KINCAID’S BATTERY

BY

GEORGE W. CABLE

1908

ILLUSTRATED BY

ALONZO KIMBALL

To

E.C.S.C.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Anna

“‘Tis good-by, Kincaid’s
Battery”

And the next instant she
was in his arms

“No! not under this
roof–nor in sight of these things.”

“You ‘ave no ri-ight to
leave me! Ah, you shall not!”

She dropped into a
seat, staring like one demented.

Kincaid’s Battery

I

CARROLLTON GARDENS

Let its northernmost corner be Vicksburg, the famous, on the
Mississippi. Let the easternmost be Mobile, and let the most
southerly and by far the most important, that pivotal corner of
the fan from which all its folds radiate and where the whole
pictured thing opens and shuts, be New Orleans. Then let the
grave moment that gently ushers us in be a long-ago afternoon
in the Louisiana Delta.

Throughout that land of water and sky the willow clumps
dotting the bosom of every sea-marsh and fringing every
rush-rimmed lake were yellow and green in the full flush of a
new year, the war year, ‘Sixty-one.

Though rife with warm sunlight, the moist air gave distance
and poetic charm to the nearest and humblest things. At the
edges of the great timbered swamps thickets of young
winter-bare cypresses were budding yet more vividly than the
willows, while in the depths of those overflowed forests, near
and far down their lofty gray colonnades, the dwarfed
swamp-maple drooped the winged fruit of its limp bush in pink
and flame-yellow and rose-red masses until it touched its own
image in the still flood.

That which is now only the “sixth district” of greater New
Orleans was then the small separate town of Carrollton. There
the vast Mississippi, leaving the sugar and rice fields of St.
Charles and St. John Baptist parishes and still seeking the
Gulf of Mexico, turns from east to south before it sweeps
northward and southeast again to give to the Creole capital its
graceful surname of the “Crescent City.” Mile-wide, brimful,
head-on and boiling and writhing twenty fathoms deep, you could
easily have seen, that afternoon, why its turfed levee had to
be eighteen feet high and broad in proportion. So swollen was
the flood that from any deck of a steamboat touching there one
might have looked down upon the whole fair still suburb.

Widely it hovered in its nest of rose gardens, orange
groves, avenues of water-oaks, and towering moss-draped pecans.
A few hundred yards from the levee a slender railway, coming
from the city, with a highway on either side, led into its
station-house; but mainly the eye would have dwelt on that
which filled the interval between the nearer high road and the
levee–the “Carrollton Gardens.”

At a corner of these grounds closest to the railway station
stood a quiet hotel from whose eastern veranda it was but a
step to the centre of a sunny shell-paved court where two
fountains danced and tinkled to each other. Along its farther
bound ran a vine-clad fence where a row of small tables dumbly
invited the flushed visitor to be inwardly cooled. By a narrow
gate in this fence, near its townward end, a shelled walk lured
on into a musky air of verdurous alleys that led and misled,
crossed, doubled, and mazed among flowering shrubs from bower
to bower. Out of sight in there the loiterer came at startling
moments face to face with banks of splendid bloom in ravishing
negligee–Diana disrobed, as it were, while that untiring
sensation-hunter, the mocking-bird, leaped and sang and clapped
his wings in a riot of scandalous mirth.

In the ground-floor dining-room of that unanimated hotel sat
an old gentleman named Brodnax, once of the regular army, a
retired veteran of the Mexican war, and very consciously
possessed of large means. He sat quite alone, in fine dress
thirty years out of fashion, finishing a late lunch and reading
a newspaper; a trim, hale man not to be called old in his own
hearing. He had read everything intended for news or
entertainment and was now wandering in the desert of the
advertising columns, with his mind nine miles away, at the
other end of New Orleans.

Although not that person whom numerous men of his
acquaintance had begun affectionately to handicap with the
perilous nickname of “the ladies’ man,” he was thinking of no
less than five ladies; two of one name and three of another.
Flora Valcour and her French grandmother (as well as her
brother of nineteen, already agog to be off in the war) had but
lately come to New Orleans, from Mobile. On a hilly border of
that smaller Creole city stood the home they had left, too
isolated, with war threatening, for women to occupy alone. Mrs.
Callender was the young widow of this old bachelor’s life-long
friend, the noted judge of that name, then some two years
deceased. Constance and Anna were her step-daughters, the
latter (if you would believe him) a counterpart of her
long-lost, beautiful mother, whose rejection of the soldier’s
suit, when he was a mere lieutenant, was the well-known cause
of his singleness. These Callender ladies, prompted by him and
with a sweet modesty of quietness, had just armed a new field
battery with its six splendid brass guns, and it was around
these three Callenders that his ponderings now hung; especially
around Anna and in reference to his much overprized property
and two nephews: Adolphe Irby, for whom he had obtained the
command of this battery, which he was to see him drill this
afternoon, and Hilary Kincaid, who had himself cast the guns
and who was to help the senior cousin conduct these
evolutions.

The lone reader’s glance loitered down a long row of slim
paragraphs, each beginning with the same wee picture of a
steamboat whether it proclaimed the Grand Duke or the
Louis d’Or, the Ingomar bound for the “Lower
Coast,” or the Natchez for “Vicksburg and the Bends.”
Shifting the page, he read of the Swiss Bell-Ringers as back
again “after a six years’ absence,” and at the next item really
knew what he read. It was of John Owens’ appearance, every
night, as Caleb Plummer in “Dot,” “performance to begin
at seven o’clock.” Was it there Adolphe would this evening take
his party, of which the dazzling Flora would be one and Anna,
he hoped, another? He had proposed this party to Adolphe,
agreeing to bear its whole cost if the nephew would manage to
include in it Anna and Hilary. And Irby had duly reported
complete success and drawn on him, but the old soldier still
told his doubts to the newspaper.

“Adolphe has habits,” he meditated, “but success is not one
of them.”

Up and down a perpendicular procession on the page he every
now and then mentally returned the salute of the one little
musketeer of the same height as the steamboat’s chimneys,
whether the Attention he challenged was that of the
Continentals, the Louisiana Grays, Orleans Cadets, Crescent
Blues or some other body of blithe invincibles. Yet his thought
was still of Anna. When Adolphe, last year, had courted her,
and the hopeful uncle had tried non-intervention, she had
declined him–“and oh, how wisely!” For then back to his native
city came Kincaid after years away at a Northern military
school and one year across the ocean, and the moment the uncle
saw him he was glad Adolphe had failed. But now if she was
going to find Hilary as light-headed and cloying as Adolphe was
thick-headed and sour, or if she must see Hilary go soft on the
slim Mobile girl–whom Adolphe was already so torpidly enamored
of–“H-m-m-m!”

Two young men who had tied their horses behind the hotel
crossed the white court toward the garden. They also were in
civil dress, yet wore an air that goes only with military
training. The taller was Hilary Kincaid, the other his
old-time, Northern-born-and-bred school chum, Fred Greenleaf.
Kincaid, coming home, had found him in New Orleans, on duty at
Jackson Barracks, and for some weeks they had enjoyed cronying.
Now they had been a day or two apart and had chanced to meet
again at this spot. Kincaid, it seems, had been looking at a
point hard by with a view to its fortification. Their manner
was frankly masterful though they spoke in guarded tones.

“No,” said Kincaid, “you come with me to this drill.
Nobody’ll take offence.”

“Nor will you ever teach your cousin to handle a battery,”
replied Greenleaf, with a sedate smile.

“Well, he knows things we’ll never learn. Come with me,
Fred, else I can’t see you till theatre’s out–if I go there
with her–and you say–“

“Yes, I want you to go with her,” murmured Greenleaf, so
solemnly that Kincaid laughed outright.

“But, after the show, of course,” said the laugher, “you and
I’ll ride, eh?” and then warily, “You’ve taken your initials
off all your stuff?… Yes, and Jerry’s got your ticket. He’ll
go down with your things, check them all and start off on the
ticket himself. Then, as soon as you–“

“But will they allow a slave to do so?”

“With my pass, yes; ‘Let my black man, Jerry–‘”

The garden took the pair into its depths a moment too soon
for the old soldier to see them as he came out upon the side
veranda with a cloud on his brow that showed he had heard his
nephew’s laugh.

II

CARRIAGE COMPANY

“Bring it with the coffee.”

But the negro instantly brought it without the coffee and
placed it on the table with a delicate flourish, shuffled a
step back and bowed low:

“Coffee black, Gen’al, o’ co’se?”

“Black as your grandmother.”

The servant tittered: “Yas, suh, so whah it flop up-siden de
cup it leave a lemon-yalleh sta-ain.”

He capered away, leaving the General to the little
steamboats and to a blessed ignorance of times to be when at
“Vicksburg and the Bends” this same waiter would bring his
coffee made of corn-meal bran and muddy water, with which to
wash down scant snacks of mule meat. The listless eye still
roamed the arid page as the slave returned with the fragrant
pot and cup, but now the sitter laid it by, lighted a cigar and
mused:–

In this impending war the South would win, of course–oh,
God is just! But this muser could only expect to fall at the
front. Then his large estate, all lands and slaves, five
hundred souls–who would inherit that and hold it together?
Held together it must be! Any partition of it would break no
end of sacredly humble household and family ties and work
spiritual havoc incalculable. There must be but one heir. Who?
Hilary’s mother had been in heaven these many years, the mother
of Adolphe eighteen months; months quite enough to show the
lone brother how vast a loss is the absence of the right
mistress from such very human interests as those of a great
plantation. Not only must there be but one heir, but he must
have the right wife.

The schemer sipped. So it was Anna for Hilary if he could
bring it about. So, too, it must be Hilary for his
adjutant-general, to keep him near enough to teach him the
management of the fortune coming to him if he, Hilary, would
only treat his kind uncle’s wishes–reasonably. With the cup
half lifted he harkened. From a hidden walk and bower close on
the garden side of this vine-mantled fence sounded footsteps
and voices:

“But, Fred! where on earth did she get–let’s sit in
here–get that rich, belated, gradual smile?”

A memory thrilled the listening General. “From her mother,”
thought he, and listened on.

“It’s like,” continued his nephew–“I’ll tell you what it’s
like. It’s like–Now, let me alone! You see, one has to
learn her beauty–by degrees. You know, there is
a sort of beauty that flashes on you at first sight, like–like
the blaze of a ball-room. I was just now thinking of a striking
instance–“

“From Mobile? You always are.”

“No such thing! Say, Fred, I’ll tell you what Miss Anna’s
smile is like. It’s as if you were trying–say in a
telescope–for a focus, and at last all at once it comes
and–there’s your star!”

The Northerner softly assented.

“Fred! Fancy Flora Valcour with that smile!”

“No! Hilary Kincaid, I think you were born to believe in
every feminine creature God ever made. No wonder they nickname
you as they do. Now, some girls are quite too feminine for
me.”

In his own smoke the General’s eyes opened aggressively. But
hark! His nephew spoke again:

“Fred, if you knew all that girl has done for that boy and
that grandmother–It may sound like an overstatement, but you
must have observed–“

“That she’s a sort of overstatement herself?”

“Go to grass! Your young lady’s not even an
understatement; she’s only a profound pause. See here! what
time is it? I prom–“

On the uncle’s side of the fence a quick step brought a
newcomer, a Creole of maybe twenty-nine years, member of his
new staff, in bright uniform:

“Ah, Général, yo’ moze ob-edient! Never less
al-lone then when al-lone? ‘T is the way with myseff–“

He seemed not unrefined, though of almost too mettlesome an
eye; in length of leg showing just the lack, in girth of waist
just the excess, to imply a better dignity on horseback and to
allow a proud tailor to prove how much art can overcome. Out on
the road a liveried black coachman had halted an open carriage,
in which this soldier had arrived with two ladies. Now these
bowed delightedly from it to the General, while Kincaid and his
friend stood close hid and listened agape, equally amused and
dismayed.

“How are you, Mandeville?” said the General. “I am not
nearly as much alone as I seem, sir!”

A voice just beyond the green-veiled fence cast a light on
this reply and brought a flush to the Creole’s very brows.
“Alas! Greenleaf,” it cried, “we search in vain! He is not
here! We are even more alone than we seem! Ah! where is that
peerless chevalier, my beloved, accomplished, blameless,
sagacious, just, valiant and amiable uncle? Come let us press
on. Let not the fair sex find him first and snatch him from us
forever!”

The General’s scorn showed only in his eyes as they met the
blaze of Mandeville’s. “You were about to remark–?” he began,
but rose and started toward the carriage.

There not many minutes later you might have seen the four
men amicably gathered and vying in clever speeches to pretty
Mrs. Callender and her yet fairer though less scintillant
step-daughter Anna.

III

THE GENERAL’S CHOICE

What he thought he saw was a golden-brown profusion of hair
with a peculiar richness in its platted coils, an unconsciously
faultless poise of head, and, equally unconscious, a dreamy
softness of sweeping lashes. As she laughed with the General
her student noted further what seemed to him a rare silkiness
in the tresses, a vapory lightness in the short strands that
played over the outlines of temple and forehead, and the
unstudied daintiness with which they gathered into the merest
mist of a short curl before her exquisite ear.

But when now she spoke with him these charms became
forgettable as he discovered, or fancied he did, in her
self-oblivious eyes, a depth of thought and feeling not in the
orbs alone but also in the brows and lids, and between upper
and under lashes as he glimpsed them in profile while she
turned to Mandeville. And now, unless his own insight misled
him, he observed how unlike those eyes, and yet how subtly
mated with them, was her mouth; the delicate rising curve of
the upper lip, and the floral tenderness with which it so
faintly overhung the nether, wherefrom it seemed ever about to
part yet parted only when she spoke or smiled.

“A child’s mouth and a woman’s eyes,” he mused.

When her smiles came the mouth remained as young as before,
yet suddenly, as truly as the eyes, showed–showed him at
least–steadfastness of purpose, while the eyes, where fully
half the smile was, still unwittingly revealed their depths of
truth.

“Poor Fred!” he pondered as the General and Mandeville
entered the carriage and it turned away.

A mile or two from Carrollton down the river and toward the
city lay the old unfenced fields where Hilary had agreed with
Irby to help him manoeuvre his very new command. Along the
inland edge of this plain the railway and the common road still
ran side by side, but the river veered a mile off. So
Mandeville pointed out to the two ladies as they, he, and the
General drove up to the spot with Kincaid and Greenleaf as
outriders. The chosen ground was a level stretch of wild turf
maybe a thousand yards in breadth, sparsely dotted with
shoulder-high acacias. No military body was yet here, and the
carriage halted at the first good view point.

Mrs. Callender, the only member of her family who was of
Northern birth and rearing, was a small slim woman whose smile
came whenever she spoke and whose dainty nose went all to merry
wrinkles whenever she smiled. It did so now, in the shelter of
her diminutive sunshade opened flat against its jointed handle
to fend off the strong afternoon beams, while she explained to
Greenleaf–dismounted beside the wheels with Mandeville–that
Constance, Anna’s elder sister, would arrive by and by with
Flora Valcour. “Connie”, she said, had been left behind in the
clutches of the dressmaker!

“Flora,” she continued, crinkling her nose ever so
kind-heartedly at Greenleaf, “is Lieutenant Mandeville’s
cousin, you know. Didn’t he tell you something back yonder in
Carrollton?”

Greenleaf smiled an admission and her happy eyes closed to
mere chinks. What had been told was that Constance had
yesterday accepted Mandeville.

“Yes,” jovially put in the lucky man, “I have divulge’ him
that, and he seem’ almoze as glad as the young lady
herseff!”

Even to this the sweet widow’s misplaced wrinkles faintly
replied, while Greenleaf asked, “Does the Lieutenant’s good
fortune account for the–‘clutches of the dressmaker’?”

It did. The Lieutenant hourly expecting to be ordered to the
front, this wedding, like so many others, would be at the
earliest day possible. “A great concession,” the lady said,
turning her piquant wrinkles this time upon Mandeville. But
just here the General engrossed attention. His voice had warmed
sentimentally and his kindled eye was passing back and forth
between Anna seated by him and Hilary close at hand in the
saddle. He waved wide:

“This all-pervading haze and perfume, dew and dream,” he was
saying, “is what makes this the Lalla Rookh’s land it is!” He
smiled at himself and confessed that Carrollton Gardens always
went to his head. “Anna, did you ever hear your mother
sing–

“‘There’s a bower of
roses–‘?”

She lighted up to say yes, but the light was all he needed
to be lured on through a whole stanza, and a tender
sight–Ocean silvering to brown-haired Cynthia–were the two,
as he so innocently strove to recreate out of his own lost
youth, for her and his nephew, this atmosphere of poetry.

“‘To sit in the roses and
hear the bird’s song!'”

he suavely ended–“I used to make Hilary sing that for me
when he was a boy.”

“Doesn’t he sing it yet?” asked Mrs. Callender.

“My God, madame, since I found him addicted to comic songs
I’ve never asked him!”

Kincaid led the laugh and the talk became lively. Anna was
merrily accused by Miranda (Mrs. Callender) of sharing the
General’s abhorrence of facetious song. First she pleaded
guilty and then reversed her plea with an absurd tangle of
laughing provisos delightful even to herself. At the same time
the General withdrew from his nephew all imputation of a
frivolous mind, though the nephew avowed himself nonsensical
from birth and destined to die so. It was a merry moment, so
merry that Kincaid’s bare mention of Mandeville as Mandy made
even the General smile and every one else laugh. The Creole, to
whom any mention of himself, (whether it called for gratitude
or for pistols and coffee,) was always welcome, laughed
longest. If he was Mandy, he hurried to rejoin, the absent
Constance “muz be Candy–ha, ha, ha!” And when Anna said
Miranda should always thenceforth be Randy, and Mrs. Callender
said Anna ought to be Andy, and the very General was seduced
into suggesting that then Hilary would be Handy, and when every
one read in every one’s eye, the old man’s included, that
Brodnax would naturally be Brandy, the Creole bent and wept
with mirth, counting all that fine wit exclusively his.

“But, no!” he suddenly said, “Hilary he would be Dandy,
bic-ause he’s call’ the ladies’ man!”

“No, sir!” cried the General. “Hil–” He turned upon his
nephew, but finding him engaged with Anna, faced round to his
chum: “For Heaven’s sake, Greenleaf, does he allow–?”

“He can’t help it now,” laughed his friend, “he’s tagged it
on himself by one of his songs.”

“Oh, by Jove, Hilary, it serves you right for singing
them!”

Hilary laughed to the skies, the rest echoing.

“A ladies’ man!” the uncle scoffed on. “Of all things on
God’s earth!” But there he broke into lordly mirth: “Don’t you
believe that of him, ladies, at any rate. If only for my
sake, Anna, don’t you ever believe a breath of it!”

The ladies laughed again, but now Kincaid found them a
distraction. Following his glance cityward they espied a broad
dust-cloud floating off toward the river. He turned to Anna and
softly cried, “Here come your guns, trying to beat the
train!”

The ladies stood up to see. An unseen locomotive whistled
for a brief stop. The dust-cloud drew nearer. The engine
whistled to start again, and they could hear its bell and
quickening puff. But the dust-cloud came on and on, and all at
once the whole six-gun battery–six horses to each piece and
six to each caisson–captain, buglers, guidon, lieutenants,
sergeants and drivers in the saddle, cannoneers on the
chests–swept at full trot, thumping, swaying, and rebounding,
up the highway and off it, and, forming sections, swung out
upon the field in double column, while the roaring train rolled
by it and slowed up to the little frame box of Buerthe’s
Station with passengers cheering from every window.

The Callenders’ carriage horses were greatly taxed in their
nerves, yet they kept their discretion. Kept it even when now
the battery flashed from column into line and bore down upon
them, the train meanwhile whooping on toward Carrollton. And
what an elated flock of brightly dressed citizens and
citizenesses had alighted from the cars–many of them on the
moment’s impulse–to see these dear lads, with their
romantically acquired battery, train for the holiday task of
scaring the dastard foe back to their frozen homes! How we
loved the moment’s impulse those days!

What a gay show! And among the very prettiest and most
fetchingly arrayed newcomers you would quickly have noticed
three with whom this carriage group exchanged signals. Kincaid
spurred off to meet them while Greenleaf and Mandeville helped
Anna and Miranda to the ground. “There’s Constance,” said the
General.

“Yes,” Mrs. Callender replied, “and Flora and Charlie
Valcour!” as if that were the gleefulest good luck of all.

IV

MANOEUVRES

The tallish girl always looked her best beside some manly
form of unusual stature, and because that form now was Hilary’s
Irby was aggrieved. All their days his cousin had been getting
into his light, and this realization still shaded his brow as
Kincaid yielded Flora to him and returned to Anna to talk of
things too light for record.

Not so light were the thoughts Anna kept unuttered. Here
again, she reflected, was he who (according to Greenleaf) had
declined to command her guns in order to let Irby have them.
Why? In kindness to his cousin, or in mild dislike of a woman’s
battery? If intuition was worth while, this man was soon to be
a captain somewhere. Here was that rare find for which even
maidens’ eyes were alert those days–a born leader. No ladies’
man this–“of all things on God’s earth!” A men’s man! And
yet–nay, therefore–a man for some unparagoned woman
some day to yield her heart and life to, and to have for her
very own, herself his consummate adornment. She cast a glance
at Flora.

But her next was to him as they talked on. How nearly black
was the waving abundance of his hair. How placid his brow,
above eyes whose long lashes would have made them meltingly
tender had they not been so large with mirth: “A boy’s eyes,”
thought she while he remembered what he had just called hers.
She noted his mouth, how gently firm: “A man’s mouth!”

Charlie Valcour broke in between them: “Is there not going
to be any drill, after all?”

“Tell Captain Irby you can’t wait any longer,” replied
Kincaid with a mock frown and gave Anna yet gayer attention a
minute more. Then he walked beside his cousin toward the
command, his horse close at his back. The group, by pairs,
chose view points. Only Miss Valcour stayed in the carriage
with the General, bent on effecting a change in his mind. In
Mobile Flora had been easily first in any social set to which
she condescended. In New Orleans, brought into the Callenders’
circles by her cousin Mandeville, she had found herself quietly
ranked second to Anna, and Anna now yet more pointedly
outshining her through the brazen splendor of this patriotic
gift of guns. For this reason and others yet to appear she had
planned a strategy and begun a campaign, one of whose earliest
manoeuvres must be to get Irby, not Kincaid, made their uncle’s
adjutant-general, and therefore to persuade the uncle that to
give Kincaid the battery would endear him to Anna and so crown
with victory the old man’s perfectly obvious plan.

Greenleaf left his horse tied and walked apart with Anna.
This, he murmured, was the last time they would be together for
years.

“Yes,” she replied with a disheartening composure, although
from under the parasol with which he shaded her she met his
eyes so kindly that his heart beat quicker. But before he could
speak on she looked away to his fretting horse and then across
to the battery, where a growing laugh was running through the
whole undisciplined command. “What is it about?” she playfully
inquired, but then saw. In response to the neigh of Greenleaf’s
steed Hilary’s had paused an instant and turned his head, but
now followed on again, while the laughter ended in the clapping
of a hundred hands; for Kincaid’s horse had the bridle free on
his neck and was following his master as a dog follows. Irby
scowled, the General set his jaws, and Hilary took his horse’s
bridle and led him on.

“That’s what I want to do every time I look at him!”
called Charlie to his sister.

“Then look the other way!” carolled back the slender beauty.
To whom Anna smiled across in her belated way, and wondered if
the impulse to follow Hilary Kincaid ever came to women.

But now out yonder the two cousins were in the saddle,
Irby’s sabre was out, and soon the manoeuvres were fully under
way. Flora, at the General’s side, missed nothing of them, yet
her nimble eye kept her well aware that across here in this
open seclusion the desperate Greenleaf’s words to Anna were
rarely explanatory of the drill.

“And now,” proclaimed Mandeville, “you’ll see them form into
line fazed to the rear!” And Flora, seeing and applauding, saw
also Anna turn to her suitor a glance, half pity for him, half
pleading for his pity.

“I say unless–” Greenleaf persisted–

“There is no ‘unless.’ There can’t ever be any.”

“But may I not at least say–?”

“I’d so much rather you would not,” she begged.

“At present, you mean?”

“Or in the future,” said Anna, and, having done perfectly
thus far, spoiled all by declaring she would “never marry!” Her
gaze rested far across the field on the quietly clad figure of
Kincaid riding to and fro and pointing hither and yon to his
gold-laced cousin. Off here on the left she heard Mandeville
announcing:

“Now they’ll form batt’rie to the front by throwing caisson’
to the rear–look–look!… Ah, ha! was not that a
prettie?”

Pretty it was declared to be on all sides. Flora called it
“a beautiful.” Part of her charm was a Creole accent much too
dainty for print. Anna and Greenleaf and the other couples
regathered about the carriage, and Miss Valcour from her high
seat smiled her enthusiasm down among them, exalting theirs.
And now as a new movement of the battery followed, and now
another, her glow heightened, and she called musically to
Constance, Mrs. Callender and Anna, by turns, to behold and
admire. For one telling moment she was, and felt herself, the
focus of her group, the centre of its living picture. Out
afield yet another manoeuvre was on, and while Anna and her
suitor stood close below her helplessly becalmed each by each,
Flora rose to her feet and caught a great breath of delight.
Her gaze was on the glittering mass of men, horses, and brazen
guns that came thundering across the plain in double
column–Irby at its head, Kincaid alone on the flank–and
sweeping right and left deployed into battery to the front with
cannoneers springing to their posts for action.

“Pretties’ of all!” she cried, and stood, a gentle air
stirring her light draperies, until the boys at the empty guns
were red-browed and short of breath in their fierce pretence of
loading and firing. Suddenly the guns were limbered up and went
bounding over the field, caissons in front. And now pieces
passed their caissons, and now they were in line, then in
double column, and presently were gleaming in battery again,
faced to the rear. And now at command the tired lads dropped to
the ground to rest, or sauntered from one lounging squad to
another, to chat and chaff and puff cigarettes. Kincaid and
Irby lent their horses to Mandeville and Charlie, who rode to
the battery while the lenders joined the ladies.

Once more Hilary yielded Flora and sought Anna; but with
kinder thought for Flora Anna pressed herself upon Irby, to the
open chagrin of his uncle. So Kincaid cheerfully paired with
Flora. But thus both he and Anna unwittingly put the finishing
touch upon that change of heart in the General which Flora, by
every subtlety of indirection, this hour and more in the
carriage, had been bringing about.

A query: With Kincaid and Irby the chief figures in their
social arena and Hilary so palpably his cousin’s better in
looks, in bearing, talents, and character, is it not strange
that Flora, having conquest for her ruling passion, should
strive so to relate Anna to Hilary as to give her, Anna, every
advantage for the higher prize? Maybe it is, but she liked
strangeness–and a stiff game.

V

HILARY?–YES, UNCLE?

“Greenleaf,” said the old soldier, “why does Hilary forever
walk as though he were bringing the best joke of the season?
Can’t you make him quit it?”

The nephew joined them: “Uncle, if you’d like to borrow my
horse I can go by train.”

That was a joke. “H-m-m! I see! No, Greenleaf’s going
by train. Would you like to ride with me?”

“Well, eh–ha! Why, uncle, I–why, of course, if Fred
really–” They mounted and went.

“Hilary?”

“Yes, uncle?”

“How is it now? Like my girl any better?”

“Why–yes! Oh, she’s fine! And yet I–“

“You must say? What must you say?”

“Nothing much; only that she’s not the kind to seem like the
owner of a field battery. My goodness! uncle, if she had half
Miss Flora’s tang–“

“She hasn’t the least need of it! She’s the quiet kind, sir,
that fools who love ‘tang’ overlook!”

“Yes,” laughed Hilary, “she’s quiet; quiet as a
fortification by moonlight! Poor Fred! I wish–“

“Well, thank God you wish in vain! That’s just been settled.
I asked him–oh, don’t look surprised at me. Good Lord!
hadn’t I the right to know?”

The two rode some way in silence. “I wish,” mused the nephew
aloud, “it could be as he wants it.”

The uncle’s smile was satirical: “Did you ever, my boy, wish
anything could be as I want it?”

“Now, uncle, there’s a big difference–“

“DAMN THE DIFFERENCE! I’m going to try you. I’m going to
make Adolphe my adjutant-general. Then if you hanker for this
battery as it hankers for you–“

“Mary, Queen of Scots!” rejoiced Hilary. “That’ll suit us
both to the bone! And if it suits you too–“

“Well it doesn’t! You know I’ve never wanted Adolphe about
me. But you’ve got me all snarled up, the whole kit of you.
What’s more, I don’t want him for my heir nor any girl with
‘tang’ for mistress of my lands and people. Hilary, I swear! if
you’ve got the sand to want Anna and she’s got the grace to
take you, then, adjutant-general or not, I’ll leave you my
whole fortune! Well, what amuses you now?”

“Why, uncle, all the cotton in New Orleans couldn’t tempt me
to marry the girl I wouldn’t take dry so without a continental
cent.”

“But your own present poverty might hold you back even from
the girl you wanted, mightn’t it?”

“No!” laughed the nephew, “nothing would!”

“Good God! Well, if you’ll want Anna I’ll make it easy for
you to ask for her. If not, I’ll make it as hard as I can for
you to get any one else.”

Still Hilary laughed: “H-oh, uncle, if I loved any girl, I’d
rather have her without your estate than with it.” Suddenly he
sobered and glowed: “I wish you’d leave it to Adolphe! He’s a
heap-sight better business man than I. Besides, being older, he
feels he has the better right to it. You know you always
counted on leaving it to him.”

The General looked black: “You actually decline the
gift?”

“No. No, I don’t. I want to please you. But of my own free
choice I wouldn’t have it. I’m no abolitionist, but I don’t
want that kind of property. I don’t want the life that has to
go with it. I know other sorts that are so much better. I’m not
thinking only of the moral responsibility–“

“By–! sir, I am!”

“I know you are, and I honor you for it.”

“Bah!… Hilary, I–I’m much obliged to you for your
company, but–“

“You’ve had enough,” laughed the good-natured young man.
“Good-evening, sir.” He took a cross-street.

“Good-evening, my boy.” The tone was so kind that Hilary
cast a look back. But the General’s eyes were straight before
him.

Greenleaf accompanied the Valcours to their door. Charlie,
who disliked him, and whose admiration for his own sister was
privately cynical, had left them to themselves in the train.
There, wholly undetected by the very man who had said some
women were too feminine and she was one, she had played her sex
against his with an energy veiled only by its intellectual
nimbleness and its utterly dispassionate design. Charlie
detected achievement in her voice as she twittered good-by to
the departing soldier from their street door.

VI

MESSRS. SMELLEMOUT AND KETCHEM

The smallest of the three women was aged. That the other two
were young and beautiful we know already. At eighteen the old
lady, the Bohemian-glass one, had been one of those royalist
refugees of the French Revolution whose butterfly endeavors to
colonize in Alabama and become bees make so pathetic a chapter
in history. When one knew that, he could hardly resent her
being heavily enamelled. Irby pressed into the coach after the
three and shut the door, Kincaid uncovered, and the carriage
sped off.

Hilary turned, glanced easily over the heads of the throng,
and espied Greenleaf beckoning with a slender cane. Together
they crossed the way and entered the office of a public
stable.

“Our nags again,” said Kincaid to one of a seated group, and
passed into a room beyond. Thence he re-issued with his dress
modified for the saddle, and the two friends awaited their
mounts under an arch. “Dost perceive, Frederic,” said the
facetious Hilary, “yon modestly arrayed pair of palpable gents
hieing hitherward yet pretending not to descry us? They be
detectives. Oh–eh–gentlemen!”

The strangers halted inquiringly and then came forward. The
hair of one was black, of the other gray. Hilary brightened
upon them: “I was just telling my friend who you are. You know
me, don’t you?” A challenging glint came into his eye.

But the gray man showed a twinkle to match it: “Why–by
sight–yes–what there is of you.”

Hilary smiled again: “I saw you this morning in the office
of the Committee of Public Safety, where I was giving my word
that this friend of mine should leave the city within
twenty-four hours.” He introduced him: “Lieutenant Greenleaf,
gentleman, United States Army. Fred, these are Messrs.
Smellemout and Ketchem, a leading firm in the bottling
business.”

Greenleaf and the firm expressed their pleasure. “We hang
out at the corner of Poet and Good-Children Streets,” said the
black-haired man, but made his eyes big to imply that this was
romance.

Greenleaf lifted his brows: “Streets named for yourselves, I
judge.”

“Aye. Poet for each, Good-Children for both.”

Kincaid laughed out. “The Lieutenant and I,” he said as he
moved toward their approaching horses, “live on Love street
exactly half-way between Piety and Desire.” His eyes widened,
too. Suddenly he stepped between Greenleaf and the others: “See
here, let’s begin to tell the truth! You know Kincaid’s
Foundry? It was my father’s–“

“And his father’s before him,” said the gray man.

“And I’ve come home to go into this war,” Hilary went
on.

“And just at present,” said Gray, “you’re casting shot and
shell and now and then a cannon; good for you! You want to give
us your guarantee–?”

“That my friend and I will be together every moment till he
leaves to-morrow morning on the Jackson Railroad, bound for the
North without a stop.”

“To go into this war on the other side!”

“Why, of course!” said the smiling Kincaid. “Now, that’s
all, isn’t it? I fear we’re keeping you.”

“Oh, no.” The gray man’s crow’s-feet deepened playfully. “If
you think you need us we’ll stick by you all night.”

“No,” laughed Kincaid, “there’s no call for you to be so
sticky as all that.” The horsemen mounted.

“Better us than the Patriots’ League,” said the younger
detective to Hilary as Greenleaf moved off. “They’ve got your
friend down in their Send-’em-to-hell book and are after him
now. That’s how come we to be–“

“I perceive,” replied Hilary, and smiled in meditation.
“Why–thank you, both!”

“Oh, you go right along, Mr. Kincaid. We’ll be at the depot
to-morrow ourselves, and to-night we’ll see that they don’t
touch neither one of you.”

Hilary’s smile grew: “Why–thank you again! That will make
it more comfortable for them. Good-night.”

The two friends rode to a corner, turned into Poydras
Street, crossed Magazine and Tchoupitoulas and presently, out
from among the echoing fronts of unlighted warehouses, issued
upon the wide, white Levee.

VII

BY STARLIGHT

Greenleaf faced across the wide bend at his left. In that
quarter, quite hidden in live-oaks and magnolias, as both well
knew, were the low, red towers of Jackson Barracks. But it was
not for them the evicted young soldier claimed this last gaze.
It was for a large dwelling hard by them, a fine old plantation
house with wide verandas, though it also was shut from view, in
its ancient grove.

“Fred,” said Hilary, “didn’t she tell you why?”

“No,” replied the lover when they had turned away and were
moving up the harbor front, “except that it isn’t because I’m
for the Union.”

Hilary’s eyes went wide: “That’s wonderful, old man! But I
don’t believe she likes a soldier of any sort. If I were a
woman I’d be doggoned if I’d ever marry a soldier!”

“Yet the man who gets her,” said Greenleaf, “ought to be a
soldier in every drop of his blood. You don’t know her yet; but
you soon will, and I’m glad.”

“Now, why so? I can’t ever please her enough to be pleased
with her. I’m too confounded frivolous! I love nonsense, doggon
it, for its own sake! I love to get out under a sky like this
and just reel and whoop in the pure joy of standing on a world
that’s whirling round!”

“But you do please her. She’s told me so.”

“Don’t you believe her! I don’t. I can’t. I tell you, Fred,
I could never trust a girl that forever looks so trustworthy!
S’pose I should fall in love with her! Would you–begrudge her
to me?”

“I bequeath her to you.”

“Ah! you know I haven’t the ghost of a chance! She’s not for
po’ little Hil’ry. I never did like small women, anyhow!”

“My boy! If ever you like this one she’ll no more seem small
than the open sea.”

“I suppose,” mused Hilary, “that’s what makes it all the
harder to let go. If a girl has a soul so petty that she can
sit and hear you through to the last word your heart can bleed,
you can turn away from her with some comfort of resentment, as
if you still had a remnant of your own stature.”

“Precisely!” said the lover. “But when she’s too
large-hearted to let you speak, and yet answers your unspoken
word, once for all, with a compassion so modest that it seems
as if it were you having compassion on her, she’s harder to
give up than–“

“Doggon her, Fred, I wouldn’t give her up!”

“Ah, this war, Hilary! I may never see her again. There’s
just one man in this world whom–“

“Oh, get out!”

“I mean what I say. To you I leave her.”

“Ha, ha! No, you don’t! It’s only to her you leave me. Old
boy, promise me! If you ever come back and she’s still in the
ring, you’ll go for her again no matter who else is bidding,
your humble servant not excepted.”

“Why–yes–I–I promise that. Now, will you promise me?”

“What! let myself–?”

“Yes.”

“Ho-o, not by a jug-full! If ever I feel her harpoon in me
I’ll fight like a whale! But I promise you this, and warn you,
too: That when it comes to that, a whole platoon of Fred
Greenleafs between her and me won’t make a pinch of
difference.”

To that Greenleaf agreed, and the subject was changed. With
shipping ever on their left and cotton-yards and warehouses for
tobacco and for salt on their right their horses’ feet clinked
leisurely over the cobble pavements, between thousands of
cotton-bales headed upon the unsheltered wharves and only fewer
thousands on the narrow sidewalks.

So passed the better part of an hour before they were made
aware, by unmistakable odors, that they were nearing the
Stock-Landing. There, while they were yet just a trifle too far
away to catch its echoes, had occurred an incident–a fracas,
in fact–some of whose results belong with this narrative to
its end. While they amble toward the spot let us reconnoitre
it. Happily it has long been wiped out, this blot on the city’s
scutcheon. Its half-dozen streets were unspeakable mud, its air
was stenches, its buildings were incredibly foul
slaughter-houses and shedded pens of swine, sheep, beeves,
cows, calves, and mustang ponies. The plank footways were
enclosed by stout rails to guard against the chargings of
long-horned cattle chased through the thoroughfares by
lasso-whirling “bull-drivers” as wild as they. In the middle of
the river-front was a ferry, whence Louisiana Avenue, broad,
treeless, grassy, and thinly lined with slaughter-houses, led
across the plain. Down this untidy plaisance a grimy little
street-car, every half-hour, jogged out to the Carrollton
railway and returned. This street and the water-front were
lighted–twilighted–with lard-oil lamps; the rest of the place
was dark. At each of the two corners facing the ferry was a
“coffee-house”–dram-shop, that is to say.

Messrs. Sam Gibbs and Maxime Lafontaine were president and
vice-president of that Patriots’ League against whose
machinations our two young men had been warned by the
detectives in St. Charles Street. They had just now arrived at
the Stock-Landing. Naturally, on so important an occasion they
were far from sober; yet on reaching the spot they had lost no
time in levying on a Gascon butcher for a bucket of tar and a
pillow of feathers, on an Italian luggerman for a hurried
supper of raw oysters, and on the keeper of one of the
“coffee-houses” for drinks for the four.

“Us four and no more!” sang the gleeful Gibbs; right number
to manage a delicate case. The four glasses emptied, he had
explained that all charges must be collected, of course, from
the alien gentleman for whom the plumage and fixative were
destined. Hence a loud war of words, which the barkeeper had
almost smoothed out when the light-hearted Gibbs suddenly
decreed that the four should sing, march, pat and “cut the
pigeon-wing” to the new song (given nightly by Christy’s
Minstrels) entitled “Dixie’s Land.”

Hot threats recurring, Gascony had turned to go, Maxime had
headed him off, Italy’s hand had started into his flannel
shirt, and “bing! bang! pop!” rang Gibbs’s repeater and one of
Maxime’s little derringers–shot off from inside his sack-coat
pocket. A whirlwind of epithets filled the place. Out into the
stinking dark leaped Naples and Gascony, and after them darted
their whooping assailants. The shutters of both barrooms
clapped to, over the way a pair of bull-drivers rushed to their
mustangs, there was a patter of hoofs there and of boots here
and all inner lights vanished. A watchman’s rattle buzzed
remotely. Then silence reigned.

Now Sam and Maxime, deeming the incident closed, were
walking up the levee road beyond the stock-pens, in the new and
more sympathetic company of the two mounted bull-drivers, to
whose love of patriotic adventure they had appealed
successfully. A few yards beyond a roadside pool backed by
willow bushes they set down tar-bucket and pillow, and under a
low, vast live-oak bough turned and waited. A gibbous moon had
set, and presently a fog rolled down the river, blotting out
landscape and stars and making even these willows dim and
unreal. Ideal conditions! Now if their guest of honor, with or
without his friend, would but stop at this pool to wash the
Stock-Landing muck from his horse’s shins–but even luck has
its limits.

Nevertheless, that is what occurred. A hum of voices–a
tread of hoofs–and the very man hoped for–he and Hilary
Kincaid–recognized by their voices–d at the pool’s margin.
Sam and Maxime stole forward.

