Chapter 8

As he resumed his up-stream gaze he saw old Joy, still at the stair, stand as if lost and then descend alone while madame and the priest moved toward the sickroom. The helm went gently over and the _Votaress_ rounded the point, but the priest waited outside where madame had gone in, and when the door reopened enough to let one out it was Julian who grimly confronted him, holding a pen, half concealed.

"My brother declines to see you, sir."

A flash came from the eyes of the priest, but the youth repeated: "My brother _declines_ to _see_ you, sir."

The visitor caught breath to speak, but the great bell pealed for another landing and burial, and madame came out. She addressed him a few words in French, and with an austere bow to Julian he humbly turned away at her side.

XX

LADIES' TABLE

Hugh stood at the head of the midday dinner-table, waiting for a full assembly of its guests. The Vicksburg merchant and his wife, the planter from Milliken's Bend and his wife, also stood at their places.

The two ladies glanced about as if listlessly noting the cabin's lavish arabesques and gilding, while each really studied and knew the other was studying the captain's son. For this tale which we tell, they saw. It was "a-happmin'" before their eyes and, in degree, to themselves. Hugh and his father, the commodore and madame, the first mate, the twins, Ramsey, and the committee of seven--who, we shall see, were not taking discomfiture meekly--were scarlet threads in the story's swiftly weaving fabric--cogent reasons, themselves, why these two ladies had helped vote Ramsey to the seat next Hugh.

His face, Hugh's, was not easy reading. Certain shadows cast on it by that part of his mind just then busiest were quite unintelligible. Deciphered they would have meant a solemn joy for his broadening accountability; an awesome anxiety and distressed eagerness to meet and fill that accountability as fast as it broadened. He was just then recalling one of Ramsey's queries of the evening before, when she had seemed so much younger than now, and when, nevertheless, a germ of fellowship had sprung up between them; that word of hers about "feeling oneself widen out of oneself," etc. He did not at present feel himself nearly so much as he felt things round about him growing and growing.

The _Votaress_ had grown, grown wonderfully, and the story happening, the play being acted on her three decks at once, was neither story nor play to him. Which fact was one of the few things the two gentle students of his face made out to read. However, it quite rewarded them; it went, itself, so well into the story.

And certainly, as even the Gilmores would have said, it is not when our spiritual vision sees things at their completest values that _all_ the world's a stage and its men and women _merely_ players. Nor is it at our best that we discern our own story, as a story, while it happens. It is a poor eye that sees itself. When Ramsey arrived at the table Hugh's gaze was so big with the reality, not the romance, of things on all the three decks that she had to laugh a little to keep her balance.

Yet her question was an earnest and eager one: "Is my brother better, or is he worse?"

The toll of the bell on the deck above--to land, as we have said, near Point Breeze--came like a spectral reply, invoking, as it did, new trouble unknown to her though just beneath her feet.

"He's better not to be worse," said Hugh, and when she frowned whimsically he explained: "His sickness is not quite the same as that on the lower deck."

"How is it different?" she asked, unconsciously keeping the whole company of the ladies' table on their feet. At the gentlemen's table, just forward of them and tapering slenderly away in the long cabin's white-and-gilt perspective, that grosser majority who had come only to feed were mutely and with stooped shoulders feeding like pigeons from a trough, and far down at its end the white-haired commodore had taken his seat, with senator, judge, squire, general, and the seventeen-year-old Hayle boy nearest him on his right and left. The bishop was not there. He was at the ladies' table, paired with the judge's sister"--a leaden load even for a bishop.

"Your brother's illness is so much slower," Hugh said.

"So, then--he--he had it when he came aboard?"

"He had it when he came aboard," assented Hugh, moving for the group to be seated. "But----"

"Wait," said Ramsey. "Mustn't we all be as gay and happy as we can?" And when every one but the judge's sister playfully said yes she turned to the Vicksburg merchant: "Then will you change places with Mr. Gilmore?"

Faith, he would! It paired him with the actor's wife, and his wife with the actor. Gayety began forthwith. "And will you change--with--with you?" Ramsey asked the planter of Milliken's Bend and the squire's brother-in-law.

