fabrications, but giving forth only what was wrung from her and parting with each word as if it cost her a pang. Starving and sickening, fighting and falling, the haggard boys watched; yet so faultless was the maiden’s art that when in a fury of affright at the risks of time she one day forced their commander to see her heart’s starvation for him the battery saw nothing, and even to him she yet appeared faultless in modesty and utterly, marvelously, splendidly ignorant of what she had done.
“Guide right!” he mused alone. “At last, H.K., your nickname’s got a meaning worth living up to!”
While he mused, Flora, enraged both for him and against him, and with the rage burning in her eye and on her brow, stood before her seated grandmother, mutely giving gaze for gaze until the elder knew.
The old woman resumed her needle. “And all you have for it,” was the first word, “is his pity, eh?”
“Wait!” murmured the girl. “I will win yet, if I have to lose–“
“Yes?” skeptically simpered the grandam, “–have to lose yourself to do it?”
The two gazed again until the maiden quietly nodded and her senior sprang half up:
“No, no! ah, no-no-no! There’s a crime awaiting you, but not that! Oh, no, you are no such fool!”
“No?” The girl came near, bent low and with dancing eyes said, “I’ll be fool enough to lead him on till his sense of honor–“
“Sense of–oh, ho, ho!”
“Sense of his honor and _mine_–will make him my prisoner. Or else–!” The speaker’s eyes burned. Her bosom rose and fell.
“Yes,” said the seated one–to her needle–“or else his sense that Charlie–My God! don’t pinch my ear off!”
“Happy thought,” laughed Flora, letting go, “but a very poor guess.”
LIX
IN A LABYRINTH
For ladies’ funerals, we say, mortars and siege-guns, as a rule, do not pause. But here at Vicksburg there was an hour near the end of each day when the foe, for some mercy to themselves, ceased to bombard, and in one of these respites that procession ventured forth in which rode the fevered Anna: a farm wagon, a battered family coach, a carryall or two.
Yet in the midst of the graveyard rites there broke out on the unseen lines near by, northward, an uproar of attack, and one or two shells burst in plain view, frightening the teams. The company leaped into the vehicles any way they could and started townward over a miserable road with the contest resounding on their right. As they jostled along the edge of a wood that lay between them and the firing some mishap to the front team caused all to alight, whereupon a shell, faultily timed, came tearing through the tree-tops and exploded in the remains of a fence close beyond them. Amid thunder, smoke, and brute and human terror the remounting groups whirled away and had entirely left the scene before that was asked which none could tell: Where was Anna?
Anna herself did not know, could not inquire of her own mind. With a consciousness wholly disembodied she was mainly aware of a great pain that seemed to fill all the region and atmosphere, an atmosphere charged with mysterious dim green light and full of great boomings amid a crackle of smaller ones; of shouts and cheers and of a placid quaking of myriad leaves; all of which things might be things or only divers manifestations of her undefinable self.
By and by through the pain came a dream of some one like her living in a certain heaven of comfort and beauty, peace, joy, and love named “Callender House”; but the pain persisted and the dream passed into a horrible daytime darkness that brought a sense of vast changes near and far; a sense of many having gone from that house, and of many having most forbiddenly come to it; a sense of herself spending years and years, and passing from world to world, in quest of one Hilary, Hilary Kincaid, whom all others believed to be dead or false, or both, but who would and should and must be found, and when found would be alive and hale and true; a sense of having, with companions, been all at once frightfully close to a rending of the sky, and of having tripped as she fled, of having fallen and lain in a thunderous storm of invisible hail, and of having after a time risen again and staggered on, an incalculable distance, among countless growing things, fleeing down-hill, too weak to turn up-hill, till suddenly the whole world seemed to strike hard against something that sent it reeling backward.
And now her senses began feebly to regather within truer limits and to tell her she was lying on the rooty ground of a thicket. Dimly she thought to be up and gone once more, but could get no farther than the thought although behind her closed lids glimmered a memory of deadly combat. Its din had passed, but there still sounded, just beyond this covert, fierce commands of new preparation, and hurried movements in response–a sending and bringing, dismissing, and summoning of men and things to rear or front, left or right, in a fury of supply and demand.
Ah, what! water? in her face? Her eyes opened wildly. A man was kneeling beside her. He held a canteen; an armed officer in the foe’s blue. With lips parting to cry out she strove to rise and fly, but his silent beseechings showed him too badly hurt below the knees to offer aid or hindrance, and as she gained her feet she let him plead with stifled eagerness for her succor from risks of a captivity which, in starving Vicksburg and in such plight, would be death.
He was a stranger and an enemy, whose hurried speech was stealthy and whose eyes went spying here and there, but so might it be just then somewhere with him for whom she yet clung to life. For that one’s sake, and more than half in dream, she gave the sufferer her support, and with a brow knit in anguish, but with the fire of battle still in his wasting blood, he rose, fitfully explaining the conditions of the place and hour. To cover a withdrawal of artillery from an outer to an inner work a gray line had unexpectedly charged, and as it fell back with its guns, hotly pressed, a part of the fight had swung down into and half across this ravine, for which another struggle was furiously preparing on both sides, but which, for him, in the interval, was an open way of deliverance if she would be his crutch.
In equal bewilderment of thought and of outer sense, pleadingly assured that she would at once be sent back under flag of truce, with compassion deepening to compulsion and with a vague inkling that, failing the white flag, this might be heaven’s leading back to Callender House and the jewel treasure, to Mobile and to Hilary, she gave her aid. Beyond the thicket the way continued tangled, rough and dim. Twice and again the stricken man paused for breath and ease from torture, though the sounds of array, now on two sides, threatened at every step to become the cry of onset. Presently he stopped once more, heaved, swayed and, despite her clutch, sank heavily to the ground.
“Water!” he gasped, but before she could touch the canteen to his lips he had fainted. She sprinkled his face, but he did not stir. She gazed, striving for clear thought, and then sprang up and called. What word? Ah, what in all speech should she call but a name, the name of him whose warrant of marriage lay at that moment in her bosom, the name of him who before God and the world had sworn her his mated, life-long protection?
“Hilary!” she wailed, and as the echoes of the green wood died, “Hilary!” again. On one side there was more light in the verdure than elsewhere and that way she called. That way she moved stumblingly and near the edge of a small clear space cried once more, “Hilary!… Hilary!”
LX
HILARY’S GHOST
Faintly the bearer of that name heard the call; heard it rise from a quarter fearfully nearer the foe’s line than to his; caught it with his trained ear as, just beyond sight of Irby, Miranda, and others, he stood in amazed converse with Flora Valcour. Fortune, smiling on Flora yet, had brought first to her the terrified funeral group and so had enabled her to bear to Hilary the news of the strange estrayal, skilfully blended with that revelation of Anna’s Vicksburg sojourn which she, Flora, had kept from him so cleverly and so long.
With mingled rapture and distress, with a heart standing as still as his feet, as still as his lifted head and shining eyes, he listened and heard again. Swiftly, though not with the speed he would have chosen, he sprang toward the call; sped softly through the brush, softly and without voice, lest he draw the enemy’s fire; softly and mutely, with futile backward wavings and frowning and imploring whispers to Flora as in a dishevelled glow that doubled her beauty she glided after him.
Strangely, amid a swarm of keen perceptions that plagued him like a cloud of arrows as he ran, that beauty smote his conscience; her beauty and the worship and protection it deserved from all manhood and most of all from him, whose unhappy, unwitting fortune it was to have ensnared her young heart and brought it to the desperation of an unnatural self-revealment; her uncoveted beauty, uncourted love, unwelcome presence, and hideous peril! Was he not to all these in simplest honor peculiarly accountable? They lanced him through with arraignment as, still waving her beseechingly, commandingly back, with weapons undrawn the more swiftly to part the way before him, his frenzy for Anna drew him on, as full of introspection as a drowning man, thinking a year’s thoughts at every step. Oh, mad joy in pitiful employment! Here while the millions of a continent waged heroic war for great wrongs and rights, here on the fighting-line of a beleaguered and starving city, here when at any instant the peal of his own guns might sound a fresh onset, behold him in a lover’s part, loving “not honor more,” setting the seal upon his painful alias, filching time out of the jaws of death to pursue one maiden while clung to by another. Oh, Anna! Anna Callender! my life for my country, but this moment for thy life and thee! God stay the onslaught this one moment!
As he reached the edge of that narrow opening from whose farther side Anna had called he halted, glanced furtively about, and harkened forward, backward, through leafy distances grown ominously still. Oh, why did the call not come again? Hardly in a burning house could time be half so priceless. Not a breath could promise that in the next the lightnings, thunders, and long human yell of assault would not rend the air. Flora’s soft tread ceased at his side.
“Stay back!” he fiercely breathed, and pointed just ahead: “The enemy’s skirmishers!”
“Come away!” she piteously whispered, trembling with terror. For, by a glimpse as brief as the catch of her breath, yonder a mere rod or so within the farther foliage, down a vista hardly wider than a man’s shoulders, an armed man’s blue shoulders she had seen, under his black hat and peering countenance. Joy filled the depth of her heart in the belief that a thin line of such black hats had already put Anna behind them, yet she quaked in terror, terror of death, of instant, shot-torn death that might leave Hilary Kincaid alive.
With smiting pity he saw her affright. “Go back!” he once more gasped: “In God’s name, go back!” while recklessly he stepped forward out of cover. But in splendid desperation, with all her soul’s battle in her eyes–horror, love, defiance, and rending chagrin striving and smiting, she sprang after him into the open, and clutched and twined his arms. The blue skirmish-line, without hearing, saw him; saw, and withheld their fire, fiercely glad that tactics and mercy should for once agree. And Anna saw.
“Come with me back!” whispered Flora, dragging on him with bending knees. “She’s lost! She’s gone back to those Yankee, and to Fred Greenleaf! And you”–the whisper rose to a murmur whose pathos grew with her Creole accent–“you, another step and you are a deserter! Yes! to your country–to Kincaid’ Batt’ree–to me-me-me!” The soft torrent of speech grew audible beyond them: “Oh, my God! Hilary Kincaid, listen-to-me-listen! You ‘ave no right; no ri-ight to leave me! _Ah, you shall not!_ No right–ri-ight to leave yo’ Flora–sinze she’s tol’ you –sinze she’s tol’ you–w’at she’s tol’ you!”
In this long history of a moment the blue skirmishers had not yet found Anna, but it was their advance, their soft stir at her back as they came upon their fallen leader, that had hushed her cries. At the rift in the wood she had leaned on a huge oak and as body and mind again failed had sunk to its base in leafy hiding. Vaguely thence she presently perceived, lit from behind her by sunset beams, the farther edge of the green opening, and on that border, while she feebly looked, came suddenly a ghost!