VIII

ONE KILLED

“Good-evening,” remarked Gibbs.

“Good-morning,” chirped Hilary, and scrubbed on. “Do you
happen to be Mr. Samuel Gibbs?–Don’t stop, Fred, Maxime won’t
object to your working on.”

“Yes, he will!” swore Gibbs, “and so will I!”

Still Hilary scrubbed: “Why so, Mr. Gibbs?”

“Bic-ause,” put in Maxime, “he’s got to go back through the
same mud he came!”

“Why, then,” laughed Hilary, “I may as well knock off, too,”
and began to wash his hands.

“No,” growled Gibbs, “you’ll ride on; we’re not here for
you.”

“You can’t have either of us without the other, Mr. Gibbs,”
playfully remarked Kincaid. The bull-drivers loomed out of the
fog. Hilary leisurely rose and moved to draw a
handkerchief.

“None o’ that!” cried Gibbs, whipping his repeater into
Kincaid’s face. Yet the handkerchief came forth, its owner
smiling playfully and drying his fingers while Mr. Gibbs went
on blasphemously to declare himself “no chicken.”

“Oh, no,” laughed Hilary, “none of us is quite that. But did
you ever really study–boxing?” At the last word Gibbs
reeled under a blow in the face; his revolver, going off
harmlessly, was snatched from him, Maxime’s derringer missed
also, and Gibbs swayed, bleeding and sightless, from Hilary’s
blows with the butt of the revolver. Presently down he lurched
insensible, Hilary going half-way with him but recovering and
turning to the aid of his friend. Maxime tore loose from his
opponent, beseeching the bull-drivers to attack, but beseeching
in vain. Squawking and chattering like parrot and monkey, they
spurred forward, whirled back, gathered lassos, cursed
frantically as Sam fell, sped off into the fog, spurred back
again, and now reined their ponies to their haunches, while
Kincaid halted Maxime with Gibbs’s revolver, and Greenleaf
sprang to the bits of his own and Hilary’s terrified horses.
For two other men, the Gascon and the Italian, had glided into
the scene from the willows, and the Gascon was showing
Greenleaf two big knives, one of which he fiercely begged him
to accept.

“Take it, Fred!” cried Hilary while he advanced on the
defiantly retreating Maxime; but as he spoke a new cry of the
drovers turned his glance another way. Gibbs had risen to his
knees unaware that the Italian, with yet another knife, was
close behind him. At a bound Hilary arrested the lifted blade
and hurled its wielder aside, who in the next breath seemed to
spring past him head first, fell prone across the prostrate
Gibbs, turned face upward, and slid on and away–lassoed. Both
bull-drivers clattered off up the road.

“Hang to the nags, Fred!” cried Hilary, and let Maxime leap
to Gibbs’s side, but seized the Gascon as with murderous intent
he sprang after him. It took Kincaid’s strength to hold him,
and Gibbs and his partner would have edged away, but–“Stand!”
called Hilary, and they stood, Gibbs weak and dazed, yet still
spouting curses. The Gascon begged in vain to be allowed to
follow the bull-drivers.

“Stay here!” said Hilary in French, and the butcher tarried.
Hilary passed the revolver to his friend, mounted and dashed up
the highway.

The Gascon stayed with a lively purpose which the enfeebled
Gibbs was the first to see. “Stand back, you hell-hound!” cried
the latter, and with fresh oaths bade Greenleaf “keep him
off!”

Maxime put Gibbs on Greenleaf’s horse (as bidden), and was
about to lead him, when Kincaid galloped back.

“Fred,” exclaimed Hilary, “they’ve killed the poor chap.” He
wheeled. “Come, all hands,” he continued, and to Greenleaf
added as they went, “He’s lying up here in the road with–“

Greenleaf picked up something. “Humph!” said Hilary,
receiving it, “knives by the great gross. He must have used
this trying to cut the lasso; the one he had back yonder flew
into the pond.” He reined in: “Here’s where they–Why,
Fred–why, I’ll swear! They’ve come back and–Stop! there was a
skiff”–he moved to the levee and peered over–“It’s gone!”

The case was plain, and while from Greenleaf’s saddle Gibbs
broke into frantic revilings of the fugitives for deserting him
and Maxime to sink their dead in the mid-current of the
fog-bound river, Kincaid and his friend held soft counsel.
Evidently the drovers had turned their horses loose, knowing
they would go to their stable. No despatch to stop Greenleaf
could be sent by anyone up the railroad till the Committee of
Public Safety had authorized it, so Hilary would drop them a
line out of his pocket note-book, and by daybreak these
prisoners could go free.

“Mr. Gibbs”–he said as he wrote–“I have the sprout of a
notion that you and Mr. Lafontaine would be an ornament to a
field-battery I’m about to take command of. I’d like to talk
with you about that presently.” He tore out the page he had
written and beckoned the Gascon aside:

“Mon ami“–he showed a roll of “city money” and
continued in French–“do you want to make a hundred
dollars–fifty now and fifty when you bring me an answer to
this?”

The man nodded and took the missive.

The old “Jackson Railroad” avoided Carrollton and touched
the river for a moment only, a short way beyond, at a small
bunch of flimsy clapboard houses called Kennerville. Here was
the first stop of its early morning outbound train, and here a
dozen or so passengers always poked their heads out of the
windows. This morning they saw an oldish black man step off,
doff his hat delightedly to two young men waiting at the
platform’s edge, pass them a ticket, and move across to a pair
of saddled horses. The smaller of the pair stepped upon the
last coach, but kept his companion’s hand till the train had
again started.

“Good-by, Tony,” cried the one left behind.

“Good-by, Jake,” called the other, and waved. His friend
watched the train vanish into the forest. Then, as his horse
was brought, he mounted and moved back toward the city.

Presently the negro, on the other horse, came up almost
abreast of him. “Mahs’ Hil’ry?” he ventured.

“Well, uncle Jerry?”

“Dat’s a pow’ful good-lookin’ suit o’ clo’es what L’tenant
Greenfeel got awn.”

“Jerry! you cut me to the heart!”

The negro tittered: “Oh, as to dat, I don’t ‘spute but yone
is betteh.”

The master heaved a comforted sigh. The servant tittered
again, but suddenly again was grave. “I on’y wish to Gawd,” he
slowly said, “dat de next time you an’ him meet–“

“Well–next time we meet–what then?”

“Dat you bofe be in de same sawt o’ clo’es like you got on
now.”

IX

HER HARPOON STRIKES

Inside, its aspect was exceptional. There the inornate
beauty of its finish, the quiet abundance of its delicate
woodwork, and the high spaciousness and continuity of its rooms
for entertainment won admiration and fame. A worthy setting, it
was called, for the gentle manners with which the Callenders
made it alluring.

They, of course, had not built it. The late Judge had
acquired it from the descendants of a planter of indigo and
coffee who in the oldest Creole days had here made his home and
lived his life as thoroughly in the ancient baronial spirit as
if the Mississippi had been the mediaeval Rhine. Only its
perfect repair was the Judge’s touch, a touch so modestly true
as to give it a charm of age and story which the youth and
beauty of the Callender ladies only enhanced, enhancing it the
more through their lack of a male protector–because of which
they were always going to move into town, but never moved.

Here, some nine or ten days after Greenleaf’s flight, Hilary
Kincaid, in uniform at last, was one of two evening visitors,
the other being Mandeville. In the meantime our lover of
nonsense had received a “hard jolt.” So he admitted in a letter
to his friend, boasting, however, that it was unattended by any
“internal injury.” In the circuit of a single week, happening
to be thrown daily and busily into “her” society, “the harpoon
had struck.”

He chose the phrase as an honest yet delicate reminder of
the compact made when last the two chums had ridden
together.

All three of the Callenders were in the evening group, and
the five talked about an illumination of the city, set for the
following night. In the business centre the front of every
building was already being hung with fittings from sidewalk to
cornice. So was to be celebrated the glorious fact (Constance
and Mandeville’s adjective) that in the previous month
Louisiana had seized all the forts and lighthouses in her
borders and withdrawn from the federal union by a solemn
ordinance signed in tears. This great lighting up, said Hilary,
was to be the smile of fortitude after the tears. Over the city
hall now floated daily the new flag of the state, with the
colors of its stripes–

“Reverted to those of old Spain,” murmured Anna, mainly to
herself yet somewhat to Hilary. Judge Callender had died a
Whig, and politics interested the merest girls those days.

Even at the piano, where Anna played and Hilary hovered, in
pauses between this of Mozart and that of Mendelssohn, there
was much for her to ask and him to tell about; for instance,
the new “Confederate States,” a bare fortnight old! Would
Virginia come into them? Eventually, yes.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes!” cried Constance, overhearing. (Whatever
did not begin with oh, those times, began with ah.)

“And must war follow?” The question was Anna’s again,
and Hilary sat down closer to answer confidentially:

“Yes, the war was already a fact.”

“And might not the Abolitionists send their ships and
soldiers against New Orleans?”

“Yes, the case was supposable.”

“And might not Jackson’s battlefield of 1815, in close view
from these windows, become a new one?”

To avoid confessing that old battlefields have that tendency
the Captain rose and took up a guitar; but when he would have
laid it on her knee she pushed it away and asked the song of
him; asked with something intimate in her smiling undertone
that thrilled him, yet on the next instant seemed pure dream
stuff. The others broke in and Constance begged a song of the
new patriotism; but Miranda, the pretty stepmother, spoke
rather for something a thousand miles and months away from the
troubles and heroics of the hour; and when Anna seconded this
motion by one fugitive glance worth all their beseechings
Hilary, as he stood, gayly threw open his smart jacket lest his
brass buttons mar the instrument, and sang with a sudden fervor
that startled and delighted all the group:

“Drink to me only with thine
eyes.”

In the midst of which Constance lifted a knowing look across
to Miranda, and Miranda sent it back.

There was never an evening that did not have to end, and at
last the gentlemen began to make a show of leaving. But then
came a lively chat, all standing in a bunch. To-morrow’s
procession, the visitors said, would form in Canal Street, move
up St. Charles, return down Camp Street into Canal, pass
through it into Rampart, take the Bayou Road and march to a
grand review away out in the new camp of instruction at the
Creole Race-Course. Intermediately, from a certain Canal Street
balcony, Flora would present the flag! the gorgeous golden,
silken, satin battle standard which the Callenders and others
had helped her to make. So–good-night–good-night.

The last parting was with Mandeville, at the levee-road
gate, just below which he lived in what, during the
indigo-planter’s life, had been the overseer’s cottage. At a
fine stride our artillerist started townward, his horse being
stabled near by in that direction. But presently he halted,
harkened after the Creole’s receding step, thought long, softly
called himself names, and then did a small thing which,
although it resulted in nothing tragic at the time, marked a
turning point in his life. He leapt the grove fence, returned
to the shadows of the garden, and silently made his way to its
eastern, down-river side. Already the dwelling’s lower lights
were going out while none yet shone above, and he paused in
deep shade far enough away to see, over its upper veranda’s
edge, the tops of its chamber windows.

X

SYLVIA SIGHS

She may have intended but one look at the stars, but they
and the spiced air were enchanting, and in confidence that no
earthly eye was on her she tarried, gazing out to the farthest
gleam of the river where it swung southward round the English
Turn.

Down in the garden a mirthful ecstasy ran through all the
blood of her culprit observer and he drank to her only with his
eyes. Against the window’s brightness her dark outline showed
true, and every smallest strand of her hair that played along
the contours of brow and head changed his merriment to
reverence and bade his heart recognize how infinitely distant
from his was her thought. Hilary Kincaid! can you read no
better than that?

Her thought was of him. Her mind’s eye saw him on his
homeward ride. It marked the erectness of his frame, the gayety
of his mien, the dance of his locks. By her inner ear she heard
his horse’s tread passing up the narrow round-stone pavements
of the Creole Quarter, presently to echo in old St. Peter
Street under the windows of Pontalba Row–one of which was
Flora’s. Would it ring straight on, or would it pause between
that window and the orange and myrtle shades of Jackson Square?
Constance had said that day to Miranda–for this star-gazer to
overhear–that she did not believe Kincaid loved Flora, and the
hearer had longed to ask her why, but knew she could not tell.
Why is a man’s word. “They’re as helpless without it,” the
muser recalled having very lately written on a secret page, “as
women are before it. And yet a girl can be very hungry, at
times, for a why. They say he’s as brave as a lion–why is he
never brave to me?”

So futilely ended the strain on the remembered page, but
while his unsuspected gaze abode on her lifted eyes her thought
prolonged the note: “If he meant love to-night, why did he not
stand to his meaning when I laughed it away? Was that for his
friend’s sake, or is he only not brave enough to make one wild
guess at me? Ah, I bless Heaven he’s the kind that cannot! And
still–oh, Hilary Kincaid, if you were the girl and I the man!
I shouldn’t be on my way home; I’d be down in this garden–.”
She slowly withdrew.

Hilary, stepping back to keep her in sight, was suddenly
aware of the family coachman close at his side. Together they
moved warily a few steps farther.

“You mus’ escuse me, Cap’n,” the negro amiably whispered.
“You all right, o’ co’se! Yit dese days, wid no white gen’leman
apputtainin’ onto de place–“

“Old man!” panted Hilary, “you’ve saved my life!”

“Oh, my Lawd, no! Cap’n, I–“

“Yes, you have! I was just going into fits! Now step in and
fetch me out here–” He shaped his arms fantastically and
twiddled his fingers.

Bending with noiseless laughter the negro nodded and
went.

Just within her window, Anna, still in reverie, sat down at
a slender desk, unlocked a drawer, then a second one inside it,
and drew forth–no mere secret page but–a whole diary! “To
Anna, from Miranda, Christmas, 1860.” Slowly she took up a pen,
as gradually laid it by again, and opposite various dates let
her eyes rest on–not this, though it was still true:

“The more we see of Flora, the more we like her.”

Nor this: “Heard a great, but awful, sermon on the duty of
resisting Northern oppression.”

But this: “Connie thinks he ‘inclines’ to me. Ho! all he’s
ever said has been for his far-away friend. I wish he would
incline, or else go ten times as far away! Only not to the
war–God forbid! Ah, me, how I long for his inclining! And
while I long he laughs, and the more he laughs the more I long,
for I never, never so doted on any one’s laugh. Oh, shame! to
love before–“

What sound was that below? No mocking-bird note, no south
wind in the foliage, but the kiss of fingers on strings! Warily
it stole in at the window, while softly as an acacia the diary
closed its leaves. The bent head stirred not, but a thrill
answered through the hearer’s frame as a second cadence
ventured up and in and a voice followed it in song. Tremblingly
the book slid into the drawer, inner and outer lock clicked
whisperingly, and gliding to a door she harkened for any step
of the household, while she drank the strains, her bosom
heaving with equal alarm and rapture.

If any song is good which serves a lover’s ends we need
claim no more for the one that rose to Anna on the odors of the
garden and drove her about the room, darting, clinging,
fluttering, returning, like her own terrified bird above her in
its cage.

When Sylvia sighs
And veils the worshipped
wonder
Of her blue eyes
Their sacred curtains
under,
Naught can so nigh please me as
my tender anguish.
Only grief can ease me while
those lashes languish.
Woe best beguiles;
Mirth, wait thou other
whiles;
Thou shalt borrow all my
sorrow
When Sylvia smiles.

But what a strange effect! Could this be that Anna.
Callender who “would no more ever again seem small, than the
ocean?” Is this that maiden of the “belated, gradual smile”
whom the singer himself so lately named “a profound pause?”
Your eyes, fair girl, could hardly be more dilated if they saw
riot, fire, or shipwreck. Nor now could your brow show more
exaltation responsive to angels singing in the sun; nor now
your frame show more affright though soldiers were breaking in
your door. Anna, Anna! your fingers are clenched in your palms,
and in your heart one frenzy implores the singer to forbear,
while another bids him sing on though the heavens fall. Anna
Callender! do you not know this? You have dropped into a chair,
you grip the corners of your desk. Now you are up again,
trembling and putting out your lights. And now you seek to
relight them, but cannot remember the place or direction of
anything, and when you have found out what you were looking
for, do not know how much time has flown, except that the song
is still in its first stanza. Are you aware that your groping
hand has seized and rumpled into its palm a long strand of
slender ribbon lately unwound from your throat?

A coy tap sounds on her door and she glides to it.
“Who–who?” But in spite of her it opens to the bearer of a
lamp, her sister Constance.

“Who–who–?” she mocks in soft glee. “That’s the question!
‘Who is Sylvia?'”

“Don’t try to come in! I–I–the floor is all strewn with
matches!”

The sister’s mirth vanishes: “Why, Nan! what is the
matter?”

“Do-on’t whisper so loud! He’s right out there!”

“But, dearie! it’s nothing but a serenade.”

“It’s an outrage, Con! How did he ever know–how did he dare
to know–this was my window? Oh, put out that lamp or he’ll
think I lighted it–No! no! don’t put it out, he’ll think I did
that, too!”

“Why, Nan! you never in your life–“

“Now, Connie, that isn’t fair! I won’t stay with you!” The
speaker fled. Constance put out the light.

A few steps down and across a hall a soft sound broke, and
Anna stood in Miranda’s doorway wearing her most self-contained
smile: “Dearie!” she quietly said, “isn’t it too
ridiculous!”

Miranda crinkled a smile so rife with love and insight that
Anna’s eyes suddenly ran full and she glided to her knees by
the seated one and into her arms, murmuring, “You ought both of
you to be ashamed of yourselves! You’re totally mistaken!”

Presently, back in the dusk of her own room, an audible
breathing betrayed her return, and Constance endeavoured to
slip out, but Anna clung: “You sha’n’t go! You sha’–” Yet the
fugitive easily got away.

Down among the roses a stanza had just ended. Anna tiptoed
out half across the dim veranda, tossed her crumpled ribbon
over the rail, flitted back, bent an ear, and knew by a brief
hush of the strings that the token had drifted home.

The die was cast. From brow and heart fled all perturbation
and once more into her eyes came their wonted serenity–with a
tinge of exultation–while the strings sounded again, and again
rose the song:

When Sylvia
smiles
Her eyes to mine
inclining,
Like azure isles
In seas of lovelight
shining,
With a merry madness find I
endless pleasure–
Till she sighs–then sadness is
my only treasure.
Woe best beguiles;
Mirth, wait thou other
whiles,
Thou shalt borrow all my
sorrow
When Sylvia smiles.

XI

IN COLUMN OF PLATOONS

In those days New Orleans paved her favorite streets, when
she paved them at all, with big blocks of granite two feet by
one. They came from the North as ballast in those innumerable
wide-armed ships whose cloud of masts and cordage inspiringly
darkened the sky of that far-winding river-front where we
lately saw Hilary Kincaid and Fred Greenleaf ride. Beginning at
the great steamboat landing, half a mile of Canal Street had
such a pavement on either side of its broad grassy “neutral
ground.” So had the main streets that led from it at right
angles. Long afterward, even as late as when the Nineteenth
Century died, some of those streets were at the funeral, clad
in those same old pavements, worn as smooth and ragged as a
gentleman-beggar’s coat. St. Charles Street was one. Another
was the old Rue Royale, its squat ground-floor domiciles
drooping their mossy eaves half across the pinched sidewalks
and confusedly trying to alternate and align themselves with
tall brick houses and shops whose ample two-and three-story
balconies were upheld, balustraded, and overhung by slender
garlandries of iron openwork as graceful and feminine as a lace
mantilla. With here and there the flag of a foreign consul
hanging out and down, such is the attire the old street was
vain of in that golden time when a large square sign on every
telegraph pole bade you get your shirts at S.N. Moody’s, corner
of Canal and Royal Streets.

At this corner, on the day after the serenade, there was a
dense, waiting crowd. On the other corner of Royal, where the
show-windows of Hyde & Goodrich blazed with diamonds, and
their loftily nested gold pelican forever fed her young from
her bleeding breast, stood an equal throng. Across Canal
Street, where St. Charles opens narrowly southward, were
similar masses, and midway between the four corners the rising
circles of stone steps about the high bronze figure of Henry
Clay were hidden by men and boys packed as close as they could
sit or stand. A great procession had gone up-town and would by
and by return. Near and far banners and pennons rose and fell
on the luxurious air, and the ranks and ranks of broad and
narrow balconies were so many gardens of dames and girls,
parasols, and diaphanous gowns. Near the front of the lowest
Hyde & Goodrich balcony, close by the gilded pelican, sat
the Callenders, all gladness, holding mute dialogues with Flora
and Madame Valcour here on the balcony of Moody’s corner. It
was the birthday of Washington.

Not of him, however, did Flora and her grandmother softly
converse in Spanish amid the surrounding babel of English and
French. Their theme was our battery drill of some ten days
before, a subject urged upon Flora by the mosquito-like
probings of Madame’s musically whined queries. Better to be
bled of almost any information by the antique little dame than
to have her light on it some other way, as she had an amazing
knack of doing. Her acted part of things Flora kept
untold; but grandma’s spirit of divination could unfailingly
supply that, and her pencilled brows, stiff as they were, could
tell the narrator she had done so.

Thus now, Flora gave no hint of the beautiful skill and
quick success with which, on her homeward railway trip with
Greenleaf that evening, she had bettered his impressions of
her. By no more than a gentle play of light and shade in her
smile and an undulating melody of voice–without a word that
touched the wound itself, but with a timid glow of
compassionate admiration–she had soothed the torture of a
heart whose last hope Anna had that same hour put to death.

“But before he took the train with you,” murmured the
mosquito to the butterfly, “when he said the General was going
to take Irby upon his staff and give the battery to Kincaid,
what did you talk of?”

“Talk of? Charlie. He said I ought to make Charlie join the
battery.”

“Ah? For what? To secure Kincaid’s protection of your dear
little brother’s health–character–morals–eh?”

“Yes, ’twas so he put it,” replied Flora, while the old
lady’s eyebrows visibly cried:

“You sly bird! will you impute all your own words to
that Yankee, and his to yourself?”

Which is just what Flora continued to do as the grandma
tinkled: “And you said–what?”

“I said if I couldn’t keep him at home I ought to get him
into the cavalry. You know, dear, in the infantry the marches
are so cruel, the camps so–“

“But in the artillery,” piped the small dame, “they ride,
eh?” (It was a trap she was setting, but in vain was the net
spread.)

“No,” said the serene girl, “they, too, go afoot. Often they
must help the horses drag the guns through the mire. Only on
parade they ride, or when rushing to and fro in battle, whips
cracking, horses plunging, the hills smoking and shaking!” The
rare creature sparkled frankly, seeing the battery whirling
into action with its standard on the wind–this very flag she
expected presently to bestow.

“And with Kincaid at the head!” softly cried the
antique.

The girl put on a fondness which suddenly became a withering
droop of the eyes: “Don’t mince your smile so, grannie dear, I
can hear the paint crack.”

The wee relic flashed, yet instantly was bland again: “You
were about to say, however, that in the artillery–?”

“The risks are the deadliest of all.”

“Ah, yes!” sang the mosquito, “and for a sister to push her
boy brother into a battery under such a commander would be too
much like murder!”

The maiden felt the same start as when Greenleaf had
ventured almost those words. “Yes,” she beamingly rejoined,
“that’s what I told the Lieutenant.”

“With a blush?”

“No,” carelessly said the slender beauty, and exchanged
happy signals with the Callenders.

“You tricksy wretch!” muttered the grandmother to herself.
For though Charlie was in the battery by his own choice, Hilary
would have kept him out had not the sister begged to have him
let in.

Suddenly there was a glad stoppage of all by-play in the
swarming streets. Down St. Charles from LaFayette Square came
the shock of saluting artillery, and up Royal from Jackson
Square rolled back antiphonal thunders.

“Grandma!” softly cried Flora, as if sharing the general
elation, but had begun again to tell of Greenleaf, when from
far over in Camp Street her subtle ear caught a faint stray
sigh of saxhorns.

“Well? well? about the Yankee–?” urged Madame.

“Oh, a trifle! He was to go that night, and thinking he
might some day return in very different fashion and we be glad
to make use of him, I–” The speaker’s lithe form straightened
and her gaze went off to the left. “Here they come!” she said,
and out where Camp Street emerges, a glint of steel, a gleam of
brass, a swarming of the people that way, and again a shimmer
of brass and steel, affirmed her word that the long, plumed,
bristling column had got back to the arms of its darling Canal
Street.

“Yes,” cried many, “they’re turning this way!”

“Well?–Well?” insisted the old lady amid the rising din.
“And so you–you?”

“Be more careful,” murmured the girl. “I told him that our
convictions–about this war–yours and mine–not
Charlie’s–are the same as his.”

A charming sight she was, even in that moment of public
enthusiasm and spectacle, holding the wondering stare of her
companion with a gayety that seemed ready to break into
laughter. The dainty Madame went limp, and in words as slow and
soft as her smile, sighed, “You are a genius!”

“No, only the last thing you would suspect–a good
housekeeper. I have put him up in sugar.”

The distant martial strains became more coherent. In remote
balconies handkerchiefs fluttered wildly, and under nearer and
nearer ones the people began to pack closer and choose their
footing along the curb. Presently from the approaching column
came who but Hilary Kincaid, galloping easily over the slippery
pavements. Anna saw his eyes sweep the bank of human flowers
(with its occasional male caterpillar) on Moody’s balcony and
light upon Flora. He lifted his képi and halted. One
could read his soft questions.

“All right? All ready? Where are the others?–Ah!” He sent
an eager salutation to the Callenders, and two joyfully bowed,
but Anna gave no sign. With great dignity her gaze was bent
beyond him on the nearing host, and when Constance plucked her
arm she tardily looked three wrong ways.

The rider could not wait. The police were pressing back the
jubilant masses, swarms of ladies on the rear forms were
standing up, and Flora, still seated, had leaned down beamingly
and was using every resource of voice and fan to send him some
word through the tumult of plaudits and drums. He spurred
close. In a favoring hush–drum-corps inviting the band–she
bent low and with an arch air of bafflement tried once more,
but an outburst of brazen harmonies tore her speech to threads.
Suddenly–

“Ever of thee I’m fondly
dreaming–“

pealed the cornets, pumped the trombones, whipping it out,
cracking it off, with a rigor of rhythm to shame all peace-time
languishments–

“Thy gentle voice my spirit
can cheer.
Thou art the star–“

What could the balconies do but wave more joyously than
ever? The streets hurrahed! The head of the procession was
here! The lone horseman reined back, wheeled, cast another vain
glance toward Anna, and with an alarming rataplan of slipping
and recovering hoofs sped down the column.

But what new rapture was this? Some glorious luck had
altered the route, and the whole business swung right into this
old rue Royale! Now, now the merry clamor and rush of the crowd
righting itself! And behold! this blazing staff and its
commanding general–general of division! He first, and then all
they, bowed to Flora and her grandmother, bowed to the
Callenders, and were bowed to in return. A mounted escort
followed. And now–yea, verily! General Brodnax and his staff
of brigade! Wave, Valcours, wave Callenders! Irby’s bow to
Flora was majestic, and hers to him as gracious as the smell of
flowers in the air. And here was Mandeville, most glittering in
all the glitter. Flora beamed on him as well, Anna bowed with a
gay fondness, Miranda’s dainty nose crimped itself, and
Constance, with a blitheness even more vivid, wished all these
balconies could know that Captain–he was Lieutenant,
but that was away back last week–Captain Etienne Aristide
Rofignac de Mandeville was hers, whom, after their
marriage, now so near at hand, she was going always to
call Steve!

XII

MANDEVILLE BLEEDS

Ah, the clanging horns again, and oh, the thundering drums!
Another uniform, on a mass of infantry, another band at its
head braying another lover’s song reduced to a military tramp,
swing, and clangor–

“I’d offer thee this hand of
mine
If I could love thee
less–“

Every soldier seemed to have become a swain. Hilary and Anna
had lately sung this wail together, but not to its end, she had
called it “so ungenuine.” How rakishly now it came ripping out.
“My fortune is too hard for thee,” it declared, “‘twould chill
thy dearest joy. I’d rather weep to see thee free,” and ended
with “destroy”; but it had the swagger of a bowling-alley.

All the old organizations, some dating back to ’12-’15, had
lately grown to amazing numbers, while many new ones had been
so perfectly uniformed, armed, accoutred and drilled six nights
a week that the ladies, in their unmilitary innocence, could
not tell the new from the old. Except in two cases: Even Anna
was aware that the “Continentals,” in tasseled top-boots, were
of earlier times, although they had changed their buff
knee-breeches and three-cornered hats for a smart uniform of
blue and gray; while these red-and-blue-flannel Zouaves,
drawing swarms of boys as dray-loads of sugar-hogsheads drew
flies, were as modern as 1861 itself. But oh, ah, one
knew so many young men! It was wave, bow, smile and bow,
smile and wave, till the whole frame was gloriously weary.

Near Anna prattled a Creole girl of sixteen with whom she
now and then enjoyed a word or so: Victorine Lafontaine,
daughter of our friend Maxime.

“Louisiana Foot-Rifles–ah! but their true name,” she
protested, “are the Chasseurs-à-Pied! ‘Twas to them my
papa billong’ biffo’ he join’ hisseff on the batt’rie of
Captain Kincaid, and there he’s now a corporeal!”

What jaunty fellows they were! and as their faultless ranks
came close, their glad, buskined feet beating as perfect music
for the roaring drums as the drums beat for them, Anna, in fond
ardor, bent low over the rail and waved, exhorting Miranda and
Constance to wave with her. So marched the chasseurs by, but
the wide applause persisted as yet other hosts, with deafening
music and perfect step and with bayonets back-slanted like the
porcupine’s, came on and on, and passed and passed, ignoring in
grand self-restraint their very loves who leaned from the
banquettes’ edges and from balustraded heights and laughed and
boasted and worshipped.

Finally artillery again! every man in it loved by some
one–or dozen–in these glad throngs. Clap! call! wave! Oh,
gallant sight! These do not enter Royal Street. They keep
Canal, obliquing to that side of the way farthest from the
balconies–

“To make room,” cries Victorine, “to form line pritty soon
off horses, in front those cannon’.”

At the head rides Kincaid. Then, each in his place,
lieutenants, sergeants, drivers, the six-horse teams leaning on
the firm traces, the big wheels clucking, the long Napoleons
shining like gold, and the cannoneers–oh, God bless the
lads!–planted on limbers and caissons, with arms tight folded
and backs as plumb as the meridian. Now three of the pieces,
half the battery, have gone by and–

“Well, well, if there isn’t Sam Gibbs, sergeant of a gun! It
is, I tell you, it is! Sam Gibbs, made over new, as sure as a
certain monosyllable! and what could be surer, for Sam
Gibbs?”

So laugh the sidewalks; but society, overhead, cares not for
a made-over Gibbs while round about him are sixty or seventy
young heroes who need no making over. Anna, Anna! what a brave
and happy half-and-half of Creoles and “Americans” do your
moist eyes beam down upon: here a Canonge and there an Ogden–a
Zacherie–a Fontennette–Willie Geddes–Tom Norton–a Fusilier!
Nat Frellsen–a Tramontana–a Grandissime!–and a Grandissime
again! Percy Chilton–a Dudley–Arthur Puig y Puig–a De
Armas–MacKnight–Violett–Avendano–Rob Rareshide–Guy
Palfrey–a Morse, a Bien, a Fuentes–a Grandissme once more!
Aleck Moise–Ralph Fenner–Ned Ferry!–and lo! a Raoul
Innerarity, image of his grandfather’s portrait–and a Jules
St. Ange! a Converse–Jack Eustis–two Frowenfelds! a Mossy! a
Hennen–Bartie Sloo–McVey, McStea, a De Lavillebuevre–a
Thorndyke-Smith and a Grandissime again!

And ah! see yonder young cannoneer half-way between these
two balconies and the statue beyond; that foppish boy with his
hair in a hundred curls and his eyes wild with wayward ardor!
“Ah, Charlie Valcour!” thinks Anna; “oh, your poor sister!”
while the eyes of Victorine take him in secretly and her voice
is still for a whole minute. Hark! From the head of the column
is wafted back a bugle-note, and everything stands.

Now the trim lads relax, the balcony dames in the rear rows
sit down, there are nods and becks and wafted whispers to a
Calder and an Avery, to tall Numa, Dolhonde and short Eugene
Chopin, to George Wood and Dick Penn and Fenner and Bouligny
and Pilcher and L’Hommedieu; and Charlie sends up bows and
smiles, and wipes the beautiful brow he so openly and wilfully
loves best on earth. Anna smiles back, but Constance bids her
look at Maxime, Victorine’s father, whom neither his long white
moustaches nor weight of years nor the lawless past revealed in
his daring eyes can rob of his youth. So Anna looks, and when
she turns again to Charlie she finds him sending a glance rife
with conquest–not his first–up to Victorine, who, without
meeting it, replies–as she has done to each one before
it–with a dreamy smile into vacancy, and a faint narrowing of
her almond eyes.

Captain Kincaid comes ambling back, and right here in the
throat of Royal Street faces the command. The matter is
explained to Madame Valcour by a stranger:

“Now at the captain’s word all the cannoneers will spring
down, leaving only guns, teams and drivers at their back, and
line up facing us. The captain will dismount and ascend to the
balcony, and there he and the young lady, whoever she is–” He
waits, hoping Madame will say who the young lady is, but Madame
only smiles for him to proceed–“The captain and she will
confront each other, she will present the colors, he, replying,
will receive them, and–ah, after all!” The thing had been done
without their seeing it, and there stood the whole magnificent
double line. Captain Kincaid dismounted and had just turned
from his horse when there galloped up Royal Street from the
vanished procession–Mandeville. Slipping and clattering, he
reined up and saluted: “How soon can Kincaid’s Battery be
completely ready to go into camp?”

“Now, if necessary.”

“It will receive orders to move at seven to-morrow morning!”
The Creole’s fervor amuses the rabble, and when Hilary smiles
his earnestness waxes to a frown. Kincaid replies lightly and
the rider bends the rein to wheel away, but the slippery stones
have their victim at last. The horse’s feet spread and
scrabble, his haunches go low. Constance snatches both Anna’s
hands. Ah! by good luck the beast is up again! Yet again the
hoofs slip, the rider reels, and Charlie and a comrade dart out
to catch him, but he recovers. Then the horse makes another
plunge and goes clear down with a slam and a slide that hurl
his master to the very sidewalk and make a hundred pale women
cry out.

Constance and her two companions bend wildly from the
balustrade, a sight for a painter. Across the way Flora,
holding back her grandmother, silently leans out, another
picture. In the ranks near Charlie a disarray continues even
after Kincaid has got the battered Mandeville again into the
saddle, and while Mandeville is rejecting sympathy with a
begrimed yet haughty smile.

“Keep back, ladies!” pleads Madame’s late informant, holding
off two or three bodily. “Ladies, sit down! Will you please to
keep back!” Flora still leans out. Some one is melodiously
calling:

“Captain Kincaid!” It is Mrs. Callender. “Captain!” she
repeats.

He smiles up and at last meets Anna’s eyes. Flora sees their
glances–angels ascending and descending–and a wee loop of
ribbon that peeps from his tightly buttoned breast. Otherwise
another sight, elsewhere, could not have escaped her, though it
still escapes many.

“Poor boy!” it causes two women behind her to exclaim, “poor
boy!” but Flora pays no heed, for Hilary is speaking to the
Callenders.

“Nothing broken but his watch,” he gayly comforts them as to
Mandeville.

“He’s bleeding!” moans Constance, very white. But Kincaid
softly explains in his hollowed hands:

“Only his nose!”

The nose’s owner casts no upward look. Not his to accept
pity, even from a fiancée. His handkerchief dampened “to
wibe the faze,” two bits of wet paper “to plug the
noztril’,”–he could allow no more!

“First blood of the war!” said Hilary.

“Yez! But”–the flashing warrior tapped his sword–“nod the
last!” and was off at a gallop, while Kincaid turned hurriedly
to find that Charlie, struck by the floundering horse, had
twice fainted away.

In the balconies the press grew dangerous. An urchin
intercepted Kincaid to show him the Callenders, who, with
distressed eyes, pointed him to their carriage hurrying across
Canal Street.

“For Charlie and Flora!” called Anna. They could not stir
“themselves” for the crush; but yonder, on Moody’s side, the
same kind citizen noticed before had taken matters in hand:

“Keep back, ladies! Make room! Let these two ladies out!” He
squeezed through the pack, holding aloft the furled colors,
which all this time had been lying at Flora’s feet. Her anxious
eyes were on them at every second step as she pressed after him
with the grandmother dangling from her elbow.

The open carriage spun round the battery’s right and up its
front to where a knot of comrades hid the prostrate Charlie;
the surgeon, Kincaid, and Flora crouching at his side, the
citizen from the balcony still protecting grandmamma, and the
gilded eagle of the unpresented standard hovering over all.
With tender ease Hilary lifted the sufferer and laid him on the
carriage’s front seat, the surgeon passed Madame in and sat
next to her, but to Kincaid Flora exclaimed with a glow of
heroic distress:

“Let me go later–with Anna!” Her eyes overflowed–she bit
her lip–“I must present the flag!”

A note of applause started, a protest hushed it, and the
overbending Callenders and the distracted Victorine heard
Hilary admiringly say:

“Come! Go! You belong with your brother!”

He pressed her in. For an instant she stood while the
carriage turned, a hand outstretched toward the standard,
saying to Hilary something that was drowned by huzzas; then
despairingly she sank into her seat and was gone down Royal
Street.

“Attention!” called a lieutenant, and the ranks were in
order. To the holder of the flag Hilary pointed out Anna,
lingered for a word with his subaltern, and then followed the
standard to the Callenders’ balcony.

XIII

THINGS ANNA COULD NOT WRITE

“I cannot write. My thoughts jostle one another out of all
shape, like the women in that last crush after the
flag-presentation. I begged not to have to take Flora’s place
from her. It was like snatching jewels off her. I felt like a
robber! But in truth until I had the flag actually in my hand I
thought we were only being asked to take care of it for a later
day. The storm had begun to threaten. Some one was trying to
say to me–‘off to camp and then to the front,’ and–‘must have
the flag now,’ and still I said, ‘No, oh, no!’ But before I
could get any one to add a syllable there was the Captain
himself with the three men of the color guard behind him, the
middle one Victorine’s father. I don’t know how I began, but
only that I went on and on in some wild way till I heard the
applause all about and beneath me, and he took the colors from
me, and the first gust of the storm puffed them half
open–gorgeously–and the battery hurrahed. And then came his
part. He–I cannot write it.”

Why not, the diary never explained, but what occurred was
this:

“Ladies and gentlemen and comrades in arms!” began Hilary
and threw a superb look all round, but the instant he brought
it back to Anna, it quailed, and he caught his breath. Then he
nerved up again. To help his courage and her own she forced
herself to gaze straight into his eyes, but reading the
affright in hers he stood dumb and turned red.

He began again: “Ladies and gentlemen and comrades in arms!”
and pulled his moustache, and smote and rubbed his brow, and
suddenly drove his hand into an inside pocket and snatched out
a slip of paper. But what should come trailing out with it but
a long loop of ribbon! As he pushed it back he dropped the
paper, which another whiff of wind flirted straight over his
head, sent it circling and soaring clear above Moody’s store
and dropped it down upon the roof. And there gazed Anna and all
that multitude, utterly blank, until the martyr himself burst
into a laugh. Then a thousand laughs pealed as one, and he
stood smiling and stroking back his hair, till his men began to
cry, “song! song!”

Upon that he raised the flag high in one hand, let it
balloon to the wind, made a sign of refusal, and all at once
poured out a flood of speech–pledges to Anna and her
fellow-needlewomen–charges to his men–hopes for the cherished
cause–words so natural and unadorned, so practical and
soldier-like, and yet so swift, that not a breath was drawn
till he had ended. But then what a shout!

It was over in a moment. The great black cloud that had been
swelling up from the south gave its first flash and crash, and
everybody started pell-mell for home. The speaker stood just
long enough for a last bow to Anna while the guard went before
him with the colors. Then he hurried below and had the whole
battery trotting down Canal Street and rounding back on its
farther side, with the beautiful standard fluttering to the
storm, before the Callenders could leave the balcony.

Canal Street that evening was a veritable fairyland. When,
growing tired of their carriage, the Callenders and Mandeville
walked, and Kincaid unexpectedly joined them, fairyland was the
only name he could find for it, and Anna, in response, could
find none at all. Mallard’s, Zimmerman’s, Clark’s, Levois’s,
Laroussini’s, Moody’s, Hyde & Goodrich’s, and even old
Piffet’s were all aglow. One cannot recount half. Every hotel,
every club-house, all the theatres, all the consul’s offices in
Royal and Carondelet streets, the banks everywhere, Odd
Fellows’ Hall–with the Continentals giving their annual ball
in it–and so forth and so on! How the heart was exalted!

