merely through the “terribleness” of the times, it had gone forever astray. When, not knowing this, he despatched another, this latter had promptly arrived, but its unintelligible allusions to lines in the lost forerunner were unpardonable for lack of that forerunner’s light, and it contained especially one remark–trivial enough–which, because written in the irrepressible facetiousness so inborn in him, but taken, alas! in the ineradicable earnest so natural to her, had compelled her to reply in words which made her as they went, and him as they smote him, seem truly to have “aged three years in one.” Yet hardly had they left her before you would have said she had recovered the whole three years and a fraction over, on finding a postscript, till then most unaccountably overlooked, which said that its writer had at that moment been ordered (as soon as he could accomplish this and that and so and so) to hasten home to recruit the battery with men of his own choice, and incidentally to bring the wounded Charlie with him. Such godsends raise the spring-tides of praise and human kindness in us, and it was on the very next morning, after finding that postscript, that there had come to Anna her splendid first thought of the Bazaar.
And now behold it, a visible reality! Unlighted as yet, unpeopled, but gorgeous, multiform, sentinelled, and ready, it needed but the touch of the taper to set forth all the glories of art and wealth tenfolded by self-sacrifice for a hallowed cause. Here was the Bazaar, and yonder, far away on the southern border of Tennessee, its wasted ranks still spruce in their tatters, the battery; iron-hearted Bartleson in command; its six yellow daughters of destruction a trifle black in the lips, but bright on the cheeks and virgins all; Charlie on the roster though not in sight, the silken-satin standard well in view, rent and pierced, but showing seven red days of valor legended on its folds, and with that white-moustached old centaur, Maxime, still upholding it in action and review.
Intermediate, there, yonder, and here, from the farthest Mississippi State line clear down to New Orleans, were the camps of instruction, emptying themselves northward, pouring forth infantry, cavalry, artillery by every train that could be put upon the worn-out rails and by every main-travelled wagon road. But homeward-bound Charlie and his captain, where were they? Irby knew.
Flora, we have seen, had been willing, eager, for them to come–to arrive; not because Charlie, but because his captain, was one of the two. But Irby, never sure of her, and forever jealous of the ladies’ man, had contrived, in a dull way, to detain the home-comers in mid-journey, with telegraphic orders to see here a commandant and there a factory of arms and hurry men and munitions to the front. So he killed time and tortured hope for several hearts, and that was a comfort in itself.
However, here was the Bazaar. After all, its sentinels were not of the Crescent Regiment, for the same grave reason which postponed the opening until to-morrow; the fact that to-day that last flower of the city’s young high-life was leaving for the fields of war, as Kincaid’s Battery had left in the previous spring. Yet, oh, how differently! Again up St. Charles Street and down Calliope the bands played, the fifes squealed; once more the old men marched ahead, opened ranks, let the serried youngsters through and waved and hurrahed and kissed and wept; but all in a new manner, far more poignant than the earlier. God only knew what was to happen now, to those who went or to those who stayed, or where or how any two of them should ever meet again. The Callenders, as before, were there. Anna had come definitely resolved to give one particular beardless Dick Smith a rousing kiss, purely to nullify that guilty one of last year. But when the time came she could not, the older one had made it impossible; and when the returning bands broke out–
“Charlie is my darling! my darling! my darling!”
and the tears came dripping from under Connie’s veil and Victorine’s and Miranda’s and presently her own, she was glad of the failure.
As they were driving homeward across Canal Street, she noted, out beyond the Free Market, a steamboat softly picking its way in to the levee. Some coal-barges were there, she remembered, lading with pitch-pine and destined as fire-ships, by that naval lieutenant of the despatch-boat whom we know, against the Federal fleet lying at the head of the passes.
The coachman named the steamer to Constance: “Yass, ‘m, de ole _Genl al Quitman_; dass her.”
“From Vicksburg and the Bends!” cried the inquirer. “Why, who knows but Charlie Val–?”
With both hands she clutched Miranda and Victorine, and brightened upon Anna.
“And Flora not with us!” was the common lament.
XXXVII
“TILL HE SAID, ‘I’M COME HAME, MY LOVE'”
How absurdly poor the chance! Yet they bade the old coachman turn that way, and indeed the facts were better than the hope of any one of them. Charlie, very gaunt and battered, but all the more enamored of himself therefor and for the new chevrons of a gun corporal on his dingy sleeve, was actually aboard that boat. In one of the small knots of passengers on her boiler deck he was modestly companioning with a captain of infantry and two of staff, while they now exchanged merry anecdotes of the awful retreat out of Tennessee into Mississippi, now grimly damned this or that bad strategy, futile destruction, or horrible suffering, now re-discussed the comical chances of a bet of General Brodnax’s, still pending, and now, with the crowd, moved downstairs to the freight deck as the boat began to nose the wharf.
Meanwhile the Callenders’ carriage had made easy speed. Emerging by the Free Market, it met an open hack carrying six men. At the moment every one was cringing in a squall of dust, but as well as could be seen these six were the driver, a colored servant at his side, an artillery corporal, and three officers. Some army wagons hauling pine-knots to the fire-fleet compelled both carriages to check up. Thereupon, the gust passing and Victorine getting a better glance at the men, she tossed both hands, gave a stifled cry and began to laugh aloud.
“Charlie!” cried Anna. “Steve!” cried Constance.
“And Captain Irby!” remarked Miranda.
The infantry captain, a transient steamboat acquaintance, used often afterward to say that he never saw anything prettier than those four wildly gladdened ladies unveiling in the shade of their parasols. I doubt if he ever did. He talked with Anna, who gave him so sweet an attention that he never suspected she was ravenously taking in every word the others dropped behind her.
“But where he is, that Captain Kincaid?” asked Victorine of Charlie a second time.
“Well, really,” stammered the boy at last, “we–we can’t say, just now, where he is.”
(“He’s taken prisoner!” wailed Anna’s heart while she let the infantry captain tell her that hacks, in Nashville on the Sunday after Donelson, were twenty-five dollars an hour.)
“He means,” she heard Mandeville put in, “he means–Charlie–only that we _muz_ not tell. ‘Tis a sicret.”
“You’ve sent him into the enemy’s lines!” cried Constance to Irby in one of her intuitions.
“We?” responded the grave Irby, “No, not we.”
“Captain Mandeville,” exclaimed Victorine, “us, you don’t need to tell us some white lies.”
The Creole shrugged: “We are telling you only the whitess we can!”
(“Yes,” the infantry captain said, “with Memphis we should lose the largest factory of cartridges in the Confederacy.”)
But this was no place for parleying. So while the man next the hack-driver, ordered by Mandeville and laden with travelling-bags, climbed to a seat by the Callenders’ coachman the aide-de-camp crowded in between Constance and Victorine, the equipage turned from the remaining soldiers, and off the ladies spun for home, Anna and Miranda riding backward to have the returned warrior next his doting wife. Victorine was dropped on the way at the gate of her cottage. When the others reached the wide outer stair of their own veranda, and the coachman’s companion had sprung down and opened the carriage, Mandeville was still telling of Mandeville, and no gentle hearer had found any chance to ask further about that missing one of whom the silentest was famishing to know whatever–good or evil–there was to tell. Was Steve avoiding their inquiries? wondered Anna.
Up the steps went first the married pair, the wife lost in the hero, the hero in himself. Was he, truly? thought Anna, or was he only trying, kindly, to appear so? The ever-smiling Miranda followed. A step within the house Mandeville, with eyes absurdly aflame, startled first his wife by clutching her arm, and then Miranda by beckoning them into a door at their right, past unheeded treasures of the Bazaar, and to a front window. Yet through its blinds they could discover only what they had just left; the carriage, with Anna still in it, the garden, the grove, an armed soldier on guard at the river gate, another at the foot of the steps, a third here at the top.
It was good to Anna to rest her head an instant on the cushioning behind it and close her eyes. With his rag of a hat on the ground and his head tightly wrapped in the familiar Madras kerchief of the slave deck-hand, the attendant at the carriage side reverently awaited the relifting of her lids. The old coachman glanced back on her.
“Missy?” he tenderly ventured. But the lids still drooped, though she rose.
“Watch out fo’ de step,” said the nearer man. His tone was even more musically gentle than the other’s, yet her eyes instantly opened into his and she started so visibly that her foot half missed and she had to catch his saving hand.
“Stiddy! stiddy!” He slowly let the cold, slim fingers out of his as she started on, but she swayed again and he sprang and retook them. For half a breath she stared at him like a wild bird shot, glanced at the sentinels, below, above, and then pressed up the stair.
Constance, behind the shutters, wept. “Go away,” she pleaded to her husband, “oh, go away!” but pushed him without effect and peered down again. “He’s won!” she exclaimed in soft ecstasy, “he’s won at last!”
“Yes, he’s win!” hoarsely whispered the aide-de-camp. “He’s win the bet!”
Constance flashed indignantly: “What has he bet?”
“Bet. ‘He has bet three-ee general’ he’ll pazz down Canal Street and through the middl’ of the city, unreco’nize! And now he’s done it, they’ll let him do the rest!” From his Creole eyes the enthusiast blazed a complete argument, that an educated commander, so disguised and traversing an enemy’s camp, can be worth a hundred of the common run who go by the hard name of spy, and may decide the fortunes of a whole campaign: “They’ll let him! and he’ll get the prom-otion!”
“Ho-oh!” breathed the two women, “he’s getting all the promotion _he_ wants, right now!” The three heard Anna pass into the front drawing-room across the hall, the carriage move off and the disguised man enter the hall and set down the travelling-bags. They stole away through the library and up a rear stair.
It was not yet late enough to set guards within the house. No soul was in the drawing-rooms. In the front one, on its big wheels between two stacks of bayoneted rifles, beneath a splendor of flags and surrounded by innumerable costly offerings, rested as mutely as a seated idol that superior engine of death and woe, the great brass gun. Anna stole to it, sunk on her knees, crossed her trembling arms about its neck and rested her brow on its face.
She heard the tread in the hall, quaked to rise and flee, and yet could not move. It came upon the threshold and paused. “Anna,” said the voice that had set her heart on fire across the carriage step. She sprang up, faced round, clutched the great gun, and stood staring. Her follower was still in slave garb, but now for the first time he revealed his full stature. His black locks were free and the “Madras” dropped from his fingers to the floor. He advanced a pace or two.
“Anna,” he said again, “Anna Callender,”–he came another step–“I’ve come back, Anna, to–to–” he drew a little nearer. She gripped the gun.
He lighted up drolly: “Don’t you know what I’ve come for? I didn’t know, myself, till just now, or I shouldn’t have come in this rig, though many a better man’s in worse these days. I didn’t know–because–I couldn’t hope. I’ve come–” he stole close–his arms began to lift–she straightened to her full height, but helplessly relaxed as he smiled down upon it.