[Illustration: “You ‘ave no ri-ight to leave me! _Ah, you shall not!_”]
Ah, Heaven! the ghost of Hilary Kincaid! It looked about for her! It listened for her call! By the tree’s rough bark she drew up half her height, clung and, with reeling brain, gazed. How tall! how gaunt! how dingy gray! How unlike her whilom “ladies’ man,” whom, doubtless truly, they now called dead and buried. But what–what–was troubling the poor ghost? What did it so wildly avoid? what wave away with such loving, tender pain? Flora Valcour! Oh, see, see! Ah, death in life! what does she see? As by the glare of a bursting midnight shell all the empty gossip of two years justified–made real–in one flash of staring view. With a long moan the beholder cast her arms aloft and sank in a heap, not knowing that the act had caught Hilary’s eye, but willingly aware that her voice had perished in a roar of artillery from the farther brink of the ravine, in a crackle and fall of tree-tops, and in the “rebel yell” and charge.
Next morning, in a fog, the blue holders of a new line of rifle-pits close under the top of a bluff talked up to the grays in a trench on its crest. Gross was the banter, but at mention of “ladies” it purified.
“Johnnie!” cried “Yank,” “who is she, the one we’ve got?” and when told to ask her, said she was too ill to ask. By and by to “Johnnie’s” inquiries the blues replied:
“He? the giant? Hurt? No-o, not half bad enough, when we count what he cost us. If we’d known he was only stunned we”–and so on, not very interestingly, while back in the rear of the gray line tearful Constance praised, to her face, the haggard Flora and, in his absence, the wounded Irby, Flora’s splendid rescuer in the evening onslaught.
“A lifetime debt,” Miranda thought Flora owed him, and Flora’s meditative yes, as she lifted her eyes to her grandmother’s, was–peculiar.
A few days later Anna, waking in the bliss of a restored mind, and feeling beneath her a tremor of paddlewheels, gazed on the nurse at her side.
“Am I a–prisoner?” she asked.
The woman bent kindly without reply.
“Anyhow,” said Anna, with a one-sided smile, “they can’t call me a spy.” Her words quickened: “I’m a rebel, but I’m no spy. I was lost. And he’s no spy. He was in uniform. Is he–on this boat?”
Yes, she was told, he was, with a few others like him, taken too soon for the general parole of the surrender. Parole? she pondered. Surrender? What surrender? “Where are we going?” she softly inquired; “not to New Orleans?”
The nurse nodded brightly.
“But how can we get–by?”
“By Vicksburg? We’re already by there.”
“Has Vicks–?… Has Vicksburg–fallen?”
The confirming nod was tender. Anna turned away. Presently–“But not Mobile? Mobile hasn’t–?”
“No, not yet. But it must, don’t you think?”
“No!” cried Anna. “It must not! Oh, it must not! I–if I–Oh, if I–“
The nurse soothed her smilingly: “My poor child,” she said, “_you_ can’t save Mobile.”
LXI
THE FLAG-OF-TRUCE BOAT
September was in its first week. The news of Vicksburg–and Port Hudson–ah, yes, and Gettysburg!–was sixty days old.
From Southern Mississippi and East Louisiana all the grays who marched under the slanting bayonet or beside the cannon’s wheel were gone. Left were only the “citizen” with his family and slaves, the post quartermaster and commissary, the conscript-officer, the trading Jew, the tax-in-kind collector, the hiding deserter, the jayhawker, a few wounded boys on furlough, and Harper’s cavalry. Throughout the Delta and widely about its grief-broken, discrowned, beggared, shame-crazed, brow-beaten Crescent City the giddying heat quaked visibly over the high corn, cotton, and cane, up and down the broken levees and ruined highways, empty by-ways, and grass-grown railways, on charred bridges, felled groves, and long burnt fence lines. The deep, moss-draped, vine-tangled swamps were dry.
So quivered the same heat in the city’s empty thoroughfares. Flowers rioted in the unkept gardens. The cicada’s frying note fried hotter than ever. Dazzling thunder-heads towered in the upper blue and stood like snow mountains of a vaster world. The very snake coiled in the shade. The spiced air gathered no freshness from the furious, infrequent showers, the pavements burned the feet, and the blue “Yank” (whom there no one dared call so by word or look), so stoutly clad, so uncouthly misfitted, slept at noon face downward in the high grass under the trees of the public squares preempted by his tents, or with piece loaded and bayonet fixed slowly paced to and fro in the scant shade of some confiscated office-building, from whose upper windows gray captives looked down, one of them being “the ladies’ man.”
Not known of his keepers by that name, though as the famous Major Kincaid of Kincaid’s Battery (the latter at Mobile with new guns), all July and August he had been of those who looked down from such windows; looked down often and long, yet never descried one rippling fold of one gossamer flounce of a single specimen of those far-compassionated “ladies of New Orleans,” one of whom, all that same time, was Anna Callender. No proved spy, she, no incarcerated prisoner, yet the most gravely warned, though gentlest, suspect in all the recalcitrant city.
Neither in those sixty days had Anna seen him. The blue sentries let no one pass in sight of that sort of windows. “Permit?” She had not sought it, Some one in gold lace called her “blamed lucky” to enjoy the ordinary permissions accorded Tom, Dick, and Harry. Indeed Tom, Dick, and Harry were freer than she. By reason of hints caught from her in wanderings of her mind on the boat, in dreams of a great service to be done for Dixie, the one spot where she most yearned to go and to be was forbidden her, and not yet had she been allowed to rest her hungry eyes on Callender House. Worse than idle, therefore, perilous for both of them and for any dream of great service, would it have been even to name the name of Hilary Kincaid.
What torture the double ban, the two interlocked privations! Yonder a city, little sister of New Orleans, still mutely hoping to be saved, here Hilary alive again, though Anna still unwitting whether she should love and live or doubt and die. Yet what would they say when they should meet? How could either explain? Surely, we think, love would have found a way; but while beyond each other’s sight and hearing, no way could Hilary, at least, descry.
To him it seemed impossible to speak to her–even to Fred Greenleaf had Fred been there!–without betraying another maiden, one who had sealed his lips forever by confessing a heart which had as much–had more right to love than he to live. True, Anna, above all, had right to live, to love, to know; but in simplest honor to commonest manhood, in simplest manhood’s honor to all womankind, to Flora, to Anna herself, this knowledge should come from any other human tongue rather than from his. From Anna he needed no explanation. That most mysteriously she should twice have defaulted as keeper of sacred treasure; that she stood long accused, by those who would most gladly have scouted the charge, of leanings to another suitor, a suitor in the blue, and of sympathies, nay, services, treasonous to the ragged standards of the gray; that he had himself found her in the enemy’s lines, carried there by her own steps, and accepting captivity without a murmur, ah, what were such light-as-air trials of true love’s faith while she was still Anna Callender, that Anna from whom one breath saying, “I am true,” would outweigh all a world could show or surmise in accusation?
And Anna: What could she say after what she had seen? Could she tell him–with Flora, as it were, still in his arms–could she explain that she had been seeking him to cast herself there? Or if she stood mute until he should speak, what could he say to count one heart-throb against what she had seen? Oh, before God! before God! it was not _jealousy_ that could make her dumb or deaf to either of them. She confessed its pangs. Yes! yes! against both of them, when she remembered certain things or forgot this and that, it raged in her heart, tingled in the farthest reach of her starved and fever-dried veins. Yet to God himself, to whom alone she told it, to God himself she protested on her knees it did not, should not, could not rule her. What right had she to give it room? Had she not discerned from the beginning that those two were each other’s by natural destiny? Was it not well, was it not God-sent to all three, that in due time, before too late, he and she–that other, resplendent she–should be tried upon each other alone –together? Always hitherto she, Anna, had in some way, some degree, intervened, by some chance been thrust and held between them; but at length nature, destiny, had all but prevailed, when once more she–stubbornly astray from that far mission of a city’s rescue so plainly hers–had crashed in between to the shame and woe of all, to the gain of no cause, no soul, no sweet influence in all love’s universe. Now, meeting Hilary, what might she do or say?
One thing! Bid him, on exchange or escape–if Heaven should grant the latter–find again Flora, and in her companionship, at last unhindered, choose! Yes, that would be justice and wisdom, mercy and true love, all in one. But could she do it, say it? She sprang up in bed to answer, “No-o-o!” no, she was no bloodless fool, she was a woman! Oh, God of mercy and true love, no! For reasons invincible, no! but most of all for one reason, one doubt, vile jealousy’s cure and despair’s antidote, slow to take form but growing as her strength revived, clear at last and all-sufficing; a doubt infinitely easier, simpler, kinder, and more blessed than to doubt true love. Nay, no doubt, but a belief! the rational, life-restoring belief, that in that awful hour of twilight between the hosts, of twilight and delirium, what she had seemed to see she had but seemed to see. Not all, ah, no, not all! Hilary alive again and grappling with death to come at her call had been real, proved real; the rest a spectre of her fevered brain! Meeting him now–and, oh, to meet him now!–there should be no questionings or explainings, but while he poured forth a love unsullied and unshaken she, scarce harkening, would with battle haste tell him, her life’s commander, the one thing of value, outvaluing all mere lovers’ love: The fact that behind a chimney-panel of Callender House, in its old trivial disguise, lay yet that long-lost fund pledged to Mobile’s defense–by themselves as lovers, by poor war-wasted Kincaid’s Battery, and by all its scattered sisters; the fund which must, as nearly on the instant as his and her daring could contrive, be recovered and borne thither for the unlocking of larger, fate-compelling resources of deliverance.
One day Victorine came to Anna with ecstasy in her almond eyes and much news on her lips. “To bigin small,” she said, Flora and her grandmother had “arrive’ back ag-ain” at dawn that morning! Oddly, while Anna forced a smile, her visitor’s eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. So they sat, Anna’s smile fading out while her soul’s troubles inwardly burned afresh, Victorine’s look growing into clearer English than her Creole tongue could have spoken. “I trust her no more,” it said. “Long have I doubted her, and should have told you sooner but for–Charlie; but now, dead in love as you know me still to be, you have my conviction. That is all for the present. There is better news.”
The ecstasy gleamed again and she gave her second item. These weeks she had been seeking, for herself and a guardian aunt, a passport into the Confederacy and lo! here it lay in her pretty hand.
“Deztitution!” she joyfully confessed to be the plea on which it had been procured–by Doctor Sevier through Colonel–guess!–“Grinleaf!–juz’ riturn'” from service in the field.
And how were the destitute pair to go?
Ah! did Anna “rim-emb’r” a despatch-boat of unrivalled speed whose engines Hilary Kin–?
Yes, ah, yes!
On which she and others had once–?
Yes, yes!
