sky, at that view-point so rarely chosen by others but so favored by
her--the front of the texas roof. Down forward at the captain's station
sat the two commodores and up in the pilot-house were the two pilots,
the Gilmores, "California," Madame Hayle, and they of Vicksburg and the
Bends.
In the moral atmosphere of this uppermost group there was a new and
happy clearness easily attributable to a single potent cause--Madame
Hayle. Her advent and the moon's rising had come in the same hour and
with very similar effect. Every one was aware for himself, though nobody
could say when any one else had been told, that while Gideon's decision
was still withheld, madame, in her own sweet, absolute way, had said it
would be forthcoming before the boat touched the Canal Street wharf, and
that in the interval, whether Hugh and Ramsey were never to sit side by
side again, or were to go side by side the rest of their days, they
should have this hour this way and were free to lengthen it out till
night was gone, if they wished.
It was not late in any modern sense, yet on the passenger deck no one
was up but the barkeeper, two or three quartets at cards, the second
clerk at work on his freight list, a white-jacket or two on watch, and
Joy and Phyllis. Thus assured of seclusion the lovers communed without
haste. There had been hurried questions but Hugh had answered them and
Ramsey was now passive, partly in the bliss of being at his side as she
had never been before and partly in a despair growing out of his
confessed purpose to leave the _Enchantress_ at Red River Landing. The
grandfather had already assumed Hugh's place and cares aboard, and it
was Hugh's design to make his way, by boat or horse, up to and along
Black River in search of the twins.
To allay this distress Hugh's soft deep voice said:
"Suppose you were a soldier's wife. This is little to that. This is but
once for all."
"Yes," murmured Ramsey, "but I'd have one advantage."
"That you'd be his wife?"
"Yes," whispered Ramsey, who could not venture the name itself, for the
pure rapture of it.
"Why, you're going to be mine. As the song says: 'I will come again, my
love, though a' the seas gang dry.'"
"Hugh, didn't you once say I didn't know what fear was?"
"I certainly thought it."
"Well, now I do know."
He made no reply and she sat thinking of his errand. If he should find
her brothers he would meet them in the deepest wilderness. Only slaves,
who could not testify against masters, would be with them, their loaded
guns would be in their hands, and their blood would be heated with--She
resorted again to questions in her odd cross-examining way.
"You say you think there's going to be a war?"
"I fear so."
"Humph! fear. If there should be will you fight?"
"Certainly."
"Humph! certainly. I should think--you'd hate to fight."
"I'd fight all the more furiously on that account."
"Humph!... On which side?"
"Ramsey, I don't know. I _don't know_ till the time comes."
"Then how do you know you won't fight my brothers--now?"
"I shan't be armed."
"But if in an outburst you should snatch up some weapon?"
"I don't burst out. I don't snatch up."
"Humph! Wish I didn't."
They were rounding Point Breeze. The long reach from Fort Adams down to
Red River Landing lay before them. "Hugh, did you ever have a
presentiment? Of course not. I never did before. I got it a-comin' round
Hard Times Bend."
"Then I can cure it--with a new verse, one our poet has made and given
me. It shall be our parting word. Shall I?"
"Oh, yes, but not for parting! I don't want any parting!"
He spoke it softly:
"I dreamp I heard a joyful soun'--
O hahd times!--
Love once mo' foun' de last turn roun'
Hahd Times Ben'.
Los' an' foun', broke an' boun',
Love foun' an' boun' de last turn roun'
Hahd Times Ben'."
Ramsey barely waited for its end. "What's that light waving far away
down yonder? It began as you did."
"It didn't know it. It's only some one on the Red River wharf-boat,
wanting us to land," said Hugh, and before his last word came the
_Enchantress_ roared her assent to the signal. But Ramsey had spoken
again:
"What's this, right here?" She sprang up and gazed out on the water a
scant mile ahead. There, directly in the steamer's course and just out
of the moon's track, another faint light waved, so close to the water as
to be reflected in it. The moment the whistle broke out it ceased to
swing and when the whistle ceased the engines had stopped.
"What is it?" she asked again as Hugh stood by her looking out ahead
with eyes better trained to night use than hers.
"A skiff," he replied, "with some message."
She could see only that Watson had put the light on their starboard bow.
