Chapter XLVII

When Mr Dupuy heard from his daughter’s own lips the news of her engagement to Harry Noel, his wrath at first was absolutely unbounded; he stormed about the house, and raved and gesticulated. He refused ever to see Harry Noel again, or to admit of any proffered explanation, or to suffer Nora to attempt the defence of her own conduct. He was sure no defence was possible, and he wasn’t going to listen to one either, whether or not. He even proposed to kick Harry out of doors forthwith for having thus taken advantage in the most abominable manner of his very peculiar and unusual circumstances. Whatever came, he would never dream of allowing Nora to marry such an extremely ungentlemanly and mean-spirited fellow.

But Mr Dupuy didn’t sufficiently calculate upon the fact that in this matter he had another Dupuy to deal with, and that that other Dupuy had the indomitable family will quite as strongly developed within her as he himself had. Nora stuck bravely to her point with the utmost resolution. As long as she was not yet of age, she said, she would obey her father in all reasonable matters; but as soon as she was twenty-one, Orange Grove or no Orange Grove, she would marry Harry Noel outright, so that was the end of it; and having delivered herself squarely of this profound determination, she said not a word more upon the subject, but left events to work out their own course in their own proper and natural fashion.

Now, Mr Dupuy was an obstinate man; but his obstinacy was of that vehement and demonstrative kind which grows fiercer and fiercer the more you say to it, but wears itself out, of pure inanition, when resolutely met by a firm and passive silent opposition. Though she was no psychologist, Nora had hit quite unconsciously and spontaneously upon this best possible line of action. She never attempted to contradict or gainsay her father, whenever he spoke to her angrily, in one of his passionate outbursts, against Harry Noel; but she went her own way, quietly and unobtrusively, taking it for granted always, in a thousand little undemonstrative ways, that it was her obvious future rôle in life to marry at last her chosen lover. And as water by continual dropping wears a hole finally in the hardest stone, so Nora by constant quiet side-hints made her father gradually understand that she would really have Harry Noel for a husband, and no other. Bit by bit, Mr Dupuy gave way, sullenly and grudgingly, convinced in his own mind that the world was being rapidly turned topsy-turvy, and that it was no use for a plain, solid, straightforward old gentleman any longer to presume single-handed upon stemming the ever-increasing flood of revolutionary levelling sentiment. It was some solace to his soul, as he yielded slowly inch by inch, to think that if for once in his life he had had to yield, it was at least to a born Dupuy, and not to any pulpy, weak-minded outsider whatever.

So in the end, before the steamer was ready to sail, he had been brought, not indeed to give his consent to Nora’s marriage—for that was more than any one could reasonably have expected from a man of his character—but to recognise it somehow in an unofficial dogged fashion as quite inevitable. After all, the fellow was heir to a baronetcy, which is always an eminently respectable position; and his daughter in the end would be Lady Noel; and everybody said the young man had behaved admirably on the night of the riot; and over in England—well, over in England it’s positively incredible how little right and proper feeling people have got upon these important racial matters.

‘But one thing I will _not_ permit,’ Mr Dupuy said with decisive curtness. ‘Whether you marry this person Noel, Nora, or whether you don’t—a question on which it seems, in this new-fangled order of things that’s coming up nowadays, a father’s feelings are not to be consulted—you shall not marry him here in Trinidad. I will not allow the grand old name and fame of the fighting Dupuys of Orange Grove to be dragged through the mud with any young man whatsoever, in this island. If you want to marry the man Noel, miss, you shall marry him in England, where nobody on earth will know anything at all about it.’

‘Certainly, papa,’ Nora answered most demurely. ‘Mr Noel would naturally prefer the wedding to take place in London, where his own family and friends could all be present; and besides, of course there wouldn’t be time to get one’s things ready either, before we leave the West Indies.’

