Hugh stood at the head of the midday dinner-table, waiting for a full assembly of its guests. The Vicksburg merchant and his wife, the planter from Milliken's Bend and his wife, also stood at their places.
The two ladies glanced about as if listlessly noting the cabin's lavish arabesques and gilding, while each really studied and knew the other was studying the captain's son. For this tale which we tell, they saw. It was "a-happmin'" before their eyes and, in degree, to themselves. Hugh and his father, the commodore and madame, the first mate, the twins, Ramsey, and the committee of seven—who, we shall see, were not taking discomfiture meekly—were scarlet threads in the story's swiftly weaving fabric—cogent reasons, themselves, why these two ladies had helped vote Ramsey to the seat next Hugh.
His face, Hugh's, was not easy reading. Certain shadows cast on it by that part of his mind just then busiest were quite unintelligible. Deciphered they would have meant a solemn joy for his broadening accountability; an awesome anxiety and distressed eagerness to meet and fill that accountability as fast as it broadened. He was just then recalling one of Ramsey's queries of the evening before, when she had seemed so much younger than now, and when, nevertheless, a germ of fellowship had sprung up between them; that word of hers about "feeling oneself widen out of oneself," etc. He did not at present feel himself nearly so much as he felt things round about him growing and growing.
The Votaress had grown, grown wonderfully, and the story happening, the play being acted on her three decks at once, was neither story nor play to him. Which fact was one of the few things the two gentle students of his face made out to read. However, it quite rewarded them; it went, itself, so well into the story.
And certainly, as even the Gilmores would have said, it is not when our spiritual vision sees things at their completest values that all the world's a stage and its men and women merely players. Nor is it at our best that we discern our own story, as a story, while it happens. It is a poor eye that sees itself. When Ramsey arrived at the table Hugh's gaze was so big with the reality, not the romance, of things on all the three decks that she had to laugh a little to keep her balance.
Yet her question was an earnest and eager one: "Is my brother better, or is he worse?"
The toll of the bell on the deck above—to land, as we have said, near Point Breeze—came like a spectral reply, invoking, as it did, new trouble unknown to her though just beneath her feet.
"He's better not to be worse," said Hugh, and when she frowned whimsically he explained: "His sickness is not quite the same as that on the lower deck."
"How is it different?" she asked, unconsciously keeping the whole company of the ladies' table on their feet. At the gentlemen's table, just forward of them and tapering slenderly away in the long cabin's white-and-gilt perspective, that grosser majority who had come only to feed were mutely and with stooped shoulders feeding like pigeons from a trough, and far down at its end the white-haired commodore had taken his seat, with senator, judge, squire, general, and the seventeen-year-old Hayle boy nearest him on his right and left. The bishop was not there. He was at the ladies' table, paired with the judge's sister"—a leaden load even for a bishop.
"Your brother's illness is so much slower," Hugh said.