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
Very pleasant it was to stand thus on the tremulous deck of the swiftest
craft in the whole Confederate service. Pleasant to see on either hand
the flat landscape with all its signs of safety and plenty; its orange
groves, its greening fields of young sugar-cane, its pillared and
magnolia-shaded plantation houses, its white lines of slave cabins in
rows of banana trees, and its wide wet plains swarming with wild birds;
pleasant to see it swing slowly, majestically back and melt into a
skyline as low and level as the ocean's.
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
Queer world. Can you be sure the next pair you meet walking together of
a summer eve are as starry as they look? Lo, Constance and Miranda. Did
the bride herself realize what a hunger of loneliness was hers? Or Anna
and Irby, with Madame between them. Could you, maybe, have guessed the
veritable tempest beneath the maiden's serenity, or his inward gnashings
against whatever it was that had blighted his hour with the elusive
Flora?
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."
[Illustration: "'Tis good-by, Kincaid's Battery"]
XXIX
A CASTAWAY ROSE
Gone to sleep the camp except its sentinels, and all Callender House
save one soul. Not Miranda, not the Mandevilles, nor Madame Valcour, nor
any domestic. Flora knew, though it was not Flora. In her slumbers she
knew.
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."