putting Natchez Island close on her larboard bow and, seven miles away,
bringing hazily into sight Natchez herself, both on her bluffs and
"under-the-hill." Nay, more; abreast the _Votaress_ was another fine
boat. The _Westwood_, she was named. Her going was beautiful, yet the
_Votaress_ was gradually passing her. The Yazoo pair knew her well. When
they made salute toward two men who stood near her forward skylights,
one of them returned it.
"Why should he be so solemn?" asked the wife.
"Why shouldn't he?" laughed Ramsey.
"Because he's a mere passenger, on his wedding tour."
"Humph!" said Ramsey. "Weddings are solemn things. Is that other man the
captain?" she asked the husband.
"No, I regret to say, he's only her first clerk."
"Why should you regret to say it?" inquired the girl; but the wife, too,
had a question:
"Do you think there's anything wrong?"
"N-no, oh, no."
The _Westwood's_ clerk made a sign to Captain Courteney. The captain
glanced up to Watson, and the two boats, still at full speed, began to
draw sidewise together. But Ramsey's liveliest interest was in the
_Westwood's_ crew, who, far below about her capstan, were paying their
compliments to the newer, larger, speedier boat in song and refrain with
stately wavings and dippings of ragged hats and naked black arms. Now
the boats' guards almost touched and their commanders spoke so quietly
together that she did not hear their words. But she noted the regretful
air with which John Courteney shook his head to the _Westwood's_ clerk
and then to the passenger, and the _Westwood_ began again to drop
behind. Hugh came near, paused, and glanced around.
"Looking for the commodore?" she asked.
"I thought you went down with Mrs. Gilmore," he replied, "to rehearse
your part in the play."
"Commodore's down on the lower deck," she said; "freight deck--with
mom-a--and the bishop."
Hugh showed astonishment. "The bishop?"
"Yes, mom-a made him go." She laughed. "Some of the sick folks down
there are Protestants and were threatening to turn Catholic. Is anybody
sick aboard the _Westwood_?"
"No."
"Then where's her captain?"
Hugh made no reply but to meet her steady gaze with his own till she
asked in a subdued voice: "Cholera?"
Hugh nodded. Each knew the other was aware of the song that floated up
after them from the boat behind.
"What did the bridegroom want?" asked the girl.
"Wanted to give us a thousand dollars to take his bride--with him or
without him--aboard the _Votaress_."
"But when he heard how much worse off we are--" prompted she.
"Yes."
"But, Mr. Hugh----"
"Yes?"
"Anyhow, this boat hasn't got that boat's trouble!"
"No," said Hugh, and knew they were both thinking of his father.
Together they stood hearkening to the last of the _Westwood's_ song:
"'Ef you git dah befo' I do--
_O, high-low!_--
Jest tell 'em I'm a-comin' too--
_John's gone to high-low!_'"
XXIX
STUDYING THE RIVER--TOGETHER
They did not tie to the wharf-boat at Natchez. At that stage of water
there was good landing a few yards below, where the sandy bank was not
too wet to walk across to a higher one which floods never reached, close
under the bluff. Here had left the boat half a dozen passengers
including the judge and his sister. So good-by to that lady. Never would
_she_ have set foot on the _Votaress_ had she dreamed she was to be
"dumped off" on such a spot. She believed that girl of Gideon Hayle's
had laughed as she went up the perilous stage plank. And really there is
no proof to the contrary.
Another incident awoke in Ramsey no mirth. Yet she never forgot it. It
occurred on the upper, greener level that overlooked, across the river,
a great sweep of Louisiana lowlands at that moment bathed in a golden
sunset. The same light fell upon the incident itself--the Marburg lad's
burial; fell upon the bent mother standing behind the priest and between
her elder son and Madame Hayle, surrounded by her fellow exiles, many of
whom, with faces hidden like hers, wept more for her bereavement than
they had earlier done for their own. So the rude pine coffin descended
into the unhallowed ground. From the hurricane-deck Ramsey looked down
with wet eyes to the meek mourner returning aboard on the arm of her
Otto. Thinking how easily in the play of chance the lost brother might
have been saved and her saved brother lost, and recalling the plight of
the _Westwood_, she suddenly realized that no one could tell who might
go next--"to high-low." Otto Marburg, glancing up, saw her tears, and
would have paused but for the sacred burden on his arm.
At the same time, for eyes, even wet eyes, as lively as Ramsey's there
were livelier things to see. Hugh had gone ashore and up to the
wharf-boat, crossed it, and boarded the busy _Antelope_ with several
letters in hand, the twins' letter among them. Said the squire's
brother-in-law:
"That boy must know the danger to him there is in that document," and
the planter of Milliken's Bend agreed.