But when the heart is that way it is easy to say things
prematurely, and right there in Canal Street Hilary spoke of
love. Not personally, only at large; although when Anna
restively said no woman should ever give her heart where she
could not give a boundless and unshakable trust, his eyes
showed a noble misery while he exclaimed:

“Oh, but there are women of whom no man can ever deserve
that!” There his manner was all at once so personal that she
dared not be silent, but fell to generalizing, with many a
stammer, that a woman ought to be very slow to give her trust
if, once giving it, she would not rather die than doubt.

“Do you believe there are such women?” he asked.

“I know there are,” she said, her eyes lifted to his, but
the next instant was so panic-smitten and shamed that she ran
into a lamp post. And when he called that his fault her denial
was affirmative in its feebleness, and with the others she
presently resumed the carriage and said good-night.

“Flippantly!” thought the one left alone on the crowded
sidewalk.

Yet–“It is I who am going to have the hardest of it,” said
the diary a short hour after. “I’ve always thought that when
the right one came I’d never give in the faintest bit till I
had put him to every test and task and delay I could invent.
And now I can’t invent one! His face quenches doubt, and
if he keeps on this way–Ah, Flora! is he anything to
you? Every time he speaks my heart sees you. I see you now! And
somehow–since Charlie’s mishap–more yours than his if–“

For a full minute the pen hovered over the waiting page,
then gradually left it and sank to rest on its silver rack.

XIV

FLORA TAPS GRANDMA’S CHEEK

Kincaid, once more on horseback with General Brodnax, saw
them emerge beside his cousin’s hired carriage, and would have
hurried to them, if only to inquire after the injured boy; but
the General gave what he was saying a detaining energy. It was
of erecting certain defences behind Mobile; of the scarcity of
military engineers; and of his having, to higher authority,
named Hilary for the task. The Captain could easily leave the
battery in camp for a day or two, take the Mobile boat–He
ceased an instant and scowled, as Hilary bowed across the
way.

There was a tender raillery in the beam with which Flora
held the young man’s eye a second, and as she turned away there
was accusation in the faint toss and flicker of the deep lace
that curtained her hat. Both her companions saw it, but Irby
she filled with an instant inebriation by one look, the kindest
she had ever given him.

“Both barrels!” said the old lady to herself.

As Irby reached the carriage door Flora’s touch arrested
him. It was as light as a leaf, but it thrilled him like
wine–whose thrill he well knew.

“I’ve lost one of my gloves,” she said.

He looked about her feet.

“You mus’ have drop’ it on the stair,” said grandmamma,
discerning the stratagem, and glad to aid it.

Problem in tactics: To hunt the glove all the way up to the
balcony and return before Hilary, if he was coming, could reach
Flora’s side. Irby set his teeth–he loathed problems–and
sprang up the steps.

“No use,” chanted Madame with enjoyment; “the other one is
not coming.”

But Flora remained benign while the old lady drew a little
mocking sigh. “Ah,” said the latter, “if the General would only
stop changing his mind about his two nephews, what a lot of
hard work that would save you!”

“It isn’t hard!” cried Flora; so radiantly that passing
strangers brightened back, “I love it!”

“It!” mocked the grandmother as the girl passed her into the
carriage. “It!”

“You poor tired old thing!” sighed the compassionate beauty.
“Never mind, dear; how the General may choose no longer gives
me any anxiety.”

“Oh, you lie!”

“No,” softly laughed the girl, “not exactly. Don’t collapse,
love, you’ll get your share of the loot yet. My choice shall
fit the General’s as this glove (drawing on the one Irby was
still away in search of) fits this hand.”

Madame smiled her contempt: “Nevertheless you will risk all
just to show Anna–“

Flora made a gesture of delight but harkened on–

“That she cannot have her Captain till–“

“Till I’m sure I don’t want him!” sang the girl.

“Which will never be!” came the quiet response.

The maiden flushed: “On the contrary, my dear, I was just
going to say, you will please begin at once to be more
civil to our Captain–Irby.”

Madame gazed: “My God!”

“Ho!” said Flora, “I’d rather somebody else’s.” She cheerily
smoothed the bonnet-bows under the old lady’s chin: “Now,
chère, you know the assets are all you care
for–even if with them you have to take a nincompoop for a
grandson.”

She was laughing merrily when Irby reappeared in the crowd,
motioning that he had found nothing. Her gloved hands raised in
fond apology, and Hilary’s absence, appeased him, and he
entered the vehicle.

So to Jackson Square, where it was good-by to Irby and the
carriage, and Age and Beauty climbed their staircase together.
“To-morrow’s Saturday,” gayly sighed the girl. “I’ve a good
mind to lie abed till noon, counting up the week’s
successes.”

“Especially to-day’s,” smirked weary Age.

“Ho-o-oh!” laughed the maiden, “you and to-day be–” The
rest was whispered close, with a one-fingered tap on the
painted cheek. In the gloom of the upper landing she paused to
murmur, “hear this: Two things I have achieved this week worth
all to-day’s bad luck ten times over–you don’t believe
me?”

“No, you pretty creature; you would have told me sooner, if
only for vanity.”

“I swear to you it is true!” whispered the lithe boaster,
with a gleeful quiver from head to foot. “Listen!
First–purely, of course, for love of Anna–I have conspired
with the General to marry her to Kincaid. And, second, also
purely for love of her, I have conspired with Irby to keep her
and Kincaid forever and a day apart!”

She tapped both the aged cheeks at once: “I hate to share
anything so delicious with you, but I must, because–“

“Ah-h! because, as usual–“

“Yes! Yes, you sweet old pelican! Because you are to turn
the crank! But it’s all for love of Anna. Ah, there’s no
inspiration like exasperation!”

“Except destitution!” said the grandmother.

They came before Charlie with arms about each other and
openly enjoyed his only comment–a scornful rounding of his
eyes.

In the Callender house, as the stair clock sounded the
smallest hour of the night, Miranda, seeing the chink under
Anna’s door to be still luminous, stole to the spot, gently
rapped, and winning no response warily let herself in.

From the diary on her desk Anna lifted her cheek, looked up,
reclosed her lids, smiled and reopened them. Miranda took the
blushing face between her palms, and with quizzing eyes–and
nose–inquired:

“Is there any reason under heaven why Anna Callender
shouldn’t go to bed and have glad dreams?”

“None that I know of,” said Anna.

XV

THE LONG MONTH OF MARCH

So sang Captain Hilary Kincaid at the Mandeville-Callender
wedding feast, where his uncle Brodnax, with nearly everyone we
know, was present. Hilary had just been second groomsman, with
Flora for his “file leader,” as he said, meaning second
bridesmaid. He sat next her at table, with Anna farthest
away.

Hardly fortunate was some one who, conversing with the new
Miss Callender, said the charm of Kincaid’s singing was that
the song came from “the entire man.” She replied that just now
it really seemed so! In a sense both comments were true, and
yet never in the singer’s life had so much of “the entire man”
refused to sing. All that night of the illumination he had not
closed his eyes, except in anguish for having tried to make
love on the same day when–and to the same Anna Callender
before whom–he had drawn upon himself the roaring laugh of the
crowded street; or in a sort of remorse for letting himself
become the rival of a banished friend who, though warned that a
whole platoon of him would make no difference, suddenly seemed
to plead a prohibitory difference to one’s inmost sense of
honor.

At dawn he had risen resolved to make good his boast and
“fight like a whale.” Under orders of his own seeking he had
left the battery the moment its tents were up and had taken
boat for Mobile. Whence he had returned only just in time to
stand beside Flora Valcour, preceded by a relative of the
bridegroom paired with Anna.

Yet here at the feast none was merrier than Kincaid, who,
charmingly egged on by Flora, kept those about him in gales of
mirth, and even let himself be “cajoled” (to use his own term)
into singing this song whose title had become his nickname.
Through it all Anna smiled and laughed with the rest and
clapped for each begged-for stanza. Yet all the time she said
in her heart, “He is singing it at me!”

De squir’l he love’ de
hick’ry tree,
De clover love’ de
bummle-bee,
De flies, dey loves mullasses,
an’–
De ladies loves de ladies’
man.
I loves to be de beau o’ de
ladies!
I loves to shake a toe wid de
ladies!
Whilse eveh I’m alive, on wateh
aw Ian’,
I’s bound to be a ladies’
man.

The General, seeing no reason why Hilary should not pay Anna
at least the attentions he very properly paid his “file
leader,” endured the song with a smile, but took revenge when
he toasted the bride:

“In your prayers to-night, my dear Constance, just thank God
your husband is, at any rate, without the sense of humor–Stop,
my friends! Let me finish!”

A storm of laughter was falling upon Mandeville, but the
stubborn General succeeded after all in diverting it to Hilary,
to whom in solemn mirth he pointed as–“that flirtatious
devotee of giddiness, without a fault big enough to make him
interesting!” [“Hoh!”–“Hoh!”–from men and maidens who could
easily have named huge ones.] Silent Anna knew at least two or
three; was it not a fault a hundred times too grave to be
uninteresting, for a big artillerist to take a little
frightened lassie as cruelly at her word as he was doing right
here and now?

Interesting to her it was that his levity still remained
unsubmerged, failing him only in a final instant: Their hands
had clasped in leave-taking and her eyes were lifted to his,
when some plea with which “the entire man” seemed overcharged
to the very lips was suddenly, subtly, and not this time by
disconcertion, but by self-mastery, withheld. Irby put in a
stiff good-by, and as he withdrew, Hilary echoed only the same
threadbare word more brightly, and was gone; saying to himself
as he looked back from the garden’s outmost bound:

“She’s cold; that’s what’s the matter with Anna; cold
and cruel!”

Tedious was the month of March. Mandeville devise’ himself a
splandid joke on that, to the effect that soon enough there
would be months of tedieuse marches–ha, ha, ha!–and
contribute’ it to the news-pape’. Yet the tedium persisted.
Always something about to occur, nothing ever occurring.
Another vast parade, it is true, some two days after the
marriage, to welcome from Texas that aged general (friend of
the Callenders) who after long suspense to both sides had at
last joined the South, and was to take command at New Orleans.
Also, consequent upon the bursting of a gun that day in
Kincaid’s Battery, the funeral procession of poor, handsome,
devil-may-care Felix de Gruy; saxhorns moaning and wailing,
drums muttering from their muffled heads, Anna’s ensign furled
in black, captain and lieutenants on foot, brows inclined,
sabres reversed, and the “Stars and Bars,” new flag of the
Confederacy, draping the slow caisson that bore him past the
Callenders’ gates in majesty so strange for the gay boy.

Such happenings, of course; but nothing that ever brought
those things for which one, wakening in the night, lay and
prayed while forced by the songster’s rapture to “listen to the
mocking-bird.”

While the Judge lived the Callenders had been used to the
company of men by the weight of whose energies and counsel the
clock of public affairs ran and kept time; senators, bishops,
bank presidents, great lawyers, leading physicians; a Dr.
Sevier, for one. Some of these still enjoyed their hospitality,
and of late in the old house life had recovered much of its
high charm and breadth of outlook. Yet March was tedious.

For in March nearly all notables felt bound to be up at
Montgomery helping to rock the Confederacy’s cradle. Whence
came back sad stories of the incapacity, negligence, and
bickerings of misplaced men. It was “almost as bad as at
Washington.” Friends still in the city were tremendously busy;
yet real business–Commerce–with scarce a moan of complaint,
lay heaving out her dying breath. Busy at everything but
business, these friends, with others daily arriving in command
of rustic volunteers, kept society tremendously gay, by
gas-light; and courage and fortitude and love of country and
trust in God and scorn of the foe went clad in rainbow colors;
but at the height of all manner of revels some pessimist was
sure to explain to Anna why the war must be long, of awful
cost, and with a just fighting chance to win.

“Then why do we not turn about right here?”

“Too late now.”

Such reply gave an inward start, it seemed so fitted to her
own irrevealable case. But it was made to many besides her, and
women came home from dinings or from operas and balls for the
aid of this or that new distress of military need, and went up
into the dark and knelt in all their jewels and wept long. In
March the poor, everywhere, began to be out of work, and
recruiting to be lively among them too, because for thousands
of them it was soldier’s pay or no bread. Among the troops from
the country death had begun to reap great harvests ere a gun
was fired, and in all the camps lovers nightly sang their
lugubrious “Lorena,” feeling that “a hundred months had passed”
before they had really dragged through one. March was so
tedious, and lovers are such poor arithmeticians. Wherever
Hilary Kincaid went, showing these how to cast cannon (that
would not burst), those where to build fortifications, and some
how to make unsickly camps, that song was begged of him in the
last hour before sleep; last song but one, the very last being
always–that least liked by Anna.

Tedious to Kincaid’s Battery were his absences on so many
errands. Behind a big earthwork of their own construction down
on the river’s edge of the old battle ground, close beyond the
Callenders’, they lay camped in pretty white tents that seemed
to Anna, at her window, no bigger than visiting-cards. Rarely
did she look that way but the fellows were drilling, their
brass pieces and their officers’ drawn sabres glinting back the
sun, horses and men as furiously diligent as big and little
ants, and sometimes, of an afternoon, their red and yellow silk
and satin standard unfurled–theirs and hers. Of evenings small
bunches of the boys would call to chat and be sung to; to
threaten to desert if not soon sent to the front; and to blame
all delays on colonels and brigadiers “known” by them to be
officially jealous of–They gave only the tedious nickname.

“Why belittle him with that?” queried Miranda, winning
Anna’s silent gratitude.

“It doesn’t belittle him,” cried Charlie. “That’s the
joke. It makes him loom larger!”

Others had other explanations: Their guns were “ladies’
guns!” Were the guns the foremost cause? Some qualified:
“Foremost, yes; fundamental, no.” Rather the fact that never
was a woman cited in male gossip but instantly he was her
champion; or that no woman ever brought a grievance to any camp
where he might be but she wanted to appeal it to him.

Anna “thought the name was all from the song.”

“Oh, fully as much from his hundred and one other songs! Had
he never sung to her–

“‘I’d offer thee this hand of
mine–‘?”

Frankly, it was agreed, he did most laughably love ladies’
company; that he could always find it, as a horse can find
water; that although no evening in their society could be so
gay or so long that he would not be certain to work harder next
day than any one else, no day could be so cruelly toilsome that
he could not spend half the next night dancing with the girls;
and lastly, that with perfect evenness and a boyish modesty he
treated them all alike.

Anna laughed with the rest, but remembered three separate
balls to which, though counted on, he had not come, she
uninformed that military exigencies had at the last moment
curtly waved him off, and he unaware that these exigencies had
been created by Irby under inspiration from the daintiest and
least self-assertive tactician in or about New Orleans.

XVI

CONSTANCE TRIES TO HELP

Dropping to trifles they mentioned a knife, a rather
glittering gewgaw, which, as evidence, ought–

“Oh, that one!” said Hilary. “Yes, I have it, mud, glass
jewels and all. No,” he laughed, “I can keep it quite as safely
as you can.”

So they passed to a larger matter. “For, really, as to Gibbs
and Lafontaine–“

“You can’t have them either,” interrupted their Captain,
setting the words to a tune. Then only less melodiously–“No,
sir-ee! Why, gentlemen, they weren’t trying to kill the poor
devil, he was trying to kill them, tell your Committee of
Public Safety. And tell them times are changed. You can
take Sam and Maxime, of course, if you can take
the whole battery; we’re not doing a retail business. By the
by–did you know?–’twas Sam’s gun broke the city’s record,
last week, for rapid firing! Funny, isn’t it!–Excuse me, I
must speak to those ladies.”

The ladies, never prettier, were Mrs. Callender and
Constance. They were just reentering, from a shop, their open
carriage. In amiable reproach they called him a stranger, yet
with bewitching resignation accepted and helped out his lame
explanations.

“You look–” began Constance–but “careworn” was a risky
term and she stopped. He suggested “weather-beaten,” and the
ladies laughed.

“Yes,” they said, “even they were overtasked with patriotic
activities, and Anna had almost made herself ill. Nevertheless
if he would call he should see her too. Oh, no, not to-day; no,
not to-morrow; but–well– the day after.” (Miss Valcour passed
so close as to hear the appointment, but her greeting smile
failed to draw their attention.) “And oh, then you must tell us
all about that fearful adventure in which you saved Lieutenant
Greenleaf’s life! Ah, we’ve heard, just heard, in a
letter.” The horses danced with impatience. “We shall
expect you!”

As they drove into Royal Street with Constance rapturously
pressing Miranda’s hand the latter tried vainly to exchange
bows with a third beauty and a second captain, but these were
busy meeting each other in bright surprise and espied the
carriage only when it had passed.

Might the two not walk together a step or so? With pleasure.
They were Flora and Irby. Presently–

“Do you know,” she asked, “where your cousin proposes to be
day after to-morrow evening–in case you should want to
communicate with him?”

He did not. She told him.

XVII

“OH, CONNIE, DEAR–NOTHING–GO ON”

Out in the mellow night a bird sang from the tip-top of a
late-blooming orange tree, and inside, away inside, inside and
through and through the poor girl’s heart, the “years”–which
really were nothing but the mantel clock’s
quarter-hours–“crept slowly by.”

At length she laid her book aside, softly kissed each seated
companion, and ascended to her room and window. There she stood
long without sound or motion, her eyes beyond the stars, her
head pressed wearily against the window frame. Then the lids
closed while her lips formed soft words:

“Oh, God, he is not coming!” Stillness again. And then–“Oh,
let me believe yet that only Thy hand keeps him away! Is it to
save him for some one fairer and better? God, I ask but to
know! I’m a rebel, but not against Thee, dear Lord. I know it’s
a sin for me to suffer this way; Thou dost not owe me
happiness; I owe it Thee. Oh, God, am I clamoring for my week’s
wages before I’ve earned an hour’s pay? Yet oh! yet oh!”–the
head rocked heavily on its support–“if only–if only–“

She started–listened! A gate opened–shut. She sprang to
her glass and then from it. In soft haste she needlessly closed
the window and drew its shade and curtains. She bathed her
eyelids and delicately dried them. At the mirror again she laid
deft touches on brow and crown, harkening between for any
messenger’s step, and presently, without reason, began to set
the room more exquisitely to rights. Now she faced the door and
stood attentive, and now she took up a small volume and sat
down by her lamp.

A tap: Constance entered, beaming only too tenderly. “It was
better, wasn’t it,” she asked, hovering, “to come than to
send?”

“Why, of course, dear; it always is.”

A meditative silence followed. Then Anna languidly inquired,
“Who is it?”

“Nobody but Charlie.”

The inquirer brightened: “And why isn’t Charlie as good as
any one?”

“He is, to-night,” replied the elder beauty, “except–the
one exception.”

“Oh, Connie”–a slight flush came as the seated girl
smilingly drew her sister’s hands down to her bosom–“there
isn’t any one exception, and there’s not going to be any. Now,
that smile is downright mean of you!”

The offender atoned with a kiss on the brow.

“Why do you say,” asked its recipient, “‘as good as any one,
to-night‘?”

“Because,” was the soft reply, “to-night he comes from–the
other–to explain why the other couldn’t come.”

“Why!”–the flush came back stronger–“why, Connie! why,
that’s positively silly–ha, ha, ha!”

“I don’t see how, Nan.”

“My dear Con! Isn’t his absence equally and perfectly
innocent whether he couldn’t come or wouldn’t come? But an
explanation sent!–by courier!–to–to shorten–ah, ha, ha!–to
shorten our agony! Why, Con, wouldn’t you have thought better
of him than that? H-oh, me! What a man’s ‘bound to be’ I
suppose he’s bound to be. What is the precious
explanation?”

With melting eyes Constance shook her head. “You don’t
deserve to hear it,” she replied. Her tears came: “My little
sister, I’m on the man’s side in this affair!”

“That’s not good of you,” murmured Anna.

“I don’t claim to be good. But there’s one thing, Nan
Callender, I never did; I never chained up my lover to see if
he’d stay chained. When Steve–“

“Oh-h! Oh-h!” panted Anna, “you’re too cruel! Hilary Kincaid
wears no chain of mine!”

“Oh, yes, he does! He’s broken away, but he’s broken away,
chain and all, to starve and perish, as one look into his face
would show you!”

“He doesn’t show his face. He sends–“

“An explanation. Yes. Which first you scorn and then consent
to hear.”

“Don’t scorn me, Connie. What’s the explanation?”

“It’s this: he’s been sent back to those Mobile
fortifications–received the order barely in time to catch the
boat by going instantly. Nan, the Valcours’ house is found to
stand right on their proposed line, and he’s gone to decide
whether the line may be changed or the house must be
demolished.”

Anna rose, twined an arm in her sister’s and with her paced
the chamber. “How perfectly terrible!” she murmured, their
steps ceasing and her eyes remote in meditation. “Poor Flora!
Oh, the poor old lady! And oh, oh, poor Flora!–But, Con! The
line will be changed! He–you know what the boys call him!”

“Yes, but there’s the trouble. He’s no one lady’s man. Like
Steve, he’s so absolutely fair–“

“Connie, I tell you it’s a strange line he won’t change for
Flora Valcour!”

“Now, Nan Callender! The line will go where it ought to go.
By the by, Charlie says neither Flora nor her grandmother knows
the house is in danger. Of course, if it is harmed, the harm
will be paid for.”

“Oh, paid for!”

“Why, Nan, I’m as sorry for them as you. But I don’t
forget to be sorry for Hilary Kincaid too.”

“Connie”–walk resumed, speaker’s eyes on the floor–“if
you’d only see that to me he’s merely very
interesting–entertaining–nothing more whatever–I’d like to
say just a word about him.”

“Say on, precious.”

“Well–did you ever see a man so fond of men?”

“Oh, of course he is, or men wouldn’t be so fond of
him.”

“I think he’s fonder of men than of women!”

Constance smiled: “Do you?”

“And I think,” persisted Anna, “the reason some women find
him so agreeable is that our collective society is all he asks
of us, or ever will ask.”

“Nan Callender, look me in the eye! You can’t! My little
sister, you’ve got a lot more sense than I have, and you know
it, but I can tell you one thing. When Steve and I–“

“Oh, Connie, dear–nothing–go on.”

“I won’t! Except to say some lovers take love easy and
some–can’t. I must go back to Charlie. I know, Nan, it’s those
who love hardest that take love hardest, and I suppose it’s
born in Hilary Kincaid, and it’s born in you, to fight it as
you’d fight fire. But, oh, in these strange times, don’t do it!
Don’t do it. You’re going to have trouble a-plenty
without.”

The pair, moving to the door with hands on each other’s
shoulders, exchanged a melting gaze. “Trouble a-plenty,” softly
asked Anna, “why do you–?”

“Oh, why, why, why!” cried the other, with a sudden gleam of
tears. “I wish you and Miranda had never learned that
word.”

XVIII

FLORA TELLS THE TRUTH!

Well, neither of them had ever morally fallen enough
even to fret the brow. It is the fall that disfigures. They had
lived up to inherited principles (such as they were), and one
of the minor of these was, to adapt their contours to whatever
they impinged upon.

We covet solidity of character, but Flora and Madame were
essentially fluid. They never let themselves clash with any
one, and their private rufflings of each other had only a happy
effect of aerating their depths, and left them as mirror-smooth
and thoroughly one as the bosom of a garden lake after the
ripples have died behind two jostling swans. To the Callenders
society was a delightful and sufficient end. To the Valcours it
was a means to all kinds of ends, as truly as commerce or the
industries, and yet they were so fragrantly likable that to
call them accomplices seems outrageous–clogs the pen. Yes,
they were actors, but you never saw that. They never stepped
out of their parts, and they had this virtue, if it is one:
that behind all their rôles they were staunchly for each
other in every pinch. When Kincaid had been away a few days
this second time, these two called at the Callender house.

To none was this house more interesting than to Flora. In
her adroit mind she accused it of harboring ancient secrets in
its architecture, shrewd hiding-places in its walls. Now as she
stood in the panelled drawing-rooms awaiting its inmates, she
pointed out to her seated companion that this was what her
long-dead grandsire might have made their own home, behind
Mobile, had he spent half on its walls what he had spent in
them on wine, cards, and–

“Ah!” chanted the old lady, with a fierce glint and a
mock-persuasive smile, “add the crowning word, the capsheaf.
You have the stamina to do it.”

“Women,” said the girl of stamina beamingly, and went
floating about, peering and tapping for hollow places. At one
tap her eye, all to itself, danced; but on the instant Anna,
uninformed of their presence, and entering with a vase of fresh
roses, stood elated. Praise of the flowers hid all confusion,
and Flora, with laughing caresses and a droll hardihood which
Anna always enjoyed, declared she would gladly steal roses,
garden, house and all. Anna withdrew, promising instant
return.

“Flora dear!” queried the grandmother in French, “why did
you tell her the truth? For once you must have been
disconcerted!”

The sparkling girl laughed: “Why, isn’t that–with due
modifications–just what we’re here for?”

Madame suddenly looked older, but quickly brightened again
as Flora spoke on: “Don’t you believe the truth is, now and
then, the most effective lie? I’ve sometimes inferred you
did.”

The old lady rather enjoyed the gibe: “My dear, I can trust
you never to give any one an overdose of it. Yet take care, you
gave it a bit too pure just now. Don’t ever risk it so on that
fool Constance, she has the intuitive insight of a small
child–the kind you lost so early.”

The two exchanged a brief admiring glance. “Oh, I’m all
right with Constance,” was the reply. “I’m cousin to
‘Steve’!”

There the girl’s gayety waned. The pair were at this moment
in desperate need of money. Mandeville was one of the old
coffee-planter’s descendants. Had fate been less vile, thought
Flora, this house might have been his, and so hers in the happy
event of his demise. But now, in such case, to Constance, as
his widow, would be left even the leavings, the overseer’s
cottage; which was one more convenient reason for
detesting–not him, nor Constance–that would be to waste good
ammunition; but–

“Still thinking of dear Anna?” asked the dame.

The maiden nodded: “Grandma”–a meditative pause–“I love
Anna. Anna’s the only being on earth I can perfectly
trust.”

“Ahem!” was the soft rejoinder, and the two smilingly held
each other’s gaze for the larger part of a minute. Then one by
one came in the ladies of the house, and it was kiss and
chirrup and kiss again.

“Cousin Constance–ah, ha, ha!–cousin
Flora!”

The five talked of the wedding. Just to think! ‘Twas barely
a month ago, they said.

Yet how much had occurred, pursued Miranda, and how many
things hoped and longed for had not occurred, and how time had
dragged! At those words Flora saw Anna’s glance steal over to
Miranda. But Miranda did not observe, and the five chatted on.
How terrifying, at still noon of the last Sabbath–everybody in
church–had been that explosion of the powder-mill across the
river. The whole business blown to dust. Nothing but the bare
ground left. Happily no workmen there. No, not even a watchman,
though the city was well known to be full of the enemy’s
“minions” (Flora’s term). Amazing negligence, all agreed. Yet
only of a piece–said Constance–etc.

And how sad to find there was a victim, after all, when
poor, threadbare old Doctor Visionary, inventor of the
machine-gun and a new kind of powder, began to be missed by his
landlady, there being, in Captain Kincaid’s absence, no one
else to miss him. Yes, it was the Captain who had got him a
corner to work in at the powder-mill. So much the worse for
both. Now plans, models, formulae, and inventor were gone in
that one flash and roar that shook the whole city and stopped
all talk of Captain Kincaid’s promotion as an earthquake stops
a clock.

“Well,” cried Constance to Flora, who had grown silent, “the
battery will love him all the more!”

“And so will we all!” said Madame, also to Flora; and Flora,
throwing off a look of pain, explained to Anna, “He is so good
to my brother!”

“Naturally,” quizzed Miranda, with her merriest wrinkles.
Flora sparkled, made a pretty face at her and forced a change
of theme; gave Anna’s roses new praise, and said she had been
telling grandma of the swarms of them in the rear garden. So
the old lady, whom she had told no such thing, let Constance
and Miranda conduct her there. But Flora softly detained Anna,
and the moment they were alone seized both her hands. Whereat
through all Anna’s frame ran despair, crying, “He has asked
her! He has asked her!”

XIX

FLORA ROMANCES

Anna drew her to a sofa, seeing pictures of her and Hilary
together, and tortured with a belief in their exquisite fitness
to be so. “Can I help you, dear?” she asked, though the
question echoed mockingly within her.

“Ah, no, except with advice,” said Flora, “only with
advice!”

“Ho-o-oh! if I were worthy to advise you it wouldn’t flatter
me so to be asked.”

“But I muz’ ask. ‘Tis only with you that I know my secret
will be–to everybody–and forever–at the bed of the ocean.
You can anyhow promise me that.”

“Yes, I can anyhow promise you that.”

“Then,” said Flora, “let me speak whiles–” She dropped her
face into her hands, lifted it again and stared into her
listener’s eyes so piteously that through Anna ran another
cry–“He has not asked! No girl alive could look so if he had
asked her!”

Flora seemed to nerve herself: “Anna, every dollar we had,
every picayune we could raise, grandma and I, even on our
Mobile house and our few best jewels, is–is–“

“Oh, what–what? Not lost? Not–not stolen?”

“Blown up! Blown up with that poor old man in the
powder-mill!”

“Flora, Flora!” was all Anna, in the shame of her rebuked
conjectures, could cry, and all she might have cried had she
known the very truth: That every dollar, picayune, and other
resource had disappeared gradually in the grist-mill of
daily need and indulgence, and never one of them been near the
powder-mill, the poor old man or any of his devices.

“His theories were so convincing,” sighed Flora.

“And you felt so pitiful for him,” prompted Anna.

“Grandma did; and I was so ambitious to do some great
patriotic service–like yours, you Callenders, in giving those
cannon–and–“

“Oh, but you went too far!”

“Ah, if we had only gone no farther!”

“You went farther? How could you?”

“Grandma did. You know, dear, how suddenly Captain Kincaid
had to leave for Mobile–by night?”

“Yes,” murmured Anna, with great emphasis in her private
mind.

“Well, jus’ at the las’ he gave Charlie a small bag of gold,
hundreds of dollars, for–for–me to keep for him till his
return. Anna! I was offended.”

“Oh, but surely he meant no–“

“Ah, my dear, did I ever give him the very least right to
pick me out in that manner? No. Except in that one pretty way
he has with all of us–and which you know so well–“

An uncourageous faint smile seemed the safest response.

“Yes,” said Flora, “you know it. And I had never allowed
myself–“

With eyes down the two girls sat silent. Then the further
word came absently, “I refused to touch his money,” and there
was another stillness.

“Dear,” slowly said Anna, “I don’t believe it was his. It
would not have been in gold. Some men of the battery were here
last evening–You know the Abolition schoolmistress who was
sent North that day?”

“Yes, I know, ’twas hers.”

“Well, dear, if she could entrust it to him–“

“Ah! she had a sort of right, being, as the whole
battery knows, in love with him”–the beauty swept a finger
across her perfect brows–“up to there! For that I don’t know
is he to blame. If a girl has no more sense–“

“No,” murmured Anna as the cruel shaft went through her.
“What did Charlie do with the money?”

Flora tossed a despairing hand: “Gave it to grandma! And
poor innocent grandma lent it to the old gentleman! ‘Twas to do
wonders for the powder and gun, and be return’ in three days.
But the next–“

“I see,” sighed Anna, “I see!”

“Yes, next day ’twas Sunday, and whiles I was kneeling in
the church the powder, the gun, the old man and the
money–Oh, Anna, what shall I do?”

“My dear, I will tell you,” began Anna, but the seeker of
advice was not quite ready for it.

“We have a few paltry things, of course,” she spoke on, “but
barely would they pay half. They would neither save our honor,
neither leave us anything for rent or bread! Our house, to be
sure, is worth more than we have borrowed on it, but in the
meantime–“

“In the meantime, dear, you shall–” But still Flora
persisted:

“Any day, any hour, Captain Kincaid may return. Oh, if
’twere anybody in this worl’ but him! For, Anna, I must take
all the blame–all!” The face went again into the hands.

“My dear, you shall take none. You shall hand him every
dollar, every picayune, on sight.”

“Ah, how is that possible? Oh, no, no, no. Use your money?
Never, never, never!”

“It isn’t money, Flora. And no one shall ever know. I’ve got
some old family jewellery–“

“Family–Oh, sweet, for shame!”

“No shame whatever. There’s a great lot of it–kinds that
will never be worn again. Let me–” The speaker rose.

“No, no, no! No, Anna, no! For Heaven’s sake–“

“Just a piece or two,” insisted Anna. “Barely enough to
borrow the amount.” She backed away, Flora clinging to her
fingers and faltering: “No, blessed angel, you must not! No, I
will not wait. I’ll–I’ll–“

But Anna kissed the clinging hands and vanished.

A high elation bore her quite to her room and remained with
her until she had unlocked the mass of old jewels and knelt
before them. But then all at once it left her. She laid her
folded hands upon them, bent her brow to the hands, then lifted
brow and weeping eyes and whispered to Heaven for mercy.

“Oh”–a name she could not speak even there went through her
heart in two big throbs–“if only we had never met! I never set
so much as a smile to snare you, you who have snared me. Can
Connie be right? Have you felt my thraldom, and are you trying
to throw me off? Then I must help you do it. Though I covet
your love more than life I will not tether it. Oh, it’s because
I so covet that I will not tether it! With the last gem from my
own throat will I rather help you go free if you want to go.
God of mercy, what else can I do!”

In grave exultancy Flora moved up and down the drawing-room
enjoying her tread on its rich carpet. She would have liked to
flit back to the side of yonder great chimney breast, the spot
where she had been surprised while sounding the panel work, but
this was no time for postponable risks. She halted to regale
her critical eye on the goodly needlework of a folding-screen
whose joints, she noticed, could not be peered through, and in
a pretty, bird-like way stole a glance behind it. Nothing
there. She stepped to a front window and stood toying with the
perfect round of her silken belt. How slimly neat it was. Yet
beneath the draperies it so trimly confined lay hid, in a few
notes of “city money,” the proceeds of the gold she had just
reported blown into thin air with the old inventor–who had
never seen a glimmer of it. Not quite the full amount was
there; it had been sadly nibbled. But now by dear Anna’s
goodness (ahem!) the shortage could be restored, the entire
hundreds handed back to Captain Kincaid, and a snug sum be
retained “for rent and bread.” Yet after all–as long as good
stories came easy–why hand anything back–to anybody–even
to–him?

He! In her heart desire and odium beat strangely together.
Fine as martial music he was, yet gallingly out of her rhythm,
above her key. Liked her much, too. Yes, for charms she had;
any fool could be liked that way. What she craved was to be
liked for charms she had not, graces she scorned; and because
she could not be sure how much of that sort she was winning she
tingled with heat against him–and against Anna–Anna giver of
guns–who had the money to give guns–till her bosom
rose and fell. But suddenly her musing ceased, her eyes
shone.

A mounted officer galloped into the driveway, a private
soldier followed, and the private was her brother. Now they
came close. The leader dismounted, passed his rein to Charlie
and sprang up the veranda steps. Flora shrank softly from the
window and at the same moment Anna reëntered gayly,
showing a glitter of values twice all expectation:

“If these are not enough–” She halted with lips apart.
Flora had made sign toward the front door, and now with a moan
of fond protest covered the gem-laden hand in both her palms
and pushed it from her.

“Take them back,” she whispered, yet held it fast, “’tis too
late! There–the door-bell! ‘Tis Hilary Kincaid! All is too
late, take them back!”

“Take them, you!” as vehemently whispered Anna. “You must
take them! You must, you shall!”

Flora had half started to fly, but while she hung upon
Anna’s words she let her palms slip under the bestowing hand
and the treasure slide into her own fingers.

“Too late, too late! And oh, I can never, never use them
any’ow!” She sprang noiselessly aside. To a maid who came down
the hall Anna quietly motioned to show the newcomer into an
opposite room, but Flora saw that the sign was misinterpreted:
“She didn’t understan’! Anna, she’s going to bring him!” Before
the words were done the speaker’s lithe form was gliding down
the room toward the door by which the other ladies had gone
out, but as she reached it she turned with a hand-toss as of
some despairing afterthought and flitted back.

Out in the hall the front door opened and closed and a sabre
clinked: “Is Miss Callender at home?”

Before the question was half put its unsuspected hearers had
recovered a faultless poise. Beside a table that bore her roses
she whom the inquirer sought stood retouching them and
reflecting a faint excess of their tint, while Flora, in a
grave joy of the theatrical, equal to her companion’s distress
of it, floated from view behind the silken screen.

XX

THE FIGHT FOR THE STANDARD

Yet not the very same Hilary Kincaid. So said her heart the
instant glance met glance. The tarnish of hard use was on all
his trappings; like sea-marshes on fire he was reddened and
browned; about him hung palpably the sunshine and air of sands
and waves, and all the stress and swing of wide designs; and on
brow and cheek were new lines that looked old. From every point
of his aspect the truth rushed home to her livelier, deadlier
than ever hitherto, that there was War, and that he and she
were already parts of it.

But the change was more than this. A second and quieter
look, the hand-grasp lingering, showed something deeper;
something that wove and tangled itself through and about all
designs, toils, and vigils, and suddenly looking out of his
eyes like a starved captive, cried, “you–you–” and prophesied
that, whether they would or not, this war was to be his and
hers together. A responding thrill must have run from her
fingers into his and belied the unaccountable restraint of her
welcome, for a joy shone from him which it took her ignoring
smile and her hand’s withdrawal to quench.

“Miss Anna–“

They sat down. His earlier boyishness came again somewhat,
but only somewhat, as he dropped his elbows to his knees,
looking now into his cap and now into her face. A glance behind
her had assured Anna that there was no shadow on the screen,
behind which sat Flora on the carpet, at graceful ease
listening while she eagerly appraised the jewels in her hands
and lap.

“Miss Anna,” said the soldier again, “I’ve come–I’ve come
to tell you something. It’s mighty hard to tell. It’s harder
than I thought it would be. For, honestly, Miss Anna, you–from
the first time I ever saw you, you–you–Were you going to
speak?”

Behind the screen Flora smiled malignly while Anna said,
“No, I–I was only–no, not at all; go on.”

“Yes, Miss Anna, from the first time I–“

“When did you get back from Mobile?” asked Anna seeing he
must be headed off.

“From Mobile? Just now, almost. You don’t sup–“

“Oh! I hope”–she must head him off again–“I hope you bring
good news?” There was risk in the question, but where was there
safety? At her back the concealed listener waited keenly for
the reply.

“Yes,” said Hilary, “news the very best and hardly an hour
old. Didn’t you hear the battery cheering? That’s what I’ve
come to tell you. Though it’s hard to tell, for I–“

“It’s from Mobile, you say?”

“No, I can tell you the Mobile news first, but it’s bad.
Miss Flora’s home–“

Anna gave a start and with a hand half upthrown said
quietly, “Don’t tell me. No, please, don’t, I don’t want to
hear it. I can’t explain, but I–I–” Tears wet her lashes, and
her hands strove with each other. “I don’t like bad news. You
should have taken it straight to Flora. Oh, I wish you’d do
that now, won’t you–please?”

Behind the screen the hidden one stiffened where she
crouched with fierce brow and fixed eyes.

Kincaid spoke: “Would you have me pass you by with my good
news to go first to her with the bad?”

“Oh, Captain Kincaid, yes, yes! Do it yet. Go, do it now.
And tell her the good news too!”

“Tell her the good first and then stab her with the
bad?”

“Oh, tell her the bad first. Do her that honor. She has
earned it. She’ll bear the worst like the heroine she is–the
heroine and patriot. She’s bearing it so now!”

“What! she knows already?”

In her hiding Flora’s intent face faintly smiled a
malevolence that would have startled even the grandam who still
killed time out among the roses with her juniors.

“Yes,” replied Anna, “she knows already.”

“Knows! Miss Anna–that her home is in ashes?”

Anna gave a wilder start: “Oh, no-o-oh! Oh, yes–oh, no–oh,
yes, yes! Oh, Captain Kincaid, how could you? Oh, monstrous,
monstrous!” She made all possible commotion to hide any sound
that might betray Flora, who had sprung to her feet,
panting.

“But, but, Miss Anna!” protested Hilary. “Why, Miss
Anna–“

“Oh, Captain Kincaid, how could you?”

“Why, you don’t for a moment imagine–?”

“Oh, it’s done, it’s done! Go, tell her. Go at once, Captain
Kincaid. Please go at once, won’t you?… Please!”

He had risen amazed. Whence such sudden horror, in this fair
girl, of a thing known by her already before he came? And what
was this beside? Horror in the voice yet love beaming from the
eyes? He was torn with perplexity. “I’ll go, of course,” he
said as if in a dream. “Of course I’ll go at once, but–why–if
Miss Flora already–?” Then suddenly he recovered himself in
the way Anna knew so well. “Miss Anna”–he gestured with his
cap, his eyes kindling with a strange mixture of worship and
drollery though his brow grew darker–“I’m gone now!”

“In mercy, please go!”

