For a few days, the Hawthorns had plenty of callers—but all gentlemen.
Marian did not go down to receive them. Edward saw them by himself in
the drawing-room, accepting their excuses with polite incredulity, and
dismissing them as soon as possible by a resolutely quiet and taciturn
demeanour. Such a singularly silent man as the new judge, everybody
said, had never before been known in the district of Westmoreland.
One afternoon, however, when the two Hawthorns were sitting out under
the spreading mango-tree in the back-garden, forgetting their doubts
and hesitations in a quiet chat, Thomas came out to inform them duly
that two gentlemen and a lady were waiting to see them in the big bare
drawing-room. Marian sighed a sigh of profound relief. ‘A lady at
last,’ she said hopefully. ‘Perhaps, Edward, they’ve begun to find out,
after all, that they’ve made some mistake or other. Can—can any wicked
person, I wonder, have been spreading around some horrid report about
me, that’s now discovered to be a mere falsehood?’
‘It’s incomprehensible,’ Edward answered moodily. ‘The more I puzzle
over it, the less I understand it. But as a lady has called at last, of
course, darling, you’d better come in at once and see her.’
They walked together, full of curiosity, into the drawing-room. The two
gentlemen rose simultaneously as they entered. To Marian’s surprise, it
was Dr Whitaker and his father; and with them had come—a brown lady.
Marian was unaffectedly glad to see their late travelling companion;
but it was certainly a shock to her, unprejudiced as she was, that the
very first and only woman who had called upon her in Trinidad should be
a mulatto. However, she tried to bear her disappointment bravely, and
sat down to do the honours as well as she was able to her unexpected
visitors.
‘My daughtah!’ the elder brown man said ostentatiously, with an
expansive wave of his greasy left hand towards the mulatto lady—‘Miss
Euphemia Fowell-Buxton Duchess-of-Sutherland Whitaker.’
Marian acknowledged the introduction with a slight bow, and bit her
lip. She stole a look at Dr Whitaker, and saw at once upon his face an
unwonted expression of profound dejection and disappointment.
‘An’ how do you like Trinidad, Mrs Hawtorn?’ Miss Euphemia asked with a
society simper; while Edward began engaging in conversation with the
two men. ‘You find de excessiveness of de temperature prejudicial to
salubrity, after de delicious equability of de English climate?’
‘Well,’ Marian assented smiling, ‘I certainly do find it very hot.’
‘Oh, exceedingly,’ Miss Euphemia replied, as she mopped her forehead
violently with a highly scented lace-edged cambric pocket-handkerchief.
‘De heat is most oppressive, most unendurable. I could wring out me
handkerchief, I assure you, Mrs Hawtorn, wit de extraordinary profusion
of me perspiration.’
‘But this is summer, you must remember,’ Dr Whitaker put in nervously,
endeavouring in vain to distract attention for the moment from Miss
Euphemia’s conversational peculiarities. ‘In winter, you know, we shall
have quite delightful English weather on the hills—quite delightful
English weather.’
‘Ah, yes,’ the father went on with a broad smile. ‘In winter, Mrs
Hawtorn, ma’am, you will be glad to drink a glass of rum-and-milk
sometimes, I tell you, to warm de blood on dese chilly hilltops.’
The talk went on for a while about such ordinary casual topics; and
then at last Miss Euphemia happened to remark confidentially to Marian,
that that very day her cousin, Mr Septimius Whitaker, had been married
at eleven o’clock down at the cathedral.
‘Indeed,’ Marian said, with some polite show of interest. ‘And did you
go to the wedding, Miss Whitaker?’
Miss Euphemia drew herself up with great dignity. She was a
good-looking, buxom, round-faced, very negro-featured girl, about as
dark in complexion as her brother the doctor, but much more decidedly
thick-lipped and flat-nosed. ‘O no,’ she said, with every sign of
offended prejudice. ‘We didn’t at all approve of de match me cousin
Septimius was unhappily makin’. De lady, I regret to say, was a Sambo.’
‘A what?’ Marian inquired curiously.
‘A Sambo, a Sambo gal,’ Miss Euphemia replied in a shrill crescendo.
‘Oh, indeed,’ Marian assented in a tone which clearly showed she hadn’t
the faintest idea of Miss Euphemia’s meaning.
