Gideon's Band Part 7

"Ah!--well? yes? we muz' do our possible. My 'usband he--Ramsey!"

The girl had turned face down in a play of collapse. "n.o.body," she piped, "finishes what he starts to tell!"

"Ho!" playfully retorted the mother, "an' you muz' go?--cannot wait?

Well, good night." But no one went.

Her mother turned again to the captain. "There is something veree bad--on the boat?" Ramsey sat up alert.

The captain's reply was heard by none but her mother and the grandfather, but evidently the twins knew whatever there was to tell.

"It was no time to take deck pa.s.sengers at all!" said one of them to the other, in full voice, while the grandfather was a.s.serting:

"We are as wholly at your command, madam, as if this were Gideon Hayle's boat. Our one thought is your safety."

"And comfort of mind," added the captain, about to go.

Ramsey guessed the trouble. "We are veree oblige'," said her mother; "we'll continue on the _Votarezz_."

"Goody!" murmured the daughter to old Joy, to Hugh, and to the captain as he left the group. "Goody!"

"Mother!" protested the twins, "you must not!"

"Oh-h! you?" she radiantly inquired, "you rather go ash.o.r.e, you, eh?

Veree well. Doubdlezz the captain be please' to put you." Her smile grew stately as Ramsey laughed. She turned to the grandfather. "Never in my life I di'n' ran away from sicknezz. I billieve anybody can't die till his time come'. When his time come' he'll die. My 'usband he billieve that, too."

"Don't the Germans come from Germany?" asked Ramsey, but no one seemed able to tell her.

"And also," pursued the lady, "I billieve tha'z a cowardly--to run away from those sick." She looked around for the twins but they were conferring aside. "And also I billieve, me--like they say--to get scare'--tha'z the _sure_ way to catch that kind of sicknezz. 'Tis by that it pazz into the syztem! My 'usband he tell me that. He's veree acquaint' with medicine, my 'usband, yes! And----"

"Is Germany in Asia?" Ramsey drawled, but n.o.body seemed to know anything.

"And I billieve," persisted madame, "to continue on the boat, tha'z also the mo' safe. Because if we leave the boat, where we'll find one doctor for _that_ maladee-e? An' if we _find_ one doctor, who's goin' nurse us in that maladee?"

"Is Asia--?" tried Ramsey again, but hushed with a strange thrill as her ear caught, remotely beneath her, a faint sawing and hammering.

"Mo' better, I billieve," continued her mother, "we continue on the boat and ourselve' nurse those sick. When the Mother of G.o.d see' that she'll maybe privent from coming our time to die."

"If Germany--" whined Ramsey, but huddled down in her seat as the sawing and hammering came again----

"What, my chile?"

Light at last! She instantly sat up: "Why do they call it the Asiatic cholera if--?" She stopped short. From the open deck far below rose an angry cry:

"Stop that fool! Stop her!"

Ramsey darted so recklessly to the low front guard that Hugh darted also and held her arm as she bent over, while close upon the cry came a woman's long, unmistakable wail for her dead. Twice it filled the air, then melted out over the gliding waters and into the night, above the regardless undertones of the boat's majestic progress. Grandfather, nurse, mother, brothers pressed after the girl and Hugh. Clutched by the nurse, released by him, she still looked wildly down, seeing little yet much. At their back the great bell boomed. The boat's stem began to turn to the forested sh.o.r.e. A glare of torches at the lower guards crimsoned the flood under the bows. She flashed round accusingly upon Hugh:

"What are we landing in the woods for?"

He met her gaze and it fell. Her mother tried to draw her away but she dropped to her knees at the rail and bent her eyes upon a dark group compacting below. Hugh muttered to his grandfather:

"She'd better leave the boat. She'd rather."

Catching the words, she leaped and stood, her head thrown high. "I wouldn't! I won't!"

She glared on him through br.i.m.m.i.n.g tears, but something about him, repeated and exaggerated in the twins as she whipped round to them, reversed her mood. She smote her brow into her mother's bosom and, under the stress of a silvery laugh that would not be stifled, hung to the maternal neck and rocked from side to side.

XI

FIRST NIGHT-WATCH

Often through the first half of that night, while many other matters pressed on them, the minds of the three Courteneys turned to one theme.

Ramsey's inquiries had called it up and the presence and plight of the immigrants, down below, kept it before them: the story of Hugh's grandmother, born and bred in Holland.

