Berenice's hair glimmered to westward. Where the river had so writhed
round on itself as to be sweeping northeastward, the _Votaress_, midway
of a short "crossing" from left shore to right, was pointing southwest.
An old moon, fairly up, was on the larboard quarter, and in the nearest
bend down-stream the faint lights of a boat recently outstripped were
just being quenched by the low black willows of an island. In the bend
above shone the dim but brightening stern lights of the foremost and
speediest of the five-o'clock fleet. A lonely wooded point beneath the
brown sand of whose crumbling water's edge the poor German home-seeker
had found the home he least sought lay miles behind; miles by the long
bends of the river, miles even straight overland, and lost in the night
among the famed sugar estates that occupied in unbroken succession
College Point and Grandview Reach, Willow Bend, Bell's Point, and Bonnet
Carré. Past was Donaldsonville, at the mouth of Bayou Lafourche, and
yonder ahead, that boat just entering Bayagoula Bend, and which the
_Votaress_ was so prettily overhauling, was the _Antelope_.
"Fast time," ventured the watchman to the first mate.
"Yes, fast enough for a start."
No word from either as to any trouble aboard.
A cub pilot risked a remark to his chief: "'--Chase the antelope over
the plain,' says the song, but I reckon we won't quite do that, sir."
No, they wouldn't quite do that. Not a breath as to any unfortunate
conditions anywhere. But on every deck, wherever equals met, the fearful
plight of the queer folk down nearest the water was softly debated.
Distressing to feminine sympathy was the necessity of instant burials,
first revealed up-stairs by that woman's cry of agony down on the lower
gangway. But masculine nerve explained that such promptness would save
lives and might confine the disease to the lower deck. Was no physician
on the boat? No, one would be taken aboard in the morning. Of course you
could ask to be set ashore, but, all things considered, to stay seemed
wiser. Where was Madame Hayle? Few passengers knew, none of the boat's
"family" chose to tell, and at bedtime the majority "retired." So much
for the surface of things.
But beneath the surface--"Good God, sir! if any one is to go ashore, why
shouldn't it be _they_--the foreigners?"
For the full bearing of this speech let us recount certain doings in
this first half of the night. The Hayle twins, coming aboard at "Post
Forty-Six," had begun, by the time the boat backed away, to offer
exchanges of courtesy with such men on the boiler deck as seemed best
worth while, and this they kept up with an address which, despite their
obvious juleps, unfailingly won them attention. Even a Methodist bishop,
who "knew their father and had known his father, both stanch
Methodists," was unstintedly cordial. No less so was a senator.
"Know Gideon Hayle?" He had "known him before they had! Hoped to know
him yet when his sons should be commodores." Was on the _Chevalier_ when
the _Chevalier_ outran the _Quakeress_. One twin heard the tale while
the other brought the bishop.
"Senator, you already know Bishop So-and-So?"
"Senator, we'd like you to know Judge So-and-So, sir."
Judge, senator, and bishop were pleased. The senator reminded the judge
that they had met years before for a touch-and-go moment as one was
leaving and the other boarding the _Autocrat_--or was it the
_Admiral_--a Hayle boat at any rate--how time does fly! The brothers
took but a light part in the chat and were much too wise to betray any
degree of social zeal. Each new introduction was as casual as the one
before it. Sometimes they were themselves introduced but only those here
named stayed in the set. Chairs were found for four, and Julian,
stepping aside for a fifth chair, came upon another worthy, as well
juleped as himself and carrying his deck load quite as evenly.
"Bishop So-and-So, this is our father's boyhood friend, General
So-and-So. Judge So-and-So--Senator So-and-So--you both know the
general?" The general accepted Lucian's chair, and presently Lucian,
with two more chairs, brought one more personage, tall and solemn.
"Senator, have you never met Squire So-and-So?"
The senator had long wished to do so, the judge was well acquainted, the
general shook hands grandly, and the bishop blithely said the squire had
the largest plantation on the Yazoo River. The squire was too thirsty to
smile but said he hoped the bishop would not feel above joining the
others as his guest at the bar. The bishop declined, but kept the seats
of all till their return. They came back talking politics, having found
themselves of one democratic mind, southwestern variety, and able to
discuss with quiet dignity their minor differences of view on a number
of then burning questions now long burned out with the men who kindled
them: Webster, Fillmore, Scott, Seward, Clay, Cass, Douglas, Garrison,
Davis, and others.
