Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 124, vol. III, May 15, 1886

IN ALL SHADES.

CHAPTER XXVI.

No human eye ever again beheld Wilberforce Whitaker, alive or dead. The torrent that had washed down the gap in the narrow horsepath tore away with it in the course of that evening’s rain a great mass of tottering earth that had long trembled on the edge of the precipice; and when next day the governor’s servants went down in awed silence to hunt among the débris for the mangled body, they found nothing but a soaked hat on the road behind, and a broken riding-whip close to the huge rent that yawned across the path by the crumbling ledge of newly fallen clay. Louis Delgado alone could tell of what had happened; and in Louis Delgado’s opinion, Dr Whitaker’s crushed and shapeless body must be lying below under ten thousand tons of landslip rubbish. ‘I see de gentleman haltin’ on de brink ob de hole,’ he said a hundred times over to his gossips next day, ‘and I tink I hear him call aloud someting as him go ober de tip ob de big precipice. But it doan’t sound to me ezackly as if him scared and shoutin’; ’pears more as if him singing to hisself a kind ob mounful miserable psalm-tune.’

In tropical countries, people are accustomed to hurricanes and thunderstorms and landslips and sudden death in every form—does not the Church service even contain that weirdly suggestive additional clause among the petitions of the litany, ‘From earthquake, tempest, and violent commotion, good Lord, deliver us?’—and so nobody ever tried to dig up Wilberforce Whitaker’s buried body; and if they had tried, they would never have succeeded in the attempt, for a thousand tons of broken fragments lay on top of it, and crushed it to atoms beneath them. Poor old Bobby felt the loss acutely, after his childish fashion, for nearly a fortnight, and then straightway proceeded to make love as usual to Miss Seraphina and the other ladies, and soon forgot his whole trouble in that one congenial lifelong occupation.

Nora Dupuy did not so quickly recover the shock that the mulatto’s sudden and almost supernatural death had given her system. It was many weeks before she began to feel like herself again, or to trust herself in a room alone for more than a very few minutes together. Born West Indian as she was, and therefore superstitious, she almost feared that Dr Whitaker’s ghost would come to plead his cause with her once more, as he himself had pleaded with her that last unhappy evening on the Italian terrace. It wasn’t her fault, to be sure, that she had been the unwitting cause of his death; and yet in her own heart she felt to herself almost as if she had deliberately and intentionally killed him. That insuperable barrier of race that had stood so effectually in his way while he was still alive was partly removed now that she could no longer see him in person; and more than once, Nora found herself in her own room with tears standing in both her eyes for the poor mulatto she could never possibly or conceivably have married.

As for Tom Dupuy, he couldn’t understand such delicate shades and undertones of feeling as those which came so naturally to Nora; and he had therefore a short and easy explanation of his own for his lively little cousin’s altered demeanour. ‘Nora was in love with that infernal nigger fellow,’ he said confidently over and over again to his uncle Theodore. ‘You take my word for it, she was head over ears in love with him; that’s about the size of it. And that evening when she behaved so disgracefully with him on the terrace at the governor’s, he proposed to her, and she accepted him, as sure as gospel. If I hadn’t threatened him with a good sound horsewhipping, and driven him away from the house in a deuce of a funk, so that he went off with his tail between his legs, and broke his neck over a precipice in that terrible thunderstorm—you mark my words, Uncle Theodore—she’d have gone off, as I always said she would, and she’d have ended by marrying a woolly-headed brown man.’

Mr Theodore Dupuy, for his part, considered that even to mention the bare possibility of such a disgrace within the bosom of the family was an insult to the pure blood of the Dupuys that his nephew Tom ought to have been the last man on earth to dream of perpetrating.

Time rolled on, however, month after month, and gradually Nora began to recover something of her natural gaiety. Even deep impressions last a comparatively short time with bright young girls; and before six months more had fairly rolled by, Nora was again the same gay, light, merry, dancing little thing that she had always been, in England or in Trinidad.

One morning, about twelve months after Nora’s first arrival in the island, the English mail brought a letter for her father, which he read with evident satisfaction, and then handed it contentedly to Nora across the breakfast-table. Nora recognised the crest and monogram in a moment with a faint flutter: she had seen them once before, a year ago, in England. They were Harry Noel’s. But the postmark was Barbadoes. She read the letter eagerly and hastily.

