Part 3

Nora laughed—laughed in spite of herself—laughed aloud a simple, merry, girlish laugh of pure amusement—it was so comical. There they had all stood last night in imminent danger of their lives, and of what is dearer than life itself, surrounded by a frantic, yelling mob of half-demented, rum-maddened negroes—her father left for dead upon the piazza steps, Harry Noel hacked with cutlasses before her very eyes, herself trampled under foot in her swoon upon the drawing-room floor by the naked soles of those negro rioters—and now this morning, Cousin Tom comes up quietly when all was over to tell her at his ease how he had taken the most approved precautions for the protection of his beloved vacuum pans. Every time she thought of it, Nora laughed again, with a fresh little outburst of merry laughter, more and more vehemently, just as though her father were not at that very moment lying within between life and death, as still and motionless as a corpse, in his own bedroom.

There is nothing more fatal to the possible prospects of a suitor, however hopeless, than to be openly laughed at by the lady of his choice at a critical moment—nothing more galling to a man under any circumstances than patent ridicule from a beautiful woman. Tom Dupuy grew redder and redder every minute, and stammered and stuttered in helpless speechlessness; and still Nora looked at him and laughed, ‘for all the world,’ he thought to himself, ‘as if I were just nobody else but the clown at the theatre.’

But that was not indeed the stage on which Tom Dupuy really performed the part of clown with such distinguished success in his unconscious personation.

‘How’s your father this morning?’ he asked at last gruffly, with an uneasy shuffle. ‘I hear the niggers cut him about awfully last night, and next door to killed him with their beastly cutlasses.’

Nora drew herself up and checked her untimely laughter with a sudden sense of the demands of the situation, as she answered once more in her coldest tone: ‘My father is getting on as well as we can expect, thank you, Mr Tom Dupuy. We are much obliged to you for your kind inquiries. He slept the night pretty well, all things considered, and is partially conscious again this morning. He was very nearly killed last night, as you say; and if it hadn’t been for Mr Noel and Mr Hawthorn, who kindly came up at once and tried to protect us, he would have been killed outright, and I with him. But Mr Noel and Mr Hawthorn had happily no vacuum pans and no trash-houses to engage their first and chief attention.’

Tom Dupuy sneered visibly. ‘Hm!’ he said. ‘Two coloured fellows! Upon my conscience! the Dupuys of Trinidad must be coming down in the world, it seems, when they have to rely for help in a nigger rising upon two coloured fellows.’

‘If they’d had to rely upon white men like you,’ Nora answered angrily, flushing crimson as she spoke, ‘they’d have been burnt last night upon the ashes of the cane-house, and not a soul would have stirred a hand or foot to save them or protect them.’

Tom laughed to himself a sharp, short, malicious laugh. ‘Ha, ha!’ he said, ‘my fine English-bred lady, so that’s the way the wind blows, is it? I may be a fool, and I know you think me one’—Nora bowed immediately a sarcastic acquiescence—‘but I’m not such a fool as not to see through a woman’s face into a woman’s mind like an open window. I heard that that woolly-headed Hawthorn man had been over here and made a most cowardly time-serving speech to the confounded niggers, giving way to all their preposterous demands in the most outrageous and ridiculous fashion; but I didn’t hear that the other coloured fellow—your fine-spoken English friend Noel’—he hissed the words out with all the concentrated strength of his impotent hatred—‘had been up here too, to put his own finger into the pie when the crust was burning. Just like his impudence! the conceited coxcomb!’

‘Mr Noel is lying inside, in our own house here, this very moment, dangerously wounded,’ Nora cried, her face now like a crimson peony; ‘and he was cut down by the negroes last night, standing up bravely, alone and single-handed, with no weapon but a little riding-whip, facing those mad rebels like an angry tiger, and trying to protect me from their insults and their cutlasses; while you, sir, were stopping snugly away down at Pimento Valley, looking carefully after your canes and your vacuum pans. Tom Dupuy, if you dare to say another word, now or ever, in my hearing against the man who tried to save my life from those wild wretches at the risk of his own, as sure as I’m standing here, sir, I give you fair notice I’ll chastise you myself, as soon as I’ll look at you, you cowardly backbiter!—And now, Mr Dupuy, good-morning.’