It seemed to drift toward them but she knew that the movement was the
steamer's, and now the light was so close as to show the negro who held
it. He stood poised to throw aboard a billet of wood with a note
attached. And now he cast it. The lower guards were out of Ramsey's line
of sight but a cry of disappointment told her the stick had fallen short
and would be lost under the great wheel, which at that moment, with its
fellow, "went ahead." But as the _Enchantress_ passed the skiff its
occupant called out a hurried statement to the mate, on the forecastle,
and as the skiff and its light swept astern the mate repeated the word
to the commodores.
"Man at Red River Landing accidentally shot. Must be got to the city
quick or he can't live."
The commodores, and then the lovers, resumed their seats.
"Poor man," murmured Ramsey, "poor man! he's got _his_ trouble without
going in chase of it."
"If he'd gone in chase of it," rejoined Hugh, "he might never have met
it."
The _Enchantress_ swung more directly toward the dim lights of the
wharf-boat and at top speed ruffled through a freshening air with the
goal but a few miles away. Yet the lovers sat silent. Once parted they
would think of many a word they should have spoken while they could, but
now none seemed large enough to break such silence with. To be silent
and best content with silence was one of the most special and blissful
of lovers' rights.
Presently a glow rose from the forecastle, reddening the white
jack-staff up to its black night-hawk. The torch baskets were being
lighted. Hugh stirred to go but Ramsey laid her touch on his wrist and
he stayed.
She spoke. "Mustn't you wait near your grandfather till you see who it
is that's coming aboard?"
"I can. I may as well."
The _Enchantress_, in mid-river, began to "round to" in order to land
bow up-stream. When she came round, the half dozen men on the wharf-boat
were close at hand in the glare of her torches, eye to eye with those on
the forecastle, but prevented by the light itself from seeing those on
the upper decks.
Ramsey sprang to her feet with lips apart to cry out to her mother up
behind her, to Gideon down before, to Hugh at her side, but all these
saw and knew. A face in the centre of the torchlight and of the
wharf-boat group was Julian's bearing the mute intelligence that the
writhing man on a rude stretcher borne by two negroes was his brother.
The lovers parted without a word, but in a moment were near each other
again as Hugh joined the commodores while Ramsey and her mother crouched
at the roof's forward rail to see the wounded man brought across the
stage.
"In my room!" pleaded madame to both Courteneys at once, and the elder
assented as Hugh hurried below with the three Hayles following.
It was heart-rending work getting the sufferer into the berth while he
poured out moanings of agony mingled with frantic accusations of his
bearers, railings against God and all his laws, and unspoken
recognitions of mother and sister. Ramsey, seeing his eye fall on
Phyllis and remain there staring, and knowing from old Joy that he had
grown enough like his uncle Dan to have been his twin, suffered for her
as well as him.
"Who are _you_?" he cried, still staring. "Where am I?"
The maid did not reply, but her unfaltering gaze met his as if it
neither could nor would do otherwise. Ramsey intuitively followed the
play of her mind. To look again on Gideon Hayle had already recalled
emotions she had striven for half a lifetime to put away, and now they
kept her eyes set on this tortured yet unrelenting advocate of all the
wrongs from which those emotions sprang.
He looked to his mother. "Great God! mother, is this the new Courteney
boat? Well, if this isn't hell's finishing touch! Jule! Where's Jule?
Go, get me Jule!"
Phyllis turned to go but--"No," he cried with a light of sudden purpose
in his face, "you stay. Everybody else go! And send me Jule. Don't send
a doctor, I'm the doctor myself. Get out, all of you, go! This isn't my
death-bed. God! I wish it was, for I'm a cripple for life and will never
walk again--leave! go! and send me Jule!"
Guided by a cabin-boy to Hugh's room, Ramsey found Julian confronting
his father, "California," and the Gilmores. Hugh had led them there for
privacy and stood close at one side. Julian seemed to be suffering a
shock scarcely less than his brother's though it made a wholly different
outward show. His face wore an appalled look, his voice was below its
accustomed pitch, and his words, words which could not have been
premeditated, seemed studiously fit and precise.
"Fortunately," he had been saying before Ramsey appeared, "he
never"--meaning his brother--"goes into the country without his drugs
and instruments--we have them with us yet--and he could tell me what to
do and I did it, or he would have died right there in the swamp."
"But you don't say how the accursed thing happened," said Gideon as
Ramsey entered hardly aware that she was pausing at Hugh's side. The
brother turned and stared on the two.
"Come," said Gideon, "never mind that. How did it happen?"
"It happened, sir, through my own incredible carelessness and by my own
hand. _Don't say a word!_ I would to God I had been the victim and had
fallen dead in my tracks. If I had killed him I would have put the other
load into my brain."