And which had been captured when the city fell? That boat was now lying off Callender House! Did Anna _not_ know that her shattered home, so long merely the headquarters of a blue brigade, had lately become of large, though very quiet, importance as a rendezvous of big generals who by starlight paced its overgrown garden alleys debating and planning something of great moment? Doctor Sevier had found that out and had charged Victorine to tell it with all secrecy to the biggest general in Mobile the instant she should reach there. For she was to go by that despatch-boat.
“Aw-dinner-illy,” she said, a flag-of-truce craft might be any old tub and would go the short way, from behind the city and across the lakes, not all round by the river and the Chandeleur Islands. But this time–that very morning–a score or so of Confederate prisoners (officers, for exchange) had been put aboard that boat, bound for Mobile. Plainly the whole affair was but a mask for reconnaissance, the boat, swiftest in all the Gulf, to report back at top speed by way of the lakes. But!–the aunt would not go at all! Never having been a mile from her door, she was begging off in a palsy of fright, and here was the niece with a deep plot–ample source of her ecstasy–a plot for Anna, duly disguised, to go in the aunt’s place, back to freedom, Dixie, and the arms of Constance and Miranda.
Anna trembled. She could lovingly call the fond schemer, over and over, a brave, rash, generous little heroine and lay caresses on her twice and again, but to know whether this was Heaven’s leading was beyond her. She paced the room. She clasped her brow. A full half of her own great purpose (great to her at least) seemed all at once as good as achieved, yet it was but the second half, as useless without the first as half a bridge on the far side of the flood. “I cannot go!” she moaned. For the first half was Hilary, and he–she saw it without asking–was on this cartel of exchange.
Gently she came and took her rescuer’s hands: “Dear child! If–if while there was yet time–I had only got a certain word to–_him_–you know? But, ah, me! I keep it idle yet; a secret, Victorine, a secret worth our three lives! oh, three times three hundred lives! Even now–“
“Give it me, Anna! Give it! Give it me, that sick-rate! I’ll take it him!”
Anna shook her head: “Ah, if you could–in time! Or even–even without him, letting him go, if just you and I–Come!” They walked to and fro in embrace: “Dear, our front drawing-room, so ruined, you know, by that shell, last year–“
“Ah, the front? no! The behine, yes, with those two hole’ of the shell and with thad _beegue_ hole in the floor where it cadge fiah.”
“Victorine, I could go–with you–in that boat, if only I could be for one minute in that old empty front room alone.”
Victorine halted and sadly tossed a hand: “Ah! h-amptee, yes, both the front and the back–till yes-the-day! This morning, the front, no! Juz’ sinze laz’ week they ‘ave brick’ up bitwin them cloze by that burned hole, to make of the front an office, and now the front ‘t is o’cupy!”
“Oh, not as an office, I hope?”
“Worse! The worse that can be! They ‘ave stop’ five prisoner’ from the boat and put them yondeh. Since an hour Col-on-el Grinleaf he tol’ me that–and she’s ad the bottom, that Flora! Bicause–” The speaker gazed. Anna was all joy.
“Because what?” demanded Anna, “because Hil–?”
“Yaas! bicause he’s one of them! Ringgleadeh! I dunno, me, what is that, but tha’z what he’s accuse’–ringg-leadingg!”
Still the oblivious Anna was glad. “It is Flora’s doing,” she gratefully cried. “She’s done it! done it for us and our cause!”
“Ah-h! not if she know herseff!”
Anna laughed the discussion down: “Come, dear, come! the whole thing opens to me clear and wide!”
Not so clear or wide as she thought. True, the suffering Flora was doing this, in desperate haste; but not for Anna, if she knew herself. Yet when Anna, in equal haste, made a certain minute, lengthy writing and, assisted by that unshaken devotee, her maid, and by Victorine, baked five small cakes most laughably alike (with the writing in ore) and laid them beside some plainer food in a pretty basket, the way still seemed wide enough for patriotism.
Now if some one would but grant Victorine leave to bestow this basket! As she left Anna she gave her pledge to seek this favor of any one else rather than of Greenleaf; which pledge she promptly broke, with a success that fully reassured her cheerful conscience.
LXII
FAREWELL, JANE!
“Happiest man in New Orleans!”
So called himself, to Colonel Greenleaf, the large, dingy-gray, lively-eyed Major Kincaid, at the sentinelled door of the room where he and his four wan fellows, snatched back from liberty on the eve of release, were prisoners in plain view of the vessel on which they were to have gone free.
With kind dignity Greenleaf predicted their undoubted return to the craft next morning. Strange was the difference between this scene and the one in which, eighteen months before, these two had last been together in this room. The sentry there knew the story and enjoyed it. In fact, most of the blue occupants of the despoiled place had a romantic feeling, however restrained, for each actor in that earlier episode. Yet there was resentment, too, against Greenleaf’s clemencies.
“Wants?” said the bedless captive to his old chum, “no, thank you, not a want!” implying, with his eyes, that the cloud overhanging Greenleaf for favors shown to–hmm!–certain others was already dark enough, “We’ve _parlor_ furniture galore,” he laughed, pointing out a number of discolored and broken articles that had been beautiful. One was the screen behind which the crouching Flora had heard him tell the ruin of her Mobile home and had sworn revenge on this home and on its fairest inmate.
During the evening the prisoners grew a bit noisy, in song; yet even when their ditties were helped out by a rhythmic clatter of boot-heels and chair-legs the too indulgent Greenleaf did not stop them. The voices were good and the lines amusing not merely to the guards here and there but to most of their epauleted superiors who, with lights out for coolness, sat in tilted chairs on a far corner of the front veranda to catch the river breeze. One lay was so antique as to be as good as new:
“Our duck swallowed a snail,
And her eyes stood out with wonder. Our duck swallowed a snail,
And her eyes stood out with wonder Till the horns grew out of her tail, tail, tail, Tail, Tail,
Tail, Tail,
Tail, Tail,
And tore it All asunder.
Farewell, Jane!
“Our old horse fell into the well
Around behind the stable.
Our old horse fell into the well
Around behind the stable.
He couldn’t fall all the way but he fell, Fell,
Fell,
Fell,
Fell,
Fell,
Fell,
As far as he was able.
Farewell, Jane!”
It is here we may safest be brief. The literature of prison escapes is already full enough. Working in the soft mortar of so new a wall and worked by one with a foundryman’s knowledge of bricklaying, the murdered Italian’s stout old knife made effective speed as it kept neat time with the racket maintained for it. When the happiest man in New Orleans warily put head and shoulders through the low gap he had opened, withdrew them again and reported to his fellows, the droll excess of their good fortune moved the five to livelier song, and as one by one the other four heads went in to view the glad sight the five gave a yet more tragic stanza from the farewell to Jane. The source of their delight was not the great ragged hole just over the intruding heads, in the ceiling’s lath and plaster, nor was it a whole corner torn off the grand-piano by the somersaulting shell as it leaped from the rent above to the cleaner one it had left at the baseboard in the room’s farther end. It was that third hole, burned in the floor; for there it opened, shoulder wide, almost under their startled faces, free to the basement’s floor and actually with the rough ladder yet standing in it which had been used in putting out the fire. That such luck could last a night was too much to hope.
Yet it lasted. The songs were hushed. The room whence they had come was without an audible stir. Sleep stole through all the house, through the small camp of the guard in the darkened grove, the farther tents of the brigade, the anchored ships, the wide city, the starlit landscape. Out in that rear garden-path where Madame Valcour had once been taken to see the head-high wealth of roses two generals, who had been there through all the singing, still paced to and fro and talked, like old Brodnax at Carrollton in that brighter time, “not nearly as much alone as they seemed.” One by one five men in gray, each, for all his crouching and gliding, as true and gallant a gentleman as either of those commanders, stole from the house’s basement and slipped in and out among the roses. Along a back fence a guard walked up and down. Two by two, when his back was turned, went four of the gliding men, as still as bats, over the fence into a city of ten thousand welcome hiding-places. The fifth, their “ringg-leadeh,” for whom they must wait concealed until he should rejoin them, lingered in the roses; hovered so close to the path that he might have touched its occupants as they moved back and forth; almost–to quote his uncle–
“Sat in the roses and heard the birds sing”–
heard blue birds, in soft notes not twittered, muttered as by owls, revealing things priceless for Mobile to know.
Bragg’s gray army, he heard, was in far Chattanooga facing Rosecrans, and all the slim remnants of Johnston’s were hurrying to its reinforcement. Mobile was merely garrisoned. Little was there save artillery. Here in New Orleans lay thousands of veterans flushed with their up-river victories, whose best and quickest aid to Rosecrans would be so to move as to turn Bragg’s reinforcements back southward. A cavalry dash across the pine-barrens of East Louisiana to cut the railroad along the Mississippi-Alabama line, a quick joint movement of land and naval forces by way of the lakes, sound, and gulf, and Mobile would fall. These things and others, smaller yet more startling, the listener learned of, not as pastime talk, but as a vivid scheme already laid, a mine ready to be sprung if its secret could be kept three days longer; and now he hurried after his four compatriots, his own brain teeming with a counter-plot to convey this secret through the dried-up swamps to the nearest Confederate telegraph station while Anna should bear it (and the recovered treasure) by boat to Mobile, two messengers being so many times surer than one.
Early next morning Madame Valcour, entering an outer room from an inner one, found Flora writing a note. The girl kept on, conscious that her irksome critic was taking keen note of a subtle, cruel decay of her beauty, a spiritual corrosion that, without other fault to the eye, had at last reached the surface in a faint hardening of lines and staleness of bloom. Now she rose, went out, dispatched her note and returned. Her manner, as the two sat down to bread and coffee, was bright though tense.
“From Greenleaf?” inquired her senior, “and to the same?”
The girl shook her fair head and named one of his fellow-officers at Callender House: “No, Colonel Greenleaf is much too busy. Hilary Kincaid has–“
“Esca-aped?” cried the aged one, flashed hotly, laughed, flashed again and smiled. “That Victorine kitten–with her cakes! And you–and Greenleaf–hah! you three cats paws–of one little–Anna!”
Flora jauntily wagged a hand, then suddenly rose and pointed with a big bread knife: “Go, dress! We’ll save the kitten–if only for Charlie! Go! _she must leave town at once_. Go! But, ah, grannie dear,”–she turned to a window–“for Anna, spite of all we can do, I am af-raid–Ship Island! Poor _Anna!_” At the name her beautiful arm, in one swift motion, soared, swung, drove the bright steel deep into the window-frame and left it quivering.
“Really,” said a courteous staff-officer as he and Doctor Sevier alighted at the garden stair of Callender House and helped Anna and her maid from a public carriage, “only two or three of us will know you’re”–His smile was awkward. The pale doctor set his jaw. Anna musingly supplied the term:
“A prisoner.” She looked fondly over the house’s hard-used front as they mounted the steps. “If they’d keep me here, Doctor,” she said at the top, “I’d be almost happy. But”–she faced the aide-de-camp–“they won’t, you know. By this time to-morrow I shall be”–she waved playfully–“far away.”
