"please"! Her fingers tapped Hugh. "_He_ wants it changed--for me. We'll
be responsible!"
"Oh, you will!" The big man did not look at Hugh; his smile broadened on
their common captor. Her answering eyes laughed, but even in them, deep
down, he saw a pleading ardor at once so childlike, so womanly, and so
celestial that suddenly the deck seemed gone.
"Please change it! quick!" she murmured again, "for us!"
He felt an inward start and saw a vision--of the future--with those two
in the midst of it. His brightening glance went belatedly to Hugh, and
verily there was more of Hugh also than he had ever seen before, but the
crass significance of his smile was quite lost on the pair.
"Yes," insisted Ramsey, "_we_ want it changed, him and me--I mean he and
I!"
The big man's laugh drowned hers. "Oh, it's plain either way. Well, by
George! that _is_ an argument. You and him! Gad, the case is covered!
You and him has got me--by the hind leg!" He began to turn away, for
yonder, apart from commodore, judge, and bishop, but with Madame Hayle
at his side, stood the captain, giving him a sign which he promptly
passed on up to the pilot. "By the hind leg," he repeated, whereat a
titter broke from the averted face of old Joy, while Ramsey stood agape
at her success.
"They _stay_--the twins--stay _aboard_?" she asked the actors, Hugh, and
the mate in turn.
"Lord, yes!" said the latter.
On tiptoes of gratitude she had parted her lips to say more, when the
air overflowed with the long bellow of the boat. "Oh," she cried
protestingly in the din, "but that's to land!"
His reply was unheard, but a shake of his head reassured her as he moved
toward the elder Courteneys, whom bishop and judge had left, and who now
stood alone awaiting him. She faced Hugh. He was telling the actor's
wife that this landing was to get a physician. Ramsey touched him and
spoke low:
"We're going to have an awful time. Don't you think so?"
He did not say. The great bell tolled thrice. She waved him to look at
the people ashore, of all sorts and shades, coming down to the
wharf-boat to see them, but suddenly, invited by a glance from his
father, he stepped away to him. "Humph!" she laughed to old Joy, and
started to join her mother, who was leaving the deck. But the mother
motioned her back. "Where are you going?" whined Ramsey.
"To Lucian."
The daughter halted, aghast. "Has he got it?" But her mother went on
without reply. She turned to the players and, when they smiled
invitingly, rejoined them. When she inquired their name they said it was
Gilmore.
"Will you tell me about the _Quakeress_?" she asked.
The husband said he would. "But you don't mean now," he qualified, "when
so many things are happening?"
"N-no," she replied grudgingly, and presently added: "I'm afraid my
brother's got the cholera." But then she brightened triumphantly.
"Anyhow," she said, "the mate didn't know that." The engine bells
jingled, the wheels paused, and the shore appeared to drift down upon
them, pushing the crowded wharf-boat before it. "What d'you reckon this
beautiful boat is saying to herself right now?" she asked.
"She ought to say," critically put in the bishop, behind her, to the
senator, while she turned and cast her head-to-foot scrutiny up and down
the two, "that for the welfare of that wharf-boatful of men and boys,
and of the homes they live in, she'd best not land, after all."
"That's what she _is_ saying!" defensively cried Ramsey, and, sure
enough, while she laughed the scape-pipes roared and the wheels backed
till the wharf-boat stood still. At the same time the pilots changed
watch. The captain sauntered to the forward rail. The commodore, with
the mate and Hugh, went below. So closely did the actor's eyes follow
them that Ramsey asked: "What are they going to do?"
"Going ashore in the yawl, I hope, for a doctor."
"And medicines," added some one.
"And for a priest," disparagingly said the smiling bishop as they moved
to the shoreward edge of the roof. "Large demands our deck passengers
are making."
"An outrage!" said the senator. "It's an outrage that they, who wouldn't
have dared whimper a month ago in their own country, should be allowed
to behave this way here!"
"It isn't!" said Ramsey, squarely in his face. There was a general
start, old Joy groaned, and Ramsey's eyes, though still in his, looked
frightened; yet there was in her tone and bearing something so pertinent
and worthy, even so womanly, that she had nearly every one on her side
in a moment and the two players audibly murmured approval.