"Oh, if!" solemnly sneered the incredulous father. While he did so
Julian, the profoundness of whose mental torture his father poorly saw,
received from Ramsey his brother's summons and with her was turning
away. He stopped and flashed back a look of agonized resentment, but
Gideon met it with a beetling frown and neither gaze fell until Ramsey
stepped between, facing the giant, and she and the brother backed away
and were gone.
They sought the passenger deck. Between anguish for Lucian's calamity
and anguish for his father's contumely there poured from Julian's lips
in hectoring questions to Ramsey a further anguish of chagrin for the
seeming triumph of Hugh's love. Two or three challenges she parried and
while in a single utterance he launched out as many more they
encountered at a wheel-house stair their mother and old Joy. He cut
short all inquiries with a proffer to return to them and Ramsey
post-haste and give a full account of the disaster.
Meantime down in the sick-room Lucian said to Phyllis, when they had
been a few minutes alone:
"And now give me my medicine."
"Yes, sir; where is it?"
"Oh, damnation! in my saddle-bags on the washstand. What are you trying
to talk white folks' English for?" He hardly spoke three words without a
moan or an oath. "Do you find a measuring-glass?"
She found it.
"See a small bottle--dark liquid--about twice the size--of the glass?"
"Yass, suh, but it's full, suh."
"Hell! what of that? Fill the glass and give it to me!"
She filled it but paused. "It--it looks like la'danum."
"Oh, damn you, so did your great-grandmother. It's not laudanum. Did you
ever smell vinegar in laudanum, or nutmeg? Give it here! God A'mighty,
if I could reach you with my fist--Give me that glass!"
"Misteh Lucian, if this is la'danum----"
"You hell-fired idiot, it isn't! And if it was, such an overdose would
only vomit me. Don't you know that?"
"Yass, suh, I know it would." But still she held back.
"Then give it here!"
Julian came in with alarm added to his other distresses.
"Oh, Luce! do you want to start that bleeding again?"
"I'd just as lief as not! Make that wench give me that glass or mash her
head! She knows if it was laudanum it would merely puke me. Damn it,
it's a simple euthanasia." The crafty sufferer felt assured his brother
would neither know nor ask the smooth word's meaning.
Julian turned, savagely upon the maid. Heated with drink, enraged at
himself, his father, Hugh Courteney, his sister, and his mother, he was
in no mood to humor the contumacy of any freed slave and least of all
this one. "Give it to him this instant," he cried. "Do you want to kill
him?"
"No, Misteh Julian, that's exactly----"
He drew and levelled his revolver and then motioned with it a repetition
of his command.
With a woe of protest in her eyes, Phyllis obeyed. Lucian swallowed the
draught and sank to his pillow. Julian watched Phyllis slowly set down
the glass and bottle.
"What did you say that stuff is?" he asked his brother, with an assumed
lightness.
"Oh, a palliative for these infernal pains. Have you told the family
what happened? Go do it." The speaker's tone grew lofty. "I want them to
know it was all my fault! This girl can stay with me till you come back,
and you can take your time. I shan't need you for an hour. Go, Jule, my
brother. Oh don't harry me with idle questions."
As Julian presently shut himself out Phyllis, her fears for the patient
disarmed by his transient excitement where she had looked for heaviness,
laid her hand on a chair; but he stopped her. "You white nigger! would
you presume to sit down in my presence? If you can't stand go
outside--and shut the door. Oh, go anyhow! Life's more tolerable with
you out of sight. If I want you I'll call."
The room was close abaft the wheel, where a widening of the guards made
an inviting space, and out there Phyllis drew a chair up beside the
door. A whitejacket came from the cabin in behalf of passengers in
neighboring staterooms to ask what the commotion meant, and as she began
to explain it away Ramsey and old Joy came down a near-by stair to watch
with her or in her stead and to them she amplified her explanation.
Ramsey listened at the door. The patient seemed to be asleep, so audible
was his breathing.
She had a sudden thought: a doctor's saddle-bags always contain
laudanum. Had Phyllis seen any--in another bottle, untouched? That would
confirm the patient's denial. She beckoned and asked. Yes, Phyllis had
seen it, labelled.
"And besides," Ramsey thought on, "neither twin has ever spoken falsely
to the other." Why, then, sleep was good!
