presently he allowed himself to resume. It confirmed, he said,
Beauregard's word in his call for volunteers, that there, before
Corinth, was the place to defend Louisiana. Soon he had regained his
hueless ardor, and laid out the whole matter on the table for the
inspiration of his three confiding auditors. Here at Chattanooga, so
impregnably ours, issued Tennessee river and the Memphis and Charleston
railroad from the mountain gateway between our eastern and western seats
of war. Here they swept down into Alabama, passed from the state's
north-east to its north-west corner and parted company. Here the railway
continued westward, here it crossed the Mobile and Ohio railroad at
Corinth, here the Mississippi Central at Grand Junction, and pressed on
to Memphis, our back-gate key of the Mississippi.
"In war," said the Doctor, "rivers and railro'--"
"Are the veins and arteries of--oh, pardon!" The crime was Anna's this
time.
"Are the lines fought for," resumed the speaker, "and wherever two or
three of them join or cross you may look for a battle." His long finger
dropped again to the table. Back here in Alabama the Tennessee turned
north to seek the Ohio, and here, just over the Mississippi state line,
in Tennessee, some twenty miles north of Corinth, it became navigable
for the Ohio's steamboats--gunboats--transports--at a place called in
the letter "Pittsburg Landing."
Yes, now, between Hilary's pages and the Doctor's logic, with Hilary
almost as actually present as the physician, the ladies saw why this
great Memphis-Chattanooga fighting line was, not alone pictorially, but
practically, right at hand! barely beyond sight and hearing or the feel
of its tremor; a veritable back garden wall to them and their beloved
city; as close as forts Jackson and St. Philip, her front gate. Yes,
and--Anna ventured to point out and the Doctor grudgingly admitted--if
the brave gray hosts along that back wall should ever--could ever--be
borne back so far southward, westward, the last line would have to run
from one to another of the Crescent City's back doorsteps and doors;
from Vicksburg, that is, eastward through Jackson, Mississippi's
capital, cross the state's two north-and-south railways, and swing down
through Alabama to Mobile on the Gulf. This, she silently perceived, was
why the letter and the Doctor quite agreed that Connie, Miranda, and she
ought to find their haven somewhere within the dim region between New
Orleans and those three small satellite cities; not near any two
railways, yet close enough to a single one for them to get news, public
or personal, in time to act on it.
At leave-taking came the guest's general summing up of fears and faiths.
All his hope for New Orleans, he said, was in the forts down at the
Passes. Should they fall the city could not stand. But amid their
illimitable sea marshes and their impenetrable swamp forests, chin-deep
in the floods of broken levees, he truly believed, they would hold out.
Let them do so only till the first hot breath of real Delta summer
should bring typhoid, breakbone, yellow, and swamp fevers, the last by
all odds the worst, and Butler's unacclimated troops would have to
reëmbark for home pell-mell or die on Ship Island like poisoned fish. So
much for the front gate. For the back gate, Corinth, which just now
seemed--the speaker harkened.
"Seemed," he resumed, "so much more like the front--listen!" There came
a far, childish call.
"An extra," laughed Constance. "Steve says we issue one every time he
brushes his uniform."
"But, Con," argued Anna, "an extra on Sunday evening, brought away down
here--" The call piped nearer.
"Victory!" echoed Constance. "I heard it as pl'--"
"Beauregard! Tennessee!" exclaimed both sisters. They flew to the
veranda, the other two following. Down in the gate could be seen the old
coachman, already waiting to buy the paper. Constance called to him
their warm approval. "I thought," murmured Miranda, "that Beauregard was
in Miss'--"
Anna touched her, and the cry came again: "Great victory--!" Yes, yes,
but by whom, and where? Johnston? Corinth? "Great victory at--!" Where?
Where, did he say? The word came again, and now again, but still it was
tauntingly vague. Anna's ear seemed best, yet even she could say only,
"I never heard of such a place--out of the bible. It sounds
like--Shiloh."