By and by, without a break in the discussion, the seven walked back into
the cabin and stood where, on the first tap of the supper bell, each
could snatch a seat near the upper end of the table and so collectively
assume among the hundreds on the boat that separate and superior station
to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitled them. The squire
had his motherless children aboard but could leave them to a sister and
brother-in-law. Which reminded the twins to look after their sister, on
the roof, as hereinbefore set forth. But both the bishop and the senator
were thoughtful for them and when they came tardily to the board they
found the group close about the old commodore, their own places saved
and the judge and the general sustaining the squire's rather peppery
assertion to the courteous but vilely inconvincible commodore, that
certain new laws of Congress must be upheld with all the national power,
Yankee mobs be squarely shot into and their leaders hanged, or the
Federal Union would not long be worth a rap.
The senator had almost thought of something tactful to say and the
bishop had just the right word on the end of his tongue, when Julian,
with very good manners in a very bad manner, asked leave to speak, and
the squire, ignoring the commodore, said: "Certainly, Mr. Hayle, sir,
do!"
"One thing to be stopped at all cost," said Mr. Hayle, "is this deluge
of immigration. Every alien who comes to New Orleans, and especially
every alien who passes on up this river into the West, strengthens the
North and weakens the South commercially, industrially, and politically,
and corrupts the national type, the national speech----"
"The national religion,"----prompted the bishop.
"The national love of law and order,"----said the judge.
"And of justice and liberty,"----put in the general.
"And the national health," said the youth. "New Orleans should refuse
every immigrant entrance to the country, and every steamboat on the
Mississippi ought to decline to carry him to his destination!"
The commodore smiled to reply, but the senator broke in with an
anecdote, long but good, of a newly landed German. The judge followed
close with the story of a very green Irishman; and the general, with
mellow inconsequence, brought in a tale to the credit of the departed
Jackson and debit of the still surviving Clay. A new sultriness
prevailed. The judge's palliative word, that many a story hard on Clay
was older than Clay himself, relieved the tension scarcely more than did
Lucian's inquiry whether it was not, at any rate, true beyond cavil that
Clay had treated Jackson perfidiously in that old matter----
That old matter's extreme deadness reminded the group that the repast
was over and Whiggism amply squelched. Besides themselves only the
ladies'-cabin people and the captain, away aft, lingered. The long,
intervening double line of mere feeders was gone and the cabin-boys were
setting the second table. The commodore rose and the seven drifted out
again, with their seven toothpicks, to the boiler deck. There men who
had passed the salt to each other at table were giving each other
cigars, some standing in knots, others taking chairs about the guards.
Almost every one had related himself to some other one or more as
somehow his or their guest and host combined, and had taken his turn or
was watching his chance to recognize the captain as social and civil
autocrat and guardian angel over all. The conspicuousness of the twins
led to stories, in undertone, of the long Hayle-Courteney rivalry.
"Remarkable, how it's run on and on without their ever locking horns,
eh?"
"Mighty nigh did it when the _Quakeress_ burned."
"Oh! do you really think so?"
"I know it, sir!" He who knew spat over the rail, and the one who had
dared to doubt moved on. Between stories there were debates on the
comparative merits of the two types of hull favored respectively by the
rival builders: the slim Hayle model and the not so slim of the
Courteneys.
"After all, sir," asserted a man of eagle eye, "a duck flies faster than
a crane."
"I doubt that, sir," said one with the eye of a stallion. "Not that I
question your word, but----"
Their friends had to separate them.
At that point along came the _Empress_, as we know, a sight only less
inspiring on this deck than to Ramsey on the roof; shining, saluting,
huzzaing, then fading round the bend. When the card-tables were set out
our group of seven fell into three parts. The squire and the general sat
down to a game with a Vicksburg merchant and a Milliken's Bend planter,
who "couldn't play late," their wives being on the boat. The twins,
ceasing to tell the senator and the bishop what damnable things _some_
boats were known to have done for the sake of speed, went down-stairs to
take a glance at the safety-valve, following a few steps behind the
captain. For him they had just seen, as he came down from the roof to
their deck and met an unexpected messenger from the engine-room,
promptly turn with him and go below. But their needless glance at the
safety-valve they never took. They saw only two or three poor women
sobbing like babes, the dead body of a young man being prepared for
burial, and the carpenter finishing his coffin. When the captain, as
will be remembered, went back to the hurricane-deck to tell their
mother, they went too.