“I’m gone, Miss Anna, I’m truly gone. I always am when I’m
with you. Fred said it would be so. You scare the nonsense out
of me, and when that goes I go–the bubble bursts! Miss
Anna–oh, hear me–it’s my last chance–I’ll vanish in a
moment. The fellows tell me I always know just what to say to
any lady or to anything a lady says; but, on my soul, I don’t
think I’ve ever once known what to say to you or to anything
you’ve ever said to me, and I don’t know now, except that I
must and will tell you–“

“That you did not order the torch set! Oh, say that!”

“No one ordered it. It was a senseless mistake. Some private
soldiers who knew that my lines of survey passed through the
house–“

“Ah-h! ah-h!”

“Miss Anna, what would you have? Such is war! Many’s the
Southern home must go down under the fire of–of Kincaid’s
Battery, Miss Anna, before this war is over, else we might as
well bring you back your flag and guns. Shall we? We can’t now,
they’re ordered to the front. There! I’ve got it out! That’s my
good news. Bad enough for mothers and sisters. Bad for the
sister of Charlie Valcour. Good for you. So good and bad in one
for me, and so hard to tell and say no more! Don’t you know
why?”

“Oh, I’ve no right to know–and you’ve no right–oh, indeed,
you mustn’t. It would be so unfair–to you. I can’t tell you
why, but it–it would be!”

“And it wouldn’t be of–?”

“Any use? No, no!”

Torturing mystery! that with such words of doom she should
yet blush piteously, beam passionately.

“Good-by, then. I go. But I go–under your flag, don’t I?
Under your flag! captain of your guns!”

“Ah–one word–wait! Oh, Captain Kincaid, right is right!
Not half those guns are mine. That flag is not mine.”

There was no quick reply. From her concealment Flora,
sinking noiselessly again to the carpet, harkened without
avail. The soldier–so newly and poignantly hurt that twice
when he took breath he failed to speak–gazed on the
disclaiming girl until for; very distress she broke the
silence: “I–you–every flag of our cause–wherever our brave
soldiers–“

“Oh, but Kincaid’s Battery!–and that flag, Anna
Callender! The flag you gave us! That sacred banner starts for
Virginia to-morrow–goes into the war, it and your guns, with
only this poor beggar and his boys to win it honor and glory.
Will you deny us–who had it from your hands–your leave to
call it yours? Oh, no, no! To me–to me you will not!”

For reply there came a light in Anna’s face that shone into
his heart and was meant so to shine, yet her dissent was
prompt: “I must. I must. Oh, Capt–Captain Kincaid, I love that
flag too well to let it go misnamed. It’s the flag of all of us
who made it, us hundred girls–“

“Hundred–yes, yes, true. But how? This very morning I
chanced upon your secret–through little Victorine–that every
stitch in all that flag’s embroideries is yours.”

“Yet, Captain Kincaid, it is the flag of all those hundred
girls; and if to any one marching under it it is to be the flag
of any one of us singly, that one can only be–you know!”

Majestically in her hiding-place the one implied lowered and
lifted her head in frigid scorn and awaited the commander’s
answer.

“True again,” he said, “true. Let the flag of my hundred
boys be to all and each the flag of a hundred girls. Yet will
it be also the flag of his heart’s one choice–sister, wife, or
sweetheart–to every man marching, fighting, or dying under
it–and more are going to die under it than are ever coming
back. To me, oh, to me, let it be yours. My tasks have spared
me no time to earn of you what would be dearer than life, and
all one with duty and honor. May I touch your hand? Oh, just to
say good-by. But if ever I return–no, have no fear, I’ll not
say it now. Only–only–” he lifted the hand to his
lips–“good-by. God’s smile be on you in all that is to
come.”

“Good-by,” came her answering murmur.

“And the flag?” he exclaimed. “The flag?” By the clink of
his sabre Flora knew he was backing away. “Tell me–me
alone–the word to perish with me if I perish–that to me as if
alone”–the clinking came nearer again–“to me and for me and
with your blessing”–again the sound drew away–“the flag–the
flag I must court death under–is yours.”

Silence. From out in the hall the lover sent back a last
beseeching look, but no sound reached the hiding of the tense
listener whose own heart’s beating threatened to reveal her; no
sound to say that now Anna had distressfully shaken her head,
or that now her tears ran down, or that now in a mingled pain
and rapture of confession she nodded–nodded! and yet
imploringly waved him away.

It was easy to hear the door open and close. Faintly on this
other hand the voices of the ladies returning from the garden
foreran them. The soldier’s tread was on the outer stair. Now
theirs was in the rear veranda. With it tinkled their laughter.
Out yonder hoofs galloped.

The hidden one stole forth. A book on a table was totally
engaging the eyes of her hostess and at the instant grandma
reëntered laden with roses. Now all five were in, and
Anna, pouring out words with every motion, and curiously eyed
by Constance, took the flowers to give them a handier form,
while Flora rallied her kinswoman on wasting their friends’
morning these busy times, and no one inquired, and no one told,
who had been here that now had vanished.

XXI

CONSTANCE CROSS-EXAMINES

As the Callenders came in again from the veranda, their
theme was Flora. “Yet who,” asked Constance, “ever heard her
utter a moral sentiment?”

“Oh, her beauty does that,” rejoined the kindly Miranda. “As
Captain Kincaid said that evening he–“

“Yes, I know. He said he would pass her into heaven on her
face, and I think it was a very strange thing for him to
say!”

“Why?” daringly asked Miranda–and ran from the room.

The hater of whys turned upon her sister: “Nan, what’s the
matter?… Oh, now, yes, there is. What made you start when
Miranda mentioned–Yes, you did. You’re excited, you know you
are. When we came in from the garden you and Flora were
both–“

“Now, Connie–“

“Pshaw, Nan, I know he’s been here, it’s in your face. Who
was with him; Charlie?”

“Yes. They just dropped in to say good-by. The battery’s
ordered to Virginia. Virginia hasn’t seceded yet, but he feels
sure she will before they can get there, and so do I. Don’t
you? If Kentucky and Maryland would only–“

“Now, Nan, just hush. When does he go?”

“To-morrow. But as to us”–the girl shrugged prettily while
caressing her roses–“he’s gone now.”

“How did he talk?”

“Oh–quite as usual.” The head bent low into the flowers.
“In the one pretty way he has with all of us, you know.”

Constance would not speak until their eyes met again. Then
she asked, “Did Charlie and Flora give him any chance–to
express himself?”

“Oh, Con, don’t be foolish. He didn’t want any. He as much
as said so!”

“Ye-es,” drawled the bride incredulously, “but–“

“Oh, he really did not, Con. He talked of nothing but the
battery flag and how, because I’d presented it, they would
forever and ever and ever and ever–” She waved her hands
sarcastically.

“Nan, behave. Come here.” The pair took the sofa. “How did
he look and act when he first came in? Before you froze him
stiff?”

“I didn’t freeze him.” The quiet, hurt denial was tremulous.
“Wood doesn’t freeze.” The mouth drooped satirically: “You know
well enough that the man who says his tasks have spared him no
time to–to–“

“Nan, honest! Did you give him a fair chance–the
kind I gave Steve?”

“Oh, Con! He had all the chance any man ever got, or will
get, from me.”

The sister sighed: “Nan Callender, you are the
poorest fisherman–“

“I’m not! I’m none! And if I were one”–the disclaimant
glistened with mirth–“I couldn’t be as poor a one as he is;
he’s afraid of his own bait.” She began to laugh but had to
force back her tears: “I didn’t mean that! He’s never had any
bait–for me, nor wanted any. Neither he nor I ever–Really,
Con, you are the only one who’s made any mistake as to either
of us! You seem to think–“

“Oh, dearie, I don’t think at all, I just know. I know he’s
furiously in love with you–Yes, furiously; but that he’s
determined to be fair to Fred Greenleaf–“

“Oh!”–a yet wickeder smile.

“Yes, and that he feels poor. You know that if the
General–“

The hearer lifted and dropped both arms: “Oh!–to be
continued!”

“Well, I know, too, that he doesn’t believe, anyhow, in
soldiers marrying. I’ve never told you, sweet, but–if I hadn’t
cried so hard–Steve would have challenged Hilary Kincaid for
what he said on that subject the night we were married!”

Anna straightened, flashed, and then dropped again as she
asked, “Is that all you know?”

“No, I know what counts for more than all the rest; I know
you’re a terror to him.”

Remotely in the terror’s sad eyes glimmered a smile that was
more than half satisfaction. “You might as well call him a
coward,” she murmured.

“Not at all. You know you’ve been a terror to every
suitor you’ve ever had–except Fred Greenleaf; he’s the only
one you couldn’t keep frightened out of his wits. Now this time
I know it’s only because you’re–you’re bothered! You don’t
know how you’re going to feel–“

“Now, Con–“

“And you don’t want to mislead him, and you’re just
bothered to death! It was the same way with me.”

“It wasn’t!” silently said Anna’s lips, her face averted.
Suddenly she turned and clutched her sister’s hands: “Oh, Con,
while we talk trifles Flora’s home lies in ashes!… Yes, he
told me so just now.”

“Didn’t he tell her too?”

“Why, no, Connie, he–he couldn’t very well. It–it would
have been almost indelicate, wouldn’t it? But he’s gone now to
tell her.”

“He needn’t,” said Constance. “She knows it now. The moment
I came in here I saw, through all her lightness, she’d got some
heavy news. She must have overheard him, Nan.”

“Connie, I–I believe she did!”

“Well, that’s all right. What are you blushing for?”

“Blushing! Every time I get a little warm–” The speaker
rose to go, but the sister kept her hand:

“Keep fresh for this evening, honey. He’ll be back.”

“No, he won’t. He doesn’t propose to if he could and he
couldn’t if he did. To get the battery off to-morrow–“

“It won’t get off to-morrow, nor the next day, nor the next.
You know how it always is. When Steve–“

“Oh, I don’t know anything,” said Anna, pulling free and
moving off. “But you, oh, you know it all, you and Steve!”

But the elder beauty was right. The battery did not go for
more than a fortnight, and Hilary came again that evening.
Sitting together alone, he and Anna talked about their inner
selves–that good old sign! and when she gave him a chance he
told her what Greenleaf had said about her and the ocean. Also
he confided to her his envy of small-statured people, and told
how it hurt him to go about showing the bigness of his body and
hiding the pettiness of his soul. And he came the next evening
and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next.

XXII

SAME STORY SLIGHTLY WARPED

Even on that first day, after his too prompt forenoon gallop
from Callender House to the Valcour apartment had, of course,
only insured his finding Flora not at home, all its evening
except the very end was passed with her, Flora, in her open
balcony overlooking the old Place d’Armes. His head ringing
with a swarm of things still to be done and ordered done, he
had purposed to remain only long enough to tell his dire news
manfully, accept without insistent debate whatever odium it
might entail, and decently leave its gentle recipients to their
grief and dismay. What steps they should take to secure
compensation it were far better they should discuss with
Adolphe, who would be here to aid them when he, Kincaid, would
be in far Virginia. The only other imperative matter was that
of the young schoolma’am’s gold, which must be left in bank.
Awkward business, to have to ask for it in scrambling haste at
such a moment.

But on a starlit balcony with two such ladies as the
Valcours, to do one’s errands, such errands, in scrambling
haste proved not even a military possibility. Their greeting
inquiries had to be answered:

“Yes, Charlie was well. He would be along soon, with fresh
messages from division headquarters. The battery was at
last–Pardon?… Yes, the Callenders were well–he supposed! He
had seen only Miss Anna, and her only for so brief an
instant–“

No, Madame Valcour had merely cleared her throat. “That
climate is hard on those throat’.”

He had seen Miss Anna, he resumed, “for so brief an
instant–on an errand–that he had not made civil inquiry after
the others, but had left good-by for them about as a
news-carrier wads and throws in the morning paper!”

It was so pretty, the silvery way the questioning pair
laughed to each other–at his simile, if that was the genuine
source of their amusement–that he let himself laugh with
them.

“But how?” they further asked. “He had left good-by?
Good-day, yes! But for what good-by when juz’ returning?”

“Ah, because here to them, also, it must be good-by, and be
as brief as there! The battery–he had sent word to them at
sunrise, but had just learned that his messenger had missed
them–the battery was at last ordered”–etc.

“Mon Dieu!” gasped the old lady as if this was too
cruelly sudden, and, “Oh, my brother! Oh, Captain Kincaid!”
beautifully sighed Flora, from whom the grandmother had heard
the news hours before.

Yet, “Of course any time ‘twould have to be sudden,”
they had presently so recovered as to say, and Flora, for both,
spoke on in accents of loveliest renunciation. She easily got
the promise she craved, that no ill should come to Charlie
which a commander’s care could avert.

The loss of their Mobile home, which also Madame had
perfectly known since morning, was broken to them with less
infelicity, though they would talk cheerily of the house as
something which no evil ever would or could befall, until
suddenly the girl said, “Grandma, dearest, that night air is
not so pretty good for your rheum; we better pass inside,” and
the old lady, insistently unselfish, moved a step within,
leaving the other two on the balcony. There, when the blow came
at last, Flora’s melodious grievings were soon over, and her
sweet reasonableness, her tender exculpation not alone of this
dear friend but even of the silly fellows who had done the
deed, and her queenly, patriotic self-obliteration, were more
admirable than can be described. Were, as one may say, good
literature. The grateful soldier felt shamed to find, most
unaccountably, that Anna’s positively cruel reception of the
same news somehow suited him better. It was nearer his own
size, he said to himself. At any rate the foremost need now, on
every account, was to be gone. But as he rose Flora reminded
him of “those few hundred gold?” Goodness! he had clean
forgotten the thing. He apologized for the liberty taken in
leaving it with her, but–“Oh!” she prettily interrupted, “when
I was made so proud!”

Well, now he would relieve her and take it at once to a bank
cashier who had consented to receive it at his house this very
night. She assured him its custody had given her no anxiety,
for she had promptly passed it over to another! He was
privately amazed:

“Oh–o-oh–oh, yes, certainly. That was right! To whom had
she–?”

She did not say. “Yes,” she continued, “she had at once
thought it ought to be with some one who could easily replace
it if, by any strange mishap–flood, fire, robbery–it should
get lost. To do which would to her be impossible if at Mobile
her house–” she tossed out her hands and dropped them
pathetically. “But I little thought, Captain Kincaid–” she
began a heart-broken gesture–

“Now, Miss Flora!” the soldier laughingly broke out, “if
it’s lost it’s lost and no one but me shall lose a cent for
it!”

“Ah, that,” cried the girl, with tears in her voice, “’tis
impossible! ‘Twould kill her, that mortification, as well as
me, for you to be the loser!”

“Loser! mortification!” laughed Hilary. “And what should I
do with my mortification if I should let you, or her, be
the loser? Who is she, Miss Flora? If I minded the thing, you
understand, I shouldn’t ask.”

Flora shrank as with pain: “Ah, you must not! And you must
not guess, for you will surely guess wrong!” Nevertheless she
saw with joy that he had guessed Anna, yet she suffered chagrin
to see also that the guess made him glad. “And this you must
make me the promise; that you never, never will let anybody
know you have discover’ that, eh?”

“Oh, I promise.”

“And you must let her pay it me back–that money–and me pay
it you. ‘Twill be easy, only she mus’ have time to get the
money, and without needing to tell anybody for why, and for why
in gold. Alas! I could have kept that a secret had it not have
been you are to go to-morrow morning”

“Oh, rest easy,” said the cheerful soldier, “mum’s the word.
But, Miss Flora, tell me this: How on earth did she lose
it?”

“Captain Kincaid, by the goodness of the heart!”

“But how did it go; was it–?”

“Blown up! Blown up with that poor old man in the
powder-mill! Ah, what do we know about money, Captain Kincaid,
we silly women? That poor, innocent child, she lent it to the
old gentleman. His theories, they were so convincing, and she,
she was so ambitious to do a great patriotic service. ‘Twas to
make wonders for the powder and gun, and to be return’ in three
days. But that next day ’twas Sunday, and whiles I was
kneeling in the church the powder, the gun, the old man
and the money–“

Hilary gestured facetiously for the narrator: “That’s how
millions have got to go in this business, and this
driblet–why, I might have lent it, myself, if I’d been here!
No, I’m the only loser, and–“

“Ah, Captain Kincaid, no, no! I implore you, no!–and for
her sake! Oh, what are those few hundred for her to lose, if so
she can only wipe that mistake? No, they shall be in the charge
of that cashier before you’re at Virginia, and that shall be my
first news written to my brother–though he’ll not comprehend
except that he is to tell it you.”

So it was arranged and agreed. As again he moved to go she
won a new pledge of unending secrecy, and Charlie came with a
document. Beside the parlor lamp, where, with one tiny foot
covertly unslippered for the easement of angry corns, Madame
sat embroidering, Kincaid broke the seal and read. He forced a
scowl, but through it glimmered a joy in which Flora discerned
again the thought of Anna. “Charlie,” he said as a smile broke
through, “prepare yourself.”

“Now, Captain, if those old imbeciles–“

The commander’s smile broadened: “Our battery, ladies and
gentlemen, can’t go for a week.”

All laughed but Charlie. He swore at the top of his voice
and threw himself from the room.

When his Captain had followed, Flora, standing and smiling,
drew from her bosom a small, well-filled jewel-bag, balanced it
on her uplifted palm and, rising to her toes, sang, “At last,
at last, grâce au ciel, money is easy!”

“Yet at the same time my gifted granddaughter,” remarked the
old lady, in her native tongue and intent on her embroidery,
“is uneasy, eh?”

Flora ignored the comment. She laid a second palm, on the
upraised booty, made one whole revolution, her soft crinoline
ballooning and subsiding with a seductive swish as she paused:
“And you shall share these blessings, grannie, love, although
of the assets themselves”–she returned the bag to its
sanctuary and smoothed the waist where the paper proceeds of
the schoolmistress’s gold still hid–“you shall never handle a
dime.” She sparkled airily.

“No?” said Madame, still moving the needle and still in
French. “Nevertheless, morning and evening together, our
winnings are–how much?”

“Ours?” melodiously asked the smiling girl, “they are not
ours, they are mine. And they are–at the least”–she dropped
to her senior’s footstool and spoke caressingly low–“a clean
thousand! Is not that sweet enough music to the ear of a
venerable”–she whispered–“cormorant?” She sparkled anew.

“I am sorry,” came the mild reply, “you are in such torture
you have to call me names. But it is, of course, entirely
concerning–the house–ahem!”

Flora rose, walked to a window, and, as she gazed out across
the old plaza, said measuredly in a hard voice: “Never mind!
Never mind her–or him either. I will take care of the two of
them!”

A low laugh tinkled from the ancestress: “Ha, ha! you
thought the fool would be scandalized, and instead he is only
the more enamored.”

The girl flinched but kept her face to the window:
“He is not the fool.”

“No? We can hardly tell, when we are–in love.”

Flora wheeled and flared, but caught herself, musingly
crossed the room, returned half-way, and with frank design
resumed the stool warily vacated by the unslippered foot; whose
owner was mincing on, just enough fluttered to play defiance
while shifting her attack–

“Home, sweet home! For our ravished one you will, I suppose,
permit his beloved country to pay–in its new paper money at
‘most any discount–and call it square, eh?” Half the
bitterness of her tone was in its sweetness.

In a sudden white heat the granddaughter clutched one aged
knee with both hands: “Wait! If I don’t get seven times all it
was ever worth, the Yankees shall!” Then with an odd gladness
in her eyes she added, “And she shall pay her
share!”

“You mean–his?” asked the absorbed embroiderer. But on her
last word she stiffened upward with a low cry of agony, shut
her eyes and swung her head as if about to faint. Flora had
risen.

“Oh-h-h!” the girl softly laughed, “was that your foot?”

XXIII

“SOLDIERS!”

The ladies, God bless them, were always free to pass the
guard on the city side of that small camp and earthwork, where
with the ladies’ guns “the ladies’ man” had worn the grass off
all the plain and the zest of novelty out of all his
nicknamers, daily hammering–he and his only less merciful
lieutenants–at their everlasting drill.

Such ladies! Why shouldn’t they pass? Was it not safe for
the cause and just as safe for them? Was not every maid and
matron of them in the “Ladies’ Society of the Confederate
Army”–whereof Miss Callender was a secretary and Miss Valcour
one of the treasurers? And had not the fellows there, owing to
an influence or two in the camp itself and another or two just
outside it, all become, in a strong, fine sense and high
degree, ladies’ men? It was good for them spiritually, and good
for their field artillery evolutions, to be watched by maidenly
and matronly eyes. Quite as good was it, too, for their
occasional heavy-gun practice with two or three huge, new-cast,
big-breeched “hell-hounds,” as Charlie and others called them,
whose tapering black snouts lay out on the parapet’s superior
slope, fondled by the soft Gulf winds that came up the river,
and snuffing them for the taint of the enemy.

One afternoon when field-gun manoeuvres were at a close,
Kincaid spoke from the saddle. Facing him stood his entire
command, “in order in the line,” their six shining pieces and
dark caissons and their twice six six-horse teams stretching
back in six statuesque rows; each of the three
lieutenants–Bartleson, Villeneuve, Tracy–in the front line,
midway between his two guns, the artificers just six yards out
on the left, and guidon and buglers just six on the right. At
the commander’s back was the levee. Only now it had been empty
of spectators, and he was seizing this advantage.

“Soldiers!” It was his first attempt since the flag
presentation, and it looked as though he would falter, but he
hardened his brow: “Some days ago you were told not to expect
marching orders for a week. Well the week’s up and we’re told
to wait another. Now that makes me every bit as mad as it makes
you! I feel as restless as any man in this battery, and I told
the commanding general to-day that you’re the worst
discontented lot I’ve yet seen, and that I was proud of you for
it. That’s all I said to him. But! if there’s a man here who
doesn’t yet know the difference between a soldierly discontent
and unsoldierly grumbling I want him to GO! Kincaid’s
Battery is not for him. Let him transfer to infantry or
cavalry. Oh, I know it’s only that you want to be in the very
first fight, and that’s all right! But what we can’t get we
don’t grumble for in Kincaid’s Battery!”

He paused. With his inspired eyes on the splendid array,
visions of its awful destiny only exalted him. Yet signs which
he dared not heed lest he be confounded told him that every eye
so fixed on his was aware of some droll distraction. He must
speak on.

“My boys! as sure as this war begins it’s going to last.
There’ll be lots of killing and dying, and I warn you now, your
share’ll be a double one. So, then, no indecent haste.
Artillery can’t fight every day. Cavalry can–in its small way,
but you may have to wait months and months to get into a
regular hell on earth. All the same you’ll get there!–soon
enough–times enough. Don’t you know why, when we have to be
recruited–to fill up the shot holes–they’ll go by the cavalry
to the infantry, and pick the best men there, and
promote them to your ranks? It’s because of how you’ve
got to fight when your turn comes; like devils, to hold up, for
all you may know, the butt end of the whole day’s bloody
business. That’s why–and because of how you may have to wait,
un-com-plain-ing, in rotting idleness for the next tea
party.”

Again he ceased. What was the matter? There sat his
matchless hundred, still and straight as stone Egyptians,
welcoming his every word; yet some influence not his was having
effect and, strangest of all, was enhancing his.

“One more word,” he said. “You’re sick of the drill-ground.
Well, the man that’s spoiling for a fight and yet has no belly
for drill–he–oh, he belongs to the cavalry by birth! We
love these guns. We’re mighty dogg–we’re extremely
proud of them. Through thick and thin, through fire and carnage
and agony, remembering where we got them, we propose to
keep them; and some proud day, when the trouble’s all
over, say two years hence, and those of us who are spared come
home, we propose to come with these same guns unstained by the
touch of a foe’s hand, a virgin battery still. Well, only two
things can win that: infernal fighting and perpetual toil. So,
as you love honor and your country’s cause, wait. Wait in
self-respectful patience. Wait and work, and you shall be at
the front–the foremost front!–the very first day and hour my
best licks can get you there. That’s all.”

Bartleson advanced from the line: “By section!” he called,
“right wheel–“

“Section,” repeated each chief of section, “right
wheel–“

“March!” commanded Bartleson.

“March,” echoed the chiefs, and the battery broke into
column. “Forward! Guide right!” chanted Bartleson, and all
moved off save Kincaid.

He turned his horse, and lo! on the grassy crest of the
earthwork, pictured out against the eastern pink and blue,
their summer gauzes filled with the light of the declining sun,
were half a dozen smiling ladies attended by two or three
officers of cavalry, and among them Flora, Constance, and
Miranda.

Anna? Only when he had dismounted did his eager eye find
her, where she had climbed and seated herself on a siege gun
and was letting a cavalier show her how hard it would be for a
hostile ship, even a swift steamer, to pass, up-stream, this
crater of destruction, and ergo how impossible for a
fleet–every ship a terror to its fellows the moment it was
hurt–to run the gauntlet of Forts Jackson and St. Philip on a
far worse stretch of raging current some eighty miles farther
down the river.

Not for disbelief of the demonstration, but because of a
general laugh around a tilt of words between Kincaid and the
cavalry fellows, Anna lighted down and faced about, to find
him, for the third time in five days, at close range. With much
form he drew nearer, a bright assurance in his eyes, a sort of
boyish yes, for a moment, but the next moment gone as it met in
hers a womanly no.

“You little artist,” thought Flora.

XXIV

A PARKED BATTERY CAN RAISE A DUST

Back among the tents and mess fires–

“Fellows!” said the boys, in knots, “yonder’s how he puts in
his ‘best licks’ for us!” But their wanton gaze was also fond
as it followed the procession of parasols and sword-belts,
muslins and gold lace that sauntered down along the levee’s
crest in couples, Hilary and Anna leading.

Flora, as they went, felt a most unusual helplessness to
avert a course of things running counter to her designs. It is
true that, having pledged herself to the old General to seek a
certain issue and to Irby to prevent it, she might, whichever
way the matter drifted, gather some advantage if she could
contrive to claim credit for the trend; an if which she
felt amply able to take care of. To keep two men fooled was no
great feat, nor even to beguile her grandmother, whose gadfly
insistence centred ever on the Brodnax fortune as their only
true objective; but so to control things as not to fool herself
at last–that was the pinch. It pinched more than it would
could she have heard how poorly at this moment the lover and
lass were getting on–as such. Her subtle interferences–a mere
word yesterday, another the day before–were having more
success than she imagined, not realizing how much they were
aided by that frantic untamableness to love’s yoke, which, in
Hilary only less than in Anna, qualified every word and
motion.

Early in the talk of these two Hilary had mentioned his
speech just made, presently asking with bright abruptness how
Anna liked it and, while Anna was getting her smile ready for a
safe reply, had added that he never could have made it at all
had he dreamed she was looking on. “Now if she asks why,” he
thought to himself in alarm, “I’ve got to blurt it out!”

But she failed to ask; only confessed herself unfit to judge
anybody’s English.

“English! oh, pass the English!” he said, he “knew how bad
that was.” What he wanted her criticism on was–“its
matter–its spirit–whichever it was, matter or spirit!” How
comical that sounded! They took pains that their laugh should
be noticed behind them. Flora observed both the laugh and the
painstaking.

“Matter or spirit,” said Anna more gravely, “I can’t
criticise it. I can’t even praise it–oh! but that’s only
be–because I haven’t–the courage!”

The lover’s reply was low and full of meaning: “Would you
praise it if you had the courage?”

She could have answered trivially, but something within bade
her not. “Yes,” she murmured, “I would.” It was an awful
venture, made unpreparedly, and her eyes, trying to withstand
his, dropped. Yet they rallied splendidly–“They’ve got to!”
said something within her–and, “I could,” she blushingly
qualified, “but–I could criticise it too!”

His heart warmed at her defiant smile. “I’d rather have that
honor than a bag of gold!” he said, and saw his slip too late.
Gold! Into Anna’s remembrance flashed the infatuation of the
poor little schoolmistress, loomed Flora’s loss and distress
and rolled a smoke of less definite things for which this man
was going unpunished while she, herself, stood in deadly peril
of losing her heart to him.

“Oh, Captain Kincaid!” Like artillery wheeling into action
came her inconsequent criticism, her eyes braving him at last,
as bright as his guns, though flashing only tears. “It was
right enough for you to extol those young soldiers’ willingness
to serve their country when called. But, oh, how
could you commend their chafing for battle and
slaughter?”

“Ah, Miss Anna, you–“

“Oh, when you know that the sooner they go the sooner comes
the heartache and heartbreak for the hundreds of women they so
light-heartedly leave behind them! I looked from Charlie to
Flora–“

“You should have looked to Victorine. She wants the boy to
go and her dad to go with him.”

“Poor thoughtless child!”

“Why, Miss Anna, if I were a woman, and any man–with war
coming on–could endure to hang back at home for love of
me, I should feel–“

“Captain Kincaid! What we womenkind may feel is not to the
point. It’s how the men themselves feel toward the women who
love them.”

“They ought,” replied the soldier, and his low voice
thrilled like a sounding-board, “to love the women–out of
every fibre of their being.”

“Ah!” murmured the critic, as who should say,
“checkmate!”

“And yet–” persisted this self-sung “ladies’ man”–

“Yet what?” she softly challenged. (Would he stand by his
speech, or his song?)

“Why, honestly, Miss Anna, I think a man can love a
woman–even his heart’s perfect choice–too much. I know he
can!”

The small lady gave the blunderer a grave, brief,
now-you-have-done-it glance and looked down. “Well, I
know,” she measuredly said, “that a man who can tell a
woman that, isn’t capable of loving her half enough.” She
turned to go back, with a quickness which, I avow, was
beautifully and tenderly different from irritation, yet which
caused her petticoat’s frail embroidery to catch on one of his
spurs and cling till the whole laughing bevy had gathered round
to jest over Flora’s disentanglement of it.

“But really, Nan, you know,” said Constance that evening in
their home, “you used to believe that yourself! The day Steve
left you said almost exact–“

“Con–? Ah, Con! I think the sister who could remind
a sister of that–!” The sufferer went slowly up to her
room, where half an hour later she was found by Miranda drying
her bathed eyes at a mirror and instantly pretending that her
care was for any other part of her face instead.

“Singular,” she remarked, “what a dust that battery can
raise!”

XXV

“HE MUST WAIT,” SAYS ANNA

“What? Kincaid’s Bat–?”

“No-o, the Zouaves! Infantry! when the one only sane thing
to do,” cried every cannoneer of Camp Callender–in its white
lanes or on three-hours’ leave at home on Bayou Road or
Coliseum Square or Elysian Fields or Prytania street–“the one
sane thing to do,” insisted the growingly profane lads to their
elders, and assented the secretly pained elders to them, “the
one thing that, if only for shame’s sake, ought to have been
done long ago, was to knock Fort Pickens to HELL with
SHELL!” Sadly often they added the tritest three-monosyllabled
expletive known to red-hot English.

Charlie–mm-mm! how he could rip it out! Sam Gibbs, our
veritable Sam, sergeant of the boy’s gun, “Roaring Betsy,”
privately remarked to the Captain what a blank-blank shame it
was, not for its trivial self, of course, but in view of the
corruptions to which it opened the way. And the blithe
commander, in the seclusion of his tent, standing over the lad
and holding him tenderly by both pretty ears, preached to him
of his sister and grandmother until with mute rage the
youngster burned as red as his jacket facings; and then of the
Callenders–“who gave us our guns, and one of whom is the
godmother of our flag, Charlie”–until the tears filled
Charlie’s eyes, and he said:

“I’ll try, Captain, but it’s–oh, it’s no use! If anything
could make me swear worse“–he smiled despairingly–“it
would be the hope of being hauled up again for another talk
like this!”

One Sunday, three days after the going of the Zouaves, while
out in Jackson Square “Roaring Betsy” sang a solo of harrowing
thunder-claps, the Callenders and Valcours, under the
cathedral’s roof, saw consecrated in its sacred nave the
splendid standard of the Chasseurs-à-Pied.

Armed guards, keeping the rabble out, passed the ladies in
before the procession had appeared in the old Rue Condé.
But now here it came, its music swelling, the crowd–shabbier
than last month and more vacant of face–parting before it.
Carrying their sabres, but on foot and without their pieces,
heading the column as escort of honor, lo, Kincaid’s Battery;
rearmost the Chasseurs, masses and masses of them; and in
between, a silver crucifix lifted high above a body of acolytes
in white lace over purple, ranks of black-gowned priests, a
succession of cloth-of-gold ecclesiastics, and in their midst
the mitred archbishop.

But the battery! What a change since last February! Every
man as spruce as ever, but with an added air of tested
capability that inspired all beholders. Only their German
musicians still seemed fresh from the mint, and oh! in what
unlucky taste, considering the ecclesiastics, the song they
brayed forth in jaunty staccato.

“They’re offering us that hand of theirs again,” murmured
Anna to Constance, standing in a side pew; but suddenly the
strain ceased, she heard Hilary’s voice of command turning the
column, and presently, through a lane made by his men, the
Chasseurs marched in to the nave, packed densely and halted.
Then in close order the battery itself followed and stood. Now
the loud commands were in here. Strange it was to hear them
ring through the holy place (French to the Chasseurs, English
to the battery), and the crashing musket-butts smite the paved
floor as one weapon, to the flash of a hundred sabres.

So said to itself the diary on the afternoon of the next
day, and there hurriedly left off. Not because of a dull rumble
reaching the writer’s ear from the Lake, where Kincaid and his
lieutenants were testing new-siege-guns, for that was what she
was at this desk and window to hear; but because of the
L.S.C.A., about to meet in the drawing-room below and be met by
a friend of the family, a famed pulpit orator and greater
potentate, in many eyes, than even the Catholic archbishop.

He came, and later, in the battery camp with the Callenders,
Valcours, and Victorine, the soldiers clamoring for a speech,
ran them wild reminding them with what unique honor and
peculiar responsibility they were the champions of their six
splendid guns. In a jostling crowd, yet with a fine decorum,
they brought out their standard and–not to be outdone by any
Chasseurs under the sky–obliged Anna to stand beside its
sergeant, Maxime, and with him hold it while the man of God
invoked Heaven to bless it and bless all who should follow it
afield or pray for it at home. So dazed was she that only at
the “amen” did she perceive how perfectly the tables had been
turned on her. For only then did she discover that Hilary
Kincaid had joined the throng exactly in time to see the whole
tableau.

Every officer of the camp called that evening, to say
graceful things, Kincaid last. As he was leaving he wanted to
come to the same old point, but she would not let him. Oh! how
could she, a scant six hours after such a bid from
herself? He ought to have seen she couldn’t–and wouldn’t! But
he never saw anything–of that sort. Ladies’ man indeed! He
couldn’t read a girl’s mind even when she wanted it read. He
went away looking so haggard–and yet so tender–and still so
determined–she could not sleep for hours. Nevertheless–

“I can’t help his looks, Con, he’s got to wait! I owe that
to all womanhood! He’s got to practise to me what he preaches
to his men. Why, Connie, if I’m willing to wait, why
shouldn’t he be? Why–?”

Constance fled.

Next day, dining with Doctor Sevier, said the Doctor, “That
chap’s working himself to death, Anna,” and gave his fair guest
such a stern white look that she had to answer flippantly.

She and Hilary were paired at table and talked of Flora, he
telling how good a friend to her Flora was. The topic was
easier, between them, than at any other time since the loss of
the gold. Always before, she had felt him thinking of that loss
and trying to guess something about her; but now she did not,
for on Sunday, in the cathedral, Flora had told her at last,
ever so gratefully and circumstantially, that she had repaid
the Captain everything! yes, the same day on which she had
first told Anna of the loss; and there was nothing now left to
do but for her to reimburse Anna the moment she could.

Hilary spoke of Adolphe’s devotion to Flora–hoped he would
win. Told with great amusement how really well his cousin had
done with her government claim–sold it to his Uncle Brodnax!
And Flora–how picturesque everything she did!–had put–? yes,
they both knew the secret–had put the proceeds into one of
those beautiful towboats that were being fitted up as
privateers! Hilary laughed with delight. Yes, it was for that
sort of thing the boys were so fond of her. But when Anna
avowed a frank envy he laughed with a peculiar tenderness that
thrilled both him and her, and murmured:

“The dove might as well envy the mocking-bird.”

“If I were a dove I certainly should,” she said.

“Well, you are, and you shouldn’t!” said he.

All of which Flora caught; if not the words, so truly the
spirit that the words were no matter.

“Just as we were starting home,” soliloquized, that night,
our diary, “the newsboys came crying all around, that General
Beauregard had opened fire on Fort Sumter, and the war has
begun. Poor Constance! it’s little she’ll sleep to-night.”

XXVI

SWIFT GOING, DOWN STREAM

The black driver drew in. From Jackson Square came distant
thunders and across the great bend of the river they could see
the white puff of each discharge. What could it
mean?

“Oh, Nan, the Abolitionists must have sued for peace!”
exclaimed the sister.

“No-no!” cried Miranda. “Hark!”

Behind them the battery band had begun–

“O, carry me back to old
Vir–“

“Virginia!” sang the three. “Virginia is out! Oh, Virginia
is out!” They clapped their mitted hands and squeezed each
other’s and laughed with tears and told the coachman and said
it over and over.

In Canal Street lo! it was true. Across the Neutral Ground
they saw a strange sight; General Brodnax bareheaded!
bareheaded yet in splendid uniform, riding quietly through the
crowd in a brilliantly mounted group that included Irby and
Kincaid, while everybody told everybody, with admiring
laughter, how the old Virginian, dining at the St. Charles
Hotel, had sallied into the street cheering, whooping, and
weeping, thrown his beautiful cap into the air, jumped on it as
it fell, and kicked it before him up to one corner and down
again to the other. Now he and his cavalcade came round the
Clay statue and passed the carriage saluting. What glory was in
their eyes! How could our trio help but wave or the crowd hold
back its cheers!

Up at Odd Fellows’ Hall a large company was organizing a
great military fair. There the Callenders were awaited by Flora
and Madame, thither they came, and there reappeared the General
and his train. There, too, things had been so admirably cut and
dried that in a few minutes the workers were sorted and busy
all over the hall like classes in a Sunday-school.

The Callenders, Valcours, and Victorine were a committee by
themselves and could meet at Callender House. So when Kincaid
and Irby introduced a naval lieutenant whose amazingly swift
despatch-boat was bound on a short errand a bend or so below
English Turn, it was agreed with him in a twinkling–a few
twinklings, mainly Miranda’s–to dismiss horses, take the trip,
and on the return be set ashore at Camp Callender by early
moonlight.

They went aboard at the head of Canal Street. The river was
at a fair stage, yet how few craft were at either long landing,
“upper” or “lower,” where so lately there had been scant room
for their crowding prows. How few drays and floats came and
went on the white, shell-paved levees! How little freight was
to be seen except what lay vainly begging for export–sugar,
molasses, rice; not even much cotton; it had gone to the yards
and presses. That natty regiment, the Orleans Guards, was
drilling (in French, superbly) on the smooth, empty ground
where both to Anna’s and to Flora’s silent notice all the
up-river foodstuffs–corn, bacon, pork, meal, flour–were so
staringly absent, while down in yonder streets their lack was
beginning to be felt by a hundred and twenty-five thousand
consumers.

Backing out into mid-stream brought them near an anchored
steamer lately razeed and now being fitted for a cloud of
canvas on three lofty masts instead of the two small sticks she
had been content with while she brought plantains, guava jelly,
coffee, and cigars from Havana. The Sumter she was to
be, and was designed to deliver some of the many agile
counter-thrusts we should have to make against that “blockade”
for which the Yankee frigates were already hovering off Ship
Island. So said the Lieutenant, but Constance explained to him
(Captain Mandeville having explained to her) what a farce that
blockade was going to be.

How good were these long breaths of air off the sea marshes,
enlivened by the speed of the craft! But how unpopulous the
harbor! What a crowd of steamboats were laid up along the
“Algiers” shore, and of Morgan’s Texas steamers, that huddled,
with boilers cold, under Slaughter-House Point, while all the
dry-docks stood empty. How bare the ship wharves; hardly a
score of vessels along the miles of city front. About as many
more, the lieutenant said, were at the river’s mouth waiting to
put to sea, but the towboats were all up here being turned into
gunboats or awaiting letters of marque and reprisal in order to
nab those very ships the moment they should reach good salt
water. Constance and Miranda tingled to tell him of their brave
Flora’s investment, but dared not, it was such a secret!

On a quarter of the deck where they stood alone, what a
striking pair were Flora and Irby as side by side they faced
the ruffling air, softly discussing matters alien to the
gliding scene and giving it only a dissimulative show of
attention. Now with her parasol he pointed to the sunlight in
the tree tops of a river grove where it gilded the windows of
the Ursulines’ Convent.

“Hum!” playfully murmured Kincaid to Anna, “he motions as
naturally as if that was what they were talking about.”

“It’s a lovely picture,” argued Anna.

“Miss Anna, when a fellow’s trying to read the book of his
fate he doesn’t care for the pictures.”

