Mr Dupuy paused for a moment; then he looked up a second time, and asked, with extraordinary vehemence for an invalided man: ‘Is this riot put down? Have they driven off the niggers? Have they taken the ringleaders? Have they hanged Delgado?’
‘Hush, hush!’ Nora cried, a little appalled in her cooler mood, after all that had happened, at this first savage outcry for vengeance. ‘You mustn’t talk, papa; you mustn’t excite yourself. Yes, yes; the riot is put down, and Delgado—Delgado is dead. He has met with his due punishment.’
‘That’s well!’ Mr Dupuy exclaimed, with much gusto, in spite of his weakness, rubbing his hands feebly underneath the bedclothes. ‘Serves the villain right. I’m glad they’ve hanged him. Nothing on earth comes up to martial law in these emergencies; and hang ’em on the spot, say I, as fast as you catch ’em, red-handed! Flog ’em first, and hang ’em afterwards!’
Marian looked down at him speechless, with a shudder of horror; but Nora put her face between her hands, overwhelmed with awe, now her own passion had burst itself out, at that terrible outburst of the old bad barbaric spirit of retaliation. ‘Don’t let him talk so, dear,’ she cried to Marian. ‘O Marian, Marian, I’m so ashamed of myself! I’m so ashamed of us all—us Dupuys, I mean; I wish we were all more like you and Mr Hawthorn.’
‘You must not speak, Mr Dupuy,’ Macfarlane said, interposing gently, with his rough-and-ready Scotch tenderness. ‘Ye’re not strong enough for conversation yet, I’m thinking. Ye must just take a wee bit sleep till the fever’s reduced. Ye’ve had a narrow escape of your life, my dear sir; and ye must not excite yourself the minute ye’re getting a trifle better.’
The old man lay silent for a few minutes longer; then he turned again to Nora, and without noticing Marian’s presence, said more vehemently and more viciously than ever: ‘I know who set them on to this, Nora. It wasn’t their own doing; it was coloured instigation. They were put up to it—I know they were put up to it—by that scoundrel Hawthorn—a seditious, rascally, malevolent lawyer, if ever there was one. I hope they’ll hang him too—he deserves it soundly—flog him and hang him as soon as they catch him!’
‘O papa, papa!’ Nora cried, growing hotter and redder in the face than ever, and clutching Marian’s hand tightly in an agony of distress and shamefacedness, ‘you don’t know what you’re saying! You don’t know what you owe to him! It was Mr Hawthorn who finally pacified and dispersed the negroes; and if it hadn’t been for his coolness and his bravery, we wouldn’t one of us have been alive to say so this very minute!’
Mr Dupuy coughed uneasily, and muttered to himself once more in a vindictive undertone: ‘Hang him when they catch him!—hang him when they catch him! I’ll speak to the governor about it myself, and prove to him conclusively that if it hadn’t been for this fellow Hawthorn, the niggers’d never have dreamed of kicking up such a hullabaloo and bobbery!’
‘But, papa,’ Nora began again, her eyes full of tears, ‘you don’t understand. You’re all wrong about it. If it hadn’t been for that dear, good, brave Mr Hawthorn’——
Marian touched her lightly on the shoulder. ‘Never mind about it, Nora, darling,’ she whispered consolingly, with a womanly caress to the poor shrinking girl at her elbow; ‘don’t trouble him with the story now. By-and-by, when he’s better, he’ll come to hear the facts; and then he’ll know what Edward’s part was in the whole matter. Don’t distress yourself about it, darling, now, after all that has happened. I know your father’s feelings too well to take amiss anything he may happen to say in the heat of the moment.’