while they lacerated each other like lion and tiger, and then dropped away. The hunted _Hartford_ gave a staggering thrust and futile broadside.
So for an hour went the fight; ships charging, the _Tennessee_ crawling ever after her one picked antagonist, the monitors’ awful guns forever pounding her iron back and sides. But at length her mail began to yield, her best guns went silent, her smokestack was down, her steering-chains were gone, Buchanan lay heavily wounded. Of Farragut’s twenty-seven hundred men more than a seventh had fallen, victims mainly of the bear and her cubs, yet there she weltered, helpless. From her grim disjointed casemate her valorous captain let down the Southern cross, the white flag rose, and instantly, everywhere, God’s thunder and man’s alike ceased, and the merciful heavens smiled white and blue again. But their smile was on the flag of the Union, and mutely standing in each other’s embrace, with hearts as nearly right as they could know, Anna and Miranda gazed on the victorious stars-and-stripes and wept.
What caused Anna to start and glance behind she did not know; but doing so she stared an instant breathless and then, as she clutched Miranda for support, moaned to the tall, wasted, sadly smiling, crutched figure that moved closer–
“Oh, Hilary! Are you Hilary Kincaid?”
LXX
GAINS AND LOSSES
They kissed.
It looks strange written and printed, but she did not see how to hold off when he made it so tenderly manful a matter of course after his frank hand-shake with Miranda, and when there seemed so little time for words.
An ambulance drawn by the Callenders’ horses had brought him and two or three others down the West Side. A sail-boat had conveyed them from the nearest beach. Here it was, now, in tow beside the steamboat as she gathered headway toward Fort Powell. He was not so weak or broken but he could point rapidly about with his crutches, the old light of command in his eyes, while with recognized authority he spoke to the boat’s master and these companions.
He said things freely. There was not much down here to be secret about. Mobile had not fallen. She would yet be fought for on land, furiously. But the day was lost; as, incidentally, might be, at any moment, if not shrewdly handled, this lonesome little boat.
Her captain moved to the pilot-house. Miranda and the junior officers left Hilary with Anna. “Did you say ‘the day,'” she softly asked, “or ‘the bay’?”
“Both,” he murmured, and with his two crutches in one hand directed her eyes: to the fleet anchored midway off Morgan, Gaines, and Powell; to the half-dozen gunboats on Mississippi Sound; to others still out in the Gulf, behind Morgan, off Mobile Point; to the blue land force entrenched behind Gaines, and to the dunes east of Morgan, where similar besiegers would undoubtedly soon be landed.
“Yes … Yes,” she said to his few explanations. It was all so sadly clear.
“A grand fort yet,” he musingly called Morgan, “but it ought to be left and blown to fare-you-well to-night before it’s surroun–I wish my cousin were there instead of in Gaines. ‘Dolphe fights well, but he knows when not to fight and that we’ve come, now, to where every man we’ve got, and every gun, counts bigger than to knock out any two of the enemy’s. You know Fred’s over yonder, don’t you? and that Kincaid’s Battery, without their field-pieces, are just here in Powell behind her heavy guns?… Yes, Victorine said you did; I saw her this morning, with Constance.” He paused, and then spoke lower:
“Beloved?”
She smiled up to him.
“Our love’s not through all the fire, yet,” he said, but her smile only showed more glow.
“My soul’s-mate, war-mate soldier-girl,” he murmured on.
“Well?”
“If you stand true in what’s before us now, before just you and me, now and for weeks to come, I want your word for it right here that your standing true shall not be for the sake of any vow you’ve ever made to me, or for me, or with me, in the past, the blessed, blessed past. You promise?”
“I promise,” she breathed. “What is it?”
“A thing that takes more courage than I’ve got.”
“Then how will you do it?” she lightly asked.
“By borrowing all yours. May I?”
“You may. Is it to save–our battery?”
“Our battery, yes, against their will, with others, if I can persuade the fort’s commander. At low tide to-night when the shoals can be forded to Cedar Point, I shall be”–his words grew hurried–the steamer was touching the fort’s pier–the sail-boat, which was to take Anna and Miranda to where the ambulance and their own horses awaited them had cast off her painter–“I shall be the last man out of Powell and shall blow it up. Come, it may be we sha’n’t meet again until I’ve”–he smiled–“been court-martialed and degraded. If I am, we–“
“If you are,” she murmured, “you may take me to the nearest church–or the biggest–that day.”
“No, no!” he called as she moved away, and again, with a darkening brow, “no, no!”