“Mainland, or island?” grimly asked the Doctor.
She did not know. “But I know, now, how a rabbit feels with the hounds after her. Honestly,” she said again to the officer, “I wish I might have her cunning.” And the soldier murmured, “Amen.”
LXIII
THE IRON-CLAD OATH
Under Anna’s passive air lay a vivid alertness to every fact in range of eye or ear.
Any least thing now might tip the scale for life or death, and while at the head of the veranda steps she spoke of happiness her distressed thought was of Hilary’s madcap audacity, how near at hand he might be even then, under what fearful risk of recognition and capture. She was keenly glad to hear two men complain that the guard about the house and grounds was to-day a new one awkward to the task. Of less weight now it seemed that out on the river the despatch-boat had shifted her berth down-stream and with steam up lay where the first few wheel turns would put her out of sight. Indoors, where there was much official activity, it relieved her to see that neither Hilary’s absence nor her coming counted large in the common regard. The brace of big generals were in the library across the hall, busy on some affair much larger than this of “ourn.”
The word was the old coachman Israel’s. What a tender joy it was to find him in the wretched drawing-room trying to make it decent for her and dropping his tears as openly as the maid. With what a grace, yet how boldly, he shut the door between them and blue authority. While the girl arranged on a table, for Anna’s use, a basket of needlework brought with them he honestly confessed his Union loyalty, yet hurriedly, under his breath, bade Anna not despair, and avowed a devotion to the safety and comfort of “ole mahs’s and mis’s sweet baby” as then and forever his higher law. He was still autocrat of the basement, dropsied with the favor of colonels and generals, deferential to “folks,” but a past-master in taking liberties with things. As he talked he so corrected the maid’s arrangement of the screen that the ugly hole in the wall was shut from the view of visitors, though left in range of Anna’s work-table, and as Anna rose at a tap on the door, with the gentle ceremony of the old home he let in Doctor Sevier and Colonel Greenleaf and shut himself out.
“Anna,” began the Doctor, “There’s very little belief here that you’re involved in this thing.”
“Why, then,” archly said Anna, “who is?”
“Ah, that’s the riddle. But they say if you’ll just take the oath of allegiance–“
Anna started so abruptly as to imperil her table. Her color came and her voice dropped to its lowest note as she said between long breaths: “No!–no!–no!”
But the Doctor spoke on:
“They believe that if you take it you’ll keep it, and they say that the moment you take it you may go free, here or anywhere–to Mobile if you wish.”
Again Anna flinched: “Mobile!” she murmured, and then lifting her eyes to Greenleaf’s, repeated, “No! No, not for my life. Better Ship Island.”
Greenleaf reddened. “Anna,” put in the Doctor, but she lifted a hand:–
“They’ve never offered it to you, Doctor? H-oh! They’d as soon think of asking one of our generals. They’d _almost_ as soon”–the corners of her lips hinted a smile–“ask Hilary Kincaid.”
“I’ve never advised any one against it, Anna.”
“Well, I do!–every God-fearing Southern man and woman. A woman is all I am and I may be short-sighted, narrow, and foolish, but–Oh, Colonel Greenleaf, you shouldn’t have let Doctor Sevier take this burden for you. It’s hard enough–“
The Doctor intervened: “Anna, dear, this old friend of yours”–laying a finger on Greenleaf–“is in a tight place. Both you and Hilary–“
“Yes, I know, and I know it’s not fair to him. Lieutenant–Colonel, I mean, pardon me!–you sha’n’t be under odium for my sake or his. As far as I stand accused I must stand alone. The one who must go free is that mere child Victorine, on her pass, to-day, this morning. When I hear the parting gun of that boat down yonder I want to know by it that Victorine is safely on her way to Mobile, as she would be had she not been my messenger yesterday.”
“She carried nothing but a message?”
“Nothing but a piece of writing–mine! Colonel, I tell you faithfully, whatever Major Kincaid broke prison with was not brought here yesterday by any one and was never in Victorine’s hands.”
“Nor in yours, either?” kindly asked Greenleaf.
Anna caught her breath and went redder than ever. Doctor Sevier stirred to speak, but Anna’s maid gave her a soft thrust, pointed behind the screen, and covered a bashful smile with her apron. Anna’s blush became one of mirth. Her eyes went now to the Doctor and again to the broken wall.
“Israel!” she laughed, “why do you enter–?”
“On’y fitten’ way, missie. House so full o’ comin’ and goin’, and me havin’ dis cullud man wid me.”
Out on the basement ladder, at the ragged gap of Israel’s “on’y fittin’ way,” was visible, to prove his word, another man’s head, white-turbaned like his own, and two dark limy hands passing in a pail of mortar. Welcome distraction. True, Greenleaf’s luckless question still stood unanswered, but just then an orderly summoned him to the busy generals and spoke aside to Doctor Sevier.
“Miss Valcour,” explained the Doctor to Anna.
“Oh, Doctor,” she pleaded, “I want to see her! Beg them, won’t you, to let her in?”
LXIV
“NOW, MR. BRICK-MASON,–“
Amid the much coming and going that troubled Israel–tramp of spurred boots, clank of sabres, seeking, meeting and parting of couriers and aides–Madame Valcour, outwardly placid, inwardly terrified, found opportunity to warn her granddaughter, softly, that unless she, the granddaughter, could get that look of done-for agony out of her eyes, the sooner and farther they fled this whole issue, this fearful entanglement, the better for them.
But brave Flora, knowing the look was no longer in the eyes alone but had for days eaten into her visage as age had for decades into the grandam’s, made no vain effort to paint it out with smiles but accepted and wore it in show of a desperate solicitude for Anna. Yet this, too, was futile, and before Doctor Sevier had exchanged five words with her she saw that to him the make-up was palpable and would be so to Greenleaf. Poor Flora! She had wrestled her victims to the edge of a precipice, yet it was she who at this moment, this dazzling September morning, seemed doomed to go first over the brink. Had not both Hilary and Anna met again this Greenleaf and through him found answer for all their burning questions? She could not doubt her web of deceptions had been torn to shreds, cast to the winds. Not one of the three could she now hope to confront successfully, much less any two of them together. To name no earlier reason–having reached town just as Kincaid was being sent out of it, she had got him detained on a charge so frivolous that how to sustain it now before Greenleaf and his generals she was tortured to contrive.
Yet something must be done. The fugitive must be retaken and retained, the rival deported, and, oh, Hilary Kincaid! as she recalled her last moment with you on that firing-line behind Vicksburg, shame and rage outgrew despair, and her heart beat hot in a passion of chagrin and then hotter, heart and brain, in a frenzy of ownership, as if by spending herself she had bought you, soul and body, and if only for self-vindication would have you from all the universe.
“The last wager and the last card,” she smilingly remarked to her kinswoman, “they sometimes win out,” and as the smile passed added, “I wish I had that bread-knife.”
To Doctor Sevier her cry was, “Oh, yes, yes! Dear Anna! Poor Anna! Yes, before I have to see any one else, even Colonel Greenleave! Ah, please, Doctor, beg him he’ll do me that prizelezz favor, and that for the good God’s sake he’ll keep uz, poor Anna and me, not long waiting!”
Yet long were the Valcours kept. It was the common fate those days. But Flora felt no title to the common fate, and while the bustle of the place went on about them she hiddenly suffered and, mainly for the torment it would give her avaricious companion, told a new reason for the look in her eyes. Only a few nights before she had started wildly out of sleep to find that she had _dreamed_ the cause of Anna’s irreconcilable distress for the loss of the old dagger. The dream was true on its face, a belated perception awakened by bitterness of soul, and Madame, as she sat dumbly marvelling at its tardiness, chafed the more against each minute’s present delay, seeing that now to know if Kincaid, or if Anna, held the treasure was her liveliest hankering.
Meantime the captive Anna was less debarred than they. As Greenleaf and the Doctor, withdrawing, shut her door, and until their steps died away, she had stood by her table, her wide thought burning to know the whereabouts, doings, and plight of him, once more missing, with whom a scant year-and-a-half earlier–if any war-time can be called scant–she had stood on that very spot and sworn the vows of marriage: to know his hazards now, right now! with man; police, informer, patrol, picket, scout; and with nature; the deadly reptiles, insects, and maladies of thicketed swamp and sun-beaten, tide-swept marsh; and how far he had got on the splendid mission which her note, with its words of love and faith and of patriotic abnegation, had laid upon him.
Now eagerly she took her first quick survey of the room she knew so well. Her preoccupied maid was childishly questioning the busy Israel as he and the man out on the basement ladder removed bricks from the edges of the ragged opening between them.
“Can’t build solid ef you don’t staht solid,” she heard the old coachman say. She glided to the chimney-breast, searching it swiftly with her eyes and now with her hands. Soilure and scars had kept the secret of the hidden niche all these months, and neither stain, scar, nor any sign left by Hilary or Flora betrayed it now. Surely _this_ was the very panel Flora had named. Yet dumbly, rigidly it denied the truth, for Hilary, having reaped its spoil, had, to baffle his jailors, cunningly made it fast. And time was flying! Tremblingly the searcher glanced again to the door, to the screen, to the veranda windows–though these Israel had rudely curtained–and then tried another square, keenly harkening the while to all sounds and especially to the old negro’s incessant speech:
“Now, Mr. Brick-mason, ef you’ll climb in hyuh I’ll step out whah you is and fetch a bucket o’ warteh. Gal, move one side a step, will you?”
While several feet stirred lightly Anna persisted in her trembling quest–not to find the treasure, dear Heaven, but only to find it gone. Would that little be denied? So ardent was the mute question that she seemed to have spoken it aloud, and in alarm looked once more at the windows, the door, the screen–the screen! A silence had settled there and as her eye fell on it the stooping mason came from behind it, glancing as furtively as she at windows and door and then exaltedly to her. She stiffened for outcry and flight, but in the same instant he straightened up and she knew him; knew him as right here she had known him once before in that same disguise, which the sad fortunes of their cause had prevented his further use of till now. He started forward, but with beseeching signs and whispers, blind to everything between them but love and faith, she ran to him. He caught her to his heart and drew her behind the screen under the enraptured eyes of her paralyzed maid. For one long breath of ecstasy the rest of the universe was nothing. But then–
“The treasure?” she gasped. “The dagger?”
He showed the weapon in its precious scabbard and sought to lay it in her hands, but–“Oh, why! why!” she demanded, though with a gaze that ravished his,–. “Why are you not on your way–?”
“Am!” he softly laughed. “Here, leave me the dirk, but take the sheath. Everything’s there that we put there long ago, beloved, and also a cypher report of what I heard last night in the garden–never mind what!–_take it_, you will save Mobile! Now both of you slip through this hole and down the ladder and quietly skedaddle–quick–come!”