So did their wives. There was "everything in it he wouldn't want there
and nothing he would want."
He was doing the "brave thing," they all said, and the wives called it
too brave. The brave thing, they thought, "ran a slim chance against
Hayle's twins."
"My dear ladies," said the planter, "it runs the only chance he has. The
brave thing is the only thing those two young fire-eaters have any
respect for." He stopped short; Ramsey had overheard. Yet she kept a
pretty front.
"Why do you call him 'that boy'?" she laughingly asked.
"Well, really, because," replied the planter, twinkling, "he's so much
more than a boy. Don't you think so?"
She gave him a sidelong glance, twitched her curls, and looked down
ashore. Her mother was there with the "boy's" grandfather. They were
getting into a rickety hack. Now Hugh joined them from the _Antelope_,
and they went whipping up the steep road across the face of the bluff
and into the "stuck-up" Natchez atop the hill. She guessed their errand.
Meantime the _Westwood_ had reached the wharf-boat, put her bridal pair
aboard the _Antelope_, and backed out again so promptly that as the
_Antelope_ cast off and started after her she had rounded Marengo Bend
and was showing only her smoke across Cowpen Point. And now reappeared
Madame Hayle, the commodore, and Hugh, bringing with them--welcome
sight--two sisters of charity. The moment they touched the lower deck
the _Votaress_, with John Courteney on her roof, backed away, and soon,
in the first bend above, any eye could plainly see the _Westwood_, still
less than four miles off across country though eight by the river, with
the _Antelope_ four miles behind her and four ahead of the _Votaress_.
Said the pilot, Ned, to Ramsey, pulling the wheel down to head into the
crimson west:
"Four 'n' four's eight, ain't it? Used to be. Can't tell what'll change
on this river. When Lake Concordia, over here in Louisiana, was part o'
the river, an' Vidal's Island, in its middle, was in the river, this
bend wa'n't jest eight mile' round, it wuz twenty. These are _the_
bends. F'om here to Cairo we got to run one etarnal wriggle o' six
hund'd 'n' eighty mile' to make three hund'd 'n' seventy."
"Oh, I'm glad of it! At least--ain't--ain't you?"
He shook his head: "Not this run." The supper bell rang and Ramsey fled,
but he repeated: "No, not this run!" He turned and looked back upon
Natchez bluff far behind the steamer's wake. "I wished every last Hayle
on this blessed boat wuz off o' her an' 'top o' you!"
On that bluff, in colonial days, had stood Fort Rosalie, whose dire
tragedy Ramsey, down in the cabin, found Gilmore, at table, recounting
to Hugh and others: murder of its French settlers by Natchez Indians and
the extermination of the Natchez tribe by the French from New Orleans.
He was brief, and for a good ending went on to recall his own first
sight of the spot, before the time of steamboats, when Natchez was a
village; how, as his low broadhorn came drifting down around this point
close above it, the bold rise swung into view, crowned with pines, its
lower parts evergreen with the bay magnolia, and its precipitous front
lighted up, as now, with the last beams of day. He made it seem so fair
and important that Ramsey's native pride and a shame of her previous
blindness almost drove her from the board to take a last look at it from
the stern guards; but she was again in her mother's seat and again very
hungry. He was good company to every one, the actor; always acting, yet
always as natural as if acting and nature were one; a quiet education to
Hugh, an unfailing joy to his wife, and both to Ramsey.
After supper the players got out an old two-act play for the next
evening's entertainment. They cast Hugh and Ramsey for two small rôles,
and for two larger ones found a young brother and sister--of
Napoleon--at the mouth of the Arkansas--who would have just time to act
them before leaving the boat. Supper had prevented its guests from
seeing the _Votaress_ turn Giles's Bend and Rifle Point and meet another
boat as glittering as she and pass Lake Saint John and Fairchild's
Bend--where the river widened to three miles about Fairchild's double
island. Wherefore the indulgent Gilmores, on Ramsey's pleading, elected
to coach first the brother and sister--of Napoleon--letting Hugh ascend
to the starlight of the roof and Ramsey follow attended once more by old
Joy.
She met Hugh at the foot of the pilot-house steps. "We are postponed!"
she said, "you and me--I!"
"Yes. Do you know for what?"
"Yes, because those other two parts are so much bigger than ours, and
because--I d'n' know--I believe they think I'm sleepy--ha, ha! I'm glad,
for _I_ want to study this _river_, all I can, day and night. And
you--must, mustn't you?"
"Yes," he said, which was all he was to say in the play.
