gift for invective. "You stone image! 'To help you,' indeed! _You_! As
if you--as if I--I won't, you born tyrant! 'Help you'--against my own
kin! I will not--ever again. We're _quits_ for good and all."
XLII
AGAINST KIN
"Ramsey," said the boy, his voice gone to a shred, "you're good--to come
back in--in time. Ain't you going--to laugh? It'd be all right. Oh,
sis'"--the sunken eyes lighted up--"it's come to me, sissy, it's come.
I've got religion, Ramsey. I'm going straight to the arms of Jesus.
Sissy dear, I wish"--he waited for strength--"I could see
the--twins--just a minute or two----"
"Why, you shall, honey. I'll go bring 'em."
"Wish you would--and Hugh Courteney. It's the last----"
"Honey boy, th'ain't room for so many at once. And it ain't your last
anything; you' going to get well."
His eyes closed, his brows knit. The tearful mother rose and looked at
her. The glance was kind, yet remorse tore the girl's heart again. "Go,"
said her mother. "Joy, she'll go with you. Bring the three."
"My last"--the boy whispered on--"last chance--to do some'--something
worthy of"--he faintly smiled to his mother--"of Gideon's Band."
The door opened and closed and the two were alone. At his sign she
knelt, took his clammy hand, and bent close that he might flutter out
his hurried words with least effort.
"She sang it finely!" he whispered. "She'd 'a' known we heard it if
she'd 'a' thought. Wish you'd sing a verse of it. It's a hymn, you
know--or was. The chorus is--yet. Anyhow, it's our song. Oh, I'd like to
live on and be a real true Hayle--a Gideon! I hope--hope Hugh
Courteney'll--live. Just think! he was on the _Quakeress_ when Uncle
Dan--.... He's going to do big things some day. Mother--want to tell you
something." She bent closer. He whispered on:
"I wish Hugh Courteney'd live and--marry sis'."
His eyes reclosed and the mother drew back, but he whispered on with
lids unlifted: "Sing--a verse or two--or just the chorus, won't you?"
As softly as to an infant fallen asleep she sang, in her Creole accent,
with eyes streaming:
"Do you billong to Gideon' ban'?
Yere's my 'eart an' yere's my 'an'."
Outside, meantime, before old Joy had quite left the closed door,
another, the second aft of it, opened and the texas tender stepped out.
A fellow servant within shut it, and he started for a near-by stair, but
checked up, amazed, to let Ramsey hasten on for the same point.
But Ramsey halted. "How's the bishop?" she asked him.
"Good Lawd!" he gasped, and then tittered at himself. "I ax yo' pahdon,
miss, I _neveh_ know de Hayles twins 'uz _double_ twins, male 'n'
female. You ax me----?"
"The bishop; how is he now?"
"Well, Miss Hayles--you is Miss Hayles, ain't you? Yit, my Lawd! miss,
ain't I dess now see you down in de cabin a-playin' in de play, an' a
hund'ed people sayin': '_'tis_ her, 'cose it is'?"
"Humph! no, I left as the curtain rose. How's the----?"
"Bishop? Oh, de bishop, he, eh--'bout five-six minute' ago--aw it mowt
be ten--whilse I 'uz down dah--de bishop--I'm bleeds to say--breave his
las'."
"While I--!" She tossed both arms.
"Ummmm, hmmmm!" droned old Joy; "gone to glory!"
"Yass, de good bishop gone to his good bishop!"
"Oh, who was with him?" cried the girl.
"Why, eh"--the three moved on their way--"de doctoh, he 'uz dah, and de
bofe sis' o' charity; yass'm."
"The commodore--wasn't?--Nor the senator--nor----?"
"Oh, yass'm, de commodo', he 'uz dah--faw a spell. He didn' stay till
de--finish. He couldn'. He git slightly indispose', hisseff, an' have to
go to his own room."
The nurse made a meek show of despair and Ramsey turned upon her. "Now,
mammy, this is no time--_now--don't--cry_."
The old woman braced up superbly. "Yass'm," persisted the waiter, "he
dah now, in bed; slightly indispose'."
A rumble close below broke in upon the rhythm of the boat. "What's
that?" demanded Ramsey.
"Oh, dat's on'y de aujience a-stompin' de actohs."
The next moment, a step or two down the stair, with the skylight roof
still in sight as much as hidden tears would let her see it, she stopped
again, to stare anxiously at another trio, coming from the bell to the
captain's room.