But, “Yes, yes,” she brightly insisted as she rejoined Miranda. “Yes!”
For the horses’ sake the ladies went that afternoon only to “Frascati,” lower limit of the Shell Road, where, in a small hour of the night Anna heard the sudden boom and long rumble that told the end of Fort Powell and salvation of its garrison.
That Gaines held out a few days, Morgan a few weeks, are heroic facts of history, which, with a much too academic shrug, it calls “magnifique, mais–!” Their splendid armament and all their priceless men fell into their besiegers’ hands. Irby, haughtily declining the strictly formal courtesies of Fred Greenleaf, went to prison in New Orleans. What a New Orleans! The mailed clutch on her throat (to speak as she felt) had grown less ferocious, but everywhere the Unionist civilian–the once brow-beaten and still loathed “Northern sympathizer,” with grudges to pay and losses to recoup and re-recoup–was in petty authority. Confiscation was swallowing up not industrial and commercial properties merely, but private homes; espionage peeped round every street corner and into every back window, and “A. Ward’s” ante-bellum jest, that “a white man was as good as a nigger as long as he behaved himself,” was a jest no more. Miss Flora Valcour, that ever faithful and daring Southerner, was believed by all the city’s socially best to be living–barely living–under “the infamous Greenleaf’s” year-long threat of Ship Island for having helped Anna Callender to escape to Mobile. Hence her haunted look and pathetic loss of bloom. Now, however, with him away and with General Canby ruling in place of Banks, she and her dear fragile old grandmother could breathe a little.
They breathed much. We need not repeat that the younger was a gifted borrower. She did other things equally well; resumed a sagacious activity, a two-sided tact, and got Irby paroled. On the anniversary of the day Hilary had played brick-mason a city paper (Unionist) joyfully proclaimed the long-delayed confiscation of Kincaid’s Foundry and of Callender House, and announced that “the infamous Kincaid” himself had been stripped of his commission by a “rebel” court-martial. Irby promptly brought the sheet to the Valcours’ lodgings, but Flora was out. When she came in, before she could lay off her pretty hat:–
“You’ve heard it!” cried the excited grandam. “But why so dead-alive? Once more the luck is yours! Play your knave! play Irby! He’s just been here! He will return! He will propose this evening if you allow him! Let him do it! Let him! Mobile may fall any day! If you dilly-dally till those accursed Callenders get back, asking, for instance, for their–ha, ha!–their totally evaporated chest of plate–gr-r-r! Take him! He has just shown me his uncle’s will–as he calls it: a staring forgery, but you, h-you won’t mind _that_, and the ‘ladies’ man’–ah, the ‘ladies’ man,’ once you are his cousin, he’ll never let on. Take Irby! he is, as you say, a nincompoop”–she had dropped into English–“and seldom sober, _mais_ take him! ‘t is the las’ call of the auctioneer, yo’ fav-oreet auctioneer–with the pointed ears and the forked black tail.”
Flora replied from a mirror with her back turned: “I’ll thing ab-out it. And maybee–yes! Ezpecially if you would do uz that one favor, lazd thing when you are going to bed the night we are married. Yez, if you would–ahem!–juz’ blow yo’ gas without turning it?”
That evening, when the accepted Irby, more nearly happy than ever before in his life, said good-night to his love they did not kiss. At the first stir of proffer Flora drew back with a shudder that reddened his brow. But when he demanded, “Why not?” her radiant shake of the head was purely bewitching as she replied, “No, I haven’ fall’ that low yet.”
When after a day or so he pressed for immediate marriage and was coyly referred to Madame, the old lady affectionately–though reluctantly–consented. With a condition: If the North should win the war his inheritance would be “confiz-_cate_'” and there would be nothing to begin life on but the poor child’s burned down home behind Mobile, unless, for mutual protection, nothing else,–except “one dollar and other valuable considerations,”–he should preconvey the Brodnax estate to the poor child, who, at least, had never been “foun’ out” to have done anything to subject property of hers to confiscation.
This transfer Irby, with silent reservations, quietly executed, and the day, hour and place, the cathedral, were named. A keen social flutter ensued and presently the wedding came off–stop! That is not all. Instantly upon the close of the ceremony the bride had to be more lifted than led to her carriage and so to her room and couch, whence she sent loving messages to the bridegroom that she would surely be well enough to see him next day. But he had no such fortune, and here claims record a fact even more wonderful than Anna’s presentiment as to Hilary that morning in Mobile Bay. The day after his wedding Irby found his parole revoked and himself, with others, back in prison and invited to take the oath and go free–stand up in the war-worn gray and forswear it–or stay where they were to the war’s end. Every man of them took it–when the war was over; but until then? not one. Not even the bridegroom robbed of his bride. Every week or so she came and saw him, among his fellows, and bade him hold out! stand fast! It roused their great admiration, but not their wonder. The wonder was in a fact of which they knew nothing: That the night before her marriage Flora had specifically, minutely prophesied this whole matter to her grandmother, whose only response was that same marveling note of nearly four years earlier–
“You are a genius!”