“But the guards?”
“Just brass it out and walk by them. Victorine’s waiting out behind with all her aunt’s things at a house that old Israel will tell you of–listen!” From just outside the basement, near the cisterns, a single line of song rose drowsily and ceased:
“Heap mo’ dan worteh-million juice–“
“That’s he. It means come on. Go!” He gathered a brick and trowel and rang them together as if at work. The song answered:
“Aw ‘possum pie aw roasted goose–“
The trowel rang on. Without command from her mistress the maid was crouching into the hole. In the noise Anna was trying to press an anxious query upon Hilary, but he dropped brick and tool and snatched her again into his embrace.
“Aw soppin’s o’ de gravy pan–“
called the song. The maid was through!
“But you, Hilary, my life?” gasped Anna as he forced her to the opening.
“The swamp for me!” he said, again sounding the trowel. “I take this”–the trowel–“and walk out through the hall. Go, my soul’s treasure, go!”
Anna, with that art of the day which remains a wonder yet, gathered her crinoline about her feet and twisted through and out upon the ladder. Hilary seized a vanishing hand, kissed it madly, and would have loosed it, but it clung till his limy knuckles went out and down and her lips sealed on them the distant song’s fourth line as just then it came:
“De ladies loves de ladies’ man!”
As mistress and maid passed in sight of the dark singer he hurried to them, wearing the bucket of water on his turban as lightly as a hat. “Is you got to go so soon?” he asked, and walked beside them. Swiftly, under his voice, he directed them to Victorine and then spoke out again in hearing of two or three blue troopers. “You mus’ come ag’in, whensomeveh you like.”
They drew near a guard: “Dese is ole folks o’ mine, Mr. Gyuard, ef you please, suh, dess a-lookin’ at de ole home, suh.”
“We were admitted by Colonel Greenleaf,” said Anna, with a soft brightness that meant more than the soldier guessed, and he let them out, feeling as sweet, himself, as he tried to look sour.
“Well, good-by, Miss Nannie,” said the old man, “I mus’ recapitulate back to de house; dey needs me pow’ful all de time. Good luck to you! Gawd bless you!… Dass ow ba-aby, Mr. Gyuard–Oh, Lawd, Lawd, de days I’s held dat chile out on one o’ dese ole han’s!” He had Flora’s feeling for stage effects.
Toiling or resting, the Southern slaves were singers. With the pail on his head and with every wearer of shoulder-straps busy giving or obeying some order, it was as normal as cock-crowing that he should raise yet another line of his song and that from the house the diligent bricklayer should reply.
Sang the water-carrier:
“I’s natch-i-ully gallant wid de ladies,–“
and along with the trowel’s tinkle came softly back,
“I uz bawn wid a talent fo’ de ladies.”
For a signal the indoor singer need not have gone beyond that line, but the spirit that always grew merry as the peril grew, the spirit which had made Kincaid’s Battery the fearfulest its enemies ever faced, insisted:
“You fine it on de map o’ de contrac’ plan, I’s boun’ to be a ladies’ man!”
LXV
FLORA’S LAST THROW
Normal as cock-crowing seemed the antiphony to the common ear, which scarcely noticed the rareness of the indoor voice. But Greenleaf’s was not the common ear, nor was Flora Valcour’s.
To her that closing strain made the torture of inaction finally unbearable. Had Anna heard? Leaving Madame she moved to a hall door of the room where they sat. Was Anna’s blood surging like her own? It could not! Under what a tempest of conjectures she looked down and across the great hall to the closed and sentinelled door of that front drawing-room so rife with poignant recollections. There, she thought, was Anna. From within it, more faintly now, came those sounds of a mason at work which had seemed to ring with the song. But the song had ceased. About the hall highly gilded officers conferred alertly in pairs or threes, more or less in the way of younger ones who smartly crossed from room to room. Here came Greenleaf! Seeking her? No, he would have passed unaware, but her lips ventured his name.
Never had she seen such a look in his face as that with which he confronted her. Grief, consternation, discovery and wrath were all as one save that only the discovery and wrath meant her. She saw how for two days and nights he had been putting this and that and this and that and this and that together until he had guessed her out. Sternly in his eyes she perceived contumely withholding itself, yet even while she felt the done-for cry heave through her bosom, and the floor fail like a sinking deck, she clung to her stage part, babbled impromptu lines.
“Doctor Sevier–?” she began–
“He had to go.”
Again she read the soldier’s eyes. God! he was comparing her changed countenance–a fool could see he was!–with Anna’s! both smitten with affliction, but the abiding peace of truth in one, the abiding war of falsehood in the other. So would Kincaid do if he were here! But the stage waited: “Ah, Colonel, Anna! poor Anna!” Might not the compassion-wilted supplicant see the dear, dear prisoner? She rallied all her war-worn fairness with all her feminine art, and to her amazement, with a gleam of purpose yet without the softening of a lineament, he said yes, waved permission across to the guard and left her.
She passed the guard and knocked. Quietly in the room clinked the brick-mason’s work. He strongly hummed his tune. Now he spoke, as if to his helper, who seemed to be leaving him. Again she knocked, and bent her ear. The mason sang aloud:
“Some day dis worl’ come to an en’,
I don’t know how, I don’t know when–“
She turned the door-knob and murmured, “Anna!”
The bricklaying clinked, tapped and scraped on. The workman hummed again his last two lines.
“Who is it?” asked a feigned voice which she knew so instantly to be Kincaid’s that every beat of her heart jarred her frame.
“‘Tis I, Anna, dear. ‘Tis Flora.” She was mindful of the sentry, but all his attention was in the busy hall.
There came a touch on the inner door-knob. “Go away!” murmured the manly voice, no longer disguised. “In God’s name! for your own sake as well as hers, go instantly!”
“No,” melodiously replied Flora, in full voice for the sentry’s ear, but with resolute pressure on the door, “no, not at all…. No, I muz’ not, cannot.”
“Then wait one moment till you hear me at work!”
She waited. Presently the trowel sounded again and its wielder, in a lowered tone, sang with it:
“Dat neveh trouble Dandy Dan
Whilst de ladies loves de ladies’ man.”
At the first note she entered with some idle speech, closed the door, darted her glance around, saw no one, heard only the work and the song and sprang to the chimney-breast. She tried the panel–it would not yield! Yet there, as if the mason’s powerful hands had within that minute reopened and reclosed it, were the wet marks of his fingers. A flash of her instinct for concealment bade her wipe them off and she had barely done so when he stepped from the screen, fresh from Israel’s water-bucket, drying his face on his hands, his hands on his face and un-turbaned locks, prison-worn from top to toe, but in Dixie’s full gray and luminous with the unsmiling joy of danger.
“It’s not there,” he loudly whispered, showing the bare dagger. “Here it is. She has the rest, scabbard and all.”
Flora clasped her hands as in ecstasy: “And is free? surely free?”
“Almost! Surely when that despatch-boat fires!” In a few rapid words Hilary told the scheme of Anna’s flight, at the same time setting the screen aside so as to show the hole in the wall nearly closed, humming his tune and ringing the trowel on the brickwork.
Flora made new show of rapture. Nor was it all mere show. Anna escaping, the treasure would escape with her, and Flora be thrown into the dungeon of penury. Yet let them both go, both rival and treasure! Love’s ransom! All speed to them since they left her Hilary Kincaid and left him at her mercy. But the plight was complex and suddenly her exultation changed to affright. “My God! Hilary Kincaid,” she panted, “you ‘ave save’ her to deztroy yo’seff! You are–“
Proudly, gaily he shook his head: “No! No! against her will I’ve sent her, to save–” He hushed. He had begun to say a city, Flora’s city. Once more a captive, he would gladly send by Flora also, could she contrive to carry it, the priceless knowledge which Anna, after all, might fail to convey. But something–it may have been that same outdone and done-for look which Greenleaf had just noted–silenced him, and the maiden resumed where she had broken off:
“My God, Hilary Kincaid, you are in denger to be hanged a spy! Thiz minute you ‘ave hide yo’ dizguise in that panel!”
“You would come in,” said Hilary, with a playful wave of the trowel, and turned to his work, singing:
“When I hands in my checks–“
Flora ran and clung tenderly to his arm, but with a distressed smile he clasped her wrists in one hand and gently forced her back again while she asked in burning undertone, “And you ‘ave run that h-awful risk for me? for me? But, why? why? why?”
“Oh!” he laughingly said, and at the wall once more waved the ringing trowel, “instinct, I reckon; ordinary manhood–to womanhood. If you had recognized me in that rig–“
“And I would! In any rigue thiz heart would reco’nize you!”
“Then you would have had to betray me or else go, yourself, to Ship Island”
“H-o-oh! I would have gone!”
“That’s what I feared,” said Hilary, though while he spoke she fiercely felt that she certainly would have betrayed him; not for horror of Ship Island but because now, _after this_, no Anna Callender nor all the world conspired should have him from her alive.
He lifted his tool for silence, and fresh anger wrung her soul to see joy mount in his eyes as from somewhere below the old coachman sang:
“When I hands in my checks, O, my ladies!”
Yet she showed elation: “That means Anna and Victorine they have pazz’ to the boat?”
With merry nods and airy wavings of affirmation he sang back, rang back:
“Mighty little I espec’s, O, my ladies! But whaheveh–“
Suddenly he darkened imperiously and motioned Flora away. “Now! now’s your time! go! now! this instant go!” he exclaimed, and sang on:
“–I is sent–“
“Ah!” she cried, “they’ll h-ask me about her!”
“I don’t believe it!” cried he, and sang again:
“–dey mus’ un-deh-stan’–“
“Yes,” she insisted, “–muz’ undehstan’, and they will surely h-ask me!”
“Well, let them ask their heads off! Go! at once! before you’re further implicated!”
“And leave you to–?”
“Oh, doggon _me_. The moment that boat’s gun sounds–if only you’re out o’ the way–I’ll make a try. Go! for Heaven’s sake, go!”
Instead, with an agony of fondness, she glided to him. Distress held him as fast and mute as at the flag presentation. But when she would have knelt he caught her elbows and held her up by force.
“No,” he moaned, “you shan’t do that.”
She crimsoned and dropped her face between their contending arms while for pure anguish he impetuously added, “Maybe in God’s eyes a woman has this right, I’m not big enough to know; but as _I’m made_ it can’t be done. I’m a man, no more, no less!”
Her eyes flashed into his: “You are Hilary Kincaid. I will stan’!”
“No,”–he loosed his hold,–“I’m _only_ Hilary Kincaid and you’ll go–in mercy to both of us–in simple good faith to every one we love–Oh, leave me!” He swung his head in torture: “I’d sooner be shot for a spy or a coward than be the imbecile this makes me.” Then all at once he was fierce: “Go!”