The boat's torches enabled all on the various decks to view the burial.
It ended the game of cards. During the swift ceremony and long after it
the twins consulted the squire, the general, the Vicksburger, the
senator, the bishop, the judge, and the planter from Milliken's Bend as
to what ought to be done. They took care to advance their questions and
suggestions singly and according to the nature of each hearer's
inflammability, and as each one kindled they brought him close to
another, Julian always supplying the hardihood, Lucian the guile. Here
were men, they said, and soon had others saying--the squire to the
merchant, the general to the Milliken's Bend planter--here were men,
gentlemen, scores on scores, not to say hundreds, who at all times and
everywhere could take the chances of life like men, like gentlemen,
native American gentlemen. But here also were women and children, the
families of many of these gentlemen. Such risks were not for such women
and children. Was no step to be generally agreed upon? Was it to be
supinely assumed that the owners of the _Votaress_, now mainly
preoccupied in overhauling the _Antelope_, knew all that was best to do
and would punctually do it all?
The twins did not originate half the inquiries or replies, they merely
started the ferment and kept it working. "You saw at table, did you not,
the positive contempt the commodore--who is a foreigner himself--showed
for the direst needs of our country?" To be sure that had little to do
with the management of the boat, but it made it easier to think that the
Courteneys, the captain himself being half Dutch in his origin, might
incline to do more for those people down-stairs than was just to those
above them--every way above them. The general called it a criminal error
to plant the victims of a deadly contagion along a great national
highway, like fertile seed in a fertile furrow. The bishop counted it no
mercy to the aliens themselves to keep them aboard when they could be
set ashore in a rough sort of roofless quarantine on some such isolated
spot as Prophet's Island, which should be reached by sunrise, was
heavily wooded, and lay but six miles below the small town of Port
Hudson.
Nor could he call it a mercy to consult the immigrants' wishes. How
could they be expected to view the matter unselfishly?
A deputation of seven elected itself to wait on the captain. The
masterful twins, finding themselves not of its number, sought him in
advance, alone. But their interview was brief. We pass it. The first
_watch_ turned in. The men who had served through the first two hours'
run came again on duty as "middle watch," and in their care, after their
four hours' rest, the shining _Votaress_, teeming with slumberers,
breasted the strenuous flood as regally as ever.
XII
HUGH AND THE TWINS
In the captain's chair, between the derricks and the bell, far above and
behind which the chimneys' vast double plume of smoke and sparks trailed
down the steamer's wake, sat Hugh Courteney, quite uncompanioned.
So his father had just left him, leaving with him the thought, though
without hint of it in word or tone, that some night, on some boat as
deeply freighted with cares as this one, he must sit thus, her master.
The wonder of it, with the wonder of the boat herself and all she
carried, sounded a continuous stern alarum through his spirit like a
long roll sounding through a camp: "Be a man! Make haste! See even those
Hayle twins, with all their faults, and up! Make haste! Rise up and be a
man!" Had the wonder-loving Ramsey been there she must have laughed
again; looking into his round, heavy visage was so much like looking
into the back of a watch--one saw such ceaseless movement of mind yet
learned so little from it. Amid his wonderings he wondered of her; not
only where at that moment she might be, but what a child she still was,
and yet in how few years--as few as two or three--she would be a woman,
might be a bride.
But soon a bride or never, the boat was full of matters only less
remarkable and he gently let the girl out of his thought by looking
behind him. The windows of the captain's room--between the
chimneys--front room of the texas--gave shining evidence that somewhere
the captain was yet astir. From the rayless pilot-house above it faint
notes of speech showed that some one was up there with the pilot, but at
the same time a near-by tread drew Hugh to his feet with quick pleasure
and again his father stood before him, looking at the lights of the
_Antelope_, a few hundred yards ahead.
"She'll soon be astern," said Hugh.
"We can't keep her so," replied the captain, accepting his chair. "We
must land too often. Where's your crony?"
"The commodore? He's turned in." After a pause--"Father, you've shipped
a lot of trouble."
"Yes," was the light response, "counting Hayle's twins."