Shiloh it was. At a table lamp indoors the Doctor bent over the fresh
print. "It's true," he affirmed. "It's Beauregard's own despatch. 'A
complete victory,' he says. 'Driving the enemy'--" The reader ceased and
stared at the page. "Why, good God!" Slowly he lifted his eyes upon
those three sweet women until theirs ran full. And then he stared once
more into the page: "Oh, good God! Albert Sidney Johnston is dead."
XLIII
THAT SABBATH AT SHILOH
"Whole theatre of action."
The figure had sounded apt to Anna on that Sunday evening when the
Doctor employed it; apt enough--until the outburst of that great and
dreadful news whose inseparable implications and forebodings robbed her
of all sleep that night and made her the first one astir at daybreak.
But thenceforward, and now for half a week or more, the aptness seemed
quite to have passed. Strange was the theatre whose play was all and
only a frightful reality; whose swarming, thundering, smoking stage had
its audience, its New Orleans audience, wholly behind it, and whose
curtain of distance, however thin, mocked every bodily sense and
compelled all to be seen and heard by the soul's eye and ear, with all
the joy and woe of its actuality and all its suspense, terror, triumph,
heartbreak, and despair.
Yet here was that theatre, and the Doctor's metaphor was still good
enough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour ladies, to whom Anna
had quoted it. And here, sprinkled through the vast audience of that
theatre, with as keen a greed for its play as any, were all the various
non-combatants with whom we are here concerned, though not easily to be
singled out, such mere units were they of the impassioned multitude
every mere unit of which, to loved and loving ones, counted for more
than we can tell.
However, our favourites might be glimpsed now and then. On a certain
midday of that awful half-week the Callenders, driving, took up
Victorine at her gate and Flora at her door and sped up-town to the
newspaper offices in Camp street to rein in against a countless surge of
old men in fine dress, their precious dignity thrown to the dogs, each
now but one of the common herd, and each against all, shouldering,
sweating, and brandishing wide hands to be the first purchaser and
reader of the list, the long, ever-lengthening list of the killed and
wounded. Much had been learned of the great two-days' battle, and many
an infantry sister, and many a battery sister besides Anna, was
second-sighted enough to see, night and day, night and day, the muddy
labyrinth of roads and by-roads that braided and traversed the wide,
unbroken reaches of dense timber--with their deep ravines, their long
ridges, and their creek-bottom marshes and sloughs--in the day's journey
from Corinth to the bluffs of the Tennessee. They saw them, not empty,
nor fearlessly crossed by the quail, the wild turkey, the fox, or the
unhunted deer, nor travelled alone by the homespun "citizen" or by
scouts or foragers, but slowly overflowed by a great gray, silent,
tangled, armed host--cavalry, infantry, ordnance trains, batteries,
battery wagons and ambulances: Saw Hilary Kincaid and all his heroes and
their guns, and all the "big generals" and their smart escorts and busy
staffs: Saw the various columns impeding each other, taking wrong ways
and losing priceless hours while thousands of inexperienced boys,
footsore, drenched and shivering yet keen for the fight, ate their
five-days' food in one, or threw it away to lighten the march, and
toiled on in hunger, mud, cold and rain, without the note of a horn or
drum or the distant eye of one blue scout to tell of their oncoming.
They saw, did Anna and those sisters (and many and many a wife and
mother from Callender House to Carrollton), the vast, stealthy, fireless
bivouac at fall of night, in ear-shot of the enemy's tattoo, unsheltered
from the midnight storm save by raked-up leaves: Saw, just in the
bivouac's tortuous front, softly reddening the low wet sky, that huge,
rude semicircle of camps in the dark ridged and gullied forests about
Shiloh's log meeting-house, where the victorious Grant's
ten-thousands--from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Michigan, as new to arms as their foe, yet a band of lions in
lair--lay dry-tented, full fed and fast asleep, safely flanked by
swollen streams, their gunboats behind them and Buell coming, but
without one mounted outpost, a scratch of entrenchment or a whisper of
warning.