Indeed they would. The change not only paired each with the other's wife but brought the brother-in-law next to Ramsey. Underfoot meantime the engine bells jingled, overhead the scape-pipes roared, and in every part the boat quivered as her great wheels churned or was strangely quiet as they paused for another signal. So all sat down, well aware what the landing was for, and began blithely to converse and be waited on, as if the world were being run primarily for their innocent delight.

What a Sabbath feast was there spread for a bishop to say grace upon, and what travellers' hunger to match it. Among Hugh and Ramsey's dozen, if no further, how the conversation rippled, radiated, and out-tinkled and out-twinkled the fine tablewares. One almost forgot his wine or that the boat and her wheels had stopped; might have quite forgotten had not certain sounds, starting in full volume from the lower deck but arriving under the cabin floor faint and wasted--emaciated, as you might say--stolen up and in. A diligent loquacity contrived to ignore the most of them. The soft chanting of the priest as he walked down the landing-stage and out upon the damp brown sands, followed by the bearers of the new pine box and by a short procession of bowed mourners, perished unheard at the table; but many noises more penetrative were also much more discomfiting, and it was fortunate that the talk of the bishop and others could charm most of them away even from the judge's nervous sister, who, nevertheless, amid such remote themes as Jenny Lind, Nebraska, coming political conventions, and the new speed record of the big _Eclipse_ in the fourteen hundred and forty miles from New Orleans, could not help a light start now and then. It was good, to Hugh and to Ramsey, to see how the actor, Gilmore, despite this upward seepage of ghostly cries--faint notes of horror, anguish, and despair--attenuated groans and wailings of bodily agony--held the eyes of the ladies nearest him with tales of travel and the theatre, and mention of the great cut-off of 1699, which they would soon pass and must notice. But quite as good was it to the wives of Vicksburg and Milliken's Bend to observe with what fluency Hugh, commonly so quiet, discoursed to Mrs. Gilmore and to Ramsey on other river features near at hand: Dead Man's Bend, Ellis Cliffs, Natchez Island, the crossing above it, Saint Catherine's Creek, and Natchez itself.

"Where I was born!" said Ramsey. "Largest town in Mississippi and the most stuck-up."

The other Mississippians laughed delightedly.

"We stop there," said Hugh, "to put off freight."

"Mr. Courteney," asked Ramsey, "what _is_ a 'crossing'?"

There were new lower-deck noises to drown and Hugh welcomed the slender theme. "The channel of a great river in flat lands," he said, "is a river within a river. It frets against its walls of slack water----"

"I see!--as the whole river does against its banks!"

"Yes. Wherever the shore bends, the current, when strong, keeps straight on across the slack water till it hits the bend. Then it swerves just enough to rush by, and miles below hits the other shore, swerves again, and crosses in another long slant down there."

"Except where it breaks through and makes a cut-off!"

"But a cut-off is an event. This goes on all the time, in almost every reach; so that pilots, whether running down-stream in the current or up-stream in the slack water, cross the river about as often as the current does."

"Hence the term!" laughed Ramsey.

"I think so. You might ask Mr. Watson."

"No, I'll ask him what a reach is--and a towhead--and a pirooter--oh, don't you love this river?"

While the talk thus flowed, what delicacies--pastries, ices, fruits--had come in and served their ends! But also against what sounds from the underworld had each utterance still to make headway: commands and threats and cries of defiance and rage, faint but intense, and which all at once ceased at the crack of a shot! The judge's sister let out a soft note of affright and looked here and there for explanation. In vain. The Vicksburg merchant lightly spoke across the table:

"Shooting alligators, bishop?"

"Oh!" broke in the judge's sister, aggrieved, "that was for no alligator." She appealed to a white-jacket bringing coffee: "Was that for an alligator?"

"I dunno'm. Mowt be a deer. Mowt be a b'ar."

His bashful smirk implied it might be none of the three. Ramsey looked at Hugh and Hugh said quietly to a boy at his back:

"Go, see what it is."

XXI

RAMSEY AND THE BISHOP

"High water like this," casually said the planter, next to Ramsey, "drives the big game out o' the swamps, where they use, and makes 'em foolish."

"Yes," said the bishop. "You know, Dick"--for he and the planter were old acquaintances--"not far from here, those long stretches of river a good mile wide, and how between them there are two or three short pieces where the shores are barely a quarter of a mile apart?"