When the next steamer was prepared to sail, it carried away a large contingent of well-known residents from the island of Trinidad. On the deck, Edward and Marian Hawthorn stood waving their handkerchiefs energetically to their friends on the wharf, and to the great body of negroes who had assembled in full force to give a parting cheer to ‘de black man fren’, Mr Hawtorn.’ Harry Noel, in a folding cane-chair, sat beside them, still pale and ill, but bowing, it must be confessed, from time to time a rather ironical bow to his late assailants, at the cheers, which were really meant, of course, for his more popular friend and travelling companion. Close by stood Nora, not sorry in her heart that she was to see the last that day of the land of her fathers, where she had suffered so terribly and dared so much. And close by, too, on the seat beside the gunwale, sat Mr and Mrs Hawthorn the elder, induced at last, by Edward’s earnest solicitation, to quit Trinidad for the evening of their days, and come to live hard by his own new home in the mother country. As for Mr Dupuy, he had no patience with the open way in which that man Hawthorn was waving his adieux so abominably to his fellow-conspirators; so, by way of escaping from the unwelcome demonstration, he was quietly ensconced below in a corner of the saloon, enjoying a last parting cigar and a brandy cocktail with some of his old planter cronies, who were going back to shore by-and-by in the pilot boat. As a body, the little party downstairs were all agreed that when a man like our friend Dupuy here was positively driven out of the island by coloured agitators, Trinidad was no longer a place fit for any gentleman with the slightest self-respect to live in. The effect of this solemn declaration was only imperceptibly marred by the well-known fact that it had been announced with equal profundity of conviction, at intervals of about six months each, by ten generations of old Trinidad planters, ever since the earliest foundation of the Spanish colony in that island.

Just two months later, Mr Dupuy was seated alone at his solitary lunch in the London club to which Harry Noel had temporarily introduced him as an honorary guest. It was the morning after Nora’s wedding, and Mr Dupuy was feeling naturally somewhat dull and lonely in that great unsympathetic world of London. His attention, however, was suddenly attracted by two young men at a neighbouring table, one of whom distinctly mentioned in an audible tone his new son-in-law’s name, ‘Harry Noel.’ The master of Orange Grove drew himself up stiffly and listened with much curiosity to such scraps as he could manage to catch of their flippant conversation.

‘O yes,’ one of them was saying, ‘a very smart affair indeed, I can tell you. Old Sir Walter down there from Lincolnshire, and half the smartest people in London at the wedding breakfast. Very fine fellow, Noel, and comes in to one of the finest estates in the whole of England. Pretty little woman, too, the bride—nice little girl, with such winning little baby features.’

‘Ah!’ drawled out the other slowly. ‘Pretty, is she? Ah, really. And pray, who was she?’

Mr Dupuy’s bosom swelled with not unnatural paternal pride and pleasure as he anticipated the prompt answer from the wedding guest: ‘One of the fighting Dupuys of Trinidad.’

But instead of replying in that perfectly reasonable and intelligible fashion, the young man at the club responded slowly: ‘Well, upon my word, I don’t exactly know who she was, but somebody colonial, any way, I’m certain. I fancy from Hong-kong, or Penang, or Demerara, or somewhere.—No; Trinidad—I remember now—it was certainly either St Kitts or Trinidad. Oh, Trinidad, of course, for Mrs Hawthorn, you know—Miss Ord that was—wife of that awfully clever Cambridge fellow Hawthorn, who’s just been appointed to a permanent something-or-other-ship at the Colonial Office—Mrs Hawthorn knew her when she was out there during that nigger row they’ve just been having; and she pointed me out the bride’s father, a snuffy-looking old gentleman in the sugar-planting line, over in those parts, as far as I understood her. Old gentleman looked horribly out of it among so many smart London people. Horizon apparently quite limited by rum and sugar.—O yes, it was a great catch for her, of course, I needn’t tell you; but I understand this was the whole story of it. She angled for him very cleverly; and, by Jove, she hooked him at last, and played him well, and now she’s landed him and fairly cooked him. It appears, he went out there not long before this insurrection business began, to look after some property they have in the island, and he stopped with her father, who, I daresay, was accustomed to dispensing a sort of rough-and-ready colonial hospitality to all comers, gentle and simple. When the row came, the snuffy old gentleman in the sugar-planting line, as luck would have it, was the very first man whose house was attacked—didn’t pay his niggers regularly, they tell me; and this young lady, posing herself directly behind poor Noel, compelled him, out of pure politeness, being a chivalrous sort of man, to fight for her life, and beat off the niggers single-handed for half an hour or so. Then he gets cut down, it seems, with an ugly cutlass wound: she falls fainting upon his body, for all the world like a Surrey melodrama; Hawthorn rushes in with drawn pistol and strikes an attitude; and the curtain falls: tableau. At last, Hawthorn manages to disperse the niggers; and my young lady has the agreeable task of nursing Noel at her father’s house, through a slow convalescence. Deuced clever, of course: makes him save her life first, and then she helps to save his. Has him both ways, you see—devotion and gratitude. So, as I say, she lands him promptly: and the consequence is, after a proper interval, this smart affair that came off yesterday over at St George’s.’

