‘No, missy,’ the girl answered, passively handing her the soaked towel. ‘Him doan’t dead yet; but him dyin’, him dyin’. De blood comin’ out ob him, spurt, spurt, spurt, so him can’t lib long, not anyway. Him bledded to death already, I tinkin’, a’most.’
Nora looked at the white face, and a few tears began at last to form slowly in her brimming eyelids. But she brushed them away quickly, before they had time to trickle down her blanched cheek, for her proud West Indian blood was up now, as much as the negroes’ had been a few minutes earlier; and she twisted her handkerchief round a pocket pencil so as to form a hasty extemporised tourniquet, which she fastened bravely and resolutely with intuitive skill above the open wound on the left elbow. She had no idea that the little jets in which the blood spurted out so rhythmically were indicative of that most dangerous wound, a severed artery; but she felt instinctively, somehow, that this was the right thing to do, and she did it without flinching, as if she had been used to dealing familiarly with dangerous wounds for half her lifetime. Then she twisted the hasty instrument tightly round till the artery was securely stopped, and the little jets ceased entirely at each pulsation of the now feeble and weakened heart.
‘Run for the doctor, somebody!’ she cried eagerly; ‘run for the doctor, or he’ll die outright before we can get help for him!’
But Nita and Rose, on their knees beside the wounded man, only cowered closer to the bedside, and shook with terror as another cry rose on a sudden from outside from the excited negroes. It was the cry they raised when they found Delgado was really struck dead before their very eyes by the visible and immediate judgment of the Almighty.
Nora looked down at them with profound contempt, and merely said, in her resolute, scornful voice: ‘What! afraid even of your own people? Why, I’m not afraid of them; I, who am a white woman, and whom they’d murder now and hack to pieces, as soon as they’d look at me, if once they could catch me, when their blood’s up!—Marian, Marian! you’re a white woman; will you come with me?’
Marian trembled a little—she wasn’t upheld through that terrible scene by the ingrained hereditary pride of a superior race before the blind wrath of the inferior, bequeathed to Nora by her slave-owning ancestors; but she answered with hardly a moment’s hesitation: ‘Yes, Nora. If you wish it, I’ll go with you.’
There is something in these conflicts of race with race which raises the women of the higher blood for the time being into something braver and stronger than women. In England, Marian would never have dared to go out alone in the face of such a raging tumultuous mob, even of white people; but in Trinidad, under the influence of that terrible excitement, she found heart to put on her hat once more, and step forth with Nora under the profound shade of the spreading mango-trees, now hardly lighted up at all at fitful intervals by the dying glow from the burnt-out embers of the smoking cane-houses. They went down groping their way by the garden path, and came out at last upon the main bridle-road at the foot of the garden. There Marian drew back Nora timidly with a hand placed in quick warning upon her white shoulder. ‘Stand aside, dear,’ she whispered at her ear, pulling her back hastily within the garden gate and under the dark shadow of the big star-apple tree. ‘They’re coming down—they’re coming down! I hear them, I hear them! O God, O God, I shouldn’t have come away! They’ve killed Edward! My darling, my darling! They’ve killed him—they’ve killed him!’
‘I wouldn’t stand aside for myself,’ Nora answered half aloud, her eyes flashing proudly even in the shadowy gloom of the garden. ‘But to save Mr Noel’s life, to save his life, I’ll stand aside if you wish, Marian.’
As they drew back into the dark shadow, even Nora trembling and shivering a little at the tramp of so many naked feet, some of the negroes passed close beside them outside the fence on their way down from the piazza, where they had just been electrified into sudden quietness by the awful sight of Louis Delgado’s dead body. They were talking earnestly and low among themselves, not, as before, shrieking and yelling and gesticulating wildly, but conversing half below their breath in a solemn, mysterious, awe-struck fashion.
‘De Lard be praise for Mr Hawtorn!’ one of them said as he passed unseen close beside them. ‘Him de black man fren’. We got nobody like him. I no’ would hurt Mr Hawtorn, de blessed man, not for de life ob me.’