"Why didn't he want her set free?" insisted the forgotten.
"Ah!" said the mother to the senator as though the inquiry were his,
"Dan, he seem' to thing tha'z a caztigation on him. An' he say: 'Neveh
mine, I figs thad so she can'd be free pretty soon.' An' me, I thoughd
he leave her to those twin' till I'm reading the will."
Ramsey stood up elatedly. "I know what he did! I see it!"
But as her mother chidingly murmured her name she reflected the maternal
dignity and accepted a bunch of keys.
"Go, if you please, ad my room," said madame, "open----"
"Your little trunk, and pop-a's tin box inside," the girl interrupted,
but deferentially caught herself again and with the corner of an eye
felt about for Hugh. But Hugh had gone back to his father and thence to
the deck next below.
"Yass. You fine there manny pape'. One is mark'--you'll see. Fedge me
thad. 'Tis the h-only tha'z blue."
Ramsey sped away over skylights and down a back stair.
The senator spoke: "Who were that will's executors?"
"Ah, of co'se, my 'usban', Capitan Hayle, al-lone."
"The heirs, I dare say, have seen it?"
The lady smiled. "Not at all. Biccause h-anybody can see it if he want,
nobody eveh want, an' leaz' of all those twin' when they are getting
everything. Nobody speak abbout Phylliz, biccause Phylliz is su'pose
drown', an' drown' peop' they don' count."
In the stateroom Ramsey knelt, opened the trunk, then the tin box, and
then, despite old Joy's reprehending moan, the document itself.
"I knew it!" she whispered elatedly, relocking the box and trunk. "I
guessed right!"
When at the forward end of the pantry gangway she came upon the twins
and "California" and shrank back into hiding, the will was in her hand.
In a tremble between staying and fleeing she heard the gold hunter, as
he stood with his hands full of yellow coin, declare himself a
Kentuckian and no abolitionist, and therefore understood instantly the
significance of Lucian's response:
"One thousand dollars."
Too eager for speech, she glided forth and at the Californian's back
halted before her brothers. But he had already smitten a fist into the
hungry palm of either twin and was saying as he unburdened it there:
"A hundred on account to you--same to you--balance when you show
title--she's mine!"
"She's mine!" cried the laughing girl.
The three men stared, but the twins hurried the gold into their pockets
while she laughed on to them: "Hand that back. You've got no title. This
is Uncle Dan's will and she's been mine for eleven years." On the stair
close by them she began to step up backward but stopped to add to the
Californian: "Take back your money and come trade with mom-a."
The twins showed instant conviction, but to them all dispossession was
robbery and Lucian broke out, first on Ramsey, "We don't give back one
dime!" then to the Californian, "You pushed it on us and we'll keep it!"
then to Julian, "He hasn't the faintest right to it now in law, morals,
or custom!" and then back to the Californian: "You sha'n't ever see a
copper of it!"
Ramsey was quick-witted again. She threw the gold hunter a glance which
conveyed to him the realization that to leave the money with the twins
was to put them at a hopeless disadvantage. Almost as quickly Lucian saw
the same thing and flashed it to Julian; but in that brief interval
their sister disappeared on the deck above, old Joy following, and while
the brothers lost another moment in a motionless contest of impulses the
Californian vanished after her. Lucian, with his breath drawn to call up
the empty stair, started forward but struck his knee-cap on a light,
gilded chair left there by some child. Burning with rage and trembling
with nervous exhaustion, he barely saved himself from lunging into two
men of slight stature who had just come from a neighboring state-room: a
slender old man leaning feebly on a thick-set youth, whom one flash of
his eye identified as the commodore and Hugh, though as they passed
toward the stair they betrayed no sign that they had observed him.
He gave his speechless brother a single look, caught the chair by its
back, lifted it over his head, and with a long, smothered cry, half
moan, half whine, crashed it down upon the balustrade--once--twice--and
again, again, hurled the last fragment underfoot, and with eyes
streaming stamped, stamped, and stamped, while the commodore and his
supporter went on up to the roof and beyond view without a glance
behind.
LIV
"CAN'T!"
On handing the will to her mother, Ramsey found her no longer leading
the conversation. The senator had the floor, the deck, and, as Ned or
Watson might have said, was "drawing all the water in the river." His
discourse was to madame and the general alternately, though now and then
he included the parson's wife and Mrs. Gilmore.