"Yes," replied Dick and others.

"Well, last week, on my down trip, as we rounded a point in one of those narrow places, there, right out in mid-river, was a big buck, swimming across. Two swampers had spied him and were hot after him in a skiff."

"Oh," cried Ramsey, "I hope he got away!"

"Why, _I_ partly hoped he would," laughed the bishop, "and partly I hoped they'd get him."

"Characteristic," she heard the planter say to himself.

"And sure enough," the tale went on, "just as his forefeet hit the bank--" But there Hugh's messenger reappeared, and as Hugh listened to his murmured report the deer's historian avoided oblivion only by asking:

"Well, Mr. Courteney, after all, what was it?"

"Tell the bishop," said Hugh to the boy.

"'T'uz a man, suh," the servant announced, and when the ladies exclaimed he amended, "leas'wise a deckhan', suh."

"Thank Heaven!" thought several, not because it was a man but because the bells jingled again and the moving boat resumed her own blessed sounds. But the bishop was angry--too angry for table talk. He had his suspicions.

"Did deckhands make all that row?"

"Oh, no, suh; not in de beginnin', suh."

"Wasn't there trouble with the deck passengers?"

"Yassuh, at fus'; at fus', yassuh; wid dem and dey young leadeh. Y'see, dey be'n so long aboa'd ship dey plumb stahve fo' gyahden-sass an' 'count o' de sickness de docto' won't 'low 'em on'y some sawts. But back yondeh on sho' dey's some wile mulbe'y trees hangin' low wid green mulbe'ys, an' comin' away f'om de grave dey make a break fo' 'em. But de mate he head' 'em off. An' whilse de leadeh he a-jawin' at de mate on sho', an' likewise at de clerk on de b'ileh deck an' at the cap'm on de roof----"

"In a foreign tongue," prompted the bishop, to whom that seemed the kernel of the offense.

"Yassuh, I reckon so; in a fond tongue; yassuh."

"About his sick not having proper food?" asked Ramsey.

"Yass'm--no'm--yass'm! An' whilse he a-jawin', some o' de crew think dey see a chance fo' to slip into de bresh an' leave de boat. An' when de mate whip' out his 'evolveh on 'em, an' one draw a knife on him, an' he make a dash fo' dat one, he--dat deckhan'--run aboa'd so fas' dat he ain't see whah he gwine tell it's too la-ate."

The bishop tightened his lips at Hugh and peered at the cabin-boy: "How was it too late?"

"De deckhan' he run ove'boa'd, suh."

The ladies flinched, the men frowned. "But," said the querist, "meantime the mate had fired, hmm? Did he--hit?"

"Dey don't know, suh. De deckhan' he neveh riz."

"Awful!" The bishop and Hugh looked steadily at each other. "So that also we owe to our aliens!"

"Yes," said Hugh.

"We don't," said Ramsey softly, yet heard by all.

Across the board Mrs. Gilmore said "Oh!" but in the next breath all but the judge's sister laughed, the bishop, as Hugh and he began to rise, laughing most.

"Wait," said Ramsey, laying a hand out to each and addressing Hugh. "How are those sick downstairs going to get the right food?"

The cabin-boy almost broke in but caught himself.

"Say it," said Hugh.

"Why, dem what already sick dey a-gitt'n' it. Yass'm, dey gitt'n' de boat's best. Madam Hayle and de cap'm dey done see to dat f'om de staht. H-it's de well uns what needs he'p."

"But," said Ramsey, still to Hugh, "for sick or well--the right food--who pays for it?"

"The boat."

"Who pays the boat?" she asked, and suddenly, blushing, saw her situation. Except the bishop and the judge's sister, who were conversing in undertone--except them and Hugh--the whole company, actually with here and there an elbow on the board, had turned to her in such bright expectancy as to give her a shock of encounter. But mirth upheld her, and leaning in over the table she shifted her question to the smiling bishop: "Who pays the boat?"

"The boat? Why--ha, ha!--that's the boat's lookout."

"It isn't," she laughed, but laughed so daintily and in a gayety so modestly self-justified that the group approved and the Vicksburg man asked her:

"Who ought to pay the boat?"

"We!" she cried. "All of us! It's in the Bible that we ought!" She looked again to the bishop. "Ain't it?"

