Chapter XXXIII

Next day was Tuesday; and to Louis Delgado and his friends at least, the days were now well worth counting; for was not the hour of the Lord’s deliverance fixed for eight o’clock on Wednesday evening?

Nora, too, had some reason to count the days for her own purposes, for on Tuesday night they were to have a big dinner-party—the biggest undertaken at Orange Grove since Nora had first returned to her father’s house in the capacity of hostess. Mr Dupuy, while still uncertain about Harry Noel’s precise colour, had thought it well—giving him the benefit of the doubt—to invite all the neighbouring planters to meet the distinguished member of the English aristocracy: it reminded him, he said, of those bygone days when Port-of-Spain was crowded with carriages, and Trinidad was still one of the brightest jewels in the British crown (a period perfectly historical in every English colony all the world over, and usually placed about the date when the particular speaker for the time being was just five-and-twenty).

That Tuesday morning, as fate would have it, Mr Dupuy had gone with the buggy into Port-of-Spain for the very prosaic purpose—let us fain confess it—of laying in provisions for the night’s entertainment. In a country where the fish for your evening’s dinner must all have been swimming about merrily in the depths of the sea at eight o’clock the same morning, where your leg of mutton must have been careering joyously in guileless innocence across the grassy plain, and your chicken cutlets must have borne their part in investigating the merits of the juicy caterpillar while you were still loitering over late breakfast, the question of commissariat is of course a far less simple one than in our own well-supplied and market-stocked England. To arrange beforehand that a particular dusky fisherman shall stake his life on the due catching and killing of a turtle for the soup on that identical morning and no other; that a particular oyster-woman shall cut the bivalves for the oyster sauce from the tidal branches of the mangrove swamp not earlier than three or later than five in the afternoon, on her honour as a purveyor; and that a particular lounging negro coffee-planter somewhere on the hills shall guarantee a sufficient supply of black landcrabs for not less than fourteen persons—turtle and oyster and crab being all as yet in the legitimate enjoyment of their perfect natural freedom—all this, I say, involves the possession of strategical faculties of a high order, which would render a man who has once kept house in the West Indies perfectly capable of undertaking the res frumentaria for an English army on one of its innumerable slaughtering picnics for the extension of the blessings of British rule among a totally new set of black, benighted, and hitherto happy heathen. Now, Mr Dupuy was a model entertainer, of the West Indian pattern; and having schemed and devised all these his plans beforehand with profound wisdom, he had now gone into Port-of-Spain with the buggy, on hospitable thoughts intent, to bring out whatever he could get, and make arrangements, by means of tinned provisions from England, for the inevitable deficiencies which always turn up under such circumstances at the last moment. So Harry and Nora were left alone quite to themselves for the whole morning.

The veranda of the house—it fronted on the back garden at Orange Grove—is always the pleasantest place in which to sit during the heat of the day in a West Indian household. The air comes so delightfully fresh through the open spaces of the creeper-covered trellis-work, and the humming-birds buzz about so merrily among the crimson passion-flowers under your very eyes, and the banana bushes whisper so gently before the delicate fanning of the cool sea-breezes in the leafy courtyard, that you lie back dreamily in your folding-chair and half believe yourself, for once in your life, in the poet’s Paradise. On such a veranda, Harry Noel and Nora Dupuy sat together that Tuesday morning; Harry pretending to read a paper, which lay, however, unfolded on his knees—what does one want with newspapers in Paradise?—and Nora almost equally pretending to busy herself, Penelope-like, with a wee square of dainty crewel-work, concerning which it need only be said that one small flower appeared to take a most unconscionable and incredible time for its proper shaping. They were talking together as young man and maiden will talk to one another idly under such circumstances—circling half unconsciously round and round the object of both their thoughts, she avoiding it, and he perpetually converging towards it, till at last, like a pair of silly, fluttering moths around the flame of the candle, they find themselves finally landed, by a sudden side-flight in the very centre at an actual declaration.

‘Really,’ Harry said at length, at a pause in the conversation, ‘this is positively too delicious, Miss Dupuy, this sunshine and breeziness. How the light glances on the little green lizards on the wall over yonder! How beautiful the bougainvillea looks, as it clambers with its great purple masses over that big bare trunk there! We have a splendid bougainvillea in the greenhouse at our place in Lincolnshire; but oh, what a difference, when one sees it clambering in its native wildness like that, from the poor little stunted things we trail and crucify on our artificial supports over yonder in England! I almost feel inclined to take up my abode here altogether, it all looks so green and sunny and bright and beautiful.’

‘And yet,’ Nora said, ‘Mr Hawthorn told me your father’s place in Lincolnshire is so very lovely. He thinks it’s the finest country-seat he’s ever seen anywhere in England.’