"Da'--dat's all right," the white-jacket reassured her. "Dat's dess de
cap'm, wid Mr. Hugh an' a passengeh."
"Kentucky passenger?"
"Yass'm, 'zac'ly; f'om Ca'fawnia; dat's him."
She sprang back to the deck, and the servant went his way down the
stair. Hugh had left his father to proceed on the arm of the Californian
and was approaching. He murmured only a preoccupied greeting and would
have taken the stair, but old Joy motioned eagerly to the girl. She
spoke. He stopped. "Yes, Miss Ramsey?"
"Go on," she said, "we're going that way."
Down on the cabin guards the two paused at the bottom step, the old
woman lingering at the top. "Mr. Hugh," said Ramsey, "mom-a's sending me
for the twins." She drew a breath. "You know about the commodore?"
"Yes, Miss Ramsey."
"And the--the bishop?"
"I know, Miss Ramsey."
"Mr. Hugh, is your father--taken?"
"Yes, Miss Ramsey."
"Where are you going?"
"To bring the first clerk."
"The boat's command doesn't fall to him, does it?"
"It falls to the first mate."
"I don't see why. Who'll it fall to next? You?"
"No, the first clerk."
Double disappointment. "But you; you'll still look after us passengers
and help him, too, won't you?"
"I may."
She knew it! Somehow he was to share with the mate and the clerk the
command of the boat!
"Mr. Hugh"--they moved on, with Joy at a discreet distance--"you're in a
hurry--so am I; but I ought to tell you, though of course it's just
ridiculous for us--for me--to think I've ever helped you or can help you
in any of these things or in anything--I--oh--I can't help you, or play
help you, any more."
Cruel word in a cruel moment. She felt it so and expected him to show
the same feeling. But instead he halted in the lamplight of a passageway
to the cabin and confronted her with the widest, most formidable gaze,
not her father's, she had ever met. He seemed absolutely majestic. It
was very absurd for one so young and--stumpy--to seem majestic, yet
there he stood, truly so. Partly for that reason she could not so much
as smile; but partly, too, it was because she felt herself so guiltily
frivolous, having anything to say to him, or even standing in his gaze,
gazing into it, while his father, her brother, and the bishop lay as
they were lying in their several rooms so close overhead.
"You _can_ help me," he said in his magisterial voice, so deep yet so
soft. "You will. You must. I cannot spare you."
Did any one ever! She tossed a faint defiance: "I can't. No. I
won't--can't--ever again, against my own kin."
"There are things stronger than kin."
"I'd like to know what!"
"Truth. Justice. Honor. Right. Public welfare."
She waved them all away as wholly immaterial. "Hoh!"
With a kindness far too much like magnanimity to suit her, Hugh, drawing
backward, smiled, and replied, not as pressing the argument but as
dropping it:
"One can be against one's kin, yet not against them. Basile knows that.
He proved it to-day."
"Basile--oh, Mr. Hugh, Basile wants to see you. Mom-a's sent me as much
for you as for the twins. Basile's asked for you. But of course if your
father----"
"I'll come, the moment I can be spared. Is your brother really better?"
Ramsey flinched as from pain. She leaned on the shoulder of the
nurse--who had come close--and sadly shook her head. But then she
straightened smilingly and said: "If you're coming at all----"
She might have finished but for a faint sound that reached her from
directly underfoot, a sound of sawing. She faced sharply about, passed
into the cabin, and found the Gilmores and the amateurs in the midst of
their play.
XLIII
WHICH FROM WHICH
This world of tragic contrasts and cross-purposes, realities and
fictions, this world where the many so largely find their inspiration in
the performances of the few, was startlingly typified to Ramsey as, out
of the upper night and the darkness of her troubles, she came in upon
the show; the audience sitting in their self-imposed twilight of a few
dimmed lamps, designedly forgetful of the voyage for which all were
there, and the players playing their parts as though the play were the
only thing real.
If the prefigurement was at any point vague it was none the less
arresting. As the _Votaress_--or Gideon Hayle's _Wild Girl_--might, in
full career, strike on hidden sands, so Ramsey struck on the thought--or
call it the unformulated perception--that whoever would really live
must, by clear choice and force of will, keep himself--herself--adjusted
to this world as a whole; as one great multitudinous entity with a
stronger, higher claim on each mere part's sympathy, service, sacrifice,
than any mere part can ever hold on it.
