Chapter 22

In the long run from Commerce to Norfolk came breakfast. Commerce was another case of infant-city still-birth, Norfolk was less. Breakfast, double-ranked, stoop-shouldered, mute: beefsteak and fried onions its solar centre, with hot rolls for planets; Hugh at the ladies' table, the first clerk at the gentlemen's. Then the boiler deck, toothpicks, cigars, breezes, armchairs, spittoons, the sad news of the two deaths up-stairs, the ugly news of the five passengers set ashore and the reason thereof. Men spat straight and hard as they heard or told the latter item, yet with tacit unanimity awaited the re-emergence of the still secluded senator, general, and twins.

By Hugh's unsmiling forethought Madame Hayle, Ramsey, and the Gilmores breakfasted in the pilot-house. With "Harriet" close to her elbow, Ramsey ate at a window, standing, to watch the gliding shores and floods and privily cross-examine, again in autobiography and at printing-press speed, the willing maid-servant. At Island Fifty-Two another boat, the _Shooting Star_, streamed by. At a plantation and wood-yard the _Votaress_ paused to restock with dairy and kitchen-garden supplies and to lash to her either side a thirty-cord wood flat, and now swept on with the foam twenty feet broad at the square front of each while the deck-hands trotted aboard under their great shoulder loads by one narrow hook plank and came leaping back for more, and the loaders and pilers chanted and chorussed:

"Oh, Shan-a-do'e, I loves yo' daught-eh-- Ah! ha! roll-in' riveh!-- Oh, ef she don't love me she'd ought teh-- Ah! ha!... bound away!... faw de wile ... Mis-'ou-ree!"

The foam and the swift wooding-up gave an illusion of speed to the boat herself, and in what seemed no time at all the empty scows were dropping away astern; but it was farewell for good and all to the _Westwood_, the _Antelope_. And now Cat Island, its bend, its chute; Cow Island, its bend, its chute; Horn Lake, a prehistoric loop of twelve miles, reduced to three by Horn Lake Bend----

"Come, Ramsey." The call smote like a buffet. Memphis was almost in sight. In the southwestern corner of Tennessee, just above Tennessee Chute and the northwestern corner of Mississippi, was the fourth of the Chickasaw Bluffs. On it sat Memphis, a city with churches, banks, and the "electromagnetic telegraph." Its twelve thousand people of that day are a hundred and thirty-five thousand now and have taken in almost out of remembrance the small settlement of Pickering, or Fort Pickering, on the down-stream end of the bluff, where the _Votaress_ that beautiful morning landed and laid to rest Madame Marburg, the bishop, and Basile.

Aboard the _Votaress_, as in Tennessee Chute she faced again the morning sun, two scenes were enacted at the same time. One took place below, on the fore-castle; the other above and just aft of it, on the boiler deck. In the lower there was but a single pine box, in the upper there were two. In the lower stood the black-gowned priest, the two white-bonneted, gray-robed sisters, Otto Marburg alone, and here a mass of immigrants and there a majority of the crew. The upper scene included all the cabin passengers--ladies seated--and half the boat's family. In fulfilment of Basile's wish Hugh read: "I am the resurrection and the life." By Hugh's invitation, given beforehand, the senator delivered a eulogy on the bishop and added such tender praises of the boy, whom every one had liked so early and so well, and gilded them with such delicate allusions to the heroism of his mother, that few eyes were dry. The very twins wept, though there was a touch of rage in their tears. By choice of the parson's wife and sweetly led by her, they sang: "I would not live alway." With streaming eyes Ramsey remembered how yearningly the poor lad had clung to this dear earth, and she could only sit silent and modestly wonder how anybody, under any fate that left them power to sing at all, could sit there--stand there--on that boat, that river, in the splendor of that sun, the beauty of that landscape, and call life a "few lurid mornings."