‘A Sambo,’ Mr Whitaker the elder said, smiling, and coming to her
rescue—‘a Sambo, Mrs Hawtorn, is one of de inferior degrees in de
classified scale and hierarchy of colour. De offspring of an African
and a white man is a mulatto—dat, madam, is my complexion. De offspring
of a mulatto and a white man is a quadroon—dat is de grade immediately
superior. But de offspring of a mulatto and a negress is a Sambo—dat
is de class just beneat us. De cause of complaint alleged by de family
against our nephew Septimius is dis—dat bein’ himself a mulatto—de
very fust remove from de pure-blooded white man—he has chosen to ally
himself in marriage wit a Sambo gal—de second and inferior remove in
de same progression. De family feels dat in dis course Septimius has
toroughly and irremediably disgraced himself.’
‘And for dat reason,’ added Miss Euphemia with stately coldness, ‘none
of de ladies in de brown society of Trinidad have been present at dis
morning’s ceremony. De gentlemen went, but de ladies didn’t.’
‘It seems to me,’ Dr Whitaker said, in a pained and humiliated tone,
‘that we oughtn’t to be making these absurd distinctions of minute
hue between ourselves, but ought rather to be trying our best to
break down the whole barrier of time-honoured prejudice by which the
coloured race, as a race, is so surrounded.—Don’t you agree with me, Mr
Hawthorn?’
‘Pho!’ Miss Euphemia exclaimed, with evident disgust. ‘Just listen to
Wilberforce! He has no proper pride in his family or in his colour.
He would go and shake hands wit any vulgar, dirty, nigger woman, I
believe, as black as de poker; his ideas are so common!—Wilberforce, I
declare, I’s quite ashamed of you!’
Dr Whitaker played nervously with the knob of his walking-stick. ‘I
feel sure, Euphemia,’ he said at last, ‘these petty discriminations
between shade and shade are the true disgrace and ruin of our brown
people. In despising one another, or boasting over one another, for
our extra fraction or so of white blood, we are implicitly admitting
in principle the claim of white people to look down upon all of us
impartially as inferior creatures.—Don’t you think so, Mr Hawthorn?’
‘I quite agree with you,’ Edward answered warmly. ‘The principle’s
obvious.’
Dr Whitaker looked pleased and flattered. Edward stole a glance at
Marian, and neither could resist a faint smile at Miss Euphemia’s
prejudices of colour, in spite of their pressing doubts and
preoccupations. And yet, they didn’t even then begin to perceive the
true meaning of the situation. They had not long to wait, however, for
before the Whitakers rose to take their departure, Thomas came in with
a couple of cards to announce Mr Theodore Dupuy, and his nephew, Mr Tom
Dupuy of Pimento Valley.
The Whitakers went off shortly, Miss Euphemia especially in very high
spirits, because Mrs Hawthorn had shaken hands in the most cordial
manner with her, before the face of the two white men. Edward and
Marian would fain have refused to see the Dupuys, as they hadn’t
thought fit to bring even Nora with them; and at that last mysterious
insult—a dagger to her heart—the tears came up irresistibly to poor
wearied Marian’s swimming eyelids. But Thomas had brought the visitors
in before the Whitakers rose to go, and so there was nothing left but
to get through the interview somehow, with what grace they could manage
to muster.
‘We had hoped to see Nora long before this,’ Edward Hawthorn said
pointedly to Mr Dupuy—after a few preliminary polite inanities—half
hoping thus to bring things at last to a positive crisis. ‘My wife
and she were school-girls together, you know, and we saw so much of
one another on the way out. We have been quite looking forward to her
paying us a visit.’
Mr Dupuy drew himself up very stiffly, and answered in a tone of the
chilliest order: ‘I don’t know to whom you can be alluding, sir, when
you speak of “Nora;” but if you refer to my daughter, Miss Dupuy,
I regret to say she is suffering just at present from—ur—a severe
indisposition, which unfortunately prevents her from paying a call on
Mrs Hawthorn.’