Half-way up the steps she halted: "You're to be a captain on it yourself
as soon as you're fit, ain't you?"
"If that time ever comes."
"Phew! how modest" She stared an instant, turned her back, clasped the
rail, and with her forehead on her arms laughed till Hugh was weary--not
necessarily long.
He spoke: "Here come the _Westwood_ and the _Antelope_."
"Where?" She glanced round, sprang up the steps, and soon was making
room for him beside her at a larboard window behind Watson. Looking
thence across the long, slim neck of Cole's Point they saw the two boats
coming back westward in the upper reach of the fourteen-mile eastern
loop they were running to make two miles into the north. Now the
_Westwood_ passed and now the _Antelope_, their skylights glinting like
fireflies through the intervening tree tops, and Watson showed how to
tell them apart by night. Presently they turned north again and
vanished, leaving the mighty stream to its three students.
"It'll cut off this whole fourteen mile' some day," said Watson; but the
other two, in their dim nook, remained silent. He knew that sort of
silence. When Ramsey by and by spoke, her words were to Hugh exclusively
and in undertone.
"The _Quakeress_--Oh, I didn't mean----!"
"That's all right," said Hugh. "The _Quakeress_----!"
"Oh, I meant the _Antelope_! She'll soon be in the lead again?"
"Yes."
"With both those letters."
"Both."
"Ain't you glad I didn't mean the _Quakeress_?"
"No."
"Well, you're glad I didn't mean Phyllis, ain't you?"
"No."
"Would you really be willing to tell me about Phyllis?"
"I would."
"You wasn't willing--before--was you?--were you?"
"No."
"What's changed your mind?"
"Lawd, missy!" sighed the forgotten Joy.
But Ramsey insisted: "What's changed it?"
"You, chiefly."
"I haven't," very quietly said the girl.
"You have."
Ramsey glanced cautiously at Watson, but the pilot's eyes were a league
ahead. Hers returned to Hugh. "Wasn't it my brothers changed your
mind--the twins?"
"They helped."
She looked him over absently: "I love my brothers."
"I don't," said Hugh.
She stared again and slowly remarked: "You haven't got to.... You're
powerful queer, ain't you?"
"Not by choice."
"I'm queer. Wish I wasn't--wa'n't--weren't--but I am."
"Yes," said Hugh, "you are."
She tilted her chin, stepped to Watson's side, and called down over the
breast-board to the Gilmores, who had finished with their two pupils for
a time and had taken chairs with a newly found young married pair on the
texas roof:
"Oho, down there!"
"Oho!" the group answered.
"Do you want us to stay up here?" asked Ramsey. "'Cause if you do we'll
come right down. Or if you'd rather we'd come down we'll stay up here!"
It was a new note.
The players laughed. "It's the long dress says that," they observed to
the other pair.
"It certain'y is," replied they; which is Southern form for "probably."
XXX
PHYLLIS AGAIN
About eleven o'clock that same Sunday evening the _Votaress_, at full
speed, was in a part of the river whose remarkable character sustained
the son of John Courteney and the daughter of Gideon Hayle in the theory
that their interest in it was all that had brought them to--all that
detained them in--the unlighted pilothouse, on the visitors' bench,
beside Watson. Below, the passengers were for the most part once more in
slumber. The exhorter had loudly sung himself to sleep:
"'Mahch-ign thoo Im-madn-uedl's groudnd
Toe fahr-eh wordlds odn high.'"
Madame Hayle was in her stateroom and berth, deep in sleep under the
weight of her toils and assured by the players that Ramsey should go to
bed when they did. Basile, too, slept, but talked and tossed in his
sleep, while old Joy, sent to him by Ramsey and the Gilmores, crouched
outside his door and dozed with an ear against it. The Yazoo squire, his
children, his sister, her husband, the Vicksburgers, and they of
Milliken's Bend, purposing to be called up an hour before day to leave
the boat at their proper landings, had "retired" early, saying fond
good-bys and hoping to meet every one again. The ladies had astonished
Ramsey with kisses, given, doubtless, she thought, because her father
was a hero and her mother a saint. The squire's brother-in-law had
assured her that her brothers, all three--as Southern boys always, or
almost always, did--would come out all right--every way; but on being
asked for details he had slipped away to give his De Bow to the
commodore and his last good-by to Hugh.
The actor and his wife, however, were as broad awake as Watson. Loving
the lone starry hours for the hours' own starry sake and having for Hugh
and Ramsey a certain zeal unconfessed even to each other, they were yet
in view from the pilot's wheel and visitors' bench at this hour of
eleven, staying up as willingly as nightingales with the young husband
and wife who had agreed with them that somebody's mental radius
"certain'y had" lengthened as suddenly as her gown.