Ramsey's talent for taking in everything at once was taxed to its limit
when at the same time that she attended to him she watched an elegant
steamer, one of the Saturday-evening boats out of Cincinnati, pass
remotely on the Arkansas side behind Island Thirty-six; marked the
return of the Californian as he followed her from his conference with
the twins; noted the slow, preoccupied passing of Hugh and his
grandfather to the captain's room; measured every winged stride of the
_Votaress's_ approach toward the Third Chickasaw Bluff; observed--as
earlier bidden by the actor--the strange pink and yellow stripes of the
bluff's clay face, and recognized in the great bell's landing signal the
sad business which had become so half-conscious a habit in the boat's
routine. Yet she caught the senator's every word.
Whether a person born in slavery, although seven eighths white, he was
saying, was free by law was hardly a practical question, the matter
being so nearly independent of any mere statute. For if such a slave
sought liberty of an owner inclined to grant it there certainly was no
law to prevent its bestowal, whereas if the owner was unwilling the
burden of proof would naturally fall upon the slave, who, of course----
"No," said Ramsey, drawing his and every eye and interesting everybody
by a sweet maturity of tone to which her mourning dress lent emphasis.
"No, it would not. The judge told me about that on Sunday."
Madame started and smiled. "You h-asked? An' fo' w'at?"
The transient air of maturity failed, and Ramsey's shoulders went up in
her more usual manner.
The senator had his question: "What did the judge say?"
"The judge says, where the slave seems to be white the owner must prove
she ain't--prove she isn't; but the burden, he says, of getting the case
into court----"
"Ah!" The senator was relieved. "Practically the same thing. For no
slave can get a case into court without white help, and no decent white
man will step between an owner and a slave who confesses to any African
blood."
"No-c'ommunity would ssstand it," said the general.
"Now," pursued the senator, "a claim based on pure white blood and
charging some palpable mistake or fraud would be different. That would
invite a community's sympathy and support. I've heard of such cases." He
faced Ramsey again, whose smile implied a query in waiting.
Madame had handed the document to the senator. It was short. He read it
in a glance or two and, refolding it, addressed Ramsey again: "This
slave girl can neither be set free nor sold, for she's yours, and you're
a minor. She seems to have been left to you just for that."
Until her mother spoke, Ramsey was mystified by her gracious bows of
satisfaction to the senator and the general, but then she understood and
was glad. "Verrie well," said madame, "iv Phylliz be satizfi' to billong
to Ramzee----"
"She is," said Mrs. Gilmore. "She's told me so."
"Verrie well, she'll juz' billong. An'"--to the senator--"you'll tell
h-all those passenger' you h-are the fran' of my 'usban' an' fran' of
the pewblic an' you 'ave seen thad will, an' Phylliz she's h-all those
year' billong to Ramzee, an' tha'z h-all arrange' and h-every-boddie
satizfi', ondly those twin' they 'ave not hear' abboud that yet, but
you'll see them an' make them satizfi'----"
"They know," called Ramsey and "California," and the latter added to the
senator: "They've sold all claim to her, sight unseen, and have got the
money; took it from me, before witnesses." Then to the astonished matron
he added: "We can fix that in a jiffy, as slick as glass."
But there the immediate scene diverted every one; the whole group moved
to the roof's edge to see the boat land. Then, while her bells still
jingled and her wheels yeasted, the company, heart-sick of burials, fell
apart. The senator and the general, promising zealous action and the
best results, returned to the boiler deck, the parson's wife sought her
children, Mrs. Gilmore went down to "Harriet." To shield madame from the
full force of the breeze "California" moved her chair, Joy following
with Ramsey's, to the shelter of the great chimney nearest the captain's
door, where sympathy itself tended to draw them, and by the time this
was done the commodore, again on Hugh's arm, reissued from the captain's
room and, at sight of this quartet, paused, turned, and accepted a seat
among them.
The first word was Ramsey's: How was the captain?
The best that could be said was that he was "holding out"--or "up"--or
"on"--the commodore's voice was weak. He had come away from the
captain's bed-side because a convalescent was "only in the way," he
said, and because Hugh felt that he belonged on deck if anywhere, though
that, the old man fondly added, was less important than Hugh chose to
regard it. This unimportance Ramsey recognized by diverting the
conversation so far as to announce that "mom-a" had just settled the
whole Phyllis business.
"Mighty nigh," the Californian admitted, answering Hugh's quiet glance,
while his heart praised the daughter's failure to credit him with his
share in the achievement, that being a thing still in progress, whose
design he had not fully revealed. The omission seemed to him most
maidenly and daughterly. He spoke on, to the two ladies:
"There's a thing or two more----"
"Oh, I'll pay that two hundred dollars!" cried Ramsey.
