Mr Dupuy was seated quietly at dinner in his own dining-room, with Nora
at the opposite end of the table, and Uncle ’Zekiel, the butler, in
red plush waistcoat as usual, standing solemnly behind his chair. Mr
Dupuy was in excellent spirits, in spite of the little affair of the
previous night, for the sugar-cane had cut very heavy, and the boiling
was progressing in the most admirable manner. He sipped his glass of
St Emilion (as imported) with the slow, easy air of a person at peace
with himself and with all creation. The world at large seemed just
that moment to suit him excellently. ‘Nora, my dear,’ he drawled out
lazily, with the unctuous deliberateness of the full-blooded man well
fed, ‘this is a capital pine-apple certainly—a Ripley, I perceive; far
superior in flavour, Ripleys, to the cheap common black sugar-pines:
always insist upon getting Ripleys.—I think, if you please, I’ll take
another piece of that pine-apple.’
Nora cut him a good thick slice from the centre of the fruit—it is
only in England that people commit the atrocity of cutting pine in
thin layers—and laid down the knife with a stifled yawn upon the tall
dessert dish. She was evidently bored—very deeply bored indeed. Orange
Grove without Harry Noel began to seem a trifle dull; and it must be
confessed that to live for months together with an old gentleman of
Mr Dupuy’s sluggish temperament was scarcely a lively mode of life
for a pretty, volatile, laughter-loving girl of twenty, like little
Nora. ‘What’s this, papa,’ she asked languidly, just by way of keeping
up the conversation, ‘about the negroes here in Westmoreland being
so dreadfully discontented? Somebody was telling me’—Nora prudently
suppressed Marian Hawthorn’s name, for fear of an explosion—‘that
there’s a great deal of stir and ferment among the plantation hands.
What are they bothering and worrying about now, I wonder?’
Mr Dupuy rolled the remainder of his glassful of claret on his
discriminative palate, very reflectively, for half a minute or so,
and then answered in his most leisurely fashion: ‘Lies, lies—a pack
of lies, the whole lot of it, Nora. I know who you heard that from,
though you won’t tell me so. You heard it from some of your fine
coloured friends there, over at Mulberry.—Now, don’t deny it, for I
won’t believe you. When I say a thing, you know I mean it. You heard
it, I say, from some of these wretched, disaffected coloured people.
And there isn’t a word of truth in the whole story—not a syllable—not
a shadow—not a grain—not a penumbra. Absolute falsehood, the entire
lot of it, got up by these designing radical coloured people, to serve
their own private purposes. I assure you, Nora, there isn’t in the
whole world a finer, better paid, better fed, better treated, or more
happy and contented peasantry than our own comfortable West Indian
negroes. For my part, I can’t conceive what on earth they’ve ever got
to be discontented about.’
‘But, papa, they _do_ say there’s a great chance of a regular rising.’
‘Rising, my dear!—rising! Did you say a rising? Ho, ho! that’s really
too ridiculous! What, these niggers rise in revolt against the white
people! Why, my dear child, they’d never dare to do it. A pack of
cowardly, miserable, quaking and quavering nigger blackguards.
Rise, indeed! I’d like to see them try it! O no; nothing of the
sort. Somebody’s been imposing on you. They’re too afraid of us, my
dear, ever to think of venturing upon a regular rising. Show me a
nigger, I always say to anybody who talks that sort of nonsense to
me, and I’ll show you a coward, and a thief too, and a liar, and a
vagabond.—’Zekiel, you rascal, pour me out another glass of claret,
sir, this minute!’
Uncle ’Zekiel poured out the claret for his red-faced master with a
countenance wholly unclouded by this violent denunciation of his own
race; to say the truth, the old butler was too much accustomed to
similar sentiments from Mr Dupuy’s lips ever to notice particularly
what his master was saying. He smiled and grinned, and showed his own
white teeth good-humouredly as he laid down the claret jug, exactly as
though Mr Dupuy had been ascribing to the African race in general, and
to himself in particular, all the virtues and excellences ever observed
in the most abstractly perfect human character.
‘No,’ Mr Dupuy went on dogmatically, ‘they won’t rise: a pack of
mean-spirited, cowardly, ignorant vagabonds as ever were born, the
niggers, the whole lot of them. I never knew a nigger yet who had a
single ounce of courage in him. You might walk over them, and trample
them down in heavy riding-boots, and they wouldn’t so much as dare
to raise a finger against you. And besides, what have they got to
rise for? Haven’t they got everything they can ever expect to have?
Haven’t they got their freedom and their cottages? But they’re always
grumbling, always grumbling about something or other—a set of idle,
lazy, discontented vagabonds as ever I set eyes on!’
‘I thought you said just now,’ Nora put in with a provoking smile,
‘they were the finest, happiest, and most contented peasantry to be
found anywhere.’
