the bell, clutching it as if a whirlwind had struck them, while its
single, majestic peal thundering, "I pass to starboard, hail! farewell!"
drowned speech and mind in its stupendous roar. Mirth, too, was drowned
in awe. And now the vast din ceased, and now the _Empress_, every moment
more resplendent, responded, first with her bell, then with the long,
solemn halloo of her whistle, and presently with huzzas from all her
glittering decks as she passed within a cable's length.
Ramsey gazed entranced. Not until the fading vision had dwindled down
and around the great bend did her tread realize again the quivering
deck, or her sight reawaken to the wonder of the ever coming, parting,
passing flood, its prostrate, phantom shores, and the starry hosts and
illimitable deeps of the sky. Even then she was but half-way back to
earth, unconscious that she had stepped down forward to the captain's
chair and into a group including Hugh and his grandfather, her mother
and youngest brother.
"Oh!" she cried, turning, "it's as if--" and found herself face to face
not with Hugh but his father.
"As if--what?" smilingly asked the boat's master.
"As if," she said more softly, "we'd left one world and were hunting
another."
His smile grew. Her own resented it. "I know what you're thinking," she
said, and glanced away. Her curls twitched, her chin tilted, and she
sent down from it one of those visible waves that ended at her feet, as
if they were the cracker of the whip. When he spoke, her eyes came back
at him sidelong.
"I was thinking only," he rejoined, "that at your age it's always as if
we'd just left one world and were seeking another."
Her eyes--and lashes--were sceptical. "Weren't you going to say it would
seem more so if we should blow up?"
"No," he laughed, "nothing like it."
She began absently to scrutinize his entire dress. It was like the old
man's though without the jewelry and ruffles. "Were you ever in an
explosion?" she asked. The words came of themselves. She was backsliding
from her table decorum.
"No," he replied, "I was never in an explosion."
"Ah, my child!" broke in the mother, "questions again? And even to
Captain Courteney?"
Ramsey laughed, gave the deck a wilful scuff, and demanded of the
captain: "Were you ever on a burning boat?"
Madame Hayle flinched, gasped, and drew her from him as he replied:
"Yes--once--I was."
The mother started again. "There!" she cried; "so! you 'ave it! Now,
go"--she laughingly pushed the querist--"go, talk with Hugh--allong with
yo' brotheh."
The girl, as she backed away, turned to the grandfather: "Was Hugh on
the boat--when it burned?"
Her mother smiled with new pain, but while the captain bowed himself
away the old man replied: "Come, Miss Ramsey, sit down with me and I'll
tell you the story--if we may, madam?--Hugh--some chairs, will you?"
Ramsey sprang to Hugh's aid, but her brother had a mind for mutiny. "You
told me," he accused his mother, "that I could go watch them play
cards!"
"Yes?" she asked in a pretty irony; "well, then, of co'se, sisteh or no
sisteh, you muz' instan'ly go!" The steady tinkle of the sister's
laughter as she passed with a chair provoked her own: "Yes, go! Me, I'll
rimmain with her till Joy"--the nurse--"ritturn from suppeh."
The boy went, flinging back for a last word: "You want to hear the story
as bad as Ramsey does!"
"'Tis true!" she brightly said to the old gentleman. "Since all those
nine year', me, I've want' to hear the Courteney side of that!"--little
supposing that this was what neither she nor Ramsey would then or ever
quite lay hold upon.
"No," laughed the irrelevant girl to the old man, "you sit here." She
faced him up-stream, her mother on his "stabboard," as she said, herself
on his "labboard," and Hugh on her left, "labboardest of all." But--to
Hugh--"now, wait--wait! If I'm on your stabboard--how can you be--on my
lab'--? Oh, yes, I see!" She dropped into her chair and, to Hugh's great
weariness, laughed till her curls fell on her cheeks, larboard and
starboard by turns.
Yet she ceased sooner than any one had hoped and the four sat silent
while several ladies sauntered past on the arms of escorts, all highly
entertained to see such cordiality between any Hayles and the
Courteneys. One trio that paused near by to catch some Hayle or
Courteney utterance praised aloud the enchantment of the night and of
the boat's speed, and as they strolled on again, having caught nothing,
Ramsey breathed softly to the old man:
"They can't describe it! Nobody can! I've tried!"
Through four or five breathings of the giant chimneys she waited for the
story she was not to hear, and at length herself broke silence. "I
think," she said, "this boat is the most wonderful thing in the world."
No one rejoined that it was or was not. "Don't you?" she airily
challenged the "labboardest of all," defensively letting herself realize
how nearly a woman she was, how merely a boy was he.