“How do you know that’s what he’s doing?”

“He’s always doing it!” laughed Hilary.

The word was truer than he meant. The Irby-value of things
was all that ever seriously engaged the ever serious cousin.
Just now his eyes had left the shore, where Flora’s lingered,
and he was speaking of Kincaid. “I see,” he said, “what you
think: that although no one of these things–uncle Brodnax’s
nonsense, Greenleaf’s claims, Hilary’s own preaching
against–against, eh–“

“Making brides to-day and widows to-morrow?”

“Yes, that while none of these is large enough in his view
to stop him by itself, yet combined they–“

“All working together they do it,” said the girl. Really she
had no such belief, but Irby’s poor wits were so nearly useless
to her that she found amusement in misleading them.

“Hilary tells me they do,” he replied, “but the more he says
it the less I believe him. Miss Flora, the fate of all my uncle
holds dear is hanging by a thread, a spider’s web, a young
girl’s freak! If ever she gives him a certain turn of the hand,
the right glance of her eye, he’ll be at her feet and every
hope I cherish–“

“Captain Irby,” Flora softly asked with her tinge of accent,
“is not this the third time?”

“Yes, if you mean again that–“

“That Anna, she is my dear, dear frien’! The fate of
nothing, of nobody, not even of me–or of–you–” she let that
pronoun catch in her throat–“can make me to do anything–oh!
or even to wish anything–not the very, very best for her!”

“Yet I thought it was our understanding–“

“Captain: There is bitwin us no understanding excep'”–the
voice grew tender–“that there is no understanding bitwin us.”
But she let her eyes so meltingly avow the very partnership her
words denied, that Irby felt himself the richest, in
understandings, of all men alive.

“What is that they are looking?” asked his idol, watching
Anna and Hilary. The old battle ground had been passed. Anna,
gazing back toward its townward edge, was shading her eyes from
the burnished water, and Hilary was helping her make out the
earthwork from behind which peered the tents of Kincaid’s
Battery while beyond both crouched low against the bright west
the trees and roof of Callender House–as straight in line from
here, Flora took note, as any shot or shell might ever fly.

XXVII

HARD GOING, UP STREAM

Anna and Kincaid went inside to see the upper and more
shining portions of the boat’s beautiful machinery. No one had
yet made rods, cranks, and gauge-dials sing anthems; but she
knew it was Hilary and an artisan or two in his foundry whose
audacity in the remaking of these gliding, plunging, turning,
vanishing, and returning members had given them their fine new
speed-making power, and as he stood at her side and pointed
from part to part they took on a living charm that was
reflected into him. Pleasant it was, also, to hear two or three
droll tales about his battery boys; the personal traits,
propensities, and soldierly value of many named by name, and
the composite character and temper that distinguished the
battery as a command; this specific quality of each particular
organic unit, fighting body, among their troops being as
needful for commanders to know as what to count on in the
individual man. So explained the artillerist while the pair
idled back to the open deck. With hidden vividness Anna liked
the topic. Had not she a right, the right of a silent partner?
A secret joy of the bond settled on her like dew on the
marshes, as she stood at his side.

Hilary loved the theme. The lives of those boys were in his
hands; at times to be hoarded, at times to be spent, in sudden
awful junctures to be furiously squandered. He did not say
this, but the thought was in both of them and drew them closer,
though neither moved. The boat rounded to, her engines stopped,
an officer came aboard from a skiff, and now she was under way
again and speeding up stream on her return, but Hilary and Anna
barely knew it. He began to talk of the boys’ sweethearts. Of
many of their tender affairs he was confidentially informed.
Yes, to be frank, he confessed he had prompted some fellows to
let their hearts lead them, and to pitch in and win while–

“Oh! certainly!” murmured Anna in compassion, “some of
them.”

“Yes,” said their captain, “but they are chaps–like
Charlie–whose hearts won’t keep unless they’re salted down and
barrelled, and I give the advice not in the sweethearts’
interest but–“

“Why not? Why shouldn’t a–” The word hung back.

“A lover?”

“Yes. Why shouldn’t he confess himself in her
interest? That needn’t pledge her.”

“Oh! do you think that would be fair?”

“Perfectly!”

“Well, now–take an actual case. Do you think the mere fact
that Adolphe truly and stick-to-it-ively loves Miss Flora gives
her a right to know it?”

“I do, and to know it a long, long time before he can have
any right to know whether–“

“Hum! while he goes where glory waits him–?”

“Yes.”

“And lets time–?”

“Yes.”

“And absence and distance and rumor try his unsupported
constancy?”

“Yes.”

With tight lips the soldier drew breath. “You know my uncle
expects now to be sent to Virginia at once?”

“Yes.”

“Adolphe, of course, goes with him.”

“Yes.”

“Yet you think–the great principle of so-much-for-so-much
to the contrary notwithstanding–he really owes it to her
to–“

Anna moved a step forward. She was thinking what a sweet
babe she was, thus to accept the surface of things. How did she
know that this laughing, light-spoken gallant, seemingly so
open and artless–oh! more infantile than her very self!–was
not deep and complex? Or that it was not he and Flora on
whose case she was being lured to speculate? The boat, of whose
large breathings and pulsings she became growingly aware,
offered no reply. Presently from the right shore, off before
them, came a strain of band music out of Camp Callender.

“Anna.”

“What hosts of stars!” said she. “How hoveringly they follow
us.”

The lover waited. The ship seemed to breathe deeper–to
glide faster. He spoke again: “May I tell you a secret?”

“Doesn’t the boat appear to you to tremble more than ever?”
was the sole response.

“Yes, she’s running up-stream. So am I. Anna, we’re off this
time–sure shot–with the General–to Virginia. The boys don’t
know it yet, but–listen.”

Over in the unseen camp the strain was once more–

“I’d offer thee this hand of
mine–“

“We’re turning in to be landed, are we not?” asked Anna as
the stars began to wheel.

“Yes. Do you really believe, Anna, that that song is not the
true word for a true lover and true soldier, like Adolphe, for
instance–to say to himself, of course, not to her?”

“Oh, Captain Kincaid, what does it matter?”

“Worlds to me. Anna, if I should turn that song into a
solemn avowal–to you–“

“Please don’t!–Oh, I mean–I don’t mean–I–I mean–“

“Ah, I know your meaning. But if I love you, profoundly,
abidingly, consumingly–as I do, Anna Callender, as I do!–and
am glad to pledge my soul to you knowing perfectly that you
have nothing to confess to me–“

“Oh, don’t, Captain Kincaid, don’t! You are not fair to me.
You make me appear–oh–we were speaking only of your cousin’s
special case. I don’t want your confession. I’m not ready
for–for anybody’s! You mustn’t make it! You–you–“

“It’s made, Anna Callender, and it makes me fair to you at
last.”

“Oh-h-h!”

“I know that matters little to you–“

“Oh, but you’re farther from fair than ever, Captain
Kincaid; you got my word for one thing and have used it for
another!” She turned and they tardily followed their friends,
bound for the gangway. A torch-basket of pine-knots blazing
under the bow covered flood and land with crimson light and
inky shadows. The engines had stopped. The boat swept the
shore. A single stage-plank lay thrust half out from her
forward quarter. A sailor stood on its free end with a coil of
small line. The crouching earthwork and its fierce guns glided
toward them. Knots of idle cannoneers stood along its crest. A
few came down to the water’s edge, to whom Anna and Hilary,
still paired alone, were a compelling sight. They lifted their
smart red caps. Charlie ventured a query: “It’s true, Captain,
isn’t it, that Virginia’s out?”

“I’ve not seen her,” was the solemn reply, and his comrades
tittered.

“Yes!” called Constance and Miranda, “she’s out!”

“Miss Anna,” murmured Hilary with a meekness it would have
avenged Charlie to hear, “I’ve only given you the right you
claim for every woman.”

“Oh, Captain Kincaid, I didn’t say every woman! I took
particular–I–I mean I–“

“If it’s any one’s right it’s yours.”

“I don’t want it!–I mean–I mean–“

“You mean, do you not? that I’ve no right to say what can
only distress you.”

“Do you think you have?–Oh, Lieutenant, it’s been a
perfectly lovely trip! I don’t know when the stars have seemed
so bright!”

“They’re not like us dull men, Miss Callender,” was the
sailor’s unlucky reply, “they can rise to any occasion a lady
can make.”

“Ladies don’t make occasions, Lieutenant.”

“Oh, don’t they!” laughed the sea-dog to Hilary. But duty
called. “No, no, Miss Val–! Don’t try that plank alone!
Captain Kincaid, will you give–? That’s right, sir…. Now,
Captain Irby, you and Miss Callender–steady!”

Seventh and last went the frail old lady, led by Kincaid.
She would have none other. She kept his arm with definite
design while all seven waved the departing vessel good-by. Then
for the walk to the house she shared Irby with Anna and gave
Flora to Hilary, with Miranda and Constance in front
outmanoeuvred by a sleight of hand so fleeting and affable that
even you or I would not have seen it.

XXVIII

THE CUP OF TANTALUS

Or can any one say, in these lives of a thousand
concealments and restraints, when things are
happening and when not, within us or without, or how near we
are now to the unexpected–to fate? See, Flora and
Hilary. He gave no outward show that he was burning to flee the
spot and swing his fists and howl and tear the ground.

Yet Flora knew; knew by herself; by a cold rage in her own
fair bosom, where every faculty stood gayly alert for each
least turn of incident, to foil or use it, while they talked
lightly of Virginia’s great step, or of the night’s loveliness,
counting the stars. “How small they look,” she said, “how calm
how still.”

“Yes, and then to think what they really are! so fearfully
far from small–or cold–or still!”

“Like ourselves,” she prompted.

“Yes!” cried the transparent soldier. “At our smallest the
smallest thing in us is that we should feel small. And how deep
down are we calm or cold? Miss Flora, I once knew a girl–fine
outside, inside. Lovers -she had to keep a turnstile. I knew a
pair of them. To hear those two fellows separately tell what
she was like, you couldn’t have believed them speaking of the
same person. The second one thought the first had–sort
o’–charted her harbor for him; but when he came to sail in,
‘pon my soul, if every shoal on the chart wasn’t deep water,
and every deep water a fortified shore–ha, ha, ha!”

Flora’s smile was lambent. “Yes,” she said, “that sweet Anna
she’s very intric-ate.” Hilary flamed and caught his breath,
but she met his eyes with the placidity of the sky above
them.

Suddenly he laughed: “Now I know what I am! Miss Flora, I–I
wish you’d be my pilot.”

She gave one resenting sparkle, but then shook her averted
head tenderly, murmured “Impossible,” and smiled.

“You think there’s no harbor there?”

“Listen,” she said.

“Yes, I hear it, a horse.”

“Captain Kincaid?”

“Miss Flora?”

“For dear Anna’s sake and yours, shall I be that
little bit your pilot, to say–?”

“What! to say. Don’t see her to-night?”

Flora’s brow sank.

“May I go with you, then, and learn why?” The words were
hurried, for a horseman was in front and the others had so
slackened pace that all were again in group. Anna caught
Flora’s reply:

“No, your cousin will be there. But to-morrow evening,
bif-ore–“

“Yes,” he echoed, “before anything else. I’ll come. Why!”–a
whinny of recognition came from the road–“why, that’s my
horse!”

The horseman dragged in his rein. Constance gasped and
Kincaid exclaimed, “Well! since when and from where, Steve
Mandeville?”

The rider sprang clanking to the ground and whipped out a
document. All pressed round him. He gave his bride two furious
kisses, held her in one arm and handed the missive to
Kincaid:

“With the compliment of Général Brodnax!”

Irby edged toward Flora, drawn by a look.

Hilary spoke: “Miss Anna, please hold this paper open for me
while I–Thank you.” He struck a match. The horse’s neck was
some shelter and the two pressed close to make more, yet the
match flared. The others listened to Mandeville:

“And ’twas me dizcover’ that tranzportation, juz’ chanzing
to arrive by the railroad–“

“Any one got a newspaper?” called Hilary. “Steve–yes, let’s
have a wisp o’ that.”

The paper burned and Hilary read. “Always the man of the
moment, me!” said Mandeville. “And also ‘t is thangs to me you
are the firs’ inform’, and if you are likewise the firs’ to
ripport–“

“Thank you!” cried Kincaid, letting out a stirrup leather.
“Adolphe, will you take that despatch on to Bartleson?” He
hurried to the other stirrup.

“Tell him no!” whispered Flora, but in vain, so
quickly had Anna handed Irby the order.

“Good-night, all!” cried Hilary, mounting. He wheeled, swung
his cap and galloped.

“Hear him!” laughed Miranda to Flora, and from up the dim
way his song came back:

“‘I can’t stand the
wilderness
But a few days, a few
days.'”

Still swinging his cap he groaned to himself and dropped his
head, then lifted it high, shook his locks like a swimmer, and
with a soft word to his horse sped faster.

“Yo’ pardon, sir,” said Mandeville to Irby, declining the
despatch, “I wou’n’t touch it. For why he di’n’ h-ask me? But
my stable is juz yondeh. Go, borrow you a horse–all night ‘f
you like.”

Thence Irby galloped to Bartleson’s tent, returned to
Callender House, dismounted and came up the steps. There stood
Anna, flushed and eager, twining arms with the placid Flora.
“Ah,” said the latter, as he offered her his escort home, “but
grandma and me, we–“

Anna broke in: “They’re going to stay here all night so that
you may ride at once to General Brodnax. Even we girls, Captain
Irby, must do all we can to help your cousin get away with the
battery, the one wish of his heart!” She listened, untwined and
glided into the house.

Instantly Flora spoke: “Go, Adolphe Irby, go! Ah,
snatch your luck, you lucky–man! Get him away to-night,
cost what cost!” Her fingers pushed him. He kissed them. She
murmured approvingly, but tore them away: “Go, go, go-o!”

Anna, pacing her chamber, with every gesture of
self-arraignment and distress, heard him gallop. Then standing
in her opened window she looked off across the veranda’s
balustrade and down into the camp, where at lines of mess-fires
like strings of burning beads the boys were cooking three days’
rations. A tap came on her door. She snatched up a toilet
brush: “Come in?”

She was glad it was only Flora. “Chérie,” tinkled the
visitor, “they have permit’ me!”

Anna beamed. “I was coming down,” she recklessly replied,
touching her temples at the mirror.

“Yes,” said the messenger, “’cause Mandeville he was
biggening to tell about Fort Sumter, and I asked them to
wait–ah”–she took Anna’s late pose in the window–“how plain
the camp!”

“Yes,” responded Anna with studied abstraction, “when the
window happens to be up. It’s so warm to-night, I–“

“Ah, Anna!”

“What, dear?” In secret panic Anna came and looked out at
Flora’s side caressingly.

“At last,” playfully sighed the Creole, “’tis good-by,
Kincaid’s Battery. Good-by, you hun’red good fellows, with yo’
hun’red horses and yo’ hun’red wheels and yo’ hun’red
hurras.”

“And hundred brave, true hearts!” said Anna.

“Yes, and good-by, Bartleson, good-by, Tracy, good-by
ladies’ man!–my dear, tell me once more! For him why always
that name?” Both laughed.

“I don’t know, unless it’s because–well–isn’t it–because
every lady has a piece of his heart and–no one wants all of
it?”

“Ah! no one?–when so many?–“

“Now, Flora, suppose some one did! What of it, if he can’t,
himself, get his whole heart together to give it to any one?”
The arguer offered to laugh again, but Flora was sad:

“You bil-ieve he’s that way–Hilary Kincaid?”

“There are men that way, Flora. It’s hard for us women to
realize, but it’s true!”

“Ah, but for him! For him that’s a dreadful!”

“Why, no, dear, I fancy he’s happiest that way.”

“But not best, no! And there’s another thing–his uncle! You
know ab-out that, I su’pose?”

“Yes, but he–come, they’ll be sending–“

“No,–no! a moment! Anna! Ah, Anna, you are too wise for me!
Anna, do you think”–the pair stood in the room with the
inquirer’s eyes on the floor–“you think his cousin is like
that?”

Anna kissed her temples, one in pity, the other in joy: “No,
dear, he’s not–Adolphe Irby is not.”

On the way downstairs Flora seized her hands: “Oh, Anna,
like always–this is just bit-win us? Ah, yes. And, oh, I wish
you’d try not to bil-ieve that way–ab-out his cousin!
Me, I hope no! And yet–“

“Yet what, love?” (Another panic.)

“Nothing, but–ah, he’s so ki-ind to my brother! And his
cousin Adolphe,” she whispered as they moved on down, “I don’t
know, but I fear perchanze he don’t like his cousin
Adolphe–his cousin Adolphe–on the outside, same as the
General, rough–‘t is a wondrous how his cousin Adolphe is fond
of him!”

Poor Anna. She led the way into the family group actually
wheedled into the belief that however she had blundered with
her lover, with Flora she had been clever. And now they heard
the only true account of how Captain Beauregard and General
Steve had taken Fort Sumter. At the same time every hearer kept
one ear alert toward the great open windows. Yet nothing came
to explain that Kincaid’s detention up-town was his fond
cousin’s contriving, and Sumter’s story was at its end when all
started at once and then subsided with relief as first the
drums and then the bugles sounded–no alarm, but only,
drowsily, “taps,” as if to say to Callender House as well as to
the camp, “Go to slee-eep … Go to slee-eep … Go to bed, go
to bed, go to slee-eep … Go to slee-eep, go to slee-eep …
Go to slee-ee-eep.”

XXIX

A CASTAWAY ROSE

Two of the morning. Had the leader, the idol of Kincaid’s
Battery, failed in his endeavor? Anna, on her bed, half
disrobed, but sleepless yet, still prayed he might not succeed.
Just this one time, oh, Lord! this one time! With Thee are not
all things possible? Canst Thou not so order all things that a
day or two’s delay of Kincaid’s Battery need work no evil to
the Cause nor any such rending to any heart as must be hers if
Kincaid’s Battery should go to-night? Softly the stair clock
boomed three. She lifted her head and for a full three minutes
harkened toward the camp. Still no sound there, thank God! She
turned upon her pillow.

But–what! Could that be the clock again, and had she
slumbered? “Three, four,” murmured the clock. She slipped from
her bed and stole to the window. Just above the low, dim
parapet, without a twinkle, the morning star shone large, its
slender, mile-long radiance shimmering on the gliding river. In
all the scented landscape was yet no first stir of dawn, but
only clearness enough to show the outlines of the camp ground.
She stared. She stared again! Not a tent was standing. Oh! and
oh! through what bugling, what rolling of drums and noise of
hoofs, wheels, and riders had she lain oblivious at last? None,
really; by order of the commanding general–on a private
suggestion of Irby’s, please notice, that the practice would be
of value–camp had been struck in silence. But to her the sole
fact in reach was that all its life was gone!

Sole fact? Gone? All gone? What was this long band of
darkness where the gray road should be, in the dull shadow of
the levee? Oh, God of mercy, it was the column! the whole of
Kincaid’s Battery, in the saddle and on the chests, waiting for
the word to march! Ah, thou ladies’ man! Thus to steal away! Is
this your profound–abiding–consuming love? The whisper was
only in her heart, but it had almost reached her lips, when she
caught her breath, her whole form in a tremor. She clenched the
window-frame, she clasped her heaving side.

For as though in reply, approaching from behind the house as
if already the producer had nearly made its circuit, there
sounded close under the balustrade the walking of a horse. God
grant no other ear had noted it! Now just beneath the window it
ceased. Hilary Kincaid! She could not see, but as sure as sight
she knew. Her warrior, her knight, her emperor now at last,
utterly and forever, she his, he hers, yet the last moment of
opportunity flitting by and she here helpless to speak the one
word of surrender and possession. Again she shrank and
trembled. Something had dropped in at the window. There it lay,
small and dark, on the floor. She snatched it up. Its scant tie
of ribbon, her touch told her, was a bit of the one she had
that other time thrown down to him, and the thing it tied and
that looked so black in the dusk was a red, red rose.

She pressed it to her lips. With quaking fingers that only
tangled the true-love knot and bled on the thorns, she stripped
the ribbon off and lifted a hand high to cast it forth, but
smote the sash and dropped the emblem at her own feet. In pain
and fear she caught it up, straightened, and glanced to her
door, the knot in one hand, the rose in the other, and her lips
apart. For at some unknown moment the door had opened, and in
it stood Flora Valcour.

Furtively into a corner fluttered rose and ribbon while the
emptied hands extended a counterfeit welcome and beckoned the
visitor’s aid to close the window. As the broad sash came down,
Anna’s heart, in final despair, sunk like lead, or like the
despairing heart of her disowned lover in the garden, Flora’s
heart the meantime rising like a recovered kite. They moved
from the window with their four hands joined, the dejected girl
dissembling elation, the elated one dejection.

“I don’t see,” twittered Anna, “how I should have closed it!
How chilly it gets toward–“

“Ah!” tremulously assented the subtler one. “And such a
dream! I was oblige’ to escape to you!”

“And did just right!” whispered and beamed poor Anna. “What
did you dream, dear?”

“I dremp the battery was going! and going to a battle! and
with the res’ my brother! And now–“

“Now it’s but a dream!” said her comforter.

“Anna!” the dreamer flashed a joy that seemed almost fierce.
She fondly pressed the hands she held and drew their owner
toward the ill-used rose. “Dearest, behold me! a thief, yet
innocent!”

Anna smiled fondly, but her heart had stopped, her feet
moved haltingly. A mask of self-censure poorly veiled Flora’s
joy, yet such as it was it was needed. Up from the garden,
barely audible to ears straining for it, yet surging through
those two minds like a stifling smoke, sounded the tread of the
departing horseman.

“Yes,” murmured Anna, hoping to drown the footfall, and with
a double meaning though with sincere tenderness, “you are
stealing now, not meaning to.”

“Now?” whispered the other, “how can that be?” though she
knew. “Ah, if I could steal now your heart al-so! But
I’ve stolen, I fear, only–your–confidenze!” Between the words
she loosed one hand, stooped and lifted the flower. Each tried
to press it to the other’s bosom, but it was Anna who
yielded.

“I’d make you take it,” she protested as Flora pinned it on,
“if I hadn’t thrown it away.”

“Dearest,” cooed the other, “that would make me a thief
ag-ain, and this time guilty.”

“Can’t I give a castaway rose to whom I please?”

“Not this one. Ah, sweet, a thousand thousand pardon!”–the
speaker bent to her hearer’s ear–“I saw you when you kiss’
it–and before.”

Anna’s face went into her hands, and face and hands to
Flora’s shoulder; but in the next breath she clutched the
shoulder and threw up her head, while the far strain of a bugle
faintly called, “Head of column to the right.”

The cadence died. “Flora! your dream is true and that’s the
battery! It’s going, Flora. It’s gone! Your brother’s gone!
Your brother, Flora, your brother! Charlie! he’s gone.”
So crying Anna sprang to the window and with unconscious ease
threw it up.

The pair stood in it. With a bound like the girl’s own,
clear day had come. Palely the river purpled and silvered. No
sound was anywhere, no human sign on vacant camp ground, levee,
or highroad. “Ah!”–Flora made a well pretended gesture of
discovery and distress–“’tis true! That bugl’ muz’ have meant
us good-by.”

“Oh, then it was cruel!” exclaimed Anna. “To you, dear,
cruel to you to steal off in that way. Run! dress for the
carriage!”

Flora played at hesitation: “Ah, love, if perchanze that
bugl’ was to call you?”

“My dear! how could even he–the ‘ladies’ man,’ ha,
ha!–imagine any true woman would come to the call of a
bugle? Go! while I order the carriage.”

They had left the window. The hostess lifted her hand toward
a bell-cord but the visitor stayed it, absently staring while
letting herself be pressed toward the door, thrilled with a
longing as wild as Anna’s and for the same sight, yet cunningly
pondering. Nay, waiting, rather, on instinct, which the next
instant told her that Anna would inevitably go herself, no
matter who stayed.

“You’ll come al-long too?” she pleadingly asked.

“No, dear, I cannot! Your grandmother will, of course, and
Miranda.” The bell-cord was pulled.

“Anna, you must go, else me, I will not!”

“Ah, how can I? Dear, dear, you’re wasting such
golden moments! Well, I’ll go with you! Only make
haste while I call the others–stop!” Their arms fell lightly
about each other’s neck. “You’ll never tell on me?… Not even
to Miranda?… Nor h-his–his uncle?… Nor”–the petitioner
pressed closer with brightening eyes–“nor his–cousin?”

Softly Flora’s face went into her hands, and face and hands
to Anna’s shoulder, as neat a reduplication as ever was. But
suddenly there were hoof-beats again. Yes, coming at an easy
gallop. Now they trotted through the front gate. The eyes of
the two stared. “A courier,” whispered Anna, “to Captain
Mandeville!” though all her soul hoped differently.

Only a courier it was. So said the maid who came in reply to
the late ring, but received no command. The two girls, shut in
together, Anna losing moments more golden than ever, heard the
rider at the veranda steps accost the old coachman and so soon
after greet Mandeville that it was plain the captain had
already been up and dressing.

“It’s Charlie!” breathed Anna, and Flora nodded.

Now Charlie trotted off again, and now galloped beyond
hearing, while Mandeville’s booted tread reascended to his
wife’s room. And now came Constance: “Nan, where on earth is
Fl–? Oh, of course! News, Nan! Good news, Flora! The battery,
you know–?”

“Yes,” said Anna, with her dryest smile, “it’s sneaked off
in the dark.”

“Nan, you’re mean! It’s marching up-town now, Flora. At
least the guns and caissons are, so as to be got onto the train
at once. And oh, girls, those poor, dear boys! the train–from
end to end it’s to be nothing but a freight train!”

“Hoh!” laughed the heartless Anna, “that’s better than
staying here.”

The sister put out her chin and turned again to Flora. “But
just now,” she said, “the main command are to wait and rest in
Congo Square, and about ten o’clock they’re to be joined by all
the companies of the Chasseurs that haven’t gone to Pensacola
and by the whole regiment of the Orleans Guards, as an escort
of honor, and march in that way to the depot, led by General
Brodnax and his staff–and Steve! And every one who wants to
bid them good-by must do it there. Of course there’ll be a
perfect jam, and so Miranda’s ordering breakfast at seven and
the carriage at eight, and Steve–he didn’t tell even me last
night because–” Her words stuck in her throat, her tears
glistened, she gnawed her lips. Anna laid tender hands on
her.

“Why, what, Connie, dear?”

“St–Ste–Steve–“

“Is Steve going with them to Virginia?”

The face of Constance went into her hands, and face and
hands to Anna’s shoulder. Meditatively smiling, Flora slipped
away to dress.

XXX

GOOD-BY, KINCAID’S BATTERY

Now he gave their words a frowning attention, and now
answered abruptly: “Humph! That looks tremendously modest in
you, gentlemen,–what?… Well, then, in your whole command if
it’s their notion. But it’s vanity at last, sirs, pure vanity.
Kincaid’s Battery ‘doesn’t want to parade its dinginess till
it’s done something’–pure vanity! ‘Shortest way’–nonsense!
The shortest way to the train isn’t the point! The point is to
make so inspiring a show of you as to shame the damned
stay-at-homes!”

“You’ll par-ade,” broke in the flaming Mandeville. “worse’
dress than presently, when you rit-urn conqueror’!” But that
wearied the General more.

“Oh, hell,” he mumbled. “Captain Kincaid, eh–” He led that
officer alone to a window and spoke low: “About my girl,
Hilary,–and me. I’d like to decide that matter before you show
your heels. You, eh,–default, I suppose?”

“No, uncle, she does that. I do only the hopeless
loving.”

“The wha-at? Great Lord! You don’t tell me you–?”

“Yes, I caved in last night; told her I loved her. Oh, I
didn’t do it just in this ashes-of-roses tone of voice,
but”–the nephew smiled–the General scowled–“you should have
seen me, uncle. You’d have thought it was Mandeville. I made a
gorgeous botch of it.”

“You don’t mean she–?”

“Yes, sir, adjourned me sine die. Oh, it’s no use to
look at me.” He laughed. “The calf’s run over me. My fat’s in
the fire.”

The General softly swore and continued his gaze. “I
believe,” he slowly said, “that’s why you wanted to slink out
of town the back way.”

“Oh, no, it’s not. Or at least–well, anyhow, uncle, now you
can decide in favor of Adolphe.”

The uncle swore so audibly that the staff heard and
exchanged smiles: “I neither can nor will decide–for either of
you–yet! You understand? I don’t do it. Go, bring your
battery.”

The city was taken by surprise. Congo Square was void of
soldiers before half Canal street’s new red-white-and-red
bunting could be thrown to the air. In column of fours–escort
leading and the giant in the bearskin hat leading it–they came
up Rampart street. On their right hardly did time suffice for
boys to climb the trees that in four rows shaded its noisome
canal; on their left not a second too many was there for the
people to crowd the doorsteps, fill windows and garden gates,
line the banquettes and silently gather breath and ardor while
the escort moved by, before the moment was come in which to
cheer and cheer and cheer, as with a hundred flashing sabres at
shoulder the dismounted, heavy-knapsacked, camp-worn battery,
Kincaid’s Battery–you could read the name on the
flag–Kincaid’s Battery! came and came and passed. In Canal
street and in St. Charles there showed a fierceness of pain in
the cheers, and the march was by platoons. At the hotel General
Brodnax and staff joined and led it–up St. Charles, around
Tivoli Circle, and so at last into Calliope street.

Meantime far away and sadly belated, with the Valcours
cunningly to blame and their confiding hostesses generously
making light of it, up Love street hurried the Callenders’
carriage. Up the way of Love and athwart the oddest tangle of
streets in New Orleans,–Frenchmen and Casacalvo, Greatmen,
History, Victory, Peace, Arts, Poet, Music, Bagatelle, Craps,
and Mysterious–across Elysian Fields not too Elysian, past the
green, high-fenced gardens of Esplanade and Rampart flecked
red-white-and-red with the oleander, the magnolia, and the
rose, spun the wheels, spanked the high-trotters. The sun was
high and hot, shadows were scant and sharp, here a fence and
there a wall were as blinding white as the towering
fair-weather clouds, gowns were gauze and the parasols were
six, for up beside the old coachman sat Victorine. She it was
who first saw that Congo Square was empty and then that the
crowds were gone from Canal street. It was she who first
suggested Dryads street for a short cut and at Triton Walk was
first to hear, on before, the music,–ah, those horn-bursting
Dutchmen! could they never, never hit it right?–

“When other lips and other
hearts
Their tale of love shall
tell–“

and it was she who, as they crossed Calliope street, first
espied the rear of the procession, in column of fours again, it
was she who flashed tears of joy as they whirled into Erato
street to overtake the van and she was first to alight at the
station.

The General and his staff were just reaching it. Far down
behind them shone the armed host. The march ceased, the
music–“then you’ll rememb'”–broke off short. The column
rested. “Mon Dieu!” said even the Orleans Guards, “quel
chaleur! Is it not a terrib’, thad sun!” Hundreds of their blue
képis, hundreds of gray shakos in the Confederate
Guards, were lifted to wipe streaming necks and throats, while
away down beyond our ladies’ ken all the drummers of the double
escort, forty by count, silently came back and moved in between
the battery and its band to make the last music the very
bravest. Was that Kincaid, the crowd asked, one of another; he
of the thick black locks, tired cheek and brow, and eyes that
danced now as he smiled and talked? “Phew! me, I shou’n’ love
to be tall like that, going to be shot at, no! ha, ha! But
thad’s no wonder they are call’ the ladies’ man batt’rie!”

“Hah! they are not call’ so because him, but because
themse’v’s! Every one he is that, and they didn’ got the name
in Circus street neither, ha, ha!–although–Hello, Chahlie
Valcour. Good-by, Chahlie. Don’t ged shoot in the back–ha,
ha!–“

A command! How eternally different from the voice of
prattle. The crowd huddled back to either sidewalk, forced by
the opening lines of the escort backed against it, till the
long, shelled wagon-way gleamed white and bare. Oh, Heaven! oh,
home! oh, love! oh, war! For hundreds, hundreds–beat Anna’s
heart–the awful hour had come, had come! She and her five
companions could see clear down both bayonet-crested living
walls–blue half the sun-tortured way, gray the other half–to
where in red képis and with shimmering sabres, behind
their tall captain, stretched the dense platoons and came and
came, to the crash of horns, the boys, the boys, the dear, dear
boys who with him, with him must go, must go!

“Don’t cry, Connie dear,” she whispered, though stubborn
drops were salting her own lips, “it will make it harder for
Steve.”

“Harder!” moaned the doting bride, “you don’t know him!”

“Oh, let any woman cry who can,” laughed Flora, “I wish I
could!” and verily spoke the truth. Anna meltingly pressed her
hand but gave her no glance. All eyes, dry or wet, were fixed
on the nearing mass, all ears drank the rising peal and roar of
its horns and drums. How superbly rigorous its single,
two-hundred-footed step. With what splendid rigidity the
escorts’ burnished lines walled in its oncome.

But suddenly there was a change. Whether it began in the
music, which turned into a tune every Tom, Dick, and Harry now
had by heart, or whether a moment before among the blue-caps or
gray-shakos, neither Anna nor the crowd could tell. Some father
in those side ranks lawlessly cried out to his red-capped boy
as the passing lad brushed close against him, “Good-by, my
son!” and as the son gave him only a sidelong glance he seized
and shook the sabre arm, and all that long, bristling lane of
bayonets went out of plumb, out of shape and order, and a
thousand brass-buttoned throats shouted good-by and hurrah.
Shakos waved, shoulders were snatched and hugged, blue
képis and red were knocked awry, beards were kissed and
mad tears let flow. And still, with a rigor the superbest yet
because the new tune was so perfect to march by, fell the
unshaken tread of the cannoneers, and every onlooker laughed
and wept and cheered as the brass rent out to the deafening
drums, and the drums roared back to the piercing brass,–

De black-snake love’ de
blackbird’ nes’,
De baby love’ his mamy’s
bres’,
An’ raggy-tag, aw
spick-an’-span,
De ladies loves de ladies’
man.
I loves to roll my eyes to de
ladies!
I loves to sympathize wid de
ladies!
As long as eveh I knows sugah
f’om san’
I’s bound to be a ladies’
man.

So the black-hatted giant with the silver staff strode into
the wide shed, the puffy-cheeked band reading their music and
feeling for foothold as they followed, and just yonder behind
them, in the middle of the white way, untouched by all those
fathers, unhailed by any brother of his own, came Hilary
Kincaid with all the battery at his neat heels, its files
tightly serried but its platoons in open order, each flashing
its sabres to a “present” on nearing the General and back to a
“carry” when he was passed, and then lengthening into column of
files to enter the blessed shade of the station.

In beside them surged a privileged throng of near kin, every
one calling over every one’s head, “Good-by!” “Good-by!”
“Here’s your mother, Johnnie!” and, “Here’s your wife,
Achille!” Midmost went the Callenders, the Valcours, and
Victorine, willy-nilly, topsy-turvy, swept away, smothering,
twisting, laughing, stumbling, staggering, yet saved alive by
that man of the moment Mandeville, until half-way down the shed
and the long box-car train they brought up on a pile of
ordnance stores and clung like drift in a flood. And at every
twist and stagger Anna said in her heart a speech she had been
saying over and over ever since the start from Callender House;
a poor commonplace speech that must be spoken though she
perished for shame of it; that must be darted out just at the
right last instant if such an instant Heaven would only send:
“I take back what I said last night and I’m glad you spoke as
you did!”

Here now the moment seemed at hand. For here was the
officers’ box-car and here with sword in sheath Kincaid also
had stopped, in conference with the conductor, while his
lieutenants marched the column on, now halted it along the
train’s full length, now faced it against the open cars and now
gave final command to break ranks. In comic confusion the
fellows clambered aboard stormed by their friends’ fond
laughter at the awkwardness of loaded knapsacks, and their
retorting mirth drowned in a new flood of good-bys and adieus,
fresh waving of hats and handkerchiefs, and made-over smiles
from eyes that had wept themselves dry. The tear-dimmed
Victorine called gay injunctions to her father, the undimmed
Flora to her brother, and Anna laughed and laughed and waved hi
all directions save one. There Mandeville had joined Kincaid
and the conductor and amid the wide downpour and swirl of words
and cries was debating with them whether it were safer to leave
the shed slowly or swiftly; and there every now and then Anna’s
glance flitted near enough for Hilary to have caught it as
easily as did Bartleson, Tracy, every lieutenant and sergeant
of the command, busy as they were warning the throng back from
the cars; yet by him it was never caught.

The debate had ended. He gave the conductor a dismissing nod
that sent him, with a signalling hand thrown high, smartly away
toward the locomotive. The universal clatter and flutter
redoubled. The bell was sounding and Mandeville was hotly
shaking hands with Flora, Miranda, all. The train stirred,
groaned, crept, faltered, crept on–on–one’s brain tingled to
the cheers, and women were crying again.

Kincaid’s eyes ran far and near in final summing up. The
reluctant train gave a dogged joggle and jerk, hung back,
dragged on, moved a trifle quicker; and still the only proof
that he knew she was here–here within three steps of him–was
the careful failure of those eyes ever to light on her. Oh,
heart, heart, heart! would it be so to the very end and
vanishment of all?

“I take back–I take–” was there going to be no chance to
begin it? Was he grief blind? or was he scorn blind? No matter!
what she had sown she would reap if she had to do it under the
very thundercloud of his frown. All or any, the blame of
estrangement should be his, not hers! Oh, Connie, Connie!
Mandeville had clutched Constance and was kissing her on lips
and head and cheeks. He wheeled, caught a hand from the nearest
car, and sprang in. Kincaid stood alone. The conductor made him
an eager sign. The wheels of the train clicked briskly. He
glanced up and down it, then sprang to Miranda, seized her
hand, cried “Good-by!” snatched Madame’s, Flora’s, Victorine’s,
Connie’s,–“Good-by–Good-by!”–and came to Anna.

And did she instantly begin, “I take–?” Not at all! She
gave her hand, both hands, but her lips stood helplessly apart.
Flora, Madame, Victorine, Constance, Miranda, Charlie from a
car’s top, the three lieutenants, the battery’s whole hundred,
saw Hilary’s gaze pour into hers, hers into his. Only the eyes
of the tumultuous crowd still followed the train and its living
freight. A woman darted to a car’s open door and gleaned one
last wild kiss. Two, ten, twenty others, while the conductor
ran waving, ordering, thrusting them away, repeated the
splendid theft, and who last of all and with a double booty but
Constance! Anna beheld the action, though with eyes still
captive. With captive eyes, and with lips now shut and now
apart again as she vainly strove for speech, she saw still
plainer his speech fail also. His hands tightened on hers, hers
in his.

“Good-by!” they cried together and were dumb again; but in
their mutual gaze–more vehement than their voices
joined–louder than all the din about them–confession so
answered worship that he snatched her to his breast; yet when
he dared bend to lay a kiss upon her brow he failed once more,
for she leaped and caught it on her lips.

Dishevelled, liberated, and burning with blushes, she
watched the end of the train shrink away. On its last iron
ladder the conductor swung aside to make room for Kincaid’s
stalwart spring. So! It gained one handhold, one foothold. But
the foot slipped, the soldier’s cap tumbled to the ground, and
every onlooker drew a gasp. No, the conductor held him, and
erect and secure, with bare locks ruffling in the wind of the
train, he looked back, waved, and so passed from sight.

Archly, in fond Spanish, “How do you feel now?” asked Madame
of her scintillant granddaughter as with their friends and the
dissolving throng they moved to the carriage; and in the same
tongue Flora, with a caressing smile, rejoined, “I feel like
swinging you round by the hair.”

Anna, inwardly frantic, chattered and laughed. “I don’t know
what possessed me!” she cried.

But Constance was all earnestness: “Nan, you did it for the
Cause–the flag–the battery–anything but him personally.
He knows it. Everybody saw that. Its very
publicity–“

“Yes?” soothingly interposed Madame, “‘t was a so verrie
pewblic that–“

“Why, Flora,” continued the well-meaning sister, “Steve says
when he came back into Charleston from Fort Sumter the
ladies–“

“Of course!” said Flora, sparkling afresh. “Even Steve
understands that, grandma.” Her foot was on a step of the
carriage. A child plucked her flowing sleeve:

“Misses! Mom-a say'”–he pressed into her grasp something
made of broadcloth, very red and golden–“here yo’ husband’s
cap.”

XXXI

VIRGINIA GIRLS AND LOUISIANA BOYS

Let us never paint war too fair; but this small volume tells
of little beyond the gold-laced year of ‘Sixty-one, nor of much
beyond Virginia, even over whose later war-years the color
effects of reminiscence show blue and green and sun-lit despite
all the scarlet of carnage, the black and crimson of burning,
and the grim hues of sickness, squalor, and semi-starvation;
show green and blue in the sunlight of victory, contrasted with
those of the states west and south of her.