In animated approval her mother nodded to both.
"Not if the court knows itself," said the modest man, with so winsome a
smile that every one noticed how blue were his eyes. "I can trump that,"
he added, musingly.
"What's the other thing? You said a thing or two," asked Ramsey.
"Her wages, ain't it, for eleven years?"
"Ho, ho!" laughed madame in amiable scorn, while----
"Paid!" cried Ramsey. "Mrs. Gilmore's always paid her!"
"Knowin' she was a runaway? and who' from?"
Madame bowed sweetly, yet with an aroused sparkle.
"Humph!" said Ramsey, watching the boat back out and lay her course for
Island Thirty-five, "I'd have done as they did, either of them." She
stepped into the freshening breeze.
The inquirer's eyes rested on her, bluer than ever.
"Don't you propose to collect?" he asked.
"Most certainly not!" sang Ramsey at full height.
"Not a sou," said madame, looking about in grand amusement. "Not a
pic-ah-yune--hoh!"
"But she's going back into yo' hands?"
"My 'an's," said madame.
"And you'll never sell her?"
"Can't!" laughed Ramsey, with eyes ahead.
"You can hire her."
"Yes," said Ramsey, turning. "Oh, yes."
"Well, what'll you take, from the right bidder, for that girl's free
papers dated ahead to when you come of age, bidder takin' all the
resks?"
"You said down-stairs you wasn't an abolitionist!"
He twinkled. "Well, down-stairs I wa'n't, and in general I ain't.
I'm a Kentuckian. But I've got an offer to make." He turned to the
Courteneys: "I allowed to make it to this young gentleman first, alone,
an' get his advice--an' the commodo's if he'd give it; but the' ain't
anybody in this small crowd but what's welcome to hear it, even this
young lady, considerin' that she's jest heard so much worse again'
me--insinuated--down-stairs."
There was a pause. Old Joy murmured and Madame spoke the daughter's
name, adding something in French.
"_Moi_," replied Ramsey, planting herself and gazing up the river, "_je
préfére_ to stay right here."
The mother's smile to the Kentuckian bade him proceed, but he still
addressed Hugh and the grandfather:
"You see, that girl down-stairs, 'Harriet,' 'Phyllis,' has been
free--Lawdy, free's nothin', she's been white!--fo' ten years. Now, if
she goes back home, there may be no place like it, but she's got to be
black again. Well, think what that is. I've been weighin' that fact
while I looked into her eyes and listened to her voice, an' thinks I to
myself: 'If I was this girl, this goin' back to be black would mean one
of two things: I'd either die myself, aw I'd kill some one, maybe
sev'l.' True, I'm pyo' white an' she ain't, quite, but I don't believe
her po' little drop o' low blood makes her any mo' bridlewise 'n what
I'd be."
While the speaker's smile drew smiles from madame and the commodore,
Ramsey turned to him a severe face and in the same glance managed to see
Hugh's, but Hugh's might as well have been, to her mind, the face of a
Chickasaw bluff.
"Well, what then?" she asked the gold hunter.
"Same time," said "California," still to the Courteneys, while madame
promptly discerned his covert argument and Ramsey suddenly busied
herself talking up to the pilot-house, "I noticed, more'n eveh, how much
she, Phyllis, favoh'd somebody I was once 'pon a time pow'ful soft on,
but whose image"--his smile won smiles again--"I to'e out o' my
heart--aw buried in thah--aw both--it bein' too ridiculous fo' me to
aspiah that high. An' so here looked to me like a substitute, gentlemen,
that ought to satisfy all concerned." His eye turned to madame but lost
courage and escaped back to Hugh.
"Now, Mr. Hugh, I've got money a-plenty. It's all I have got excep'
maybe a good tempeh, an' I'm goin' back to the diggin's anyhow; one man
to the squa' mile is too crowded fo' me. Meantime, madam"--he turned
again and this time he was invincible, although madame straightened and
sparkled and Ramsey gave a staring attention, having throughout all her
pilot-house talk heard everything----"Meantime, madam, with a priest
right here on boa'd, if I can buy, at any price, Phyllis's free
papehs----"
"You can't!" chanted Ramsey. "She can have 'em for nothing but nobody
can buy 'em."
"Pries'?" asked madame, "an' free pape'! W'at you pro-ose do with those
pries' an' free pape'?"