With Hugh standing by, the girl had drawn its recital from his grandfather; as whose bride that grandmother had been an immigrant, like these, though hardly in their forlorn way and with Philadelphia, not New Orleans, for a first goal. Thence, years later, with husband and child, she had reached and traversed this wild river, when it was so much wilder, and had dwelt in New Orleans throughout her son's, John Courteney's, boyhood. Thence again, in his twenty-first year, she had recrossed the water to inherit an estate and for seven years had lived in great ports and capitals of Europe, often at her husband's side, yet often, too, far from him, as he--leaving his steamboats to good captains and the mother to her son--came and went on commercial adventures ocean-wide. It was these first seven years of John Courteney's manhood, spent in transatlantic study, society, public affairs, and a father's partners.h.i.+p, that had made him--what Ramsey saw.

The tale was fondly told and had made Hugh feel very homespun compared with such progenitors. But Ramsey had looked him up and down as if he must have all his forebears' beautiful values deep hid somewhere in his inside pockets, and had wondered, as she tossed away to the pilot-house, if he was destined ever to show the father's special gift of winning and holding the strongest and best men's allegiance. A very mature thought for her, but she sometimes had such, and had once heard her father frankly confess that therein lay the Courteneys' largest advantage over him, he being signally able to rule the rudest men by a more formidable rudeness, but not to command the devotion of men superior to that sort of rule.

At length the stars of midnight hung overhead. The amber haze of Queen Berenice's hair glimmered to westward. Where the river had so writhed round on itself as to be sweeping northeastward, the _Votaress_, midway of a short "crossing" from left sh.o.r.e to right, was pointing southwest.

An old moon, fairly up, was on the larboard quarter, and in the nearest bend down-stream the faint lights of a boat recently outstripped were just being quenched by the low black willows of an island. In the bend above shone the dim but brightening stern lights of the foremost and speediest of the five-o'clock fleet. A lonely wooded point beneath the brown sand of whose crumbling water's edge the poor German home-seeker had found the home he least sought lay miles behind; miles by the long bends of the river, miles even straight overland, and lost in the night among the famed sugar estates that occupied in unbroken succession College Point and Grandview Reach, Willow Bend, Bell's Point, and Bonnet Carre. Past was Donaldsonville, at the mouth of Bayou Lafourche, and yonder ahead, that boat just entering Bayagoula Bend, and which the _Votaress_ was so prettily overhauling, was the _Antelope_.

"Fast time," ventured the watchman to the first mate.

"Yes, fast enough for a start."

No word from either as to any trouble aboard.

A cub pilot risked a remark to his chief: "'--Chase the antelope over the plain,' says the song, but I reckon we won't quite do that, sir."

No, they wouldn't quite do that. Not a breath as to any unfortunate conditions anywhere. But on every deck, wherever equals met, the fearful plight of the queer folk down nearest the water was softly debated.

Distressing to feminine sympathy was the necessity of instant burials, first revealed up-stairs by that woman's cry of agony down on the lower gangway. But masculine nerve explained that such promptness would save lives and might confine the disease to the lower deck. Was no physician on the boat? No, one would be taken aboard in the morning. Of course you could ask to be set ash.o.r.e, but, all things considered, to stay seemed wiser. Where was Madame Hayle? Few pa.s.sengers knew, none of the boat's "family" chose to tell, and at bedtime the majority "retired." So much for the surface of things.

But beneath the surface--"Good G.o.d, sir! if any one is to go ash.o.r.e, why shouldn't it be _they_--the foreigners?"

For the full bearing of this speech let us recount certain doings in this first half of the night. The Hayle twins, coming aboard at "Post Forty-Six," had begun, by the time the boat backed away, to offer exchanges of courtesy with such men on the boiler deck as seemed best worth while, and this they kept up with an address which, despite their obvious juleps, unfailingly won them attention. Even a Methodist bishop, who "knew their father and had known his father, both stanch Methodists," was unstintedly cordial. No less so was a senator.

"Know Gideon Hayle?" He had "known him before they had! Hoped to know him yet when his sons should be commodores." Was on the _Chevalier_ when the _Chevalier_ outran the _Quakeress_. One twin heard the tale while the other brought the bishop.

"Senator, you already know Bishop So-and-So?"

"Senator, we'd like you to know Judge So-and-So, sir."

Judge, senator, and bishop were pleased. The senator reminded the judge that they had met years before for a touch-and-go moment as one was leaving and the other boarding the _Autocrat_--or was it the _Admiral_--a Hayle boat at any rate--how time does fly! The brothers took but a light part in the chat and were much too wise to betray any degree of social zeal. Each new introduction was as casual as the one before it. Sometimes they were themselves introduced but only those here named stayed in the set. Chairs were found for four, and Julian, stepping aside for a fifth chair, came upon another worthy, as well juleped as himself and carrying his deck load quite as evenly.

"Bishop So-and-So, this is our father's boyhood friend, General So-and-So. Judge So-and-So--Senator So-and-So--you both know the general?" The general accepted Lucian's chair, and presently Lucian, with two more chairs, brought one more personage, tall and solemn.