‘Yes, it is pretty, certainly,’ Harry Noel admitted with a depreciating wave of his delicate right hand—‘very pretty, and very well kept up, one must allow, as places go nowadays. I took Hawthorn down there one summer vac., when we two were at Cambridge together, and he was quite delighted with it; and really, it is a very nice place, too, though it is in Lincolnshire. The house is old, you know, really old—not Elizabethan, but early Tudor, Henry the Seventh, or something thereabouts: all battlements and corner turrets, and roses and portcullises on all the shields, and a fine old portico, added by Inigo Jones, I believe, and out of keeping, of course, with the rest of the front, but still, very fine and dignified in its own way, for all that, in spite of what the architects (awful prigs) say to the contrary. And then there’s a splendid avenue of Spanish chestnuts, considered to be the oldest in all England, you know (though, to be sure, they’ve got the oldest Spanish chestnuts in the whole country at every house in all Lincolnshire that I’ve ever been to). And the lawn’s pretty, very pretty; a fine stretch of sward, with good parterres of these ugly, modern, jam-tart flowers, leading down to about the best sheet of water in the whole county, with lots of swans on it.—Yes,’ he added reflectively, contrasting the picture in his own mind with the one then actually before him, ‘the Hall’s not a bad sort of place in its own way—far from it.’

‘And Mr Hawthorn told me,’ Nora put in, ‘that you’d got such splendid conservatories and gardens too.’

‘Well, we have: there’s no denying it. They’re certainly good in their way, too, very good conservatories. You see, my dear mother’s very fond of flowers: it’s a perfect passion with her: brought it over from Barbadoes, I fancy. She was one of the very first people who went in for growing orchids on the large scale in England. Her orchid-houses are really awfully beautiful. We never have anything but orchids on the table for dinner—in the way of flowers, I mean—we don’t dine off a lily, of course, as they say the æsthetes do. And my mother’s never so proud as when anybody praises and admires her masdevallias or her thingumbobianas—I’m sorry to say I don’t myself know the names of half of them. She’s a dear, sweet, old lady, my mother, Miss Dupuy; I’m sure you couldn’t fail to like my dear mother.’

‘She’s a Barbadian too, you told us,’ Nora said reflectively. ‘How curious that she too should be a West Indian!’

Harry half sighed. He misunderstood entirely the train of thought that was passing that moment through Nora’s mind. He believed she saw in it a certain rapprochement between them two, a natural fitness of things to bring them together. ‘Yes,’ he said, with more tenderness in his tone than was often his wont, ‘my mother’s a Barbadian, Miss Dupuy: such a grand, noble-looking, commanding woman—not old yet; she never will be old, in fact; she’s too handsome for that; but so graceful and beautiful, and wonderfully winning as well, in all her pretty, dainty, old coffee-coloured laces.’ And he pulled from his pocket a little miniature, which he always wore next to his heart. He wore another one beside it, too, but that one he didn’t show her just then: it was her own face, done on ivory by a well-known artist, from a photograph which he had begged or borrowed from Marian Hawthorn’s album twelve months before in London.

‘She’s a beautiful old lady, certainly,’ Nora answered, gazing in some surprise at Lady Noel’s clear-cut and haughty, high-born-looking features. She couldn’t for the moment exactly remember where she had seen some others so very like them; and then, as Harry’s evil genius would unluckily have it, she suddenly recollected with a start of recognition: she had seen them just the evening before on the lawn in front of her: they answered precisely, in a lighter tint, to the features and expression of Isaac Pourtalès!

‘How proud she must be to be the mistress of such a place as Noel Hall!’ she said musingly, after a short pause, pursuing in her own mind to herself her own private line of reflection. It seemed to her as if the heiress of the Barbadian brown people must needs find herself immensely lifted up in the world by becoming the lady of such a splendid mansion as Harry had just half unconsciously described to her.

But Harry himself, to whom, of course, Lady Noel had been Lady Noel, and nothing else, as long as ever he could remember her, again misunderstood entirely the course of Nora’s thoughts, and took her naive expression of surprise as a happy omen for his own suit. ‘She thinks,’ he thought to himself quietly, ‘that it must be not such a very bad position after all to be mistress of the finest estate in Lincolnshire! But I don’t want her to marry me for that. O no, not for that! that would be miserable! I want her to marry me for my very self, or else for nothing.’ So he merely added aloud, in an unconcerned tone: ‘Yes; she’s very fond of the place and of the gardens; and as she’s a West Indian by birth, I’m sure you’d like her very much, Miss Dupuy, if you were ever to meet her.’

Nora coloured. ‘I should like to see some of these fine English places very much,’ she said, half timidly, trying with awkward abruptness to break the current of the conversation. ‘I never had the chance, when I was last in England. My aunt, you know, knew only very quiet people in London, and we never visited at any of the great country-houses.’