‘DEAR SIR’—it ran—‘I have had the pleasure already of meeting some members of your family on the other side of the Atlantic’—that was an overstatement, Nora thought to herself quietly; the plural for the singular—‘and as I have come out to look after some property of my father’s here in Barbadoes, I propose to run across to Trinidad also, by the next steamer, and gain a little further insight into the habits and manners of the West Indies. My intention is to stop during my stay with my friend Mr Hawthorn, who—as you doubtless know—holds a district judgeship or something of the sort somewhere in Trinidad. But I think it best at the same time to inclose a letter of introduction to yourself from General Sir Henry Laboutillière, whom I daresay you remember as formerly commandant of Port-of-Spain when the Hundred and Fiftieth were in your island. I shall do myself the honour of calling upon you very shortly after my arrival, and am meanwhile, very faithfully yours,

HARRY NOEL.’

The letter of introduction which accompanied this very formal note briefly set forth that Sir Walter Noel, Mr Noel’s father, was an exceedingly old and intimate friend of the writer’s, and that he would feel much obliged if Mr Dupuy would pay young Mr Noel any attentions in his power during his short stay in the island of Trinidad.

It would be absurd to deny that Nora felt flattered. She blushed, and blushed, and blushed again, with unmistakable pleasure. To be sure, she had refused Harry Noel; and if he were to ask her again, even now, she would refuse him a second time. But no girl on earth is wholly proof in her own heart against resolute persistence. Even if she doesn’t care a pin for a man from the matrimonial point of view, yet provided only he is ‘nice’ and ‘eligible,’ she feels naturally flattered by the mere fact that he pays her attention. If the attention is marked and often renewed, the flattery is all the deeper, subtler, and more effective. But here was Harry Noel, pursuant of his threat (or should we rather say his promise?), following her up right across the Atlantic, and coming to lay siege to her heart with due formalities once more, in the very centre of her own stronghold! Yes, Nora was undeniably pleased. Of course, she didn’t care for him; oh, dear, no, not the least little bit in the world, really; but still, even if you don’t want to accept a lover, you know, it is at anyrate pleasant to have the opportunity of a second time cruelly rejecting him. So Nora blushed, and smiled to herself, and blushed over again, and felt by no means out of humour at Harry Noel’s evident persistence.

‘Well, Nora?’ her father said to her, eyeing her interrogatively. ‘What do you think of it?’

‘I think, papa, Mr Noel’s a very gentlemanly, nice young man, of a very good old English family.’

‘Yes, yes, Nora: I know that, of course. I see as much from Sir Henry Laboutillière’s letter of introduction. But what I mean is, we must have him here, at Orange Grove, naturally, mustn’t we? It would never do, you see, to let a member of the English aristocracy’—Mr Dupuy dwelt lovingly upon these latter words with some unction, as preachers dwell with lingering cadence upon the special shibboleths of their own particular sect or persuasion—‘go to stop with such people as your coloured friends over yonder at Mulberry, the Hawthorns.’

Nora was silent.

‘Why don’t you answer me, miss?’ Mr Dupuy asked testily, after waiting for a moment in silent expectation.

‘Because I will never speak to you about my own friends, papa, when you choose to talk of them in such untrue and undeserved language.’

Mr Dupuy smiled urbanely. He was in a good humour. It flattered him, too, to think that when members of the English aristocracy came out to Trinidad they should naturally select him, Theodore Dupuy, Esquire, of Orange Grove, as the proper person towards whom to look for hospitality. The fame of the fighting Dupuys was probably not unknown to the fashionable world even in London. They were recognised and talked about. So Mr Dupuy merely smiled a bland smile of utter obliviousness, and observed in the air (as men do when they are addressing nobody in particular): ‘Coloured people are always coloured people, I suppose, whether they’re much or little coloured; just as a dog’s always a dog whether he’s a great big heavy St Bernard or a little snarling snapper of a Skye terrier. But anyhow, it’s quite clear to me individually that we can’t let this young Mr Noel—a person of distinction, Nora, a person of distinction—go and stop at any other house in this island except here at Orange Grove, I assure you, my dear. Tom or I must certainly go down to meet the steamer, and bring him up here bodily in the buggy, before your friend Mr Hawthorn—about whose personal complexion I prefer to say absolutely nothing, for good or for evil—has time to fasten on him and drag him away by main force to his own dwelling-place.’ (Mr Dupuy avoided calling Mulberry Lodge a house on principle; for in the West Indies, it is an understood fact that only white people live in houses.)

