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"
A week or two ran by, and now again it was March. Never an earlier
twelvemonth had the women of New Orleans--nor of any town or time--the
gentlewomen--spent in more unselfish or arduous toil.
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
Could they have known half the toil, care, and trial the preparation of
this Bazaar was to cost their friends, apologized the Callenders as it
neared completion, they would never have dared propose it.
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'"
How absurdly poor the chance! Yet they bade the old coachman turn that
way, and indeed the facts were better than the hope of any one of them.
Charlie, very gaunt and battered, but all the more enamored of himself
therefor and for the new chevrons of a gun corporal on his dingy sleeve,
was actually aboard that boat. In one of the small knots of passengers
on her boiler deck he was modestly companioning with a captain of
infantry and two of staff, while they now exchanged merry anecdotes of
the awful retreat out of Tennessee into Mississippi, now grimly damned
this or that bad strategy, futile destruction, or horrible suffering,
now re-discussed the comical chances of a bet of General Brodnax's,
still pending, and now, with the crowd, moved downstairs to the freight
deck as the boat began to nose the wharf.
Meanwhile the Callenders' carriage had made easy speed. Emerging by the
Free Market, it met an open hack carrying six men. At the moment every
one was cringing in a squall of dust, but as well as could be seen these
six were the driver, a colored servant at his side, an artillery
corporal, and three officers. Some army wagons hauling pine-knots to the
fire-fleet compelled both carriages to check up. Thereupon, the gust
passing and Victorine getting a better glance at the men, she tossed
both hands, gave a stifled cry and began to laugh aloud.
"Charlie!" cried Anna. "Steve!" cried Constance.
"And Captain Irby!" remarked Miranda.
The infantry captain, a transient steamboat acquaintance, used often
afterward to say that he never saw anything prettier than those four
wildly gladdened ladies unveiling in the shade of their parasols. I
doubt if he ever did. He talked with Anna, who gave him so sweet an
attention that he never suspected she was ravenously taking in every
word the others dropped behind her.
"But where he is, that Captain Kincaid?" asked Victorine of Charlie a
second time.
"Well, really," stammered the boy at last, "we--we can't say, just now,
where he is."
("He's taken prisoner!" wailed Anna's heart while she let the infantry
captain tell her that hacks, in Nashville on the Sunday after Donelson,
were twenty-five dollars an hour.)
"He means," she heard Mandeville put in, "he means--Charlie--only that
we _muz_ not tell. 'Tis a sicret."
"You've sent him into the enemy's lines!" cried Constance to Irby in one
of her intuitions.
"We?" responded the grave Irby, "No, not we."
"Captain Mandeville," exclaimed Victorine, "us, you don't need to tell
us some white lies."
The Creole shrugged: "We are telling you only the whitess we can!"
("Yes," the infantry captain said, "with Memphis we should lose the
largest factory of cartridges in the Confederacy.")
But this was no place for parleying. So while the man next the
hack-driver, ordered by Mandeville and laden with travelling-bags,
climbed to a seat by the Callenders' coachman the aide-de-camp crowded
in between Constance and Victorine, the equipage turned from the
remaining soldiers, and off the ladies spun for home, Anna and Miranda
riding backward to have the returned warrior next his doting wife.
Victorine was dropped on the way at the gate of her cottage. When the
others reached the wide outer stair of their own veranda, and the
coachman's companion had sprung down and opened the carriage, Mandeville
was still telling of Mandeville, and no gentle hearer had found any
chance to ask further about that missing one of whom the silentest was
famishing to know whatever--good or evil--there was to tell. Was Steve
avoiding their inquiries? wondered Anna.
Up the steps went first the married pair, the wife lost in the hero, the
hero in himself. Was he, truly? thought Anna, or was he only trying,
kindly, to appear so? The ever-smiling Miranda followed. A step within
the house Mandeville, with eyes absurdly aflame, startled first his wife
by clutching her arm, and then Miranda by beckoning them into a door at
their right, past unheeded treasures of the Bazaar, and to a front
window. Yet through its blinds they could discover only what they had
just left; the carriage, with Anna still in it, the garden, the grove,
an armed soldier on guard at the river gate, another at the foot of the
steps, a third here at the top.
It was good to Anna to rest her head an instant on the cushioning
behind it and close her eyes. With his rag of a hat on the ground and
his head tightly wrapped in the familiar Madras kerchief of the slave
deck-hand, the attendant at the carriage side reverently awaited the
relifting of her lids. The old coachman glanced back on her.
"Missy?" he tenderly ventured. But the lids still drooped, though she
rose.
"Watch out fo' de step," said the nearer man. His tone was even more
musically gentle than the other's, yet her eyes instantly opened into
his and she started so visibly that her foot half missed and she had to
catch his saving hand.
"Stiddy! stiddy!" He slowly let the cold, slim fingers out of his as she
started on, but she swayed again and he sprang and retook them. For half
a breath she stared at him like a wild bird shot, glanced at the
sentinels, below, above, and then pressed up the stair.
Constance, behind the shutters, wept. "Go away," she pleaded to her
husband, "oh, go away!" but pushed him without effect and peered down
again. "He's won!" she exclaimed in soft ecstasy, "he's won at last!"
"Yes, he's win!" hoarsely whispered the aide-de-camp. "He's win the
bet!"
Constance flashed indignantly: "What has he bet?"
"Bet. 'He has bet three-ee 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."