"In her race conscience," a.s.sented Hugh.
Ramsey whipped around. "Thought you had no argument."
"I"m giving grandfather"s," said the grandson.
"Humph! it"s yours. I"d know it at sight--by the color."
"Miss Ramsey," said the old man, toying with his cane, "Hugh and I have been finding that, right or wrong, Mrs. Grundy or Mr. Grundy, race conscience is a wonderful, unaccountable thing for which men will give their life-blood by thousands." His voice failed. He waved smilingly to Hugh.
"And when," broke in Hugh to Ramsey, "when Mrs. Grundy, in her race conscience, says Phyllis is not white no one ought to snap his fingers in even Mrs. Grundy"s face merely to please himself or to relieve some private situation."
Ramsey stood up, flashing first on him and then to her mother, dropped again, and with her face in her elbow on the chair"s back recited drearily--from her third reader:
"You can hear him swing his heavy sledge With measured beat and slow, Like the s.e.xton ringing the village bell When the evening sun----"
"Ramzee!" exclaimed madame, while the old nurse groaned: "Oh, Lawd "a"
ma.s.sy!"
The girl rose, laughed, and flashed again: "Well, if Phyllis ain"t white what is she? She"s got to be something!"
"Yes," said the youth, "but not everything. I know her wrongs. But none of us, with whatever rights and wrongs, can have, or do, or be----"
"Oh, don"t we know all that?" Ramsey turned to the grandfather and with sudden deference sprang to help him rise. He faced her and the Californian together.
"Miss Ramsey, Hugh has all your feelings in this matter."
Madame, "California," and old Joy eagerly a.s.sented.
"But poor, blundering old Mrs. Grundy, always wronging some one," the old man smilingly continued, "is really fighting hard for a better human race. That"s the greatest battle she can fight, my dear young lady, and when----"
"Well," rejoined Ramsey with eyes frankly tearful, "she fights it mighty badly."
"Ah, a hundred times worse than you think. Yet we who presume to fight the blunders of that battle must fight them unselfishly and to help her win."
Old Joy groaned so approvingly that he turned to her.
"What do you think, old mammy?"
"Who, me? Lawd, I thinks mighty little an" I knows less. Yit one thing I does know: Phyllis ain" gwine. She know" you cayn"t make her white by takin" her to whah it make" no odds ef she ain"t white. Phyllis love"
folks. She love" de quality, she love" de crowd. White aw black aw octoroom free niggeh, Phyllis gwine to choose de old Hayle home and de great riveh--full o" steamboat"--sooneh"n any lan" whah de ain"t mo"n one "oman to de mile. Phyllis ain"t gwine."
The closing words faded to soliloquy. For every one stood up, and even the old woman"s attention was diverted to Watson"s apprentice approaching from the captain"s room. On his way below for the doctor he came, in the actor"s behalf, to ask if he might bring up also Mrs.
Gilmore.
a.s.suredly he might. How was the patient?
"Very quiet," the boy hopefully replied. Whereupon madame begged leave to repair at once to the sick-room, but neither of the Courteneys would consent nor either of them allow the other to go. The steersman pa.s.sed on down.
From enviously watching him do so, "California" turned to the company and in open abandonment of his amazing proposition said drolly that never before had he failed, in so many ways "hand-running," to make himself useful. He reseated Madame Hayle and would have set the daughter beside her, but the mother bade Ramsey give Joy the chair and leaned wearily on the old woman"s shoulder. Both Courteneys urged their seats on the girl, and when she would not accept while either of them stood for her servant to sit, the grandfather left Hugh debating with her, took "California"s" arm, found other chairs a few paces away, and engaged him in a gentle parley which any one might see was an appeal to his sober second thought. It was Ned"s shift up at the wheel, but the change of watch was near; his partner stood at his elbow. Their gaze was up a reach between the two most northern of those four groups of bluffs whose mention even Ramsey was for the moment tired of, yet they studied the three couples on the roof below.
"Runs smooth at the present writing," said Watson.
"Clair chann"l ef noth"n" else," responded Ned. The allusion was neither to boat nor stream but to a certain opportuneness of things, whose obviousness to them, looking down, was mainly what kept Ramsey standing.
While she stood beside the two empty chairs cross-questioning Hugh with a fresh show of her maturer mildness and he stood inwardly taking back his late farewell to sweet companionship and softly answering in his incongruous pomp of voice with a new tenderness, and while the worn-out mother gradually let her full weight sink on the tired slave, this obvious propitiousness was embarra.s.singly increased by the two weary ones falling asleep.
True, the clearness of channel--this channel in the upper air--was not absolute, but its obstacles nettled mostly the pilots. To Ramsey, even to Hugh, obstacles were almost welcome, as enabling them to show to a prying world that nothing beyond the grayest commonplace was occurring between them. One such interruption was the upcoming and pa.s.sing of Mrs.
Gilmore and the physician to the sick-room and the cub pilot"s parting with them to join the younger pair. The boy found Hugh confessing that he should not know exactly how to word Phyllis"s "free papers" but adding that the first clerk would be pleased to make them out at once if Ramsey"s eagerness so dictated. It did, and presently the modest intruder was hurrying away on a double errand: to bear this confidential request to the clerk and then to seek the Brothers Ambrosia and with them and the two under-clerks arrange for the evening performance, the giving of which, however, Ramsey insisted, must depend on the captain"s condition when evening should come.
"Wish it were here now," she said as they watched the messenger go.
"Don"t you?"
"I could," he replied, "but it will be here soon enough."
The conversation which followed remained in their memory through years of separation.
She spoke again in her new tone: "You think your father will get well, don"t you?"
"No, Ramsey."
At those words her heart did two things at once: stopped on the first, rebounded on the second. But it fell again as he added: "I fear I must lose my father to-night."
She stood mute, looking into his eyes and pondering every light and shadow of the severe young face that to her seemed so imperially unlike all others. "He"s great," she said in her heart. "And he loves with his greatness. Loves even his father that way; not as I love mine or love anybody, or ever shall or can, or could wish to, unless I were a man and as great as him--he. I never could have dreamt of any one loving me that way, but if any ever should I"d worship him." Suddenly her sympathy rose high.
"Oh, why not just think to yourself: "He _will_ live"?"
"Why should I? Should I be fit to live myself if I were not true to myself?"
"You are! You always are!"
"No one can be who isn"t truthful to himself."
Ramsey gazed again. A sense of his suffering benumbed her, and for relief she asked: "Is that why you don"t wish it were evening, when really you do?"
He smiled. "I can"t wish the sun to get out of my way. That"s what it would mean, isn"t it?"
She fell to thinking what it meant. All at once she pointed: "That"s the First Chickasaw Bluff.... Yes, I s"pose it does mean that.... It"s terrible how thoughtless I am."
"It doesn"t terrify me. I promise you it never shall."
Was he making game of her? She narrowed her lids and looked at him 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!"