lady, this isn't you; you've caught this mood of a moment from your
brother."
It was not his words, however, that startled Ramsey to silence; the
audience was again stamping and pounding. Now she resumed: "Oh, I hear!
Mrs. Gilmore, the trouble's not that home song nor the spring song nor
the love-song; it's that silly thing you-all say I _must_ sing if I get
an encore--which I can't believe I'll get!"
"My dear, you'll get several. We've arranged that."
"Arr'--! Why, I've only that one silly thing!"
"The fate of the whole show is in that one silly thing."
"Oh, it's not! It's in you two talented, professional, famous people!"
"Ah, maybe it ought to be, but it's not. That's the way of the stage, my
dear. Your silly thing has plenty of verses. Sing only two at a time."
"A sort o' Hayle's twins," laughed the girl. Then despairingly she
dropped to the edge of the berth. But Hugh had been pushing in past the
players and as he reached her she sprang erect again.
"This is entirely my doing," he said to her. "These two good friends
mustn't urge you to sing. They're in danger, you know; greater danger
than they'll believe."
Gilmore broke in: "Now, Mr. Hugh, listen to me."
But Ramsey put out a hand. "No, _you_ listen--to him," and Hugh went on:
"Should it come to be known by--certain ones----"
"Certain twos," said Ramsey, "go on."
"It would double, or treble, that danger."
"My dear boy--" began the actor again, but his wife restrained him, and
Ramsey whispered at him in turn:
"Tsh-sh!" Then she prompted Hugh: "And so----?"
"So you must sing without any urging but mine."
Her lips parted in droll repudiation, but he went on.
"And you'll give the encore."
"Oh, when did you learn to talk? I--w-i-l-l--n-o-t!"
Once more the actor tried to break in, but his wife eagerly whispered:
"Let them alone! Let--them--alone!"
"Success hangs on it," persisted Hugh, "and success here means success
all over the boat. It will mean their" (the Gilmores') "safety; while
failure-- Think of it, Miss Ramsey.... Don't you see?"
She stared an instant and then with a sign of distress and aversion
gasped: "Go away! Go away!" and dropping to the berth cast her face into
its pillow. With gentle speed Mrs. Gilmore pressed Hugh aside and took
his place. The stamping and pounding, for a moment suspended, broke
forth afresh. "Send him away!" cried Ramsey, her voice muffled by the
pillow, one eye fitfully glancing from it, and one arm waving backward.
"All advice rejected! Send him away! Send them both."
With such dignity as they could save, the two outcasts fled, meeting and
turning back half the stage company while the actor's wife shut the
door.
"Is she ill?" asked the gaping girls. "Is she ill?"
"Not at all," "No," said the actor and Hugh, right and left, the one
complacent, the other "ironer" than ever. "She is, eh--she, eh----"
Every head was lifted to hearken. The cabin's applause ceased abruptly
for a second or two, or three. Then again there was a stillness broken
only by the speeding of the boat; and then, like a perfume from some
wilderness garden, came the untrained notes of a song, a maiden's song
of her lost German home, and leaning elatedly from the reopened door
Mrs. Gilmore loudly whispered:
"She's on!"
XL
RAMSEY AT THE FOOTLIGHTS
The actor stepped to his wife. "Will she do it all?" he inquired, and
Hugh, who had started to join the audience by a short cross passage,
lingered to hear.
"Heaven knows," laughed the lady, shutting herself out, yet keeping the
door; "I too am banished." Her glance drew Hugh nearer. "Miss Ramsey
begs us, all three----"
"For her to beg is to command," said Gilmore playfully.
"Yes, and so I've promised for all three----"
"Promised! What?"
Mrs. Gilmore whispered: "To pray for her."
The smiling actor and the unsmiling youth looked at each other. "Why,
that's," said Gilmore, "entirely----"
"Practicable," said Hugh. He moved on, and into the passage. Gilmore,
following, stopped at its outer end. At the inner stood Hugh, waiting,
in shadow and with downcast eyes, for the song to be done. What unvoiced
supplication, if any, may have been behind the lips of either was not
for the other to know. Yet it was an hour of formidable besetments and
we may pardon the actor if an actor's self-consciousness moved him to
reflect that there were thousands of healthy men, some as raw as Hugh,
some as ripe as himself, who, for the sake of a promise, a wife or a
maiden, or even without them, standing thus, had prayed.