Tom saw the game was fairly up and his hand outwitted. It was no use arguing with her any longer. ‘When she’s in this humour,’ he said to himself philosophically, ‘you might as well try to reason with a wounded lioness.’ So he whistled carelessly for Slot to fellow, lifted his hat as politely as he was able—he didn’t pretend to all these fine new-fangled town-bred ways of Harry Noel’s—jumped with awkward agility upon his chestnut pony, turned its head in the direction of Pimento Valley, and delivered a parting Parthian shot from a safe distance, just as he got beyond the garden gateway. ‘Good-by, Miss Nora,’ he said then savagely, raising his hat a second time with sarcastic courtesy: ‘good-bye for ever. This is our last meeting. And remember that I always said you’d finish in the end, for all your fine English education, in marrying a confounded woolly-headed brown man!’

CHAPTER XLV.

All day long, Mr Dupuy lay speechless and almost motionless on his bed, faint with loss of blood, and hovering between life and death, but gradually mending by imperceptible degrees, as Marian fancied. The brain had been terribly shaken, and there were some symptoms of stunning and concussion; but the main trouble was merely the excessive drain on the vascular system from the long-continued and unchecked bleeding. About mid-day, he became hot and feverish, with a full pulse, beating unsteadily. Macfarlane, who had remained in the house all night, ordered him at once a rough mixture of sal-volatile, bismuth, and whisky. ‘And whatever ye do,’ he said emphatically, ‘don’t forget the whisky—a good wine-glassful in half a pint of cold water.’

Mr Dupuy was raised in the bed to drink the mixture, which he swallowed mechanically in a half-unconscious fashion; and then a bandage of pounded ice was applied to his forehead, and leeches were hastily sent for to Port-of-Spain to reduce the inflammation. Long before the leeches had time to arrive, however, Nora, who was watching by his bedside, observed that his eyes began to open more frequently than before, and that gleams of reason seemed to come over them every now and again for brief intervals. ‘Give him some more whisky,’ Macfarlane said in his decided tone; ‘there’s nothing like it, nothing like it—in these cases—especially for a man of Dupuy’s idiosyncrasy.’

At that moment Mr Dupuy’s lips moved feebly, and he tried to turn with an effort on the pillow.

‘Hush, hush!’ Nora cried; ‘he wants to speak. He has something to tell us. What is it he’s saying? Listen, listen!’

Mr Dupuy’s lips moved again, and a faint voice proceeded slowly from the depths of his bosom: ‘Not fit to hold a candle to old Trinidad rum, I tell you, doctor.’

Macfarlane rubbed his hand against his thigh with evident pleasure and satisfaction. ‘He’s wrong there,’ he murmured, ‘undoubtedly wrong, as every judicious person could easily tell him; but no matter. He’ll do now, when once he’s got life enough left in him to contradict one. It always does a Dupuy good to contradict other people. Let it be rum, then—a wine-glassful of Mr Tom’s best stilling.’

Almost as soon as the rum was swallowed, Mr Dupuy seemed to mend rapidly for the passing moment. He looked up and saw Nora. ‘That’s well then,’ he said with a sigh, recollecting suddenly the last night’s adventures. ‘So they didn’t kill you after all, Nora?’

Nora stooped down with unwonted tenderness and kissed him fervently. ‘No, papa,’ she said; ‘they didn’t; nor you either.’

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.’

‘If you speak another word before six o’clock, to-night, Dupuy,’ Macfarlane put in with stern determination, ‘I’ll just clear every soul that knows ye out of the room at once, and leave you alone to the tender mercies of old Aunt Clemmy. Turn over on your side, man, when your doctor tells ye to, and try to get a little bit of refreshing sleep before the evening.’

