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:
[Illustration: And the next instant she was in his arms]
"And all you had to do was to say yes to him?"
"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 Reporters' heaven, the Bazaar. So on its opening night Hilary named it
to Flora.
"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
From Camp Villeré, close below small Camp Callender, one more last
regiment--Creoles--was to have gone that afternoon to the Jackson
Railroad Station and take train to join their Creole Beauregard for the
defence of their own New Orleans.
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
Hilary had bent an arm around Anna when Flora called his name. Irby
handed him the order. A glance made it clear. Its reader cast a wide
look over the heads of the dancers and lifting the missive high beckoned
with it to Mandeville. Then he looked for some one else: "Charlie!"
"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.