‘But, papa,’ Nora cried, ‘you really mustn’t. I don’t think you ought to bring him up here. Wouldn’t it—well, you know, wouldn’t it look just a little pointed, considering there’s nobody else at all living in the house except you and me, you know, papa?’

‘My dear,’ Mr Dupuy said, not unkindly, ‘a member of the English aristocracy, when he comes to Trinidad, ought to be received in the house of one of the recognised gentry of the island, and not in that—well, not in the dwelling-place of any person not belonging to the aristocracy of Trinidad. _Noblesse oblige_, Nora; _noblesse oblige_, remember. Besides, when you consider the relation in which you already stand to your cousin Tom, my dear—why, an engaged young lady, of course, an engaged young lady occupies nearly the same position in that respect as if she were already actually married.’

‘But I’m not engaged, papa,’ Nora answered earnestly. ‘And I never will be to Tom Dupuy, if I die unmarried, either.’

‘That, my dear,’ Mr Dupuy responded blandly, looking at her with parental fondness, ‘is a question on which I venture to think myself far better qualified to form an opinion than a mere girl of barely twenty. Tom and I have arranged between us, as I have often already pointed out to you, that the family estates ought on all accounts to be reunited in your persons. As soon as you are twenty-two, my dear, we propose that you should marry. Meanwhile, it can only arouse unseemly differences within the family to discuss the details of the question prematurely. I have made up my mind, and will not go back upon it. A Dupuy never does. As to this young Mr Noel who’s coming from Barbadoes, I shall go down myself to the next steamer, and look out to offer him our hospitality immediately on his arrival, before any coloured people—I mention no names—can seize upon the opportunity of intercepting him, and carrying him off forcibly against his will, bag and baggage, to their own dwelling-places.’

SOME RUSTIC NAMES OF FLOWERS.

Who does not love the country names of old-fashioned flowers better than those by which botanists and florists call them? By old-fashioned flowers—if forms perennially renewed can ever be called old-fashioned—are meant the flowers our oldest poets praise, and whose simple charms find a place in the songs of modern ones—flowers, the roots of which the old Flemings and the proscribed of Nantes brought with them in their enforced migration to this country, and which, like the industries they introduced, flourished into brighter bloom and strength than in the Fatherland. Some of the rustic names of these old flowers have a quaint prettiness and meaning in them, like the pet names of little children, which are at once piquant and endearing; and as some are local, others little known, and others, again, nearly obsolete, and likely to be wholly so in another generation or two, one is interested in endeavouring to preserve them.

The ‘Falfalaries’ (checkered snake’s head) of old Shropshire people are properly spoken of by their children’s children as ‘Fritillaries;’[1] and bright-looking blushful ‘Pretty Betty,’ indigenous to the Kentish chalk, and familiar to many persons by this name, is now, thanks to botany and Board Schools, correctly known as ‘Red Valerian.’ We, however, who have known it from childhood by its homelier name, will know it by no other; for us, it will always be ‘Pretty Betty,’ and suggestive of the high bloom on the hypothetical maiden’s cheek in honour of whom it was so named. In Chaucer’s time, it was crudely called ‘Setwale,’ or ‘Set-a-wall,’ from its well-known habit of cresting old castles and other crumbling walls, and of growing above gray posterns and old garden-gates, whence, from the tender ‘Good-nights’ not unusual at such places, it probably got its Shropshire name of ‘Kiss-at-the-wicket,’ and its Surrey synonym, ‘Kiss-behind-the-garden-gate.’ The variegated ‘Ribbon-grass’ of our gardens, anciently called—but that was when the rood of Boxley flourished, and village maidens, knowing no other literature, read their saints’ calendar in flowers—‘Our Lady’s Laces,’ had become, when Parkinson wrote, ‘Painted’ or ‘Ladies’ Laces,’ which makes all the difference. In many places it has the common name of ‘Gardener’s Garters;’ but in a corner of Kent not far from the Weald, where many old-world ways and words are cherished, it has the pretty, pert, but apposite one of ‘Match-me-if-you-can’—a name that prompted the examination of a dozen blades of it, only to discover that, by some exquisite diversity of arrangement of the creamy white and pale-green stripes, not one of the delicately striated leaves exactly resembled another.

‘I won’t have it called “London-pride,”’ said the eighty-year-old proprietress of a garden, once fuller of bloom and colour and sweetness than any other we have known; but that was before sight failed its owner. ‘What have we country-folk and simple flowers to do with “London-pride?” For my part, I like it best by its old Kentish name of “None-so-pretty.”’ If any doubt the fitness of the sobriquet, let them take the trouble to microscopically examine the minute painted and jewelled corolla of this flower, and assure themselves how truly it deserves the appellation.