Even in outer sights and sounds there was solace and reassurance: in
river and shore forever passing majestically up-stream through floods of
moonlight; in the rhythmic flutter and rush of wheels and foam, and in
the keen quiver of the _Enchantress_ flying to New Orleans on the
swiftest wings steam could give. Ramsey sent Phyllis up to bid Julian be
at ease, and the maid, returning, announced that both the commodores had
gone to rest but that madame was anxious to come back to the invalid the
moment he would permit. She added, unasked, that Captain Hugh was in the
captain's chair.
The hour passed and Julian reappeared. The partial relief of mind which
had come to all the others had in degree reached him. It enabled him, as
he came down the wheel-house stair, to reflect, though with a shudder,
upon that furious treatment which alone, he had somewhere heard, would
counteract an opium poisoning, and upon Lucian's utter inability to
endure any part of such a treatment. He found Ramsey hearkening at the
door again, newly disquieted. The two servants were out at the rail of
the wide guards.
"Ought his breathing," she said, "to sound like that?"
Julian thought not, but even a sister's solicitude offended his lifelong
sentiment of paramount ownership in his brother. "Stand away, I'll let
you know," he replied, passed in, and closed the door.
Then all at once, as so often has happened to so many of us, he saw his
heedlessness where he had fancied himself vigilant. The light was dim.
He knelt close to the sleeper. One long stare into the pale yet livid
face was enough. Lucian was dying. Julian leaped to his feet to seek aid
but saw its futility and fell again to his knees. Lucian was dying of
the "black-drop" which his brother, in haughty ignorance, by the hand of
Phyllis, had given him.
Presently Julian found voice, yet, mindful still of the listening
Ramsey, let himself only softly murmur: "Oh, Lucian, my brother! Oh,
Lucian, my twin brother! I've killed you, killed you twice over, my twin
brother! God! but you're right not to live a cripple. And it was I who
crippled you! Oh, Lucian, I'm the cripple now!"
Ramsey tapped. He sprang to the door and without opening it answered:
"Yes, in a minute. He--he's all right."
At the wash-stand he lifted the phial of black-drop still half full. As
quietly as if the dose were a dram at the bar he filled the
measuring--glass and drank its last drop. Then he turned to the door and
barely opened it.
"He's all right, Ramsey.... Yes.... Yes. He's done just the right thing.
So have I. Now, go away, please, wherever you like, only
don't--stay--here just to bother us. I'll merely lie down beside him
without--What?... No, go away! You'll find us all right in the morning."
LXIII
THE CAPTAIN'S CHAIR
On the next afternoon but one, while hundreds went down to the steamboat
landing to view the new _Enchantress_, there was a double funeral in the
old French cemetery, Saint Louis Street, New Orleans.
Returning from it together, Watson and his former "cub" spoke of Gideon
Hayle.
"He takes the loss of them boys harder'n what I'd 'a' thought he would,"
said the younger pilot.
And Watson replied: "Yes, but he don't take it as hard as what, years
ago, he tuck their fust refus'n' to go with him on the river."
They said no more all the way up Rampart Street to Canal, out Canal to
the steamboat landing, and across the levee to the _Enchantress_. An
hour later they stood in her wheel-house, looking down on the same
Saturday afternoon five o'clock scene that Watson and Ned had thus
contemplated from the _Votaress_ a hundred months before.
Here were the same vast piles of harvest wealth, the same crowds and
little flags, the same shouting and tumult only grown greater, the same
open sky--though of October--the same many-pillared cloud of black
smoke, the same smartly painted bumboats selling oranges, bananas,
pineapples, corals, and seashells--many of the latter treated with
puritanic art, having, that is, the Lord's Prayer bitten into them with
muriatic acid. Here lay the same yellow harbor with many more fussy
little tugs in it, its water low yet still mast-deep, its yard-long
catfish and fathom-long gars leaping and wallowing after their prey, its
white gulls flashing about the steamers' pantry windows. Here was the
same black forest of ships in the up-stream and down-stream distance and
here, finally, the same public hope and pride grown wider and loftier in
their last affluence before entering that purgatory of civil war which
now seems but a bad dream outlived.
Steam was up on the _Enchantress_, and every now and then her mighty
wheels tugged on her hawsers. In the crowd gathered on the wharf to see
her go were the Gilmores and the half dozen from Vicksburg and the
Bends. Up on the hurricane-deck were two or three small knots of
passengers, chiefly ladies, unknown to the Gilmore group; but beside a
derrick post, where we first saw Hugh on the _Votaress_, stood the three
Hayles, old Joy, and "California"--bound once more for the
gold-diggings. Near the Hayles, yet nearer the bell, was Hugh, in
command.