“I’ve come not just to get your promise, Anna Callender, but to muster you in; to _marry_ you.”
She flinched behind the gun’s muzzle in resentful affright. He lowered his palms in appeal to her wisdom. “It’s the right thing, Anna, the only safe way! I’ve known it was, ever since Steve Mandeville’s wedding. Oh! it takes a colossal assurance to talk to you so, Anna Callender, but I’ve got the _colossal assurance_. I’ve got that, beloved, and you’ve got all the rest–my heart–my soul–my life. Give me yours.”
Anna had shrunk in against the farther wheel, but now rallied and moved a step forward. “Let me pass,” she begged. “Give me a few moments to myself. You can wait here. I’ll come back.”
He made room. She moved by. But hardly had she passed when a soft word stopped her. She turned inquiringly and the next instant–Heaven only knows if first on his impulse or on hers–she was in his arms, half stifled on his breast, and hanging madly from his neck while his kisses fell upon her brow–temples–eyes–and rested on her lips.
Flora sat reading a note just come from that same “A.C.” Her brother had gone to call on Victorine. Irby had just bade the reader good-by, to return soon and go with her to Callender House to see the Bazaar. Madame Valcour turned from a window with a tart inquiry:
[Illustration: And the next instant she was in his arms]
“And all you had to do was to say yes to him?”
“That would have been much,” absently replied the reader, turning a page.
“‘Twould have been little!–to make him rich!–and us also!”
“Not us,” said the abstracted girl; “me.” Something in the missive caused her brows to knit.
“And still you trifle!” nagged the grandam, “while I starve! And while at any instant may arrive–humph–that other fool.”
Even this did not draw the reader’s glance. “No.” she responded. “He cannot. Irby and Charlie lied to us. He is already here.” She was re-reading.
The grandmother stared, tossed a hand and moved across the floor. As she passed near the girl’s slippered foot it darted out, tripped her and would have sent her headlong, but she caught by the lamp table. Flora smiled with a strange whiteness round the lips. Madame righted the shaken lamp, quietly asking, “Did you do that–h-m-m–for hate of the lady, or, eh, the ladies’ man?”
“The latter,” said the reabsorbed girl.
“Strange,” sighed the other, “how we can have–at the same time–for the same one–both feelings.”
But Flora’s ears were closed. “Well,” she audibly mused, “he’ll get a recall.”
“Even if it must be forged?” twittered the dame.
XXXVIII
ANNA’S OLD JEWELS
A Reporters’ heaven, the Bazaar. So on its opening night Hilary named it to Flora.
“A faerye realm,” the scribes themselves itemed it; “myriad lights–broad staircases gracef’y asc’d’g–ravish’g perfumes–met our gaze–garlandries of laurel and magn’a–prom’d’g from room to room–met our gaze–directed by masters of cerem’y in Conf’te G’d’s unif’m–here turn’g to the right–fair women and brave men–carried thither by the dense throng–music with its volup’s swell–met our gaze–again descend’g–arriv’g at din’g-hall–new scene of ench’t bursts–refr’t tables–enarched with ev’gr’s and decked with labarums and burgees–thence your way lies through–costly volumes and shimm’g bijoutries–met our gaze!”
It was Kincaid who saw their laborious office in this flippant light, and so presented it to Anna that she laughed till she wept; laughing was now so easy. But when they saw one of the pencillers writing awkwardly with his left hand, aided by half a right arm in a pinned-up sleeve, her mirth had a sudden check. Yet presently it became a proud thrill, as the poor boy glowed with delight while Hilary stood and talked with him of the fearful Virginia day on which that ruin had befallen him at Hilary’s own side in Kincaid’s Battery, and then brought him to converse with her. This incident may account for the fervor with which a next morning’s report extolled the wonders of the “fair chairman’s” administrative skill and the matchless and most opportune executive supervision of Captain Hilary Kincaid. Flora read it with interest.
With interest of a different kind she read in a later issue another passage, handed her by the grandmother with the remark, “to warn you, my dear.” The matter was a frothy bit of tragical romancing, purporting to have been gathered from two detectives out of their own experience of a year or so before, about a gift made to the Bazaar by Captain Kincaid, which had–“met our gaze jealously guarded under glass amid a brilliant collection of reliques, jewels, and bric-a-brac; a large, evil-looking knife still caked with the mud of the deadly affray, but bearing legibly in Italian on its blade the inscription, ‘He who gets me in his body never need take a medicine,’ and with a hilt and scabbard encrusted with gems.”
Now, one of the things that made Madame Valcour good company among gentlewomen was her authoritative knowledge of precious stones. So when Flora finished reading and looked up, and the grandmother faintly smiled and shook her head, both understood.
“Paste?”
“Mostly.”
“And the rest–not worth–?”
“Your stealing,” simpered the connoisseur, and, reading, herself, added meditatively, “I should hate anyhow, for you to have that thing. The devil would be always at your ear.”
“Whispering–what?”
The grandmother shrugged: “That depends. I look to see you rise, yet, to some crime of dignity; something really tragic and Italian. Whereas at present–” she pursed her lips and shrugged again.
The girl blandly laughed: “You venerable ingrate!”
At the Bazaar that evening, when Charlie and grandma and the crowd were gone, Flora handled the unlovely curiosity. She and Irby had seen Hilary and Anna and the Hyde & Goodrich man on guard just there draw near the glass case where it lay “like a snake on a log,” as Charlie had said, take it in their hands and talk of it. The jeweller was expressing confidentially a belief that it had once been set with real stones, and Hilary was privately having a sudden happy thought, when Flora and Adolphe came up only in time to hear the goldsmith’s statement of its present poor value.
“But surely,” said Kincaid, “this old jewellery lying all about it here–.”
“That? that’s the costliest gift in the Bazaar!”
Irby inquired whose it was, Anna called it anonymous, and Flora, divining that the giver was Anna, felt herself outrageously robbed. As the knife was being laid back in place she recalled, with odd interest, her grandmother’s mention of the devil, and remembered a time or two when for a moment she had keenly longed for some such bit of steel; something much more slender, maybe, and better fitting a dainty hand, but quite as long and sharp. A wave from this thought may have prompted Anna’s request that the thing be brought forth again and Flora allowed to finger it; but while this was being done Flora’s main concern was to note how the jeweller worked the hidden spring by which he opened the glass case. As she finally gave up the weapon: “Thank you,” she sweetly said to both Anna and Hilary, but with a meaning reserved to herself.
You may remember how once she had gone feeling and prying along the fair woodwork of these rooms for any secret of construction it might hold. Lately, when the house began to fill with secretable things of large money value, she had done this again, and this time, in one side of a deep chimney-breast, had actually found a most innocent-looking panel which she fancied to be kept from sliding only by its paint. Now while she said her sweet thanks to Anna and Hilary she could almost believe in fairies, the panel was so near the store of old jewels. With the knife she might free the panel, and behind the panel hide the jewels till their scent grew cold, to make them her bank account when all the banks should be broken, let the city fall or stand. No one need ever notice, so many were parting with their gems perforce, so many buying them as a form of asset convenient for flight. So good-night, old dagger and jewels; see you again, but don’t overdo your limited importance. Of the weapon Flora had further learned that it was given not to the Bazaar but to Anna, and of the jewels that they were not in that lottery of everything, with which the affair was to end and the proceeds of whose tickets were pouring in upon Anna, acting treasurer, the treasurer being ill.
Tormentingly in Hilary’s way was this Lottery and Bazaar. Even from Anna, sometimes especially from Anna, he could not understand why certain things must not be told or certain things could not be done until this Bazaar–etc. Why, at any hour he might be recalled! Yes, Anna saw that–through very moist eyes. True, also, she admitted, Beauregard and Johnston _might_ fail to hold off Buell and Grant; and true, as well, New Orleans _could_ fall, and might be sacked. It was while confessing this that with eyes down and bosom heaving she accepted the old Italian knife. Certainly unless the pooh-poohing Mandeville was wrong, who declared the forts down the river impregnable and Beauregard, on the Tennessee, invincible, flight (into the Confederacy) was safest–but–the Bazaar first, flight afterward. “We women,” she said, rising close before him with both hands in his, “must stand by _our_ guns. We’ve no more right”–it was difficult to talk while he kissed her fingers and pressed her palms to his gray breast–“no more right–to be cowards–than you men.”
Her touch brought back his lighter mood and he told the happy thought–project–which had come to him while they talked with the jeweller. He could himself “do the job,” he said, “roughly but well enough.” Anna smiled at the fanciful scheme. Yet–yes, its oddity was in its favor. So many such devices were succeeding, some of them to the vast advantage of the Southern cause.
When Flora the next evening stole a passing glance at the ugly trinket in its place she was pleased to note how well it retained its soilure of clay. For she had that day used it to free the panel, behind which she had found a small recess so fitted to her want that she had only to replace panel and tool and await some chance in the closing hours of the show. Pleased she was, too, to observe that the old jewels lay in a careless heap. Now to conceal all interest and to divert all eyes, even grandmama’s! Thus, however, night after night an odd fact eluded her: That Anna and her hero, always singly, and themselves careful to lure others away, glimpsed that disordered look of the gems and unmolested air of the knife with a content as purposeful as her own. Which fact meant, when came the final evening, that at last every sham jewel in the knife’s sheath had exchanged places with a real one from the loose heap, while, nestling between two layers of the sheath’s material, reposed, payable to bearer, a check on London for thousands of pounds sterling. Very proud was Anna of her lover’s tremendous versatility and craftsmanship.
XXXIX
TIGHT PINCH
From Camp Villere, close below small Camp Callender, one more last regiment–Creoles–was to have gone that afternoon to the Jackson Railroad Station and take train to join their Creole Beauregard for the defence of their own New Orleans.
More than a day’s and a night’s journey away was “Corinth,” the village around which he had gathered his forces, but every New Orleans man and boy among them knew, and every mother and sister here in New Orleans knew, that as much with those men and boys as with any one anywhere, lay the defence and deliverance of this dear Crescent City. With Grant swept back from the Tennessee, and the gunboats that threatened Island Ten and Memphis sunk, blown up; or driven back into the Ohio, New Orleans, they believed, could jeer at Farragut down at the Passes and at Butler out on horrid Ship Island. “And so can Mobile,” said the Callenders to the Valcours.
“The fortunes of our two cities are one!” cried Constance, and the smiling Valcours were inwardly glad to assent, believing New Orleans doomed, and remembering their Mobile home burned for the defence of the two cities of one fortune.
However, the Camp Villere regiment had not got off, but would move at midnight. On the train with them Hilary was sending recruits to the battery, younger brothers of those who had gone the year before. He had expected to conduct, not send, them, but important work justified–as Anna told Flora–his lingering until his uncle should bid him come. Which bidding Irby might easily have incited, by telegraph, had Flora let him. But Flora’s heart was too hopelessly entangled to release Hilary even for the gain of separating him from Anna; and because it was so entangled (and with her power to plot caught in the tangle), she was learning to hate with a distemper of passion that awed even herself.