This young pair were expecting to go ashore within the next half-hour at
"New Carthage," a city of seven houses, nearly opposite another of equal
pride called Palmyra, and some four miles above the head of Hurricane
Island, whose foot the _Votaress_ was then passing. They and the
Gilmores were still down at the forward edge of the texas roof, the
players finding the Carthaginians very attractive: fluent on morals,
cuisine, manners, steamboats, the turf, fashions, the chase; voluble on
the burdensomeness of the slave to his master, the blessedness of the
master to his slave; but sore to the touch on politics and
religion--with their religion quite innocently adjusted to their
politics--and promptly going hard aground on any allusion to history,
travel, the poets, statistics, architecture, ornithology, art, music,
myths, memoirs, Europe, Asia, Africa, homoeopathy, or phrenology. It
entertained the players just to see how many things the happy lovers
knew nothing about and to hear them state in some new form, each time
they backed off a sand-bar of their own ignorance, that they had seen
the world, sucked the orange, yet found no spot of earth so perfect to
live in as New Carthage.
The briefest sittings at such entertainment had been enough for Hugh,
too much for Ramsey, and had driven them back, twice and thrice, to that
fairer world on high in the pilot-house, where they could study the
river undistracted. There and thence, now together, now apart, they had
gone and come all through Watson's watch, moved by Hugh's duties or her
caprice. Their each new meeting had been by accident, but it is odd how
often accidents can occur--"at that stage o' the game," thought the kind
pilot, and on each recurrence he noticed that they had got a bit farther
on in the story of Phyllis.
"How long is this island, Mr. Watson?" inquired Ramsey, as if islands
were all she was sitting up for.
"Two mile' 'n' a half. D'd you ask me that before? I don't hear much
behind me if it ain't hove right at me." Stalest device of the
sentimentalist--the self-sacrificing lie! But Watson cared not for its
staleness if it might promote the game. And the game, though as
wanderingly as the river, went on. Without strict order of time, now on
the bench, now on the roof, early and late, here is how it went:
"You're not afraid of my brothers, are you? I'm not."
"I'm afraid for them. And for my father and grandfather. And for your
father and your mother."
"Good gracious!" laughed Ramsey, then mused, and then asked: "Ain't you
afraid for me?"
Hugh said nothing, and thenceforth her tone grew more maidenly though
her words remained childlike enough.
"I know why you want to tell me about Phyllis," she added more softly.
"You think if you don't my brothers will."
"They don't know the facts," murmured Hugh.
"Don't they think they do? And ain't that the trouble?"
"Yes." Hugh thought her insight surprising, while she enjoyed the
spiritual largeness she fancied she saw in his immobile features. "Yes,"
he repeated, "they think they do; that's the trouble, much of it."
"How do you know they don't?"
"By what they believe and by what I know."
"How do you know you know?"
"By my own eyes and Phyllis's own lips."
"Would she tell you things she never told any one else?"
"Yes, things she never dared tell any one else."
Ramsey pondered, laughed, and pondered and laughed again: "Why, most of
that time you was--you were--nothing but a little toddler. Didn't she
love you?"
"She hated me."
Ramsey flinched but quickly laughed a bright unbelief to the youth's
face, a face which might as well have been a wood-carving. "Oh," she
cried, "how ridiculous!"
"She used to flog me, cruelly."
Ramsey gasped: "And you never told? Oh, why--why----?"
"She said she'd kill me--and my mother. And she'd have done it,
somehow."
"But she's been dead ten years!"
"Has she?"
"Why, of course! Wasn't she on the _Quakeress_ when----?"
"So was I."
Ramsey flinched worse and stared away with lips apart, wondering if that
was what gave him that look.
"But Phyllis," she resumed, "was lost."
"Was she?"
"Why ... wasn't she? Mammy Joy says my uncle--in the blazing
pilot-house--did you know my uncle Dan?"
"Yes. That night, half an hour before the burning----"
"Oh! was it at night?"
"Yes. I was sitting with Phyllis, behind him, with him at the wheel, as
we're sitting now behind Mr. Watson."
"Uncle Dan didn't hate you, did he?"
"No, indeed."
"Then why didn't you tell him about Phyllis? He was her master, you
know."
"I did. He wormed it out of me. He was like you--in some things."
The questioner flashed and stared but then dropped her eyes. "Did
he--have red curls?"
"Yes, redder than yours."
"Humph!" ... She mused.... "I'm tired here. Let's go down by the
Gilmores and walk--'thortships!"
