sidewise. No, plainly he was not; so plainly that she took refuge in
another question. "Don't you like night better than day sometimes?"
"I do, often."
"Why?"
"For one thing, we can see so much farther."
"Oh, ridiculous! we can't see nearly so far!"
"We can see so much farther and wider, deeper, clearer. The day blinds
us. Spoils our sense of proportion. At night we see more of what
creation really is. Our sun becomes one little star among thousands of
greater ones, and we are humbled into a reasonableness which is very
hard not to lose in the bewilderments of daylight."
Ramsey sank to the arm of a chair, but when he remained standing she
stood again. "Wasn't you saying something like that the evening we left
New Orleans?" she asked.
"To my father, yes. I couldn't have said it in daylight then. I couldn't
say it in daylight now to any one but you, Ramsey."
Her heart leaped again. Her eyes looked straight into his; could not
look away. He spoke on:
"You're a kind of evening to me, yourself; evening star."
Her bosom pounded. She glanced up behind to the pilots. Watson had the
wheel. As she strenuously pushed back her curls she felt her temples
burn. She could have cried aloud for Hugh to cease, yet was mad for him
to go on.
And so he did. "You are my evening star in this nightfall of affliction.
I tell you so not in weakness but in strength and in defiance: in the
strength I summon for the hour before me; in the defiance I fling to
your brothers. I may never have another chance. If ours were the
ordinary chances of ordinary life I should say nothing now. I should
wait; wait and give love time; time to prove itself in me--in both of
us. I _ask_ nothing. I am too new to you, life is too new--to you--for
pledges."
She flashed him a glance and then, looking up the river, said, with the
ghost of a toss: "I'm older than you think."
He ignored the revelation. "But I will say," he went on, "--for these
three days and nights have been three years to me and I feel a three
years' right to say--I love you; love you for life; am yours for life
though we never meet again. For I believe that we belong to each other
from the centre of our souls, by a fitness plain even to the eyes of
your brothers."
[Illustration: "For I believe that we belong to each other from the
centre of our souls, by a fitness plain even to the eyes of your
brothers"]
Still looking up the flood and red from brow to throat, Ramsey murmured
two or three words which she saw he did not hear. Yet he stood without
sound or look to ask what she had said, and presently repeated:
"I believe in God's sight we belong to each other."
"So do I," said Ramsey again, with clearer voice and with her brimming
eyes looking straight into his. A footfall turned her and she faced the
relieved pilot.
"Isn't this Island Thirty-three," she asked, "right here on our
starboard bow?"
"Thirty-three," assented Ned. "Alias Flour Island; but _not_ Flow-er
Island. Flour-ladened flatboats wrecked there in the days o' yo'
grandfather, Eliphalet Hayle, whose own boats they might 'a' been, only
Hayles ain't never been good at losin' boats. But his'n or not, _can_
you suspicion they wuz flow-er-ladened? Shucks! them that spell it
that-a-way air jest as bad an' no wuss than them that stick _b_ onto
Plum in Plum P'int an' pull the _y_ out o' Hayle fo' Hayle's P'int! They
jest a-airin' they ignorance. Some fellers love to air they ignorance. I
do, myself."
He gave these facts of topography in reward of the grave interest that
Hugh--elated interest that Ramsey--still seemed to take in all such
items, as well as to allow them to infer that he had not noticed them
betraying interest in anything more personal.
"Hayle's P'int--" he resumed, and when Madame Hayle and old Joy roused
and glanced around on him, while the senator and the general reappeared
close by, looking back down the steamer's wake with military comments on
the First Chickasaw Bluff, just left behind, he addressed them all as
one. Hayle's Point, he persisted, was miles away yet and comparatively
unimportant "considerin' its name," but the small cluster of houses on
the Arkansas side up in the next bend was Osceola, where Plum Point Bars
made the "wickedest" bit of river between Saint Louis and the Gulf; a
bit that "killed" at least one steamboat every year. He said they were
then passing a sand-bar, under water at this stage, which had been
Island Thirty-two until "swallered whole" by the "big earthquake" of
1811.
