Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 120, vol. III, April 17, 1886

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The only other legal tender are Bank of England notes. They are a legal tender for sums above five pounds. The Bank of England itself must, however, if desired, pay gold.

IN ALL SHADES.

CHAPTER XX.

There was great excitement in the District Court at Westmoreland one sunny morning, a few days later, for the new judge was to sit and hear an appeal, West Indian fashion, from a magistrate’s decision in the case of Delgado _versus_ Dupuy. The little courthouse in the low parochial buildings of Westmoreland was crowded with an eager throng of excited negroes. Much buzzing and humming of voices filled the room, for it was noised abroad among the blacks that Mistah Hawtorn, being a brown man born, was likely to curry favour with the buckras—as brown men will—by giving unjust decisions in their favour against the black men; and this was a very important case for the agricultural negroes, as it affected a question of paying wages for work performed in the Pimento Valley cane-pieces.

Rosina Fleming was there among the crowd; and as Louis Delgado, the appellant in the case, came into court, he paused for a moment to whisper hurriedly a few words to her. ‘De med’cine hab effeck like I tell you, Missy Rosina?’ he asked in an undertone.

Rosina laughed and showed her white teeth. ‘Yes, Mistah Delgado, him hab effeck, sah, same like you tell me. Isaac Pourtalès, him lub me well for true, nowadays.’

‘Him gwine to marry you, missy?’

Rosina shook her head. ‘No; him can’t done dat,’ she answered carelessly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Him got anudder wife already.’

‘Ha! Him got wife ober in Barbadoes?’ Delgado muttered. ‘Him doan’t nebber tell me dat.—Well, Missy Rosy, I want you bring Isaac Pourtalès to me hut dis one day. I want Isaac to help me. De cup ob de Dupuys is full dis day; an’ if de new judge gib decision wrongfully agin me, de Lard will arise soon in all him glory, like him tell de prophets, an’ make de victory for him own people.’

‘But not hurt de missy?’ Rosina inquired anxiously.

‘Yah, yah! You is too chupid, Miss Rosy, I tellin’ you. You tink de Lard gwine to turn aside in de day ob vengeance for your missy? De Dupuys is de Lard’s enemy, le-ady, an’ he will destroy dem utterly, men and women.’

Before Rosina could find time to reply, there was a sudden stir in the body of the court, and Edward Hawthorn, entering from the private door behind, took his seat upon the judge’s bench in hushed silence.

‘Delgado _versus_ Dupuy, an appeal from a magistrate’s order, referred to this court as being under twenty shillings in value.—Who heard the case in the first instance?’ Edward inquired.

‘Mr Dupuy of Orange Grove and Mr Henley,’ Tom Dupuy, the defendant, answered quietly.

Edward’s forehead puckered up a little. ‘You are the defendant, I believe, Mr Thomas Dupuy?’ he said to the young planter with a curious look.

Tom Dupuy nodded acquiescence.

‘And the case was heard in the first instance by Mr Theodore Dupuy of Orange Grove, who, if I am rightly informed, happens to be your own uncle?’

‘Rightly informed!’ Tom Dupuy sneered half angrily—‘rightly informed, indeed! Why, you know he is, of course, as well as I do. Didn’t we both call upon you together the other day? I should say, considering what sort of interview we had, you can’t already have quite forgotten it!’

Edward winced a little, but answered nothing. He merely allowed the plaintiff to be put in the box, and proceeded to listen carefully to his rambling evidence. It wasn’t very easy, even for the sharp, half-Jewish brown barrister who was counsel for the plaintiff, to get anything very clear or definite out of Louis Delgado with his vague rhetoric. Still, by dint of patient listening, Edward Hawthorn was enabled at last to make out the pith and kernel of the old African’s excited story. He worked, it seemed, at times on Orange Grove estate, and at times, alternately, at Pimento Valley. The wages on both estates, as frequently happens in such cases, were habitually far in arrears; and Delgado claimed for many days, on which, he asserted, he had been working at Tom Dupuy’s cane-pieces; while Tom Dupuy had entered a plea of never indebted on the ground that no entry appeared in his own book-keeper’s account for those dates of Delgado’s presence. Mr Theodore Dupuy had heard the case, and he and a brother-magistrate had at once decided it against Delgado. ‘But, I know, sah,’ Delgado said vehemently, looking up to the new judge with a certain defiant air, as of a man who comes prepared for injustice, ‘I know I work dem days at Pimento Valley, becase I keep book meself, an’ put down in him in me own hand all de days I work anywhere.’