Amid the eager carriage talk, in which Anna kept her part, her mind's
eye still saw the farther scene as it changed again and the gray dawn
and gray host furtively rose together and together silently spread
through the deep woods. She watched the day increase and noon soar up
and sink away while the legions of Hardee, Bragg, Polk and Breckinridge
slowly writhed out of their perplexed folds and set themselves, still
undetected in their three successive lines of battle. She beheld the
sun set calm and clear, the two hosts lie down once more, one in its
tents, the other on its arms, the leafy night hang over them resplendent
with stars, its watches near by, the Southern lines reawaken in
recovered strength, spring up and press forward exultantly to the awful
issue, and the Sabbath dawn brighten into a faultless day with the boom
of the opening gun.
As the ladies drew up behind the throng and across the throat of
Commercial Alley the dire List began to flutter from the Picayune office
in greedy palms and over and among dishevelled heads like a feeding
swarm of white pigeons. News there was as well as names, but every eye
devoured the names first and then--unless some name struck lightning in
the heart, as Anna saw it do every here and there and for that poor old
man over yonder--after the names the news.
"Nan, we needn't stay if you--"
"Oh, Miranda, isn't all this ours?"
The bulletin boards were already telling in outline, ahead of the list,
thrilling things about the Orleans Guards, the whirlwind onset of whose
maiden bayonets had captured double its share of the first camp taken
from the amazed, unbreakfasted enemy, and who again and again, hour by
hour, by the half-mile and mile, had splendidly helped to drive
him--while he hammered back with a deadly stubbornness all but a match
for their fury. Through forests, across clearings, over streams and bogs
and into and out of ravines and thickets they had swept, seizing
transiently a whole field battery, permanently hundreds of prisoners,
and covering the strife's broad wake with even more appalling numbers
of their own dead and wounded than of the foe's: wailing wounded,
ghastly, grimy dead, who but yesterday were brothers, cousins and
playmates of these very men snatching and searching the list. They told,
those boards, of the Washington Artillery (fifth company, never before
under fire) being thanked on the field by one of the "big generals,"
their chests and wheels shot half to splinters but no gun lost. They
told of all those Louisiana commands whose indomitable lines charged and
melted, charged and withered, over and over the torn and bloody ground
in that long, horrible struggle that finally smoked out the "Hornets'
Nest." They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on all these
sidewalks and away up to and beyond their Bishop-General Polk's Trinity
Church, whose desperate gallantry had saved that same Washington
Artillery three of its pieces, and to whose thinned and bleeding ranks
swarms of the huddled Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as their
captors and as glorious, had at last laid down their arms. And they told
of Kincaid's Battery, Captain Kincaid commanding; how, having early lost
in the dense oak woods and hickory brush the brigade--Brodnax's--whose
way they had shelled open for a victorious charge, they had followed
their galloping leader, the boys running beside the wheels, from
position to position, from ridge to ridge, in rampant obedience of an
order to "go in wherever they heard the hottest firing", how for a time
they had fought hub to hub beside the Washington Artillery; how two of
their guns, detached for a special hazard and sweeping into fresh action
on a flank of the "Hornets' Nest," had lost every horse at a single
volley of the ambushed foe, yet had instantly replied with slaughterous
vengeance; and how, for an hour thereafter, so wrapped in their own
smoke that they could be pointed only by the wheel-ruts of their recoil,
they had been worked by their depleted gunners on hands and knees with
Kincaid and Villeneuve themselves at the trails and with fuses cut to
one second. So, in scant outline said the boards, or more in detail read
one man aloud to another as they hurried by the carriage.
"But," said Anna, while Flora enjoyed her pallor, "all that is about the
first day's fight!"
"No," cried Constance, "it's the second day's, that Beauregard calls 'a
great and glorious victory!'"
"Yes," interposed Flora, "but writing from behind his fortification' at
Corinth, yes!"
XLIV
"THEY WERE ALL FOUR TOGETHER"
Both Constance and Victorine flashed to retort, but saw the smiling
critic as pale as Anna and recalled the moment's truer business, the
list still darting innumerably around them always out of reach. The
carriage had to push into the very surge, and Victorine to stand up and
call down to this man and that, a fourth and fifth, before one could be
made to hear and asked to buy for the helpless ladies. Yet in this
gentlewomen's war every gentlewoman's wish was a military command, and
when at length one man did hear, to hear was to vanish in the turmoil on
their errand. Now he was back again, with the list, three copies! Oh,
thank you, thank you and thank you!