"Better'n forty year' ago, that was. Only quake ever felt in these
parts, but so big that, right in the middle of all the b'ilin' an'
staggerin' an' sinkin' down to Chiny, the Mis'sippi River give birth to
her fust steamboat--an' saved it!" So he continued, egged on by the
conviction that, over and above the intrinsic value of the facts, these
conversational eddies outside the current of incident "a-happ'min' to
'em yit" helped forward his two most deeply interested hearers on that
course erroneously supposed never to run smooth.
Be that as it may, the two pilots' joint theory of maxims working as
well backward as forward worked here; deep waters ran still. Love, that
is, having broken intolerable bounds in one short fierce "chute" of
declaration, was content to run deep and still and to give broad
precedence to duties, sorrows, and courtesies. The pair noticeably
drifted apart and conversed with others when others were quite willing
they should drift together. Madame Hayle needed but a glance or so to
perceive that something beautiful had happened in the spiritual
experience of her daughter. By and by when the commodore and the
Californian rejoined the group, Hugh and his grandfather spent a still
moment looking into each other's eyes and when both gazes relaxed at
once the story had been told and understood.
They turned to hear what was passing between the general, senator, and
Californian. Said the soldier:
"Sssirs, I only insssist that _if_ this region ever sees war Port
Hudson, Grand Gulf, Vvvicksburg, these fffour Chickasaw Bluffs, and
Island Ten up here above us will be imp-regnably fffortified."
Ramsey turned to the actor's wife as she came from the texas.
"How's the captain?" asked both she and her mother. But Mrs. Gilmore was
too overcome to reply.
Ramsey saw the actor at the stateroom door. He had beckoned. Hugh and
the grandfather were on their way. At a quieter pace the four women
followed and more slowly still the other four men. Reaching Gilmore, the
Courteneys paused and spoke, then looked back to Ramsey and madame, and
beckoned--Hugh to the mother, the commodore to Ramsey. Gilmore repeated
the gesture and they glided forward. At the same time the player
advanced to meet his wife, and, as if some intuition had rung the call,
the scene-loving twins appeared in the senator's halted group and stood
with them gazing, while Madame Hayle, the commodore, Ramsey, and Hugh
entered the captain's room.
LVI
EIGHT YEARS AFTER
"A hundred months," says the love-song that beguiled so many thousands
of hearts throughout the Mississippi Valley in those old "Lily Dale,"
"Nellie Gray," "What is Home Without a Mother?" days, when the
lugubrious was so blithely enjoyed at the piano. Its first wails date
nearly or quite back to October, 1860.
"A hundred months had passed" since that first up-stream voyage of the
_Votaress_, or, to be punctilious, something under a hundred and two. It
was the opening week of that mid-autumn month in which it became evident
that Abraham Lincoln would be the next president. Another new boat, new
pride of the great river, the fairest yet, still in the hands of her
contractors, and on her trial trip from Louisville to New Orleans, was
rounding, one after another, now far in the east, now as far in the
west, the bends nearest below Memphis: Cow Island, Cat Island, St.
Francis, Delta--so on.
The river was low. You would hardly have known a reach, a cut-off, a
point of it by any aspect remembered from that journey of April, '52.
Scantness of waters appeared to contract distances. "Paddy's Hen and
Chickens," just above Memphis, were all out on dry sands and seemed
closer under the "Devil's Elbow" than eight years before. Every towhead
and bar and hundreds of snags were above water and as ugly as mud, age,
sun bleach, and turkey-buzzards could make them. Many a chute
comfortably run by the _Votaress_ was now "closed for repairs," said one
of the pilots of the _Enchantress_. He was the whilom steersman we knew
as Watson's cub; a very capable-looking man now. At the moment, he was
off watch and had come out from the bar to the boiler deck with a trim,
supple man of forty, whose shirt of fine white flannel was open at the
throat, where a soft neckerchief of red silk matched the sash at his
waist: "California," eight years older and out of the West again despite
his "never" to Hayle's twins.
"I like to change my mind sometimes," he explained. "It shows me I've
got one."