Mr Dupuy obeyed in a feeble fashion; but he still muttered doggedly to himself as he turned over: ‘Catch him and hang him! Prove it to the governor!’

As he spoke, Edward beckoned Marian out into the drawing-room through the open door, to show her a note which had just been brought to him by a mounted orderly. It was a few hasty lines, written in pencil, that very morning by the governor himself, thanking Mr Hawthorn in his official capacity for his brave and conciliatory conduct on the preceding evening, whereby a formidable and organised insurrection had been nipped in the bud, and a door left open for future inquiry, and redress of any possible just grievances on the part of the rioters and discontented negroes. ‘It is to your firmness and address alone,’ the governor wrote, ‘that the white population of the island of Trinidad owes to-day its present security from fire and bloodshed.’

Meanwhile, preparations had been made for preventing any possible fresh outbreak of the riot that evening; and soldiers and policemen were arriving every moment at the smouldering site of the recent fire, and forming a regular plan of defence against the remote chance of a second rising. Not that any such precautions were really necessary; for the negroes, deprived of their head in Delgado, were left utterly without cohesion or organisation; and Edward’s promise to go to England and see that their grievances were properly ventilated had had far more effect upon their trustful and excitable natures than the display of ten regiments of soldiers in marching order could possibly have produced. The natural laziness of the negro mind, combining with their confidence in the young judge, and their fervent faith in the justice of Providence under the most apparently incongruous circumstances, had made them all settle down at once into their usual listless _laissez-faire_ condition, as soon as the spur of Delgado’s fiery energy and exhortation had ceased to stimulate them. ‘It all right,’ they chattered passively among themselves. ‘Mistah Hawtorn gwine to ’peak to Missis Queen fur de poor naygur; an’ de Lard in hebben gwine to watch ober him, an’ see him doan’t suffer no more wrong at de heavy hand ob de proud buckra.’

When the time arrived to make preparations for the night’s watching and nursing, Nora came to Marian once more with her spirit vexed by a sore trouble. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘this is a dreadful thing about poor Mr Noel having to go on stopping here. It’s very unfortunate he couldn’t have been nursed through his illness at your house or at Captain Castello’s. He’ll be down in bed for at least a week or two, in all probability; and it won’t be possible to move him out of this until he’s better.’

‘Well, darling?’ Marian answered, with an inquiring smile.

‘Well, you see, Marian, it wouldn’t be so awkward, of course, if poor papa wasn’t ill too, because then, if I liked, I could go over and stop with you at Mulberry until Mr Noel was quite recovered. But as I shall have to stay here, naturally, to nurse papa, why’——

‘Why, what then, Nora?’

Nora hesitated. ‘Why, you see, darling,’ she went on timidly at last, ‘people will say that as I’ve helped to nurse Mr Noel through a serious illness’——

‘Yes, dear?’

‘O Marian, don’t be so stupid! Of course, in that case, everybody’ll expect me—to—to—accept him.’

Marian looked down deep into her simple, little, girlish eyes with a curious smile of arch womanliness. ‘And why not, Nora?’ she asked at last with perfect simplicity.

Nora blushed. ‘Marian—Marian—dear Marian,’ she said at length, after a long pause, ‘you are so good—you are so kind—you are so helpful to me. I wish I could say to you all I feel, but I can’t; and even if I did, you couldn’t understand it—you couldn’t fathom it. You don’t know what it is, Marian, to be born a West Indian with such a terrible load of surviving prejudices. O darling, darling, we are all so full of wicked, dreadful, unjust feelings! I wish I could be like you, dear, I wish indeed I could; but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, somehow!’

Marian stroked her white little hand with sisterly tenderness in perfect silence for a few minutes; then she said, rather reproachfully: ‘So you wish Mr Noel wasn’t going to be nursed under your father’s roof at all, Nora! That’s a very poor return, isn’t it, my darling, for all his bravery and heroism and devotion?’