"I'll marry her; marry her an' take her to whah a woman's a woman fo' a'
that an' can clean house aw cook dinneh whilst I gatheh the honeycomb
bright as gold and drive the wolf to his secret hold." He cast around
the group a glance of bright inquiry, but except old Joy every one
silently looked at every one else. The old woman softly closed her eyes
and shook her head.
"Vote!" cried Ramsey, remembering Sunday's victory. "Let's vote on it!"
LV
LOVE MAKES A CUT-OFF
But the grandfather addressed the adventurer. "You'd rather not, I
fancy."
"Rather not; looks too unanimous the wrong way."
"Would you still like to have Hugh's advice?"
"I would! I'd like to hear yo'-all's argument."
Ramsey dropped into her chair with a tired sigh and up-stream gaze
though with an inner ear of keenest attention.
Hugh glanced toward his father's door, whence at any moment, as every
one realized, the actor might beckon.
"I have no argument," he began.
"You have," breathed a voice, unmistakably Ramsey's; "you always have."
"You know," he continued to the Kentuckian, "there's something in all of
us, I don't say what, or whether wise or foolish, that says: 'Don't do
it.' You feel it, don't you?"
Madame interrupted: "_Mais_ don't do w'at?"
Ramsey faced the group as if to answer just that question. "Now we pass
between Cedar Point and Pecan Point and head for the Second Chickasaw
Bluffs!"
"Ah bah, _les_ bloff'," murmured madame and repeated to Hugh: "Something
say, 'Don' do it'? _Mais_ w'at it say don' do?"
"Don't mix the great races we know apart by their color."
"Umph! An' w'at is thad something w'at tell uz that?"
"Grandfather calls it race conscience."
"Grandfather!" whimpered Ramsey, while madame asked:
"Of w'at race has Phylliz the conscien'? An' you would know Phylliz'
race--ad sight--by the color?"
"I'd know it!" put in the Kentuckian. "She's white, to all intents and
purposes."
"No," said Hugh, "not quite to all. Not to all as organized society, in
its----"
Ramsey, with eyes up the river, sighed: "Mrs. Grundy?"
"Yes, but Mrs. Grundy in her best intents and purposes."
"In her race conscience," wailed Ramsey to the breeze.
"In her race conscience," assented Hugh.
Ramsey whipped around. "Thought you had no argument."
"I'm giving grandfather's," said the grandson.
"Humph! it's yours. I'd know it at sight--by the color."
"Miss Ramsey," said the old man, toying with his cane, "Hugh and I have
been finding that, right or wrong, Mrs. Grundy or Mr. Grundy, race
conscience is a wonderful, unaccountable thing for which men will give
their life-blood by thousands." His voice failed. He waved smilingly to
Hugh.
"And when," broke in Hugh to Ramsey, "when Mrs. Grundy, in her race
conscience, says Phyllis is not white no one ought to snap his fingers
in even Mrs. Grundy's face merely to please himself or to relieve some
private situation."
Ramsey stood up, flashing first on him and then to her mother, dropped
again, and with her face in her elbow on the chair's back recited
drearily--from her third reader:
"You can hear him swing his heavy sledge
With measured beat and slow,
Like the sexton ringing the village bell
When the evening sun----"
"Ramzee!" exclaimed madame, while the old nurse groaned: "Oh, Lawd 'a'
massy!"
The girl rose, laughed, and flashed again: "Well, if Phyllis ain't white
what is she? She's got to be something!"
"Yes," said the youth, "but not everything. I know her wrongs. But none
of us, with whatever rights and wrongs, can have, or do, or be----"
"Oh, don't we know all that?" Ramsey turned to the grandfather and with
sudden deference sprang to help him rise. He faced her and the
Californian together.
"Miss Ramsey, Hugh has all your feelings in this matter."
Madame, "California," and old Joy eagerly assented.
"But poor, blundering old Mrs. Grundy, always wronging some one," the
old man smilingly continued, "is really fighting hard for a better human
race. That's the greatest battle she can fight, my dear young lady, and
when----"
"Well," rejoined Ramsey with eyes frankly tearful, "she fights it mighty
badly."
"Ah, a hundred times worse than you think. Yet we who presume to fight
the blunders of that battle must fight them unselfishly and to help her
win."
Old Joy groaned so approvingly that he turned to her.
"What do you think, old mammy?"
"Who, me? Lawd, I thinks mighty little an' I knows less. Yit one thing I
does know: Phyllis ain' gwine. She know' you cayn't make her white by
takin' her to whah it make' no odds ef she ain't white. Phyllis love'
folks. She love' de quality, she love' de crowd. White aw black aw
octoroom free niggeh, Phyllis gwine to choose de old Hayle home and de
great riveh--full o' steamboat'--sooneh'n any lan' whah de ain't mo'n
one 'oman to de mile. Phyllis ain't gwine."