‘Can you produce the book?’ Edward inquired of the excited negro.

‘It isn’t any use,’ Tom Dupuy interrupted angrily. ‘I’ve seen the book myself, and you can’t read it. It’s all kept in some heathenish African language or other.’

‘I must request you, Mr Dupuy, not to interrupt,’ Edward Hawthorn said in his sternest voice. ‘Please to remember, I beg of you, that this room is a court of justice.’

‘Not much justice here for white men, I expect,’ Tom Dupuy muttered to himself in a half-audible undertone. ‘The niggers’ll have it all their own way in future, of course, now they’ve got one of themselves to sit upon the bench for them.’

‘Produce the book,’ Edward said, turning to Delgado, and restraining his natural anger with some difficulty.

‘It doan’t no good, sah,’ the African answered, with a sigh of despondency, pulling out a greasy account-book from his open bosom, and turning over the pages slowly in moody silence. ‘It me own book, dat I hab for me own reference, an’ I keep him all in me own handwriting.’

Edward held out his hand commandingly, and took the greasy small volume that the African passed over to him, with some little amusement and surprise. He didn’t expect, of course, that he would be able to read it, but he thought at least he ought to see what sort of accounts the man kept; they would at anyrate be interesting, as throwing light upon negro ideas and modes of reckoning. He opened the book the negro gave him and turned it over hastily with a languid curiosity. In a second, a curious change came visibly over his startled face, and he uttered sharply a little sudden cry of unaffected surprise and astonishment. ‘Why,’ he said in a strangely altered voice, turning once more to the dogged African, who stood there staring at him in stolid indifference, ‘what on earth is the meaning of this? This is Arabic!’

Rosina Fleming, looking eagerly from in front at the curious characters, saw at once they were the same in type as the writing in the obeah book Delgado had showed her the evening she went to consult him at his hut about Isaac Pourtalès.

Delgado glanced back at the young judge with a face full of rising distrust and latent incredulity. ‘You doan’t can read it, sah?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘It African talk. You doan’t can read it?’

‘Certainly, I can,’ Edward answered with a smile. ‘It’s very beautifully and clearly written, and the entries are in good and accurate Arabic.’ And he read a word or two of the entries aloud, in proof of his ability to decipher at sight the mysterious characters.

Delgado in turn gave a sudden start; and drawing himself up to his full height, with newborn pride and dignity, he burst forth at once into a few sentences in some strange foreign tongue, deep and guttural, addressed apparently, as Tom Dupuy thought, to the new judge in passionate entreaty. But in reality the African was asking Edward Hawthorn, earnestly and in the utmost astonishment, whether it was a fact that he could really and truly speak Arabic.

Edward answered him back in a few words, rapidly spoken, in the fluent colloquial Egyptian dialect which he had learned in London from his Mohammedan teacher, Sheik Abdullah. It was but a short sentence, but it was quite enough to convince Delgado that he did positively understand the entries in the account-book. ‘De Lard be praise!’ the African shouted aloud excitedly. ‘De new judge, him can read de book I keep for me own reckonin’! De Lard be praise! Him gwine to delibber me!’

‘Did ever you see such a farce in your life?’ whispered Tom Dupuy to his uncle Theodore. ‘I don’t believe the fellow understands a single word of it; and I’m sure the gibberish they were talking to one another can’t possibly be part of any kind of human language even in Africa. And yet, after all, I don’t know! The fellow’s a nigger himself, and perhaps he may really have learned from his own people some of their confounded African lingoes. But who on earth would ever have believed, Uncle Theodore, we’d have lived to hear such trash as that talked openly from the very bench in a Queen’s court in the island of Trinidad!’

Edward coloured up again at the few words which he caught accidentally of this ugly monologue; but he only said to the eager African: ‘I cannot speak with you here in Arabic, Delgado; here we must use English only.’

‘Certainly,’ Tom Dupuy suggested aloud—colonial courts are even laxer than English ones. ‘We mustn’t forget, of course, Mr Hawthorn, as you said just now, that this room is a court of justice.’

The young judge turned over the book to conceal his chagrin, and examined it carefully. ‘What are the dates in dispute?’ he asked, turning to the counsel.

Delgado and Tom Dupuy in one breath gave a full list of them. Counsel handed up a little written slip with the various doubtful days entered carefully upon it in ordinary English numbers. Edward ticked them off one by one in Delgado’s note-book, quietly to himself, smiling as he did so at the quaint Arabic translations of the Grove of Oranges and the Valley of Pimento. Every one of Delgado’s dates was quite accurately and carefully entered in his own account-book.

