To see what was up, Watson rose and looked down. On the roof below, evidently having come there for privacy, were the commodore, the senator, and Hugh. Watson loitered from the pilot-house and disappeared.
Down on the roof the commodore and the senator conversed across Hugh's front. The statesman, with heavy "dear sirs" and heavier smiles, was buttonholing the elder Courteney, who at every least pause affably endeavored to refer him to Hugh. The grandson's turn to speak seemed not to have arrived. The senator was trying to keep it from arriving and Hugh was glum. Hence it may be doubted if the senator's cigar was really cocked as high, or that his silk hat was as dingy, his very good teeth as yellow, his cheeks as hard, or his forehead as knotty as they appeared to Hugh, or that his tone of superiority, so overbearing last night, so ingratiating to-day, was any worse for the change. Hugh was biassed—felt bias and anger as an encumbering and untimely weight. In self-depreciating contrast he recalled a certain young lady's airy, winning way—airy way of winning—and coveted it for himself here and now: a wrestler's nimble art of overcoming weight by lightness; of lifting a heavy antagonist off his feet into thin air where his heaviness would be against him. His small, trim grandfather had it, in good degree; was using it now. Would it were his own in this issue, where the senator held in his hand the folded petition, having already vainly proffered it to the commodore, who had as vainly motioned him to hand it to Hugh. Would the art were his! But he felt quite helpless to command it, lacking the joyous goodness of heart which in the young lady so irresistibly redeemed what the senator, the bishop, and the judge's sister, to themselves, called her amazing—and the Gilmores to each other called her American—bad manners. It made Hugh inwardly bad-mannered just to feel in himself this lack, and tempted him to think what a comfort it would be to apply the wrestler's art physically and heave the senator overboard.
Said that gentleman—"For you saw I wouldn't let the matter come up at the table. A lot of those men who signed this paper—which your grandson suggested last night, you know—" He smiled at Hugh. "Now, I am never touchy, and I know, commodore, that you're not. But, Lord, so many of us—maybe Democrats a little more than Whigs—are! We take our politics, like our bread, smokin' hot." He put away his smile. "My dear sir, to us the foreigner—as you saw last night at supper—has become a political problem, a burning question. Yet I propose to keep this whole subject so unmenacing to you personally, you owners of this boat, that I won't let a word be risked where any one might take even a tone of voice unkindly."
"So, then, Hugh can take care of it."
The senator tossed a hand in amiable protest: "Oh, sir, you see it much too small! My half of it is large enough for me, with forty times this young gentleman's experience. I don't see just this one boat and trip and these few hundred native-American citizens in deadly contact with a few hundred of Europe's refuse. I see—your passengers see—we view with alarm—a state of affairs—and a test case!"
The old commodore's eyes flashed to retort, but the senator forced a propitiative smile, adding: "However, let that pass just now, here's something else."
"Is it also in that paper?"
"It is."
"Tell it to Hugh—or let him read it."
But as the old gentleman would have moved away, the senator, ignoring the suggestion, stepped across his path:—