A towering, massive, grizzly man several years older than the
Californian, with a short, stiff, throat-latch beard and a great bush of
dense, short curls, stood by the forward guards, a picture of rude force
and high efficiency. At every moment, from some direction among the
deck's loungers a light scrutiny ventured to rest on him, to which he
seemed habituated, and the lightest was enough to reveal in him a
striking union of traits coarse and fine. He wore a big cluster diamond
pin, a sort of hen-and-chickens of his own, secured by a minute
guard-chain on a ruffled shirt-front of snowiest linen, where clung dry
crumbs of the "fine-cut" which puffed the lower side pockets of his gray
alpaca sack coat. His gold-headed cane was almost a bludgeon. He had
come aboard at Memphis, having reached that city but a few hours earlier
by rail-way train from White Sulphur Springs, Va., where he had had the
good fortune to find great relief from rheumatism. The young lady in his
company, now back in the ladies' cabin, was his daughter, they said,
beautiful and all of twenty-two, yet unmarried! This man the pilot and
the Californian approached and waited for his attention. When he gave it
the pilot spoke.
"Commodore," he said, "welcome back to the river."
The big man grew bigger and his shaggy brows more severe.
"I feel welcome," he said. "Only place under God's canopy where I can
breathe down into my boots."
"And you want the roof for it here, don't you? I do. Roof or wheel.
Commodore Hayle, my friend Mr. So-and-so, from California. He's your
brand; Kentuck' born and raised."
The two shook hands, scanning each other's countenances. The eyes of
both were equally blue, equally intrepid.
"Are you the man--?" Hayle began to ask with grim humor.
"I think so."
"Well, my boy, I've been wanting to see you for better than eight
years." The speaker glanced around for privacy.
"Come up," said the pilot; "I'm just going on watch." They followed him.
On the roof he continued:
"Seen Captain Hugh yet, commodore? He's sure enough captain now, you
know; youngest on the river. He was looking for you a bit ago. This is a
beautiful boat he's going to have, eh?"
"Humph, yes. _Votaress_ over again." The critic gave her a fresh
scrutiny from cutwater to stern rail, from freight guards to the
oak-leaf crown on either chimney-top.
"Why, commodore, she knocks the hindsights off the old _Votaress_ every
way. You'll see that mighty quick."
"Humph, yes; best yet, of the Courteney type. Ridiculous, how they hang
to that. I'll build a boat to beat her inside a year if old Abe ain't
elected. If he is, we'll just build gunboats and raise particular hell."
On the skylight the speaker amiably declined to climb any higher.
"No, us two Kentuck's will try it here." The pair found seats together,
and soon the Californian was making the best of an opportunity he, no
less than Gideon Hayle, had coveted for eight years. It interested him
keenly, as affording a glimpse into the famous boatman's character, that
the latter showed a grasp of the dreadful voyage's story as vivid and
clear in each of its two versions--the mother and daughter's and the
twins'--as though the intervening months had been one instead of a
hundred--and two.
They rehearsed together the arrival of the _Votaress_ at Louisville in
the dead of night; confessed the folly of any "outsider" seeking the
grief-burdened Gideon's ear in that first hour of reunion with his
family, and the equal unwisdom of his pressing, in such an hour, an
acute personal question upon Hugh and his grandfather who, at Paducah,
had just buried John Courteney.
"And you've never pressed it sence?" asked "California."
"Mm-no."
"Nor let either o' them press it?"
"No!"--a sturdy oath--"nor you nor anybody alive. Go on with your
story."
The gold hunter went on unruffled; told it as he had seen it occur;
recounted, among other things, how, on the final landing of the
immigrants, at Cairo, Marburg and not a few besides had covered Madame
Hayle's hands with kisses and tears and would have done Hugh Courteney's
so could they have got at him. His hearer frowned and set his big jaw,
but the narrative flowed on, describing how, like Marburg, many had
waved affectionate farewells to Hugh and to Ramsey which she could guess
no reason for in her case except her own wet eyes, but which
"California" saw was because, through himself and Phyllis, the
immigrants had found her out as another who believed in letting the
oppressed go free and come free. He told even those irrelevant things
about himself which had made him ludicrous. They imparted a needed
lightness and kindled the big commodore's smile.
"They never found out," said "California," "that the fellow who played
'Bounding Billow' and 'A Life on the Ocean Wave' was me--I--myself."
He told all as honestly, fearlessly as we might know he would. When his
huge listener tried to say off-handedly that every man who knew anything
knew that women and men never see things alike and that different
witnesses could, quite honestly, give irreconcilable accounts of the
same thing, the Californian serenely waved away all such gloss and with
the seated giant hanging over him like a thunder-cloud said that the
twins could never see anything straight enough to tell the truth about
it if they wanted to and that just as certainly they often didn't want
to. Pausing there and getting no retort, he ventured another step. Said
he:
"And there you've hung the case up for eight years."