LXXI
SOLDIERS OF PEACE
In March, ‘Sixty-five, the Confederacy lay dying. While yet in Virginia and the Carolinas, at Mobile and elsewhere her armies daily, nightly strove on, bled on, a stricken quiet and great languor had come over her, a quiet with which the quiet ending of this tale is only in reverent keeping.
On Mobile’s eastern side Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely, her last defenses, were fighting forty thousand besiegers. Kincaid’s Battery was there, and there was heavy artillery, of course, but this time the “ladies’ men”–still so called–had field-guns, though but three. They could barely man that number. One was a unit of the original six lost “for them, not by them,” at Vicksburg, and lately recovered.
Would there were time for its story! The boys had been sent up the state to reinforce Forrest. Having one evening silenced an opposing battery, and stealing over in the night and bringing off its best gun, they had slept about “her” till dawn, but then had laughed, hurrahed, danced, and wept round her and fallen upon her black neck and kissed her big lips on finding her no other than their own old “Roaring Betsy.” She might have had a gentler welcome had not her lads just learned that while they slept _the_ “ladies’ man” had arrived from Mobile with a bit of news glorious alike for him and them.
The same word reached New Orleans about the same date. Flora, returning from a call on Irby, brought it to her grandmother. In the middle of their sitting-room, with the worst done-for look yet, standing behind a frail chair whose back she gripped with both hands, she meditatively said–
“All privieuse statement’ ab-out that court-martial on the ‘vacuation of Ford Powell are prim-ature. It has, with highez’ approval, _acquit_’ every one concern’ in it.” She raised the light chair to the limit of her reach and brought it down on another with a force that shivered both. Madame rushed for a door, but–“Stay!” amiably said the maiden. “Pick up the pieces–for me–eh? I’ll have to pick up the pieces of you some day–soon–I hope–mm?”
She took a book to a window seat, adding as she went, “Victorine. You’ve not heard ab-out that, neither? She’s biccome an orphan. Hmm! Also–the little beggar!–she’s–married. Yes. To Charles Valcour. My God! I wish I was a man.”
[Illustration: Music “Um, hmm, hmm, hmm, Mm, hmm, hmm, hmm–“]
“_Leave the room!_”
But these were closed incidents when those befell which two or three final pages linger to recount. The siege of Spanish Fort was the war’s last great battle. From March twenty-sixth to April the eighth it was deadly, implacable; the defense hot, defiant, audacious. On the night of the eighth the fort’s few hundred cannoneers spiked their heavy guns and, taking their light ones along, left it. They had fought fully aware that Richmond was already lost, and on the next day, a Sabbath, as Kincaid’s Battery trundled through the town while forty thousand women and children–with the Callenders and little Steve–wept, its boys knew their own going meant Mobile had fallen, though they knew not that in that very hour the obscure name of Appomattox was being made forever great in history.
“I reached Meridian,” writes their general, “refitted the …field batteries and made ready to march across (country) and join General Joseph E. Johnston in Carolina. The tidings of Lee’s surrender soon came…. But …the little army of Mobile remained steadfastly together, and in perfect order and discipline awaited the final issue of events.”
It was while they so waited that Kincaid’s Battery learned of the destruction, by fire, of Callender House, but took comfort in agreeing that now, at last, come or fail what might, the three sweetest women that ever lived would live up-town.
One lovely May morning a Federal despatch-boat–yes, the one we know–sped down Mobile Bay with many gray-uniformed men aboard, mostly of the ranks and unaccoutred, but some of them officers still belted for their unsurrendered swords. Many lads showed the red artillery trim and wore jauntily on their battered caps K.B. separated by crossed cannon. “Roaring Betsy” had howled her last forever. Her sergeant, Valcour, was there, with his small fond bride, both equally unruffled by any misgiving that they would not pull through this still inviting world happily.