Nora drew back like one bitten suddenly by a venomous creature, and putting her hand in haste on her breast, as if it pained her terribly, answered, with a little deep-drawn sigh: ‘It isn’t that, Marian—it isn’t that, darling. You know what it is, dear, as well as I do. Don’t say it’s that, my sweet; oh, don’t say it’s that, or you’ll kill me, you’ll kill me with remorse and anger! You’ll make me hate myself, if you say I’m ungrateful. But I’m not ungrateful, Marian—I’m not ungrateful. I admire, and—and love him; yes, I love him, for the way he acted here last evening.’ And as she spoke, she buried her head fervidly, with shame and fear, in Marian’s bosom.

Marian smoothed her hair tenderly for a few minutes longer, this time again in profound silence, and then she spoke once more very softly, almost at Nora’s ear, in a low whisper. ‘I went this morning into Mr Noel’s room,’ she said, ‘darling, just when he was first beginning to recover consciousness; and as he saw me, he turned his eyes up to me with a beseeching look, and his lips seemed to be moving, as if he wanted ever so much to say something. So I stooped down and listened to catch the words he was trying to frame in his feverish fashion. He said at first just two words—“Miss Dupuy;” and then he spoke again, and said one only—“Nora.” I smiled, and nodded at him to tell him it was all well; and he spoke again, quite audibly: “Have they hurt her? Have they hurt her?” I said: “No; she’s as well as I am!” and his eyes seemed to grow larger as I said it, and filled with tears; and I knew what he meant by them, Nora—I knew what he meant by them. A little later, he spoke to me again, and he said: “Mrs Hawthorn, I may be dying; and if I die, tell her—tell Nora—that last night, when she stood beside me there so bravely, I loved her, I loved her better even than I had ever loved her!” He won’t die, Nora; but still I’ll break his confidence, darling, and tell it you this evening.—O Nora, Nora! you say you wish to goodness you hadn’t got all these dreadful, wicked, West Indian feelings. You’re brave enough—I know that—no woman braver. Why don’t you have the courage to break through them, then, and come away with Edward and me to England, and accept poor Mr Noel, who would gladly give his very life a thousand times over for you, darling?’

Nora burst into tears once more, and nestled, sobbing, closer and closer upon Marian’s shoulder.

‘My darling,’ she cried, ‘I’m too wicked! I only wish I could feel as you do!’

SWIMMING.

The extent to which the power of swimming is cultivated amongst Englishmen is scarcely creditable to the citizens of a country which boasts both that it is the greatest naval power, and that it possesses infinitely the largest mercantile marine on the face of the earth. It is only within recent years that it has been anything but a rare exception for a sailor to be able to swim. Amongst old naval officers it is still remembered as a notable occurrence that some fifty years ago, Lord Ingestre, when in command of a ship on the Mediterranean station, refused to rate as an able seaman any man who could not swim, and that from time to time other captains followed his example. That this should be still recalled to mind shows how rare an accomplishment swimming was amongst sailors in past times; and if this has now been remedied in the royal navy, where, at the present day, swimming is taught, a similar improvement has by no means taken place in the mercantile marine, in which a seaman who can swim is still a curiosity. Probably the same remark would apply to our ‘long-shore’ population, to our lightermen and professional watermen, and to the inhabitants of our numerous canal-boats. And yet English people of both sexes and of the average type seem to take to the water as naturally as a duck. The difference is that they delight to disport themselves on the waves instead of in them. Every seaport, every suitable stretch of river, every lake, has its Rowing Club; Cockneys, whose ideas of rowing are original if not elegant, and whose notions of boat-management constitute a minus quantity, make summer Sundays and the August Bank Holiday hideous on the Thames in the neighbourhood of Hampton Court; and if ’Arry takes his ’Arriet for a day’s excursion to some one of the seaside resorts which they patronise, the enjoyment of both is incomplete if they do not court the woes of sea-sickness by going for a sail.