"Why, I don't recall any mention of this matter there."

"Nor of strangers?" she asked, "nor of sick folks?" and her demure mirth, not flung at him or at any one, but quite to itself and for itself, came again.

"Ah, that's another affair!" he rejoined. He felt her and Hugh, with half the rest, saying to themselves, "It is not!" but was all the more moved to continue: "My fair daughter, you prepare the way of the Lord. Brethren and sisters, I want you to gather with me here as soon as those yonder are through"--a backhanded toss indicated the children's table, whose feasters showed no sign that they would ever be through at all. "We must--every believer--and whosoever will--on this passenger-deck--spend an hour--more if the spirit leads--in prayer for this pestilence to be stayed." He fastened his gaze on Hugh; no senator was present to overtop him now, and certainly this colt of John Courteney's should not. Yet the largeness with which the colt's eyes stared through and beyond him was significant to all.

"And we must do more!" he persisted.

"We shall," said Hugh.

"We must!" said the bishop; "we must beseech God for a spiritual outpouring. We have on this boat the stranger of our own land and the sick of our own tongue: the stranger to grace and the sick in soul, who may be eternally lost before this boat has finished her trip; and as much as the soul's worth outweighs the body's is it our first duty to help them get religion!"

With her curls lowered nearly to the table Ramsey--ah, me!--laughed. Her notes were as light as a perfume, but to the bishop all perfumes were heavy. He turned to the actor. "Isn't that so, brother?"

"Oh, bishop, you know a lot better than I do."

"He doesn't," tinkled Ramsey, and, as the bishop swung back to her--"Do you?" she ingratiatingly challenged him. "No, you don't! You know you don't!"

The company would have laughed with her if only to save their face, and when he made a very bright retort they laughed the heartier. They rose with Hugh. Ramsey said she wished she knew again how her brother was, and Hugh sent his servant to inquire. As all loitered aft, the bishop held them together a moment more.

"You don't object to such a meeting?" he asked Hugh.

"Not if you don't alarm or distress any one. The doctor forbids that." While Hugh so replied, the circle was joined by the commodore. The bishop flared:

"Doctors always forbid! How can we exhort sinners without alarming or distressing them?"

Hugh's answer was overprompt: "I don't know, sir."

But Ramsey, drawing the Gilmores with her, came between. "Just a bit ago," she said to the bishop, "didn't you say yes, we must all be as gay and happy as we can?"

"I did, verily. But surely that shouldn't prevent this."

"Oh, surely not!" exclaimed both the players.

"It needn't," said Ramsey. "But if we five"--Gilmores, Courteneys, and herself--"and some others--help you with your meeting to-day will you help us with ours to-morrow?"

"If I can, assuredly! But how will you help me to-day, my young sister?"

On three fingers the young sister--so lately his daughter--counted: "First, we'll get the people to come; we'll tell them you're not going to alarm or distress anybody. Second, if you forget and begin to do it we'll remind you! And, third, we'll take up the collection!"

The senator laughed so much above the rest that the bishop colored as he said: "I never exhort and collect at the same time."

"Oh-h!" sighed Ramsey. "We must collect, you know, to pay our share, each of us, for the care of the sick. And we can't collect to-morrow; we'll all be so busy getting up our own meeting." Her eyes wandered to the senator, so fervently was he urging some matter upon the commodore.

"What," asked the bishop, turning to the players, "is to-morrow's meeting to be for?"

"Why," brightly said the wife, "just to keep every one as gay and happy as we can." But Ramsey added: "And to raise money for the not-sick emigrants, to get them the right food."

"Ho, ho! Another collection!"

"No, only admission fees. Six bits for the play, four bits for the dance."

Half offended, half amused, the bishop swelled. "And you ask me"--he laughed, but she had turned away and he reverted to the players--"on top of our prayers for God's mercy upon our bodies and souls you ask me to help get up a play and a dance!"