"It's very wonderful," replied Hugh indulgently, as one so nearly a man
should to one so merely a child. "I've never seen anything in this world
that wasn't."
"Neither have I!" cried the girl and clapped her hands.
In that moment, for the first time, each thought how admirable the
other, as yet so absurd, was--some day--probably--going--to be, and
right there arose between them a fellowship more potent than either
would recognize for a length of hours or days which is here best left
unstated. Their two seniors saw; saw, but kept still--_mais pourquoi
non?_--and why not?--while the great steamer breathed on, quivered on,
breathed and quivered, on and on.
Ramsey transiently forgot them. "Do you, too," she asked her
"labboardest," "feel yourself widen out of yourself and down and round
into all this wonderful boat till you are it and it's all--you?"
"Yes," Hugh confessed, and they in turn were still, even though the
seniors resumed converse, one mildly telling which sugar estates along
the shore had been whose and the other recounting how their heirs had
intermarried.
IX
SITTING SILENT
Thus they sat, Hugh and Ramsey, not recognizing that sitting silent is a
symptom.
They sat and together felt their consciousness, his and hers, wing and
wing, widen beyond their own frames to a mightier embodiment in this
great cloud-white structure breasting the air that cooled their brows
and cleaving unseen the flood so far beneath them. Together in this
greater self they felt the headway of the long, low hull, the prodigious
heart glow of the hungry fires, the cyclopean push of steam in eight
vast boilers, the pulsing click and travail of the engines--whisper of
valve and cylinder, noiseless in-plunge and out-glide of shining
rods--the ten-foot stroke of either shaft and equal sweep of crank, the
nimble beat of paddle-wheels and tumble of their cataracts, the tranquil
creep of tiller-ropes, and the compelling swing and sage guidance of the
helm.
In this vaster consciousness, by a partnership which had to be tacit or
instantly perish, they easily lifted and carried the abounding freight,
of every form and substance, destined for the feeding, apparelling, or
equipment of thousands awaiting it in homes and families whose strivings
and fortunes helped to make that universal wonder of things which kept
Hugh grave and Ramsey laughing. Especially the teeming human life of the
great craft did these two jointly draw into this magnified self. They
drew on deck-hands, mates, watchmen, firemen, engineers, and strikers,
each with some aspiration and some appetite. They drew in stewards,
cooks, chambermaids, and cabin-boys, every one with yearnings and
sacrifices; pilots, clerks, and mud clerks, full of histories and
dreams. Down in dim spaces behind the engines and between the two wheels
they drew in the immigrant deck passengers, so mutely sad for the
distant homes behind them, so mutely hopeful and fearful for the distant
homes before. And on the deck above these exiles they took in the cabin
passengers--ladies who told their lives over their knitting or
embroidery in floods of lamplight and the cushioned ease of feminine
seclusion; children here and there battling against sleep or yielding to
it in stateroom berths; the ruder sex at card-tables in the forward
cabin--from which, oddly, the twins were refraining; three or four
tipplers at the fragrant bar, and one or two readers under the
chandeliers. Outside, scores of non-readers sat in tilted chairs, their
heels breast-high on the guard-rails and their minds tobacco-lulled to a
silent content with the breezy lanternlight of the boiler deck, the
occasional passing of a downward-bound flatboat or steamer, the gradual
overhauling of some craft that had backed out earlier at New Orleans,
and the wide, slow oscillations of the unbounded starlight overhanging
land and flood.
These too the young pair included. All these were parts of their blended
consciousness as the alert Ramsey noticed that the grandfather's talk
had turned upon Hugh and boats.
"He and the _Quakeress_ were the same age," he was remarking, when
Ramsey's laugh jingled.
"Both," she broke in, "built the same year!" Her curls switched backward
at the old man. She faced Hugh. "Where were you born?"
But he only signed for her not to interrupt. In the dim light she made a
wry face at him and jingled again while her mother said: "On the
_Quakerezz_!--end of trial trip!--whiles landing at New Orleans! Me, I
was there, ad the landingg! Yes! on the boat of my 'usband, the
_Conqueror_--also trial trip--arrive' since only one hour biffo'!"
Ramsey, with her eyes roaming over Hugh, faintly kept up her laugh, yet
parallel with it her mother managed to continue: "Yes, that was in
eighteen-thirty-three, Janawary. Because that was the winter when
Jackson he conquer' Clay in the election and conquer' Calhoun in the
nullification, and tha'z the cause why my 'usband he name' his boat the
_Conqueror_. Ah, veree well I rimember that; how the _Quakerezz_ she
came cre-eepingg in, out of that fog, an' like the fog so still an'
white, cloze aggains' the _Conqueror_. And the firz' news they pazz----"
The old nurse reappeared, laid thin shawls on the mother and daughter,
and sat down on the deck close below Ramsey.