The closing words faded to soliloquy. For every one stood up, and even
the old woman's attention was diverted to Watson's apprentice
approaching from the captain's room. On his way below for the doctor he
came, in the actor's behalf, to ask if he might bring up also Mrs.
Gilmore.
Assuredly he might. How was the patient?
"Very quiet," the boy hopefully replied. Whereupon madame begged leave
to repair at once to the sick-room, but neither of the Courteneys would
consent nor either of them allow the other to go. The steersman passed
on down.
From enviously watching him do so, "California" turned to the company
and in open abandonment of his amazing proposition said drolly that
never before had he failed, in so many ways "hand-running," to make
himself useful. He reseated Madame Hayle and would have set the daughter
beside her, but the mother bade Ramsey give Joy the chair and leaned
wearily on the old woman's shoulder. Both Courteneys urged their seats
on the girl, and when she would not accept while either of them stood
for her servant to sit, the grandfather left Hugh debating with her,
took "California's" arm, found other chairs a few paces away, and
engaged him in a gentle parley which any one might see was an appeal to
his sober second thought. It was Ned's shift up at the wheel, but the
change of watch was near; his partner stood at his elbow. Their gaze was
up a reach between the two most northern of those four groups of bluffs
whose mention even Ramsey was for the moment tired of, yet they studied
the three couples on the roof below.
"Runs smooth at the present writing," said Watson.
"Clair chann'l ef noth'n' else," responded Ned. The allusion was neither
to boat nor stream but to a certain opportuneness of things, whose
obviousness to them, looking down, was mainly what kept Ramsey standing.
While she stood beside the two empty chairs cross-questioning Hugh with
a fresh show of her maturer mildness and he stood inwardly taking back
his late farewell to sweet companionship and softly answering in his
incongruous pomp of voice with a new tenderness, and while the worn-out
mother gradually let her full weight sink on the tired slave, this
obvious propitiousness was embarrassingly increased by the two weary
ones falling asleep.
True, the clearness of channel--this channel in the upper air--was not
absolute, but its obstacles nettled mostly the pilots. To Ramsey, even
to Hugh, obstacles were almost welcome, as enabling them to show to a
prying world that nothing beyond the grayest commonplace was occurring
between them. One such interruption was the upcoming and passing of Mrs.
Gilmore and the physician to the sick-room and the cub pilot's parting
with them to join the younger pair. The boy found Hugh confessing that
he should not know exactly how to word Phyllis's "free papers" but
adding that the first clerk would be pleased to make them out at once if
Ramsey's eagerness so dictated. It did, and presently the modest
intruder was hurrying away on a double errand: to bear this confidential
request to the clerk and then to seek the Brothers Ambrosia and with
them and the two under-clerks arrange for the evening performance, the
giving of which, however, Ramsey insisted, must depend on the captain's
condition when evening should come.
"Wish it were here now," she said as they watched the messenger go.
"Don't you?"
"I could," he replied, "but it will be here soon enough."
The conversation which followed remained in their memory through years
of separation.
She spoke again in her new tone: "You think your father will get well,
don't you?"
"No, Ramsey."
At those words her heart did two things at once: stopped on the first,
rebounded on the second. But it fell again as he added: "I fear I must
lose my father to-night."
She stood mute, looking into his eyes and pondering every light and
shadow of the severe young face that to her seemed so imperially unlike
all others. "He's great," she said in her heart. "And he loves with his
greatness. Loves even his father that way; not as I love mine or love
anybody, or ever shall or can, or could wish to, unless I were a man and
as great as him--he. I never could have dreamt of any one loving me that
way, but if any ever should I'd worship him." Suddenly her sympathy rose
high.
"Oh, why not just think to yourself: 'He _will_ live'?"
"Why should I? Should I be fit to live myself if I were not true to
myself?"
"You are! You always are!"
"No one can be who isn't truthful to himself."
Ramsey gazed again. A sense of his suffering benumbed her, and for
relief she asked: "Is that why you don't wish it were evening, when
really you do?"
He smiled. "I can't wish the sun to get out of my way. That's what it
would mean, isn't it?"
She fell to thinking what it meant. All at once she pointed: "That's the
First Chickasaw Bluff.... Yes, I s'pose it does mean that.... It's
terrible how thoughtless I am."
"It doesn't terrify me. I promise you it never shall."