They went. "Well?--about Phyllis? What did she whip you for? Being bad?"
"Bad or good was all one to Phyllis."
"Wasn't--weren't--weren't you ever bad, Mr. Hugh?"
"Frequently."
"How were you bad?--steal jam?--eat green plums?"
"Yes; had fights, went in swimming--in snake holes----"
"D'd you tease your sisters?--pull their hair?--let the sawdust out o'
their dolls?"
"Yes, yes, all that."
"Hmm! that's nothing. Basile and I--Ain't you going on? Of course, if
you don't want to I--I shan't worm. Why did Phyllis--oh, pshaw!"
With the exclamation came such one-sided mirth that Mrs. Gilmore looked
round. But her husband said there would never be anything to look round
for while "that laugh" kept its quality.
Presently Hugh found himself murmurously "going on" and Ramsey
listening. It was a great moment in both lives. If we cannot see it so,
no matter; but in still depths of perception below all formulated
thought both the youth and the girl were aware, separately, that the
story of Phyllis was not the largest fruit of the hour.
Phyllis, Hugh said, had not hated him alone. In her heart had burned a
pure flame of wrath against every member--save one--of the fair race to
which she belonged by three-fourths of her blood but by not one word of
human law. Wronged for the race she disclaimed, she hated the race that
disclaimed her. Hated even the mothers of Hugh and Ramsey, who abhorred
slavery, a slavery enthralling men, women, children in whose veins ran
not four only but eight and sixteen times as much masters' blood as
slaves'. She hated them because all their sweet abhorrence found no
deliverance or revenge for her. Mitigations there were, but mitigations
she loathed. The uncompromising quality of her hatred was one thing that
had made dissimulation easy, and through all Hugh's childhood she had
practised it perfectly in every relation and direction on every one but
him. Another easement had been her indomitable, unflagging triple
purpose to be free, to be reunited to her master, and to be revenged.
And a third, craftily won through the trustfulness of Hugh's Quaker
mother, had been the opportunity to wreak the frequent overflow of her
resentments on him. The fact that he was almost of the exact age of her
own lost offspring had forever goaded her, and to him, with each
maltreatment, she had told again her heart's whole burden, outermost
wrong, innermost rage, thus recovering poise to treat his sisters and
brother with exemplary care and tenderly to discuss with their mother
Hugh's precocious reticence and gravity. Always she had held a
self-command cunningly tempered in the fire of her triple resolve and
fitted to the desperate chances with which she unceasingly crossed
daggers. She never tired of telling her little white slave that, having
herself once got the lash, she was only paying interest on it through
him. Him, at least, she would teach to hate slavery as she hated it.
Hugh's listener moved as if to touch him. A boat was coming by. They
paused in their "thort-ships" walk and with a slight choke in her voice
Ramsey asked: "You know what I hope?" Her voice went lower. "I hope you
learned."
"That's the strangest part," said Hugh. "I did."
The boat passed, a cloud of burning gems. "Go on," said Ramsey, "I can
see that and hear you at the same time."
But Hugh's mind was too masculine for such legerdemain and though she
sighed and sighed again he waited until the vision grew dim astern.
Then, as he was about to resume, she interrupted.
XXXI
THE BURNING BOAT
"Where was the commodore all that time?" she asked.
"In Europe. We did business there too. It wasn't all river and boats
those days."
"Humph!" She preferred it to be all river and boats.
"But at length," said Hugh----
"What length?"
"Ten years. Grandfather was coming home, to stay. We were all to go up
to Saint Louis on the _Quakeress_."
"Phyllis too?"
"Yes, to meet him there and bring him back with us."
"Ten years!" marvelled Ramsey. "Hadn't Phyllis ever heard from my--from
Walnut Hills?"
"Now and then, yes; and when those ten years seemed to have worn her,
body and soul, to the breaking point----"
"You're strange. You feel tender to her yet."
"Perhaps I do. One day--night--she got word--I heard it from my nursery
bed--she got news; news that to her was as good and as bad as news could
be."
"That _he_ was on the river again!" guessed Ramsey.
"Yes, relearning it--it changes so fast, you know--and that your father
had asked my father to employ him; for he didn't want to go with your
father."
"No, Hayles will _fight_ for Hayles, pop-a says, but they won't work for
them."
"Also that he was going to be married. But Phyllis told my mother so
meekly that the past was all past----"
"And she'd seemed so good for so long, I suppose."
"Yes--that even my father thought it _was_ past, and when we went aboard
the boat and it started up the river, there at the wheel was your uncle
Dan."
"You didn't dare tell on her?--Oh, you were only ten years old!"