Away trotted the handsome span while five pairs of beautiful eyes
searched the three printed sheets, that bore--oh, marvellous
fortune!--not one of the four names writ largest in those five hearts.
Let joy be--ah, let joy be very meek while to so many there is
unutterable loss. Yet let it meekly abound for the great loved cause so
splendidly advanced. Miranda pointed Anna to a bit of editorial:
"Monday was a more glorious day than Sunday. We can scarcely forbear to
speculate upon the great results that are to flow from this decisive
victory. An instant pursuit of the flying enemy should--"
Why did the carriage halt at a Gravier Street crossing obliquely
opposite the upper front corner of the St. Charles Hotel? Why did all
the hotel's gold-braided guests and loungers so quietly press out
against its upper balustrades? Why, under its arches, and between
balcony posts along the curbstones clear down to Canal Street, was the
pathetically idle crowd lining up so silently? From that point why, now,
did the faint breeze begin to waft a low roar of drums of such grave
unmartial sort? And why, gradually up the sidewalks' edges in the hot
sun, did every one so solemnly uncover? Small Victorine stood up to see.
At first she made out only that most commonplace spectacle, home guards.
They came marching in platoons, a mere company or two. In the red and
blue of their dress was all the smartness yet of last year, but in their
tread was none of it and even the bristle of their steel had vanished.
Behind majestic brasses and muffled drums grieving out the funeral
march, they stepped with slow precision and with arms reversed. But now
in abrupt contrast there appeared, moving as slowly and precisely after
them, widely apart on either side of the stony way, two single
attenuated files of but four bronzed and shabby gray-jackets each, with
four others in one thin, open rank from file to file in their rear, and
in the midst a hearse and its palled burden. Rise, Anna, Constance,
Miranda--all. Ah, Albert Sidney Johnston! Weep, daughters of a
lion-hearted cause. The eyes of its sons are wet. Yet in your gentle
bosoms keep great joy for whoever of your very own and nearest the awful
carnage has spared; but hither comes, here passes slowly, and yonder
fades at length from view, to lie a day in state and so move on to
burial, a larger hope of final triumph than ever again you may fix on
one mortal man.
Hats on again, softly. Drift apart, aimless crowd. Cross the two streets
at once, diagonally, you, young man from the St. Charles Hotel with
purpose in your rapid step, pencil unconsciously in hand and trouble on
your brow. Regather your reins, old coachman--nay, one moment! The
heavy-hearted youth passed so close under the horses' front that only
after he had gained the banquette abreast the carriage did he notice its
occupants and Anna's eager bow. It was the one-armed Kincaid's Battery
boy reporter. With a sudden pitying gloom he returned the greeting,
faltered as if to speak, caught a breath and then hurried on and away.
What did that mean; more news; news bad for these five in particular?
Silently in each of them, without a glance from one to another, the
question asked itself.
"The True Delta," remarked Anna to Miranda, "is right down here on the
next square," and of his own motion the driver turned that way.
"Bitwin Common Strit and Can-al," added Victorine, needless words being
just then the most needed.
Midway in front of the hotel Anna softly laid a hand on Flora, who
respondingly murmured. For the reporter was back, moving their way along
the sidewalk almost at a run. Now Constance was aware of him.
"When we cross Common Street," she observed to Miranda, "he'll want to
stop us."
In fact, as soon as their intent to cross was plain, he sped out beside
them and stood, his empty sleeve pinned up, his full one raised and
grief evident in his courteous smile. Some fifty yards ahead, by the
True Delta office, men were huddling around a fresh bulletin. Baring his
brow to the sun, the young man came close to the wheels.
"Wouldn't you-all as soon--?" he began, but Constance interrupted:
"The news is as good as ever, isn't it?"
