Chambers's journal of popular literature, science, and art, fifth series, no. 122, vol. III, May 1, 1886

Another method much in vogue in the old days of smuggling, but seldom practised now, was to conceal tobacco in loaves of bread specially baked for the purpose. This particular trick has not been lost sight of altogether. At Hull, in March 1884, on a Customs’ officer rummaging the firemen’s quarters on board a steamer, he found two loaves of bread baked in the German fashion. Taking them in his hand, he suspected the weight as being excessive, and cutting one in two with his knife, found four pounds of tobacco inside. The packages had been firmly tied together, and a thin crust baked over them.

An ingenious place of concealment was discovered by the officers at Hull in January 1883, when, on boarding a vessel from the continent, they found seventeen boxes of cigars concealed in the hollow of the port and starboard rails which surmounted the bulwarks. Underneath firewood, buried in ballast, hidden in chain lockers, beneath oilcloths, in the stuffing of sofa-pillows, behind cabin panels, in the empty interior of an innocent-looking cabin clock, in these and a thousand other places have the officers, from time to time, discovered the contraband of the smuggler; while it is known that the ropes apparently constituting the upper rigging of small craft have occasionally consisted of tobacco twisted into a resemblance of cordage!

From what we have written, it would appear that though smuggling on an extensive scale belongs more to past than to present days, yet the same spirit still exists among people, otherwise honest enough, whose education and social position ought to free them from thieving propensities. It is almost against human nature to expect that revenue frauds will ever be thoroughly eradicated while the present high duties on special commodities are maintained. The duty on tobacco, for instance, amounting to five times its value, makes it one of the greatest temptations to seamen. Most strenuous efforts on the part of the Customs’ authorities and shipowners have been made to eradicate the traffic, yet every now and then a successful detection—which represents three or four successful evasions—occurs, which shows that the spirit of smuggling is difficult to conquer.

IN ALL SHADES.

BY GRANT ALLEN,

AUTHOR OF ‘BABYLON,’ ‘STRANGE STORIES,’ ETC. ETC.

CHAPTER XXIII.

The governor’s dance was the great event of the Trinidad season—the occasion to which every girl in the whole island looked forward for months with the intensest interest. And it was also a great event to Dr Whitaker; for it was the one time and place, except the Hawthorns’ drawing-room, where he could now meet Nora Dupuy on momentary terms of seeming equality. In the eye of the law, even in Trinidad, white men, black men, and brown men are all equal; and under the governor’s roof, as became the representative of law and order in the little island, there were no invidious distinctions of persons between European and negro. Every well-to-do inhabitant, irrespective of cuticular peculiarities, was duly bidden to the governor’s table: ebony and ivory mingled freely together once in a moon at the governor’s At Homes and dances. And Dr Whitaker had made up his mind that on that one solitary possible occasion he would venture on his sole despairing appeal to Nora Dupuy, and stand or fall by her final answer.

It was not without serious misgivings that the mulatto doctor had at last decided upon thus tempting Providence. He was weary of the terrible disillusion that had come upon him on his return to the home of his fathers; weary of the painfully vulgar and narrow world into which he had been cast by unrelenting circumstances. He could not live any longer in Trinidad. Let him fight it out as he would for the sake of his youthful ideals, the battle had clearly gone against him, and there was nothing left for him now but to give it up in despair and fly to England. He had talked the matter over with Edward Hawthorn—not, indeed, the question of proposing to Nora Dupuy, for that he held too sacred for any other ear, but the question of remaining in the island and fighting down the unconquerable prejudice—and even Edward had counselled him to go; for he felt how vastly different were the circumstances of the struggle in his own case and in those of the poor young mulatto doctor. He himself had only to fight against the social prejudices of men his real inferiors in intellect and culture and moral standing. Dr Whitaker had to face as well the utterly uncongenial brown society into which he had been rudely pitchforked by fate, like a gentleman into the midst of a pot-house company. It was best for them all that Dr Whitaker should take himself away to a more fitting environment; and Edward had himself warmly advised him to return once more to free England.