"That's my business!" Gideon smote the arm of his chair.
"California" laughed a moment like a girl, with drooping head. Then--oh,
the twins had their good points, yes. One was the way they stuck to each
other. And their biggest virtue, their "best holt," the one their worst
enemy couldn't help liking them for, was their invincible sand.
"The devil couldn't scare 'em with his tail red-hot."
At that the father laughed gratefully.
"They'd ought to be in some trade where pluck," the Californian went on,
"is the whole show. They'd ought to be soldiers. As plain up-and-down
fighters for fight'n's sake, commodore, they'd hit it off as sweet as
blackstrap!"
The truth smote hard but the parent feigned a jovial inappreciation. If
that was so they had made a "most damnable misdeal," he laughed, having
settled down in Natchez together, "too soft on each other to marry and
as tame as parrakeets"; Julian as county sheriff, his brother a
physician.
The Californian silently doubted the tameness. Abruptly, though in tones
of worship, he inquired after Madame Hayle.
Madame just then was at home, on the plantation at Natchez. Yes, she and
Ramsey often made trips with Gideon on that _Paragon_ which they had
gone up the river to come down on, in '52. The _Paragon_, wonderfully
preserved, was still in the "Vicksburg and Bends" trade and happened
then to be some forty-eight hours ahead of the _Enchantress_ and nearing
New Orleans. Madame and her daughter now and then spent part of the
social season in the great river's great seaport, which was--"bound to
be the greatest in the world, my boy," said Gideon. But Ramsey----
When Ramsey became the topic, even "California," while the father
boasted, had to hold on, as he would have said, with his teeth to keep
from being blown away. Her "one and only love" was the river! She "knew
it like a pilot" and loved it and the whole life on it not merely for
its excitements, variety, and outlook on the big world.
"That is to say----for its poetry," prompted "California."
"Yes, not for that only but just as much for its prose, by Mike! Why, my
boy, that's all that's kept her single!"
"Except!" said the Californian softly, but Gideon pressed on. "And
single, now, I reckon, she'll always be. Why, sir, not a day breaks but
she knows, within an hour's run, the whereabouts of every Hayle boat
alive."
"Some Courteney boats too, hmm?"
"Why, eh"--a stare--"I shouldn't wonder. Yes. Humph! 'youngest captain
on the river'--fact is, that's _her_. Lady as she is, and lovely as she
is, she's a better steamboatman to-day than--than many a first-class
one. She's nearer being my business partner than any man I ever hired."
"Partner's share of the swag?"
"No," laughed the giant, "but I'm leaving her the boats."
"Well," said "California," "all that's good preparation."
The huge man shot him a glance and the two pairs of blue eyes held each
other. Then "California" smiled his winsomest and said: "Did you ever
notice how much easier you can see through the ends of an iron pipe than
through its sides?"
Gideon stared. "Humph! Any fool that wants to see through me may see and
be--joyful. What do you think you see?"
"Oh, things you'd ought to thought of and never have."
"Why, you in'--Well, I'll be damned."
"Shouldn't wonder a bit," said "California" so amiably that the big man
laughed.
"Maybe you'll tell me my oversights!"
"No, but you'll be told, shortly, if the man I think I know is the man
I--think I know. Let's pass that now, commodore. Oh, I wish you'd been
with us on the _Votaress_. How different things might 'a' turned out.
You know? I don't believe any other trip on all this big river, barring
the first steamboat's first, ever made so big a turning-point in so many
lives. Why, jest two or three things in it, things and people, made me
another man."
"One not so need'n' to be hanged?"
"Yes, and not so hungry to hang other fellers. I hadn't ever met up with
such aristocratic stock as I did then but I tchuned right up to 'em and
I've mighty nigh held their pitch ever sence. Fo'most of all was this
Hugh Courteney. Fo'most because, he being a man, I wa'n't afraid of him.
But a close second was yo' daughter; second because, she being a woman,
I was afraid of her. Why, even Phyllis, that's now chambermaid on this
boat----"
"By Jupiter!" Gideon Hayle half started from his seat. "On this boat?
our Phyllis? that Ramsey set free?"
"Yes. Captain Hugh's nurse that was."
"Look here, my boy, is that why you're aboard?"