In a word, Hugh Courteney, baby elephant, born tyrant, egotist--or
egoist, whichever it was--self-confessed egotist, stone-faced
egoist--with his big-wig airs and big-fiddle voice--was nearer right
than she would _ever_ submit to confess to him: there _were_ things
stronger than kin, bigger every way; and other things bigger than those
bigger things, and yet others still bigger than those, and so on and on
to the world's circumference. Staggering discovery. Yet how infinitely
old it looked the moment she clearly saw it: old, obvious, beautiful,
and ugly as the man in the moon. It chanced that right there and then
she was forced to accept its practical application. A white-jacket said
to her in a muffled voice:
"Ef you please--to not to move up to'a'ds de stage whilse de play
a-goin' on."
"Oh, but I must," she explained. "I'm on business; business that can't
wait any longer. I've already been delayed--" Her last word faltered.
Something occurring on the stage held her eyes, while two or three
auditors who had turned on her a glance of annoyance changed it to a
gaze of astonishment. The cub pilot came to her on tiptoe.
"Oh, Mr. So-and-so," she smilingly whispered as she edged on, "I want my
twin brothers. Mom-a wants them, right away, up-stairs."
He nodded at each word and began softly to say that this act would be
finished in a minute; but she broke in, still inching along: "I can't
wait a minute. I've no right to be this late. Basile wants the twins and
he's so sick that--that he can't, he mustn't wait."
"Missy," pleadingly whispered old Joy at their backs, "missy!" But
neither she nor the cub pilot could stop the messenger. Nor did she heed
the growing number of those seated all about her whose attention she
attracted, though now they were a dozen, a score, glancing, in a
suppressed flutter, from her to the stage and from the stage to her and
one another.
Yet she stopped. For on the stage, in the play, in the part that was to
have been hers, she beheld "Harriet" doing that part so well, and
winning such lively approval, that doing it better would have distorted
the play. Rouged and coifed to reduce her apparent age as much as
Ramsey's was to have been increased, she was at all points so like what
Ramsey would have been that the bulk of the audience had mistaken her
for Ramsey and had made her more and more a favorite at each brief
reappearance.
Fearful moment. Beyond sight only to the outer eye, the bishop, whom she
herself had pushed into the grapple of the pestilence, lay dead. Basile
was dying. Two of the Courteneys were plague stricken, and the third,
for whom she felt a special, inexplicable accountability, was, with
Gilmore and Watson, in constant mortal peril from her twin brothers, and
the twins therefore from them. Before her eyes, so near she could have
tossed a flower to her, was Phyllis, a spectre from an awful past, the
destroyer of the _Quakeress_, liable herself, within any hour, should
the truth be discovered, to be burned like a witch. There she was, "the
slave girl Phyllis," as the runaway advertisement would have had it, a
culprit, and a property no way superior, in popular regard, to the
blackest African, yet by Hayle blood so near of kin--kin! kin to
her!--that with no other aid than a few touches of paint and pencil she
was being enthusiastically acclaimed as Ramsey Hayle by an assemblage
which has just applauded her, Ramsey, in the blaze of those same
footlights. Fearful moment! that aged her as no earlier moment ever had;
yes, and for the instant, at least, threw into her face a maturity that
heightened the unhappy resemblance.
She stopped because her presence seemed about to precipitate a terrible
mischief, and she stood because flight would but leave that mischief to
do its worst. Through this glaring show of likeness she seemed to be in
the keenest danger of betraying back into slavery on the spot this poor,
intrepid "Harriet," identified as the Phyllis supposed these ten years
to be under the floods of the Mississippi. At that moment, on the stage,
in Ramsey's rôle of a housemaid, the rôle from which Ramsey bitterly
remembered she had been excused through Hugh Courteney's urging,
"Harriet" chanced to be acting a ludicrous dismay before a transient
dilemma in which, as in Ramsey's, staying threatened disaster yet good
faith said stay--Ramsey's own present actual case except that Harriet's
was comic. A hundred beholders laughed, and then turning and peering at
the dim, central figure of Ramsey suddenly redoubled the laugh and
presently redoubled it again.
Yet it yielded a certain relief. While there is mirth there is hope.
