The three weeks’ difference in practical time between England and the
West Indies, due to the mail, made the day that Edward and Marian
spent at Southampton exactly coincide with the one when Mr Dupuy and
his nephew Tom went up to view old Mr Hawthorn’s cattle at Agualta
Estate, Trinidad. On that very same evening, while Nora and Harry were
walking together among the fields behind the battery, Mr Tom Dupuy was
strolling leisurely by himself in the cool dusk, four thousand miles
away, on one of the innumerable shady bridle-paths that thread the
endless tangled hills above Pimento Valley.
Mr Tom was smoking a very big Manila cheroot, and was accompanied
upon his rounds by a huge and ferocious-looking Cuban bloodhound,
the hungry corners of whose great greedy slobbering mouth hung
down hideously on either side in loose folds of skin of the most
bloodthirsty and sinister aspect. As he went along, Tom Dupuy kept
patting affectionately from time to time his four-footed favourite, to
whom, nevertheless, every now and again he applied, as it seemed out
of pure wantonness, the knotted lash of the cruel dog-whip which he
carried jauntily in his right hand. The dog, however, formidable as he
was, so far from resenting this unkindly treatment, appeared to find in
it something exceedingly congenial to his own proper barbarous nature;
for after each such savage cut upon his bare flanks from the knotted
hide, he only cowered for a second, and then fawned the more closely
and slavishly than ever upon his smiling master, looking up into his
face with a strange approving glance from his dull eyes, that seemed
to say: ‘Exactly the sort of thing I should do myself, if you were the
dog, and I were the whip-holder.’
At a bend of the path, where the road turned suddenly aside to cross
the dry bed of a winter torrent, Tom Dupuy came upon a clump of tall
cabbage palms, hard by a low mud-built negro hut, overshadowed in front
by two or three huge flowering bushes of crimson hibiscus. A tall,
spare, gray-headed negro, in a coarse sack by way of a shirt, with
his bare and sinewy arms thrust loosely through the long slits which
alone did duty in the place of sleeve-holes, was leaning as he passed
upon a wooden post. The bloodhound, breaking away suddenly from his
master, at sight and smell of the black skin, its natural prey, rushed
up fiercely towards the old labourer, and leapt upon him with a savage
snarl of his big teeth, and with ominous glittering eyes. But the
negro, stronger and more muscular than he looked, instead of flinching,
caught the huge brute in his long lean arms, and flung him from him by
main force with an angry oath, dashing his great form heavily against
the rough pathway. Quick as lightning, the dog, leaping up again at
once with diabolical energy in its big flabby mouth, was just about to
spring once more upon his scowling opponent, when Tom Dupuy, catching
him angrily by his leather collar, threw him down and held him back,
growling fiercely, and showing his huge tearing teeth in a ferocious
grin, after the wonted manner of his deadly kind. ‘Quiet, Slot,
quiet!’ the master said, patting his hollow forehead with affectionate
admiration. ‘Quiet, sir; down this minute! Down, I tell you!—He’s death
on niggers, Delgado—death on niggers. You should stand out of the way,
you know, when you see him coming. Of course, these dogs never can
abide the scent of you black fellows. The _bookay d’Afreek_ always
drives a bloodhound frantic.’
The old negro drew himself up haughtily and sternly, and stared back in
the insolent face of the slouching young white man with a proud air of
native dignity. ‘Buckra gentleman hab no right, den, to go about wid
dem dog,’ he answered angrily, fixing his piercing fiery eye on the
bloodhound’s face. ‘Dem dog always spring at a black man wherebber dey
find him. If you want to keep dem, you should keep dem tied up at de
house, so as to do for watchdog against tievin’ naygur. But you doan’t
got no right to bring dem about de ro-ads, loose dat way, jumpin’ up at
people’s troats, when dem standin’ peaceable beside dem own hut here.’
Tom Dupuy laughed carelessly. ‘It’s their nature, you see, Delgado,’
he answered with a pleasant smile, still holding the dog and caressing
it lovingly. ‘They and their fathers were trained long ago in slavery
days to hunt runaway niggers up in the mountains and track them to
their hiding-places, and drag them back, alive or dead, to their lawful
masters; and of course that makes them run naturally after the smell of
a nigger, as a terrier runs after the smell of a rat. When the rat sees
the terrier coming, he scuttles off as hard as his legs can carry him
into his hole; and when you see Slot’s nose turning round the corner,
you ought to scuttle off into your hut as quick as lightning, if you
want to keep your black skin whole upon your body. Slot never can abide
the smell of a nigger.—Can you, Slot, eh, old fellow?’
