Under the benign stars, as we have said, Hugh hastened from Basile to his father.
Those were the same heavenly lights with which only two nights earlier he and that father had so tranquilly—and the dead boy's sister so airily—communed. With a hand yet on the door that he was leaving, and while his distress for what had befallen in this room brought a foreboding of what might impend in the other, he felt the chiding of that celestial benignity and was dimly made to see its illimitable span and the smallness of magnifying the things we call trouble.
All the more, then, a melting heart for the tearful mother and sister, to whom no word of this could be said; but a stout heart, stouter than he knew where to find, for whatever was yet in store. Also a preoccupied good-by to sweet companionship. Nay, a mind too preoccupied for any good-by to any companionship for the remainder of this voyage, if not forever. It was humiliating to have even so much thought of such a kind at such a time; yet suppress it as he might, he could not wholly stifle it, even at his father's door.
Three hours later the senator, coming up in search of him, gradually discovered the presence of more people than he was looking for or cared even to find awake—being who they were. At the top of the steps he told the watchman sleeplessness had driven him up here for fresh air. It is but human to explain to a watchman.
But how was the captain? And how was the commodore?
The commodore was doing well enough, but the captain—the watchman shook his head with the wisdom of a doctor.
The seeker after fresh air, eager to move on, yet loath to imply that the air about a watchman was stale, said, with a glance at the stars, that here was quiet.
But the watchman begged to differ. Never by starlight had he seen so busy a hurricane-deck. Just now there was a lull but it was the first in three hours. Preparations here, preparations there, for the dead, for the living, the sick, the well; such a going and coming of cabin-boys, of chambermaids, of the immigrant they called Marburg, the Hayles' old black woman, the texas tender, the mud clerk, the actor and his wife, her servant girl——
"And others," prompted the senator. "What doing?"
A hundred things. The actor's wife had got Miss Hayle into funeral black from her own stage "warrobe," and the young man Marburg had brought up, for Madame Hayle, one of his deceased mother's mourning gowns, "a prodigious fine one." It did not fit but the actor's wife and her maid were altering it while they kept watch where Basile lay and while Madame Hayle resumed her cares on the lower deck.