Edward coughed an angry little cough, which Marian saw at once meant
a fixed determination to pursue the matter to the bitter end. ‘Miss
Dupuy herself requested me to call her Nora,’ he said, ‘on our journey
over, during which we naturally became very intimate, as she was put in
charge of my wife at Southampton, by her aunt in England. If she had
not done so, I should never have dreamt of addressing her, or speaking
of her, by her Christian name. As she did do so, however, I shall take
the liberty of continuing to call her by that name, until I receive
a request to desist from her own lips. We have long been expecting a
call, I repeat, Mr Dupuy, from your daughter Nora.’
‘Sir!’ Mr Dupuy exclaimed angrily; the blood of the fighting Dupuys was
boiling up now savagely within him.
‘We have been expecting her,’ Edward Hawthorn repeated firmly; ‘and I
insist upon knowing the reason why you have not brought her with you.’
‘I have already said, sir,’ Mr Dupuy answered, rising and growing
purple in the face, ‘that my daughter is suffering from a severe
indisposition.’
‘And I refuse,’ Edward replied, in his sternest tone, rising also, ‘to
accept that flimsy excuse—in short, to call it by its proper name, that
transparent falsehood. If you do not tell me the true reason at once,
much as I respect and like Miss Dupuy, I shall have to ask you, sir, to
leave my house immediately.’
A light seemed to burst suddenly upon the passionate planter, which
altered his face curiously, by gradual changes, from livid blue to
bright scarlet. The corners of his mouth began to go up sideways in
a solemnly ludicrous fashion: the crow’s-feet about his eyes first
relaxed and then tightened deeply; his whole big body seemed to be
inwardly shaken by a kind of suppressed impalpable laughter. ‘Why,
Tom,’ he exclaimed, turning with a curious half-comical look to his
wondering nephew, ‘do you know—upon my word—I really believe—no,
it can’t be possible—but I really believe—they don’t even now know
anything at all about it.’
‘Explain yourself,’ Edward said sternly, placing himself between Mr
Dupuy and the door, as if on purpose to bar the passage outward.
‘If you really don’t know about it,’ Mr Dupuy said slowly, with an
unusual burst of generosity for him, ‘why, then, I admit, the insult to
Miss Dupuy is—is—is less deliberately intentional than I at first sight
imagined.—But no, no: you _must_ know all about it already. You can’t
still remain in ignorance. It’s impossible, quite impossible.’
‘Explain,’ Edward reiterated inexorably.
‘You compel me?’
‘I compel you.’
‘You’d better not; you won’t like it.’
‘I insist upon it.’
‘Well, really, since you make a point of it—but there, you’ve been
brought up like a gentleman, Mr Hawthorn, and you’ve married a wife
who, as I learn from my daughter, is well connected, and has been
brought up like a lady; and I don’t want to hurt your feelings
needlessly. I can understand that under such circumstances’——
‘Explain. Say what you have to say; I can endure it.’
‘Tom!’ Mr Dupuy murmured imploringly, turning to his nephew. After all,
the elder man was something of a gentleman; he shrank from speaking out
that horrid secret.
‘Well, you see, Mr Hawthorn,’ Tom Dupuy went on, taking up the parable
with a sardonic smile—for he had no such scruples—‘my uncle naturally
felt that with a man of _your colour_’—— He paused significantly.
Edward Hawthorn’s colour at that particular moment was vivid crimson.
The next instant it was marble white. ‘A man of my colour!’ he
exclaimed, drawing back in astonishment, not unmingled with horror, and
flinging up his arms wildly—‘a man of my colour! For heaven’s sake,
sir, what, in the name of goodness, do you mean by a man of my colour?’
‘Why, of course,’ Tom Dupuy replied maliciously and coolly, ‘seeing
that you’re a brown man yourself, and that your father and mother were
brown people before you, naturally, my uncle’——
Marian burst forth into a little cry of intense excitement. It wasn’t
horror; it wasn’t anger; it wasn’t disappointment: it was simply relief
from the long agony of that endless, horrible suspense.
‘We can bear it all, Edward,’ she cried aloud cheerfully, almost
joyously—‘we can bear it all! My darling, my darling, it is nothing,
nothing, nothing!’
And regardless of the two men, who stood there still, cynical and
silent, watching the effect of their unexpected thunderbolt, the poor
young wife flung her arms wildly around her newly wedded husband, and
smothered him in a perfect torrent of passionate kisses.
But as for Edward, he stood there still, as white, as cold, and as
motionless as a statue.
(_To be continued._)