It tells–this book compiled largely from correspondence of
persons well known to you and me–of the first “eight-days’
crawl” that conveyed the chaffing, chafing command up through
Mississippi, across East Tennessee into southeast Virginia and
so on through Lynchburg to lovely Richmond; tells how never a
house was passed in town or country but handkerchiefs,
neckerchiefs, snatched-off sunbonnets, and Confederate flags
wafted them on. It tells of the uncounted railway stations
where swarmed the girls in white muslin aprons and
red-white-and-red bows, who waved them, in as they came, and
unconsciously squinted and made faces at them in the intense
sunlight. It tells how the maidens gave them dainties and sweet
glances, and boutonnières of tuberoses and violets, and
bloodthirsty adjurations, and blarney for blarney; gave them
seven wild well-believed rumors for as many impromptu canards,
and in their soft plantation drawl asked which was the one
paramount “ladies’ man,” and were assured by every lad of the
hundred that it was himself. It tells how, having heard in
advance that the more authentic one was black-haired, handsome,
and overtowering, they singled out the drum-major, were set
right only by the roaring laughter, and huddled backward like
caged quails from Kincaid’s brazen smile, yet waved again as
the train finally jogged on with the band playing from the roof
of the rear car,–

“I’d offer thee this hand of
mine
If I could love thee
less!”

To Anna that part seemed not so killingly funny or so very
interesting, but she was not one of the book’s editors.

Two or three pages told of a week in camp just outside the
Virginian capital, where by day, by night, on its rocky bed
sang James river; of the business quarter, noisy with army
wagons–“rattling o’er the stony street,” says the page; of
colonels, generals, and statesmen by name–Hampton, Wigfall,
the fiery Toombs, the knightly Lee, the wise Lamar; of such and
such headquarters, of sentinelled warehouses, glowing
ironworks, galloping aides-de-camp and couriers and arriving
and departing columns, some as trig (almost) as Kincaid’s
Battery, with their black servants following in grotesque herds
along the sidewalks; and some rudely accoutred, shaggy,
staring, dust-begrimed, in baggy butternut jeans, bearing
flint-lock muskets and trudging round-shouldered after fifes
and drums that squealed and boomed out the strains of their
forgotten ancestors: “The Campbells are coming,” “Johnnie was a
piper’s son,” or–

“My heart is ever turning
back
To the girl I left behind
me.”

“You should have seen the girls,” laughs the book.

But there were girls not of the mountains or sand-hills,
whom also you should have seen, at battery manoeuvres or in the
tulip-tree and maple shade of proud Franklin street, or in its
rose-embowered homes by night; girls whom few could dance with,
or even sit long beside in the honeysuckle vines of their
porticos, without risk of acute heart trouble, testifies the
callow volume. They treated every lad in the battery like a
lieutenant, and the “ladies’ man” like a king. You should have
seen him waltz them or in quadrille or cotillon swing, balance,
and change them, their eyes brightening and feet quickening
whenever the tune became–

“Ole mahs’ love’ wine, ole
mis’ love’ silk,
De piggies, dey loves
buttehmilk.”

Great week! tarheel camp-sentries and sand-hill
street-patrols mistaking the boys for officers, saluting as
they passed and always getting an officer’s salute in return!
Hilary seen every day with men high and mighty, who were as
quick as the girls to make merry with him, yet always in their
merriment seeming, he and they alike, exceptionally upright,
downright, heartright, and busy. It kept the boys straight and
strong.

Close after came a month or so on the Yorktown peninsula
with that master of strategic ruse, Magruder, but solely in the
dreariest hardships of war, minus all the grander sorts that
yield glory; rains, bad food, ill-chosen camps, freshets,
terrible roads, horses sick and raw-boned, chills, jaundice,
emaciation, barely an occasional bang at the enemy on
reconnoissances and picketings, and marches and countermarches
through blistering noons and skyless nights, with men, teams,
and guns trying to see which could stagger the worst, along
with columns of infantry mutinously weary of forever fortifying
and never fighting. Which things the book bravely makes light
of, Hilary maintaining that the battery boys had a spirit to
bear them better than most commands did, and the boys
reporting–not to boast the special kindness everywhere of
ladies for ladies’ men–that Hilary himself, oftenest by sunny,
but sometimes by cyclonic, treatment of commissaries,
quartermasters, surgeons, and citizens, made their burdens
trivial.

So we, too, lightly pass them. After all, the things most
important here are matters not military of which the book does
not tell. Of such Victorine, assistant editor to Miranda,
learned richly from Anna–who merely lent letters–without Anna
knowing it. Yet Flora drew little from Victorine, who was as
Latin as Flora, truly loved Anna, and through Charlie was a
better reader of Flora’s Latin than he or Flora or any one
suspected.

For a moment more, however, let us stay with the chronicle.
At last, when all was suffered, the infuriated boys missed Ben
Butler and Big Bethel! One day soon after that engagement,
returning through Richmond in new uniforms–of a sort–with
scoured faces, undusty locks, full ranks, fresh horses, new
harness and shining pieces, and with every gun-carriage,
limber, and caisson freshly painted, they told their wrath to
Franklin street girls while drinking their dippers of water.
Also–“Good-by!–

“‘I’d offer thee this hand of
mine–‘”

They were bound northward to join their own Creole
Beauregard at a railway junction called–.

XXXII

MANASSAS

Fred Greenleaf was one of its wounded prisoners. Hilary
cared for him and sought his exchange; but owing to some
invisible wire-pulling by Flora Valcour, done while with equal
privacy she showed the captive much graciousness, he was still
in the Parish Prison, New Orleans, in February, ’62, when the
book was about to be made, though recovered of wounds and
prison ills and twice or thrice out on his parole, after dusk
and in civilian’s dress, at Callender House.

The Callenders had heard the combat’s proud story often, of
course, not only from battery lads bringing home dead comrades,
or coming to get well of their own hurts, or never to get well
of them, but also from gold-sleeved, gray-breasted new suitors
of Anna (over-staying their furloughs), whom she kept from
tenderer themes by sprightly queries that never tired and
constantly brought forth what seemed totally unsought mentions
of the battery. And she had gathered the tale from Greenleaf as
well. Constance, to scandalized intimates, marvelled at her
sister’s tolerance of his outrageous version; but Miranda
remembered how easy it is to bear with patience (on any matter
but one) a rejected lover who has remained faithful, and Flora,
to grandma, smiled contentedly.

Anna’s own private version (sum of all), though never
written even in her diary, was illustrated, mind-pictured. Into
her reveries had gradually come a tableau of the great field.
Inaccurate it may have been, incomplete, even grotesquely
unfair; but to her it was at least clear. Here–through the
middle of her blue-skied, pensive contemplation, so to
speak–flowed Bull Run. High above it, circling in eagle
majesty under still, white clouds, the hungry buzzard, vainly
as yet, scanned the green acres of meadow and wood merry with
the lark, the thrush, the cardinal. Here she discerned the
untried gray brigades–atom-small on nature’s face, but with
Ewell, Early, Longstreet, and other such to lead them–holding
the frequent fords, from Union Mills up to Lewis’s. Here near
Mitchell’s, on a lonesome roadside, stood Kincaid’s Battery,
fated there to stay for hours yet, in hateful idleness and a
fierce July sun, watching white smoke-lines of crackling
infantry multiply in the landscape or bursting shells make
white smoke-rings in the bright air, and to listen helplessly
to the boom, hurtle and boom of other artilleries and the far
away cheering and counter-cheering of friend and foe. Yonder in
the far east glimmered Centerville, its hitherward roads,
already in the sabbath sunrise, full of brave bluecoats choking
with Virginia dust and throwing away their hot blankets as they
came. Here she made out Stone Bridge, guarded by a brigade
called Jackson’s; here, crossing it east and west, the
Warrenton turnpike, and yonder north of them that rise of dust
above the trees which meant a flanking Federal column and crept
westward as Evans watched it, toward Sudley Springs, ford,
mill, and church, where already much blue infantry had stolen
round by night from Centerville. Here, leading south from
these, she descried the sunken Sudley road, that with a dip and
a rise crossed the turnpike and Young’s Branch. There eastward
of it the branch turned north-east and then southeast between
those sloping fields beyond which Evans and Wheat were
presently fighting Burnside; through which Bee, among bursting
shells, pressed to their aid against such as Keyes and Sherman,
and back over which, after a long, hot struggle, she could
see–could hear–the aiders and the aided swept in one torn,
depleted tumult, shattered, confounded, and made the more
impotent by their own clamor. Here was the many-ravined,
tree-dotted, southward rise by which, in concave line, the
Northern brigades and batteries, pressing across the bends of
the branch, advanced to the famed Henry house plateau–that key
of victory where by midday fell all the horrid weight of the
battle; where the guns of Ricketts and Griffen for the North
and of Walton and Imboden for the South crashed and mowed, and
across and across which the opposing infantries volleyed and
bled, screamed, groaned, swayed, and drove each other,
staggered, panted, rallied, cheered, and fell or fought on
among the fallen. Here cried Bee to the dazed crowd, “Look at
Jackson’s brigade standing like a stone wall.” Here Beauregard
and Johnson formed their new front of half a dozen states on
Alabama’s colours, and here a bit later the Creole general’s
horse was shot under him. Northward here, down the slope and
over the branch, rolled the conflict, and there on the opposite
rise, among his routed blues, was Greenleaf disabled and
taken.

All these, I say, were in Anna’s changing picture. Here from
the left, out of the sunken road, came Howard, Heintzelman, and
their like, and here in the oak wood that lay across it the
blue and gray lines spent long terms of agony mangling each
other. Here early in that part of the struggle–sent for at
last by Beauregard himself, they say–came Kincaid’s Battery,
whirling, shouting, whip-cracking, sweating, with Hilary well
ahead of them and Mandeville at his side, to the ground behind
the Henry house when it had been lost and retaken and all but
lost again. Here Hilary, spurring on away from his bounding
guns to choose them a vantage ground, broke into a horrid
mêlée alone and was for a moment made prisoner,
but in the next had handed his captors over to fresh graycoats
charging; and here, sweeping into action with all the grace and
precision of the drill-ground at Camp Callender, came his
battery, his and hers! Here rode Bartleson, here Villeneuve,
Maxime with the colors, Tracy, Sam Gibbs; and here from the
chests sprang Violett, Rareshide, Charlie and their scores of
fellows, unlimbered, sighted, blazed, sponged, reloaded, pealed
again, sent havoc into the enemy and got havoc from them. Here
one and another groaned, and another and another dumbly fell.
Here McStea, and St. Ange, Converse, Fusilier, Avendano, Ned
Ferry and others limbered up for closer work, galloped, raced,
plunged, reared, and stumbled, gained the new ground and made
it a worse slaughter-pen than the first, yet held on and
blazed, pealed, and smoked on, begrimed and gory. Here was
Tracy borne away to field hospital leaving Avendano and McStea
groveling in anguish under the wheels, and brave Converse and
young Willie Calder, hot-headed Fusilier and dear madcap Jules
St. Ange lying near them out of pain forever. Yet here their
fellows blazed on and on, black, shattered, decimated, short of
horses, one caisson blown up, and finally dragged away to
bivouac, proud holders of all their six Callender guns, their
silken flag shot-torn but unsoiled and furled only when shells
could no longer reach the flying foe.

XXXIII

LETTERS

Yes, they were in correspondence–after a fashion. That
signified nothing, she would have had you understand; so were
Charlie and Victorine, so were–oh!–every girl wrote to
somebody at the front; one could not do less and be a patriot.
Some girl patriots had a dozen on their list. Some lads had a
dozen on theirs.

Ah, me! those swan-white, sky-blue, rose-pink maidens who in
every town and on every plantation from Memphis to Charleston,
from Richmond to New Orleans, despatched their billets by the
forlornly precarious post only when they could not send them by
the “urbanity” of such or such a one! Could you have contrasted
with them the homeless, shelterless, pencil-borrowing,
elbow-scratching, musty, fusty tatterdemalions who stretched
out on the turfless ground beside their mess fires to extort or
answer those cautious or incautious missives, or who for the
fortieth time drew them from hiding to reread into their
guarded or unguarded lines meanings never dreamed by their
writers, you could not have laughed without a feeling of tears,
or felt the tears without smiling. Many a chap’s epistle was
scrawled, many a one even rhymed, in a rifle-pit with the
enemy’s shells bursting over. Many a one was feebly dictated to
some blessed, unskilled volunteer nurse in a barn or
smoke-house or in some cannon-shattered church. From the like
of that who with a woman’s heart could withhold reply? Yes,
Anna and Hilary were in correspondence.

So were Flora and Irby. So were Hilary and Flora. Was not
Flora Anna’s particular friend and Hilary’s “pilot”? She had
accepted the office on condition that, in his own heart’s
interest, their dear Anna should not know of it.

“The better part of life”–she wrote–“is it not made up of
such loving concealments?”

And as he read the words in his tent he smilingly thought,
“That looks true even if it isn’t!”

Her letters were much more frequent than Anna’s and always
told of Anna fondly, often with sweet praises–not so sweet to
him–of her impartial graciousness to her semicircle of
brass-buttoned worshippers. Lately Flora had mentioned
Greenleaf in a modified way especially disturbing.

If Anna could have made any one a full confidante such might
have been Flora, but to do so was not in her nature. She could
trust without stint. Distrust, as we know, was intolerable to
her. She could not doubt her friends, but neither could she
unveil her soul. Nevertheless, more than once, as the two
exchanged–in a purely academical way–their criticisms of
life, some query raised by Anna showed just what had been
passing between her and Hilary and enabled Flora to keep them
steered apart.

No hard task, the times being so highly calculated to make
the course of true love a “hard road to travel,” as the singing
soldier boys called “Jordan.” Letters, at any time, are
sufficiently promotive of misunderstandings, but in the
Confederacy they drifted from camp to camp, from pocket to
pocket, like letters in bottles committed to the sea. The times
being such, I say, and Hilary and Anna as they were: he a
winner of men, yes! but by nature, not art; to men and women
equally, a grown up, barely grown up, boy. That is why women
could afford to like him so frankly. The art of courtship–of
men or women–was not in him. Otherwise the battery–every gun
of which, they say, counted for two as long as he was by–must
have lost him through promotion before that first year was half
out. The moment he became a conscious suitor, to man or woman,
even by proxy, his power went from him; from pen, from tongue,
from countenance. And Anna–I may have shown the fact
awkwardly, but certainly you see–Anna was incurably
difficult.

Too much else awaits our telling to allow here a recital of
their hearts’ war while love–and love’s foes–hid in winter
quarters, as it were. That is to say, from the season of that
mad kiss which she had never forgiven herself (much less
repented), to the day of Beauregard’s appeal, early in ’62, to
all the plantations and churches in Dixie’s Land to give him
their bells, bells, bells–every bit of bronze or brass they
could rake up or break off–to be cast into cannon; and to his
own Louisiana in particular to send him, hot speed, five
thousand more men to help him and Albert Sidney Johnston drive
Buel and Grant out of Tennessee.

Before the battery had got half way to Virginia Hilary had
written back to Anna his inevitable rhapsody over that amazing
performance of hers, taking it as patent and seal of her final,
utter, absolute self-bestowal. And indeed this it might have
turned out to be had he but approached it by a discreet circuit
through the simplest feminine essentials of negative
make-believe. But to spring out upon it in that straightforward
manner–! From May to February her answer to this was the only
prompt reply he ever received from her. It crowds our story
backward for a moment, for it came on one of those early
Peninsula days previous to Manassas, happening, oddly, to reach
him–by the hand of Villeneuve–as he stood, mounted, behind
the battery, under a smart skirmish fire. With a heart leaping
in joyous assurance he opened the small missive and bent his
eyes upon its first lines.

As he did so a hostile shell, first that had ever come so
near, burst just in front of his guns. A big lump of metal
struck one of them on the chase, glanced, clipped off half the
low top of his forage-cap and struck in the trunk of an oak
behind him, and as his good horse flinched and quivered he
looked unwillingly from the page toward a puff of white smoke
on a distant hill, and with a broad smile said–a mere nonsense
word; but the humor of such things has an absurd valuation and
persistency in camps, and for months afterward,
“Ah-r?–indeed!” was the battery’s gay response to every
startling sound. He had luck in catchwords, this Hilary. He
fought the scrimmage through with those unread pages folded
slim between a thumb and forefinger, often using them to point
out things, and when after it he had reopened them and read
them through–and through again–to their dizzying close, the
battery surgeon came murmuring privately–

“Cap, what’s wrong; bad news?”

“Oh!” said Hilary, looking up from a third reading, “what,
this? No-o! nothing wrong in this. I was wrong. I’m all right
now.”

“No, you’re not, Captain. You come along now and lie down.
The windage of that chunk of iron has–“

“Why, Doc, I shouldn’t wonder! If you’ll just keep everybody
away from me awhile, yourself included, I will lie down,” said
the unnerved commander, and presently, alone and supine, softly
asked himself with grim humor, “Which chunk of iron?”

The actual text of Anna’s chunk was never divulged, even to
Flora. We do not need it. Neither did Flora. One of its later
effects was to give the slender correspondence which crawled
after it much more historical value to the battery and the
battery’s beloved home city than otherwise it might have had.
From Virginia it told spiritedly of men, policies, and
movements; sketched cabinet officers, the president, and the
great leaders and subleaders in the field–Stuart, Gordon,
Fitzhugh Lee. It gave droll, picturesque accounts of the
artillerist’s daily life; of the hard, scant fare and the lucky
feast now and then on a rabbit or a squirrel, turtles’ eggs, or
wild strawberries. It depicted moonlight rides to dance with
Shenandoah girls; the playing of camp charades; and the singing
of war, home, and love songs around the late camp fire, timed
to the antic banjo or the sentimental guitar. Drolly, yet with
tenderness for others, it portrayed mountain storm, valley
freshet, and heart-breaking night marches beside tottering guns
in the straining, sucking, leaden-heavy, red clay, and then,
raptly, the glories of sunrise and sunset over the contours of
the Blue Ridge. And it explained the countless things which
happily enable a commander to keep himself as busy as a
mud-dauber, however idle the camp or however torn his own
heart.

From Anna’s side came such stories as that of a flag
presentation to the Sumter, wherein she had taken some
minor part; of seeing that slim terror glide down by Callender
House for a safe escape through the blockading fleet to the
high seas and a world-wide fame; of Flora’s towboat privateer
sending in one large but empty prize whose sale did not pay
expenses, and then being itself captured by the blockaders; of
“Hamlet” given by amateurs at the St. Charles Theatre; of great
distress among the poor, all sorts of gayeties for their
benefit, bad money, bad management, a grand concert for the
army in Arkansas, women in mourning as numerous as men in
uniform, and both men and women breaking down in body and mind
under the universal strain.

Historically valuable, you see. Yet through all this
impersonal interchange love shone out to love like lamplight
through the blinds of two opposite closed windows, and every
heart-hiding letter bore enough interlinear revealment of mind
and character to keep mutual admiration glowing and growing. We
might very justly fancy either correspondent saying at any time
in those ten months to impatient or compassionate Cupid what
Hilary is reported to have said on one of the greatest days
between Manassas and Shiloh, in the midst of a two-sided
carnage: “Yes, General, hard hit, but please don’t put us out
of action.”

XXXIV

A FREE-GIFT BAZAAR

Again marched Continentals, Chasseurs, and so on. Yet not as
before; all their ranks were of new men; the too old, the too
frail, the too young, they of helpless families, and the
“British subjects.” Natives of France made a whole separate
“French Legion,” in red képis, blue frocks, and trousers
shaped like inverted tenpins, as though New Orleans were Paris
itself. The whole aspect of things was alert, anxious,
spent.

But it was only now this spent look had come. Until lately
you might have seen entire brigades of stout-hearted men in
camps near by: Camps Benjamin, Walker, Pulaski and, up in the
low pine hills of Tangipahoa, Camp Moore. From Camp Lewis
alone, in November, on that plain where Kincaid’s Battery had
drilled before it was Kincaid’s, the Bienville, Crescent City
and many similar “Guards,” Miles’ Artillery, the Orleans Light
Horse, the Orleans Howitzers, the Orleans Guards, the
Tirailleurs d’Orléans, etc., had passed in front of
Governor Moore and half a dozen generals, twenty-four thousand
strong.

Now these were mostly gone–to Bragg–to Price–to Lee and
Joe Johnston, or to Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard. For
the foe swarmed there, refusing to stay “hurled back.” True he
was here also, and not merely by scores as battle captives, but
alarmingly near, in arms and by thousands. Terrible Ship
Island, occupied by the boys in gray and fortified,
anathematized for its horrid isolation and torrid sands, had at
length been evacuated, and on New Year’s Day twenty-four of the
enemy’s ships were there disembarking bluecoats on its gleaming
white dunes. Fair Carrollton was fortified (on those lines laid
out by Hilary), and down at Camp Callender the siege-guns were
manned by new cannoneers; persistently and indolently new and
without field-pieces or brass music or carriage company.

The spent look was still gallant, but under it was a feeling
of having awfully miscalculated: flour twelve dollars a barrel
and soon to be twenty. With news in abundance the papers had
ceased their evening issues, so scarce was paper, and morning
editions told of Atlantic seaports lost, of Johnston’s retreat
from Kentucky, the fall of Fort Donelson with its fifteen
thousand men, the evacuation of Columbus (one of the
Mississippi River’s “Gibraltars”) and of Nashville, which had
come so near being Dixie’s capital. And yet the
newspapers–

“‘We see no cause for despondency,'” read Constance at the
late breakfast table–“oh, Miranda, don’t you see that with
that spirit we can never be subjugated?” She flourished the
brave pages, for which Anna vainly reached.

“Yes!” said Anna, “but find the report of the
Bazaar!”–while Constance read on: “‘Reverses, instead of
disheartening, have aroused our people to the highest pitch of
animation, and their resolution to conquer is invincible.'”

“Oh, how true! and ah, dearie!”–she pressed her sister’s
hand amid the silver and porcelain on the old mahogany–“that
news (some item read earlier, about the battery), why, Miranda,
just that is a sign of impending victory! Straws tell! and
Kincaid’s Battery is the–“

“Biggest straw in Dixie!” jeered Anna, grasping the paper,
which Constance half yielded with her eye still skimming its
columns.

“Here it is!” cried both, and rose together.

‘”Final Figures of the St. Louis Hotel Free-Gift Lottery and
Bazaar’!” called Constance, while Anna’s eyes flew over the
lines.

“What are they?” exclaimed Miranda.

“Oh, come and see! Just think, Nan: last May, in
Odd-Fellows’ Hall, how proud we were of barely thirteen
thousand, and here are sixty-eight thousand dollars!”

Anna pointed Miranda to a line, and Miranda, with their
cheeks together, read out: “‘Is there no end to the liberality
of the Crescent City?'”

“No-o!” cried gesturing Constance, “not while one house
stands on another! Why, ‘Randa, though every hall and hotel
from here to Carrollton–“

Anna beamingly laid her fingers on the lips of the
enthusiast: “Con!–Miranda!–we can have a bazaar right
in this house! Every friend we’ve got, and every friend of the
bat’–Oh, come in, Flora Valcour! you’re just in the nick o’
time–a second Kirby Smith at Manassas!”

Thus came the free-gift lottery and bazaar of Callender
House. For her own worth as well as to enlist certain valuable
folk from Mobile, Flora was, there and then–in caucus, as it
were–nominated chairman of everything. “Oh, no, no, no!”–“Oh,
yes, yes, yes!”–she “yielded at last to overpowering
numbers.”

But between this first rapturous inception and an
all-forenoon argumentation on its when, who, how, what, and for
what, other matters claimed notice. “Further news from Charlie!
How was his wound? What! a letter from his own hand–with full
account of–what was this one? not a pitched battle,
but–?”

“Anyhow a victory!” cried Constance.

“You know, Flora, don’t you,” asked Miranda, “that the
battery’s ordered away across to Tennessee?”

Flora was genuinely surprised.

“Yes,” put in Constance, “to rejoin Beauregard–and
Brodnax!”

Flora turned to Anna: “You have that by letter?”

“No!” was the too eager reply, “It’s here in the morning
paper.” They read the item. The visitor flashed as she dropped
the sheet.

“Now I see!” she sorely cried, and tapped Charlie’s folded
letter. “My God! Anna, wounded like that, Hilary Kincaid is
letting my brother go with them!”

“Oh-h-h!” exclaimed the other two, “but–my dear! if he’s so
much better that he can be allowed–“

“Allowed!–and in those box-car’!–and with that
snow–rain–gangrene–lockjaw–my God! And when ’twas already
arrange‘ to bring him home!”

Slow Callenders! not to notice the word “bring” in place of
“send”: “Ah, good, Flora! ah, fine! You’ll see! The dear boy’s
coming that far with the battery only on his way home to
us!”

“H-m-m!” Flora nodded in sore irony, but then smiled with
recovered poise: “From Tennessee who will bring him–before
they have firs’ fight another battle?–and he–my
brother?”–her smile grew droll.

“Your brother sure to be in it!” gasped Anna. The Callenders
looked heart-wrung, but Flora smiled on as she thought what
comfort it would be to give each of them some life-long
disfigurement.

Suddenly Constance cheered up: “Flora, I’ve guessed
something! Yes, I’ve guessed who was intending–and, maybe,
still intends–to bring him!”

Flora turned prettily to Anna: “Have you?”

Quite as prettily Anna laughed. “Connie does the guessing
for the family,” she said.

Flora sparkled: “But don’t you know–perchanze?”

Anna laughed again and blushed to the throat as she
retorted, “What has that to do with our bazaar?”

It had much to do with it.

XXXV

THE “SISTERS OF KINCAID’S BATTERY”

At any rate so were flutteringly construed the crisp
declarations of our pale friend of old, Doctor Sevier, as in
Callender House he stood (with Anna seated half behind him as
near as flounced crinoline would allow) beside a small table
whose fragile beauty shared with hers the enthralled
contemplation of every member of a numerous flock that
nevertheless hung upon the Doctor’s words; such a knack have
women of giving their undivided attention to several things at
once. Flora was getting her share.

This, he said, was a women’s–a gentlewomen’s–war.

“Ah!” A stir of assent ran through all the gathering. The
long married, the newly wed, the affianced, the suspected, the
débutantes, the post-marriageable, every one approved.
Yes, a gentlewomen’s war–for the salvation of society!

Hardly had this utterance thrilled round, however, when the
speaker fell into an error which compelled Anna softly to
interrupt, her amazed eyes and protesting smile causing a
general hum of amusement and quickening of fans. “No-o!” she
whispered to him, “she was not chairman of the L.S.C.A., but
only one small secretary of that vast body, and chairman pro
tem.–nothing more!–of this mere contingent of it, these
‘Sisters of Kincaid’s Battery.'”

Pro tem., nothing more! But that is how–silly little
Victorine leading the hue and cry which suddenly overwhelmed
all counter-suggestion as a levee crevasse sweeps away
sand-bags–that is how the permanent and combined chairmanship
of Sisters and Bazaar came to be forcibly thrust upon Anna
instead of Flora.

Experienced after Odd-Fellows’ Hall and St. Louis Hotel, the
ladies were able to take up this affair as experts. Especially
they had learned how to use men; to make them as handy as–“as
hairpins,” prompted Miranda, to whom Anna had whispered it; and
of men they needed all they could rally, to catch the first
impact of the vast and chaotic miscellany of things which would
be poured into their laps, so to speak, and upon their heads:
bronzes, cutlery, blankets, watches, thousands of brick (orders
on the brick-yards for them, that is), engravings, pianos,
paintings, books, cosmetics, marbles, building lots (their
titles), laces, porcelain, glass, alabaster, bales of cotton,
big bank checks, hair flowers, barouches, bonds, shawls,
carvings, shell-work boxes, jewellery, silks, ancestral relics,
curios from half round the world, wax fruits, tapestries, and
loose sapphires, diamonds, rubies, and pearls. The Callenders
and Valcours could see, in fancy, all the first chaos of it and
all the fair creation that was to arise from it.

What joy of planning! The grove should be ruddy with
pine-knot flares perched high, and be full of luminous tents
stocked with stuffs for sale at the most patriotic prices by
Zingaras, Fatimas, and Scheherazades. All the walks of the
garden would be canopied with bunting and gemmed with candles
blinking like the fireflies round that bower of roses by
Bendermere’s stream. The verandas would be enclosed in canvas
and be rich in wares, textiles, and works of art. Armed
sentries from that splendid command, the Crescent Regiment,
would be everywhere in the paved and latticed basement (gorged
with wealth), and throughout the first and second floors. The
centrepiece in the arrangement of the double drawing-rooms
would be a great field-piece, one of Hilary’s casting, on its
carriage, bright as gold, and flanked with stacks of muskets.
The leading item in the hall would be an allegorical
painting–by a famous Creole artist of nearly sixty years
earlier–Louisiana Refusing to Enter the Union. Glass cases
borrowed of merchants, milliners and apothecaries would receive
the carefully classified smaller gifts of rare value, and a
committee of goldsmiths, art critics, and auctioneers, would
set their prices. If one of those torrential
hurricanes–however, there came none.

How much, now, could they hope to clear? Well, the women of
Alabama, to build a gun-boat, had raised two hundred thousand
dollars, and–

“They will ‘ave to raise mo’,” twittered Madame Valcour, “if
New Orleans fall’.”

“She will not fall,” remarked Anna from the chair, and there
was great applause, as great as lace mitts could make.

Speaking of that smaller stronghold, Flora had a capital
suggestion: Let this enterprise be named “for the common
defence.” Then, in the barely conceivable event of the city’s
fall, should the proceeds still be in women’s hands–and it
might be best to keep them so–let them go to the defence of
Mobile!

Another idea–Miranda’s and Victorine’s–quite as gladly
accepted, and they two elected to carry it out–was, to
compile, from everybody’s letters, a history of the battery, to
be sold at the bazaar. The large price per copy which that work
commanded was small compared with what it would bring now.

XXXVI

THUNDER-CLOUD AND SUNBURST

But the smiling reply was Spartan: “Oh! what are such
trifles when we think how our own fathers, husbands, and
brothers have suffered–even in victory!” The “Sisters” were
still living on last summer’s glory, and only by such
indirections alluded to defeats.

Anna smiled as brightly as any, while through her mind
flitted spectral visions of the secondary and so needless
carnage in those awful field-hospitals behind the battles, and
of the storms so likely to follow the fights, when the midnight
rain came down in sheets on the wounded still lying among the
dead. On all the teeming, bleeding front no father, husband, or
brother was hers, but amid the multitudinous exploits and
agonies her thoughts were ever on him who, by no tie but the
heart’s, had in the past year grown to be father, mother,
sister, and brother to the superb hundred whom she so tenderly
knew, who so worshipingly knew her, and still whose lives, at
every chance, he was hurling at the foe as stones from a
sling.

“After all, in these terrible time’,” remarked Miss Valcour
in committee of the whole–last session before the public
opening–“any toil, even look’ at selfishly, is better than to
be idle.”

“As if you ever looked at anything selfishly!” said a
matron, and there was a patter of hands.

“Or as if she were ever in danger of being idle!” fondly put
in a young battery sister.

As these two rattled and crashed homeward in a deafening
omnibus they shouted further comments to each other on this
same subject. It was strange, they agreed, to see Miss Valcour,
right through the midst of these terrible times, grow daily
handsomer. Concerning Anna, they were of two opinions. The
matron thought that at moments Anna seemed to have aged three
years in one, while, to the girl it appeared that her
beauty–Anna’s–had actually increased; taken a deeper tone,
“or something.” This huge bazaar business, they screamed, was
something a girl like Anna should never have been allowed to
undertake.

“And yet,” said the matron on second thought, “it may really
have helped her to bear up.”

“Against what?”

“Oh,–all our general disturbance and distress, but the
battery’s in particular. You know its very guns are, as we may
say, hers, and everything that happens around them, or to any
one who belongs to them in field, camp, or hospital, happens,
in her feeling, to her.”

The girl interrupted with a knowing touch: “You realize
there’s something else, don’t you?”

Her companion showed pain: “Yes, but–I hoped you hadn’t
heard of it. I can’t bear to talk about it. I know how common
it is for men and girls to trifle with each other, but for such
as he–who had the faith of all of us, yes, and of all his men,
that he wasn’t as other men are–for Hilary Kincaid to dawdle
with Anna–with Anna Callender–“

“Oh!” broke in the girl, a hot blush betraying her own
heart, “I don’t think you’ve got the thing right at all. Why,
it’s Anna who’s making the trouble! The dawdling is all hers!
Oh, I have it from the best authority, though I’m not at
liberty–“

“My dear girl, you’ve been misled. The fault is all his. I
know it from one who can’t be mistaken.”

The damsel blushed worse. “Well, at any rate,” she said,
“the case doesn’t in any slightest way involve Miss
Valcour.”

“Oh, I know that!” was the cocksure reply as they alighted
in Canal Street to take an up-town mule-car.

Could Madame and Flora have overheard, how they would have
smiled to each other.

With now a wary forward step and now a long pause, and now
another short step and another pause, Hilary, in his letters to
Anna, despite Flora’s often successful contrivings, had
ventured back toward that understanding for which the souls of
both were starving, until at length he had sent one which
seemed, itself, to kneel, for him, at her feet–would have
seemed, had it not miscarried. But, by no one’s craft, merely
through the “terribleness” of the times, it had gone forever
astray. When, not knowing this, he despatched another, this
latter had promptly arrived, but its unintelligible allusions
to lines in the lost forerunner were unpardonable for lack of
that forerunner’s light, and it contained especially one
remark–trivial enough–which, because written in the
irrepressible facetiousness so inborn in him, but taken, alas!
in the ineradicable earnest so natural to her, had compelled
her to reply in words which made her as they went, and him as
they smote him, seem truly to have “aged three years in one.”
Yet hardly had they left her before you would have said she had
recovered the whole three years and a fraction over, on finding
a postscript, till then most unaccountably overlooked, which
said that its writer had at that moment been ordered (as soon
as he could accomplish this and that and so and so) to hasten
home to recruit the battery with men of his own choice, and
incidentally to bring the wounded Charlie with him. Such
godsends raise the spring-tides of praise and human kindness in
us, and it was on the very next morning, after finding that
postscript, that there had come to Anna her splendid first
thought of the Bazaar.

And now behold it, a visible reality! Unlighted as yet,
unpeopled, but gorgeous, multiform, sentinelled, and ready, it
needed but the touch of the taper to set forth all the glories
of art and wealth tenfolded by self-sacrifice for a hallowed
cause. Here was the Bazaar, and yonder, far away on the
southern border of Tennessee, its wasted ranks still spruce in
their tatters, the battery; iron-hearted Bartleson in command;
its six yellow daughters of destruction a trifle black in the
lips, but bright on the cheeks and virgins all; Charlie on the
roster though not in sight, the silken-satin standard well in
view, rent and pierced, but showing seven red days of valor
legended on its folds, and with that white-moustached old
centaur, Maxime, still upholding it in action and review.

Intermediate, there, yonder, and here, from the farthest
Mississippi State line clear down to New Orleans, were the
camps of instruction, emptying themselves northward, pouring
forth infantry, cavalry, artillery by every train that could be
put upon the worn-out rails and by every main-travelled wagon
road. But homeward-bound Charlie and his captain, where were
they? Irby knew.

Flora, we have seen, had been willing, eager, for them to
come–to arrive; not because Charlie, but because his captain,
was one of the two. But Irby, never sure of her, and forever
jealous of the ladies’ man, had contrived, in a dull way, to
detain the home-comers in mid-journey, with telegraphic orders
to see here a commandant and there a factory of arms and hurry
men and munitions to the front. So he killed time and tortured
hope for several hearts, and that was a comfort in itself.

However, here was the Bazaar. After all, its sentinels were
not of the Crescent Regiment, for the same grave reason which
postponed the opening until to-morrow; the fact that to-day
that last flower of the city’s young high-life was leaving for
the fields of war, as Kincaid’s Battery had left in the
previous spring. Yet, oh, how differently! Again up St. Charles
Street and down Calliope the bands played, the fifes squealed;
once more the old men marched ahead, opened ranks, let the
serried youngsters through and waved and hurrahed and kissed
and wept; but all in a new manner, far more poignant than the
earlier. God only knew what was to happen now, to those who
went or to those who stayed, or where or how any two of them
should ever meet again. The Callenders, as before, were there.
Anna had come definitely resolved to give one particular
beardless Dick Smith a rousing kiss, purely to nullify that
guilty one of last year. But when the time came she could not,
the older one had made it impossible; and when the returning
bands broke out–

“Charlie is my darling! my
darling! my darling!”

and the tears came dripping from under Connie’s veil and
Victorine’s and Miranda’s and presently her own, she was glad
of the failure.

As they were driving homeward across Canal Street, she
noted, out beyond the Free Market, a steamboat softly picking
its way in to the levee. Some coal-barges were there, she
remembered, lading with pitch-pine and destined as fire-ships,
by that naval lieutenant of the despatch-boat whom we know,
against the Federal fleet lying at the head of the passes.

The coachman named the steamer to Constance: “Yass, ‘m, de
ole Genl al Quitman; dass her.”

“From Vicksburg and the Bends!” cried the inquirer. “Why,
who knows but Charlie Val–?”

With both hands she clutched Miranda and Victorine, and
brightened upon Anna.

“And Flora not with us!” was the common lament.

XXXVII

“TILL HE SAID, ‘I’M COME HAME, MY LOVE'”

Meanwhile the Callenders’ carriage had made easy speed.
Emerging by the Free Market, it met an open hack carrying six
men. At the moment every one was cringing in a squall of dust,
but as well as could be seen these six were the driver, a
colored servant at his side, an artillery corporal, and three
officers. Some army wagons hauling pine-knots to the fire-fleet
compelled both carriages to check up. Thereupon, the gust
passing and Victorine getting a better glance at the men, she
tossed both hands, gave a stifled cry and began to laugh
aloud.

“Charlie!” cried Anna. “Steve!” cried Constance.

“And Captain Irby!” remarked Miranda.

The infantry captain, a transient steamboat acquaintance,
used often afterward to say that he never saw anything prettier
than those four wildly gladdened ladies unveiling in the shade
of their parasols. I doubt if he ever did. He talked with Anna,
who gave him so sweet an attention that he never suspected she
was ravenously taking in every word the others dropped behind
her.

“But where he is, that Captain Kincaid?” asked Victorine of
Charlie a second time.

“Well, really,” stammered the boy at last, “we–we can’t
say, just now, where he is.”

(“He’s taken prisoner!” wailed Anna’s heart while she let
the infantry captain tell her that hacks, in Nashville on the
Sunday after Donelson, were twenty-five dollars an hour.)

“He means,” she heard Mandeville put in, “he
means–Charlie–only that we muz not tell. ‘Tis a
sicret.”

“You’ve sent him into the enemy’s lines!” cried Constance to
Irby in one of her intuitions.

“We?” responded the grave Irby, “No, not we.”

“Captain Mandeville,” exclaimed Victorine, “us, you don’t
need to tell us some white lies.”

The Creole shrugged: “We are telling you only the whitess we
can!”

(“Yes,” the infantry captain said, “with Memphis we should
lose the largest factory of cartridges in the
Confederacy.”)

But this was no place for parleying. So while the man next
the hack-driver, ordered by Mandeville and laden with
travelling-bags, climbed to a seat by the Callenders’ coachman
the aide-de-camp crowded in between Constance and Victorine,
the equipage turned from the remaining soldiers, and off the
ladies spun for home, Anna and Miranda riding backward to have
the returned warrior next his doting wife. Victorine was
dropped on the way at the gate of her cottage. When the others
reached the wide outer stair of their own veranda, and the
coachman’s companion had sprung down and opened the carriage,
Mandeville was still telling of Mandeville, and no gentle
hearer had found any chance to ask further about that missing
one of whom the silentest was famishing to know whatever–good
or evil–there was to tell. Was Steve avoiding their inquiries?
wondered Anna.

Up the steps went first the married pair, the wife lost in
the hero, the hero in himself. Was he, truly? thought Anna, or
was he only trying, kindly, to appear so? The ever-smiling
Miranda followed. A step within the house Mandeville, with eyes
absurdly aflame, startled first his wife by clutching her arm,
and then Miranda by beckoning them into a door at their right,
past unheeded treasures of the Bazaar, and to a front window.
Yet through its blinds they could discover only what they had
just left; the carriage, with Anna still in it, the garden, the
grove, an armed soldier on guard at the river gate, another at
the foot of the steps, a third here at the top.

It was good to Anna to rest her head an instant on the
cushioning behind it and close her eyes. With his rag of a hat
on the ground and his head tightly wrapped in the familiar
Madras kerchief of the slave deck-hand, the attendant at the
carriage side reverently awaited the relifting of her lids. The
old coachman glanced back on her.

“Missy?” he tenderly ventured. But the lids still drooped,
though she rose.