A third scene occurred as the boat, facing westward, reached the head of President's Island, fairest island in all the river, and coming into full view of Memphis, a short league beyond, tolled her solemn bell and landed at Pickering. Others on the lower deck besides Madame Marburg had passed away in the night but had either been laid under the wet sands of the water's edge in some wild grove down-stream or were not quite in time, so to speak, for this landing. Contemplated from each deck by a numerous gathering and from the pilot-house by Watson, Mrs. Gilmore, and "Harriet," a small procession followed the priest and the three boxes--borne by white-jackets--ashore and out of sight where a small wooden church spire, inland behind the bluff, peered over its crest. Madame Hayle leaned on Julian's arm, Ramsey on Lucian's, Hugh walked with Marburg, the senator with the general, the first clerk with Ned, the Californian with the cub pilot. By and by they returned, outwardly unburdened, and the moment the last tread, the Californian's, was on the stage, Watson's bells jingled and the _Votaress_ swung out and moved up to the Memphis wharf-boat. But there Hugh, the first clerk, the steward, and the doctor went up into town, and it was a long hour before they reappeared and the black smoke billowed again from her chimneys and she backed out and started up and away around "Paddy's Hen and Chickens."

The "family of that name"--to quote Watson--were a group of four islands so entitled from earliest flatboat days, clustered in the river, just above the town. Since that day two of the chicks have flown, or grown, to the mainland, and the mother bird is now merely the "Old Hen" with one "Chicken Island," while "Poor Paddy," we are told, "works on the railway."

In its first forty leagues above Memphis the river went--has gone--still goes--through more violent writhings than in any like part of its whole course, running almost twenty crazy miles to make two sane ones--made finally, in the republic's hundredth year, by Centennial Cut-off. On an average there was an island for every four miles of river, or, say, three for every hour of the _Votaress's_ progress, and in this high water she was running all their chutes. A great resource such incidents were, on that particular day, to Ramsey. At any moment when conversation needed to be started, stopped, or turned, here was her chance. Some of the islands covered many square miles, contained large plantations, and had names as well as numbers. Island Forty, reached about ten o'clock, was also Beef Island. Number Thirty-eight, which they began to pass half an hour later, was Brandywine Island. To pass Island Thirty-five on its short side at full speed took half an hour, and Forked-Deer Island, which kept the boat flying up a narrow chute from half-past two till three o'clock, was old Twenty-seven and Twenty-six grown together.

Now, these things are geography rather than history. But for at least two souls aboard the _Votaress_ they were more history than geography. History--they were life! the outer frame of life so really lived that for those two souls it would be history thenceforth to life's end. And here comes in some pure philosophy from the two pilots: to wit, that if you turn any old maxim over you will always find another truth on its other side. They reached this conclusion, through Ned's remarking that the course of true love never runs smooth.

"That," said Watson, "depends. It depends a lot on who they air that's a-takin' the course. Ef they're the right ones, a real for-true pair, sech as the wayfarin' man though a pilot kin see _air_ a pair, like----"

"Two gloves," said Ned.

"Yass, or galluses--I misdoubt ef there's anything in the world that'll run so smooth through and over and around and under so much cussed roughness as what true love will."

The remark was justified before their eyes. The two whom they contemplated, outwardly so unlike, were in their essence so of a kind that they belonged each to each as simply and patently as the first human pair. They saw it so themselves. Society about them was strangely primitive--a "clapboard civilization," the actor named it to his wife at their pilot-house point of view--and the "for-true" pair in sight below them took frank advantage of its conditions to appropriate and accept each other as simply and completely as if these weird conditions--with their Devil's Elbow, Race-ground, Island, Tea-table, and Back-oven--were a veritable Eden as Eden was before the devil got in. Without a note of courtship or coquetry love ran ever more and more smoothly, growing hourly and receiving each accession as we have seen the Mississippi receive Red River--merely by deepening its own flow--but, unlike the Mississippi, gaining in transparency as it gained in depth and power.

Since leaving Memphis this love without courtship or coquetry had grown under the effulgence of Madame Hayle's immediate presence like a grain-field in sunshine. On her return from the triple burial, through sheer exhaustion, she had fainted away. Borne upstairs by the physician's command and allowed the roof but forbidden the lower deck for twenty-four hours, she had let Mrs. Gilmore and "Harriet" assume her pious task turn about, going and coming by after stairs. And so love grew on. But so did hate, so did craft, all three, to borrow the figure, going and coming by the after stairs of general intercourse.

LIII

TRADING FOR PHYLLIS

This afternoon was cooler than any of the three before it.

Change of latitude, assuredly; but also a sky half blue, half gray, and a brisker air. Yet for that small minority of the ladies, who rather craved than feared the sunlight, the boat's roofs--since custom debarred them from the boiler deck--were still its most inviting part. After a few modifications of dress a very pleasant refuge those roofs were, although when the boat's course led her into the wind it was good to shut a sash or two if you were in the pilot-house, or to draw your chairs into the lee of something if on the open deck. Madame Hayle, urged by all to seek repose in her stateroom, said to Hugh and the Californian, behind one of the chimneys:

"Me, I fine it mo' betteh to breathe on that deck than to bleach in that cabin."