He tiptoed to the youth's side and together they leaned in enough to
look down the dimmed cabin, over ranks of silhouetted heads, to the
bright stage front and the singer. She was in the centre of its light
and the last notes of her simple song called for so little effort that
they only helped the eye to give itself wholly and instantly to the mere
picture of her, slender, golden, magnified by this sudden outburst into
blossom, and radiant with the tenderness of her words as a flower with
morning dew. The next moment she was bowing and withdrawing, aglow with
gratitude for an applause that came in volume as though for the finish
of a chariot-race, and Hugh saw as plainly as the experienced actor, if
not with as clear a recognition of Mrs. Gilmore's attiring skill, that
the tribute was at least as much to the singer as to the song.
The same perception came to Ramsey in the stateroom to which she had
returned and in which she stood alone, hearkening and trembling. She
noiselessly laughed for joy to be, however unworthily, the daughter of
Gideon Hayle, never doubting it was for his name, his blood, his
likeness, she stood thus approved. The conviction gave her better heart
for the task yet before her. She glided to the rear door, locked it, and
dropped to her knees.
"Oh, Lord 'a' mercy!" she murmured. "Oh, Basile, my brother! And oh,
mom-a, dear, brave mom-a!" She did not name her father, though his
figure was central in her imagination, broad, overtowering, intrepid,
imperious.
The applause persisted. Now it sank but at once it rose again, easy
overflow of a popular mind glad of all unrestraint and always ready--as
even she discerned--for the joy of exaggeration. She sprang up and moved
toward it, her eyes sparkling responsively. Yet her tremor was piteous
and in mute thought she said again, at high speed:
"My brother, oh, my brother! I'll be back in a minute. This ain't for my
own silly self, you know, honey. It's for them that need it; for all the
people, up stairs and down, and for--for the boat!--as any of
her--owners--would do for any of our boats. You said you wished _you_
could do some fine thing for somebody--in a fire--or explosion, and this
is just as awful only not so sudden, and I'm doing this in your place,
honey boy; yes, I am, this is just as if you did it yourself!"
The applause was still summoning her as she ended. A hand, probably Mrs.
Gilmore's, had tried the locked door. From the lower deck leaked up the
sad "peck, peck" of the carpenter driving his nails, and close outside
the door sounded sharp footsteps and the mingled voices of the pilot's
cub and the actor calling with suppressed vehemence to one of the
pantrymen: "Here, boy! Here! Go below like a shot and tell 'Chips' to
stop that pounding this instant! He can saw if he must but he mustn't
hammer!"
Then as if carried there by some force not her own she found herself
again in the bewildering sheen of the footlights, smiling merrily to the
hushed, half-seen assemblage, and suddenly aware of every throb of the
_Votaress's_ bosom, every fall of her winged feet, every tinkle of her
cabin's candelabra, and, most vivid of all, horribly out of time with
all, the still insistent "rap, tap, tap" of the carpenter's hammer.
At the same time, unconfessedly, the eager audience took note of quite
another group of facts, emphasized by the appearance of Hugh in a back
row of seats, by the presence of Hayle's twins in the dusk of the front
row, with war even in the back of their heads, and by the illuminated
form of the singer just drawing a last breath of preparation to exhale
it in melody. Hardly in the gathering was there one who had not by this
time learned the whole state of affairs between all Hayles, all
Courteneys, and all those others whom its schemings, aggressions,
discomfitures, tirades, and prophetic threats had entangled with them.
Every one thought he knew precisely both Hugh's and Ramsey's varied
relations to each and all those persons, his and her effects upon them,
and his and her ludicrously dissimilar ways of getting those effects.
They knew this warfare was still on and was here before them now. In
every phase of it in which Ramsey had taken part she had come off victor
and in every instance had done so by the sheer power of what she, with
fair accuracy, called nonsense. So now they were ready to see her, at
any juncture the twins or accident might spring, show the same method
and win an even more lustrous triumph in keeping with her own
metamorphosis. Nay, they were more than ready to lend a hand toward such
an outcome. Like Watson, they had sentimentally matched Hugh and Ramsey,
prospectively, in their desire, and saw that such a union must sooner or
later be, if it was not already, a paramount issue in the strife. In
such expectancy sat the throng, keenly aware of the twins at their front
and Hugh at their back, as Ramsey's indrawn breath began to return in
song, its first notes as low as her voice could sink, its time slow, its
verbal inflections those of the freight-deck negro:
"Do you belong toe Gideon's ban'?"