The senator grew benign. "My fair young lady," he said, "if your father,
Gideon Hayle, were captain here he'd have those people off this boat in
short metre."
"He wouldn't!" said Ramsey. Her eyes flashed and widened. Then as they
darted round upon the actor her most tinkling laugh broke out, and she
caught his wife's arm and rocked her forehead on it, the laugh recurring
in light gusts between her words as they came singingly: "He wouldn't
... he wouldn't ... he wouldn't."
"There they go," said a voice, and down on the waters directly beneath
appeared the white yawl like a painted toy, but full of men. The
commodore was there and the mate. Beside the mate sat the young German
who had fought the twins.
"That's the one they call Otto," said Ramsey, though how she knew is to
be wondered; and somebody, to amplify, added:
"Otto Marburg. They're taking him along so the others will be quiet till
he comes back."
"Humph!" said Ramsey, arching her brows to old Joy and the Gilmores and
by her own glance directing theirs to the aftermost figure in the yawl.
It was Hugh. He was steering.
XIX
THIS WAY TO WOMANHOOD
Noon came with a beauty of sky as if it smiled back to the smiles of a
land innocent of pain, grief, or strife.
It found the _Votaress_ under full headway, with a physician aboard and
Bayou Sara one great reach and two great bends behind. In a stateroom of
her texas, by madame's grateful acceptance of the captain's offer, lay
Lucian, torn with pain but bravely meek, with Julian in close
attendance, Ramsey excluded, and the mother looking in often, though
very busy yet with the doctor on the lower deck.
In the middle of the forenoon, invited by the captain, the bishop had
held divine service in the ladies' cabin and, praying for his country,
found himself praying also, resoundingly and with tears, for the
"strange people" down under his bended knees, while out on the boiler
deck the disputation concerning them steadily warmed and spread, the
committee of seven feeling themselves for the moment baffled but by no
means beaten--baffled, for their casual brush with Ramsey had most
surprisingly, not to say unfairly, discredited their cause. "Gideon
Hayle's daughter" had become as universally known by sight as "John
Courteney's son," and all about among the male cabin passengers her
method of debate--"It won't! They don't! He wouldn't! We
shouldn't!"--with a mirth often provokingly unlike hers--was the fashion
and had won two or three small victories.
"The side that laughs, nowadays and hereabouts," agreed the two players,
"wins." But they said it aside from Ramsey, who, they had begun to fear,
would be sadly spoiled, the juveniles were so humbly looking up to her,
and so many grown-ups sought her to draw out her brief but prompt
utterances upon the situation and repeat them elsewhere to those who
liked their seats so much more than anything else. They tried to keep
her with them and off the absorbing theme and were not without success.
Just now the word had run all through the boat that the next turn would
bring her into the "Raccourci," or, as every one but the players called
it, "Raccourci Cut-off." Counting up-stream, it was the second of four
great shortenings of the river, which, in the brief century and a half
since the country had become a white man's possession, had reduced a
hundred and twenty miles of its wandering course to half as many within
a straight overland distance of thirty. Wonderful to Ramsey was the
story of it. The kindly Gilmore told it with a pictorial and personal
interest that made it seem as if he himself had planned and supervised
the whole work. One of the shortenings was Shreve's Cut-off, made only
twenty-one years before this birth year of the _Votaress_. Yonder it
lay, just veering into the remotest view, where Red River, over twelve
hundred miles from its source in the Staked Plains beyond the Rocky
Mountains, swept, two thousand feet wide, into the Mississippi without
broadening the "Father of Waters" a yard.
Yet why look there, so distantly, when here between, right here under
the boat's cut-water, was the Raccourci, barely four years old? The
_Votaress_ was in it, half through it, before either Ramsey or Mrs.
Gilmore could be fully informed, and now their attention was beyond even
their own command. For yonder ahead, miles away in Shreve's Cut-off,
riding the strong current under Turnbull's Island, came the _Regent_,
finest and speediest of Gideon Hayle's steamers.