Harry determined that instant to throw his last die at once on this evident chance that opened up so temptingly before him, and said with fervour, bending forward towards her: ‘I hope, Miss Dupuy, when you are next in England, you’ll have the opportunity of seeing many, and some day of becoming the mistress of the finest in Lincolnshire. I told you at Southampton, you know, that I would follow you to Trinidad, and I’ve kept my promise.—Oh, Miss Dupuy, I hope you don’t mean to say no to me this time again! We have each had twelve months more to make up our minds in. During all those twelve months, I have only learned every day, whether in England or in Trinidad, to love you better. I have felt compelled to come out here and ask you to accept me. And you—haven’t you found your heart growing any softer meanwhile towards me? Will you unsay now the refusal you gave me a year ago over in England?’

He spoke in a soft persuasive voice, which thrilled through Nora’s very inmost being; and as she looked at him, so handsome, so fluent, so well born, so noble-looking, she could hardly refrain from whispering low a timid ‘Yes,’ on the impulse of the moment. But something that was to her almost as the prick of conscience arose at once irresistibly within her, and she motioned away quickly, with a little gesture of positive horror, the hand with which Harry strove half forcibly to take her own. The image of scowling Isaac Pourtalès as he emerged, all unexpectedly, from the shadow the night before, rose up now in strange vividness before her eyes and blinded her vision; next moment, for the first time in her life, she perceived hurriedly that Isaac not only resembled Lady Noel, but quite as closely resembled in face and feature Harry also. That unhappy resemblance was absolutely fatal to poor Harry’s doubtful chance of final acceptance. Nora shrank back, half frightened and wholly disenchanted, as far as she could go, in her own chair, and answered in a suddenly altered voice: ‘Oh, Mr Noel, I didn’t know you were going to begin that subject again; I thought we met on neutral ground, merely as friends now. I—I gave you my answer definitely long ago at Southampton. There has been nothing—nothing of any sort—to make me alter it since I spoke to you then. I like you—I like you very much indeed; and I’m so grateful to you for standing up as you have stood up for Mr Hawthorn and for poor dear Marian—but I can never, never, never—never marry you!’

Harry drew back hastily with sudden surprise and great astonishment. He had felt almost sure she was going this time really to accept him; everything she said had sounded so exactly as if she meant at last to take him. The disappointment took away his power of fluent speech. He could only ask, in a suddenly checked undertone: ‘Why, Miss Dupuy? You will at least tell me, before you dismiss me for ever, why your answer is so absolutely final.’

Nora took up the little patch of crewel-work she had momentarily dropped, and pretended, with rigid, trembling fingers, to be stitching away at it most industriously. ‘I cannot tell you,’ she answered very slowly, after a moment’s long hesitation: ‘don’t ask me. I can never tell you.’

Harry rose and gazed at her anxiously. ‘You cannot mean to say,’ he whispered, bending down towards her till their two faces almost touched one another, ‘that you are going willingly to marry your cousin, for whom your father intends you? Miss Dupuy, that would be most unworthy of you! You do not love him! You cannot love him!’

‘I hate him!’ Nora answered with sudden vehemence; and at the words, the blood rushed hot again into Harry’s cheek, and he whispered once more: ‘Then, why do you say—why do you say, Nora, you will never marry me?’

At the sound of her name, so uttered by Harry Noel’s lips, Nora rose and stood confronting him with crimson face and trembling fingers. ‘Because, Mr Noel,’ she answered slowly and with emphasis, ‘an impassable barrier stands for ever fixed and immovable between us!’

‘Can she mean,’ Harry thought to himself hastily, ‘that she considers my position in life too far above her own to allow of her marrying me?—O no; impossible, impossible! A lady’s a lady wherever she may be; and nobody could ever be more of a lady, in every action and every movement, than Nora, my Nora. She shall be my Nora. I must win her over. But I can’t say it to her; I can’t answer her little doubt as to her perfect equality with me; it would be far too great presumption even to suggest it.’

Well it was, indeed, for Harry Noel that he didn’t hint aloud in the mildest form this unlucky thought, that flashed for one indivisible second of time across the mirror of his inner consciousness; if he had, heaven only knows whether Nora would have darted away angrily like a wounded tigress from the polluted veranda, or would have stood there petrified and chained to the spot, like a Gorgon-struck Greek figure in pure white marble, at the bare idea that any creature upon God’s earth should even for a passing moment appear to consider himself superior in position to a single daughter of the fighting Dupuys of Orange Grove, Trinidad!

‘Then you dismiss me for ever?’ Harry asked quivering.

Nora cast her eyes irresolutely down upon the ground and faltered for a second; then, with a sudden burst of firmness, she answered tremulously: ‘Yes, for ever.’

At the word, Harry bounded away like a wounded man from her side, and rushed wildly with tempestuous heart into his own bedroom. As for Nora, she walked quietly back, white, but erect, to her little boudoir, and when she reached it, astonished Aunt Clemmy by flinging herself with passionate force down at full length upon the big old sofa, and bursting at once into uncontrollable floods of silent, hot, and burning tears.