So far it got before it was drowned in a deluge of laughter and
applause. She had made, as Gilmore said to his wife behind the curtain,
a "ten-strike." Her hearers did not pause an instant to determine
whether the utterance was wit or humor or pure inanity. It fitted their
mood; fitted it better than the actor or Hugh had believed it could. To
the company's notion it was good nonsense offsetting and overpowering an
otherwise invincible bad nonsense and snatching from it all right of
argument, sympathy, or judicial appeal; laughing it out of court, to
remain out at least until the completion of this voyage should give this
jury, these hearers, an honorable discharge. The shrewd good sense of
it, in their judgment, was the most fun of all, and while in her heart
Ramsey was gratefully giving the credit of that to the actor and Hugh,
the people naturally gave it to her and laughed and clapped and pounded
again on second thought.
Now abruptly they hushed and let her resume:
"Do you belong toe Gideon's ban'?
Here's my heart an' here's my han'.
Do you belong toe Gideon's ban'?
Fight'n faw yo' home!"
Again the audience broke in.
"Fighting for your home!" they laughed to one another as they clapped.
Home was the catchword of the times. Jenny Lind was singing nightly:
"Midt bleasures undt balacess----"
and three fourths of all the songs not of the opera were of home and its
ties. What the word might exactly signify in this case made little
matter; on her lips, from her breast, it meant human kindness, maiden
innocence, young love; meant courage, fidelity, the right, the true, the
beautiful, the good; meant anything, everything, which she herself,
shining there above the footlights like a star in the sunset, their
darling of the hour, could be fancied to stand for; meant, anyhow, the
twins' war-song turned into a peace-and-joy song.
"Tsh-sh-sh! let her go on!" And she went on: she, Noah's ark, and the
_Votaress_, all three, together:
"Den come de buck-ram and de ewe----"
"What? what's that?" They leaned and whispered right and left. "New
words! new words!"
"Den come de buck-ram and de ewe----"
"Why--she must 'a' made those words, herself!"
Not she. She knew no better than to believe them the improvisations of
the Gilmores.
"Den come de buck-ram and de ewe
De ole niroscenos and de gnu----"
Pun! a pun! a real pun!
"Do you belong toe Gideon's ban'?"
Yes, verily! They clapped, ha-haed, leaned around one another to see the
dark upturned heads of the twins, and stole backward glances on the
immovable features of the captain's son. At his side sat the Californian
just then gravely murmuring to him, but he remaining as motionless as a
Buddha. The refrain pressed on to its close, and the applause redoubled,
but stopped as she prepared for another verse.
"Nex' come de mule and den de quail----"
Laughter! Mule and quail! royal pair of the cotton field, rightly thrice
heralded!
"Nex' come de mule and den de quail,
Nex' come de mule and den de quail,
Nex' come de mule and den de quail,
De monkey-wrench and de wiggletail."
The senator clapped yea, the general thumped his cane. Half-a-dozen
voices began to chime with her, "Here's my heart and----" till Julian
looked round, when they stopped so short that the laugh swelled again
and Julian resumed his seat. Only two or three saw Hugh and the
Californian softly pass out together.
"No, no, no!" cried several, but that was to Ramsey for trying to get
away. "No, you don't! Another verse! sing anoth'-- Tsh-sh-sh!".... She
sang:
"Den come de man-drake and de moose,
Den come de man-drake and de moose,
Den come de man-drake and de moose,
De hickory-pottamus and de goose.
Do you belong----?"
Belong? How could they help but belong? Was ever anything such fun? Not
itself, maybe, but she! And no more could Ramsey help belonging to them,
though thoughts of the texas and of the immigrant deck--where the
carpenter's saw played an interlude to her every verse--pierced her
heart at each throb of her pulse and of the boat's pulse and at every
glimpse of the scowling twins, dimly visible to her just beyond the
footlights. Silence fell once more as she moved a step forward with a
light in her eyes, a life in her poise, that made her a pure joy, albeit
an instinct warned her that her tide was at the flood and she must make
her exit on this wave. So with a light toss as if to say, "Positively
last appearance," she sang:
"Den d'rattlesnake and de antidote,
De rattlesnake and de antidote,
De rattlesnake and de antidote,
De rangitang and de billy-goat.
Do you belong----?"
The applause was as lively as ever and increased with each step of her
bowing retreat. Near the stateroom door, chancing to look across the
cabin to the one opposite, she saw within two or three of the amateurs
clapping and the actor approvingly waving her off. Then finding herself
alone she threw open the rear door and was in Mrs. Gilmore's embrace.
"How's Basile?" she demanded--"and the bishop--and Marburg's mother? All
this time----"
"My dear, you've sung only six minutes."