So late in the season her passengers were few and she was not utterly
smothered in a cargo of cotton bales, yet her freight deck showed a
goodly brown mass of them, above which her snowy form gleamed against
the verdant background of the forested island, as dainty as a swan,
while her gliding stem raised on either side a silver ribbon of water
that arched itself almost to her gunwales.
"Each to her own starboard," answered the _Regent's_ mellow bell to the
bell of the _Votaress_. Her whistle whitened and trumpeted in salute,
and on jack-staff and verge-staff her rippling flags ran up and dipped,
twice, thrice, to the answering flags of the Courteney boat. Well
forward on her hurricane-deck her captain, whom many on the _Votaress_
pointed out by name, stood alone. Amid-ships her cabin-boys lined her
cook-house guards. Her negro crew swarmed round her capstan with their
chantey-man on its head and sent over the gliding waters the same
stalwart perversion of the wilderness hymn of "Gideon's Band" to which
the twins had danced the night before. Now the lone, high voice of the
leader sang:
"Fus' come de animals, two by two,
Fus' come de animals, two by two,
Fus' come de animals, two by two,
De elephantine and de kanguiroo,"
and now, while he held the key-note through the refrain's whole first
line, the chorus rolled up from an octave below:
"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!"
No song is so poor that it may not thrill a partisan devotion. Ramsey
stood on her toes. Down in his berth and in torture the shut-in Lucian
faintly heard, turned his gaze to his brother, whispered "the _Regent_!"
and listened for another verse. The boats were passing widely apart, and
when it came only memory made its foolish lines plain to his doting ear:
"Nex' come de hoss and den de flea,
Nex' come de hoss and den de flea,
Nex' come de hoss and den de flea,
De camomile and de bumblebee.
Do you belong to Gideon's Band?
. . . . . . . .
Fight'n' fo' yo' home!"
On the last line the singers were half a mile downstream, in Raccourci
Cut-off, and Ramsey and the _Votaress_ were well started up the ten-mile
reach from Red River Landing to Fort Adams.
How swiftly and incessantly the scene changed. Down in a stateroom near
the boiler deck some beginner on the horn was dejectedly playing "A Life
on the Ocean Wave," but even with pestilence aboard and a brother
stricken with it what an exalted, exalting life was a life on this
mighty stream! Flat lands? Flat waters? It was the highest, widest
outlook into the world of nature and of man she had ever had.
Monotonous?--when one felt oneself a year older to-day than yesterday
and growing half a month's growth every hour? In yesterday's
childishness she had begun at Post Forty-six to keep count of all the
timber rafts and flatboats met, and here in this long stretch came three
more of the one and five of the other, with men hurrahing to her from
them--men as wild as the wilderness, yet with homes and families away
back up the great tributaries and their tributaries. And here were
mile-wide cotton fields, with the black people hoeing in them and
looking no bigger than flocks of birds feeding. And here came another
steamboat--and yonder another! The very drift logs, so countlessly
frequent, vast trees from vast forests, some of them not yet dead, told
to her sobering mind in tragic dumb show as they came gliding and
plunging by, the age-long drama of their rise, decline, and fall.
Unbrokenly green, yes, forever the one same green, were the low willow
and cottonwood jungles of the creeping shores; but while the "labboard"
shore was still Louisiana the "stabboard" was now her own native
Mississippi.
Yes, these wild shores were States--States of the great Union, the
world's hope; Jackson's, Clay's, Webster's Union, which "must and shall
be preserved," "now and forever, one and inseparable." Somewhere between
these shores, moreover, and not behind but away on up-stream, probably,
Mr. Watson said, in Dead Man's Bend, was, once more, the _Antelope_. In
the long wait at Bayou Sara, where Hugh and the outlandish Otto--who
could speak French--had found the priest while the commodore and the
mate were getting the doctor, the _Antelope_ had reappeared, swept up,
and foamed by, and now was so far ahead that in hardly less than another
hundred and sixty miles could she be again overtaken. But to Ramsey,
even without the _Antelope_ or any or all of the sights and facts of
landscape and history, no moment could go stale while the tale of
Phyllis and the _Quakeress_ waited like funds in a bank, and while the
commodore, the captain, and Hugh, the pilots, the mate, the Gilmores,
the judge, general, bishop, squire, senator, Otto Marburg in his green
coat, and dozens and scores of others were all over the boat, each more
and more a story, a study, as hourly she grew older.