“But I must clear out mighty soon,” said Hilary that evening to Greenleaf, whose exchange he had procured at last and, rather rashly, was taking him to Callender House to say good-by. They talked of Anna. Greenleaf knew the paramount secret; had bravely given his friend a hand on it the day he was told. Now Hilary said he had been begging her again for practical steps, and the manly loser commended.
“But think of that from me, Fred! who one year ago–you know how I talked–about Steve, for instance. Shame!–how reckless war’s made us. Here we are, by millions, in a perpetual crash of victory and calamity, and yet–take me for an example–in spite of me my one devouring anxiety–that wakes me up in the night and gives me dreams in the day–is how to get her before this next battle get’s me. Yes, the instant I’m ordered I go, and if I’m not ordered soon I go anyhow. I wouldn’t have my boys”–etc.
And still the prison-blanched Greenleaf approved. But the next revelation reddened his brow: Anna, Hilary said, had at last “come round–knuckled down! Yes, sir-ee, cav-ed in!” and this evening, after the Bazaar, to a few younger sisters of the battery whom she would ask to linger for a last waltz with their young heroes, she would announce her engagement and her purpose to be wed in a thrillingly short time.
The two men found the Bazaar so amusingly collapsed that, as Hilary said, you could spell it with a small b. A stream of vehicles coming and going had about emptied the house and grounds. No sentries saluted, no music chimed. In the drawing-rooms the brass gun valiantly held its ground, but one or two domestics clearing litter from the floors seemed quite alone there, and some gay visitors who still tarried in the library across the hall were hardly enough to crowd it. “Good,” said Hilary beside the field-piece. “You wait here and I’ll bring the Callenders as they can come.”
But while he went for them whom should Greenleaf light upon around a corner of the panelled chimney-breast but that secret lover of the Union and all its defenders, Mademoiselle Valcour. Her furtive cordiality was charming as she hurriedly gave and withdrew a hand in joy for his liberation.
“Taking breath out of the social rapids?” he softly inquired.
“Ah, more! ‘Tis from that deluge of–“
He understood her emotional gesture. It meant that deluge of disloyalty–rebellion–there across the hall, and all through this turbulent city and land. But it meant, too, that they must not be seen to parley alone, and he had turned away, when Miranda, to Flora’s disgust, tripped in upon them with her nose in full wrinkle, archly surprised to see Flora here, and proposing to hale both into the general throng to applaud Anna’s forthcoming “proclamation!”
Greenleaf de trop? Ah, nay! not if he could keep the old Greenleaf poise! and without words her merry nose added that his presence would only give happier point to what every one regarded as a great Confederate victory. At a subtle sign from Flora the hostess and he went, expecting her to follow.
But Flora was in a perilous strait. Surprised by Hilary’s voice, with the panel open and the knife laid momentarily in the recess that both hands might bring the jewels from the case, she had just closed the opening with the dagger inside when Greenleaf confronted her. Now, in this last instant of opportunity at his and Miranda’s back, should she only replace the weapon or still dare the theft? At any rate the panel must be reopened. But when she would have slid it her dainty fingers failed, failed, failed until a cold damp came to her brow and she trembled. Yet saunteringly she stepped to the show-case, glancing airily about. The servants had gone. She glided back, but turned to meet another footfall, possibly Kincaid’s, and felt her anger rise against her will as she confronted only the inadequate Irby. A sudden purpose filled her, and before he could speak:
“Go!” she said, “telegraph your uncle! instantly!”
“I’ve done so.”
Her anger mutinied again: “Without consult’–! And since when?”
“This morning.”
She winced yet smiled: “And still–your cousin–he’s receive’ no order?” Her fingers tingled to maim some one–this dolt–anybody! Her eyes sweetened.
Irby spoke: “The order has come, but–“
“What! you have not given it?”
“Flora, it includes me! Ah, for one more evening with you I am risking–“
Her look grew fond though she made a gesture of despair: “Oh, short-sighted! Go, give it him! Go!”
Across the hall a prolonged carol of acclamation, confabulation, laughter, and cries of “Ah-r, indeed!” told that Anna’s word was out. “What difference,” Irby lingered to ask, “can an hour or two between trains–?”
But the throng was upon them. “We don’t know!” cried Flora. “Give it him! We don’t know!” and barely had time herself to force a light laugh when here were Charlie and Victorine, Hilary, Anna, Miranda, Madame, Constance, Mandeville, and twenty others.
“Fred!” called Hilary. His roaming look found the gray detective: “Where’s Captain Greenleaf?”
“Gone.”
“With never a word of good-by? Oh, bless my soul, he _did_ say good-by!” There was a general laugh. “But this won’t do. It’s not safe for him–“
The gray man gently explained that his younger associate was with Greenleaf as bodyguard. The music of harp and violins broke out and dancers swept round the brass gun and up and down the floors.
XL
THE LICENSE, THE DAGGER
Hilary had bent an arm around Anna when Flora called his name. Irby handed him the order. A glance made it clear. Its reader cast a wide look over the heads of the dancers and lifting the missive high beckoned with it to Mandeville. Then he looked for some one else: “Charlie!”
“Out on the veranda,” said a passing dancer.
“Send him here!” The commander’s eye came back to Irby: “Old man, how long have you had this?”
“About an hour.”
“Oh, my stars, Adolphe, you should have told me!”
It was a fair sight, though maddening to Flora yonder by the glass case, to see the two cousins standing eye to eye, Hilary’s brow dark with splendid concern while without a glance at Anna he passed her the despatch and she read it.
“Steve,” he said, as the Mandeville pair pressed up, “look at that! boots-and-saddles! now! to-night! for you and Adolphe and me! Yes, Charlie, and you; go, get your things and put Jerry on the train with mine.”
The boy’s partner was Victorine. Before she could gasp he had kissed her. Amid a laugh that stopped half the dance he waved one farewell to sister, grandmother and all and sprang away. “Dance on, fellows,” called Hilary, “this means only that I’m going with you.” The lads cheered and the dance revived.
Their captain turned: “Miss Flora, I promised your brother he should go whenever–“
“But me al-_so_ you promised!” she interrupted, and a fair sight also, grievous to Irby, startling to Anna, were this pair, standing eye to eye.
“Yes,” replied Kincaid, “and I’ll keep my word. In any extremity you shall come to him.”
“As likewise my wive to me!” said the swelling Mandeville, openly caressing the tearful Constance. “Wive to ‘usband,” he declaimed, “sizter to brother–” But his audience was lost. Hilary was speaking softly to Anna. She was very pale. The throng drew away. You could see that he was asking if she only could in no extremity come to him. His words were inaudible, but any one who had ever loved could read them. And now evidently he proposed something. There was ardor in his eye–ardor and enterprise. She murmured a response. He snatched out his watch.
“_Just_ time,” he was heard to say, “time enough by soldier’s measure!” His speech grew plainer: “The law’s right for me to call and for you to come, that’s all we want. What frightens you?”
“Nothing,” she said, and smiled. “I only feared there wasn’t time.”
The lover faced his cousin so abruptly that all started and laughed, while Anna turned to her kindred, as red as a rose. “Adolphe,” cried he, “I’m going for my marriage license. While I’m getting it, will you–?”
Irby went redder than Anna. “You can’t get it at this hour!” he said. His eyes sought Flora, but she was hurriedly conferring with her grandmother.
Hilary laughed: “You’ll see. I fixed all that a week ago. Will you get the minister?”
“Why, Hilary, this is–“
“Yass!” piped Madame, “he’ll obtain him!”
The plaudits of the dancers, who once more had stopped, were loud. Flora’s glance went over to Irby, and he said, “Why, yes, Hilary, if you–why, of course I will.” There was more applause.
“Steve,” said Hilary, “some one must go with me to the clerk’s office to–“
“To vouch you!” broke in the aide-de-camp. “That will be Steve Mandeville!” Constance sublimely approved. As the three Callenders moved to leave the room one way and the three captains another, Anna seized the hands of Flora and her grandmother.
“You’ll keep the dance going?” she solicited, and they said they would. Flora gave her a glowing embrace, and as Irby strode by murmured to him.
“Put your watch back half an hour.”
In such disordered days social liberty was large. When the detective, after the Callenders were gone up-stairs and the captains had galloped away, truthfully told Miss Valcour that his only object in tarrying here was to see the love-knot tied, she heard him affably, though inwardly in flames of yearning to see him depart. She burned to see him go because she believed him, and also because there in the show-case still lay the loosely heaped counterfeit of the booty whose reality she had already ignorantly taken and stowed away.
What should she do? Here was grandma, better aid than forty Irbys; but with both phases of her problem to deal with at once–how to trip headlong this wild matrimonial leap and how to seize this treasure by whose means she might leave Anna in a fallen city and follow Hilary to the war–she was at the end of her daintiest wits. She talked on with the gray man, for that kept him from the show-case. In an air full of harmonies and prattle, of fluttering draperies, gliding feet, undulating shoulders, twinkling lights, gallantry, fans, and perfume, she dazzled him with her approval when he enlarged on the merits of Kincaid and when he pledged all his powers of invention to speed the bridal. Frantic to think what better to do, she waltzed with him, while he described the colonel of the departing regiment as such a martinet that to ask him to delay his going would only hasten it; waltzed on when she saw her grandmother discover the knife’s absence and telegraph her a look of contemptuous wonder. But ah, how time was flying! Even now Kincaid must be returning hitherward, licensed!
The rapturous music somewhat soothed her frenzy, even helped her thought, and in a thirst for all it could give she had her partner swing her into the wide hall whence it came and where also Hilary must first reappear. Twice through its length they had swept, when Anna, in altered dress, came swiftly down the stair with Constance protestingly at her side. The two were speaking anxiously together as if a choice of nuptial adornments (for Constance bore a box that might have held the old jewels) had suddenly brought to mind a forgotten responsibility. As they pressed into the drawing-rooms the two dancers floated after them by another door.
When presently Flora halted beside the gun and fanned while the dance throbbed on, the two sisters stood a few steps away behind the opened show-case, talking with her grandmother and furtively eyed by a few bystanders. They had missed the dagger. Strangely disregarded by Anna, but to Flora’s secret dismay and rage, Constance, as she talked, was dropping from her doubled hands into the casket the last of the gems. Now she shut the box and laid it in Anna’s careless arms.
Leaving the gray man by the gun, Flora sprang near. Anna was enduring, with distracted smiles, the eager reasonings of Madame and Constance that the vanished trinket was but borrowed; a thief would have taken the _jewels_, they argued; but as Flora would have joined in, every line of Anna’s face suddenly confided to her a consternation whose cause the silenced Flora instantly mistook. “Ah, if you knew–!” Anna began, but ceased as if the lost relic stood for something incommunicable even to nearest and dearest.