"I wish you'd give me full charge of them."
"Do you?" laughed the father. "Take it. You hear them, don't you?"
They were easy to hear, down on the forward freight deck, dancing round
a bottle of liquor, and----
"Singing 'Gideon's Band,'" said Hugh listening.
"Yes," said the amused captain, "after pledging me on their honor to go
straight to bed." Hugh started away so abruptly that his father asked:
"Where are you bound?"
"I'm going to send them to bed."
"Both of them?" smilingly asked the captain.
"Yes, both."
"Not both at once?"
"Yes, both at once. Do you know where their sister is?"
"Why, abed and asleep long ago, is she not?"
"I don't know," said Hugh, going; "I doubt it."
On his way he glanced about for her. Taking charge of the twins seemed
logically to involve a care of her. Where the mother was he knew. Down
in the after parts of the lower deck, between the ceaseless torrents of
the wheels, most of the people from overseas had spread their beds
wherever they might, while in one small place apart some five or six lay
smitten with the deadly contagion, two or three in agony, one or two in
painless collapse, under the unskilled, heartbroken care of a few
terrified kindred. There, by stealth at first and by the captain's
helpless leave when he found her there, attended by a colored man and
maid from the cabin service, was Madame Hayle, ministering, now with
medicine, now with the crucifix, amid the hammer's unflagging din. To
this Hugh was reconciled; but it would never, never do, he felt, to let
the daughter share such an experience. Better to find her, even at that
hour, on the boiler deck.
But on the boiler deck he found only its wide semicircle of chairs quite
empty and no one moving among the high piles of trunks and light freight
under the hanging bunches of pineapples and bananas. He looked into the
saloon. It was bright though with half its lamps cold, but the barber's
shop and the clerk's office were shut, and double curtains of silk and
wool cloistered off the ladies' cabin. The fragrant bar stood open, and
at two or three card-tables sat heavy-betting, hard-chewing quartets,
but no one else was to be seen; even the third Hayle brother had gone to
bed. Halfway down the double front stairs to the lower deck, on a
landing where the two flights merged into one, Hugh paused. All about
beneath him forward of the wheels, clear out to the capstan and
jack-staff, slept the deckhands, except a few on watch, a few more who
with eager crouchings, snapping fingers, and soft cries gambled at dice
in the red glare of the furnaces, and one who had become an amused
onlooker of the Hayle twins--the negro who, six hours before, by merely
putting out a hand had saved their sister's life.
And there, close before Hugh, at the stairs' foot, under the open sky,
were the twins. In their hunger for notice, their equal disdain of the
captain and the deputation of seven, and their belief that the gayest
defiance of the plague was its best preventive, they had set their
bottle on the deck and in opposite directions were daintily pacing round
it in a long ellipse and chanting to a camp-meeting tune their song of
Gideon:
"O, Noah, he did build de ahk,
O, Noah, he did build de ahk,
O, Noah, he did build de ahk,
An' shingle it wid cinnamon bahk.
Do you belong to Gideon's band?
Here's my heart an' here's my hand!
Do you belong to Gideon's band?
Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"[1]
A glance at Hugh gave them new life. Singing on, they halted at opposite
ends of the beat, patted thighs, called figures, leaped high, crossed
shins, cracked heels, cut double-shuffles, balanced, swung round the
bottle, lifted it, drank, replaced it, and resumed their elliptical
march to another stanza:
"He couldn't tote de whole worl' breed,
He couldn't tote de whole worl' breed,
He couldn't tote de whole worl' breed,
He los' de crap, but he save' de seed!
Do you belong to Gideon's band?
. . . . . . . .
Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"
Hugh moved on down. "Both at once," he had said, but on every
account--their mother's, her daughter's, his father's--it must be both
at once without a high word from him. On the bottom step he was about to
speak, when a tall, flaxen-haired German in big boots and green cap and
coat, meek of brow and barely a year or two his senior, came out from
behind the stair and stepped between the dancers, silent but with a hand
lifted to one and then to the other.
"No," said Hugh to him. The alien's meekness vanished. He motioned
toward the sick. His blue eyes flashed. But in the same instant he was
jolted half off his feet by the lunging shoulder of one of the Hayles
marching to the refrain:
"Do _you_ belong to Gideon's band?"