On the bench close behind her in the pilot-house a lady with needlework,
a gentleman with _De Bow's Review_ (the squire's sister and
brother-in-law), had begun to talk with the Gilmores and presently
mentioned the twins, speaking in such a tone of doom as to give Ramsey a
sudden panic.
"It's fine!" said the husband, praising Julian's devotion to his
stricken brother. "And they are fine. Their faults--which you've had
occasion to discover, sir--are spots on the sun; the faults, madam, of
all our young Southern gentlemen----"
"Would you say of all?" asked the actor's wife.
"No!" said the other lady, "no, not of all!" and her husband was glad to
stand corrected.
"No," he admitted, "but still of almost all; faults of which we may
almost say, sir, that we may almost be proud!"
"Oh, well," begged his wife, "please almost don't say it! They're the
faults of our 'peculiar institution' and I wish our 'peculiar
institution' were--" She sewed hard.
"In the deep bosom of the ocean buried," suggested her husband to the
players. "Why, honestly, so do I. But it's not, and can't be, and as
long as it can't be we----"
"Oh, well," said his wife, "don't let's begin on that."
Reckless of institutions Ramsey turned. "Is my brother worse?" she broke
in, but a white-jacket entered with the dinner-bell and spoke softly to
old Joy. "Yes," said Ramsey to him, "I'm Miss Hayle. What is it? Is my
brother worse?"
"Miss Hayle, Mr. Hugh Co'teney make his comp'ments----"
Ramsey laughed in relief.
"Yass'm, an' say' cap'm cayn' come to de table an' yo' ma she cayn't
come----"
"I know she can't. Is my brother----?"
"And de commodo' he at de gemp'men's table, an' so he, Mr. Hugh, he
'p'inted to de ladies' table, an' will you please fo' to set in de place
o' yo' ma?"
"Oh, rid-ic-ulous! Who? me? I?" The laugh grew plaintive.
"Yes, you; why not?" said the pilot at the wheel, with his eyes fixed
far up the river.
But Ramsey glanced at her short skirts and laughed to all by turns: "Oh,
it's just some ridiculous mistake!"
"No, miss, 'tain't no mistake. All de yetheh ladies incline de place."
Every one laughed. "Oh, he on'y off' it to one! But when she say fo' to
off' it to you den dey all say de same; yass'm, sawt o' in honoh o' yo'
ma."
"They're afraid that seat'll give 'em the cholera," said the pilot in
grim jest, still gazing up-stream, but the ladies cried out in denial
for all their sex.
"I accept," said Ramsey, with a downward pull at her draperies. "How's
my brother?"
"Thank y'ma'am," was the bowing waiter's only reply. He tripped down the
pilot-house steps and away.
"Your brother," said the squire's sister as they all followed, "isn't in
nearly so much pain, we hear."
Ramsey flashed: "Does that mean better--or worse?"
"Why--we--we can't always be sure."
"Ringading tingalingaty, ringadang ding!" sang the festive bell up and
down the deck to which they began to descend by a narrow stair, old Joy
at the rear. Madame Hayle, ascending by another with the Bayou Sara
priest, espied the nurse and beckoned her. The pilot, high above,
observed the three as they met, although his ear was bent to a
speaking-tube. Now he answered into it: "Yes, sir.... Yes, close above
the point--Point Breeze, yes, sir."
As he resumed his up-stream gaze he saw old Joy, still at the stair,
stand as if lost and then descend alone while madame and the priest
moved toward the sickroom. The helm went gently over and the _Votaress_
rounded the point, but the priest waited outside where madame had gone
in, and when the door reopened enough to let one out it was Julian who
grimly confronted him, holding a pen, half concealed.
"My brother declines to see you, sir."
A flash came from the eyes of the priest, but the youth repeated: "My
brother _declines_ to _see_ you, sir."
