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
Hilary stared, reddened as she paled, and with a slow smile shook his
head. She murmured again:
"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'--"
The last few days of March and first three or four of April, since the
battery boys and the three captains had gone, were as full of frightened
and angry questions as the air is of bees around a shaken hive.
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!"