Even now the player of the part was recognized only as Mrs. Gilmore's
maid. Her resemblance to Ramsey was passing for pure accident. That the
whole thing was visibly offensive to Hayle's twins made it all the more
amusing, and Ramsey's pause in the aisle seemed the most natural thing
she could do on finding herself in two places at the same time. So for a
moment, in which she rejoiced that at any rate the twins had never seen
Phyllis as Phyllis. But then the demonstration broke short off. At
different points three men stood up at once. In the front row appeared
Julian. A few seats behind him loomed the exhorter. The third rose just
at Ramsey's elbow, offering her his seat, yet counting it but courtesy
still to keep his attention mainly on the play. It was the first clerk,
he who had once been clerk on the _Quakeress_, where he had known
Phyllis as Hugh's nurse, and whose scrutiny "Harriet" had until now
somehow escaped. Whether in thanking him Ramsey accepted or declined she
hardly knew, for just then the gaze he still bent on "Harriet" showed a
gleam of recognition. Ramsey's heart rose into her throat. She murmured
a hurried word, which she had to go over a second time before it took
effect on him:
"Mr. Hugh's looking for you, out forward. The commodore and the captain
are both sick."
As the announcement drew his quick glance she almost waved him to go.
Yet what was done was done; with Phyllis recognized, it might be far
better for him to remain, and she turned her dismissing gesture into one
of detention.
"I'm Miss Hayle," she whispered, while both looked again toward Julian
and "Harriet." "That's my old mammy back yonder. I want my twin
brothers. Mom-a wants them, up in the texas, as quick as--never mind,
here they come."
XLIV
FORBEARANCE
Ramsey was mistaken--her brothers were staying. The play's first act was
done, there was great clapping and thumping and the curtain was
falling--or closing, in two parts from opposite sides, eased over
sticking-points by nimble efforts behind it; but though Julian--who
evidently had been getting through the general's courtesy the indulgence
denied him at the bar--had moved a step or so from his chair, Lucian
remained seated. Next them sat the general and the senator, and the four
were debating together. Oddly enough, the twins were in disaccord, and
while Lucian had the senator's approval the general's went to his
brother. The applause died out prematurely and the whole company gave
its attention to the debate, Ramsey sinking into the clerk's seat and
laughing merrily--since it was laugh or perish.
"No, gentlemen," she heard Julian say, "this is the last-st st-straw. A
nigger wench made up to counterfeit a member of our family, and the part
given her which that member of our family was to have played! ...
Overlook--oh, good God, sir, we've done nothing but overlook, every hour
of day and night since we started."
From the other three came responses too quiet to be understood. Ramsey
half rose toward the clerk and sank again, begging him to carry her
errand on to the brothers, and he had softly moved forward as far as to
the exhorter when that person, still on his feet, called to Julian:
"Yass! an' thah ah cause to believe said niggeh----"
Two small interruptions came at once, provoking a general laugh: Julian,
staring at him in heavy abstraction, said dreamily, "Ho--ho--hold your
tongue," while the clerk, at "John the Baptist's" side, gently grasped
between the shoulders a fold of his coat, mildly suggested, "Have a
seat," and put him so suddenly off his balance that he plumped heavily
into his chair--quite enough to rouse the mirth of a company already a
trifle nervous. And now Julian was heard again:
"No, Luce, you can stay, I'll go alone--or with--thank you, general! Oh,
senator, we are not blind, sir, though every time we overlook some
insult they think we are. Good Lord! do you reckon we don't see that all
this laugh is at us, got up at our expense, and has been at us since the
first turn of this boat's wheels at Canal Street? We saw--_and_
overlooked--that vile attempt to take our two ladies up the river
without us, starting the instant they got aboard and leaving us at the
water's edge a laughing-stock for passengers, crew, and pantry boys!"
Both senator and general coaxed him to sit down, but the most he would
concede was to drop his voice as he continued: "You know, gentlemen, and
they know, that any true man would as soon be slapped in the face and
spit upon as to be laughed at.... No, I--" His words became
indistinguishable.
Ramsey was in anguish. She would have glided forward with her tidings
and summons but for the clerk blocking the path half-way. A stir of
annoyance ran through the gathering, here grave, there facetious, but it
stopped short as a new figure moved quietly past Ramsey and stood beside
the clerk. It was Hugh, and the general interest revived. He exchanged a
word or two with the clerk, who turned and left the cabin while Hugh
stayed with the exhorter.