“They’ve sworn their love on it!” was the thought of Flora and the detective in the same instant. It filled her veins with fury, yet her response was gentle and meditative. “To me,” she said, “it seemed such a good-for-nothing that even if I saw it is gone, me, I think I wouldn’ have take’ notice.” All at once she brightened: “Anna! without a doubt! without a doubt Captain Kincaid he has it!” About to add a caress, she was startled from it by a masculine voice that gayly echoed out in the hall:
“Without a doubt!”
The dance ceased and first the short, round body of Mandeville and then the tall form of Hilary Kincaid pushed into the room. “Without a doubt!” repeated Hilary, while Mandeville asked right, asked left, for Adolphe. “Without a doubt,” persisted the lover, “Captain Kincaid he has it!” and proffered Anna the law’s warrant for their marriage.
She pushed it away. Her words were so low that but few could hear. “The dagger!” she said. “Haven’t you got the dagger? You haven’t got it?”
XLI
FOR AN EMERGENCY
Hilary stared, reddened as she paled, and with a slow smile shook his head. She murmured again:
“It’s lost! the dagger! with all–“
“Why,–why, Miss Anna,”–his smile grew playful, but his thought ran back to the exploded powder-mill, to the old inventor, to Flora in those days, the deported schoolmistress’s gold still unpaid to him, the jeweller and the exchanged gems, the Sterling bill–“Why, Miss Anna! how do you mean, lost?”
“Taken! gone! and by my fault! I–_I forgot all about it_.”
He laughed aloud and around: “Pshaw! Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is some joke you’re”–he glanced toward the show-case–
“No,” insisted Anna, “it’s taken! Here are the other things.” She displayed the box.
Madame, very angry, smiled from it to Flora: “Oh, thou love’s fool! not to steal _that_ and leave the knife, with which, luckily! now that you have it, you dare not strike!”
All this the subtle girl read in the ancient lady’s one small “ahem!” and for reply, in some even more unvoiced way, warned her against the eye of the gray man near the gun. To avoid whose scrutiny herself she returned sociably to his side.
“The other things!” scoffed meantime the gay Hilary, catching up Anna’s word. “No! if you please, _here_ is the only other thing!” and boyishly flaunted the license at Mandeville and all the Callenders, the throng merrily approving. His eye, falling upon the detective, kindled joyfully: “Oh, you godsend! _You_ hunt up the lost frog-sticker, will you–while we–?” He flourished the document again and the gray man replied with a cordial nod. Kincaid waved thanks and glanced round. “Adolphe!” he called. “Steve, where in the dickens–?”
Whether he so designed it or not, the contrast between his levity and Anna’s agitation convinced Flora, Madame, all, that the weapon’s only value to the lovers was sentimental. “Or religious,” thought the detective, whose adjectives could be as inaccurate as his divinations. While he conjectured, Anna spoke once more to Hilary. Her vehement words were too soft for any ear save his, but their tenor was so visible, her distress so passionate and her firmness of resolve so evident that every mere beholder fell back, letting the Callender-Valcour group, with Steve and the gentle detective, press closer. With none of them, nor yet with Hilary, was there anything to argue; their plight seemed to her hopeless. For them to marry, for her to default, and for him to fly, all in one mad hour–one whirlwind of incident–“It cannot be!” was all she could say, to sister, to stepmother, to Flora, to Hilary again: “We cannot do it! I will not!–till that lost thing is found!”
With keen sympathy the detective, in the pack, enjoyed the play of Hilary’s face, where martial animation strove inspiringly against a torture of dashed hopes. Glancing aside to Flora’s as she turned from Anna, he caught there no sign of the storm of joy which had suddenly burst in her bosom; but for fear he might, and to break across his insight and reckoning, she addressed him.
“Anna she don’t give any _reason_” she exclaimed. “Ask her, you, the reason!”
“‘Tain’t reason at all,” he softly responded, “it’s superstition. But hold on. Watch me.” He gestured for the lover’s attention and their eyes met. It made a number laugh, to see Hilary’s stare gradually go senseless and then blaze with intelligence. Suddenly, joyfully, with every eye following his finger, he pointed into the gray man’s face:
“Smellemout, you’ve got it!”
The man shook his head for denial, and his kindly twinkle commanded the belief of all. Not a glint in it showed that his next response, however well-meant, was to be a lie.
“Then Ketchem has it!” cried Kincaid.
The silent man let his smile mean yes, and the alert company applauded. “Go h-on with the weddingg!” ordered the superior Mandeville.
“Where’s Adolphe?” cried Kincaid, and “On with the wedding!” clamored the lads of the battery, while Anna stood gazing on the gray man and wondering why she had not guessed this very thing.
“Yes,” he quietly said to her, “it’s all right. You’ll have it back to-morrow. ‘Twon’t cut love if you don’t.”
At that the gay din redoubled, but Flora, with the little grandmother vainly gripping her arms, flashed between the two.
“Anna!” she cried, “I don’t bil-ieve!”
Whether it was true or false Mandeville cared nothing, but–“Yes, ’tis true!” he cried in Flora’s face, and then to the detective–“Doubtlezz to phot-ograph it that’s all you want!”
The detective said little, but Anna assured Flora that was all. “He wants to show it at the trial!”
“Listen!” said Flora.
“Here’s Captain Irby!” cried Mrs. Callender–Constance–half a dozen, but–
“Listen!” repeated Flora, and across the curtained veranda and in at the open windows, under the general clamor, came a soft palpitating rumble. Did Hilary hear it, too? He was calling:
“Adolphe, where’s your man–the minister? Where in the–three parishes–?” and others were echoing, “The minister! where’s the minister?”
Had they also caught the sound?
“Isn’t he here?” asked Irby. He drew his watch.
“Half-hour slow!” cried Mandeville, reading it.
“But have you heard noth–?”
“Nothingg!” roared Mandeville.
“Where’d you leave him?” sharply asked Kincaid.
His cousin put on great dignity: “At his door, my dear sir, waiting for the cab I sent him.”
“Oh, sent!” cried half the group. “Steve,” called Kincaid, “your horse is fresh–“
“But, alas, without wings!” wailed the Creole, caught Hilary’s shoulder and struck a harkening pose.
“Too late!” moaned Flora to the detective, Madame to Constance and Miranda, and the battery lads to their girls, from whose hands they began to wring wild good-byes as a peal of fifes and drums heralded the oncome of the departing regiment.
Thus Charlie Valcour found the company as suddenly he reappeared in it, pushing in to the main group where his leader stood eagerly engaged with Anna.
“All right, Captain!” He saluted: “All done!” But a fierce anxiety was on his brow and he gave no heed to Hilary’s dismissing thanks: “Captain, what’s ‘too late’?” He turned, scowling, to his sister: “What are we too late for, Flo? Good God! not the wedding? Not your wedding, Miss Anna? It’s _not_ too late. By Jove, it sha’n’t be too late.”
All the boyish lawlessness of his nature rose into his eyes, and a boy’s tears with it. “The minister!” he retorted to Constance and his grandmother, “the minister be–Oh, Captain, don’t wait for him! Have the thing without a minister!”
The whole room was laughing, Hilary loudest, but the youth’s voice prevailed. “It’ll hold good!” He turned upon the detective: “Won’t it?”
A merry nod was the reply, with cries of “Yes,” “Yes,” from the battery boys, and he clamored on:
“Why, there’s a kind of people–“
“Quakers!” sang out some one.
“Yes, the Quakers! Don’t they do it all the time! Of course they do!” With a smile in his wet eyes the lad wheeled upon Victorine: “Oh, by S’n’ Peter! if that was the only–“
But the small, compelling hand of the detective faced him round again and with a sudden swell of the general laugh he laughed too. “He’s trying to behave like Captain Kincaid,” one battery sister tried to tell another, whose attention was on a more interesting matter.
“Here!” the gray man was amiably saying to Charlie. “It’s your advice that’s too late. Look.”
Before he had half spoken a hush so complete had fallen on the company that while every eye sought Hilary and Anna every ear was aware that out on the levee road the passing drums had ceased and the brass–as if purposely to taunt the theatrical spirit of Flora–had struck up The Ladies’ Man. With military curtness Kincaid was addressing the score or so of new cannoneers:
“Corporal Valcour, this squad–no, keep your partners, but others please stand to the right and left–these men are under your command. When I presently send you from here you’ll take them at a double-quick and close up with that regiment. I’ll be at the train when you reach it. Captain Mandeville,”–he turned to the married pair, who were hurriedly scanning the license Miranda had just handed them,–“I adjure you as a true and faithful citizen and soldier, and you, madam, as well, to testify to us, all, whether that is or is not the license of court for the marriage of Anna Callender to Hilary Kincaid.”
“It is!” eagerly proclaimed the pair.
“Hand it, please, to Charlie. Corporal, you and your men look it over.”
“And now–” His eyes swept the throng. Anna’s hand, trembling but ready, rose shoulder-high in his. He noted the varied expressions of face among the family servants hurriedly gathering in the doors, and the beautiful amaze of Flora, so genuine yet so well acted. Radiantly he met the flushed gaze of his speechless cousin. “If any one alive,” he cried, “knows any cause why this thing should not be, let him now speak or forever hereafter hold his peace.” He paused. Constance handed something to her husband.
“Oh, go on,” murmured Charlie, and many smiled.
“Soldiers!” resumed the lover, “this fair godmother of your flag agrees that for all we two want just now Kincaid’s Battery is minister enough. For all we want is–” Cheers stopped him.
“The prayer-book!” put in Mandeville, pushing it at him. The boys harkened again.
“No,” said Kincaid, “time’s too short. All we want is to bind ourselves, before Heaven and all mankind, in holy wedlock, for better, or worse, till death us do part. And this we here do in sight of you all, and in the name and sight and fear of God.” He dropped his glance to Anna’s: “Say Amen.”
“Amen,” said Anna. At the same moment in one of the doors stood a courier.
“All right!” called Hilary to him. “Tell your colonel we’re coming! Just a second more, Captain Irby, if you please. Soldiers!–I, Hilary, take thee, Anna, to be my lawful wedded wife. And you–“
“I, Anna,” she softly broke in, “take thee, Hilary, to be my–” She spoke the matter through, but he had not waited.
“Therefore!” he cried, “you men of Kincaid’s Battery–and you, sir,–and you,”–nodding right and left to Mandeville and the detective,–“on this our solemn pledge to supply as soon as ever we can all form of law and social usage here omitted which can more fully solemnize this union–do now–“
Up went the detective’s hand and then Mandeville’s and all the boys’, and all together said:
“Pronounce you man and wife.”