Almost below her breath she instantly replied, “I will not!” She stood at her full, beautiful height. “Together we go or together stay. List-en!–no-no, not for _that_.” (Meaning the gun.) In open anger she crimsoned again: “‘Twill shoot, all right, and Anna, _she’ll_ go. Yes, she will _leave_ you. She can do that. And you, you can sen’ her away!”
He broke in with a laugh of superior knowledge and began to draw back, but she caught his jacket in both hands, still pouring forth,–“She _has_ leave you–to me! me to you! My God! Hilary Kincaid, could she do that if she love’ you? She don’t! She knows not how–and neither you! But you, ah, you shall learn. She, she never can!” Through his jacket her knuckles felt the bare knife. Her heart leapt.
“Let go,” he growled, backing away and vainly disengaging now one of her hands and now the other. “My trowel’s too silent.”
But she clung and dragged, speaking on wildly: “You know, Hilary, you know? _You love me_. Oh, no-no-no, don’ look like that, I’m not crazee.” Her deft hands had got the knife, but she tossed it into the work-basket: “Ah, Hilary Kincaid, oft-en we love where we thing we do not, and oft-en thing we love where we do not–“
He would not hear: “Oh, Flora Valcour! You smother me in my own loathing–oh, God send that gun!” The four hands still strove.
“Hilary, list-en me yet a moment. See me. Flora Valcour. Could Flora Valcour do like this–_ag-ains’ the whole nature of a woman_–if she–?”
“Stop! stop! you shall not–“
“If she di’n’ know, di’n’ feel, di’n’ see, thad you are loving her?”
“Yet God knows I’ve never given cause, except as–“
“A ladies’ man?” prompted the girl and laughed.
The blood surged to his brow. A wilder agony was on hers as he held her from him, rigid; “Enough!” he cried; “We’re caged and doomed. Yet you still have this one moment to save us, _all of us_, from life-long shame and sorrow.”
She shook her head.
“Yes, yes,” he cried. “You can. I cannot. I’m helpless now and forever. What man or woman, if I could ever be so vile as to tell it, could believe the truth of this from me? In God’s name, then, go!” He tenderly thrust her off: “Go, live to honor, happiness and true love, and let me–“
“Ezcape, perchanze, to Anna?”
“Yes, if I–” He ceased in fresh surprise. Not because she toyed with the dagger lying on Anna’s needlework, for she seemed not to know she did it; but because of a strange brightness of assent as she nodded twice and again.
“I will go,” she said. Behind the brightness was the done-for look, plainer than ever, and with it yet another, a look of keen purpose, which the grandam would have understood. He saw her take the dirk, so grasping it as to hide it behind wrist and sleeve; but he said only, beseechingly, “Go!”
“Stay,” said another voice, and at the small opening still left in the wall, lo! the face of Greenleaf and the upper line of his blue and gilt shoulders. His gaze was on Flora. She could do nothing but gaze again. “I know, now,” he continued, “your whole two-years’ business. Stay just as you are till I can come round and in. Every guard is doubled and has special orders.”
She dropped into a seat, staring like one demented, now at door and windows, now from one man to the other, now to the floor, while Kincaid sternly said, “Colonel Greenleaf, the reverence due from any soldier to any lady–” and Greenleaf interrupted–
“The lady may be sure of.”
“And about this, Fred, you’ll be–dumb?”
“Save only to one, Hilary.”
“Where is she, Fred?”
“On that boat, fancying herself disguised. Having you, we’re only too glad not to have her.”
The retaken prisoner shone with elation: “And those fellows of last night?–got them back?”
Greenleaf darkened, and shook his head.
“Hurrah,” quietly remarked the smiling Hilary.
“Wait a moment,” said the blue commander, and vanished.
LXVI
“WHEN I HANDS IN MY CHECKS”
Kincaid glanced joyfully to Flora, but her horrified gaze held him speechless.
“Now,” she softly asked, “who is the helplezz–the cage’–the doom’? You ‘ave kill’ me.”
“I’ll save you! There’s good fighting yet, if–“
“H-oh! already, egcep’ inside me, I’m dead.”
“Not by half! There’s time for a last shot and I’ve seen it win!” He caught up the trowel, turned to his work and began to sing once more:
“When I hands in my checks, O, my ladies, Mighty little I espec’s, O, my ladies–“
[Illustration: She dropped into a seat, staring like one demented.]
He ceased and listened. Certainly, somewhere, some one had moaned. Sounds throughout the house were growing, as if final orders had set many in motion at once. For some cause unrelated to him or to Anna, to Flora or the silent boat, bugles and drums were assembling the encamped brigade. Suddenly, not knowing why, he flashed round. Flora was within half a step of him with her right arm upthrown. He seized it, but vain was the sparring skill that had won at the willow pond. Her brow was on his breast, the knife was in her left hand, she struck with thrice her natural power, an evil chance favored her, and, hot as lightning, deep, deep, the steel plunged in. He gulped a great breath, his eyes flamed, but no cry came from him or her. With his big right hand crushing her slim fingers as they clung to the hilt, he dragged the weapon forth and hurled her off.
Before he could find speech she had regained her balance and amazed him yet again with a smile. The next instant she had lifted the dagger against herself, but he sprang and snatched it, exclaiming as he drew back:–
“No, you sha’n’t do that, either.”
She strove after it. He held her off by an arm, but already his strength was failing. “My God!” he groaned, “it’s you, Flora Valcour, who’ve killed me. Oh, how did–how did you–was it accid’–wasn’t it accident? Fly!” He flung her loose. “For your life, fly! Oh, that gun! Oh, God send it! Fly! Oh, Anna, Anna Callender! Oh, your city, Flora Valcour, your own city! Fly, poor child! I’ll keep up the sham for you!”
Starting now here, now there, Flora wavered as he reeled to the broken wall and seized the trowel. The knife dropped to the floor but he set foot on it, brandished the tool and began to sing:
“When I hands in my checks, O, my ladies–“
A cry for help rang from Flora. She darted for the door but was met by Greenleaf. “Stay!” he repeated, and tone, hand, eye told her she was a prisoner. He halted aghast at the crimson on her hands and brow, on Hilary’s, on Hilary’s lips and on the floor, and himself called, “Help here! a surgeon! help!” while Kincaid faced him gaily, still singing:
“Mighty little I espec’s, O, my ladies–“
Stooping to re-exchange the tool for the weapon, the singer went limp, swayed, and as Greenleaf sprang to him, toppled over, lengthened out and relaxed on the arm of his foe and friend. Wild-eyed, Flora swept to her knees beside him, her face and form all horror and affright, crying in a voice fervid and genuine as only truth can make it in the common run of us, “He di’n’ mean! Oh, he di’n’ mean! ‘Twas all accident! He di’n’ mean!”
“Yes, Fred,” said Hilary. “She–she–mere accident, old man. Keep it mum.” He turned a suffering brow to Flora: “You’ll explain for me–when”–he gathered his strength–“when the–boat’s gone.”
The room had filled with officers asking “who, how, what?” “Did it himself, to cheat the gallows,” Madame heard one answer another as by some fortune she was let in. She found Greenleaf chief in a group busy over the fallen man, who lay in Flora’s arms, deadly pale, yet with a strong man’s will in every lineament.
“Listen, Fred,” he was gasping. “It’ll sound. It’s got to! Oh, it will! One minute, Doctor, please. My love and a city–Fred, can’t some one look and see if–?”
From a lifted window curtain the young aide who had brought Anna to the house said, “Boat’s off.”
“Thank God!” panted Hilary. “Oh, Fred, Fred, my girl and _all_! Just a minute, Doctor,–_there_!”
A soft, heavy boom had rolled over the land. The pain-racked listener flamed for joy and half left the arms that held him: “Oh, Fred, wasn’t that heaven’s own music?” He tried to finish his song:
“But whaheveh I is sent, dey mus’ undehstan’–“
and swooned.
LXVII
MOBILE
About a green spot crowning one of the low fortified hills on a northern edge of Mobile sat Bartleson, Mandeville, Irby, Villeneuve and two or three lieutenants, on ammunition-boxes, fire-logs and the sod, giving their whole minds to the retention of Anna and Miranda Callender, who sat on camp-stools. The absent Constance was down in the town, just then bestowing favors not possible for any one else to offer so acceptably to a certain duplicate and very self-centered Steve aged eighty days–sh-sh-sh!
The camp group’s soft discourse was on the character of one whom this earliest afternoon in August they had followed behind muffled drums to his final rest. Beginning at Carrollton Gardens, they said, then in the flowery precincts of Callender House, later in that death-swept garden on Vicksburg’s inland bluffs, and now in this one, of Flora’s, a garden yet, peaceful and fragrant, though no part of its burnt house save the chimneys had stood in air these three years and a half, the old hero–
“Yes,” chimed Miranda to whoever was saying it–
The old hero, despite the swarm of mortal perils and woes he and his brigade and its battery had come through in that period, had with a pleasing frequency–to use the worn-out line just this time more–
“Sat in the roses and heard the birds’ song.”
The old soldier, they all agreed, had had a feeling for roses and song, which had gilded the edges and angles of his austere spirit and betrayed a tenderness too deep hid for casual discovery, yet so vital a part of him that but for its lacerations–with every new public disaster–he never need have sunk under these year-old Vicksburg wounds which had dragged him down at last.
Miranda retold the splendid antic he had cut in St. Charles Street the day Virginia seceded. Steve recounted how the aged warrior had regained strength from Chickamauga’s triumph and lost it again after Chattanooga. Two or three recalled how he had suffered when Banks’ Red River Expedition desolated his fair estate and “forever lured away” his half-a-thousand “deluded people.” He must have succumbed then, they said, had not the whole “invasion” come to grief and been driven back into New Orleans. New Orleans! younger sister of little Mobile, yet toward which Mobile now looked in a daily torture of apprehension. And then Hilary’s beloved Bartleson put in what Anna sat wishing some one would say.
“With what a passion of disowned anxiety,” he remarked, “had the General, to the last, watched every step, slip and turn in what Steve had once called ‘the multifurieuse carreer’ of Hilary Kincaid.”
So turned the talk upon the long-time absentee, and instances were cited of those outbreaks of utter nonsense which were wont to come from him in awful moments: gibes with which no one reporting them to the uncle could ever make the “old man” smile. The youngest lieutenant (a gun-corporal that day the Battery left New Orleans) told how once amid a fearful havoc, when his piece was so short of men that Kincaid was himself down on the ground sighting and firing it, and an aide-de-camp galloped up asking hotly, “Who’s in command here!” the powder-blackened Hilary had risen his tallest and replied,–
“I!… b, e, x, bex, Ibex!”