“Watch out fo’ de step,” said the nearer man. His tone was
even more musically gentle than the other’s, yet her eyes
instantly opened into his and she started so visibly that her
foot half missed and she had to catch his saving hand.

“Stiddy! stiddy!” He slowly let the cold, slim fingers out
of his as she started on, but she swayed again and he sprang
and retook them. For half a breath she stared at him like a
wild bird shot, glanced at the sentinels, below, above, and
then pressed up the stair.

Constance, behind the shutters, wept. “Go away,” she pleaded
to her husband, “oh, go away!” but pushed him without effect
and peered down again. “He’s won!” she exclaimed in soft
ecstasy, “he’s won at last!”

“Yes, he’s win!” hoarsely whispered the aide-de-camp. “He’s
win the bet!”

Constance flashed indignantly: “What has he bet?”

“Bet. ‘He has bet three-ee général’ he’ll pazz
down Canal Street and through the middl’ of the city,
unreco’nize! And now he’s done it, they’ll let him do the
rest!” From his Creole eyes the enthusiast blazed a complete
argument, that an educated commander, so disguised and
traversing an enemy’s camp, can be worth a hundred of the
common run who go by the hard name of spy, and may decide the
fortunes of a whole campaign: “They’ll let him! and he’ll get
the prom-otion!”

“Ho-oh!” breathed the two women, “he’s getting all the
promotion he wants, right now!” The three heard Anna
pass into the front drawing-room across the hall, the carriage
move off and the disguised man enter the hall and set down the
travelling-bags. They stole away through the library and up a
rear stair.

It was not yet late enough to set guards within the house.
No soul was in the drawing-rooms. In the front one, on its big
wheels between two stacks of bayoneted rifles, beneath a
splendor of flags and surrounded by innumerable costly
offerings, rested as mutely as a seated idol that superior
engine of death and woe, the great brass gun. Anna stole to it,
sunk on her knees, crossed her trembling arms about its neck
and rested her brow on its face.

She heard the tread in the hall, quaked to rise and flee,
and yet could not move. It came upon the threshold and paused.
“Anna,” said the voice that had set her heart on fire across
the carriage step. She sprang up, faced round, clutched the
great gun, and stood staring. Her follower was still in slave
garb, but now for the first time he revealed his full stature.
His black locks were free and the “Madras” dropped from his
fingers to the floor. He advanced a pace or two.

“Anna,” he said again, “Anna Callender,”–he came another
step–“I’ve come back, Anna, to–to–” he drew a little nearer.
She gripped the gun.

He lighted up drolly: “Don’t you know what I’ve come for? I
didn’t know, myself, till just now, or I shouldn’t have come in
this rig, though many a better man’s in worse these days. I
didn’t know–because–I couldn’t hope. I’ve come–” he stole
close–his arms began to lift–she straightened to her full
height, but helplessly relaxed as he smiled down upon it.

“I’ve come not just to get your promise, Anna Callender, but
to muster you in; to marry you.”

She flinched behind the gun’s muzzle in resentful affright.
He lowered his palms in appeal to her wisdom. “It’s the right
thing, Anna, the only safe way! I’ve known it was, ever since
Steve Mandeville’s wedding. Oh! it takes a colossal assurance
to talk to you so, Anna Callender, but I’ve got the colossal
assurance. I’ve got that, beloved, and you’ve got all the
rest–my heart–my soul–my life. Give me yours.”

Anna had shrunk in against the farther wheel, but now
rallied and moved a step forward. “Let me pass,” she begged.
“Give me a few moments to myself. You can wait here. I’ll come
back.”

He made room. She moved by. But hardly had she passed when a
soft word stopped her. She turned inquiringly and the next
instant–Heaven only knows if first on his impulse or on
hers–she was in his arms, half stifled on his breast, and
hanging madly from his neck while his kisses fell upon her
brow–temples–eyes–and rested on her lips.

Flora sat reading a note just come from that same “A.C.” Her
brother had gone to call on Victorine. Irby had just bade the
reader good-by, to return soon and go with her to Callender
House to see the Bazaar. Madame Valcour turned from a window
with a tart inquiry:

“That would have been much,” absently replied the reader,
turning a page.

“‘Twould have been little!–to make him rich!–and us
also!”

“Not us,” said the abstracted girl; “me.” Something in the
missive caused her brows to knit.

“And still you trifle!” nagged the grandam, “while I starve!
And while at any instant may arrive–humph–that other
fool.”

Even this did not draw the reader’s glance. “No.” she
responded. “He cannot. Irby and Charlie lied to us. He is
already here.” She was re-reading.

The grandmother stared, tossed a hand and moved across the
floor. As she passed near the girl’s slippered foot it darted
out, tripped her and would have sent her headlong, but she
caught by the lamp table. Flora smiled with a strange whiteness
round the lips. Madame righted the shaken lamp, quietly asking,
“Did you do that–h-m-m–for hate of the lady, or, eh, the
ladies’ man?”

“The latter,” said the reabsorbed girl.

“Strange,” sighed the other, “how we can have–at the same
time–for the same one–both feelings.”

But Flora’s ears were closed. “Well,” she audibly mused,
“he’ll get a recall.”

“Even if it must be forged?” twittered the dame.

XXXVIII

ANNA’S OLD JEWELS

“A faerye realm,” the scribes themselves itemed it; “myriad
lights–broad staircases gracef’y asc’d’g–ravish’g
perfumes–met our gaze–garlandries of laurel and
magn’a–prom’d’g from room to room–met our gaze–directed by
masters of cerem’y in Conf’te G’d’s unif’m–here turn’g to the
right–fair women and brave men–carried thither by the dense
throng–music with its volup’s swell–met our gaze–again
descend’g–arriv’g at din’g-hall–new scene of ench’t
bursts–refr’t tables–enarched with ev’gr’s and decked with
labarums and burgees–thence your way lies through–costly
volumes and shimm’g bijoutries–met our gaze!”

It was Kincaid who saw their laborious office in this
flippant light, and so presented it to Anna that she laughed
till she wept; laughing was now so easy. But when they saw one
of the pencillers writing awkwardly with his left hand, aided
by half a right arm in a pinned-up sleeve, her mirth had a
sudden check. Yet presently it became a proud thrill, as the
poor boy glowed with delight while Hilary stood and talked with
him of the fearful Virginia day on which that ruin had befallen
him at Hilary’s own side in Kincaid’s Battery, and then brought
him to converse with her. This incident may account for the
fervor with which a next morning’s report extolled the wonders
of the “fair chairman’s” administrative skill and the matchless
and most opportune executive supervision of Captain Hilary
Kincaid. Flora read it with interest.

With interest of a different kind she read in a later issue
another passage, handed her by the grandmother with the remark,
“to warn you, my dear.” The matter was a frothy bit of tragical
romancing, purporting to have been gathered from two detectives
out of their own experience of a year or so before, about a
gift made to the Bazaar by Captain Kincaid, which had–“met our
gaze jealously guarded under glass amid a brilliant collection
of reliques, jewels, and bric-à-brac; a large,
evil-looking knife still caked with the mud of the deadly
affray, but bearing legibly in Italian on its blade the
inscription, ‘He who gets me in his body never need take a
medicine,’ and with a hilt and scabbard encrusted with
gems.”

Now, one of the things that made Madame Valcour good company
among gentlewomen was her authoritative knowledge of precious
stones. So when Flora finished reading and looked up, and the
grandmother faintly smiled and shook her head, both
understood.

“Paste?”

“Mostly.”

“And the rest–not worth–?”

“Your stealing,” simpered the connoisseur, and, reading,
herself, added meditatively, “I should hate anyhow, for you to
have that thing. The devil would be always at your ear.”

“Whispering–what?”

The grandmother shrugged: “That depends. I look to see you
rise, yet, to some crime of dignity; something really tragic
and Italian. Whereas at present–” she pursed her lips and
shrugged again.

The girl blandly laughed: “You venerable ingrate!”

At the Bazaar that evening, when Charlie and grandma and the
crowd were gone, Flora handled the unlovely curiosity. She and
Irby had seen Hilary and Anna and the Hyde & Goodrich man
on guard just there draw near the glass case where it lay “like
a snake on a log,” as Charlie had said, take it in their hands
and talk of it. The jeweller was expressing confidentially a
belief that it had once been set with real stones, and Hilary
was privately having a sudden happy thought, when Flora and
Adolphe came up only in time to hear the goldsmith’s statement
of its present poor value.

“But surely,” said Kincaid, “this old jewellery lying all
about it here–.”

“That? that’s the costliest gift in the Bazaar!”

Irby inquired whose it was, Anna called it anonymous, and
Flora, divining that the giver was Anna, felt herself
outrageously robbed. As the knife was being laid back in place
she recalled, with odd interest, her grandmother’s mention of
the devil, and remembered a time or two when for a moment she
had keenly longed for some such bit of steel; something much
more slender, maybe, and better fitting a dainty hand, but
quite as long and sharp. A wave from this thought may have
prompted Anna’s request that the thing be brought forth again
and Flora allowed to finger it; but while this was being done
Flora’s main concern was to note how the jeweller worked the
hidden spring by which he opened the glass case. As she finally
gave up the weapon: “Thank you,” she sweetly said to both Anna
and Hilary, but with a meaning reserved to herself.

You may remember how once she had gone feeling and prying
along the fair woodwork of these rooms for any secret of
construction it might hold. Lately, when the house began to
fill with secretable things of large money value, she had done
this again, and this time, in one side of a deep
chimney-breast, had actually found a most innocent-looking
panel which she fancied to be kept from sliding only by its
paint. Now while she said her sweet thanks to Anna and Hilary
she could almost believe in fairies, the panel was so near the
store of old jewels. With the knife she might free the panel,
and behind the panel hide the jewels till their scent grew
cold, to make them her bank account when all the banks should
be broken, let the city fall or stand. No one need ever notice,
so many were parting with their gems perforce, so many buying
them as a form of asset convenient for flight. So good-night,
old dagger and jewels; see you again, but don’t overdo your
limited importance. Of the weapon Flora had further learned
that it was given not to the Bazaar but to Anna, and of the
jewels that they were not in that lottery of everything, with
which the affair was to end and the proceeds of whose tickets
were pouring in upon Anna, acting treasurer, the treasurer
being ill.

Tormentingly in Hilary’s way was this Lottery and Bazaar.
Even from Anna, sometimes especially from Anna, he could not
understand why certain things must not be told or certain
things could not be done until this Bazaar–etc. Why, at any
hour he might be recalled! Yes, Anna saw that–through very
moist eyes. True, also, she admitted, Beauregard and Johnston
might fail to hold off Buell and Grant; and true, as
well, New Orleans could fall, and might be sacked. It
was while confessing this that with eyes down and bosom heaving
she accepted the old Italian knife. Certainly unless the
pooh-poohing Mandeville was wrong, who declared the forts down
the river impregnable and Beauregard, on the Tennessee,
invincible, flight (into the Confederacy) was safest–but–the
Bazaar first, flight afterward. “We women,” she said, rising
close before him with both hands in his, “must stand by
our guns. We’ve no more right”–it was difficult to talk
while he kissed her fingers and pressed her palms to his gray
breast–“no more right–to be cowards–than you men.”

Her touch brought back his lighter mood and he told the
happy thought–project–which had come to him while they talked
with the jeweller. He could himself “do the job,” he said,
“roughly but well enough.” Anna smiled at the fanciful scheme.
Yet–yes, its oddity was in its favor. So many such devices
were succeeding, some of them to the vast advantage of the
Southern cause.

When Flora the next evening stole a passing glance at the
ugly trinket in its place she was pleased to note how well it
retained its soilure of clay. For she had that day used it to
free the panel, behind which she had found a small recess so
fitted to her want that she had only to replace panel and tool
and await some chance in the closing hours of the show. Pleased
she was, too, to observe that the old jewels lay in a careless
heap. Now to conceal all interest and to divert all eyes, even
grandmama’s! Thus, however, night after night an odd fact
eluded her: That Anna and her hero, always singly, and
themselves careful to lure others away, glimpsed that
disordered look of the gems and unmolested air of the knife
with a content as purposeful as her own. Which fact meant, when
came the final evening, that at last every sham jewel in the
knife’s sheath had exchanged places with a real one from the
loose heap, while, nestling between two layers of the sheath’s
material, reposed, payable to bearer, a check on London for
thousands of pounds sterling. Very proud was Anna of her
lover’s tremendous versatility and craftsmanship.

XXXIX

TIGHT PINCH

More than a day’s and a night’s journey away was “Corinth,”
the village around which he had gathered his forces, but every
New Orleans man and boy among them knew, and every mother and
sister here in New Orleans knew, that as much with those men
and boys as with any one anywhere, lay the defence and
deliverance of this dear Crescent City. With Grant swept back
from the Tennessee, and the gunboats that threatened Island Ten
and Memphis sunk, blown up; or driven back into the Ohio, New
Orleans, they believed, could jeer at Farragut down at the
Passes and at Butler out on horrid Ship Island. “And so can
Mobile,” said the Callenders to the Valcours.

“The fortunes of our two cities are one!” cried Constance,
and the smiling Valcours were inwardly glad to assent,
believing New Orleans doomed, and remembering their Mobile home
burned for the defence of the two cities of one fortune.

However, the Camp Villeré regiment had not got off,
but would move at midnight. On the train with them Hilary was
sending recruits to the battery, younger brothers of those who
had gone the year before. He had expected to conduct, not send,
them, but important work justified–as Anna told Flora–his
lingering until his uncle should bid him come. Which bidding
Irby might easily have incited, by telegraph, had Flora let
him. But Flora’s heart was too hopelessly entangled to release
Hilary even for the gain of separating him from Anna; and
because it was so entangled (and with her power to plot caught
in the tangle), she was learning to hate with a distemper of
passion that awed even herself.

“But I must clear out mighty soon,” said Hilary that evening
to Greenleaf, whose exchange he had procured at last and,
rather rashly, was taking him to Callender House to say
good-by. They talked of Anna. Greenleaf knew the paramount
secret; had bravely given his friend a hand on it the day he
was told. Now Hilary said he had been begging her again for
practical steps, and the manly loser commended.

“But think of that from me, Fred! who one year ago–you know
how I talked–about Steve, for instance. Shame!–how reckless
war’s made us. Here we are, by millions, in a perpetual crash
of victory and calamity, and yet–take me for an example–in
spite of me my one devouring anxiety–that wakes me up in the
night and gives me dreams in the day–is how to get her before
this next battle get’s me. Yes, the instant I’m ordered I go,
and if I’m not ordered soon I go anyhow. I wouldn’t have my
boys”–etc.

And still the prison-blanched Greenleaf approved. But the
next revelation reddened his brow: Anna, Hilary said, had at
last “come round–knuckled down! Yes, sir-ee, cav-ed in!” and
this evening, after the Bazaar, to a few younger sisters of the
battery whom she would ask to linger for a last waltz with
their young heroes, she would announce her engagement and her
purpose to be wed in a thrillingly short time.

The two men found the Bazaar so amusingly collapsed that, as
Hilary said, you could spell it with a small b. A stream of
vehicles coming and going had about emptied the house and
grounds. No sentries saluted, no music chimed. In the
drawing-rooms the brass gun valiantly held its ground, but one
or two domestics clearing litter from the floors seemed quite
alone there, and some gay visitors who still tarried in the
library across the hall were hardly enough to crowd it. “Good,”
said Hilary beside the field-piece. “You wait here and I’ll
bring the Callenders as they can come.”

But while he went for them whom should Greenleaf light upon
around a corner of the panelled chimney-breast but that secret
lover of the Union and all its defenders, Mademoiselle Valcour.
Her furtive cordiality was charming as she hurriedly gave and
withdrew a hand in joy for his liberation.

“Taking breath out of the social rapids?” he softly
inquired.

“Ah, more! ‘Tis from that deluge of–“

He understood her emotional gesture. It meant that deluge of
disloyalty–rebellion–there across the hall, and all through
this turbulent city and land. But it meant, too, that they must
not be seen to parley alone, and he had turned away, when
Miranda, to Flora’s disgust, tripped in upon them with her nose
in full wrinkle, archly surprised to see Flora here, and
proposing to hale both into the general throng to applaud
Anna’s forthcoming “proclamation!”

Greenleaf de trop? Ah, nay! not if he could keep the old
Greenleaf poise! and without words her merry nose added that
his presence would only give happier point to what every one
regarded as a great Confederate victory. At a subtle sign from
Flora the hostess and he went, expecting her to follow.

But Flora was in a perilous strait. Surprised by Hilary’s
voice, with the panel open and the knife laid momentarily in
the recess that both hands might bring the jewels from the
case, she had just closed the opening with the dagger inside
when Greenleaf confronted her. Now, in this last instant of
opportunity at his and Miranda’s back, should she only replace
the weapon or still dare the theft? At any rate the panel must
be reopened. But when she would have slid it her dainty fingers
failed, failed, failed until a cold damp came to her brow and
she trembled. Yet saunteringly she stepped to the show-case,
glancing airily about. The servants had gone. She glided back,
but turned to meet another footfall, possibly Kincaid’s, and
felt her anger rise against her will as she confronted only the
inadequate Irby. A sudden purpose filled her, and before he
could speak:

“Go!” she said, “telegraph your uncle! instantly!”

“I’ve done so.”

Her anger mutinied again: “Without consult’–! And since
when?”

“This morning.”

She winced yet smiled: “And still–your cousin–he’s
receive’ no order?” Her fingers tingled to maim some one–this
dolt–anybody! Her eyes sweetened.

Irby spoke: “The order has come, but–“

“What! you have not given it?”

“Flora, it includes me! Ah, for one more evening with you I
am risking–“

Her look grew fond though she made a gesture of despair:
“Oh, short-sighted! Go, give it him! Go!”

Across the hall a prolonged carol of acclamation,
confabulation, laughter, and cries of “Ah-r, indeed!” told that
Anna’s word was out. “What difference,” Irby lingered to ask,
“can an hour or two between trains–?”

But the throng was upon them. “We don’t know!” cried Flora.
“Give it him! We don’t know!” and barely had time herself to
force a light laugh when here were Charlie and Victorine,
Hilary, Anna, Miranda, Madame, Constance, Mandeville, and
twenty others.

“Fred!” called Hilary. His roaming look found the gray
detective: “Where’s Captain Greenleaf?”

“Gone.”

“With never a word of good-by? Oh, bless my soul, he
did say good-by!” There was a general laugh. “But this
won’t do. It’s not safe for him–“

The gray man gently explained that his younger associate was
with Greenleaf as bodyguard. The music of harp and violins
broke out and dancers swept round the brass gun and up and down
the floors.

XL

THE LICENSE, THE DAGGER

“Out on the veranda,” said a passing dancer.

“Send him here!” The commander’s eye came back to Irby: “Old
man, how long have you had this?”

“About an hour.”

“Oh, my stars, Adolphe, you should have told me!”

It was a fair sight, though maddening to Flora yonder by the
glass case, to see the two cousins standing eye to eye,
Hilary’s brow dark with splendid concern while without a glance
at Anna he passed her the despatch and she read it.

“Steve,” he said, as the Mandeville pair pressed up, “look
at that! boots-and-saddles! now! to-night! for you and Adolphe
and me! Yes, Charlie, and you; go, get your things and put
Jerry on the train with mine.”

The boy’s partner was Victorine. Before she could gasp he
had kissed her. Amid a laugh that stopped half the dance he
waved one farewell to sister, grandmother and all and sprang
away. “Dance on, fellows,” called Hilary, “this means only that
I’m going with you.” The lads cheered and the dance
revived.

Their captain turned: “Miss Flora, I promised your brother
he should go whenever–“

“But me al-so you promised!” she interrupted, and a
fair sight also, grievous to Irby, startling to Anna, were this
pair, standing eye to eye.

“Yes,” replied Kincaid, “and I’ll keep my word. In any
extremity you shall come to him.”

“As likewise my wive to me!” said the swelling Mandeville,
openly caressing the tearful Constance. “Wive to ‘usband,” he
declaimed, “sizter to brother–” But his audience was lost.
Hilary was speaking softly to Anna. She was very pale. The
throng drew away. You could see that he was asking if she only
could in no extremity come to him. His words were inaudible,
but any one who had ever loved could read them. And now
evidently he proposed something. There was ardor in his
eye–ardor and enterprise. She murmured a response. He snatched
out his watch.

“Just time,” he was heard to say, “time enough by
soldier’s measure!” His speech grew plainer: “The law’s right
for me to call and for you to come, that’s all we want. What
frightens you?”

“Nothing,” she said, and smiled. “I only feared there wasn’t
time.”

The lover faced his cousin so abruptly that all started and
laughed, while Anna turned to her kindred, as red as a rose.
“Adolphe,” cried he, “I’m going for my marriage license. While
I’m getting it, will you–?”

Irby went redder than Anna. “You can’t get it at this hour!”
he said. His eyes sought Flora, but she was hurriedly
conferring with her grandmother.

Hilary laughed: “You’ll see. I fixed all that a week ago.
Will you get the minister?”

“Why, Hilary, this is–“

“Yass!” piped Madame, “he’ll obtain him!”

The plaudits of the dancers, who once more had stopped, were
loud. Flora’s glance went over to Irby, and he said, “Why, yes,
Hilary, if you–why, of course I will.” There was more
applause.

“Steve,” said Hilary, “some one must go with me to the
clerk’s office to–“

“To vouch you!” broke in the aide-de-camp. “That will be
Steve Mandeville!” Constance sublimely approved. As the three
Callenders moved to leave the room one way and the three
captains another, Anna seized the hands of Flora and her
grandmother.

“You’ll keep the dance going?” she solicited, and they said
they would. Flora gave her a glowing embrace, and as Irby
strode by murmured to him.

“Put your watch back half an hour.”

In such disordered days social liberty was large. When the
detective, after the Callenders were gone up-stairs and the
captains had galloped away, truthfully told Miss Valcour that
his only object in tarrying here was to see the love-knot tied,
she heard him affably, though inwardly in flames of yearning to
see him depart. She burned to see him go because she believed
him, and also because there in the show-case still lay the
loosely heaped counterfeit of the booty whose reality she had
already ignorantly taken and stowed away.

What should she do? Here was grandma, better aid than forty
Irbys; but with both phases of her problem to deal with at
once–how to trip headlong this wild matrimonial leap and how
to seize this treasure by whose means she might leave Anna in a
fallen city and follow Hilary to the war–she was at the end of
her daintiest wits. She talked on with the gray man, for that
kept him from the show-case. In an air full of harmonies and
prattle, of fluttering draperies, gliding feet, undulating
shoulders, twinkling lights, gallantry, fans, and perfume, she
dazzled him with her approval when he enlarged on the merits of
Kincaid and when he pledged all his powers of invention to
speed the bridal. Frantic to think what better to do, she
waltzed with him, while he described the colonel of the
departing regiment as such a martinet that to ask him to delay
his going would only hasten it; waltzed on when she saw her
grandmother discover the knife’s absence and telegraph her a
look of contemptuous wonder. But ah, how time was flying! Even
now Kincaid must be returning hitherward, licensed!

The rapturous music somewhat soothed her frenzy, even helped
her thought, and in a thirst for all it could give she had her
partner swing her into the wide hall whence it came and where
also Hilary must first reappear. Twice through its length they
had swept, when Anna, in altered dress, came swiftly down the
stair with Constance protestingly at her side. The two were
speaking anxiously together as if a choice of nuptial
adornments (for Constance bore a box that might have held the
old jewels) had suddenly brought to mind a forgotten
responsibility. As they pressed into the drawing-rooms the two
dancers floated after them by another door.

When presently Flora halted beside the gun and fanned while
the dance throbbed on, the two sisters stood a few steps away
behind the opened show-case, talking with her grandmother and
furtively eyed by a few bystanders. They had missed the dagger.
Strangely disregarded by Anna, but to Flora’s secret dismay and
rage, Constance, as she talked, was dropping from her doubled
hands into the casket the last of the gems. Now she shut the
box and laid it in Anna’s careless arms.

Leaving the gray man by the gun, Flora sprang near. Anna was
enduring, with distracted smiles, the eager reasonings of
Madame and Constance that the vanished trinket was but
borrowed; a thief would have taken the jewels, they
argued; but as Flora would have joined in, every line of Anna’s
face suddenly confided to her a consternation whose cause the
silenced Flora instantly mistook. “Ah, if you knew–!” Anna
began, but ceased as if the lost relic stood for something
incommunicable even to nearest and dearest.

“They’ve sworn their love on it!” was the thought of Flora
and the detective in the same instant. It filled her veins with
fury, yet her response was gentle and meditative. “To me,” she
said, “it seemed such a good-for-nothing that even if I saw it
is gone, me, I think I wouldn’ have take’ notice.” All at once
she brightened: “Anna! without a doubt! without a doubt Captain
Kincaid he has it!” About to add a caress, she was startled
from it by a masculine voice that gayly echoed out in the
hall:

“Without a doubt!”

The dance ceased and first the short, round body of
Mandeville and then the tall form of Hilary Kincaid pushed into
the room. “Without a doubt!” repeated Hilary, while Mandeville
asked right, asked left, for Adolphe. “Without a doubt,”
persisted the lover, “Captain Kincaid he has it!” and proffered
Anna the law’s warrant for their marriage.

She pushed it away. Her words were so low that but few could
hear. “The dagger!” she said. “Haven’t you got the dagger? You
haven’t got it?”

XLI

FOR AN EMERGENCY

“It’s lost! the dagger! with all–“

“Why,–why, Miss Anna,”–his smile grew playful, but his
thought ran back to the exploded powder-mill, to the old
inventor, to Flora in those days, the deported schoolmistress’s
gold still unpaid to him, the jeweller and the exchanged gems,
the Sterling bill–“Why, Miss Anna! how do you mean, lost?”

“Taken! gone! and by my fault! I–I forgot all about
it.”

He laughed aloud and around: “Pshaw! Now, ladies and
gentlemen, this is some joke you’re”–he glanced toward the
show-case–

“No,” insisted Anna, “it’s taken! Here are the other
things.” She displayed the box.

Madame, very angry, smiled from it to Flora: “Oh, thou
love’s fool! not to steal that and leave the knife, with
which, luckily! now that you have it, you dare not strike!”

All this the subtle girl read in the ancient lady’s one
small “ahem!” and for reply, in some even more unvoiced way,
warned her against the eye of the gray man near the gun. To
avoid whose scrutiny herself she returned sociably to his
side.

“The other things!” scoffed meantime the gay Hilary,
catching up Anna’s word. “No! if you please, here is the
only other thing!” and boyishly flaunted the license at
Mandeville and all the Callenders, the throng merrily
approving. His eye, falling upon the detective, kindled
joyfully: “Oh, you godsend! You hunt up the lost
frog-sticker, will you–while we–?” He flourished the document
again and the gray man replied with a cordial nod. Kincaid
waved thanks and glanced round. “Adolphe!” he called. “Steve,
where in the dickens–?”

Whether he so designed it or not, the contrast between his
levity and Anna’s agitation convinced Flora, Madame, all, that
the weapon’s only value to the lovers was sentimental. “Or
religious,” thought the detective, whose adjectives could be as
inaccurate as his divinations. While he conjectured, Anna spoke
once more to Hilary. Her vehement words were too soft for any
ear save his, but their tenor was so visible, her distress so
passionate and her firmness of resolve so evident that every
mere beholder fell back, letting the Callender-Valcour group,
with Steve and the gentle detective, press closer. With none of
them, nor yet with Hilary, was there anything to argue; their
plight seemed to her hopeless. For them to marry, for her to
default, and for him to fly, all in one mad hour–one whirlwind
of incident–“It cannot be!” was all she could say, to sister,
to stepmother, to Flora, to Hilary again: “We cannot do it! I
will not!–till that lost thing is found!”

With keen sympathy the detective, in the pack, enjoyed the
play of Hilary’s face, where martial animation strove
inspiringly against a torture of dashed hopes. Glancing aside
to Flora’s as she turned from Anna, he caught there no sign of
the storm of joy which had suddenly burst in her bosom; but for
fear he might, and to break across his insight and reckoning,
she addressed him.

“Anna she don’t give any reason” she exclaimed. “Ask
her, you, the reason!”

“‘Tain’t reason at all,” he softly responded, “it’s
superstition. But hold on. Watch me.” He gestured for the
lover’s attention and their eyes met. It made a number laugh,
to see Hilary’s stare gradually go senseless and then blaze
with intelligence. Suddenly, joyfully, with every eye following
his finger, he pointed into the gray man’s face:

“Smellemout, you’ve got it!”

The man shook his head for denial, and his kindly twinkle
commanded the belief of all. Not a glint in it showed that his
next response, however well-meant, was to be a lie.

“Then Ketchem has it!” cried Kincaid.

The silent man let his smile mean yes, and the alert company
applauded. “Go h-on with the weddingg!” ordered the superior
Mandeville.

“Where’s Adolphe?” cried Kincaid, and “On with the wedding!”
clamored the lads of the battery, while Anna stood gazing on
the gray man and wondering why she had not guessed this very
thing.

“Yes,” he quietly said to her, “it’s all right. You’ll have
it back to-morrow. ‘Twon’t cut love if you don’t.”

At that the gay din redoubled, but Flora, with the little
grandmother vainly gripping her arms, flashed between the
two.

“Anna!” she cried, “I don’t bil-ieve!”

Whether it was true or false Mandeville cared nothing,
but–“Yes, ’tis true!” he cried in Flora’s face, and then to
the detective–“Doubtlezz to phot-ograph it that’s all you
want!”

The detective said little, but Anna assured Flora that was
all. “He wants to show it at the trial!”

“Listen!” said Flora.

“Here’s Captain Irby!” cried Mrs. Callender–Constance–half
a dozen, but–

“Listen!” repeated Flora, and across the curtained veranda
and in at the open windows, under the general clamor, came a
soft palpitating rumble. Did Hilary hear it, too? He was
calling:

“Adolphe, where’s your man–the minister? Where in
the–three parishes–?” and others were echoing, “The minister!
where’s the minister?”

Had they also caught the sound?

“Isn’t he here?” asked Irby. He drew his watch.

“Half-hour slow!” cried Mandeville, reading it.

“But have you heard noth–?”

“Nothingg!” roared Mandeville.

“Where’d you leave him?” sharply asked Kincaid.

His cousin put on great dignity: “At his door, my dear sir,
waiting for the cab I sent him.”

“Oh, sent!” cried half the group. “Steve,” called Kincaid,
“your horse is fresh–“

“But, alas, without wings!” wailed the Creole, caught
Hilary’s shoulder and struck a harkening pose.

“Too late!” moaned Flora to the detective, Madame to
Constance and Miranda, and the battery lads to their girls,
from whose hands they began to wring wild good-byes as a peal
of fifes and drums heralded the oncome of the departing
regiment.

Thus Charlie Valcour found the company as suddenly he
reappeared in it, pushing in to the main group where his leader
stood eagerly engaged with Anna.

“All right, Captain!” He saluted: “All done!” But a fierce
anxiety was on his brow and he gave no heed to Hilary’s
dismissing thanks: “Captain, what’s ‘too late’?” He turned,
scowling, to his sister: “What are we too late for, Flo? Good
God! not the wedding? Not your wedding, Miss Anna? It’s
not too late. By Jove, it sha’n’t be too late.”

All the boyish lawlessness of his nature rose into his eyes,
and a boy’s tears with it. “The minister!” he retorted to
Constance and his grandmother, “the minister be–Oh, Captain,
don’t wait for him! Have the thing without a minister!”

The whole room was laughing, Hilary loudest, but the youth’s
voice prevailed. “It’ll hold good!” He turned upon the
detective: “Won’t it?”

A merry nod was the reply, with cries of “Yes,” “Yes,” from
the battery boys, and he clamored on:

“Why, there’s a kind of people–“

“Quakers!” sang out some one.

“Yes, the Quakers! Don’t they do it all the time! Of course
they do!” With a smile in his wet eyes the lad wheeled upon
Victorine: “Oh, by S’n’ Peter! if that was the only–“

But the small, compelling hand of the detective faced him
round again and with a sudden swell of the general laugh he
laughed too. “He’s trying to behave like Captain Kincaid,” one
battery sister tried to tell another, whose attention was on a
more interesting matter.

“Here!” the gray man was amiably saying to Charlie. “It’s
your advice that’s too late. Look.”

Before he had half spoken a hush so complete had fallen on
the company that while every eye sought Hilary and Anna every
ear was aware that out on the levee road the passing drums had
ceased and the brass–as if purposely to taunt the theatrical
spirit of Flora–had struck up The Ladies’ Man. With military
curtness Kincaid was addressing the score or so of new
cannoneers:

“Corporal Valcour, this squad–no, keep your partners, but
others please stand to the right and left–these men are under
your command. When I presently send you from here you’ll take
them at a double-quick and close up with that regiment. I’ll be
at the train when you reach it. Captain Mandeville,”–he turned
to the married pair, who were hurriedly scanning the license
Miranda had just handed them,–“I adjure you as a true and
faithful citizen and soldier, and you, madam, as well, to
testify to us, all, whether that is or is not the license of
court for the marriage of Anna Callender to Hilary
Kincaid.”

“It is!” eagerly proclaimed the pair.

“Hand it, please, to Charlie. Corporal, you and your men
look it over.”

“And now–” His eyes swept the throng. Anna’s hand,
trembling but ready, rose shoulder-high in his. He noted the
varied expressions of face among the family servants hurriedly
gathering in the doors, and the beautiful amaze of Flora, so
genuine yet so well acted. Radiantly he met the flushed gaze of
his speechless cousin. “If any one alive,” he cried, “knows any
cause why this thing should not be, let him now speak or
forever hereafter hold his peace.” He paused. Constance handed
something to her husband.

“Oh, go on,” murmured Charlie, and many smiled.

“Soldiers!” resumed the lover, “this fair godmother of your
flag agrees that for all we two want just now Kincaid’s Battery
is minister enough. For all we want is–” Cheers stopped
him.

“The prayer-book!” put in Mandeville, pushing it at him. The
boys harkened again.

“No,” said Kincaid, “time’s too short. All we want is to
bind ourselves, before Heaven and all mankind, in holy wedlock,
for better, or worse, till death us do part. And this we here
do in sight of you all, and in the name and sight and fear of
God.” He dropped his glance to Anna’s: “Say Amen.”

“Amen,” said Anna. At the same moment in one of the doors
stood a courier.

“All right!” called Hilary to him. “Tell your colonel we’re
coming! Just a second more, Captain Irby, if you please.
Soldiers!–I, Hilary, take thee, Anna, to be my lawful wedded
wife. And you–“

“I, Anna,” she softly broke in, “take thee, Hilary, to be
my–” She spoke the matter through, but he had not waited.

“Therefore!” he cried, “you men of Kincaid’s Battery–and
you, sir,–and you,”–nodding right and left to Mandeville and
the detective,–“on this our solemn pledge to supply as soon as
ever we can all form of law and social usage here omitted which
can more fully solemnize this union–do now–“

Up went the detective’s hand and then Mandeville’s and all
the boys’, and all together said:

“Pronounce you man and wife.”

“Go!” instantly rang Kincaid to Charlie, and in a sudden
flutter of gauzes and clink of trappings, with wringing of soft
fingers by hard ones, and in a tender clamor of bass and treble
voices, away sprang every cannoneer to knapsacks and sabres in
the hall, and down the outer stair into ranks and off under the
stars at double-quick. Sisters of the battery, gliding out to
the veranda rail, faintly saw and heard them a precious moment
longer as they sped up the dusty road. Then Irby stepped
quickly out, ran down the steps, mounted and galloped. A far
rumble of wheels told the coming of two omnibuses chartered to
bear the dancers all, with the Valcours and the detective, to
their homes. Now out to the steps came Mandeville. His wife was
with him and the maidens kindly went in. There the detective
joined them. At a hall door Hilary was parting with Madame,
Flora, Miranda. Anna was near him with Flora’s arm about her in
melting fondness. Now Constance rejoined the five, and now
Hilary and Anna left the other four and passed slowly out to
the garden stair alone.

Beneath them there, with welcoming notes, his lone horse
trampled about the hitching-rail. Dropping his cap the master
folded the bride’s hands in his and pressed on them a long
kiss. The pair looked deeply into each other’s eyes. Her brow
drooped and he laid a kiss on it also. “Now you must go,” she
murmured.

“My own beloved!” was his response. “My soul’s mate!” He
tried to draw her, but she held back.

“You must go,” she repeated.

“Yes! kiss me and I fly.” He tried once more to draw her
close, but still in vain.

“No, dearest,” she whispered, and trembled. Yet she clutched
his imprisoning fingers and kissed them. He hugged her hands to
his breast.

“Oh, Hilary,” she added, “I wish I could! But–don’t you
know why I can’t? Don’t you see?”

“No, my treasure, not any more. Why, Anna, you’re Anna
Kincaid now. You’re my wed’–“

Her start of distress stopped him short. “Don’t call me
that,–my–my own,” she faltered.

“But if you are that–?”

“Oh, I am! thank God, I am! But don’t name the name. It’s
too fearfully holy. We’re married for an emergency, love, an
awful crisis! which hasn’t come to you yet, and may not come at
all. When it does, so will I! in that name! and you shall call
me by it!”

“Ah, if then you can come! But what do we know?”

“We know in whom we trust, Hilary; must, must, must trust,
as we trust and must trust each other.”

Still hanging to his hands she pushed them off at
arm’s-length: “Oh, my Hilary, my hero, my love, my life, my
commander, go!” And yet she clung. She drew his fingers close
down again and covered them with kisses, while twice, thrice,
in solemn adoration, he laid his lips upon her heavy hair.
Suddenly the two looked up. The omnibuses were here in the
grove.

Here too was the old coachman, with the soldier’s horse. The
vehicles jogged near and halted. A troop of girls, with Flora,
tripped out. And still, in their full view, with Flora closest,
the bride’s hands held the bridegroom’s fast. He had neither
the strength to pull free nor the wit to understand.

“What is it?” he softly asked, as the staring men waited and
the girls about Flora hung back.

“Don’t you know?” murmured Anna. “Don’t you see–the–the
difference?”

All at once he saw! Throwing away her hands he caught her
head between his big palms. Her arms flew round his neck, her
lips went to his, and for three heart-throbs they clung like
bee and flower. Then he sprang down the stair, swung into the
saddle, and fled after his men.

XLII

“VICTORY! I HEARD IT AS PL’–“

So Anna had foreboded, yet it was not so for the causes she
had in mind; not one fierce hum asked another where the
bazaar’s money was. That earlier bazaar, in the St. Louis
Hotel, had taken six weeks to report its results, and now, with
everybody distracted by a swarm and buzz of far larger,
livelier, hotter queries, the bazaar’s sponsors might report or
not, as they chose. Meanwhile, was the city really in dire and
shameful jeopardy, or was it as safe as the giddiest boasted?
Looking farther away, over across Georgia to Fort Pulaski, so
tremendously walled and armed, was the “invader” merely wasting
lives, trying to take it? On North Carolina’s coast, where our
priceless blockade-runners plied, had Newbern, as so stubbornly
rumored, and had Beaufort, already fallen, or had they really
not? Had the Virginia not sunk the Monitor and
scattered the Northern fleets? Was it not by France,
after all (asked the Creoles), but only by Paraguay that the
Confederacy had been “reco’nize'”? Was there no truth in
the joyous report that McClellan had vanished from Yorktown
peninsula? Was the loss of Cumberland Gap a trivial
matter, and did it in fact not cut in two our great strategic
front? Up yonder at Corinth, our “new and far better” base, was
Sidney Johnston an “imbecile,” a “coward,” a “traitor”? or was
he not rather an unparagoned strategist who, having at last
“lured the presumptuous foe” into his toils, was now, with
Beauregard, notwithstanding Beauregard’s protracted illness,
about to make the “one fell swoop” of our complete deliverance?
And after the swoop and its joy and its glory, when Johnnie
should come marching home, whose Johnnies, and how many, would
never return? As to your past-and-gone bazaar, law,
honey–!

So, as to that item, in all the wild-eyed city shaking with
its ague of anxieties only Anna was troubled when day after day
no detective came back with the old mud-caked dagger and now
both were away on some quite alien matter, no one could say
where. She alone was troubled, for she alone knew it was the
bazaar’s proceeds which had disappeared. Of what avail to tell
even Miranda, Connie, or Flora if they must not tell others? It
would only bind three more souls on the rack. “Vanished with
the dagger!” That would be all they could gasp, first amazed,
then scandalized, at a scheme of safe-keeping so fantastically
reckless; reckless and fantastical as her so-called marriage.
Yes, they would be as scandalized as they would have been
charmed had the scheme prospered. And then they would blame not
her but Hilary. Blame him in idle fear of a calamity that was
not going to befall!