"Firz' news they pazz," resumed the speaker, "'tis that Captain
Courteney he's got with him his wife, from Philadelphia, and----"
Ramsey broke in merrily: "Was _she_ the Quakeress? Was the _Quakeress_
named for her?"
"Yes, and she's juz' have, they say, a li'l' son! An' my 'usband he
di'n' like that! Because----"
"But you had three little girls!" said Ramsey.
"Girl', they di'n' count! Because those girl', you know, they can' never
run those steam_boat_'."
"I don't see why," said Ramsey. Hugh might sit silent if he chose; her
silent sitting was over.
"They di'n' count," repeated the lady. "And so my 'usband he di'n' want
those Courteney' to be ahead of those Hayle' in having boys!"
"He little knew what was coming," said Ramsey, and wondered why the
remark was ignored, especially when----
"Me," said the pretty matron, "I was nearly ready to 'ave those twin',
but Gideon Hayle he di'n' know they was goin' be twin', an' he di'n'
know those twin' goin' be boys!" She gently laughed. The daughter stared
as if in no light--or shade--could those twins be a laughing matter, but
the mother spoke on gayly: "Never I 'ear my 'usband swear so hard--an'
so manny way'--like that day--at everything--everybody. Not because that
li'l babee--if that be all; but because he see that _boat_, that she's
the mo' fine boat, that _Quakerezz_, an' when they ripport her run from
Loui'ville, he's already affraid--to hisseff--that she's goin' to be the
mo' fas'."
"And was she?" asked the girl.
"Barely," said the grandfather. "It took years to prove it and by that
time your father had built another boat."
"The _Chevalier_!" she exclaimed.
"Yes, which beat the _Quakeress_ once or twice nearly every season until
the _Quakeress_ burned."
"Burned!" cried Ramsey, while Hugh, stirred to rise, yet remained. "Was
it the _Quakeress_ that--?" But the old man was telling earlier history
and she sank repiningly in her seat. "You're going backward," she softly
whined.
"In 'sixteen," he said, "I built the _Huntress_, and----"
"We already know about that," sighed Ramsey, bracing her feet in old
Joy's hands. "I know it from old nursie."
"Ramsey!" murmured her mother.
"In 'seventeen," said the chronicler, "Miss Ramsey's grandfather built
the _Hunter_. In 'twenty he built the _Charioteer_----"
"Ain't we ever going to hear about the burning?" laughingly whimpered
the girl, but the narrator kept on:
"In 'twenty-one I built the _Shepherdess_----"
Ramsey all at once revived. "And did the _Shepherdess_ outrun the
_Charioteer_?"
"A trifle, yes."
"Humph!" she said to herself, and twice again, on a higher key and with
a grimace at Hugh, "humph!"
"But in 'twenty-five the _Charioteer_ was run into and sunk, and the
Hayle boat that came next," continued the historian, "was the best ever
seen till then on these waters, of the hundred and sixty-five steamers
launched."
"Yes," said Madame Hayle, "and the firz' boat what my 'usband was
captain."
Ramsey started wildly. "The _Admiral_!" she cried at Hugh. She whisked
round on his grandfather. "And then--to beat the _Admiral_--you
built----?"
"My son built--the _Abbess_."
"And did the _Abbess_ beat the _Admiral_?"
"Not for a long time. But in 'thirty-three the _Conqueror's_ very first
run broke the _Abbess's_ record."
But madame was not to be outdone in generosity. "Ah, yes," she cried,
"but that same day the _Quakerezz_ she beat the _Conqueror_!" At which
the teased Ramsey, suddenly seeing that all this was but a roundabout
peacemaking where she could discern no strife, laughed herself so limp
that she all but tumbled into old Joy's lap.
"That's where we began!" she commented.
"True," said the old man to her mother, "but in 'thirty-eight came your
husband's _Chevalier_----"
"Came--yes! only to get beat racing yo'"--the name eluded her----
"_Ambassadress_," prompted Ramsey. "Everybody knows about that--'way
back in the country--even the dates. The _Ambassadress_ beat the
_Chevalier_, the Autocrat beat the _Ambassadress_, the _Empress_ beat
the _Autocrat_, the _Regent_ beat the _Empress_, te tum, te tum, te tum!
Didn't the _Quakeress_ ever burn up, after all?"
"Ramsey----"
"Oh, well! this forever sitting silent! I----!"