The negro looked at him with unconcealed aversion. ‘I is not rat,
Mistah Dupuy,’ he said haughtily. ‘I is gentleman myself, same as you
is, sah, when I come here over from Africa.’
Tom Dupuy sneered openly in his very face. ‘That’s the way with all
you Africans,’ he answered with a laugh, as he flipped the ash idly
from his big cheroot. ‘I never knew an imported nigger yet, since I was
born, that wasn’t a king in his own country. Seems to me, they must all
be kings over yonder in Congo, with never a solitary subject to divide
between them.—But I say, my friend, what’s going on over this way
to-night, that so many niggers are going up all the time to the Methody
chapel? Are you going to preach ’em a missionary sermon?’
Delgado glanced at him a trifle suspiciously. ‘Dar is a prayer-meetin’,
sah,’ he said with a cold look in his angry eye, ‘up at Gilead. De
bredderin gwine to meet dis ebenin’.’
‘Ho, ho; so that’s it! A prayer-meeting, is it? Well, if I go up there,
will you let me attend it?’
Delgado’s thick lip curled contemptuously, as he answered with a frown:
‘When cockroach gib dance, him no ax fowl!’
‘Ah, I see. The fowl would eat the cockroaches, would he? Well, then,
Louis Delgado, I give you fair warning; if you don’t want a white man
to go and look on at your nigger meetings, depend upon it, it’s because
you’re brewing some mischief or other up there against the constituted
authorities. I shall tell my uncle to set his police to look well after
you. You were always a bad-blooded, discontented, disaffected fellow,
and I believe now you’re up to some of your African devilry or other.
No obeah,[1] mind you, Delgado—no obeah! Prayer-meetings, my good
friend, as much as you like; but whatever you do, no obeah.’
‘You tink I do obeah because I doan’t will let you go to
prayer-meetin’! Dat just like white-man argument. Him tink de naygur
can nebber be in de right. Old-time folk has little proverb: “Mountain
sheep always guilty when jungle tiger sit to judge him.”’
Tom Dupuy laughed and nodded. ‘Well, good-night.—Down, Slot, down, good
fellow; down, down, down, I tell you!—Good-night, Louis Delgado, and
mind, whatever you do, no obeah!’
The negro watched him slowly round the corner, with a suspicious eye
kept well fixed upon the reluctant stealthy retreat of the Cuban
bloodhound; and as soon as Dupuy had got safely beyond earshot, he sat
down in the soft dust that formed the bare platform outside his hut,
and mumbled to himself, as negroes will do, a loud dramatic soliloquy,
in every deep and varying tone of passion and hatred. ‘Ha, ha, Mistah
Tom Dupuy,’ he began quietly, ‘so you go about always wid de Cuban
bloodhound, an’ you laugh to see him spring at de troat ob de black
man! You tink dat frighten him from come steal your cane an’ your
mangoes! You tink de black man afraid ob de dog, yarra! yarra! Ha, dat
frighten Trinidad naygur, perhaps, but it doan’t frighten salt-water
naygur from Africa! I hab charms, I hab potion, I hab draught to quiet
him! I doan’t afraid ob fifty bloodhound. But it doan’t good for buckra
gentleman to walk about wid dog dat spring at de black man. Black man
laugh to-day, perhaps, but press him heart tight widin him. De time
come when black man will find him heart break out, an’ de hate in it
flow over an’ make blood run, like dry ribber in de rainy season. Den
him sweep away buckra, an’ bloodhound, an’ all before him; an’ seize
de country, colour for colour. De land is black, an’ de land for de
black man. When de black man burst him heart like ribber burst him
bank in de rainy season, white man’s house snap off before him like
bamboo hut when de flood catch it!’ As he spoke, he pushed his hands
out expansively before him, and gurgled in his throat with fierce
inarticulate African gutturals, that seemed to recall in some strange
fashion the hollow eddying roar and gurgle of the mountain torrents in
the rainy season.
‘Chicken doan’t nebber lub jackal, yarra,’ he went on after a short
pause of expectant triumph; ‘an’ naygur doan’t nebber lub buckra, dat
certain. But ob all de buckra in de island ob Trinidad, dem Dupuy is
de very worst an’ de very contemptfullest. Some day, black man will
rise, an’ get rid ob dem all for good an’ ebber. If I like, I can kill
dem all to-day; but I gwine to wait. De great an’ terrible day ob de
Lard is not come yet. Missy Dupuy ober in England, where de buckra
come from. England is de white man’s Africa; de missy dar to learn him
catechism. I wait till Missy Dupuy come back before I kill de whole
family. When de great an’ terrible day ob de Lard arrive, I doan’t
leave a single Dupuy a libbin soul in de island ob Trinidad. I slay dem
all, an’ de missy wid dem, yarra, yarra!’