The visitor caught breath to speak, but the great bell pealed for
another landing and burial, and madame came out. She addressed him a few
words in French, and with an austere bow to Julian he humbly turned away
at her side.
XX
LADIES' TABLE
Hugh stood at the head of the midday dinner-table, waiting for a full
assembly of its guests. The Vicksburg merchant and his wife, the planter
from Milliken's Bend and his wife, also stood at their places.
The two ladies glanced about as if listlessly noting the cabin's lavish
arabesques and gilding, while each really studied and knew the other was
studying the captain's son. For this tale which we tell, they saw. It
was "a-happmin'" before their eyes and, in degree, to themselves. Hugh
and his father, the commodore and madame, the first mate, the twins,
Ramsey, and the committee of seven--who, we shall see, were not taking
discomfiture meekly--were scarlet threads in the story's swiftly weaving
fabric--cogent reasons, themselves, why these two ladies had helped vote
Ramsey to the seat next Hugh.
His face, Hugh's, was not easy reading. Certain shadows cast on it by
that part of his mind just then busiest were quite unintelligible.
Deciphered they would have meant a solemn joy for his broadening
accountability; an awesome anxiety and distressed eagerness to meet and
fill that accountability as fast as it broadened. He was just then
recalling one of Ramsey's queries of the evening before, when she had
seemed so much younger than now, and when, nevertheless, a germ of
fellowship had sprung up between them; that word of hers about "feeling
oneself widen out of oneself," etc. He did not at present feel himself
nearly so much as he felt things round about him growing and growing.
The _Votaress_ had grown, grown wonderfully, and the story happening,
the play being acted on her three decks at once, was neither story nor
play to him. Which fact was one of the few things the two gentle
students of his face made out to read. However, it quite rewarded them;
it went, itself, so well into the story.
And certainly, as even the Gilmores would have said, it is not when our
spiritual vision sees things at their completest values that _all_ the
world's a stage and its men and women _merely_ players. Nor is it at our
best that we discern our own story, as a story, while it happens. It is
a poor eye that sees itself. When Ramsey arrived at the table Hugh's
gaze was so big with the reality, not the romance, of things on all the
three decks that she had to laugh a little to keep her balance.
Yet her question was an earnest and eager one: "Is my brother better, or
is he worse?"
The toll of the bell on the deck above--to land, as we have said, near
Point Breeze--came like a spectral reply, invoking, as it did, new
trouble unknown to her though just beneath her feet.
"He's better not to be worse," said Hugh, and when she frowned
whimsically he explained: "His sickness is not quite the same as that on
the lower deck."
"How is it different?" she asked, unconsciously keeping the whole
company of the ladies' table on their feet. At the gentlemen's table,
just forward of them and tapering slenderly away in the long cabin's
white-and-gilt perspective, that grosser majority who had come only to
feed were mutely and with stooped shoulders feeding like pigeons from a
trough, and far down at its end the white-haired commodore had taken his
seat, with senator, judge, squire, general, and the seventeen-year-old
Hayle boy nearest him on his right and left. The bishop was not there.
He was at the ladies' table, paired with the judge's sister"--a leaden
load even for a bishop.
"Your brother's illness is so much slower," Hugh said.
"So, then--he--he had it when he came aboard?"
"He had it when he came aboard," assented Hugh, moving for the group to
be seated. "But----"
"Wait," said Ramsey. "Mustn't we all be as gay and happy as we can?" And
when every one but the judge's sister playfully said yes she turned to
the Vicksburg merchant: "Then will you change places with Mr. Gilmore?"
Faith, he would! It paired him with the actor's wife, and his wife with
the actor. Gayety began forthwith. "And will you change--with--with
you?" Ramsey asked the planter of Milliken's Bend and the squire's
brother-in-law.
Indeed they would. The change not only paired each with the other's wife
but brought the brother-in-law next to Ramsey. Underfoot meantime the
engine bells jingled, overhead the scape-pipes roared, and in every part
the boat quivered as her great wheels churned or was strangely quiet as
they paused for another signal. So all sat down, well aware what the
landing was for, and began blithely to converse and be waited on, as if
the world were being run primarily for their innocent delight.