“Go!” instantly rang Kincaid to Charlie, and in a sudden flutter of gauzes and clink of trappings, with wringing of soft fingers by hard ones, and in a tender clamor of bass and treble voices, away sprang every cannoneer to knapsacks and sabres in the hall, and down the outer stair into ranks and off under the stars at double-quick. Sisters of the battery, gliding out to the veranda rail, faintly saw and heard them a precious moment longer as they sped up the dusty road. Then Irby stepped quickly out, ran down the steps, mounted and galloped. A far rumble of wheels told the coming of two omnibuses chartered to bear the dancers all, with the Valcours and the detective, to their homes. Now out to the steps came Mandeville. His wife was with him and the maidens kindly went in. There the detective joined them. At a hall door Hilary was parting with Madame, Flora, Miranda. Anna was near him with Flora’s arm about her in melting fondness. Now Constance rejoined the five, and now Hilary and Anna left the other four and passed slowly out to the garden stair alone.
Beneath them there, with welcoming notes, his lone horse trampled about the hitching-rail. Dropping his cap the master folded the bride’s hands in his and pressed on them a long kiss. The pair looked deeply into each other’s eyes. Her brow drooped and he laid a kiss on it also. “Now you must go,” she murmured.
“My own beloved!” was his response. “My soul’s mate!” He tried to draw her, but she held back.
“You must go,” she repeated.
“Yes! kiss me and I fly.” He tried once more to draw her close, but still in vain.
“No, dearest,” she whispered, and trembled. Yet she clutched his imprisoning fingers and kissed them. He hugged her hands to his breast.
“Oh, Hilary,” she added, “I wish I could! But–don’t you know why I can’t? Don’t you see?”
“No, my treasure, not any more. Why, Anna, you’re Anna Kincaid now. You’re my wed’–“
Her start of distress stopped him short. “Don’t call me that,–my–my own,” she faltered.
“But if you are that–?”
“Oh, I am! thank God, I am! But don’t name the name. It’s too fearfully holy. We’re married for an emergency, love, an awful crisis! which hasn’t come to you yet, and may not come at all. When it does, so will I! in that name! and you shall call me by it!”
“Ah, if then you can come! But what do we know?”
“We know in whom we trust, Hilary; must, must, must trust, as we trust and must trust each other.”
Still hanging to his hands she pushed them off at arm’s-length: “Oh, my Hilary, my hero, my love, my life, my commander, go!” And yet she clung. She drew his fingers close down again and covered them with kisses, while twice, thrice, in solemn adoration, he laid his lips upon her heavy hair. Suddenly the two looked up. The omnibuses were here in the grove.
Here too was the old coachman, with the soldier’s horse. The vehicles jogged near and halted. A troop of girls, with Flora, tripped out. And still, in their full view, with Flora closest, the bride’s hands held the bridegroom’s fast. He had neither the strength to pull free nor the wit to understand.
“What is it?” he softly asked, as the staring men waited and the girls about Flora hung back.
“Don’t you know?” murmured Anna. “Don’t you see–the–the difference?”
All at once he saw! Throwing away her hands he caught her head between his big palms. Her arms flew round his neck, her lips went to his, and for three heart-throbs they clung like bee and flower. Then he sprang down the stair, swung into the saddle, and fled after his men.
XLII
“VICTORY! I HEARD IT AS PL’–“
The last few days of March and first three or four of April, since the battery boys and the three captains had gone, were as full of frightened and angry questions as the air is of bees around a shaken hive.
So Anna had foreboded, yet it was not so for the causes she had in mind; not one fierce hum asked another where the bazaar’s money was. That earlier bazaar, in the St. Louis Hotel, had taken six weeks to report its results, and now, with everybody distracted by a swarm and buzz of far larger, livelier, hotter queries, the bazaar’s sponsors might report or not, as they chose. Meanwhile, was the city really in dire and shameful jeopardy, or was it as safe as the giddiest boasted? Looking farther away, over across Georgia to Fort Pulaski, so tremendously walled and armed, was the “invader” merely wasting lives, trying to take it? On North Carolina’s coast, where our priceless blockade-runners plied, had Newbern, as so stubbornly rumored, and had Beaufort, already fallen, or had they really not? Had the _Virginia_ not sunk the _Monitor_ and scattered the Northern fleets? Was it _not_ by France, after all (asked the Creoles), but only by Paraguay that the Confederacy had been “reco’nize'”? Was there _no_ truth in the joyous report that McClellan had vanished from Yorktown peninsula? _Was_ the loss of Cumberland Gap a trivial matter, and did it in fact not cut in two our great strategic front? Up yonder at Corinth, our “new and far better” base, was Sidney Johnston an “imbecile,” a “coward,” a “traitor”? or was he not rather an unparagoned strategist who, having at last “lured the presumptuous foe” into his toils, was now, with Beauregard, notwithstanding Beauregard’s protracted illness, about to make the “one fell swoop” of our complete deliverance? And after the swoop and its joy and its glory, when Johnnie should come marching home, whose Johnnies, and how many, would never return? As to your past-and-gone bazaar, law, honey–!
So, as to that item, in all the wild-eyed city shaking with its ague of anxieties only Anna was troubled when day after day no detective came back with the old mud-caked dagger and now both were away on some quite alien matter, no one could say where. She alone was troubled, for she alone knew it was the bazaar’s proceeds which had disappeared. Of what avail to tell even Miranda, Connie, or Flora if they must not tell others? It would only bind three more souls on the rack. “Vanished with the dagger!” That would be all they could gasp, first amazed, then scandalized, at a scheme of safe-keeping so fantastically reckless; reckless and fantastical as her so-called marriage. Yes, they would be as scandalized as they would have been charmed had the scheme prospered. And then they would blame not her but Hilary. Blame him in idle fear of a calamity that was not going to befall!
She might have told that sternest, kindest, wisest of friends, Doctor Sevier. As the family’s trustee he might yet have to be told. But on that night of fantastical recklessness he had been away, himself at Corinth to show them there how to have vastly better hospitals, and to prescribe for his old friend Beauregard. He had got back but yesterday. Or she might have told the gray detective, just to make him more careful, as Hilary, by letter, suggested. In part she had told him, through Flora; told him that to save that old curio she would risk her life. Surely, knowing that, he would safeguard it, in whatever hands, and return it the moment he could. Who ever heard of a detective not returning a thing the moment he could? Not Flora, _not_ yet Madame, they said. To be sure, thought Anna, those professional masters of delay, the photographers, might be more jewel-wise than trustworthy, but what photographer could ever be so insane as to rob a detective? So, rather ashamed of one small solicitude in this day of great ones, she urged her committees for final reports–which never came–and felt very wisely in writing her hero for his consent to things, and to assure him that at the worst her own part of the family estate would make everything good, the only harrowing question being how to keep Miranda and Connie from sharing the loss.
On the first Sunday evening in April Doctor Sevier took tea with the Callenders, self-invited, alone and firmly oblivious of his own tardy wedding-gift to Anna as it gleamed at him on the board. To any of a hundred hostesses he would have been a joy, to share with as many friends as he would consent to meet; for in the last week he had eaten “hog and hominy,” and sipped corn-meal coffee, in lofty colloquy with Sidney Johnston and his “big generals”; had talked confidentially with Polk, so lately his own bishop; had ridden through the miry streets of Corinth with all the New Orleans commanders of division or brigade–Gibson, Trudeau, Ruggles, Brodnax; out on the parapets, between the guns, had chatted with Hilary and his loved lieutenants; down among the tents and mess-fires had given his pale hand, with Spartan injunctions and all the home news, to George Gregory, Ned Ferry, Dick Smith, and others of Harper’s cavalry, and–circled round by Charlie Valcour, Sam Gibbs, Maxime, and scores of their comrades in Kincaid’s Battery–had seen once more their silken flag, so faded! and touched its sacred stains and tatters. Now at the tea table something led him to remark that here at home the stubborn illness of this battery sister for whom Anna was acting as treasurer had compelled him to send her away.
Timely topic: How to go into the country, and whither. The Callenders were as eager for all the facts and counsel he could give on it as if they were the “big generals” and his facts and counsel were as to the creeks, swamps, ridges, tangled ravines, few small clearings, and many roads and by-roads in the vast, thinly settled, small-farmed, rain-drenched forests between Corinth and the clay bluffs of the Tennessee. For now the Callenders also were to leave the city, as soon as they could be ready.
“Don’t wait till then,” crisply said the Doctor.
“We must wait till Nan winds up the bazaar.”
He thought not. In what bank had she its money?
When she said not in any he frowned. Whereupon she smilingly stammered that she was told the banks themselves were sending their treasure into the country, and that even ten days earlier, when some one wanted to turn a fund into its safest portable form, three banks had declined to give foreign exchange for it at any price.
“Hmm!” he mused. “Was that your, eh,–?”
“My husband, yes,” said Anna, so quietly that the sister and stepmother exulted in her. As quietly her eyes held the doctor’s, and his hers, while the colour mounted to her brow. He spoke:
“Still he got it into some good shape for you, the fund, did he not?” Then suddenly he clapped a hand to a breast pocket and stared: “He gave me a letter for you. Did I–? Ah, yes, I have your written thanks. Anna, I thoroughly approve what you and he have done.”
Constance and Miranda were overjoyed. He turned to them: “I told Hilary so up in camp. I told Steve. Yes, Anna, you were wise. You are wise. I’ve no doubt you’re doing wisely about that fund.”
It was hard for the wise one not to look guilty.
“Have you told anybody,” he continued, “in what form you have it, or where?”
“No!” put in the aggrieved Constance, “not even her blood kin!”
“Wise again. Best for all of you. Now just hang to the lucre. It comes too late to be of use here; this brave town will have to stand or fall without it. But it’s still good for Mobile, and Mobile saved may be New Orleans recovered.”
On a hint from the other women, and urged by their visitor, Anna brought the letter and read him several closely written pages on the strategic meaning of things. The zest with which he discussed the lines made her newly proud of their source.
“They’re so like his very word o’ mouth,” said he, “they bring him right back here among us. Yes, and the whole theatre of action with him. They draw it about us so closely and relate it all to us so vitally that it–“
“Seems,” broke in the delighted Constance, “as if we saw it all from the top of this house!”
The Doctor’s jaw set. Who likes phrases stuffed into his mouth? Yet presently he allowed himself to resume. It confirmed, he said, Beauregard’s word in his call for volunteers, that there, before Corinth, was the place to defend Louisiana. Soon he had regained his hueless ardor, and laid out the whole matter on the table for the inspiration of his three confiding auditors. Here at Chattanooga, so impregnably ours, issued Tennessee river and the Memphis and Charleston railroad from the mountain gateway between our eastern and western seats of war. Here they swept down into Alabama, passed from the state’s north-east to its north-west corner and parted company. Here the railway continued westward, here it crossed the Mobile and Ohio railroad at Corinth, here the Mississippi Central at Grand Junction, and pressed on to Memphis, our back-gate key of the Mississippi.