The last two almost inarticulate words were uttered with a yell of
triumph. Hearing footsteps now approaching, he broke out into a loud
soliloquy of exultation in his own native African language. It was a
deep, savage-sounding West Coast dialect, full of harsh and barbaric
clicks or gutturals; for Louis Delgado, as Tom Dupuy had rightly said,
was ‘an imported African’—a Coromantyn, sold as a slave some thirty
years before to a Cuban slave-trader trying to break the blockade on
the coast, and captured with all her living cargo by an English cruiser
off Sombrero Island. The liberated slaves had been landed, according
to custom, at the first British port where the cutter touched; and
thus Louis Delgado—as he learned to call himself—a wild African born,
from the Coromantyn seaboard, partially Anglicised and outwardly
Christianised, was now a common West Indian plantation hand on the
two estates of Orange Grove and Pimento Valley. There are dozens of
such semi-civilised imported negroes still to be found under similar
circumstances in every one of the West India islands.
As the steps gradually approached nearer, it became plain, from the
soft footfall in the dust of the bridle-path, that it was a shoeless
black person who was coming towards him. In a minute more, the
new-comer had turned the corner, and displayed herself as a young and
comely negress—pretty with the round, good-humoured African prettiness
of smooth black skin, plump cheeks, clear eyes, and regular, even
pearl-white teeth. The girl was dressed in a loose Manchester cotton
print, brightly coloured, and not unbecoming, with a tidy red bandana
bound turban-wise around her shapely head, but barefooted, barelimbed,
and bare of neck and shoulder. Her figure was good, as the figure of
most negresses usually is; and she held herself erect and upright with
the peculiar lithe gracefulness said to be induced by the universal
practice of carrying pails of water and other burdens on the top of the
head from the very earliest days of negro childhood. As she approached
Delgado, she first smiled and showed all her pretty teeth, as she
uttered the customary polite salutation of ‘Marnin’! sah, marnin’!’ and
then dropped a profound courtesy with an unmistakable air of awe and
reverence.
Louis Delgado affected not to observe the girl for a moment, and went
on jabbering loudly and fiercely to himself in his swift and fluent
African jargon. But it was evident that his hearer was deeply impressed
at once by this rapt and prophetic inattention of the strange negro,
who spoke with tongues to vacant space in such an awful and intensely
realistic fashion. She paused for a while and looked at him intently;
then, when he stopped for a second to take breath in the midst of one
of his passionate incoherent outbursts, she came a step nearer to him
and courtesied again, at the same time that she muttered in a rather
injured querulous treble: ‘Mistah Delgado, you no hear me, sah? You no
listen to me? I tellin’ you marnin’.’
The old man broke off suddenly, as if recalled to himself and common
earth by some disenchanting touch, and answered dreamily: ‘Marnin’,
Missy Rosina. Marnin’, le-ady. You gwine up to Gilead now to de
prayer-meetin’?’
Rosina, glancing down at the Bible and hymn-book in her plump black
hand, answered demurely: ‘Yes, sah, I gwine dar.’
Delgado shook himself vigorously, as if in the endeavour to recover
from some unearthly trance, and went on in his more natural manner: ‘I
gwine up too, to pray wid de bredderin. You want me for someting? You
callin’ to me for help you?’
Rosina dropped her voice a little as she replied in her shrill tone:
‘You is African, Mistah Delgado. Naygur from Africa know plenty spell
for bring back le-ady’s lubber.’
Delgado nodded. ‘Dat is true,’ he answered. ‘Creole[2] naygur doan’t
can make spell same as African. Coromantyn naygur hab plenty oracle. De
oracles ob Aaron descend in right line to de chiefs ob de Coromantyn.’
‘Dem say you is great chief in your own country.’
The old man drew himself up with a haughty air. ‘Me fader,’ he answered
with evident pride, ‘hab twelve wives, all princess, an’ I is de eldest
son ob de eldest. King Blay fight him, an’ take me prisoner, an’ sell
me slabe, an’ dat is how I come to work now ober here on Mistah Dupuy
plantation.’
After a pause, he asked quickly: ‘Who dis sweetheart dat you want spell
for?’
‘Isaac Pourtalès.’
‘Pourtalès! Him mulatto! What for pretty naygur girl like you want
to go an’ lub mulatto? Mulatto bad man. Old-time folk say, mulatto
always hate him fader an’ despise him mudder. Him fader de white man,
an’ mulatto hate white; him mudder de black girl, an’ mulatto despise
black.’