Once more the world reeled visibly before Mr Dupuy’s eyes, and he rose up from that hospitable club table, leaving his mutton cutlet and tomato sauce almost untasted. In the heat of the moment, he was half inclined to go back again immediately to his native Trinidad, and brave the terrors of vivisection, rather than stop in this atrocious, new-fangled, upsetting England, where the family honours of the fighting Dupuys of Orange Grove were positively reckoned at less than nothing. He restrained himself, however, with a violent effort, and still condescends, from summer to summer, fitfully to inhabit this chilly, damp, and unappreciative island. But it is noticeable that he talks much less frequently now of the Dupuy characteristics than he did formerly (the population of Great Britain being evidently rather bored than otherwise by his constant allusions to those remarkable idiosyncrasies); and some of his acquaintances have even observed that since the late baronet’s lamented decease, a few months since, he has spoken more than once with apparent pride and delight of ‘my son-in-law, Sir Harry Noel.’

It is a great consolation to Tom Dupuy to this day, whenever anybody happens casually to mention his cousin Nora in his presence, that he can rub his hands gently one over the other before him, and murmur in his own peculiar drawl: ‘I always told you she’d end at last by marrying some confounded woolly-headed brown man.’

THE END.

REBEL-CATCHING.

We were in camp, and our chief was a very distinguished officer of middle age, who had won his first spurs in the Indian Mutiny, and had been winning additional spurs ever since. We were a small party, which perhaps partly accounted for the chief’s communicativeness, for to induce him to narrate any of his own experiences under ordinary circumstances was well nigh an impossibility. Be this as it may, on this occasion he did abate a little of his habitual reserve, and though he would not even hint at one of the score of incidents in which his coolness and gallantry had been almost historical, still, what he did tell us may be of some general interest. Moreover, to the best of my knowledge—and I can claim something more than a nodding acquaintance with the literature of the Sepoy Revolt—the two following stories have never been even alluded to in print. I am sorry I cannot recollect the exact words in which they were told; but I will do my best, and will only ask that any deficiencies in the narrative may be attributed to me, and not to the anonymous speaker.