Eagerly, amid a general merriment that was not quite merry, the Gilmores answered with amused disclaimers for themselves and copious excuses for him. Ramsey's eyes, like Hugh's, were on the commodore and the senator, who were starting off together. The commodore's nod called Hugh and he moved to overtake them. The boy whom Hugh had sent to the texas, returning, sought to intercept him, but Hugh passed on and the messenger found Ramsey. She had just been rejoined by her old nurse, and to both servants her questions were prompt and swift. Their low replies plainly disturbed her, and she wheeled to the bishop where he still stood addressing the Gilmores and a dozen others in a manner loftily defensive. He forestalled her speech with good-natured haste. "Now, if our gay and happy young sister will ask me to do something befitting a minister of the gospel," he began----

"Amen to dat!" said old Joy, and as Ramsey's eyes showed tears the speaker paused.

"All right," she quietly said. "Come to my sick brother. Won't you, please?"

"Why--why, yes, I--I will. Cer-certainly I will. Yet--really--if I'm forbidden to alarm him"--his smile could not hide his sense of mortal risk.

"Oh, he's already alarmed!"

"He's turrified!" softly said old Joy.

"Why, then, the moment we're through our meeting----"

"Don't begin it!" said Ramsey. "It can wait heaps better than he can. He's waiting now and begging for you. Come! You needn't be afraid; I'll go with you!" She laughed.

"No!" cried Joy. "Lawd, Mahs' Bishop, she mus'n't!"

"She need not," said the bishop. "But for me to go now, before I--why, I couldn't come back and mingle----"

"Oh, come!" The girl drew him by the sleeve. But the Gilmores held her back and he went on alone, his face betraying a definite presentiment as he glanced round in response to a clapping of hands.

"Oh, thank you!" cried Ramsey. "Gawd bless you!" droned Joy. "We'll run your meeting while you're gone!" called Ramsey. "And we'll pray for you! Won't we?" she asked the players, and they and others answered: "Yes."

XXII

BASILE AND WHAT HE SAW

For these twenty hours of constant activity one young passenger, save only when asleep in his berth, had contemplated the _Votaress_ and her swarming managers and voyagers with a regard different from any we have yet taken into account. The Gilmores, softly to each other, termed him "a type." To the face of nature he seemed wholly insensible. As the gliding boat incessantly bore him onward between river and sky, shore and shore, he appeared never to be aware whether the forests were gray or green, the heavens blue or gray, the waters tawny or blue. No loveliness of land or flood could deflect his undivided interest in whatever human converse he happened to be nearest as he drifted about decks in a listless unrest that kept him singled out at every pause and turn. His very fair intelligence was so indolently unaspiring, so intolerant of harness, as we may say, and so contentedly attuned to the general mind, mind of the multitude, that the idlest utterance falling on his ear from any merest unit of the common crowd was more to him than all the depths or heights of truth, order, or beauty that learning, training, or the least bit of consecutive reasoning could reveal. Earlier he had not lacked books or tutelage, but no one ever had been able to teach him what they were for. This was Basile Hayle, the overdressed young brother of the twins. Now that his seventeen years had ripened in him the conviction that he was entitled, as the phrase is, "to all the rights of a man and all the privileges of a boy," he seemed yet to have acquired no sense of value for any fact or thought beyond the pointblank range of the five senses. He could not have read ten pages of a serious book and would have blushed to be found trying to do it.

He was not greatly to blame. That way of life was much the fashion all about him, and he was by every impulse fashionable. Moreover, as he measured success by the crowd's measure, it was the way of life oftenest successful, the way of his father. He did not see the difference between the father's toiling up that way and his idling down it. So, at any rate, agreed the indulgent Gilmores, reading him quite through in a few glances, while all about the boat those who thought they knew best pronounced him more like Gideon Hayle in his regard for "folks just as folks" than were either the twins or the sister, from all three of whom his impulses kept him amiably aloof.

Of the three brothers certainly he had soon become the most widely acceptable among not only the young people of the passenger guards but also the male commonalty of the boiler deck. In a state of society which he, as "a type," reflected they saw themselves; saw their own spiritual image; their unqualified straightforwardness, their transparent simplicity of mind and heart, their fearlessness, their complacent rusticity, their childish notions of the uses of wealth, their personal modesty and communal vanity, their happy oblivion to world standards, their extravagance of speech, their political bigotry, their magisterial down-rightness, their inflammability, and their fine self-reliance. They saw these traits, we say, reflected in him as in a flattering hand-glass, perceived the blemishes rather plainer than the charms, and liked them better.