Her presence was to the Californian's advantage also, in his desire to be near Ramsey, and indeed the same was true of the two younger clerks and the cub pilot. And this advantage was heightened by the fact that there were such definite things to be considered wherever two or three came together. The need to keep up the passengers' spirits was as real as ever and a number of resources for doing it required to be discussed. Ramsey mentioned the unidentified man with the cornet but found no seconder. His "Life on the Ocean Wave" was thought hardly convincing and his "Bounding Billow, Cease thy Motion" seemed to clash with the sentiment for an ocean life and to suggest uncomfortable symptoms. Undaunted, she tried again. Through Basile she had early discovered three striplings of the circus ring, the "Brothers Ambrosia." Their true name, her cross-examination had revealed, was Vinegar. In star-spangled tights they would give some real "acrobatics," then some "aerial globe dancing," equally star-spangled and even more up-side-down, and finally a bit of "miraculous walking" on champagne bottles set upright on the dining-table. This proposition was accepted without audible dissent, only the parson's wife not voting. Then the Californian spoke for a self-styled "young gent" and "amateur professor" who had eagerly volunteered to "take everybody's breath away" by the magic of his tricks with hats, handkerchiefs, and cards, and to "throw them into convulsions" with his "evening cat fight among the chimney-pots." But "Beware the laugh that sours overnight," Mrs. Gilmore said, and the decision was prompt, Madame Hayle voicing it, that as convulsions could be brought on and breath taken away by the cholera itself the young gent, through "California," be gratefully requested to await a situation either less desperate or more so.

The gold hunter admitted the wisdom of this action, though his humble spirit felt acutely its discrediting reflection on himself, especially when--with only the kindest meaning--Ramsey laughed. He bravely kept his pain to himself and said nothing to disown the "amateur professor." With a brief aside to Hugh, to which Hugh nodded, he slipped away to the lower deck and for nearly two hours made his nursing skill so valuable to "Harriet" among the immigrants that her fearless mind overlooked the main object of his stay; which was to defend her from any stratagem of the twins and others, that Marburg might not detect in time or might be unable to cope with. At length, puzzled to know why Mrs. Gilmore did not appear, he was leaving, when at the foot of the narrow stair under the kitchen he met Lucian coming down. They stopped. He smiled. "Howdy!" he said.

Lucian stood silent.

"Can't come down here, you know," said the gold hunter, and instantly Lucian was white hot.

"Who tells you," he drawled, "what I may or may not do?"

"Who? oh--just a little black dog."

"Black--_what?_"

"You heard. He's a funny little cuss; like you, a trifle puny. Has coughin' fits. Coughs six times each fit. Spits up a chunk o' lead ev'y time he coughs. Want to see him?"

Lucian's unaffrighted eyes blazed down, though his reply was as if to himself. "Great God! if my brother----"

"Oh," kindly said the Californian, "he ain't fur off. Go, get him. I'll follow you, lock-step."

Lucian turned and went, the speaker adding as he followed close:

"Ladder's no place for scienced fighting, you know."

They found Julian, evidently waiting, on the passenger guards just forward of the pantry gangway. But before words could be exchanged the cub pilot came along by way of the main staircase, escorting the physician from the lower deck. The latter passed on up the wheel-house steps to the roof, but the "cub" hung back. "California" faced him.

"What's the fraction? The captain?"

The youth nodded. His inquirer waved him away.

"All right. I'll come. You go on." The boy complied.

Julian had swelled for encounter, but a warning look from Lucian checked him and he let the Californian speak first.

"Here," said the gold-digger, "I'm fixed. You're not. True, I could loan you the twin to mine, but----"

Julian's lip curled. "'But'--you're not hungry to fight."

"Oh, other things being equal, I have an appetite! Yes, sir-ee, Bob Hoss-Fly, and a red dog under the wheelbarrow! But"--smiling again--"let's do things in scientific order. You two claim that you Hayle folks own that forty-year-old white gal down-stairs which you call a runaway niggeh, and which we'll allow she is one. Well, I'll buy you two's share in her--providing I can buy the rest of her from your two ladies up-stairs--and fight you afterward or not as the case may require. Now, what'll you take for your said two shares, right here, cash down, gold; not dust but coin, New Orleans Branch Mint? Going at--what do I hear?"