A gentle speculation followed as to which of all Hilary’s utterances had taken finest effect on the boys, and it was agreed that most potent for good was the brief talk away back at Camp Callender, in which he had told them that, being artillery, they must know how to wait unmurmuring through months of “rotting idleness” from one deadly “tea-party” to another. For a year, now, they had done that, and done it the better because he had all that same time been forced to do likewise in New Orleans, a prisoner in hospital, long at death’s door, and only now getting well.
Anna remained silent. While there was praise of him what more could she want for sweet calm?
“True,” said somebody, “in these forty-odd months between March, ‘Sixty-one, and August, ‘Sixty-four, all hands had got their fill of war; laurels gained were softer to rest on than laurels unsprouted, and it ought to be as easy as rolling off a log for him to lie on his prison-hospital cot in ‘rotting idleness,’ lulled in the proud assurance that he had saved Mobile, or at least postponed for a year–“
“Hilary?” frowningly asked Adolphe.
“Yes,” with a firm quietness said Anna.
Villeneuve gallantly amended that somebody else owned an undivided half in the glory of that salvation and would own more as soon as the Union fleet (daily growing in numbers) should try to enter the bay: a hint at Anna, of course, and at the great ram _Tennessee_, which the Confederate admiral, Buchanan, had made his flag-ship, and whose completion, while nothing else was ready but three small wooden gunboats, was due–they had made even Anna believe–to the safe delivery of the Bazaar fund.
So then she, forced to talk, presently found herself explaining how such full news of Hilary had so often come in these awful months; to wit, by the long, kind letters of a Federal nurse–and Federal officer’s wife–but for whose special devotion the captive must have perished, and who, Anna revealed, was the schoolmistress banished North in ‘Sixty-one. What she kept untold was that, by favor of Greenleaf, Hilary had been enabled to auction off the poor remains of his home belongings and thus to restore the returned exile her gold. The speaker let her eyes wander to an approaching orderly, and a lieutenant took the chance to mention that early drill near Carrollton, which the General had viewed from the Callenders’ equipage. Their two horses, surviving the shells and famine of Vicksburg, had been among the mere half-dozen of good beasts retained at the surrender by some ruse, and–
The orderly brought Bartleson a document and Mandeville a newspaper–
And it was touching, to-day, the lieutenant persisted, to see that once so beautiful span, handsome yet, leading in the team of six that drew the draped caisson which–
“Ah, yes!” assented all.
Mandeville hurried to read out the news from Virginia, which could still reach them through besieged Atlanta. It was of the Petersburg mine and its slaughter, and thrilled every one. Yet Anna watched Bartleson open his yellow official envelope.
“Marching orders?” asked Miranda, and while his affirming smile startled every one, Steve, for some reason in the newspaper itself, put it up.
“Are the enemy’s ships–?” began Anna–
“We’re ordered down the bay,” replied Bartleson.
“Then so are we,” she dryly responded, at which all laughed, though the two women had spent much time of late on a small boat which daily made the round of the bay’s defenses. In a dingy borrowed rig they hastened away toward their lodgings.
As they drove, Anna pressed Miranda’s hand and murmured, “Oh, for Hilary Kincaid!”
“Ah, dear! not to be in this–‘tea-party’?”
“Yes! Yes! His boys were in so many without him, from Shiloh to Port Gibson, and now, with all their first guns lost forever–theirs and ours–lost _for_ them, not by them–and after all this year of idleness, and the whole battery hanging to his name as it does–oh, ‘Randy, it would do more to cure his hurts than ten hospitals, there or here.”
“But the new risks, Nan, as he takes them!”
“He’ll take them wherever he is. I can’t rest a moment for fear he’s trying once more to escape.”
(In fact, that is what, unknown to her, he had just been doing.)
“But, ‘Randa?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Whether he’s here or there, Kincaid’s Battery, his other self, will be in whatever goes on, and so, of course, will the _Tennessee_.”
“Yes,” said Miranda, at their door.
“Yes, and it’s not just all our bazaar money that’s in her, nor all our toil–“
“Nor all your sufferings,” interrupted Miranda, as Constance wonderingly let them in.
“Oh, nor yours! nor Connie’s! nor all–his; nor our whole past of the last two interminable years; but this whole poor terrified city’s fate, and, for all we know, the war’s final issue! And so I–Here, Con,” (handing a newspaper), “from Steve, husband.”
(Behind the speaker Miranda, to Constance, made eager hand and lip motions not to open it there.)
“And so, ‘Ran, I wish we could go ashore to-morrow, as far down the bay as we can make our usefulness an excuse, and stay!–day and night!–till–!” She waved both hands.
Constance stared: “Why, Nan Callender!”
“Now, Con, hush. You and Steve Second are non-combatants! Oh, ‘Randa, let’s do it! For if those ships–some of them the same we knew so well and so terribly at home–if they come I–whatever happens–I want to see it!”
LXVIII
BY THE DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT
Luck loves to go in mask. It turned out quite as well, after all, that for two days, by kind conspiracy of Constance and Miranda, the boat trip was delayed. In that time no fleet came.
Here at the head of her lovely bay tremblingly waited Mobile, never before so empty of men, so full of women and children. Southward, from two to four leagues apart, ran the sun-beaten, breezy margins of snow-white sand-hills evergreen with weird starveling pines, dotted with pretty summer homes and light steamer-piers. Here on the Eastern Shore were the hotels: “Howard’s,” “Short’s,” “Montrose,” “Battle’s Wharf” and Point Clear, where summer society had been wont to resort all the way from beloved New Orleans. Here, from Point Clear, the bay, broadening south-westward, doubled its width, and here, by and by, this eastern shore-line suddenly became its southern by returning straight westward in a long slim stretch of dazzling green-and-white dunes, and shut its waters from the Gulf of Mexico except for a short “pass” of a few hundred yards width and for some three miles of shoal water between the pass and Dauphin Island; and there on that wild sea-wall’s end–Mobile Point–a dozen leagues due south from the town–sat Fort Morgan, keeping this gate, the port’s main ship-channel. Here, north-west from Morgan, beyond this main entrance and the league of impassable shoals, Fort Gaines guarded Pelican Channel, while a mile further townward Fort Powell held Grant’s Pass into and out of Mississippi Sound, and here along the west side, out from Mobile, down the magnolia-shaded Bay Shell Road and the bark road below it, Kincaid’s Battery and the last thousand “reserves” the town’s fighting blood could drip–whole platoons of them mere boys–had marched, these two days, to Forts Powell and Gaines.
All this the Callenders took in with the mind’s eye as they bent over a candle-lighted map, while aware by telegraph that behind Gaines, westward on Dauphin Island, blue troops from New Orleans had landed and were then night-marching upon the fort in a black rainstorm. Furthest down yonder, under Morgan’s hundred and fifteen great guns, as Anna pointed out, in a hidden east-and-west double row athwart the main channel, leaving room only for blockade-runners, were the torpedoes, nearly seventy of them. And, lastly, just under Morgan’s north side, close on the channel’s eastern edge, rode, with her three small gunboats, the _Tennessee_, ugly to look at but worse to meet, waiting, watching, as up here in Fort Powell, smiling at the scurviness of their assignment, watched and waited Kincaid’s Battery.
Upstairs the new Steve gently wailed.
“Let me!” cried Anna, and ran.
Constance drew out Mandeville’s newspaper. Miranda smiled despairingly.
“I wish, now,” sighed the sister, “we’d shown it when we got it. I’ve had enough of keeping things from Nan Callender. Of course, even among our heroes in prison, there still may be a ‘Harry Renard’; but it’s far more likely that someone’s telegraphed or printed ‘Hilary Kinkaid’ that way; for there _was_ a Herry Renard, Steve says, a captain, in Harper’s calvary, who months ago quietly died in one of our _own hospitals_–at Lauderdale. Now, at headquarters, Steve says, they’re all agreed that the name isn’t a mite more suggestive than the pure daring of the deed, and that if they had to guess who did it they’d every one guess Hilary Kincaid.”
She spread the story out on her knee: Exchange of prisoners having virtually ceased, a number of captive Confederate officers had been started up the Mississippi from New Orleans, _under_ a heavy _but unwary_ guard, on a “tin-clad” steamer, to wear out the rest of the war in a Northern prison. Forbidden to gather even in pairs, they had yet moved freely about, often passing each other closely enough to exchange piecemeal counsels unnoticed, and all at once, at a tap of the boat’s bell had sprung, man for man, upon their keepers and instantly were masters of them, of them, of their arms stacked on the boiler-deck and of the steamboat, which they had promptly run ashore on the East Louisiana side and burned. So ran the tale, and so broke off. Ought Anna to be told it, or not?
“No,” said the sister. “After all, why should we put her again through all those sufferings that so nearly killed her after Shiloh?”
“If he would only–“
“Telegraph? How do we know he hasn’t?”
Next morning the two unencumbered Callenders went down the bay. But they found no need to leave the boat. A series of mishaps delayed her, the tide hindered, rain fell, and at length she was told to wait for orders and so lay all night at anchor just off Fort Gaines, but out of the prospective line of fire from the foe newly entrenched behind it. The rain ceased and, as one of Hilary’s songs ran–
“The stars shed forth their light serene.”
The ladies had the captain’s room, under the pilot-house. Once Anna woke, and from the small windows that opened to every quarter except up the bay townward looked forth across the still waters and low shores. Right at hand loomed Fort Gaines. A league away north-west rose small Fort Powell, just enough from the water to show dimly its unfinished parapets. In her heart’s vision she saw within it her own Kincaid’s Battery, his and hers. South-eastward, an opposite league away, she could make out Fort Morgan, but not the Tennessee. The cool, briny air hung still, the wide waters barely lifted and fell. She returned and slept again until some one ran along the narrow deck under her reclosed windows, and a male voice said–
“The Yankee fleet! It’s coming in!”
Miranda was dressing. Out on the small deck voices were quietly audible and the clink of a ratchet told that the boat was weighing anchor. She rang three-bells. The captain’s small clock showed half-past five. Now the swiftly dressed pair opened their windows. The rising sun made a golden path across the tranquil bay and lighted up the three forts and the starry battlecross softly stirring over each. Dauphin Island and Mobile Point were moss-green and pearly white. The long, low, velvety pulsations of the bay were blue, lilac, pink, green, bronze. But angry smoke poured from the funnels of the Tennessee and her three dwarf consorts, they four also showing the battle-flag, and some seven miles away, out in the Gulf, just beyond the gleaming eastern point of Sand Island, was one other sign of unrest.
“You see they’re under way?” asked Anna.
Yes, Miranda saw, and sighed with the questioner. For there, once more–low crouched, war-painted and gliding like the red savages so many of them were named for, the tall ones stripped of all their upper spars, but with the pink spot of wrath flickering at every masthead–came the ships of Farragut.