She might have told that sternest, kindest, wisest of
friends, Doctor Sevier. As the family’s trustee he might yet
have to be told. But on that night of fantastical recklessness
he had been away, himself at Corinth to show them there how to
have vastly better hospitals, and to prescribe for his old
friend Beauregard. He had got back but yesterday. Or she might
have told the gray detective, just to make him more careful, as
Hilary, by letter, suggested. In part she had told him, through
Flora; told him that to save that old curio she would risk her
life. Surely, knowing that, he would safeguard it, in whatever
hands, and return it the moment he could. Who ever heard of a
detective not returning a thing the moment he could? Not Flora,
not yet Madame, they said. To be sure, thought Anna,
those professional masters of delay, the photographers, might
be more jewel-wise than trustworthy, but what photographer
could ever be so insane as to rob a detective? So, rather
ashamed of one small solicitude in this day of great ones, she
urged her committees for final reports–which never came–and
felt very wisely in writing her hero for his consent to things,
and to assure him that at the worst her own part of the family
estate would make everything good, the only harrowing question
being how to keep Miranda and Connie from sharing the loss.

On the first Sunday evening in April Doctor Sevier took tea
with the Callenders, self-invited, alone and firmly oblivious
of his own tardy wedding-gift to Anna as it gleamed at him on
the board. To any of a hundred hostesses he would have been a
joy, to share with as many friends as he would consent to meet;
for in the last week he had eaten “hog and hominy,” and sipped
corn-meal coffee, in lofty colloquy with Sidney Johnston and
his “big generals”; had talked confidentially with Polk, so
lately his own bishop; had ridden through the miry streets of
Corinth with all the New Orleans commanders of division or
brigade–Gibson, Trudeau, Ruggles, Brodnax; out on the
parapets, between the guns, had chatted with Hilary and his
loved lieutenants; down among the tents and mess-fires had
given his pale hand, with Spartan injunctions and all the home
news, to George Gregory, Ned Ferry, Dick Smith, and others of
Harper’s cavalry, and–circled round by Charlie Valcour, Sam
Gibbs, Maxime, and scores of their comrades in Kincaid’s
Battery–had seen once more their silken flag, so faded! and
touched its sacred stains and tatters. Now at the tea table
something led him to remark that here at home the stubborn
illness of this battery sister for whom Anna was acting as
treasurer had compelled him to send her away.

Timely topic: How to go into the country, and whither. The
Callenders were as eager for all the facts and counsel he could
give on it as if they were the “big generals” and his facts and
counsel were as to the creeks, swamps, ridges, tangled ravines,
few small clearings, and many roads and by-roads in the vast,
thinly settled, small-farmed, rain-drenched forests between
Corinth and the clay bluffs of the Tennessee. For now the
Callenders also were to leave the city, as soon as they could
be ready.

“Don’t wait till then,” crisply said the Doctor.

“We must wait till Nan winds up the bazaar.”

He thought not. In what bank had she its money?

When she said not in any he frowned. Whereupon she smilingly
stammered that she was told the banks themselves were sending
their treasure into the country, and that even ten days
earlier, when some one wanted to turn a fund into its safest
portable form, three banks had declined to give foreign
exchange for it at any price.

“Hmm!” he mused. “Was that your, eh,–?”

“My husband, yes,” said Anna, so quietly that the sister and
stepmother exulted in her. As quietly her eyes held the
doctor’s, and his hers, while the colour mounted to her brow.
He spoke:

“Still he got it into some good shape for you, the fund, did
he not?” Then suddenly he clapped a hand to a breast pocket and
stared: “He gave me a letter for you. Did I–? Ah, yes, I have
your written thanks. Anna, I thoroughly approve what you and he
have done.”

Constance and Miranda were overjoyed. He turned to them: “I
told Hilary so up in camp. I told Steve. Yes, Anna, you were
wise. You are wise. I’ve no doubt you’re doing wisely about
that fund.”

It was hard for the wise one not to look guilty.

“Have you told anybody,” he continued, “in what form you
have it, or where?”

“No!” put in the aggrieved Constance, “not even her blood
kin!”

“Wise again. Best for all of you. Now just hang to the
lucre. It comes too late to be of use here; this brave town
will have to stand or fall without it. But it’s still good for
Mobile, and Mobile saved may be New Orleans recovered.”

On a hint from the other women, and urged by their visitor,
Anna brought the letter and read him several closely written
pages on the strategic meaning of things. The zest with which
he discussed the lines made her newly proud of their
source.

“They’re so like his very word o’ mouth,” said he, “they
bring him right back here among us. Yes, and the whole theatre
of action with him. They draw it about us so closely and relate
it all to us so vitally that it–“

“Seems,” broke in the delighted Constance, “as if we saw it
all from the top of this house!”

The Doctor’s jaw set. Who likes phrases stuffed into his
mouth? Yet presently he allowed himself to resume. It
confirmed, he said, Beauregard’s word in his call for
volunteers, that there, before Corinth, was the place to defend
Louisiana. Soon he had regained his hueless ardor, and laid out
the whole matter on the table for the inspiration of his three
confiding auditors. Here at Chattanooga, so impregnably ours,
issued Tennessee river and the Memphis and Charleston railroad
from the mountain gateway between our eastern and western seats
of war. Here they swept down into Alabama, passed from the
state’s north-east to its north-west corner and parted company.
Here the railway continued westward, here it crossed the Mobile
and Ohio railroad at Corinth, here the Mississippi Central at
Grand Junction, and pressed on to Memphis, our back-gate key of
the Mississippi.

“In war,” said the Doctor, “rivers and railro’–“

“Are the veins and arteries of–oh, pardon!” The crime was
Anna’s this time.

“Are the lines fought for,” resumed the speaker, “and
wherever two or three of them join or cross you may look for a
battle.” His long finger dropped again to the table. Back here
in Alabama the Tennessee turned north to seek the Ohio, and
here, just over the Mississippi state line, in Tennessee, some
twenty miles north of Corinth, it became navigable for the
Ohio’s steamboats–gunboats–transports–at a place called in
the letter “Pittsburg Landing.”

Yes, now, between Hilary’s pages and the Doctor’s logic,
with Hilary almost as actually present as the physician, the
ladies saw why this great Memphis-Chattanooga fighting line
was, not alone pictorially, but practically, right at hand!
barely beyond sight and hearing or the feel of its tremor; a
veritable back garden wall to them and their beloved city; as
close as forts Jackson and St. Philip, her front gate. Yes,
and–Anna ventured to point out and the Doctor grudgingly
admitted–if the brave gray hosts along that back wall should
ever–could ever–be borne back so far southward, westward, the
last line would have to run from one to another of the Crescent
City’s back doorsteps and doors; from Vicksburg, that is,
eastward through Jackson, Mississippi’s capital, cross the
state’s two north-and-south railways, and swing down through
Alabama to Mobile on the Gulf. This, she silently perceived,
was why the letter and the Doctor quite agreed that Connie,
Miranda, and she ought to find their haven somewhere within the
dim region between New Orleans and those three small satellite
cities; not near any two railways, yet close enough to a single
one for them to get news, public or personal, in time to act on
it.

At leave-taking came the guest’s general summing up of fears
and faiths. All his hope for New Orleans, he said, was in the
forts down at the Passes. Should they fall the city could not
stand. But amid their illimitable sea marshes and their
impenetrable swamp forests, chin-deep in the floods of broken
levees, he truly believed, they would hold out. Let them do so
only till the first hot breath of real Delta summer should
bring typhoid, breakbone, yellow, and swamp fevers, the last by
all odds the worst, and Butler’s unacclimated troops would have
to reëmbark for home pell-mell or die on Ship Island like
poisoned fish. So much for the front gate. For the back gate,
Corinth, which just now seemed–the speaker harkened.

“Seemed,” he resumed, “so much more like the front–listen!”
There came a far, childish call.

“An extra,” laughed Constance. “Steve says we issue one
every time he brushes his uniform.”

“But, Con,” argued Anna, “an extra on Sunday evening,
brought away down here–” The call piped nearer.

“Victory!” echoed Constance. “I heard it as pl’–“

“Beauregard! Tennessee!” exclaimed both sisters. They flew
to the veranda, the other two following. Down in the gate could
be seen the old coachman, already waiting to buy the paper.
Constance called to him their warm approval. “I thought,”
murmured Miranda, “that Beauregard was in Miss’–“

Anna touched her, and the cry came again: “Great victory–!”
Yes, yes, but by whom, and where? Johnston? Corinth? “Great
victory at–!” Where? Where, did he say? The word came again,
and now again, but still it was tauntingly vague. Anna’s ear
seemed best, yet even she could say only, “I never heard of
such a place–out of the bible. It sounds like–Shiloh.”

Shiloh it was. At a table lamp indoors the Doctor bent over
the fresh print. “It’s true,” he affirmed. “It’s Beauregard’s
own despatch. ‘A complete victory,’ he says. ‘Driving the
enemy’–” The reader ceased and stared at the page. “Why, good
God!” Slowly he lifted his eyes upon those three sweet women
until theirs ran full. And then he stared once more into the
page: “Oh, good God! Albert Sidney Johnston is dead.”

XLIII

THAT SABBATH AT SHILOH

The figure had sounded apt to Anna on that Sunday evening
when the Doctor employed it; apt enough–until the outburst of
that great and dreadful news whose inseparable implications and
forebodings robbed her of all sleep that night and made her the
first one astir at daybreak. But thenceforward, and now for
half a week or more, the aptness seemed quite to have passed.
Strange was the theatre whose play was all and only a frightful
reality; whose swarming, thundering, smoking stage had its
audience, its New Orleans audience, wholly behind it, and whose
curtain of distance, however thin, mocked every bodily sense
and compelled all to be seen and heard by the soul’s eye and
ear, with all the joy and woe of its actuality and all its
suspense, terror, triumph, heartbreak, and despair.

Yet here was that theatre, and the Doctor’s metaphor was
still good enough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour
ladies, to whom Anna had quoted it. And here, sprinkled through
the vast audience of that theatre, with as keen a greed for its
play as any, were all the various non-combatants with whom we
are here concerned, though not easily to be singled out, such
mere units were they of the impassioned multitude every mere
unit of which, to loved and loving ones, counted for more than
we can tell.

However, our favourites might be glimpsed now and then. On a
certain midday of that awful half-week the Callenders, driving,
took up Victorine at her gate and Flora at her door and sped
up-town to the newspaper offices in Camp street to rein in
against a countless surge of old men in fine dress, their
precious dignity thrown to the dogs, each now but one of the
common herd, and each against all, shouldering, sweating, and
brandishing wide hands to be the first purchaser and reader of
the list, the long, ever-lengthening list of the killed and
wounded. Much had been learned of the great two-days’ battle,
and many an infantry sister, and many a battery sister besides
Anna, was second-sighted enough to see, night and day, night
and day, the muddy labyrinth of roads and by-roads that braided
and traversed the wide, unbroken reaches of dense timber–with
their deep ravines, their long ridges, and their creek-bottom
marshes and sloughs–in the day’s journey from Corinth to the
bluffs of the Tennessee. They saw them, not empty, nor
fearlessly crossed by the quail, the wild turkey, the fox, or
the unhunted deer, nor travelled alone by the homespun
“citizen” or by scouts or foragers, but slowly overflowed by a
great gray, silent, tangled, armed host–cavalry, infantry,
ordnance trains, batteries, battery wagons and ambulances: Saw
Hilary Kincaid and all his heroes and their guns, and all the
“big generals” and their smart escorts and busy staffs: Saw the
various columns impeding each other, taking wrong ways and
losing priceless hours while thousands of inexperienced boys,
footsore, drenched and shivering yet keen for the fight, ate
their five-days’ food in one, or threw it away to lighten the
march, and toiled on in hunger, mud, cold and rain, without the
note of a horn or drum or the distant eye of one blue scout to
tell of their oncoming.

They saw, did Anna and those sisters (and many and many a
wife and mother from Callender House to Carrollton), the vast,
stealthy, fireless bivouac at fall of night, in ear-shot of the
enemy’s tattoo, unsheltered from the midnight storm save by
raked-up leaves: Saw, just in the bivouac’s tortuous front,
softly reddening the low wet sky, that huge, rude semicircle of
camps in the dark ridged and gullied forests about Shiloh’s log
meeting-house, where the victorious Grant’s ten-thousands–from
Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin,
Michigan, as new to arms as their foe, yet a band of lions in
lair–lay dry-tented, full fed and fast asleep, safely flanked
by swollen streams, their gunboats behind them and Buell
coming, but without one mounted outpost, a scratch of
entrenchment or a whisper of warning.

Amid the eager carriage talk, in which Anna kept her part,
her mind’s eye still saw the farther scene as it changed again
and the gray dawn and gray host furtively rose together and
together silently spread through the deep woods. She watched
the day increase and noon soar up and sink away while the
legions of Hardee, Bragg, Polk and Breckinridge slowly writhed
out of their perplexed folds and set themselves, still
undetected in their three successive lines of battle. She
beheld the sun set calm and clear, the two hosts lie down once
more, one in its tents, the other on its arms, the leafy night
hang over them resplendent with stars, its watches near by, the
Southern lines reawaken in recovered strength, spring up and
press forward exultantly to the awful issue, and the Sabbath
dawn brighten into a faultless day with the boom of the opening
gun.

As the ladies drew up behind the throng and across the
throat of Commercial Alley the dire List began to flutter from
the Picayune office in greedy palms and over and among
dishevelled heads like a feeding swarm of white pigeons. News
there was as well as names, but every eye devoured the names
first and then–unless some name struck lightning in the heart,
as Anna saw it do every here and there and for that poor old
man over yonder–after the names the news.

“Nan, we needn’t stay if you–“

“Oh, Miranda, isn’t all this ours?”

The bulletin boards were already telling in outline, ahead
of the list, thrilling things about the Orleans Guards, the
whirlwind onset of whose maiden bayonets had captured double
its share of the first camp taken from the amazed,
unbreakfasted enemy, and who again and again, hour by hour, by
the half-mile and mile, had splendidly helped to drive
him–while he hammered back with a deadly stubbornness all but
a match for their fury. Through forests, across clearings, over
streams and bogs and into and out of ravines and thickets they
had swept, seizing transiently a whole field battery,
permanently hundreds of prisoners, and covering the strife’s
broad wake with even more appalling numbers of their own dead
and wounded than of the foe’s: wailing wounded, ghastly, grimy
dead, who but yesterday were brothers, cousins and playmates of
these very men snatching and searching the list. They told,
those boards, of the Washington Artillery (fifth company, never
before under fire) being thanked on the field by one of the
“big generals,” their chests and wheels shot half to splinters
but no gun lost. They told of all those Louisiana commands
whose indomitable lines charged and melted, charged and
withered, over and over the torn and bloody ground in that
long, horrible struggle that finally smoked out the “Hornets’
Nest.” They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on
all these sidewalks and away up to and beyond their
Bishop-General Polk’s Trinity Church, whose desperate gallantry
had saved that same Washington Artillery three of its pieces,
and to whose thinned and bleeding ranks swarms of the huddled
Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as their captors and
as glorious, had at last laid down their arms. And they told of
Kincaid’s Battery, Captain Kincaid commanding; how, having
early lost in the dense oak woods and hickory brush the
brigade–Brodnax’s–whose way they had shelled open for a
victorious charge, they had followed their galloping leader,
the boys running beside the wheels, from position to position,
from ridge to ridge, in rampant obedience of an order to “go in
wherever they heard the hottest firing”, how for a time they
had fought hub to hub beside the Washington Artillery; how two
of their guns, detached for a special hazard and sweeping into
fresh action on a flank of the “Hornets’ Nest,” had lost every
horse at a single volley of the ambushed foe, yet had instantly
replied with slaughterous vengeance; and how, for an hour
thereafter, so wrapped in their own smoke that they could be
pointed only by the wheel-ruts of their recoil, they had been
worked by their depleted gunners on hands and knees with
Kincaid and Villeneuve themselves at the trails and with fuses
cut to one second. So, in scant outline said the boards, or
more in detail read one man aloud to another as they hurried by
the carriage.

“But,” said Anna, while Flora enjoyed her pallor, “all that
is about the first day’s fight!”

“No,” cried Constance, “it’s the second day’s, that
Beauregard calls ‘a great and glorious victory!'”

“Yes,” interposed Flora, “but writing from behind his
fortification’ at Corinth, yes!”

XLIV

“THEY WERE ALL FOUR TOGETHER”

Away trotted the handsome span while five pairs of beautiful
eyes searched the three printed sheets, that bore–oh,
marvellous fortune!–not one of the four names writ largest in
those five hearts. Let joy be–ah, let joy be very meek while
to so many there is unutterable loss. Yet let it meekly abound
for the great loved cause so splendidly advanced. Miranda
pointed Anna to a bit of editorial:

“Monday was a more glorious day than Sunday. We can scarcely
forbear to speculate upon the great results that are to flow
from this decisive victory. An instant pursuit of the flying
enemy should–“

Why did the carriage halt at a Gravier Street crossing
obliquely opposite the upper front corner of the St. Charles
Hotel? Why did all the hotel’s gold-braided guests and loungers
so quietly press out against its upper balustrades? Why, under
its arches, and between balcony posts along the curbstones
clear down to Canal Street, was the pathetically idle crowd
lining up so silently? From that point why, now, did the faint
breeze begin to waft a low roar of drums of such grave
unmartial sort? And why, gradually up the sidewalks’ edges in
the hot sun, did every one so solemnly uncover? Small Victorine
stood up to see.

At first she made out only that most commonplace spectacle,
home guards. They came marching in platoons, a mere company or
two. In the red and blue of their dress was all the smartness
yet of last year, but in their tread was none of it and even
the bristle of their steel had vanished. Behind majestic
brasses and muffled drums grieving out the funeral march, they
stepped with slow precision and with arms reversed. But now in
abrupt contrast there appeared, moving as slowly and precisely
after them, widely apart on either side of the stony way, two
single attenuated files of but four bronzed and shabby
gray-jackets each, with four others in one thin, open rank from
file to file in their rear, and in the midst a hearse and its
palled burden. Rise, Anna, Constance, Miranda–all. Ah, Albert
Sidney Johnston! Weep, daughters of a lion-hearted cause. The
eyes of its sons are wet. Yet in your gentle bosoms keep great
joy for whoever of your very own and nearest the awful carnage
has spared; but hither comes, here passes slowly, and yonder
fades at length from view, to lie a day in state and so move on
to burial, a larger hope of final triumph than ever again you
may fix on one mortal man.

Hats on again, softly. Drift apart, aimless crowd. Cross the
two streets at once, diagonally, you, young man from the St.
Charles Hotel with purpose in your rapid step, pencil
unconsciously in hand and trouble on your brow. Regather your
reins, old coachman–nay, one moment! The heavy-hearted youth
passed so close under the horses’ front that only after he had
gained the banquette abreast the carriage did he notice its
occupants and Anna’s eager bow. It was the one-armed Kincaid’s
Battery boy reporter. With a sudden pitying gloom he returned
the greeting, faltered as if to speak, caught a breath and then
hurried on and away. What did that mean; more news; news bad
for these five in particular? Silently in each of them, without
a glance from one to another, the question asked itself.

“The True Delta,” remarked Anna to Miranda, “is right down
here on the next square,” and of his own motion the driver
turned that way.

“Bitwin Common Strit and Can-al,” added Victorine, needless
words being just then the most needed.

Midway in front of the hotel Anna softly laid a hand on
Flora, who respondingly murmured. For the reporter was back,
moving their way along the sidewalk almost at a run. Now
Constance was aware of him.

“When we cross Common Street,” she observed to Miranda,
“he’ll want to stop us.”

In fact, as soon as their intent to cross was plain, he sped
out beside them and stood, his empty sleeve pinned up, his full
one raised and grief evident in his courteous smile. Some fifty
yards ahead, by the True Delta office, men were huddling around
a fresh bulletin. Baring his brow to the sun, the young man
came close to the wheels.

“Wouldn’t you-all as soon–?” he began, but Constance
interrupted:

“The news is as good as ever, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but wouldn’t you-all as soon drive round by Carondelet
Street?” A gesture with his hat showed a piece of manifold
writing in his fingers.

He looked to Miranda, but she faltered. Flora, in her own
way, felt all the moment’s rack and stress, but some natures
are built for floods and rise on them like a boat. So thought
she of herself and had parted her lips to speak for all, when,
to her vexed surprise, Anna lifted a hand and in a clear, firm
tone inquired, “Is there any bad news for us five?” The youth’s
tongue failed; he nodded.

“Brodnax’s brigade?” she asked. “Our battery?”

“Yes, Monday, just at the last,” he murmured.

“Not taken?“

“Not a gun!” replied the boy, with a flash. Anna reflected
it, but her tone did not change:

“There are four men, you know, whom we five–“

“Yes.”

“Which of them is the bad news about?”

“All four,” murmured the youth. His eyes swam. His hat went
under the stump of his lost arm and he proffered the bit of
writing. Idlers were staring. “Take that with you,” he said.
“They were all four together and they’re only–“

The carriage was turning, but the fair cluster bent keenly
toward him. “Only what?” they cried.

“Missing.”

XLV

STEVE–MAXIME–CHARLIE–

To this queenly city must come first and fullest all news of
her own sons, and here the “five” would not themselves be
“missing” should better tidings–or worse–come seeking them
over the wires.

“At the front?” replied Doctor Sevier to Anna, “why, at the
front you’ll be kept in the rear, lost in a storm of false
rumors.”

General Brodnax, in a letter rife with fatherly romantic
tenderness and with splendid praise of Hilary as foremost in
the glorious feat which had saved old “Roaring Betsy” but lost
(or mislaid) him and his three comrades, also bade her wait.
Everything, he assured her, that human sympathy or the art of
war–or Beauregard’s special orders–could effect was being
done to find the priceless heroes. In the retreat of a great
host–ah, me! retreat was his very word and the host was
Dixie’s–retreating after its first battle, and that an awful
one, in deluging rains over frightful roads and brimming
streams, unsheltered, ill fed, with sick and wounded men and
reeling vehicles hourly breaking down, a hovering foe to be
fended off, and every dwelling in the land a hospitable refuge,
even captains of artillery or staff might be most honorably and
alarmingly missing yet reappear safe and sound. So, for a week
and more it was sit and wait, pace the floor and wait, wake in
the night and wait; so for Flora as well as for Anna (with a
difference), both of them anxious for Charlie–and Steve–and
Maxime, but in anguish for another.

Then tidings, sure enough! glad tidings! Mandeville and
Maxime safe in camp again and back to duty, whole, hale and in
the saddle. Their letters came by the wasted yellow hands of
two or three of the home-coming wounded, scores of whom were
arriving by every south-bound train. From the aide-de-camp and
the color-bearer came the first whole story of how Kincaid,
with his picked volunteers, barely a gun detachment, and with
Mandeville, who had brought the General’s consent, had stolen
noiselessly over the water-soaked leaves of a thickety oak wood
in the earliest glimmer of a rainy dawn and drawn off the
abandoned gun by hand to its waiting horses; also how, when
threatened by a hostile patrol, Hilary, Mandeville, Maxime and
Charlie had hurried back on foot into the wood and hotly
checked the pursuit long enough for their fellows to mount the
team, lay a shoulder to every miry wheel and flounder away with
the prize. But beyond that keen moment when the four, after
their one volley from ambush, had sprung this way and that
shouting absurd orders to make-believe men, cheering and firing
from behind trees, and (cut off from their horses) had made for
a gully and swamp, the two returned ones could tell nothing of
the two unreturned except that neither of them, dead or alive,
was anywhere on the ground of the fight or flight as they knew
it. For days, inside the enemy’s advancing lines, they had
prowled in ravines and lain in blackberry patches and sassafras
fence-rows, fed and helped on of nights by the beggared yet
still warm-hearted farm people and getting through at last, but
with never a trace of Kincaid or Charlie, though after their
own perilous search they had inquired, inquired, inquired.

So, wait, said every one and every dumb condition, even the
miseries of the great gray army, of which Anna had mind
pictures again, as it toiled through mire and lightning, rain,
sleet and hail, and as its thousands of sick and shattered lay
in Corinth dying fifty a day. And Flora and Anna waited, though
with minds placid only to each other and the outer world.

“Yes,” moaned Anna to Constance, when found at dead of night
staring Corinthward from a chamber window. “Yes, friends
advise! All our friends advise! What daring thing did any one
ever do who waited for friends to advise it? Does your Steve
wait for friends to advise?… Patience? Ah, lend me yours! You
don’t need it now…. Fortitude? Oh, I never had any!… What?
command the courage to do nothing when nothing is the only hard
thing to do? Who, I? Connie! I don’t even want it. I’m a
craven; I want the easy thing! I want to go nurse the
box-carloads and mule-wagonloads of wounded at Corinth, at
Okolona and strewed all the way down to Mobile–that’s full of
them. Hilary may be somewhere among them–unidentified! They
say he wore no badge of rank that morning, you know, and
carried the carbine of a wounded cavalryman to whom he had
given his coat. Oh, he’s mine, Con, and I’m his. We’re not
engaged, we’re married, and I must go. It’s only
a step–except in miles–and I’m going! I’m going for your sake
and Miranda’s. You know you’re staying on my account, not for
me to settle this bazaar business but to wait for news that’s
never coming till I go and bring it!”

This tiny, puny, paltry business of the bazaar–the
whereabouts of the dagger and its wealth, or of the detectives,
gone for good into military secret service at the front–she
drearily smiled away the whole trivial riddle as she lay of
nights contriving new searches for that inestimable, living
treasure, whose perpetual “missing,” right yonder “almost in
sight from the housetop,” was a dagger in her heart.

And the Valcours? Yes, they, too, had their frantic impulses
to rise and fly. For Madame, though her lean bosom bled for the
lost boy, the fiercest pain of waiting was that its iron
coercion lay in their penury. For Flora its sharpest pangs were
in her own rage; a rage not of the earlier, cold sort against
Anna and whoever belonged to Anna–that transport had always
been more than half a joy–but a new, hot rage against herself
and the finical cheapness of her scheming, a rage that stabbed
her fair complacency with the revelation that she had a heart,
and a heart that could ache after another. The knife of that
rage turned in her breast every time she cried to the grandam,
“We must go!” and that rapacious torment simpered, “No funds,”
adding sidewise hints toward Anna’s jewels, still diligently
manoeuvred for, but still somewhere up-stairs in Callender
House, sure to go with Anna should Anna go while the
manoeuvrers were away.

A long lane to any one, was such waiting, lighted, for Anna,
only by a faint reflection of that luster of big generals’
strategy and that invincibility of the Southern heart which, to
all New Orleans and even to nations beyond seas, clad Dixie’s
every gain in light and hid her gravest disasters in beguiling
shadow. But suddenly one day the long lane turned. The secret
had just leaked out that the forts down the river were
furiously engaged with the enemy’s mortar-boats a few miles
below them and that in the past forty-eight hours one huge bomb
every minute, three thousand in all, had dropped into those
forts or burst over them, yet the forts were “proving
themselves impregnable.” The lane turned and there stood
Charlie.

There he stood, in the stairway door of the front room
overlooking Jackson Square. The grandmother and sister had been
keenly debating the news and what to do about it, the elder
bird fierce to stay, the younger bent on flight, and had just
separated to different windows, when they heard, turned and
beheld him there, a stranger in tattered gray and railway dirt,
yet their own coxcomb boy from his curls to his ill-shod feet.
Flora had hardly caught her breath or believed her eyes before
the grandmother was on his neck patting and petting his cheeks
and head and plying questions in three languages: When, where,
how, why, how, where and when?

Dimly he reflected their fond demonstrations. No gladness
was in his face. His speech, as hurried as theirs, answered no
queries. He asked loftily for air, soap, water and the privacy
of his own room, and when they had followed him there and seen
him scour face, arms, neck, and head, rub dry and resume his
jacket and belt, he had grown only more careworn and had not
yet let his sister’s eyes rest on his.

He had but a few hours to spend in the city, he said; had
brought despatches and must carry others back by the next
train. His story, he insisted, was too long to tell before he
had delivered certain battery letters; one to Victorine, two to
Constance Mandeville, and so on. Here was one to Flora, from
Captain Irby; perhaps the story was in it. At any rate, its
bearer must rush along now. He toppled his “grannie” into a
rocking-chair and started away. He “would be back as soon as
ever he–“

But Flora filled the doorway. He had to harden his glance to
hers at last. In her breast were acutest emotions widely at
war, yet in her eyes he saw only an unfeeling light, and it was
the old woman behind him who alone noted how painfully the
girl’s fingers were pinched upon Irby’s unopened letter. The
boy’s stare betrayed no less anger than suffering and as Flora
spoke he flushed.

“Charlie,” she melodiously began, but his outcry silenced
her:

“Now, by the eternal great God Almighty, Flora Valcour, if
you dare to ask me that–” He turned to the grandmother,
dropped to his knees, buried his face in her lap and
sobbed.

With genuine tenderness she stroked his locks. Yet while she
did so she lifted to the sister a face lighted up with a mirth
of deliverance. To nod, toss, and nod again, was poor show for
her glee; she smirked and writhed to the disdaining girl like a
child at a mirror, and, though sitting thus confined, gave all
the effects of jigging over the floor. Hilary out of the way!
Kincaid eliminated, and the whole question free of him, this
inheritance question so small and mean to all but her and Irby,
but to him and her so large, so paramount! Silently, but
plainly to the girl, her mouth widely motioned, “Il est mort!
grâce”–one hand stopped stroking long enough to make
merrily the sign of cross–“grâce au ciel, il est
mort!”

No moment of equal bitterness had Flora Valcour ever known.
To tell half her distresses would lose us in their tangle,
midmost in which was a choking fury against the man whom
unwillingly she loved, for escaping her, even by a glorious
death. One thought alone–that Anna, as truly as if stricken
blind, would sit in darkness the rest of her days–lightened
her torture, and with that thought she smiled a stony loathing
on the mincing grandam and the boy’s unlifted head. Suddenly,
purpose gleamed from her. She could not break forth herself,
but to escape suffocation she must and would procure an
outburst somewhere. Measuredly, but with every nerve and tendon
overstrung, she began to pace the room.

“Don’t cry, Charlie,” she smoothly said in a voice as cold
as the crawl of a snake. The brother knew the tone, had known
it from childhood, and the girl, glancing back on him, was
pleased to see him stiffen. A few steps on she added pensively,
“For a soldier to cry–and befo’ ladies–a ladies’ man–of that
batt’rie–tha’s hardly fair–to the ladies, eh, grandmama?”

But the boy only pressed his forehead harder down and
clutched the aged knees under it till their owner put on, to
the scintillant beauty, a look of alarm and warning. The girl,
musingly retracing her calculated steps to where the kneeler
seemed to clinch himself to his posture, halted, stroked with
her slippered toe a sole of his rude shoes and spoke once more:
“Do they oft-ten boohoo like that, grandma, those
artillerie?”

The boy whirled up with the old woman clinging. A stream of
oaths and curses appallingly original poured from him, not as
through the lips alone but from his very eyes and nostrils.
That the girl was first of all a fool and damned was but a
trivial part of the cry–of the explosion of his whole year’s
mistaken or half-mistaken inferences and smothered indignation.
With equal flatness and blindness he accused her of rejoicing
in the death of Kincaid: the noblest captain (he ramped on)
that ever led a battery; kindest friend that ever ruled a camp;
gayest, hottest, daringest fighter of Shiloh’s field; fiercest
for man’s purity that ever loved the touch of women’s fingers;
sternest that ever wept on the field of death with the dying in
his arms; and the scornfullest of promotion that ever was
cheated of it at headquarters.

All these extravagances he cursed out, too witless to see
that this same hero of his was the one human being, himself
barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged
her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna godmother
of their flag, and of being in some dark league against
him–“hell only knew what”–along with that snail of a cousin
whom everybody but Kincaid himself and the silly old uncle knew
to be the fallen man’s most venomous foe. Throughout the storm
the grandmother’s fingers pattered soothing caresses, while
Flora stood as unruffled by his true surmises as by any, a look
of cold interest in her narrowed eyes, and her whole bodily and
spiritual frame drinking relief from his transport. Now, while
he still raged, she tenderly smiled on their trembling
ancestress.

“Really, you know grandmama, sometimes me also I feel
like that, when to smazh the furniture ‘t would be a
delightful–or to wring somebody the neck, yes. But for us, and
to-day, even to get a li’l’ mad, how is that a possibl’?” She
turned again, archly, to the brother, but flashed in alarm and
sprang toward him.

His arm stiffly held her off. With failing eyes bent on the
whimpering grandmother he sighed a disheartened oath and
threshed into a chair gasping–

“My wound–opened again.”

XLVI

THE SCHOOL OF SUSPENSE

She had come round by way of Victorine’s small, tight-fenced
garden of crape-myrtles, oleanders and pomegranates–where also
the water was in the streets, backwater from the overflowed
swamp-forests between city and lake–and had sent her to
Charlie’s bedside. Pleasant it would be for us to turn back
with the damsel and see her, with heart as open as her arms,
kiss the painted grandam, and at once proceed to make herself
practically invaluable; or to observe her every now and then
dazzle her adored patient with a tear-gem of joy or pity, or of
gratitude that she lived in a time when heroic things could
happen right at home and to the lowliest, even to her; sweet
woes like this, that let down, for virtuous love, the barriers
of humdrum convention. But Flora draws us on, she and Anna. As
she touched the bell-knob Constance sprang out to welcome her,
though not to ask her in–till she could have a word with her
alone, the young wife explained.

“I saw you coming,” she said, drawing her out to the
balustrade. “You didn’t get Anna’s note of last night–too bad!
I’ve just found out–her maid forgot it! What do you reckon
we’ve been doing all day long? Packing! We’re going we don’t
know where! Vicksburg, Jackson, Meridian, Mobile, wherever Anna
can best hunt Hilary from–and Charlie too, of course.”

“Yes,” said Flora, one way to the speaker and quite another
way to herself.

“Yes, she wants to do it, and Doctor Sevier says it’s the
only thing for her. Ah, Flora, how well you can
understand that!”

“Indeed, yes,” sighed the listener, both ways again.

“We know how absolutely you believe the city’s our best
base, else we’d have asked you to go with us.” The ever genuine
Constance felt a mortifying speciousness in her words and so
piled them on. “We know the city is best–unless it
should fall, and it won’t–oh, it won’t, God’s not going to let
so many prayers go unanswered, Flora! But we’ve tossed reason
aside and are going by instinct, the way I always feel safest
in, dear. Ah, poor Anna! Oh, Flora, she’s so sweet about
it!”

“Yes? Ab-out what?”

“You, dear, and whoever is suffering the same–“

Flora softly winced and Constance blamed herself so to have
pained another sister’s love. “And she’s so quiet,” added the
speaker, “but, oh, so pale–and so hard either to comfort or
encourage, or even to discourage. There’s nothing you can say
that she isn’t already heart-sick of saying herself, to
herself, and I beg you, dear, in your longing to comfort her,
please don’t bring up a single maybe-this or maybe-that; any
hope, I mean, founded on a mere doubt.”

“Ah, but sometime’ the doubt–it is the hope!”

“Yes, sometimes; but not to her, any more. Oh, Flora, if
it’s just as true of you, you won’t be–begrudge my saying it
of my sister–that no saint ever went to her matyrdom better
prepared than she is, right now, for the very worst that can be
told. There’s only one thing to which she never can and never
will resign herself, and that is doubt. She can’t breathe its
air, Flora. As she says herself, she isn’t so built; she hasn’t
that gift.”

The musing Flora nodded compassionately, but inwardly she
said that, gift or no gift, Anna should serve her time in
Doubting Castle, with her, Flora, for turnkey. Suddenly she put
away her abstraction and with a summarizing gesture and
chastened twinkle spoke out: “In short, you want to know for
w’at am I come.”

“Flora!”

“Ah, but, my dear, you are ri-ight. That is ‘all correct,’
as they say, and one thing I’m come for–‘t is–” She handed
out Mandeville’s two letters.

The wife caught them to her bosom, sprang to her tiptoes,
beamed on the packet a second time and read aloud, “Urbanity of
Corporal Valcour!” She heaved an ecstatic breath to speak on,
but failed. Anna and Miranda had joined them and Flora had
risen from her seat on the balustrade, aware at once that the
rôle she had counted on was not to be hers, the
rôle of comforter to an undone rival.

Pale indeed was the rival, pale as rivalry could wish. Yet
instantly Flora saw, with a fiery inward sting, how beautiful
pallor may be. And more she saw: with the chagrin then growing
so common on every armed front–the chagrin of finding one’s
foe entrenched–she saw how utterly despair had failed to crush
a gentle soul. Under cover of affliction’s night and storm
Anna, this whole Anna Callender, had been reinforced, had
fortified and was a new problem.

She greeted Flora with a welcoming beam, but before speaking
she caught her sister’s arm and glanced herself, at the
superscription.

“Flora!” she softly cried, “oh, Flora Valcour! has your
brother–your Charlie!–come home alive and well?–What;
no?–No, he has not?”

The visitor was shaking her head: “No. Ah, no! home, yes,
and al-I’ve; but–“

“Oh, Flora, Flora! alive and at home! home and alive!” While
the words came their speaker slowly folded her arms about the
bearer of tidings, and with a wholly unwonted strength pressed
her again to the rail and drew bosom to bosom, still
exclaiming, “Alive! alive! Oh, whatever his plight, be
thankful, Flora, for so much! Alive enough to come
home!”

XLVII

FROM THE BURIAL SQUAD

“Ah, let me be glad for you, Flora, let me be glad for you!
Oh, think of it! You have him! have him at home, to look
upon, to touch, to call by name! and to be looked upon by
him and touched and called by name! Oh, God in heaven!
God in heaven!”

Miranda’s fond protests were too timorous to check her, and
Flora’s ceased in the delight of hearing that last wail confess
the thought of Hilary. Constance strove with tender energy for
place and voice: “Nan, dearie, Nan! But listen to Flora, Nan.
See, Nan, I haven’t opened Steve’s letter yet. Wounded and
what, Flora, something worse? Ah, if worse you couldn’t have
left him.”

“I know,” sighed Anna, relaxing her arms to a caress and
turning her gaze to Flora. “I see. Your brother, our dear
Charlie, has come back to life, but wounded and alone. Alone.
Hilary is still missing. Isn’t that it? That’s all, isn’t
it?”

Constance, in a sudden thought of what her letters might
tell, began to open one, though with her eyes at every
alternate moment on Flora as eagerly as Miranda’s or Anna’s.
Flora stood hiddenly revelling in that complexity of her own
spirit which enabled her to pour upon her questioner a look,
even a real sentiment, of ravishing pity, while nevertheless in
the depths of her being she thrilled and burned and danced and
sang with joy for the very misery she thus compassionated. By a
designed motion she showed her grandmother’s reticule on her
arm. But only Anna saw it; Constance, with her gaze in the
letter, was drawing Miranda aside while both bent their heads
over a clause in it which had got blurred, and looked at each
other aghast as they made it out to read, “‘–from the burial
squad.'” The grandmother’s silken bag saved them from Anna’s
notice.

“Oh, Flora!” said Anna again, “is there really something
worse?” Abruptly, she spread a hand under the bag and with her
eyes still in the eyes of its possessor slid it gently from the
yielding wrist. Dropping her fingers into it she brought forth
a tobacco-pouch, of her own embroidering, and from it, while
the reticule fell unheeded to the floor, drew two or three
small things which she laid on it in her doubled hands and
regarded with a smile. Vacantly the smile increased as she
raised it to Flora, then waned while she looked once more on
the relics, and grew again as she began to handle them. Her
slow voice took the tone of a child alone at play.

“Why, that’s my photograph,” she said. “And
this–this is his watch–watch and chain.” She dangled them. A
light frown came and went between her smiles.

With soft eagerness Flora called Constance, and the sister
and Miranda stood dumb.

“See, Connie,” the words went on, “see, ‘Randa, this is my
own photograph, and this is his own watch and chain. I must go
and put them away–with my old gems.” Constance would have
followed her as she moved but she waved a limp forbiddal,
prattling on: “This doesn’t mean he’s dead, you know. Oh, not
at all! It means just the contrary! Why, I saw him alive last
night, in a dream, and I can’t believe anything else, and I
won’t! No, no, not yet!” At that word she made a misstep and as
she started sharply to recover it the things she carried fell
breaking and jingling at her feet.

“Oh-h!” she sighed in childish surprise and feebly dropped
to her knees. Flora, closest by, sprang crouching to the
rescue, but recoiled as the kneeling girl leaned hoveringly
over the mementos and with distended eyes and an arm thrust
forward cried aloud, “No! No! No-o!”

At once, however, her voice was tender again. “Mustn’t
anybody touch them but me, ever any more,” she said,
regathering the stuff, regained her feet and moved on. Close
after her wavering steps anxiously pressed the others, yet not
close enough. At the open door, smiling back in rejection of
their aid, she tripped, and before they could save her, tumbled
headlong within. From up-stairs, from downstairs came servants
running, and by the front door entered a stranger, a private
soldier in swamp boots and bespattered with the mire of the
river road from his spurs to his ragged hat.