"You don't reckon," said a voice in the throng, "that that's her
captain, do you?"
"No," said another, "I should think not."
"Yes," said the very human Gilmore, "that's the captain."
Vicksburg and the Bends sent up smiles and faint wavings to Ramsey and
her mother and only did not call to them because they were in a great
city. It made them very proud and happy to see Hugh the master of this,
to them, matchless wonder of utility and beauty, and they could not help
saying things to each other with voice enough to let strangers around
them know he was their personal friend. While they did so who should
alight from a cab and glance up to Hugh but his grandfather. Hugh
answered with a gesture toward the Gilmores, to whom the old gentleman
promptly turned. There had arisen among the boats a good-natured custom
of giving friends a free trip eight miles up the river, to the suburb of
Carrollton. So a word from the commodore was enough; the players and
their group hurried aboard with him and as they touched the lower deck
the last bell sounded and the lines were cast off.
When they reached the hurricane-deck they were in the middle of the
stream. They did not join the senior Hayles at once; Ramsey met them and
with her they stood on the skylight roof watching the shores to see when
they should stop drifting and gain headway. Over on the "Algiers" side
of the harbor lay the _Paragon_, repairing a smashing she had got at the
wharf through the bad handling of another boat, else the Hayles would
hardly have been going home on the _Enchantress_.
The crew of the _Enchantress_ stood about her capstan and their
chantey-man, ready to sing when the swivel should peal and her burgee
run down; but the Gilmore group were too far aft to see them. The
player's wife, speaking gravely with Ramsey in low tones, remarked with
sudden gayety:
"I see why we're here behind the bell. You're afraid they'll sing----"
Ramsey made a pleading gesture.
"Why, what can you expect," asked her friend; "not 'Bounding Billow'?"
Ramsey, laughing, could only repeat the gesture. The swivel pealed, down
sank the burgee, a wind began to ruffle their brows, and up rolled the
song:
"Come, smilin' 'Lindy Lowe, whah de sea ships come an' go,
On de finess boat dat eveh float," etc.
It was still coming up when a young man not of the Gilmore group
surprised the actor a moment aside.
"Mr. Gilmore, is that Commodore Hayle over there?... I thought it must
be. I suppose he's going up home to settle his two sons' affairs. Mr.
Gilmore, they wan't bad, they were only wild. Sad, their having to be
buried in the city. But in this climate, you know--hmm!--yes."
The song and his observations crossed back and forth.
"Come, smilin' 'Lindy Lowe, you'd ought to come befo'"--
(Chorus.)
"You don't remember me, Mr. Gilmore, but I was on the _Votaress_ with
you and your lady and Madame Hayle and those twins and all. I married
the young lady I was keeping company with then. There she is. Don't you
re-collect my lending you my field-glass at the Devil's Elbow?"
"Dear me! was that you at the devil's elbow! I--I hope I returned them."
"Oh, you did! You remember the first clerk of the _Votaress_! He's her
captain now. And Ned--you remember Ned, the pilot, don't you? Well, he's
on her yet. I see you're lost in admiration of this most unusual sunset.
We almost always have these unusual sunsets. This is a wonderful
country."
"Come, smilin' 'Lindy Lowe, whah de sweet cane honey flow'.
(Chorus.)
"Come, smilin' 'Lindy Lowe, love a-knockin' at de do'."
(Chorus.)
Now the boat was in the pilot's hands. Hugh joined Madame Hayle and the
two commodores at the derrick post. The same shrewd texas tender who had
once abstracted the weapons of the twins from their stateroom set a
second chair beside the captain's. Hugh offered the two seats to the
commodores, but both declined. They of Vicksburg and the Bends watched
the gorgeous October sunset beyond the low, flat orangeries on their
right. "California" was with them and told them of the sunsets on the
great plains. Gilmore generously kept the one-time lender of the
field-glass and the lender's mouse of a wife beguiled with anecdotes
while Mrs. Gilmore talked on with Ramsey, making fond and welcome
incursions into her confidence.
"Isn't it ridiculous," murmured Ramsey, "that he seems condemned to do
everything in the tamest possible way? Not that he cares; he seems
almost to like it so. It's so right now. He can't proclaim anything.
And--you see why, don't you?--neither can I."
"Ramsey, you needn't. Only do one thing for us, Gilmore and me, and
we'll know. When we've landed and the boat starts away again and he--"
She finished in a voice too small for type.