“In war,” said the Doctor, “rivers and railro’–“
“Are the veins and arteries of–oh, pardon!” The crime was Anna’s this time.
“Are the lines fought for,” resumed the speaker, “and wherever two or three of them join or cross you may look for a battle.” His long finger dropped again to the table. Back here in Alabama the Tennessee turned north to seek the Ohio, and here, just over the Mississippi state line, in Tennessee, some twenty miles north of Corinth, it became navigable for the Ohio’s steamboats–gunboats–transports–at a place called in the letter “Pittsburg Landing.”
Yes, now, between Hilary’s pages and the Doctor’s logic, with Hilary almost as actually present as the physician, the ladies saw why this great Memphis-Chattanooga fighting line was, not alone pictorially, but practically, right at hand! barely beyond sight and hearing or the feel of its tremor; a veritable back garden wall to them and their beloved city; as close as forts Jackson and St. Philip, her front gate. Yes, and–Anna ventured to point out and the Doctor grudgingly admitted–if the brave gray hosts along that back wall should ever–could ever–be borne back so far southward, westward, the last line would have to run from one to another of the Crescent City’s back doorsteps and doors; from Vicksburg, that is, eastward through Jackson, Mississippi’s capital, cross the state’s two north-and-south railways, and swing down through Alabama to Mobile on the Gulf. This, she silently perceived, was why the letter and the Doctor quite agreed that Connie, Miranda, and she ought to find their haven somewhere within the dim region between New Orleans and those three small satellite cities; not near any two railways, yet close enough to a single one for them to get news, public or personal, in time to act on it.
At leave-taking came the guest’s general summing up of fears and faiths. All his hope for New Orleans, he said, was in the forts down at the Passes. Should they fall the city could not stand. But amid their illimitable sea marshes and their impenetrable swamp forests, chin-deep in the floods of broken levees, he truly believed, they would hold out. Let them do so only till the first hot breath of real Delta summer should bring typhoid, breakbone, yellow, and swamp fevers, the last by all odds the worst, and Butler’s unacclimated troops would have to reembark for home pell-mell or die on Ship Island like poisoned fish. So much for the front gate. For the back gate, Corinth, which just now seemed–the speaker harkened.
“Seemed,” he resumed, “so much more like the front–listen!” There came a far, childish call.
“An extra,” laughed Constance. “Steve says we issue one every time he brushes his uniform.”
“But, Con,” argued Anna, “an extra on Sunday evening, brought away down here–” The call piped nearer.
“Victory!” echoed Constance. “I heard it as pl’–“
“Beauregard! Tennessee!” exclaimed both sisters. They flew to the veranda, the other two following. Down in the gate could be seen the old coachman, already waiting to buy the paper. Constance called to him their warm approval. “I thought,” murmured Miranda, “that Beauregard was in Miss’–“
Anna touched her, and the cry came again: “Great victory–!” Yes, yes, but by whom, and where? Johnston? Corinth? “Great victory at–!” Where? Where, did he say? The word came again, and now again, but still it was tauntingly vague. Anna’s ear seemed best, yet even she could say only, “I never heard of such a place–out of the bible. It sounds like–Shiloh.”
Shiloh it was. At a table lamp indoors the Doctor bent over the fresh print. “It’s true,” he affirmed. “It’s Beauregard’s own despatch. ‘A complete victory,’ he says. ‘Driving the enemy’–” The reader ceased and stared at the page. “Why, good God!” Slowly he lifted his eyes upon those three sweet women until theirs ran full. And then he stared once more into the page: “Oh, good God! Albert Sidney Johnston is dead.”
XLIII
THAT SABBATH AT SHILOH
“Whole theatre of action.”
The figure had sounded apt to Anna on that Sunday evening when the Doctor employed it; apt enough–until the outburst of that great and dreadful news whose inseparable implications and forebodings robbed her of all sleep that night and made her the first one astir at daybreak. But thenceforward, and now for half a week or more, the aptness seemed quite to have passed. Strange was the theatre whose play was all and only a frightful reality; whose swarming, thundering, smoking stage had its audience, its New Orleans audience, wholly behind it, and whose curtain of distance, however thin, mocked every bodily sense and compelled all to be seen and heard by the soul’s eye and ear, with all the joy and woe of its actuality and all its suspense, terror, triumph, heartbreak, and despair.
Yet here was that theatre, and the Doctor’s metaphor was still good enough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour ladies, to whom Anna had quoted it. And here, sprinkled through the vast audience of that theatre, with as keen a greed for its play as any, were all the various non-combatants with whom we are here concerned, though not easily to be singled out, such mere units were they of the impassioned multitude every mere unit of which, to loved and loving ones, counted for more than we can tell.
However, our favourites might be glimpsed now and then. On a certain midday of that awful half-week the Callenders, driving, took up Victorine at her gate and Flora at her door and sped up-town to the newspaper offices in Camp street to rein in against a countless surge of old men in fine dress, their precious dignity thrown to the dogs, each now but one of the common herd, and each against all, shouldering, sweating, and brandishing wide hands to be the first purchaser and reader of the list, the long, ever-lengthening list of the killed and wounded. Much had been learned of the great two-days’ battle, and many an infantry sister, and many a battery sister besides Anna, was second-sighted enough to see, night and day, night and day, the muddy labyrinth of roads and by-roads that braided and traversed the wide, unbroken reaches of dense timber–with their deep ravines, their long ridges, and their creek-bottom marshes and sloughs–in the day’s journey from Corinth to the bluffs of the Tennessee. They saw them, not empty, nor fearlessly crossed by the quail, the wild turkey, the fox, or the unhunted deer, nor travelled alone by the homespun “citizen” or by scouts or foragers, but slowly overflowed by a great gray, silent, tangled, armed host–cavalry, infantry, ordnance trains, batteries, battery wagons and ambulances: Saw Hilary Kincaid and all his heroes and their guns, and all the “big generals” and their smart escorts and busy staffs: Saw the various columns impeding each other, taking wrong ways and losing priceless hours while thousands of inexperienced boys, footsore, drenched and shivering yet keen for the fight, ate their five-days’ food in one, or threw it away to lighten the march, and toiled on in hunger, mud, cold and rain, without the note of a horn or drum or the distant eye of one blue scout to tell of their oncoming.
They saw, did Anna and those sisters (and many and many a wife and mother from Callender House to Carrollton), the vast, stealthy, fireless bivouac at fall of night, in ear-shot of the enemy’s tattoo, unsheltered from the midnight storm save by raked-up leaves: Saw, just in the bivouac’s tortuous front, softly reddening the low wet sky, that huge, rude semicircle of camps in the dark ridged and gullied forests about Shiloh’s log meeting-house, where the victorious Grant’s ten-thousands–from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, as new to arms as their foe, yet a band of lions in lair–lay dry-tented, full fed and fast asleep, safely flanked by swollen streams, their gunboats behind them and Buell coming, but without one mounted outpost, a scratch of entrenchment or a whisper of warning.
Amid the eager carriage talk, in which Anna kept her part, her mind’s eye still saw the farther scene as it changed again and the gray dawn and gray host furtively rose together and together silently spread through the deep woods. She watched the day increase and noon soar up and sink away while the legions of Hardee, Bragg, Polk and Breckinridge slowly writhed out of their perplexed folds and set themselves, still undetected in their three successive lines of battle. She beheld the sun set calm and clear, the two hosts lie down once more, one in its tents, the other on its arms, the leafy night hang over them resplendent with stars, its watches near by, the Southern lines reawaken in recovered strength, spring up and press forward exultantly to the awful issue, and the Sabbath dawn brighten into a faultless day with the boom of the opening gun.
As the ladies drew up behind the throng and across the throat of Commercial Alley the dire List began to flutter from the Picayune office in greedy palms and over and among dishevelled heads like a feeding swarm of white pigeons. News there was as well as names, but every eye devoured the names first and then–unless some name struck lightning in the heart, as Anna saw it do every here and there and for that poor old man over yonder–after the names the news.
“Nan, we needn’t stay if you–“
“Oh, Miranda, isn’t all this ours?”
The bulletin boards were already telling in outline, ahead of the list, thrilling things about the Orleans Guards, the whirlwind onset of whose maiden bayonets had captured double its share of the first camp taken from the amazed, unbreakfasted enemy, and who again and again, hour by hour, by the half-mile and mile, had splendidly helped to drive him–while he hammered back with a deadly stubbornness all but a match for their fury. Through forests, across clearings, over streams and bogs and into and out of ravines and thickets they had swept, seizing transiently a whole field battery, permanently hundreds of prisoners, and covering the strife’s broad wake with even more appalling numbers of their own dead and wounded than of the foe’s: wailing wounded, ghastly, grimy dead, who but yesterday were brothers, cousins and playmates of these very men snatching and searching the list. They told, those boards, of the Washington Artillery (fifth company, never before under fire) being thanked on the field by one of the “big generals,” their chests and wheels shot half to splinters but no gun lost. They told of all those Louisiana commands whose indomitable lines charged and melted, charged and withered, over and over the torn and bloody ground in that long, horrible struggle that finally smoked out the “Hornets’ Nest.” They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on all these sidewalks and away up to and beyond their Bishop-General Polk’s Trinity Church, whose desperate gallantry had saved that same Washington Artillery three of its pieces, and to whose thinned and bleeding ranks swarms of the huddled Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as their captors and as glorious, had at last laid down their arms. And they told of Kincaid’s Battery, Captain Kincaid commanding; how, having early lost in the dense oak woods and hickory brush the brigade–Brodnax’s–whose way they had shelled open for a victorious charge, they had followed their galloping leader, the boys running beside the wheels, from position to position, from ridge to ridge, in rampant obedience of an order to “go in wherever they heard the hottest firing”, how for a time they had fought hub to hub beside the Washington Artillery; how two of their guns, detached for a special hazard and sweeping into fresh action on a flank of the “Hornets’ Nest,” had lost every horse at a single volley of the ambushed foe, yet had instantly replied with slaughterous vengeance; and how, for an hour thereafter, so wrapped in their own smoke that they could be pointed only by the wheel-ruts of their recoil, they had been worked by their depleted gunners on hands and knees with Kincaid and Villeneuve themselves at the trails and with fuses cut to one second. So, in scant outline said the boards, or more in detail read one man aloud to another as they hurried by the carriage.
“But,” said Anna, while Flora enjoyed her pallor, “all that is about the first day’s fight!”
“No,” cried Constance, “it’s the second day’s, that Beauregard calls ‘a great and glorious victory!'”
“Yes,” interposed Flora, “but writing from behind his fortification’ at Corinth, yes!”