The governor’s dance was given, not at Government House in the Plains, but at Banana Garden, the country bungalow, perched high up on a solitary summit of the Westmoreland mountains. The big ballroom was very crowded; and Nora Dupuy, in a pale, maize-coloured evening dress, was universally recognised by black, brown, and white alike as the belle of the evening. She danced almost every round with one partner after another; and it was not till almost half the evening had passed away that Dr Whitaker got the desired chance of even addressing her. The chance came at last just before the fifth waltz, a dance that Nora had purposely left vacant, in case she should happen to pick up in the earlier part of the evening an exceptionally agreeable and promising partner. She was sitting down to rest for a moment beside her chaperon of the night, on a bench placed just outside the window in the tropical garden, when the young mulatto, looking every inch a gentleman in his evening dress—the first time Nora had ever seen him so attired—strolled anxiously up to her, with ill-affected carelessness, and bowed a timid bow to his former travelling companion. Pure opposition to Mr Dupuy, and affection for the two Hawthorns, had made Nora exceptionally gracious just that moment to all brown people; and, on purpose to scandalise her ‘absurdly punctilious’ chaperon, she returned the doctor’s hesitating salute with a pleasant smile of perfect cordiality. ‘Dr Whitaker!’ she cried, leaning over towards him in a kindly way, which made the poor mulatto’s heart flutter terribly; ‘so here you are, as you promised! I’m so glad you’ve come this evening.—And have you brought Miss Whitaker with you?’

The mulatto hesitated and stammered. She could not possibly have asked him a more _mal à propos_ question. The poor young man looked about him feebly, and then answered in a low voice: ‘Yes; my father and sister are here somewhere.’

‘Nora, my dear,’ her chaperon said in a tone of subdued feminine thunder, ‘I didn’t know you had the pleasure of Miss Whitaker’s acquaintance.’

‘Neither have I, Mrs Pereira; but perhaps Dr Whitaker will be good enough to introduce me.—Not now, thank you, Dr Whitaker; I don’t want you to run away this minute and fetch your sister. Some other time will do as well. It’s so seldom, you know, we have the chance of a good talk now, together.’

Dr Whitaker smiled and stammered. It was possible, of course, to accept Nora’s reluctance in either of two senses: she might be anxious that he should stop and talk to her; or she might merely wish indefinitely to postpone the pleasure of making Miss Euphemia’s personal acquaintance; but she flooded him so with the light of her eyes as she spoke, that he chose to put the most flattering of the two alternative interpretations upon her ambiguous sentence.

‘You are very good to say so,’ he answered, still timidly; and Nora noticed how very different was his manner of speaking now from the self-confident Dr Whitaker of the old _Severn_ days. Trinidad had clearly crushed all the confidence as well as all the enthusiasm clean out of him. ‘You are very good, indeed, Miss Dupuy; I wish the opportunities for our meeting occurred oftener.’

He stood talking beside her for a minute or two longer, uttering the mere polite commonplaces of ballroom conversation—the heat of the evening, the shortcomings of the band, the beauty of the flowers—when suddenly Nora gave a little jump and seized her programme with singular discomposure. Dr Whitaker looked up at once, and divined by instinct the cause of her hasty movement. Tom Dupuy, just fresh from the cane-cutting, was looking about for her down the long corridor at the opposite end of the inner garden. ‘Where’s my cousin? Have you seen my cousin?’ he was asking everybody; for the seat where Nora was sitting with Mrs Pereira stood under the shade of a big papaw tree, and so it was impossible for him to discern her face, though she could see his features quite distinctly.

‘I won’t dance with that horrid man, my cousin Tom!’ Nora said in her most decided voice. ‘I’m quite sure he’s coming here this minute on purpose to ask me.’

‘Is your programme full?’ Dr Whitaker inquired with a palpitating heart.

‘No; not quite,’ she answered, and handed it to him encouragingly. There was just one dance still left vacant—the next waltz. ‘I’m too tired to dance it out,’ Nora cried pettishly. ‘The horrid man! I hope he won’t see me.’

‘He’s coming this way, dear,’ Mrs Pereira put in with placid composure. ‘You’ll have to sit it out with him, now; there’s no help for it.’

‘Sit it out with him!—sit it out with Tom Dupuy! O no, Mrs Pereira; I wouldn’t do it for a thousand guineas.’

‘What will you do, then?’ Dr Whitaker asked tremulously, still holding the programme and pencil in his undecided hand. Dare he—dare he ask her to dance just once with him?

‘What shall I do?—Why, nothing simpler. Have an engagement already, of course, Dr Whitaker.’

She looked at him significantly. Tom Dupuy was just coming up. If Dr Whitaker meant to ask her, there was no time to be lost. His knees gave way beneath him, but he faltered out at last in some feeble fashion: ‘Then, Miss Dupuy, may I—may I—may I have the pleasure?’

To Mrs Pereira’s immense dismay, Nora immediately smiled and nodded. ‘I can’t dance it with you,’ she said with a hasty gesture—she shrank, naturally, from that open confession of faith before the whole assembled company—‘but if you’ll allow me, I’ll sit it out with you here in the garden. You may put your name down for it, if you like. Quickly, please—write it quickly; here’s Tom Dupuy just coming.’