Julian, without seeing the newcomer, once more broke forth, this time
plainly intending to make every one his listener: "No, we don't
interrupt and we shall not."
"Oh, no," daringly put in an ironical hearer, "Hayle's twins, they never
interrupt an innocent pleasure!"
"How air it innercent?" called John the Baptist, at Hugh's side, rising
again and gesticulating. "No theayter play kin be innercent an' much
less this-yeh one, by reason 'at they ah cause to believe that-ah
servant-gal----"
He was pulled down again with even less ceremony than before, though by
friendlier hands, hands of the two lenders of the sword-canes, who fell
to counselling him in crafty undertones. But Julian was talking dead
ahead, ignoring all distractions and not even yet discovering Hugh:
"We didn't more than whisper, general, till the curtain fell. Now, did
we? When it rises again--what, sir?... My dear senator! it's our fellow
passengers who don't see--that their kind intentions are being made part
of a put-up game to torment us to leave the boat.... Oh, no, they--why,
sir, the dastards set it a-going the moment they'd persuaded our ladies
to stay and risk their priceless lives nursing those damned Dutch on the
lower deck."
The senator ached to be the steamer's length removed but saw no way of
dignified escape. Several listeners, remembering Ramsey's tactics and
their success, gayly laughed, but two or three gasped an audible dismay;
two or three men said, "Sh-sh-sh!" two or three said, "Ladies present,"
"Remember the ladies," and some one droned out in a mock voice: "The
stage waits."
And plainly it did so; waited on the audience, with Mrs. Gilmore peeping
through the curtain, whose rise would reveal "Harriet" alone; a terrible
risk if the exhorter should get in the bolt he was trying to launch.
"Oh, where is Mr. Gilmore?" thought Ramsey, and, "Why don't they call
again for 'Gideon's Band'? Yet who would sing it?" Her distressed lips
were silently asking many such questions when she sprang up and halted
the Californian, who had come in at her back on his way to Hugh.
"How's the captain?" she whispered in smiling agitation.
With low affirmative bows, so enraptured to be speaking with her as to
be all but speechless, he murmured: "Get'--getting on--so far." He waved
an oddly delicate hand--backward from the wrist, girlishly--"He's
all--hunkadory."
"And Basile?" Anxious as she was, she yet saw while she spoke--and he
saw--that Julian had at length sighted Hugh and that at least
three-fourths of the audience, the whole male portion, was eying that
pair with the alertness of man's primitive interest in man-to-man
encounter. At her mention of the sick boy the gold hunter ceased to nod.
His countenance fell.
"Oh," she whispered, "won't _you_ go and tell them, all three, Mr.
Courteney and both twins, how bad off he is, and that he sent me, and
mom-a says come quick?"
He went. Forgetting to sit down, she watched him go and let Gilmore pass
her as Hugh had done. Now, what was his errand? The actor and the
Californian reached Hugh together. The three drew a step back from the
exhorter and his advisers and conferred in the aisle while Julian's
tirade went straight on as completely ignored by them as though it were
the most normal sound of the boat's machinery. The sight so amused the
audience that laughter came again and then clapping and pounding, in a
succession of outbreaks, each coming so close after one of Julian's
utterances that his dizzy head took it for approval, though to every one
else, and especially to Ramsey, the meaning was weariness of him and
impatience of Gilmore's delay.
He spoke with his face to his associates but with his voice addressed to
those other three in the aisle: "We were invited on this boat in pure
cowardly malice." (Applause.) "To have our weapons stolen from us by
servants and locked up by underlings and to have the boat's ordinary
refreshments forbidden us." (Laughter and applause.) "To be thrust into
contact with a deadly pestilence and to be insulted or assaulted by
hired blackguards on one or another of every deck from forecastle
gangway to pilot-house." (Long and loud applause.) "And all this, sirs,
we have overlooked; but to be made a public laughing-stock we will not
endure if I have to pull every Courteney's nose to stop it!" (Loud
laughter and prolonged applause.) Amid the din Ramsey recognized the
voice of old Joy moaning with grief and consternation in the gloom
behind her, and caught the words of the cub pilot, said for his soul's
relief, not dreaming she would hear: "If you two ornery cusses wa'n't
Gid Hayle's boys we'd clap you in irons quicker'n you could lick out
your tongue."