"Ramsey!----"
X
PERIL
Ramsey clutched the old man's arm, pressed curls and brow against it,
and laughed in a rillet of pure silver.
Hugh bore it, sitting silent, while the great boat, so humanly alive and
aglow in every part, ceaselessly breathed above and quivered below, and
the ruffling breeze as ceaselessly confirmed her unflagging speed. The
mere "catalogue of the ships" had lighted in him a secret glow that
persisted. In his roused imagination the long pageant of the rival
steamers still moved on through the rudely thronging, ever-multiplying
fleet of the boundless valley's yearly swelling commerce, ocean-distant
from all disparaging contrasts of riper empires; moved, yeasting,
ruffling, through forty years of a civilization's genesis, each new
boat, Hayle or Courteney, more beautifully capable than her newest
senior, and each, in her time and degree, as cloud-white by day, as
luminous by night, and as rife with human purpose and human hazards as
this incomparable _Votaress_.
The girl's mirth faded. From behind the four a quiet tread drew near.
From another quarter came two other steps, lighter yet more assertive.
The one was John Courteney's; the two, that halted farther away, meant
again the twins.
"Well, captain?" mildly said the grandfather.
"Well, commodore?" said the captain, declining his son's chair.
"Oh, good!" cried Ramsey, and rose with her nurse. "I didn't know
anybody but my father was called commodore!"
"Yes," replied the captain, "my father too."
"Where've you been?" asked the fearless girl.
His answer was mainly to her mother: "I've been making myself acquainted
in the ladies' cabin. This is no Hudson River boat, you know--whole trip
in a day's jaunt."
"Ah, 'tis a voyage!" said madame.
"So it's well to know one's people," added he. He looked up into the
night. "What a sky! Miss Ramsey, did you ever see, through a glass, the
Golden Locks of Berenice?"
"The gold--" she began eagerly--"no-o! What are the golden--?" But there
she checked, fell upon old Joy, and laughed whimperingly, "That's a dig
at my red hair!"
One of the twins gravely accosted his mother, but she and the captain
were laughing at Ramsey while the grandfather said: "My dear child, your
hair is beautiful."
With face still hid on Joy's bosom, the girl shuffled her feet, then
turned upon the old man and playfully intoned:
"I'm not a child!"
"Ramsey!" said the mother, and "Missie!" said the nurse.
"Hugh," said the captain, "suppose you take Miss Ramsey up to the
pilot-house and show her the----"
The girl laid a hand on his arm. "Do you want to tell mom-a something
you don't want me to hear?"
"Why--" began the captain, and laughed. "On second thought, no. I want
to tell your mother and the commodore something before any one else can,
and before I tell any one else; but you may hear it if----"
"If I won't get frightened. Has anything happened to the boat?"
"Ramsey!" "Missie!" lamented matron and servant again.
"Mother," with much dignity pleaded the twins.
"Oh, no," said the captain, "not to the boat."
"I want to stay and hear it," whined Ramsey, jerking up and down. "I
won't get scared."
"'T'u'd be de fust time sence she wuz bawn ef she did," audibly mused
the nurse, and Hugh said: "I believe that."
The girl stared round at him and then back at his father, her eyes wide
with merriment. "No Ramsey to the pilot-house with him if he can help
it!" she managed to say, and fell over her mother and nurse, down into
her chair and across its arm, her laughter jingling like a basket of
glass rolling down-stairs. Suddenly she hearkened. The captain was
speaking to her mother:
"Must you reach Loui'ville as quickly as you can?"
"Ah!--well? yes? we muz' do our possible. My 'usband he--Ramsey!"
The girl had turned face down in a play of collapse. "Nobody," she
piped, "finishes what he starts to tell!"
"Ho!" playfully retorted the mother, "an' you muz' go?--cannot wait?
Well, good night." But no one went.
Her mother turned again to the captain. "There is something veree
bad--on the boat?" Ramsey sat up alert.
The captain's reply was heard by none but her mother and the
grandfather, but evidently the twins knew whatever there was to tell.
"It was no time to take deck passengers at all!" said one of them to the
other, in full voice, while the grandfather was asserting:
"We are as wholly at your command, madam, as if this were Gideon Hayle's
boat. Our one thought is your safety."
"And comfort of mind," added the captain, about to go.
Ramsey guessed the trouble. "We are veree oblige'," said her mother;
"we'll continue on the _Votarezz_."
"Goody!" murmured the daughter to old Joy, to Hugh, and to the captain
as he left the group. "Goody!"
"Mother!" protested the twins, "you must not!"
"Oh-h! you?" she radiantly inquired, "you rather go ashore, you, eh?
