Gideon's Band: A Tale of the Mississippi

by George Washington Cable

Aboard the Votaress was a gentle, retiring lady, large and fair, whom both Hugh and Ramsey had liked from the first, yet whose acquaintance they had made very slowly and quite separately. She was a parson's wife, who had never seen a play, a game of cards, or a ball, danced a dance, read a novel, tasted wine, or worn a jewel. She had four handsome, decorous, well-freckled children, two boys, two girls.

At table, until the married pairs of Vicksburg, Yazoo, and Milliken's Bend had gone ashore, she had not sat with the foremost dozen, although she and the bishop spoke often together and were always "sister" and "brother." Her near neighbors at the board had been the Carthaginians and Napoleonites, and it was through them that she had met the Gilmores. To Ramsey and Hugh she had been made known by her children, one boy and girl having fallen wildly in love with the young lady's red curls, and the other two with Hugh and his frown.

The Gilmores' hearts she had won largely by the way in which her talks with them revealed the sweet charities of a soul unwarped by the tyrannous prohibitions under which she had been "born and raised" and to which she was still loyal; and she had crowned the conquest by a gentle, inflexible refusal to "brother" John the Baptist. In their lively minds she reawakened the age-old issue between artist and pietist. Said the amused Gilmore:

"Humiliate me? Not in the least. She only humbles me; she's such a beautiful example of——"

"Yes, but, goodness, don't say it here!" said his wife. "Harriet" and the exhorter were already trouble enough.

Nevertheless, "What lovely types of character," insisted Gilmore, "come often, so often, from ugly types of faith!"

The wife flinched and looked about but he persisted: "So much better, my love—this is only my humble tribute to her—so much better is religion, even her religion, without the liberal arts than the liberal arts without religion. Faith is the foundation, they are the upper works."

"Dear, you should have been a preacher!"

"No, I'd always be preaching that one sermon. If I didn't tell it to you, I'd have to tell it to her, or make you tell her."

Mrs. Gilmore had not told her, but between the two women, across the gulf between them, there had grown such a commerce of silent esteem that neither Hugh nor Ramsey knew which one's modest liberalism to admire most. To Ramsey it was nothing against the matron that she was not nursing the immigrant sick. Only Madame Hayle was allowed to do that, and the parson's wife, being quite without madame's art of doing as she pleased, had had to submit conscience and compassions to the captain's forbiddal, repeated by the commodore and Hugh. But after the play she had insisted, "strict orders or none, and whether her children were four or forty-four," on entering the service of the busy Gilmores, "no matter how," and was now, with old Joy, in the pilot-house, a most timely successor to the actor's wife in the social care of Ramsey.