The two women could not count them, so straight on were they headed, but a man near the window said there were seven large and seven less, lashed small to large in pairs. Yet other counting they did, for now out of Sand Island Channel, just west of the ships, came a shorter line–one, two, three, four strange barely discernible things, submerged like crocodiles, a hump on each of the first two, two humps on each of the others, crossed the fleet’s course and led the van on the sunward side to bring themselves first and nearest to Morgan, its water-battery, and the _Tennessee_.
Anna sighed while to Miranda the man overflowed with information. Ah, ah! in Hampton Roads the _Virginia_ had barely coped with one of those horrors, of one hump, two guns; while here came four, whose humps were six and their giant rifles twelve.
“Twenty-two guns in our whole flotilla,” the man was saying to Miranda, “and they’ve got nearly two hundred.” The anchor was up. Gently the boat’s engines held her against the flood-tide. The man had turned to add some word, when from the land side of Gaines a single columbiad roared and a huge shell screamed off into the investing entrenchments. Then some lighter guns, thirty-twos, twenty-fours, cracked and rang, and the foe replied. His shells burst over and in the fort, and a cloud of white and brown smoke rolled eastward, veiling both this scene and the remoter, seaward, silent, but far more momentous one of Fort Morgan, the fleet, and the _Tennessee_.
The boat crept southward into the cloud, where only Gaines was dimly visible, flashing and howling landward. Irby was in that flashing. Steve was back yonder in Powell with Kincaid’s Battery. Through Steve, present at the reading of a will made at Vicksburg the day after Hilary’s capture there, Irby had just notified Anna, for Hilary, that their uncle had left everything to him, Adolphe. She hoped it was true, but for once in her life had doubts without discomfort. How idly the mind can drift in fateful moments. The bell tapped for six. As it did so the two watchers descried through a rift in the smoke the Tennessee signaling her grim litter, and the four crawling forward to meet the ships. Again the smoke closed in, but the small boat stole through it and hovered at its edge while the minutes passed and the foe came on. How plain to be seen was each pair, how familiar some of those taller shapes!
“The _Brooklyn_, ‘Randa, right in front. And there again is the admiral’s flag, on the _Hartford_. And there, with her topmasts down, is the _Richmond_–oh, ‘Ran’, it’s the same bad dream once more!”
Not quite. There were ships new to them, great and less, whose savage names, told by the man near the window, chilled the blood with reminder of old wars and massacres: the _Winnebago, Chickasaw, Octorora, Ossipee, Metacomet, Seminale_. “Look!” said the man, pointing, “the _Tecumseh_–“
LXIX
SOUTHERN CROSS AND NORTHERN STAR
A red streak and white sun-lit puff sprang from the leading monitor’s turret, and the jarring boom of a vast gun came over the water, wholly unlike the ringing peals of Gaines’s lighter armament. Now its opposite cranny puffed and thundered. The man smiled an instant. “Spitting on her hands,” he said, but then murmured to himself, “Lord! look at that wind!”
“Is it bad?” asked Anna.
“It’ll blow every bit of smoke into our men’s eyes,” he sighed.
The two white puffs melted into the perfect blue of sea and sky unanswered. Fort Gaines and its besiegers even ceased to fire. Their fate was not in their own guns. More and more weird waxed the grisly dumbness of five-sided Morgan and the spectral silence of the oncoming league-long fleet. The light wind freshened. By the bell’s six taps it was seven o’clock. The boat drifting in on the tide made Fort Gaines seem to move seaward. Miranda looked back to Fort Powell and then out to sea again.
“The worst,” said Anna, reading her thought, “will be down there with the _Tennessee_.”
Miranda answered low: “Suppose, Nan, that, after all, he should–?”
Anna turned sharply: “Get here? I expect it! Oh, you may gaze! I don’t forget how often I’ve flouted Con’s intuitions. But I’ve got one now, a big one!”
“That he’s coming?”
“Been coming these two days–pure presentiment!”
“Nan, whether he is or not, if you’ll tell us what Colonel Greenleaf wrote you I’ll tell you–“
For a second Anna stared, Miranda wrinkling; but then, with her eyes on the fleet, she shook her head: “You’re mighty good, ‘Randa, you and Con, never to have asked me in all these months; but neither he nor Hilary nor I will ever tell that. I wish none of us knew it. For one thing, we don’t, any of us, know clearly enough what really happened. Dear Fred Greenleaf!–if he _does_ wear the blue, and _is_ right now over there behind Fort Gaines!”
She stood a moment pondering a fact not in the Union soldier’s letter at all; that only through his masterful, self-sacrificing intercession in military court had Hilary escaped the death of a spy. But then her thought came back to Miranda’s request: “I can’t tell you, for I can’t tell Con. Flora’s her cousin, through Steve, and if she ever marries Captain Irby she’ll be Hilary’s cousin, and–“
There, suddenly and once for all, the theme was dropped. Some man’s quick word broke in. Fort Morgan had veiled itself in the smoke of its own broadside. Now came its thunder and the answering flame and roar of the _Brooklyn’s_ bow-chaser. The battle had begun. The ship, still half a mile from its mark, was coming on as straight as her gun could blaze, her redskin ally at her side, and all the others, large and less, bounding after by twos. And now in lurid flash and steady roar the lightning and thunder darted and rolled from Morgan, its water-battery, and the Mobile squadron, and from the bow guns of the _Brooklyn_ and _Hartford_.
How marvelously fire, din and smoke shriveled up the time, which the captain’s small clock so mincingly ticked off. A cabin-boy brought a fragrant tray of breakfast, but the grateful ladies could only laugh at it. There was no moment to observe even the few pretty sail-boats which the fearful import and majesty of the strife lured down about them on the light side-wind.
“Has the _Tennessee_ not fired yet?” anxiously asked Anna, but no one was sure. Across the breeze, that kept the near side of the picture uncurtained, she perfectly saw the _Tecumseh_ close abreast of the flashing, smoke-shrouded fort, the _Brooklyn_ to windward abreast of both, and the Hartford at the Brooklyn’s heels with her signal fluttering to all behind, “Close order.”
“Why don’t the ships–?” Anna had it on her lips to cry, when the whole sunward side of the _Brooklyn,_ and then of the _Hartford,_ vomited fire, iron and blinding, strangling smoke into the water-battery and the fort, where the light air held it. God’s mercy! you could see the cheering of the fleet’s crews, which the ear could barely gather out of the far uproar, and just as it floated to the gazers they beheld the _Tecumseh_ turn square toward them and head straight across the double line of torpedoes for the _Tennessee._
We never catch all of “whatever happens,” and neither Callender saw the brave men in gray who for one moment of horror fled from their own guns in water-battery and fort; but all at once they beheld the _Tecumseh_ heave, stagger, and lurch like a drunkard, men spring from her turret into the sea, the _Brooklyn_ falter, slacken fire and draw back, the Hartford and the whole huddled fleet come to a stand, and the rallied fort cheer and belch havoc into the ships while the _Tecumseh_ sunk her head, lifted her screw into air and vanished beneath the wave. They saw Mobile Point a semicircle of darting fire, and the _Brooklyn_ “athwart the _Hartford’s_ hawse”; but they did not see, atom-small, perched high in the rigging of the flag-ship and demanding from the decks below, “why this?” and “why that?” a certain “plain sailor” well known to New Orleans and the wide world; did not see the torpedoes lying in watery ambush for him, nor hear the dread tale of them called to him from the _Brooklyn_ while his ship passed astern of her, nor him command “full speed ahead” as he retorted, “Damn the torpedoes!”
They saw his ship and her small consort sweep undestroyed over the dead-line, the _Brooklyn_ follow with hers, the Mobile gunboats rake the four with a fire they could not return, and behind them Fort Morgan and the other ships rend and shatter each other, shroud the air with smoke and thresh the waters white with shot and shell, shrapnel, canister and grape. And then they saw their own _Tennessee_ ignore the monitors and charge the _Hartford_. But they beheld, too, the _Hartford’s_ better speed avoid the fearful blow and press on up the channel and the bay, though torn and bleeding from her foe’s broadside, while her own futilely glanced or rebounded from his impenetrable mail.
Wisely, rightly their boat turned and slowly drew away toward Fort Powell and Cedar Point. Yet as from her after deck they saw the same exploit, at the same murderous cost, repeated by the _Brooklyn_ and another and another great ship and their consorts, while not a torpedo did its work, they tearfully called the hour “glorious” and “victorious” for the _Tennessee_ and her weak squadron, that still fought on. So it seemed to them even when more dimly, as distance and confusion grew and rain-clouds gathered, they saw a wooden ship ram the _Tennessee_, but glance off, and the slow _Tennessee_ drop astern, allow a sixth tall ship and small consort to pass, but turn in the wake of the seventh and all but disembowel her with the fire of her great bow gun.
Ah, Anna! Even so, the shattered, steam-scalded thing came on and the last of the fleet was in. Yonder, a mere league eastward, it moved up the bay. Yet proudly hope throbbed on while still Mobile, behind other defenses, lay thirty miles away, while her gunboats still raked the ships, while on Powell, Gaines and Morgan still floated the Southern cross, and while, down in the pass, still unharmed, paused only for breath the _Tennessee_.
“Prisoners! they are all our prisoners!” tearfully exulted the fond Callenders. But on the word they saw the scene dissolve into a new one. Through a squall of wind and rain, out from the line of ships, four of their consorts glided away eastward, flashing and howling, in chase of the overmatched gunboats, that flashed and howled in retort as they fled. On the west a Federal flotilla in Mississippi Sound, steaming up athwart Grant’s Pass, opened on Fort Powell and awoke its thunders. Ah, ah! Kincaid’s Battery at last! Red, white and red they sent buffet for buffet, and Anna’s heart was longing anew for their tall hero and hers, when a voice hard by said, “She’s coming back, sir, the _Tennessee_.”
Out in the bay the fleet, about to anchor, turned and awaited the new onset. By the time it was at hand the Mobile gunboats, one burning, one fled, one captured, counted for nothing, yet on crept the _Tennessee_, still singling out the _Hartford_, and here the two Callenders, their boat hovering as near Powell and Gaines as it dared, looked on the titanic melee that fell round her. Like hounds and hunters on a bear robbed of her whelps, seventeen to one, they set upon her so thickly that their trouble was not to destroy one another. Near the beginning one cut her own flag-ship almost to the water-line. The first that smote the quarry–at ten knots speed–glanced and her broadside rolled harmless into the bay, while two guns of her monster adversary let daylight through and through the wooden ship. From the turret of a close-creeping monitor came the four-hundred-and-forty-pound bolt of her fifteen-inch gun, crushing the lone foe terribly yet not quite piercing through. Another wooden ship charged, hit squarely a tearing blow, yet slid off, lay for a moment touching sides with the ironclad,