The mulatto had hardly scratched his own name with shaky pencilled letters on the little card, when Tom Dupuy swaggered up in his awkward, loutish, confident manner, and with a contemptuous nod of condescending half-recognition to the overjoyed mulatto, asked, in his insular West Indian drawl, whether Nora could spare him a couple of dances.

‘Your canes seem to have delayed you too late, Tom Dupuy,’ Nora answered coldly. ‘Dr Whitaker has just asked me for my last vacancy. You should come earlier to a dance, you know, if you want to find a good partner.’

Tom Dupuy stared hard at her face in puzzled astonishment. ‘Your last vacancy!’ he cried incredulously. ‘Dr Whitaker! No more dances to spare, Nora! No, no, I say; this won’t do, you know! You’ve done this on purpose.—Let me have a squint at your programme, will you?’

‘If you don’t choose to take my word for the facts,’ Nora answered haughtily, ‘you can see the names and numbers of my engagements for yourself on my programme.—Dr Whitaker, have the kindness to hand my cousin my programme, if you please.—Thank you.’

Tom Dupuy took the programme ungraciously, and glanced down it with an angry eye. He read every name out aloud till he came to number eleven, ‘Dr Whitaker.’ As he reached that name, his lip curled with an ugly suddenness, and he handed the bit of cardboard back coldly to his defiant cousin. ‘Very well, Miss Nora,’ he answered with a sneer. ‘You’re quite at liberty, of course, to choose your own company however it pleases you. I see your programme’s quite full; but your list of names is rather comprehensive than select, I fancy.—The last name was written down as I was coming towards you. This is a plot to insult me.—Dr Whitaker, we shall settle this little difference elsewhere, probably—with the proper weapon—a horsewhip. Though your ancestors, to be sure, were better accustomed, I believe, sir, to a good raw cowhide.—Good-evening, Miss Nora.—Good-evening, Dr Whitaker.’

The mulatto’s eyes flashed fire, but he replied with a low and stately bow, in suppressed accents: ‘I shall be ready to answer you in this matter whenever you wish, Mr Dupuy—and with your own weapon. Good-evening.’ And he held out his arm quietly to Nora.

Nora rose and took the mulatto’s proffered arm at once with a sweeping air of utter indifference. ‘Shall we take a turn round the gardens, Dr Whitaker?’ she asked calmly, reassuring herself at the same time with a rapid glance that nobody except poor frightened Mrs Pereira had overheard this short altercation.—‘How lovely the moon looks to-night! What an exquisite undertone of green in the long shadows of those columns in the portico!’

‘Undertone of green!’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed aloud in vulgar derision (he was too much of a clod to see that his cue in the scene was fairly past, and that dignity demanded of him now to keep perfectly silent). ‘Undertone of green, indeed, with her precious nigger!—Mrs Pereira, this is your fault! A pretty sort of chaperon _you_ make, upon my word, to let her go and engage herself to sit out a dance with a common mulatto!—Where’s Uncle Theodore? Where is he, I tell you? I shall run and fetch him this very minute. I always said that in the end that girl Nora would go and marry a woolly-headed brown man.’

CHAPTER XXIV.

Nora and the mulatto walked across the garden in unbroken silence, past the fountain in the centre of the courtyard; past the corridor by the open supper-room; past the hanging lanterns on the outer shrubbery; and down the big flight of stone steps to the gravelled Italian terrace that overlooked the deep tropical gully. When they reached the foot of the staircase, Nora said in as unconcerned a tone as she could muster up: ‘Let us walk down here, away from the house, Dr Whitaker. Tom may perhaps send papa out to look for me, and I’d rather not meet him till the next dance is well over. Please take me along the terrace.’

Dr Whitaker turned with her silently along the path, and uttered not a word till they reached the marble seat at the end of the creeper-covered balustrade. Then he sat down moodily beside her, and said in what seemed a perfectly unruffled voice: ‘Miss Dupuy, I am not altogether sorry that this little incident has turned out just as it has happened. It enables you to judge for yourself the sort of insult that men of my colour are liable to meet with here in Trinidad.’

Nora fingered her fan nervously. ‘Tom Dupuy’s always an unendurably rude fellow,’ she said, with affected carelessness. ‘He’s rude by nature, you know, that’s the fact of it. He’s rude to me. He’s rude to everybody. He’s a boor, Dr Whitaker; a boor at heart. You mustn’t take any notice of what he says to you.’