XLIV
“THEY WERE ALL FOUR TOGETHER”
Both Constance and Victorine flashed to retort, but saw the smiling critic as pale as Anna and recalled the moment’s truer business, the list still darting innumerably around them always out of reach. The carriage had to push into the very surge, and Victorine to stand up and call down to this man and that, a fourth and fifth, before one could be made to hear and asked to buy for the helpless ladies. Yet in this gentlewomen’s war every gentlewoman’s wish was a military command, and when at length one man did hear, to hear was to vanish in the turmoil on their errand. Now he was back again, with the list, three copies! Oh, thank you, thank you and thank you!
Away trotted the handsome span while five pairs of beautiful eyes searched the three printed sheets, that bore–oh, marvellous fortune!–not one of the four names writ largest in those five hearts. Let joy be–ah, let joy be very meek while to so many there is unutterable loss. Yet let it meekly abound for the great loved cause so splendidly advanced. Miranda pointed Anna to a bit of editorial:
“Monday was a more glorious day than Sunday. We can scarcely forbear to speculate upon the great results that are to flow from this decisive victory. An instant pursuit of the flying enemy should–“
Why did the carriage halt at a Gravier Street crossing obliquely opposite the upper front corner of the St. Charles Hotel? Why did all the hotel’s gold-braided guests and loungers so quietly press out against its upper balustrades? Why, under its arches, and between balcony posts along the curbstones clear down to Canal Street, was the pathetically idle crowd lining up so silently? From that point why, now, did the faint breeze begin to waft a low roar of drums of such grave unmartial sort? And why, gradually up the sidewalks’ edges in the hot sun, did every one so solemnly uncover? Small Victorine stood up to see.
At first she made out only that most commonplace spectacle, home guards. They came marching in platoons, a mere company or two. In the red and blue of their dress was all the smartness yet of last year, but in their tread was none of it and even the bristle of their steel had vanished. Behind majestic brasses and muffled drums grieving out the funeral march, they stepped with slow precision and with arms reversed. But now in abrupt contrast there appeared, moving as slowly and precisely after them, widely apart on either side of the stony way, two single attenuated files of but four bronzed and shabby gray-jackets each, with four others in one thin, open rank from file to file in their rear, and in the midst a hearse and its palled burden. Rise, Anna, Constance, Miranda–all. Ah, Albert Sidney Johnston! Weep, daughters of a lion-hearted cause. The eyes of its sons are wet. Yet in your gentle bosoms keep great joy for whoever of your very own and nearest the awful carnage has spared; but hither comes, here passes slowly, and yonder fades at length from view, to lie a day in state and so move on to burial, a larger hope of final triumph than ever again you may fix on one mortal man.
Hats on again, softly. Drift apart, aimless crowd. Cross the two streets at once, diagonally, you, young man from the St. Charles Hotel with purpose in your rapid step, pencil unconsciously in hand and trouble on your brow. Regather your reins, old coachman–nay, one moment! The heavy-hearted youth passed so close under the horses’ front that only after he had gained the banquette abreast the carriage did he notice its occupants and Anna’s eager bow. It was the one-armed Kincaid’s Battery boy reporter. With a sudden pitying gloom he returned the greeting, faltered as if to speak, caught a breath and then hurried on and away. What did that mean; more news; news bad for these five in particular? Silently in each of them, without a glance from one to another, the question asked itself.
“The True Delta,” remarked Anna to Miranda, “is right down here on the next square,” and of his own motion the driver turned that way.
“Bitwin Common Strit and Can-al,” added Victorine, needless words being just then the most needed.
Midway in front of the hotel Anna softly laid a hand on Flora, who respondingly murmured. For the reporter was back, moving their way along the sidewalk almost at a run. Now Constance was aware of him.
“When we cross Common Street,” she observed to Miranda, “he’ll want to stop us.”
In fact, as soon as their intent to cross was plain, he sped out beside them and stood, his empty sleeve pinned up, his full one raised and grief evident in his courteous smile. Some fifty yards ahead, by the True Delta office, men were huddling around a fresh bulletin. Baring his brow to the sun, the young man came close to the wheels.
“Wouldn’t you-all as soon–?” he began, but Constance interrupted:
“The news is as good as ever, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but wouldn’t you-all as soon drive round by Carondelet Street?” A gesture with his hat showed a piece of manifold writing in his fingers.
He looked to Miranda, but she faltered. Flora, in her own way, felt all the moment’s rack and stress, but some natures are built for floods and rise on them like a boat. So thought she of herself and had parted her lips to speak for all, when, to her vexed surprise, Anna lifted a hand and in a clear, firm tone inquired, “Is there any bad news for us five?” The youth’s tongue failed; he nodded.
“Brodnax’s brigade?” she asked. “Our battery?”
“Yes, Monday, just at the last,” he murmured.
“Not _taken?_”
“Not a gun!” replied the boy, with a flash. Anna reflected it, but her tone did not change:
“There are four men, you know, whom we five–“
“Yes.”
“Which of them is the bad news about?”
“All four,” murmured the youth. His eyes swam. His hat went under the stump of his lost arm and he proffered the bit of writing. Idlers were staring. “Take that with you,” he said. “They were all four together and they’re only–“
The carriage was turning, but the fair cluster bent keenly toward him. “Only what?” they cried.
“Missing.”
XLV
STEVE–MAXIME–CHARLIE–
There was no real choice. Nothing seemed quite rational but the heaviest task of all–to wait, and to wait right here at home.
To this queenly city must come first and fullest all news of her own sons, and here the “five” would not themselves be “missing” should better tidings–or worse–come seeking them over the wires.
“At the front?” replied Doctor Sevier to Anna, “why, at the front you’ll be kept in the rear, lost in a storm of false rumors.”
General Brodnax, in a letter rife with fatherly romantic tenderness and with splendid praise of Hilary as foremost in the glorious feat which had saved old “Roaring Betsy” but lost (or mislaid) him and his three comrades, also bade her wait. Everything, he assured her, that human sympathy or the art of war–or Beauregard’s special orders–could effect was being done to find the priceless heroes. In the retreat of a great host–ah, me! retreat was his very word and the host was Dixie’s–retreating after its first battle, and that an awful one, in deluging rains over frightful roads and brimming streams, unsheltered, ill fed, with sick and wounded men and reeling vehicles hourly breaking down, a hovering foe to be fended off, and every dwelling in the land a hospitable refuge, even captains of artillery or staff might be most honorably and alarmingly missing yet reappear safe and sound. So, for a week and more it was sit and wait, pace the floor and wait, wake in the night and wait; so for Flora as well as for Anna (with a difference), both of them anxious for Charlie–and Steve–and Maxime, but in anguish for another.
Then tidings, sure enough! glad tidings! Mandeville and Maxime safe in camp again and back to duty, whole, hale and in the saddle. Their letters came by the wasted yellow hands of two or three of the home-coming wounded, scores of whom were arriving by every south-bound train. From the aide-de-camp and the color-bearer came the first whole story of how Kincaid, with his picked volunteers, barely a gun detachment, and with Mandeville, who had brought the General’s consent, had stolen noiselessly over the water-soaked leaves of a thickety oak wood in the earliest glimmer of a rainy dawn and drawn off the abandoned gun by hand to its waiting horses; also how, when threatened by a hostile patrol, Hilary, Mandeville, Maxime and Charlie had hurried back on foot into the wood and hotly checked the pursuit long enough for their fellows to mount the team, lay a shoulder to every miry wheel and flounder away with the prize. But beyond that keen moment when the four, after their one volley from ambush, had sprung this way and that shouting absurd orders to make-believe men, cheering and firing from behind trees, and (cut off from their horses) had made for a gully and swamp, the two returned ones could tell nothing of the two unreturned except that neither of them, dead or alive, was anywhere on the ground of the fight or flight as they knew it. For days, inside the enemy’s advancing lines, they had prowled in ravines and lain in blackberry patches and sassafras fence-rows, fed and helped on of nights by the beggared yet still warm-hearted farm people and getting through at last, but with never a trace of Kincaid or Charlie, though after their own perilous search they had inquired, inquired, inquired.
So, wait, said every one and every dumb condition, even the miseries of the great gray army, of which Anna had mind pictures again, as it toiled through mire and lightning, rain, sleet and hail, and as its thousands of sick and shattered lay in Corinth dying fifty a day. And Flora and Anna waited, though with minds placid only to each other and the outer world.
“Yes,” moaned Anna to Constance, when found at dead of night staring Corinthward from a chamber window. “Yes, friends advise! All our friends advise! What daring thing did any one ever do who waited for friends to advise it? Does your Steve wait for friends to advise?… Patience? Ah, lend me yours! You don’t need it now…. Fortitude? Oh, I never had any!… What? command the courage to do nothing when nothing is the only hard thing to do? Who, I? Connie! I don’t even want it. I’m a craven; I want the easy thing! I want to go nurse the box-carloads and mule-wagonloads of wounded at Corinth, at Okolona and strewed all the way down to Mobile–that’s full of them. Hilary may be somewhere among them–unidentified! They say he wore no badge of rank that morning, you know, and carried the carbine of a wounded cavalryman to whom he had given his coat. Oh, he’s mine, Con, and I’m his. We’re not engaged, we’re _married,_ and I _must_ go. It’s only a step–except in miles–and I’m going! I’m going for your sake and Miranda’s. You know you’re staying on my account, not for me to settle this bazaar business but to wait for news that’s never coming till I go and bring it!”
This tiny, puny, paltry business of the bazaar–the whereabouts of the dagger and its wealth, or of the detectives, gone for good into military secret service at the front–she drearily smiled away the whole trivial riddle as she lay of nights contriving new searches for that inestimable, living treasure, whose perpetual “missing,” right yonder “almost in sight from the housetop,” was a dagger in her heart.
And the Valcours? Yes, they, too, had their frantic impulses to rise and fly. For Madame, though her lean bosom bled for the lost boy, the fiercest pain of waiting was that its iron coercion lay in their penury. For Flora its sharpest pangs were in her own rage; a rage not of the earlier, cold sort against Anna and whoever belonged to Anna–that transport had always been more than half a joy–but a new, hot rage against herself and the finical cheapness of her scheming, a rage that stabbed her fair complacency with the revelation that she had a heart, and a heart that could ache after another. The knife of that rage turned in her breast every time she cried to the grandam, “We must go!” and that rapacious torment simpered, “No funds,” adding sidewise hints toward Anna’s jewels, still diligently manoeuvred for, but still somewhere up-stairs in Callender House, sure to go with Anna should Anna go while the manoeuvrers were away.
A long lane to any one, was such waiting, lighted, for Anna, only by a faint reflection of that luster of big generals’ strategy and that invincibility of the Southern heart which, to all New Orleans and even to nations beyond seas, clad Dixie’s every gain in light and hid her gravest disasters in beguiling shadow. But suddenly one day the long lane turned. The secret had just leaked out that the forts down the river were furiously engaged with the enemy’s mortar-boats a few miles below them and that in the past forty-eight hours one huge bomb every minute, three thousand in all, had dropped into those forts or burst over them, yet the forts were “proving themselves impregnable.” The lane turned and there stood Charlie.