Rosina hung her head down slightly on one side, and put the little
finger of her left hand with artless coyness into the corner of her
mouth. ‘I doan’t know, sah,’ she said sheepishly after a short pause;
‘but I feel somehow as if I lub Isaac Pourtalès.’
Delgado grinned a sinister grin. ‘Very well, Missy Rosy,’ he said
shortly, ‘I gain him lub for you. Wait here one, two, tree minute,
le-ady, while I run in find me Bible.’
In a few minutes, he came out again, dressed in his black coat for
meeting, with a Bible and hymn-book in one hand, and a curious volume
in the other, written in strange, twisted, twirligig characters, such
as Rosina had never before in her life set eyes on. ‘See here!’ he
cried, opening it wide before her; ‘dat is book ob spells. Dat is
African spell for gain lubber. I explain him to you’—and his hand
turned rapidly over several of the brown and well-thumbed pages: ‘Isaac
Pourtalès, mulatto; Rosina Fleming, black le-ady; dat is de page.
Hear what de spell say.’ And he ran his finger line by line along
the strange characters, as if translating them into his own negro
English as he went. ‘“Take toot’ ob alligator,” same as dis one’—and
he produced a few alligators’ teeth from his capacious pocket; ‘“tie
him up for a week in bag wid Savannah flower an’ branch of calalue;
soak him well in shark’s blood”—I gib de blood to you—“den write de
name, Isaac Pourtalès, in big letter on slip ob white paper; drop it in
de bag; an’ burn it all togedder on a Friday ebenin’, when it doan’t
no moon, wid fire ob manchineel wood.” Dat will gain de lub ob your
lubber, as sure as de gospel.’
The girl listened carefully to the directions, and made Delgado repeat
them three times over to her. When she had learned them thoroughly, she
said once more: ‘How much I got to pay you for dis, eh, sah?’
‘Nuffin.’
‘Nuffin?’
‘No, nuffin. But you must do me favour. You is house-serbant at Orange
Grove; you must come see me now an’ den, an’ tell me what go on ober in
de house dar.’
‘What far, sah?’
‘Doan’t you ax what far; but listen to me, le-ady. De great an’
terrible day ob de Lard will come before long, when de wicked will
be cut off from de face ob de eart’, an’ we shall see de end ob de
evil-doer. You read de Prophets?’
‘I read dem some time.’
‘You read de Prophet Jeremiah, what him say? Hear de tex’. I read him
to you. “Deliber up deir children to de famine, an’ pour out deir blood
by de sword.” Dat de Lard’s word for all de Dupuys; an’ when de missy
come from England, de word ob de prophecy comin’ true.’
The girl shuddered, and opened wide her big eyes with their great ring
of white setting. ‘How you know it de Dupuys?’ she asked, hesitating.
‘How you know it dem de prophet ’ludin’ to?’
‘How I know, Rosina Fleming? How I know it? Because I can expound
an’ interpret de Scripture; for when de understandin’ ob de man is
enlightened, de mout’ speaketh forth wonderful tings. Listen here; I
tellin’ you de trut’. Before de missy lib a year in Trinidad, de Lard
will sweep away de whole house ob de Dupuys out ob de land for ebber
an’ ebber.’
‘But not de missy!’ Rosina cried eagerly.
‘Ah, de missy! You tink when de black man rise like tiger in him wrath,
him spare de missy! No, me fren’. Him doan’t gwine to spare her. De
Dupuys is great people now; puffed up wid pride; look down on de black
man. But dem will drop dem bluster bime-by, as soon as deir pride is
taken out ob dem wid adversity.’
Rosina turned away with a look of terror. ‘You comin’ to
prayer-meetin’?’ she asked hastily. ‘De bredderin will all be waitin’.’
Delgado, recalled once more to his alternative character, pushed away
the strange volume through the door of his hut, took up his Bible
and hymn-book with the gravest solemnity, drew himself up to his
full height, and was soon walking along soberly by Rosina’s side, as
respectable and decorous a native Methodist class-leader as one could
wish to see in the whole green island of Trinidad.
Those who judge superficially of men and minds, would say at once that
Delgado was a hypocrite. Those who know what religion really means
to inferior races—a strange but sincere jumble of phrases, emotions,
superstitions, and melodies, permeating and consecrating all their
acts and all their passions, however evil, violent, or licentious—will
recognise at once that in his own mind Louis Delgado was not conscious
to himself in the faintest degree of any hypocrisy, craft, or even
inconsistency.
(_To be continued._)