‘Yes; he _is_ a boor, Miss Dupuy—and I shall venture to say so, although he’s your own cousin—but in what other country in the world would such a boor venture to believe himself able to look down upon other men, his equals in everything except an accident of colour?’

‘Oh, Dr Whitaker, you make too much altogether of his rudeness. It isn’t personal to you; it’s part of his nature.’

‘Miss Dupuy,’ the young mulatto burst out suddenly, after a moment’s pause and internal struggle, ‘I’m not sorry for it, as I said before; for it gives me the opportunity of saying something to you that I have long been waiting to tell you.’

‘Well?’—frigidly.

‘Well, it is this: I mean at once to leave Trinidad.’

Nora started. It was not quite what she was expecting. ‘To leave Trinidad, Dr Whitaker? And where to go? Back to England?’

‘Yes, back to England.—Miss Dupuy, for heaven’s sake, listen to me for a moment. This dance won’t be very long. As soon as it’s over, I must take you back to the ballroom. I have only these few short minutes to speak to you. I have been waiting long for them—looking forward to them; hoping for them; dreading them; foreseeing them. Don’t disappoint me of my one chance of a hearing. Sit here and hear me out: I beg of you—I implore you.’

Nora’s fingers trembled terribly, and she felt half inclined to rise at once and go back to Mrs Pereira; but she could not find it in her heart utterly to refuse that pleading tone of profound emotion, even though it came from only a brown man. ‘Well, Dr Whitaker,’ she answered tremulously, ‘say on whatever you have to say to me.’

‘I’m going to England, Miss Dupuy,’ the poor young mulatto went on in broken accents; ‘I can stand no longer the shame and misery of my own surroundings in this island. You know what they are. Picture them to yourself for a moment. Forget you are a white woman, a member of this old proud unforgiving aristocracy—“for they ne’er pardon who have done the wrong:” forget it for once, and try to think how it would feel to you, after your English up-bringing, with your tastes and ideas and habits and sentiments, to be suddenly set down in the midst of a society like that of the ignorant coloured class here in Trinidad. On the one side, contempt and contumely from the most boorish and unlettered whites; on the other side, utter uncongeniality with one’s own poor miserable people. Picture it to yourself—how absolutely unendurable!’

Nora bethought her silently of Tom Dupuy from both points of view, and answered in a low tone: ‘Dr Whitaker, I recognise the truth of what you say. I—I am sorry for you; I sympathise with you.’

It was a great deal for a daughter of the old slave-owning oligarchy to say—how much, people in England can hardly realise; and Dr Whitaker accepted it gratefully. ‘It’s very kind of you, Miss Dupuy,’ he went on again, the tears rising quickly to his eyes, ‘very, very kind of you. But the struggle is over; I can’t stand it any longer; I mean at once to return to England.’

‘You will do wisely, I think,’ Nora answered, looking at him steadily.

‘I will do wisely,’ he repeated in a wandering tone. ‘Yes, I will do wisely. But, Miss Dupuy, strange to say, there is one thing that still binds me down to Trinidad.—Oh, for heaven’s sake, listen to me, and don’t condemn me unheard.—No, no, I beg of you, don’t rise yet! I will be brief. Hear me out, I implore of you, I implore of you! I am only a mulatto, I know; but mulattoes have a heart as well as white men—better than some, I do honestly believe. Miss Dupuy, from the very first moment I saw you, I—I loved you! yes, I _will_ say it—I loved you!—I loved you!’

Nora rose, and stood erect before him, proud but tremulous, in her girlish beauty. ‘Dr Whitaker,’ she said, in a very calm tone, ‘I knew it; I saw it. From the first moment you ever spoke to me, I knew it perfectly.’

He drew a long breath to still the violent throbbing of his heart. ‘You knew it,’ he said, almost joyously—‘you knew it! And you did not repel me! Oh, Miss Dupuy, for one of your blood and birth, that was indeed a great condescension!’

Nora hesitated. ‘I liked you, Dr Whitaker,’ she answered slowly—‘I liked you, and I was sorry for you.’

‘Thank you, thank you. Whatever else you say, for that one word I thank you earnestly. But oh, what more can I say to you? I love you; I have always loved you. I shall always love you in future. Take me or reject me, I shall always love you. And yet, how can I ask you? But in England—in England, Miss Dupuy, the barrier would be less absolute.—Yes, yes; I know how hopeless it is: but this once—this once only! I _must_ ask you! Oh, for pity’s sake, in England—far away from it all—in London—where nobody thinks of these things! Why, I know a Hindu barrister—— But there! it’s not a matter for reasoning; it lies between heart and heart! Oh, Miss Dupuy, tell me—tell me, tell me, is there—is there any chance for me?’