When they came to examine Tom Dupuy and his Scotch book-keeper, their account of the whole transaction was far less definite, clear, and consistent. Tom Dupuy, with a certain airy lordly indifference, admitted that his payments were often in arrears, and that his modes of book-keeping were often somewhat rough and ready. He didn’t pretend to keep an account personally of every man’s labour on his whole estate, he said; he was a gentleman himself, and he left that sort of thing, of course, to his book-keeper’s memory. The book-keeper didn’t remember that Louis Delgado had worked at Pimento Valley on those particular disputed mornings; though, to be sure, one naturally couldn’t be quite certain about it. But if you were going to begin taking a nigger’s word on such a matter against a white man’s, why, what possible security against false charges could you give in future to the white planter?

‘How often do you post up the entries in that book?’ Delgado’s counsel asked the Scotch book-keeper in cross-examination.

The book-keeper was quite as airy and easy as his master in this matter. ‘Well, whiles I do it at the time,’ he answered quietly, ‘and whiles I do it a wee bit later.’

‘An’ I put him down ebbery evening, de minute I home, sah, in dis note-book,’ Delgado shouted eagerly with a fierce gesticulation.

‘You must be quiet, please,’ Edward said, turning to him. ‘You mustn’t interrupt the witness or your counsel.’

‘Did Delgado work at Pimento Valley yesterday?’ the brown barrister asked, looking up from the books which Tom Dupuy had been forced to produce and hand in, in evidence.

The book-keeper hesitated and smiled a sinister smile. ‘He did,’ he answered after a moment’s brief internal conflict.

‘How is it, then, that the day’s work isn’t entered here already?’ the brown barrister went on pitilessly.

The book-keeper shuffled with an uneasy shuffle. ‘Ah, well, I should have entered it on Saturday evening,’ he answered evasively.

Edward turned to Delgado’s note-book. The last day’s work was entered properly in an evidently fresh ink, that of the previous two days looking proportionately blacker and older. There could be very little doubt, indeed, which of the two posted his books daily with the greater care and accuracy.

He heard the case out patiently and temperately, in spite of Delgado’s occasional wild outbursts and Tom Dupuy’s constant sneers, and at the end he proceeded to deliver judgment as calmly as he was able, without prejudice. It was a pity that the first case he heard should have been one which common justice compelled him to give against Tom Dupuy, but there was no helping it. ‘The court enters judgment for the plaintiff,’ he said in a loud clear voice. ‘Delgado’s books, though unfortunately kept only in Arabic for his own reference, have been carefully and neatly posted.—Yours, Mr Dupuy, I regret to say, are careless, inadequate, and inaccurate; and I am also sorry to see that the case was heard in the first instance by one of your own near relations, which circumstance, it would have been far wiser, as well as more seemly, to have avoided.’

Tom Dupuy grew red and pale by turns as he listened in blank surprise and dismay to this amazing and unprecedented judgment. A black man’s word taken in evidence in open court against a white gentleman’s! It was too appalling! ‘Well, well, Uncle Theodore,’ he said bitterly, rising to go, ‘I expected as much, though it’s hard to believe it. I knew we should never get decent justice in this court any longer!’

But Delgado stood there, dazed and motionless, gazing with mute wonder at the pale face of the new judge, and debating within himself whether it could be really true or not that he had gained his case against the powerful Dupuy faction. Not that he understood for a moment the exact meaning of the legal words, ‘judgment for the plaintiff;’ but he saw at once on Tom Dupuy’s face that the white man was positively livid with anger and had been severely reprimanded. ‘De Lard be praise!’ he ejaculated at last. ‘De judge is righteous judge, an’ him lub de black man!’

Edward would have given a great deal just then if Delgado in the moment of his triumph had not used those awkward words, ‘him lub de black man!’ But there was no use brooding over it now; so, as the court was clearing he merely signed with his finger to Delgado, and whispered hastily in his ear: ‘Come to me this evening in my own room; I want to hear from you how and where you learned Arabic.’

CHAPTER XXI.

When Edward made his way, wearied and anxious, into his own room behind the courthouse, Delgado was waiting for him there, and as the judge entered, he rose quickly and uttered a few words of customary salutation in excellent Arabic. Edward Hawthorn observed at once that a strange change seemed to have come over the ragged old negro. He had lost his slouching, half-savage manner, and stood more erect, or bowed in self-respecting obeisance, with a certain obvious consciousness of personal dignity which at once reminded him of Sheik Abdullah. He noticed, too, that while the man’s English was the mere broken Creole language he had learned from the other negroes around him, his Arabic was the pure colloquial classical Arabic of the Cairo ulemas. It was astonishing what a difference this change of tongue made in the tattered old black field-labourer: when he spoke English, he was the mere ordinary plantation negro; when he spoke Arabic, he was the decently educated and perfectly courteous African Moslem.