"It seems a week," she laughed. Hugh appeared in the outer door. She
listened to the insistent applause. "I can't go back, Mrs. Gilmore. I
don't need to, do I?"
"No.... Let go of me, dear!" The applause ceased. The curtain was about
to "rise." The servant who was to draw the near half of it reached in
from the cabin and closed their door. "No, dear, you won't sing again
till after this act, anyhow."
"Oh, not even then! I just must stay with Basile. I've sung all the
verses but one, you know."
"We've got some more new ones," replied the lady, smiling to Hugh, who
was moving to let her pass out.
"Got them!" cried the girl. She turned to Hugh. "They've made them!
Didn't you know Mr. and Mrs. Gilmore made every line I've sung? Oh, Mr.
Hugh, what can't genius do?"
Hugh solemnly dissented. "Those lines," he said, "could never have been
made by mere genius!"
She stared at him a moment and then at Mrs. Gilmore, who was escaping by
the outer door and who replied: "My dear, every line made for you has
been made by Mr. Hugh." She vanished while the two stood dumbly face to
face, but on second thought was back again just in time to see and hear
Ramsey say, still gazing:
"Well, of--all--things! You! That frightful rubbish! You've got to sing
the rest, yourself! Oh, Mrs. Gilmore, make him do it! It'll tickle 'em
all to death--to hear _him_ sing Gideon's Band!--and I can stay with
Basile."
"Preposterous!" rumbled Hugh, and again, "preposterous!"
"Why--happy thought!" said Mrs. Gilmore. "Why, the very thing, Mr. Hugh,
the very thing! Come. First we'll take this young lady up-stairs----" As
they started the Californian appeared, laying a caressing hand on Hugh.
XLI
QUITS
"Wait here," slowly said Hugh in response to the gold-hunter's touch.
"I'll--see you presently."
The modest adventurer waved assent, yet looked so disappointed that Mrs.
Gilmore, moving to take his arm, asked:
"Can't Mr. So-and-so go with us?"
Oh, kind, quick wit! Three is a crowd, four is only twice two!
"Certainly," said Hugh, and to Ramsey added: "We'd better lead the way."
As they led she softly inquired: "Does he want to know something about
the twins?"
What arrows were her questions, and how straight they struck home! Yet
with that low voice for their bowstring they gave him comfort. Her
forays into his confidence not only relieved the loneliness of his too
secretive mind but often, as now, involved a sweet yielding of her
confidence to him. Yet now a straight answer was quite impossible.
"He wants to know something about you," was the reply.
She let the palpable evasion pass. On the hurricane roof there was a new
sight. The breeze was astern and moved so evenly with the boat as to
enfold her in a calm. Looking up for the stars, one saw only the giant
chimneys towering straight into the darkness and sending their smoke as
straight and as far again beyond, spangled with two firefly swarms of
sparks that fell at last in a perpetual, noiseless shower.
"Why do we go this way?" she asked, meaning forward around the skylight
roof instead of across it.
"Because this way's longer."
"Humph!" was the soft response. Presently she added, "We get more fresh
air this way," and called back to their two followers: "This is to avoid
the sparks."
"Um-hmm!" thought kind Mrs. Gilmore, and, "Oh, ho!" mused the
Californian, not quite so unselfishly.
Around in front of the bell both youth and maiden observed how palely
the derrick posts loomed against the spectral chimneys and their smoke,
and silently recalled their first meeting, just here, in the long ago of
two days earlier. The captain's chair was occupied.
"Well, father," said Hugh.
"Good evening," twittered Ramsey.
"Good evening, Miss Ramsey. Be back this way, Hugh?"
"In a moment, sir." They passed on. Ramsey looked behind at the
Californian.
"What does he want to know about me?" she asked.
"He says," said Hugh, "he's nursed this sickness at sea and at Panama
and hasn't the slightest fear of it."
"Humph!... That's not about me."
"Yes, it--was. He's taken a great fancy----"
"To Basile."
"To several of us, including Basile."
"Yes, because he and Basile played cards together."
"Not entirely for that," said Hugh, looking at her so squarely that she
had to smooth back her curls. "But he'd like to help take care of him if
you--and your mother, of course--are willing."
"Oh, how good--and brave! And he wants to ask me?"
"No, he's too bashful. I'm asking for him."