No country garden is without ‘Honesty,’ or ‘White Satin-flower’ as it is sometimes called, from the silvery lustre of its large circularly shaped _saliques_, which, when dried, were used to dress up fireplaces in summer, and decorate the chimney-mantels of cottages and village inns. Our aged friend had another name for this plant also, and called it ‘Money-in-both-pockets.’ The curious seed-vessels, which grow in pairs, and are semi-transparent, show the flat disc-shaped seeds like little coins within them, an appearance which no doubt originated the name.

Reminiscent of the times to which we just now alluded, when holy names hung about the hedgerows, and the blossoming of plants recalled sacred seasons and events, the lilac in Devonshire bears the name of ‘Whitsuntide Flower;’ the country-people know it by no other. There _Cardamine pratensis_, Shakspeare’s ‘Lady-smocks,’ the ‘Cuckoo-flower’ of old Gerarde, whose blossoms border the streams and rivulets in spring ‘all silver-white,’ like lengths of bleaching linen, is known as ‘Milkmaids;’ and in the same county the ‘Foxglove’ becomes ‘Folk’s-glove’ or ‘Fairy-glove;’ while in Ireland, children call the drooping tubular freckled bells ‘Fairy thimbles,’ and are careful not to meddle with them after sunset, on pain of being pinched by the ‘good-people.’

The milk-white ‘Candytuft’ (_Iberis amara_) grows plentifully on stony upland fields in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. Once, in the latter county, when we were gathering some of it from a field in which some women were weeding, one of them remarked to another that she should not have liked to have done so when she was a young woman; upon which we inquired its name, and was told, almost reluctantly, ‘Poverty’—a most expressive name; for it loves best a poor and arid soil, and has its botanical name from its intense bitterness. Evidently, village lads and lasses had from early times an unwritten language of flowers, and this was one of its phrases.

As our readers know, ‘Pansy’ is a very old name for the ‘Heart’s-ease,’ as old at least as Queen Elizabeth’s time, and probably older. Spenser writes of the ‘pretty pauncy;’ and Ophelia gives it ‘for thought.’ It is a plant of many names. Shakspeare twice calls it ‘Love-in-idleness.’ Poor, simple, pious folk, seeing its three lower petals rayed like a ‘glory,’ called it ‘Herb of the Trinity.’ The vagrant habit of the plant procured it the name of ‘Kit-run-the-streets,’ which appellation it has not wholly lost in country-places. Rustics also call it ‘Two-faces-under-a-hood.’ But it was as ‘Heart’s-ease’ we first knew it, a name that gives sweet force to that other old-world one, ‘Call-me-to-you,’ which without it had been meaningless.

Of local names for flowers, one of the prettiest we know is that by which a Dorsetshire girl designated the ‘Michaelmas Daisy’—a name full of unconscious poetry; she called it ‘Summer’s Farewell.’ ‘We shall not have many more nosegays this year, ma’am; I see “Summer’s Farewell” is blowing;’ and upon desiring to see the unknown flower, she pointed out the familiar ‘Michaelmas Daisy.’

In Wiltshire, the children give the names of ‘Rushlights’ and ‘Fairy-candles’ to the ‘Trip-madam’ of our ancestors, the small fleshy-leaved erect stems and terminal flowers with spreading anthers of the yellow sedum (or stonecrop), frequent on old walls and housetops; and to the subtle child-fancy, we have no doubt the resemblance is sufficiently strong to set them all alight on summer nights.

The ‘Danewort’ or Dwarf-elder is in some districts said to be so called because the people fancy it sprung from the blood of the Danes slain in battle; and that if, upon a certain day of the year, you cut it, it bleeds. It is noteworthy that the large terminal cymes of this plant, which loves waste places, are of a purplish colour, the berries black, and that the juice of the flowering stems, like the fruit, produces a blood-like stain.

The curious corruption of ‘Fritillary’ to ‘Falfalarie,’ with which we started, is easily understood; but who would recognise the poetically named ‘Narcissus’ under the homely guise of ‘White Nancies,’ the common name for it in Shropshire gardens? We had rather it kept its pretty rustic name of ‘daffodil,’ a name inwoven in many a garland of old English verse, and sweetly suggestive of woods, and nut-boughs sparkling with buds, and village children, and the fresh young joy of spring. The name daffodil is now generally applied to the species with bright yellow flowers.