There he stood, in the stairway door of the front room overlooking Jackson Square. The grandmother and sister had been keenly debating the news and what to do about it, the elder bird fierce to stay, the younger bent on flight, and had just separated to different windows, when they heard, turned and beheld him there, a stranger in tattered gray and railway dirt, yet their own coxcomb boy from his curls to his ill-shod feet. Flora had hardly caught her breath or believed her eyes before the grandmother was on his neck patting and petting his cheeks and head and plying questions in three languages: When, where, how, why, how, where and when?
Dimly he reflected their fond demonstrations. No gladness was in his face. His speech, as hurried as theirs, answered no queries. He asked loftily for air, soap, water and the privacy of his own room, and when they had followed him there and seen him scour face, arms, neck, and head, rub dry and resume his jacket and belt, he had grown only more careworn and had not yet let his sister’s eyes rest on his.
He had but a few hours to spend in the city, he said; had brought despatches and must carry others back by the next train. His story, he insisted, was too long to tell before he had delivered certain battery letters; one to Victorine, two to Constance Mandeville, and so on. Here was one to Flora, from Captain Irby; perhaps the story was in it. At any rate, its bearer must rush along now. He toppled his “grannie” into a rocking-chair and started away. He “would be back as soon as ever he–“
But Flora filled the doorway. He had to harden his glance to hers at last. In her breast were acutest emotions widely at war, yet in her eyes he saw only an unfeeling light, and it was the old woman behind him who alone noted how painfully the girl’s fingers were pinched upon Irby’s unopened letter. The boy’s stare betrayed no less anger than suffering and as Flora spoke he flushed.
“Charlie,” she melodiously began, but his outcry silenced her:
“Now, by the eternal great God Almighty, Flora Valcour, if you dare to ask me that–” He turned to the grandmother, dropped to his knees, buried his face in her lap and sobbed.
With genuine tenderness she stroked his locks. Yet while she did so she lifted to the sister a face lighted up with a mirth of deliverance. To nod, toss, and nod again, was poor show for her glee; she smirked and writhed to the disdaining girl like a child at a mirror, and, though sitting thus confined, gave all the effects of jigging over the floor. Hilary out of the way! Kincaid eliminated, and the whole question free of him, this inheritance question so small and mean to all but her and Irby, but to him and her so large, so paramount! Silently, but plainly to the girl, her mouth widely motioned, “Il est mort! grace”–one hand stopped stroking long enough to make merrily the sign of cross–“grace au ciel, il est mort!”
No moment of equal bitterness had Flora Valcour ever known. To tell half her distresses would lose us in their tangle, midmost in which was a choking fury against the man whom unwillingly she loved, for escaping her, even by a glorious death. One thought alone–that Anna, as truly as if stricken blind, would sit in darkness the rest of her days–lightened her torture, and with that thought she smiled a stony loathing on the mincing grandam and the boy’s unlifted head. Suddenly, purpose gleamed from her. She could not break forth herself, but to escape suffocation she must and would procure an outburst somewhere. Measuredly, but with every nerve and tendon overstrung, she began to pace the room.
“Don’t cry, Charlie,” she smoothly said in a voice as cold as the crawl of a snake. The brother knew the tone, had known it from childhood, and the girl, glancing back on him, was pleased to see him stiffen. A few steps on she added pensively, “For a soldier to cry–and befo’ ladies–a ladies’ man–of that batt’rie–tha’s hardly fair–to the ladies, eh, grandmama?”
But the boy only pressed his forehead harder down and clutched the aged knees under it till their owner put on, to the scintillant beauty, a look of alarm and warning. The girl, musingly retracing her calculated steps to where the kneeler seemed to clinch himself to his posture, halted, stroked with her slippered toe a sole of his rude shoes and spoke once more: “Do they oft-ten boohoo like that, grandma, those artillerie?”
The boy whirled up with the old woman clinging. A stream of oaths and curses appallingly original poured from him, not as through the lips alone but from his very eyes and nostrils. That the girl was first of all a fool and damned was but a trivial part of the cry–of the explosion of his whole year’s mistaken or half-mistaken inferences and smothered indignation. With equal flatness and blindness he accused her of rejoicing in the death of Kincaid: the noblest captain (he ramped on) that ever led a battery; kindest friend that ever ruled a camp; gayest, hottest, daringest fighter of Shiloh’s field; fiercest for man’s purity that ever loved the touch of women’s fingers; sternest that ever wept on the field of death with the dying in his arms; and the scornfullest of promotion that ever was cheated of it at headquarters.
All these extravagances he cursed out, too witless to see that this same hero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some dark league against him–“hell only knew what”–along with that snail of a cousin whom everybody but Kincaid himself and the silly old uncle knew to be the fallen man’s most venomous foe. Throughout the storm the grandmother’s fingers pattered soothing caresses, while Flora stood as unruffled by his true surmises as by any, a look of cold interest in her narrowed eyes, and her whole bodily and spiritual frame drinking relief from his transport. Now, while he still raged, she tenderly smiled on their trembling ancestress.
“Really, _you_ know grandmama, sometimes me also I feel like that, when to smazh the furniture ‘t would be a delightful–or to wring somebody the neck, yes. But for us, and to-day, even to get a li’l’ mad, how is that a possibl’?” She turned again, archly, to the brother, but flashed in alarm and sprang toward him.
His arm stiffly held her off. With failing eyes bent on the whimpering grandmother he sighed a disheartened oath and threshed into a chair gasping–
“My wound–opened again.”
XLVI
THE SCHOOL OF SUSPENSE
Thus it fell to Flora to be letter-bearer and news-bearer in her brother’s stead. Yet he had first to be cared for by her and the grandmother in a day long before “first aid” had become common knowledge. The surgeon they had hailed in had taken liberal time to show them how, night and morning, to unbandage, cleanse and rebind, and to tell them (smiling into the lad’s mutinous eyes) that the only other imperative need was to keep him flat on his back for ten days. Those same weeks of downpour which had given the Shiloh campaign two-thirds of its horrors had so overfed the monstrous Mississippi that it was running four miles an hour, overlapping its levees and heaving up through the wharves all along the city’s front, until down about the Convent and Barracks and Camp Callender there were streets as miry as Corinth. And because each and all of these hindrances were welcome to Flora as giving leisure to read and reread Irby’s long letter about his cousin and uncle, and to plan what to say and do in order to reap all the fell moment’s advantages, the shadows were long in the Callender’s grove when she finally ascended their veranda steps.
She had come round by way of Victorine’s small, tight-fenced garden of crape-myrtles, oleanders and pomegranates–where also the water was in the streets, backwater from the overflowed swamp-forests between city and lake–and had sent her to Charlie’s bedside. Pleasant it would be for us to turn back with the damsel and see her, with heart as open as her arms, kiss the painted grandam, and at once proceed to make herself practically invaluable; or to observe her every now and then dazzle her adored patient with a tear-gem of joy or pity, or of gratitude that she lived in a time when heroic things could happen right at home and to the lowliest, even to her; sweet woes like this, that let down, for virtuous love, the barriers of humdrum convention. But Flora draws us on, she and Anna. As she touched the bell-knob Constance sprang out to welcome her, though not to ask her in–till she could have a word with her alone, the young wife explained.
“I saw you coming,” she said, drawing her out to the balustrade. “You didn’t get Anna’s note of last night–too bad! I’ve just found out–her maid forgot it! What do you reckon we’ve been doing all day long? Packing! We’re going we don’t know where! Vicksburg, Jackson, Meridian, Mobile, wherever Anna can best hunt Hilary from–and Charlie too, of course.”
“Yes,” said Flora, one way to the speaker and quite another way to herself.
“Yes, she wants to do it, and Doctor Sevier says it’s the only thing for her. Ah, Flora, how well _you_ can understand that!”
“Indeed, yes,” sighed the listener, both ways again.
“We know how absolutely you believe the city’s our best base, else we’d have asked you to go with us.” The ever genuine Constance felt a mortifying speciousness in her words and so piled them on. “_We_ know the city is best–unless it should fall, and it won’t–oh, it won’t, God’s not going to let so many prayers go unanswered, Flora! But we’ve tossed reason aside and are going by instinct, the way I always feel safest in, dear. Ah, poor Anna! Oh, Flora, she’s so sweet about it!”
“Yes? Ab-out what?”
“You, dear, and whoever is suffering the same–“
Flora softly winced and Constance blamed herself so to have pained another sister’s love. “And she’s so quiet,” added the speaker, “but, oh, so pale–and so hard either to comfort or encourage, or even to discourage. There’s nothing you can say that she isn’t already heart-sick of saying herself, _to_ herself, and I beg you, dear, in your longing to comfort her, please don’t bring up a single maybe-this or maybe-that; any hope, I mean, founded on a mere doubt.”
“Ah, but sometime’ the doubt–it is the hope!”
“Yes, sometimes; but not to her, any more. Oh, Flora, if it’s just as true of you, you won’t be–begrudge my saying it of my sister–that no saint ever went to her matyrdom better prepared than she is, right now, for the very worst that can be told. There’s only one thing to which she never can and never will resign herself, and that is doubt. She can’t breathe its air, Flora. As she says herself, she isn’t so built; she hasn’t that gift.”
The musing Flora nodded compassionately, but inwardly she said that, gift or no gift, Anna should serve her time in Doubting Castle, with her, Flora, for turnkey. Suddenly she put away her abstraction and with a summarizing gesture and chastened twinkle spoke out: “In short, you want to know for w’at am I come.”
“Flora!”
“Ah, but, my dear, you are ri-ight. That is ‘all correct,’ as they say, and one thing I’m come for–‘t is–” She handed out Mandeville’s two letters.
The wife caught them to her bosom, sprang to her tiptoes, beamed on the packet a second time and read aloud, “Urbanity of Corporal Valcour!” She heaved an ecstatic breath to speak on, but failed. Anna and Miranda had joined them and Flora had risen from her seat on the balustrade, aware at once that the role she had counted on was not to be hers, the role of comforter to an undone rival.
Pale indeed was the rival, pale as rivalry could wish. Yet instantly Flora saw, with a fiery inward sting, how beautiful pallor may be. And more she saw: with the chagrin then growing so common on every armed front–the chagrin of finding one’s foe entrenched–she saw how utterly despair had failed to crush a gentle soul. Under cover of affliction’s night and storm Anna, this whole Anna Callender, had been reinforced, had fortified and was a new problem.
She greeted Flora with a welcoming beam, but before speaking she caught her sister’s arm and glanced herself, at the superscription.
“Flora!” she softly cried, “oh, Flora Valcour! has your brother–your Charlie!–come home alive and well?–What; no?–No, he has not?”