"Too--!" Ramsey pondered. They stepped more slowly. The other pair
turned back; the play demanded Mrs. Gilmore. The sick-room door was so
near that Ramsey knew her mother was inside it, by her shadow on its
glass. Suddenly, just as Hugh was about to say she need not hurry
in--whereupon she would have vanished like a light blown out--she faced
him. "D'you ever suffer from bashfulness--diffidence?"
He answered on a droll, deep note: "All its horrors."
She looked him over. He barely smiled.
"You never show it," she said.
"No." To the fanciful girl the monosyllable came like one toll from a
low tower. She laughed.
"Basile says there's another thing you suffer from."
"'Suffer'? From what do I 'suffer'?"
"From everybody else on the boat having a better chance to do
things--big things--than you have."
He smiled again. "If I did, no one should know it; least of all you."
She ignored the last clause. "Aha! I said so. I told him--and mammy Joy
told him--there's nothing bigger than to wait your turn and _then take
it_. And there ain't--there isn't, is there?"
"Well--even that can be small. Nothing a man is big enough for looks big
to him."
"Hoh!--after he's done it," laughed Ramsey.
"True--" said Hugh reflectively, "or suffered it," and both of them
began to see that we can rarely lift more than our one corner of the
whole truth at a time. "In your way," he added, still musing, "you're
larger than I."
"Oh, I'm no--such--thing!" Her speech was soft, yet she looked up warily
to Watson's pilot-house window, but Watson too thoroughly approved to be
looking down. "I'm not half or third or quarter as large." She eagerly
turned his attention up the river. Visible only by the lights of her
cabin and the sparks from her unseen chimneys, a boat was coming round
the next bend. As she entered the reach and breasted the breeze which so
calmly accompanied the _Votaress_, her two spangled plumes of smoke
swept straight astern as if two comets raced with her, or----
"The Golden Locks of Berenice," whispered Ramsey.
"Come," Hugh softly responded. The _Votaress_ had signalled the usual
passage to starboard and unless they went forward the shining spectacle
would at once be lost. As they gained the front of the texas the distant
craft, happening to open a fire-door, cast a long fan of red light ahead
of her, suddenly showing every detail of her white forecastle,
illumining her pathway on the yellow waters and revealing in their
daylight green the willows of an island close beyond. Then the furnace
was shut and again her fair outlines were left to the imagination,
except for the prismatic twinkle and glow of her cabin lights.
"That was like you when you laugh," murmured Hugh, and before she could
parry she was smitten again by an innocent random shot from the darkness
round the bell.
"Do you make her out, Mr. Watson?" asked Hugh's father, and she flinched
as if Watson were peering down on her.
"Yes, sir," said the pilot, "she's Hayle's _Wild Girl_."
Not waiting to hear that she was known by her "front skylights standin'
so fur aft of her chimbleys," Ramsey wheeled to fly. But instantly she
recovered and went with severe decorum, saying quiet nothings to Hugh as
he followed, until at the sick-room door again she turned.
"I'm willing he should help us, Mr. Hugh, if mom-a and Basile are. I'll
send him word by mammy Joy. Mr. Hugh--what is it he wants to know about
the twins?"
Hugh was taken aback. "Why, it's nothing--now. It was as pure nonsense
as those verses. Ask him. He can tell if he chooses; I can't." There was
a pause. Her eyes gave him lively attention, but one ear was bent to the
door.
"I hope Basile is better," he added.
"I'm sure he is; he's so much quieter." She felt a stir of conscience,
loitering thus, yet--"Mr. Hugh, do you think diffidence is the same as
modesty?"
"Certainly not."
"I'm--" She meditated.... "I'm glad of that.... I never was diffident a
moment in my life."
"You never had need to be," said Hugh very quietly.
"They go together, don't they, diffidence and modesty?"
"Not as often as diffidence and conceitedness."
"Why, Mr. Hugh!"
"One thing that makes me so silent is my conceit."
"Oh, you! you're not conceited at all! You're modest! You little know
how great you are! You're a wonder!" Her tone was candor itself till
maiden craft added, while she tinkled her softest and keenest: "You're a
poet!"
With a gay wave, which dismissed him so easily that she resented his
going, she turned, stepped warily into the cramped room, and stood
transfixed with remorse for her tardiness and appalled and heart-wrung.
The foot of the berth was by the door. There old Joy stood silently
weeping. At its head knelt her mother in prayer and on it lay her
playmate brother peacefully gasping out his life. A flash of
retrospection told her he must have had the malady long before he had
confessed it and that something--something earlier than her
singing--yes, and later--not twins nor Gilmores nor river--oh,
something, what was it?--had kept her--these two long, long days--blind.