Mandeville was present, his gilt braid a trifle more gilt than any one else’s. Constance and little Steve–who later became president of the Cotton Exchange–were with him. Also Miranda. Out forward yonder on the upper deck, beside tall Hilary Kincaid, stood Anna. Greenleaf eyed them from the pilot-house, where he had retired to withhold the awkward reminder inseparable from his blue livery. In Hilary’s fingers was a writing which he and Anna had just read together. In reference to it he was saying that while the South had fallen to the bottom depths of poverty the North had been growing rich, and that New Orleans, for instance, was chock full of Yankees–oh, yes, I’m afraid that’s what he called them–Yankees, with greenbacks in every pocket, eager to set up any gray soldier who knew how to make, be or do anything mutually profitable. Moved by Fred Greenleaf, who could furnish funds but preferred, himself, never to be anything but a soldier, the enterprising husband of the once deported but now ever so happily married schoolmistress who–
“Yes, I know,” said Anna–
Well, for a trifle, at its confiscation sale, this man had bought Kincaid’s Foundry, which now stood waiting for Hilary to manage, control and in the end recover to his exclusive ownership on the way to larger things. What gave the subject an intense tenderness of unsordid interest was that it meant for the pair–what so many thousands of paroled heroes and the women they loved and who loved them were hourly finding out –that they were not such beggars, after all, but they might even there and then name their wedding day, which then and there they named.
“Let Adolphe and Flora keep the old estate and be as happy on it, and in it, as Heaven will let them; they’ve got each other to be happy with. The world still wants cotton, and if they’ll stand for the old South’s cotton we’ll stand for a new South and iron; iron and a new South, Nan, my Nannie; a new and better South and even a new and better New Orl–see where we are! Right yonder the _Tennessee_–“
“Yes,” interrupted Anna, “let’s put that behind us–henceforth, as the boat is doing now.”
The steamer turned westward into Grant’s Pass. To southward lay Morgan and Gaines, floating the ensign of a saved Union. Close here on the right lay the ruins of Fort Powell. From the lower deck the boys, pressing to the starboard guards to see, singly or in pairs smiled up to Hilary’s smile. Among them was Sam Gibbs, secretly bearing home the battery’s colors wrapped round him next his scarred and cross-scarred body. And so, farewell Mobile. Hour by hour through the beautiful blue day, island after island, darkling green or glistering white, rose into view, drifted by between the steamer and the blue Gulf and sunk into the deep; Petit Bois, Horn Island, Ship Island, Cat Island. Now past Round Island, up Lake Borgne and through the Rigolets they swept into Pontchartrain, and near the day’s close saw the tide-low, sombre but blessed shore beyond which a scant half-hour’s railway ride lay the city they called home.
Across the waters westward, where the lake’s margin, black-rimmed with cypresses, lapsed into a watery horizon, and the sun was going down in melancholy splendor, ran unseen that northbound railway by which four years earlier they had set off for the war with ranks full and stately, with music in the air and with thousands waving them on. Now not a note, not a drum-tap, not a boast nor a jest illumined their return. In the last quarter-hour aboard, when every one was on the lower deck about the forward gangway, Hilary and Anna, having chanced to step up upon a coil of rope, found it easier, in the unconscious press, to stay there than to move on, and in keeping with his long habit as a leader he fell into a lively talk with those nearest him,–Sam and Charlie close in front, Bartleson and Mandeville just at his back,–to lighten the general heaviness. At every word his listeners multiplied, and presently, in a quiet but insistent tone, came calls for a “speech” and the “ladies’ man.”
“No,” he gaily replied, “oh, no, boys!” But his words went on and became something much like what they craved. As he ceased came the silent, ungreeted landing. Promptly followed the dingy train’s short run up the shore of the New Canal, and then its stop athwart St. Charles Street, under no roof, amid no throng, without one huzza or cry of welcome, and the prompt dispersal of the outwardly burdenless wanderers, in small knots afoot, up-town, down-town, many of them trying to say over again those last words from the chief hero of their four years’ trial by fire. The effort was but effort, no full text has come down; but their drift seems to have been that, though disarmed, unliveried, and disbanded, they could remain true soldiers: That the perfect soldier loves peace, loathes war: That no man can be such who cannot, whether alone or among thousands of his fellows, strive, suffer and wait with magnanimous patience, stake life and fortune, and, in extremity, fight like a whirlwind, for the victories of peace: That every setting sun will rise again _if it is a true sun:_ That good-night was not good-by: and that, as for their old nickname, no one can ever be a whole true ladies’ man whose _aim_ is not at some title far above and beyond it–which last he said not of himself, but in behalf and by request of the mother of the guns they had gone out with and of the furled but unsullied banner they had brought home.
THE END.
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