‘You have quite surprised me, Delgado,’ Edward said, still in colloquial Arabic. ‘I had no idea there were any Africans in Trinidad who understood the language of the Koran. How did you ever come to learn it?’

The old African bowed graciously, and expanded his hands with a friendly gesture. ‘Effendi,’ he answered, ‘Allah is not wholly without his true followers in any country. Is it not written in your own book that when Elijah, the forerunner of the Prophet, cried in the cave, saying: “I alone am left of the worshippers of Allah,” the Lord answered and said unto him in his mercy: “I have left me seven thousand souls in Israel which have not bowed the knee to Baal?” Even so, Allah has his followers left even here among the infidels in Trinidad.’

‘Then you are still a Mussulman?’ Edward cried in surprise.

The old African rose again from the seat into which Edward had politely motioned him, and folding both his hands reverently in front of him, answered in a profoundly solemn voice: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’

‘But I thought—I understood—I was told that you were a teacher and preacher up yonder in the Methodist chapel.’

Delgado shrugged his shoulders with African expressiveness. ‘What can I do?’ he said, throwing open his hands sideways. ‘They have brought me here all the way from the Gold Coast. There is no mosque here, no ulema, no other Moslems. What can I do? I have to do as the other negroes do.—But see!’ and he drew something carefully from the folds of his dirty cotton shirt: ‘I have brought a Book with me. I have kept it sacredly all these years. Have you seen it? Do you know it?’

Edward opened the soiled and dog-eared but carefully treasured volume that the negro handed him. He knew it at once. It was a copy of the Koran. He turned the pages over lightly till he came to the famous chapter of the Seven Treasures; then he began to read aloud a few verses in a clear, easy, Arabic intonation.

Delgado started when he heard the young judge actually reading the sacred volume. ‘So you, too, are a Moslem!’ he cried excitedly.

Edward smiled. ‘No,’ he answered; ‘I am no Mussulman. But I have learned Arabic, and I have read the Koran.’

‘Mussulman or Christian,’ Delgado answered fervently, throwing up his head, ‘you are a servant of Allah. You have given judgment to-day like Daniel the Hebrew or like Othman Calif, the successor of the Prophet. When the great and terrible day of the Lord arrives, Allah will surely not forget the least among his servants.’

Edward did not understand the hidden meaning of that seemingly conventional pious tag, so he merely answered: ‘But you haven’t yet told me, remnant of the faithful, how you ever came to learn Arabic.’

Thus encouraged, Delgado loosed the strings of his tongue, and poured forth rapidly with African volubility the whole marvellous story of his life. The son of a petty chieftain on the Guinea coast, he had been sent in his boyhood by his father, a Mohammedan convert, to the native schools for the negroes at Cairo, where he had remained till he was over seventeen years old, and had then returned to his father’s principality. There, he had gone out to fight in some small war between two neighbouring negro chieftains, the events of which war he insisted on detailing to Edward at great length; and having been taken prisoner by the hostile party, he had at last been sold in the bad old days, when a contraband ‘ebony-trade’ still existed, to a Cuban slaver. The slaver had been captured off Sombrero Rock by an English cruiser, and all the negroes landed at Trinidad. That was the sum and substance of the strangely romantic story told by the old African to the young English barrister in the Westmoreland courthouse. Couched in his childish and ignorant negro English, it would no doubt have sounded ludicrous and puerile; but poured forth in classical Arabic almost as pure and fluent as Sheik Abdullah’s own, it was brimful of pathos, eloquence, interest, and weirdness. Yet strange and almost incredible as it seemed to Edward’s mind, the old African himself apparently regarded it as the most natural and simple concatenation of events that could easily happen to anybody anywhere.

‘And how is it,’ Edward asked at last, in profound astonishment, lapsing once more into English, ‘that you have never tried to get back to Africa?’

Delgado smiled an ugly smile, that showed all his teeth, not pleasantly, but like the teeth of a bulldog snarling. ‘Do you tink, sah,’ he said sarcastically, ‘dat dem fightin’ Dupuy is gwine to help a poor black naygur to go back to him own country? Ole-time folk has proverb; “Mongoose no help cane-rat find de way back to him burrow.”’