‘Talking of catching rebels reminds me that I had a good deal to do in that line in the Mutiny days. I was only a youngster, not much more than a boy at the time; but I suppose I was rather zealous and active, for I was given a small independent command, a troop of native cavalry and a handful of infantry, and posted near the Nepal frontier to look out for rebels. This was quite at the fag-end of the Mutiny; and my chief duty was to catch, if possible, one or two noted scoundrels who had hitherto escaped, and who, it was supposed, might try to take refuge in the Nepal valley. Amongst the objects of my especial solicitude was a subahdar [native officer] who had taken a prominent part in the massacre of women and children at Cawnpore. I had full permission to shoot this hound if only I could catch him; and I waited longingly for some tidings of his whereabouts. At last, one evening a native arrived at my post, and declared that the subahdar was lying hid in a village some little distance off, on the Nepal side of the frontier. I had got my chance, and I was not going to lose it by delay. Getting together my troop of cavalry, I made a night-march to the village, and in the very early morning, before any of the inhabitants were astir, I drew a _cordon_ round it, and waited. When day broke, I sent a message to the head-man of the village and explained matters. I called upon him to deliver up the subahdar, and pointed out that I was master of the situation. To my disgust, the head-man declared that he could not give up the subahdar, for the simple reason that he was not in the village at all. However, my information had been trustworthy, and I did not like the idea of having had a long and troublesome march for nothing, so I ordered a search. This was accordingly made, but with no results except that of putting me into a rather bad temper. Finally, I said to the head-man that every single inhabitant of the place should turn out by a given time that day, or I would burn the village over their heads. The head-man sorrowfully consented; and man, woman, and child evacuated the huts, after which the troopers scoured the village in their endeavours to find their man. But not a sign of him was present, and I began to feel that I had been befooled. Somewhat sick at heart, I ordered my troopers to stop searching and to prepare for the return march.

‘As the troopers were trotting up to fall in, one of them happened to pass a small hut in which was a heap of most innocent-looking but not very savoury rubbish. Through the doorway the trooper casually poked his lance at this heap, more for swagger or to show his zeal than with any hope of making a discovery. Suddenly, up from the rubbish jumped a scared figure, who was promptly caught and brought to me. It was the subahdar!’

The speaker went on to say that they made short work of the scoundrel, who had reddened his foul hands with the blood of English ladies and children. He had his trial; but the evidence was conclusive, and mercy was out of the question. The subahdar was shot; and when one reads the details of the two massacres at Cawnpore, one is tempted to think that the death was too good for him. Our chief concluded this episode by noting that he subsequently had no difficulty in explaining to the Nepalese authorities his conduct towards the villagers, which had been, to say the least, somewhat brusque. These authorities looked upon the matter as rather humorous than otherwise, and certainly not worthy of serious notice.

‘Another curious thing happened to me,’ continued the chief, ‘during the time that I was rebel-hunting. One day I caught a criminal with a very peculiar face, one that I could not help remembering rather more clearly than I generally remember the countenances of natives. This particular rebel had done something particularly bad, and had to be shot without delay. I gave the necessary orders for a firing-party to be formed, and the execution was duly carried out. Something prevented me from being actually present on the ground, but there was a native officer, and my men were presumably to be trusted. I remember distinctly hearing the volley delivered by the firing-party, and when I subsequently inquired whether everything had been all right, it was reported to me that the man was dead.

‘About a fortnight afterwards, a man was brought in to me whose face seemed strangely familiar. Suddenly it flashed on my mind that this was the very man whose death-knell I had heard only a few days ago. Looking at him closely, I said: “How is this? Who are you? Surely I had you shot a fortnight ago?”

“It is true, sahib,” said the poor wretch. “I am the man your soldiers caught, and I was brought before your honour, and you ordered me to be shot. I was taken out, and they stood me on the edge of a _nala_ [a dried-up watercourse], and fired. Sahib, they hit me; but I was not dead, and I dropped into the _nala_ and crept away. Your soldiers never came to look for me, and I escaped. By evil chance, I have been captured again. But, sahib, do not order me to be shot again.”

“No,” said I; “I will not do that—not this time, at anyrate. You are free, and had better make the best use of your legs. But if I catch you again, I shall really be obliged to have you shot in downright earnest. Be off, and take care you don’t fall a third time into my hands.”

‘And he didn’t.’

Our chief commented on the native’s tale of his hairbreadth escape as being what Yankees would call ‘rather thin.’ He seemed himself to think that the firing-party had been tampered with, a contingency which he had, in his subsequent rebel-catching adventures, taken care to avert.

BY ORDER OF THE LEAGUE.