Veree well. Doubdlezz the captain be please' to put you." Her smile grew
stately as Ramsey laughed. She turned to the grandfather. "Never in my
life I di'n' ran away from sicknezz. I billieve anybody can't die till
his time come'. When his time come' he'll die. My 'usband he billieve
that, too."
"Don't the Germans come from Germany?" asked Ramsey, but no one seemed
able to tell her.
"And also," pursued the lady, "I billieve tha'z a cowardly--to run away
from those sick." She looked around for the twins but they were
conferring aside. "And also I billieve, me--like they say--to get
scare'--tha'z the _sure_ way to catch that kind of sicknezz. 'Tis by
that it pazz into the syztem! My 'usband he tell me that. He's veree
acquaint' with medicine, my 'usband, yes! And----"
"Is Germany in Asia?" Ramsey drawled, but nobody seemed to know
anything.
"And I billieve," persisted madame, "to continue on the boat, tha'z also
the mo' safe. Because if we leave the boat, where we'll find one doctor
for _that_ maladee-e? An' if we _find_ one doctor, who's goin' nurse us
in that maladee?"
"Is Asia--?" tried Ramsey again, but hushed with a strange thrill as her
ear caught, remotely beneath her, a faint sawing and hammering.
"Mo' better, I billieve," continued her mother, "we continue on the boat
and ourselve' nurse those sick. When the Mother of God see' that she'll
maybe privent from coming our time to die."
"If Germany--" whined Ramsey, but huddled down in her seat as the sawing
and hammering came again----
"What, my chile?"
Light at last! She instantly sat up: "Why do they call it the Asiatic
cholera if--?" She stopped short. From the open deck far below rose an
angry cry:
"Stop that fool! Stop her!"
Ramsey darted so recklessly to the low front guard that Hugh darted also
and held her arm as she bent over, while close upon the cry came a
woman's long, unmistakable wail for her dead. Twice it filled the air,
then melted out over the gliding waters and into the night, above the
regardless undertones of the boat's majestic progress. Grandfather,
nurse, mother, brothers pressed after the girl and Hugh. Clutched by the
nurse, released by him, she still looked wildly down, seeing little yet
much. At their back the great bell boomed. The boat's stem began to turn
to the forested shore. A glare of torches at the lower guards crimsoned
the flood under the bows. She flashed round accusingly upon Hugh:
"What are we landing in the woods for?"
He met her gaze and it fell. Her mother tried to draw her away but she
dropped to her knees at the rail and bent her eyes upon a dark group
compacting below. Hugh muttered to his grandfather:
"She'd better leave the boat. She'd rather."
Catching the words, she leaped and stood, her head thrown high. "I
wouldn't! I won't!"
She glared on him through brimming tears, but something about him,
repeated and exaggerated in the twins as she whipped round to them,
reversed her mood. She smote her brow into her mother's bosom and, under
the stress of a silvery laugh that would not be stifled, hung to the
maternal neck and rocked from side to side.
XI
FIRST NIGHT-WATCH
Often through the first half of that night, while many other matters
pressed on them, the minds of the three Courteneys turned to one theme.
Ramsey's inquiries had called it up and the presence and plight of the
immigrants, down below, kept it before them: the story of Hugh's
grandmother, born and bred in Holland.
With Hugh standing by, the girl had drawn its recital from his
grandfather; as whose bride that grandmother had been an immigrant, like
these, though hardly in their forlorn way and with Philadelphia, not New
Orleans, for a first goal. Thence, years later, with husband and child,
she had reached and traversed this wild river, when it was so much
wilder, and had dwelt in New Orleans throughout her son's, John
Courteney's, boyhood. Thence again, in his twenty-first year, she had
recrossed the water to inherit an estate and for seven years had lived
in great ports and capitals of Europe, often at her husband's side, yet
often, too, far from him, as he--leaving his steamboats to good captains
and the mother to her son--came and went on commercial adventures
ocean-wide. It was these first seven years of John Courteney's manhood,
spent in transatlantic study, society, public affairs, and a father's
partnership, that had made him--what Ramsey saw.
The tale was fondly told and had made Hugh feel very homespun compared
with such progenitors. But Ramsey had looked him up and down as if he
must have all his forebears' beautiful values deep hid somewhere in his
inside pockets, and had wondered, as she tossed away to the pilot-house,
if he was destined ever to show the father's special gift of winning and
holding the strongest and best men's allegiance. A very mature thought
for her, but she sometimes had such, and had once heard her father
frankly confess that therein lay the Courteneys' largest advantage over
him, he being signally able to rule the rudest men by a more formidable
rudeness, but not to command the devotion of men superior to that sort
of rule.