There was nothing more annoying to Mr Dupuy than to have one of his
frequent conversational inconsistencies ruthlessly brought home to him
by his own daughter—the only person in the whole world who would ever
have ventured upon taking such an unwarrantable liberty. So he laid
down his glass of claret with a forced smile, and by way of changing
the subject, said unconcernedly: ‘Bless my soul, what on earth can all
that glare be over yonder? Upon my word, now I look at it, I fancy,
Nora, it seems to come from the direction of the trash-houses.’
Uncle ’Zekiel, standing up behind his master’s chair, and gazing
outward, could see more easily over the dining-table, and out through
the open doorway of the room, to the hillside beyond, where the glare
came from. In a moment, he realised the full meaning of the unwonted
blaze, and cried out sharply, in his shrill old tones: ‘O sah, O sah!
de naygurs hab risen, an’ dem burnin’ de trash-houses, dem burnin’ de
trash-houses!’
Mr Dupuy, aghast with righteous anger and astonishment, could hardly
believe his own ears at this unparalleled piece of nigger impertinence
coming from so old a servant as Uncle ’Zekiel. He turned round upon
his trusty butler slowly and solemnly, chair and all, and with his two
hands planted firmly on his capacious knees, he said in his most awful
voice: ‘’Zekiel, I’m quite at a loss to understand what you can mean by
such conduct. Didn’t you hear me distinctly say to Miss Nora this very
minute that the niggers don’t rise, won’t rise, can’t rise, and never
have risen? How dare you, sir, how dare you contradict me to my very
face in this disgraceful, unaccountable manner?’
But Uncle ’Zekiel, quite convinced in his own mind of the correctness
of his own hasty inference, could only repeat, more and more
energetically every minute: ‘It de trut’ I tellin’ you, sah; it de
trut’ I tellin’ you. Naygur hab risen, runnin’ an’ shoutin’, kickin’
fire about, an’ burnin’ de trash-houses!’
Mr Dupuy rose from the table, pale but incredulous. Nora jumped up,
white and terrified, but with a mute look of horror-struck appeal to
Uncle ’Zekiel. ‘Doan’t you be afraid, missy,’ the old man whispered to
her in a loud undertone; ‘we fight all de naygur in all Trinidad before
we let dem hurt a single hair ob your sweet, pretty, white, little
head, dearie.’
At that moment, for the first time, a loud shout burst suddenly
upon their astonished ears, a mingled tumultuous yell of ‘Kill de
buckra—kill de buckra!’ broken by deep African guttural mumblings, and
the crackling noise of the wild flames among the dry cane-refuse. It
was the shout that the negroes raised as Delgado called them back from
the untimely fire to their proper work of bloodshed and massacre.
In her speechless terror, Nora flung herself upon her father’s arms,
and gazed out upon the ever reddening glare beyond with unspeakable
alarm.
Next minute, the cry from without rose again louder and louder: ‘Buckra
country for us! Kill de buckra! Colour for colour! Kill dem—kill dem!’
And then, another deep negro voice, clearer and shriller far than all
of them, broke the deathly stillness that succeeded for a second, with
the perfectly audible and awful words: ‘Follow me! I gwine to lead you
to kill de Dupuys an’ all de buckra!’
‘’Zekiel!’ Mr Dupuy said, coming to himself, and taking down his
walking-stick with that calm unshaken courage in which the white West
Indian has never been found lacking in the hour of danger—‘’Zekiel,
come with me! I must go out at once and quell these rioters.’
Nora gazed at him in blank dismay. ‘Papa, papa!’ she cried
breathlessly, ‘you’re not going out to them just with your stick, are
you? You’re not going out alone to all these wretches without even so
much as a gun or a pistol!’
‘My dear,’ Mr Dupuy answered, coolly and collectedly, disengaging
himself from her arms not without some quiet natural tenderness, ‘don’t
be alarmed. You don’t understand these people as well as I do. I’m a
magistrate for the county: they’ll respect my position. The moment I
come near, they’ll all disperse and grow as mild as babies.’
And even as he spoke, the confused shrieks of the women surged closer
and closer upon their ears: ‘Kill dem—kill dem! De liquor—de liquor!’
‘Ah! I told you so,’ Mr Dupuy murmured, half to himself, very
complacently, with a deep breath. ‘Only a foolish set of tipsy
negresses, waking and rum-drinking, and kicking about firebrands.’
For another second, there was a slight pause again, while one might
count twenty; and then the report of a pistol rang out clear and
definite upon the startled air from the direction of the flaring
trash-houses. It was Delgado’s pistol, shooting down the tipsy
recalcitrant.
‘This means business!’ Mr Dupuy ejaculated, raising his voice, with
a sidelong glance at poor trembling Nora.—‘Come along, ’Zekiel; come
along all of you. We must go out at once and quiet them or disperse
them.—Dick, Thomas, Emilius, Robert, Jo, Mark Antony! every one of you!
come along with me, come along with me, and see to the trash-houses
before these tipsy wretches have utterly destroyed them.’
(_To be continued._)