"No, sir-ee! Don't you fret. That trip, I tell you, made another man of
me. It lifted; why, commodore, it made me a poet."
"Made you a--Oh, go 'long off!"
"Yes, sir. Writ poetry ever sence. Dropped prose; too easy. It's real
poetry, commodore; rhymes as slick as grease. Show you some of it
later."
"George! if you do I'll jump into the river."
"Agreed! I've got some that'll make you do that."
"You haven't got any that wouldn't."
Neither smiled, neither frowned. Obviously each knew how to like an
adversary and when "California" rose and the two, glancing aft, saw
another two approaching from the pilot-house, one of whom was Watson,
Hayle touched the poet detainingly and said:
"Don't go 'way, I want some more of your prose."
"Want to know why I'm here? Not countin' the fun o' seein' Captain Hugh,
half the reason's that gentleman yonder comin' with Mr. Watson, and the
other half's his lady, down below a-powwowin' with yo' daughter. Fact is
I'd struck it rich again out West and got restless and come East, and at
Saint Louis I see by a newspaper that them two was allowin' to go down
to Orleans on this boat this trip, and ree-collect-in' the pinch they
got into of old on the _Votaress_, s'I to myself,'me too!'"
Here the other men drew near and, while "California" ran on, silently
pressed the big hand offered sidewise by Hayle.
"And with that I set down and writ a poem--took me a whole night--to the
best half dozen o' them that was on the other trip, invitin' 'em, at my
expense, to jump on when we come by--at New Carthage--Milliken's
Bend--Vicksburg--and trustin' to luck and fresh post stamps to find 'em.
But little did we dream o' seein' you walk aboard, at Memphis, and still
less yo' daughter and her old Joy; did we, Mr. Gilmore?"
LVII
FAREWELL, "VOTARESS"
Montezuma Bend ... Delta ... Delta Bend ... Friar's Point ... Kangaroo
Point ... Horseshoe Bend and Cut-off. Some, at least, of these we
remember. At mention of them the Gilmores and "California"
smiled--behind Ramsey: such a different, surpassingly different Ramsey!
Near the _Enchantress's_ bell these four and old Joy were gathered about
Gideon Hayle, Watson, and Hugh Courteney--such an inspiringly different
Hugh! Two or three showed a divided attention, letting an occasional
glance stray down the waters ahead, where Old Town Bend swung from west
to south.
At the same moment, in Horseshoe Cut-off, some twelve or fifteen miles
below, another swift, handsome steamer, upward bound--the great river
could hardly yet show more than one handsomer--swept into the north from
an easterly course under Island Sixty-four and pointed up the middle of
the stream to pass between Sixty-three and Sixty-two where, at the head
of the reach, they parted the river into three channels and widened it
to more than a league. She would have been an animating sight if only
for the fact that every soul aboard who was not just then engaged in
running her was at the guards of one or another of her graceful decks.
The forecastle was darkened by her crew standing in a half circle about
the capstan, her larboard pantry guards were crowded with white-jackets,
her roofs were gay with ladies and children. In elated oblivion of the
charming picture presented by their own boat and themselves, all were
awaiting a spectacle which their pilots and captain had said would
surely be met within the next hour's run.
Although behind them was a tortuous fifty miles in which hardly more
signs of human life had been seen or heard than if their way had been on
the open Atlantic, the beauty of the wilderness alone, transfigured in
the lights of the declining day, might well have satisfied the eye. A
red sun was just touching the horizon. Its beams and the blue shadows
that divided them lay level, miles long, athwart the glassy stream and
its green and gray forests and tapered and vanished in a low eastern
haze. The tints of autumn already prevailed along the shores, and the
indolent waters mirrored the reversed images of the two islands in
outlines clearer than their own and from bank to bank took on in
enriched hues the many colors of the sky. At the far end of the reach,
between and somewhat beyond the islands, stood well out of the shrunken
flood a sand-bar, its middle crested green and gold with young poplars
and willows, all its ill favor made picturesque and the whole mass
glorified by the sunset. By this bar the waters of the central channel
were again divided, north and south, and the steamer, with another
eastward turn, straightened up for the southern passage between the bar
and Sixty-three.
"We'll pass her close," said one of the boat's family to those who hung
on his words. "In this low water she's got to come round the bar and
well over to the left bank, same as us."