The spendthrift pair stared on each other, thinking with all their might. But they failed to think that on the deck above them, in group with Mrs. Gilmore, Hugh, the parson's wife, Ramsey, and old Joy, the ownership of Phyllis was being fully set forth by their mother to their own whilom champions the senator and the general, or that Ramsey was about to be sent down to the stateroom of the mother and daughter for documentary evidence.

"What do I hear?" repeated the Californian, watching his own hands as the right drew double-eagles from his belt and stacked them in the left.

Eagerly asking themselves what might be their tempter's motive, the pair thought primarily of the white slave's well-preserved beauty and the rarity of women in the far West. With that came a stinging remembrance of her glaring Hayle likeness and then of their father's old scheme--averted by their mother--to sell the girl forever out of sight and reach. And then came the pleasanter thought that at any rate here was a chance to put this daredevil at odds with the hated Gilmores as well as with their own mother and sister, the Courteneys, and all the Courteney clan. Till now they had felt that, if only for self-respect and good standing, they must recover their property, seize Phyllis on the spot, if they could possibly command the backing to do it. But this was now very doubtful. Something had happened to the senator's mind, while the general was but his echo and the element called "others" was strangely sluggish. And, finally, or rather, first and last, the brothers were thrilled with the prodigal's lust for ready money. So far they saw and no farther, but so far so good; here seemed to be an unguarded opening in the enemy's line--to use a phrase the great valley was one day to know by heart--and the warier of the pair ventured in. Said Lucian:

"We're Uncle Dan's sole legatees."

"Then name your price for her, lock, stock, and barrel."

"Want to take her only to Kentucky, or to California?"

"Californy--maybe Oregon."

"To keep house for you--single gentleman?"

"Yes, sir."

"When do you expect to come back?"

"Never."

The questioner glanced back to his brother. Both were gratified to note that the bargain would work no relief to Hugh or the Gilmores, but Julian wanted better assurance that it would not free a runaway slave or make her a lawful wife. He turned abruptly, and so it happened that all three failed to see Ramsey, in dark attire and with Joy close behind, emerge an instant from the pantry gangway and shrink again into it. On the return from her stateroom to the roof, for mere variety, she had taken this direction. Said Julian as he turned:

"You're a Kentuckian, sir. Henry Clay man?"

"No. Only don't allow anything said again' him."

"Abolitionist?"

"No, sir-ee." The emphasis was sprightly.

The twins looked at each other once more. Julian nodded.

"One thousand dollars," said Lucian....

Let us go back a step or so and up to the hurricane-deck. We have named Hugh as in the group about Madame Hayle; but he went and came. In his absences the matrons debated the Phyllis matter as it involved the Gilmores, trying to find some way not to leave it an undivided burden on Hugh and the _Votaress_. It was on one of his quiet reappearances, reporting his father "easier," that Ramsey put in:

"Mom-a, the senator's a lawyer. Send for him--and the general--and talk them over to our side. You can do it. You can talk anybody into anything! You always could!"

Madame Hayle and Hugh looked at each other very much as the twins were doing about that time on the guards next below, and Hugh said:

"I will go bring them."

"Ah, if you please, yass, go."

He brought them and they were among madame's auditors when later she said, addressing her words wherever they fitted best, so that even old Joy got her share:

"Had it not have been for Phylliz, Dan Hayle, he wouldn' neveh took that troub' to wride that will. But I insiz' he shall wride it, biccause--Phylliz. Tha'z all. An' biccause Phylliz he wrode it. But he say to me----"

"When was this?" inquired the senator.

"Tha'z when those twin' make him thad visit, Walnut Hill'. He say: 'W'ad uze to you if I make my laz' will? I give any'ow everything to those twin'.' An' tha'z biccause" (to old Joy) "thad chile w'ad die----"

"Drownded," murmured the nurse. "Ayfteh dat transpiah he take a shine to ev'y man-chile he git his ahm aroun'."

Madame resumed: "An' I say to him: 'Give all the rez' to who' you want, but Phylliz--to me.' 'No!' he say, 'you, you'll put her free!'"

"Why didn't he want her set free?" asked Ramsey.

"An' you are there--an' silend! I forgod you!"

"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.