‘But one thing I will not permit,’ Mr Dupuy said with decisive curtness. ‘Whether you marry this person Noel, Nora, or whether you don’t—a question on which it seems, in this new-fangled order of things that’s coming up nowadays, a father’s feelings are not to be consulted—you shall not marry him here in Trinidad. I will not allow the grand old name and fame of the fighting Dupuys of Orange Grove to be dragged through the mud with any young man whatsoever, in this island. If you want to marry the man Noel, miss, you shall marry him in England, where nobody on earth will know anything at all about it.’
‘Certainly, papa,’ Nora answered most demurely. ‘Mr Noel would naturally prefer the wedding to take place in London, where his own family and friends could all be present; and besides, of course there wouldn’t be time to get one’s things ready either, before we leave the West Indies.’
When the next steamer was prepared to sail, it carried away a large contingent of well-known residents from the island of Trinidad. On the deck, Edward and Marian Hawthorn stood waving their handkerchiefs energetically to their friends on the wharf, and to the great body of negroes who had assembled in full force to give a parting cheer to ‘de black man fren’, Mr Hawtorn.’ Harry Noel, in a folding cane-chair, sat beside them, still pale and ill, but bowing, it must be confessed, from time to time a rather ironical bow to his late assailants, at the cheers, which were really meant, of course, for his more popular friend and travelling companion. Close by stood Nora, not sorry in her heart that she was to see the last that day of the land of her fathers, where she had suffered so terribly and dared so much. And close by, too, on the seat beside the gunwale, sat Mr and Mrs Hawthorn the elder, induced at last, by Edward’s earnest solicitation, to quit Trinidad for the evening of their days, and come to live hard by his own new home in the mother country. As for Mr Dupuy, he had no patience with the open way in which that man Hawthorn was waving his adieux so abominably to his fellow-conspirators; so, by way of escaping from the unwelcome demonstration, he was quietly ensconced below in a corner of the saloon, enjoying a last parting cigar and a brandy cocktail with some of his old planter cronies, who were going back to shore by-and-by in the pilot boat. As a body, the little party downstairs were all agreed that when a man like our friend Dupuy here was positively driven out of the island by coloured agitators, Trinidad was no longer a place fit for any gentleman with the slightest self-respect to live in. The effect of this solemn declaration was only imperceptibly marred by the well-known fact that it had been announced with equal profundity of conviction, at intervals of about six months each, by ten generations of old Trinidad planters, ever since the earliest foundation of the Spanish colony in that island.
Just two months later, Mr Dupuy was seated alone at his solitary lunch in the London club to which Harry Noel had temporarily introduced him as an honorary guest. It was the morning after Nora’s wedding, and Mr Dupuy was feeling naturally somewhat dull and lonely in that great unsympathetic world of London. His attention, however, was suddenly attracted by two young men at a neighbouring table, one of whom distinctly mentioned in an audible tone his new son-in-law’s name, ‘Harry Noel.’ The master of Orange Grove drew himself up stiffly and listened with much curiosity to such scraps as he could manage to catch of their flippant conversation.
‘O yes,’ one of them was saying, ‘a very smart affair indeed, I can tell you. Old Sir Walter down there from Lincolnshire, and half the smartest people in London at the wedding breakfast. Very fine fellow, Noel, and comes in to one of the finest estates in the whole of England. Pretty little woman, too, the bride—nice little girl, with such winning little baby features.’
‘Ah!’ drawled out the other slowly. ‘Pretty, is she? Ah, really. And pray, who was she?’
Mr Dupuy’s bosom swelled with not unnatural paternal pride and pleasure as he anticipated the prompt answer from the wedding guest: ‘One of the fighting Dupuys of Trinidad.’
But instead of replying in that perfectly reasonable and intelligible fashion, the young man at the club responded slowly: ‘Well, upon my word, I don’t exactly know who she was, but somebody colonial, any way, I’m certain. I fancy from Hong-kong, or Penang, or Demerara, or somewhere.—No; Trinidad—I remember now—it was certainly either St Kitts or Trinidad. Oh, Trinidad, of course, for Mrs Hawthorn, you know—Miss Ord that was—wife of that awfully clever Cambridge fellow Hawthorn, who’s just been appointed to a permanent something-or-other-ship at the Colonial Office—Mrs Hawthorn knew her when she was out there during that nigger row they’ve just been having; and she pointed me out the bride’s father, a snuffy-looking old gentleman in the sugar-planting line, over in those parts, as far as I understood her. Old gentleman looked horribly out of it among so many smart London people. Horizon apparently quite limited by rum and sugar.—O yes, it was a great catch for her, of course, I needn’t tell you; but I understand this was the whole story of it. She angled for him very cleverly; and, by Jove, she hooked him at last, and played him well, and now she’s landed him and fairly cooked him. It appears, he went out there not long before this insurrection business began, to look after some property they have in the island, and he stopped with her father, who, I daresay, was accustomed to dispensing a sort of rough-and-ready colonial hospitality to all comers, gentle and simple. When the row came, the snuffy old gentleman in the sugar-planting line, as luck would have it, was the very first man whose house was attacked—didn’t pay his niggers regularly, they tell me; and this young lady, posing herself directly behind poor Noel, compelled him, out of pure politeness, being a chivalrous sort of man, to fight for her life, and beat off the niggers single-handed for half an hour or so. Then he gets cut down, it seems, with an ugly cutlass wound: she falls fainting upon his body, for all the world like a Surrey melodrama; Hawthorn rushes in with drawn pistol and strikes an attitude; and the curtain falls: tableau. At last, Hawthorn manages to disperse the niggers; and my young lady has the agreeable task of nursing Noel at her father’s house, through a slow convalescence. Deuced clever, of course: makes him save her life first, and then she helps to save his. Has him both ways, you see—devotion and gratitude. So, as I say, she lands him promptly: and the consequence is, after a proper interval, this smart affair that came off yesterday over at St George’s.’
Once more the world reeled visibly before Mr Dupuy’s eyes, and he rose up from that hospitable club table, leaving his mutton cutlet and tomato sauce almost untasted. In the heat of the moment, he was half inclined to go back again immediately to his native Trinidad, and brave the terrors of vivisection, rather than stop in this atrocious, new-fangled, upsetting England, where the family honours of the fighting Dupuys of Orange Grove were positively reckoned at less than nothing. He restrained himself, however, with a violent effort, and still condescends, from summer to summer, fitfully to inhabit this chilly, damp, and unappreciative island. But it is noticeable that he talks much less frequently now of the Dupuy characteristics than he did formerly (the population of Great Britain being evidently rather bored than otherwise by his constant allusions to those remarkable idiosyncrasies); and some of his acquaintances have even observed that since the late baronet’s lamented decease, a few months since, he has spoken more than once with apparent pride and delight of ‘my son-in-law, Sir Harry Noel.’
It is a great consolation to Tom Dupuy to this day, whenever anybody happens casually to mention his cousin Nora in his presence, that he can rub his hands gently one over the other before him, and murmur in his own peculiar drawl: ‘I always told you she’d end at last by marrying some confounded woolly-headed brown man.’