His lov-ign-kide-ness! lov-ign-kide-ness!
His lov-ign-ki-i-i-ide-ness, oh, how strogn!'"
LII
LOVE RUNS ROUGH BUT RUNS ON
Turning east in the upper arm of Saint Francis Bend, with the mouth of Saint Francis River just swinging out of sight astern and Helena an hour's run behind, the Votaress faced the rising sun.
Before the eyes of Hugh and Ramsey it soared gloriously into a sky reddened not by presage of rain but by the smoke of the Antelope and Westwood. The intervening shore and waters glowed and quivered in exquisite tints that renewed the world's youth and quite ignored all human, especially all young human, troubles. Suddenly it lighted up the black chimneys and scapes and white pilot-houses of the two boats ahead, as, a league or so apart, they came doubling back northwest, up Walnut Bend, to save in Bordeaux Chute the wide circuit of Bordeaux and Whiskey Islands, to hurry on round the long north-and-south loop of Council Bend and so have done with one of the most tortuous forty miles of the Mississippi.
We mention these things because Hugh and Ramsey were students of them, now and then together but never quite comfortable so, and now and then apart but never quite comfortable so. Everywhere the boat's people were awake. On the freight deck the crew squatted in circles, eating from tubs. Away aft on the roof, from their quarters in the far end of the texas, the whole flock of white-jackets had risen like gulls and were down in the cook-house, pantry, and cabin rattling the crockery till it echoed in every waking stomach. Already the Votaress's divine breath smelt of coffee, real coffee—chaud comme l'enfer et noir comme le diable—smelt of it, as, we fear, we shall never smell it again in this trust-ridden world. It was Ned's watch at the wheel. Watson and his cub had turned in. So had the first clerk. So had the twins, the senator, the general. Few of us, at that hour, not having slept, are skylarks.
Yet the actor and the Californian still held vigil by the captain's bed. Joy still hovered after her "young missy," and "Harriet" after Mrs. Gilmore and the parson's wife. Ramsey and "Harriet" betrayed a vivid interest in each other, a wonderfully generous thing on the maid's part, Ramsey thought, the two being who they were. The commodore was better, but the captain was not, and together or apart Hugh and Ramsey were more consciously the prisoners, albeit the undaunted prisoners, of care and sorrow than of anything else. When their feeling for the river's lore drew them, by a spiritual gravitation, to a common centre—to learn, for instance, that Council Bend and Council Island were named for one of those historic "confabs" between the white man and the red which shouldered the red brother once and forever away from the sunrise and across the great river—that centre of gravity was the captain's chair, their tutor the first mate.
Under the circumstances we hardly need begrudge a line or two more to tell how, as far back as Delta, the Votaress had begun to meet the Louisville Saturday evening packets and to receive and return their special salutes. One was a Hayle boat and one a Courteney. Such moments were refreshing. Inquiry and information flowed through them as naturally and beguilingly as a brook through a meadow and gave Hugh opportunity to contemplate incidentally the play of air and light in Ramsey's curls without her having the slightest suspicion of him!—gave her chances to ply him with questions in autobiography and social casuistry and to enjoy keenly the ridiculous majesty of his eyes and voice, while the two dear chaperons talked apart as obliviously as if she were merely asking him how deep the whiskey was in Whiskey Chute.