His answer was a blow so swift that Hugh barely saw it. The singer fell
as if he had slipped on ice. Yet promptly he was up again, and from
right and left the brothers leaped at their foe. But while men rushed in
and hustled the immigrant aft the negro who had saved Ramsey caught one
twin as lightly as he had caught her, and Hugh, jerking the other to his
knees, snatched up the bottle and whirled it overboard. A moment later
he found himself backing up-stairs, followed closely by the pair. These
were being pushed up from below by others, and, in lofty phrases hot
with oaths, were accusing all Courteneys of a studied plan to insult,
misguide, imperil, assault, and humiliate every Hayle within reach and
of a cowardly use of deckhands and Dutchmen for the purpose.
His replies were in undertone: "Come up! Hush your noise, your mother'll
hear you! Come on! Come up!"
On the boiler deck they halted. The crowd filled the stair beneath and
he marvelled once more as he gazed on the two young Hectors, who, true
to their ideals and loathing the obliquities of a moral world that left
them off deputations, blazed with self-approval in a plight whose shame
burned through him, Hugh Courteney, by sheer radiation.
"And as sure," said Julian, "as sure as _hell_, sir, your life's blood
or that of your kin shall one day pay for this! To-night we are
helpless. What is your wish?"
"My father's wish is that you go to your stateroom and berths and keep
your word of honor given to him."
"That, sir, is what we were doing when a hired ruffian----"
"Never mind the hired ruffian. Charge that to me."
"Oh, sir, it is charged!" said the two. "And the charge will be
collected!" They went their way.
[Footnote 1: [music]]
XIII
THE SUPERABOUNDING RAMSEY
In his hurricane-deck chair, with eyes out ahead on the water, John
Courteney gently took his son's hand as the latter, returning to his
side, stood without a word.
"Tucked in, are they, both of them?"
No reply.
"Hugh, I hear certain gentlemen are coming to ask me to put our deck
passengers ashore."
"You can't do it, sir."
"Would you like to tell them so?"
"I'd like nothing better."
"Now that you've tasted blood, eh?"
No reply.
"It wouldn't be a mere putting of bad boys to bed, my son. It would be
David and Goliath, with Goliath in the plural."
"Can't I pass them on to you if I find I must?"
"Of course you can. Hugh, I'm tempted to try you."
"I wish you would, sir."
"With no coaching? No 'Polonius to the players'?"
"I wish you would."
The father looked into the sky. "Superb night," he said.
Again no reply.
"Were you not deep in the spell of it when I found you here awhile ago?"
"Yes, I was."
"My son, I covet your better acquaintance."
"You mean I--say so little?"
"You reveal yourself so little. Even your mother felt that, Hugh."
"I know it, father. And yet, as for you----"
"Yes--as for me----?"
"I've never seen you without wanting to tell out all that's in me." The
pair smiled to each other.
"And you say that at last, now, you can do it?"
"Did I say that, sir?"
"Not in words. But you seem all at once to be seeing things--taking hold
of things--in a new way."
"The things themselves are new, sir. They're small,
but--somehow--they've helped me on."
"Couldn't I guess one of them?"
"I hardly think so, sir; they're really such trifles."
"Well, for a first attempt, Ramsey."
"Yes. How did you guess that?"
"She's such a persuasive example of perfect openness."
"Her mother's a much lovelier one."
"No, Hugh; allowing for years, Miss Ramsey's even a better. But--another
small thing--shall I mention it?"
"Yes, please."
"All these Hayles, to-night, bring up the past--ours."
"Yes!" said Hugh, and said no more, as if the remark had partly unlocked
something and then stuck fast.
The questioner tried a smaller key. "What were you thinking," he asked,
"when I joined you here to-night?"
"When you--? Oh, nothing we're thinking of now."
"At the same time, what was it?"
"Why--something rather too fanciful to put into words."
"All the same, let's have it."
"Well, for one thing, seeing and feeling this boat, with all its light
and life, speeding, twinkling on and on through the night like a swarm
of stars, the thought came--and I was wishing I could share it with
you----"
The elder hand pressed the younger.
"The thought that since infinite space--" The thought seemed to stall,
take breath, and start again--"since infinite space is lighted only by
the stars, the rush and roll of this universe through space is forever
and ever--in the large--a night scene--an eternal starlight. Is that
absurd--to you?"