"Yes, but wouldn't you-all as soon drive round by Carondelet Street?" A
gesture with his hat showed a piece of manifold writing in his fingers.
He looked to Miranda, but she faltered. Flora, in her own way, felt all
the moment's rack and stress, but some natures are built for floods and
rise on them like a boat. So thought she of herself and had parted her
lips to speak for all, when, to her vexed surprise, Anna lifted a hand
and in a clear, firm tone inquired, "Is there any bad news for us five?"
The youth's tongue failed; he nodded.
"Brodnax's brigade?" she asked. "Our battery?"
"Yes, Monday, just at the last," he murmured.
"Not _taken?_"
"Not a gun!" replied the boy, with a flash. Anna reflected it, but her
tone did not change:
"There are four men, you know, whom we five--"
"Yes."
"Which of them is the bad news about?"
"All four," murmured the youth. His eyes swam. His hat went under the
stump of his lost arm and he proffered the bit of writing. Idlers were
staring. "Take that with you," he said. "They were all four together and
they're only--"
The carriage was turning, but the fair cluster bent keenly toward him.
"Only what?" they cried.
"Missing."
XLV
STEVE--MAXIME--CHARLIE--
There was no real choice. Nothing seemed quite rational but the heaviest
task of all--to wait, and to wait right here at home.
To this queenly city must come first and fullest all news of her own
sons, and here the "five" would not themselves be "missing" should
better tidings--or worse--come seeking them over the wires.
"At the front?" replied Doctor Sevier to Anna, "why, at the front you'll
be kept in the rear, lost in a storm of false rumors."
General Brodnax, in a letter rife with fatherly romantic tenderness and
with splendid praise of Hilary as foremost in the glorious feat which
had saved old "Roaring Betsy" but lost (or mislaid) him and his three
comrades, also bade her wait. Everything, he assured her, that human
sympathy or the art of war--or Beauregard's special orders--could effect
was being done to find the priceless heroes. In the retreat of a great
host--ah, me! retreat was his very word and the host was
Dixie's--retreating after its first battle, and that an awful one, in
deluging rains over frightful roads and brimming streams, unsheltered,
ill fed, with sick and wounded men and reeling vehicles hourly breaking
down, a hovering foe to be fended off, and every dwelling in the land a
hospitable refuge, even captains of artillery or staff might be most
honorably and alarmingly missing yet reappear safe and sound. So, for a
week and more it was sit and wait, pace the floor and wait, wake in the
night and wait; so for Flora as well as for Anna (with a difference),
both of them anxious for Charlie--and Steve--and Maxime, but in anguish
for another.
Then tidings, sure enough! glad tidings! Mandeville and Maxime safe in
camp again and back to duty, whole, hale and in the saddle. Their
letters came by the wasted yellow hands of two or three of the
home-coming wounded, scores of whom were arriving by every south-bound
train. From the aide-de-camp and the color-bearer came the first whole
story of how Kincaid, with his picked volunteers, barely a gun
detachment, and with Mandeville, who had brought the General's consent,
had stolen noiselessly over the water-soaked leaves of a thickety oak
wood in the earliest glimmer of a rainy dawn and drawn off the
abandoned gun by hand to its waiting horses; also how, when threatened
by a hostile patrol, Hilary, Mandeville, Maxime and Charlie had hurried
back on foot into the wood and hotly checked the pursuit long enough for
their fellows to mount the team, lay a shoulder to every miry wheel and
flounder away with the prize. But beyond that keen moment when the four,
after their one volley from ambush, had sprung this way and that
shouting absurd orders to make-believe men, cheering and firing from
behind trees, and (cut off from their horses) had made for a gully and
swamp, the two returned ones could tell nothing of the two unreturned
except that neither of them, dead or alive, was anywhere on the ground
of the fight or flight as they knew it. For days, inside the enemy's
advancing lines, they had prowled in ravines and lain in blackberry
patches and sassafras fence-rows, fed and helped on of nights by the
beggared yet still warm-hearted farm people and getting through at last,
but with never a trace of Kincaid or Charlie, though after their own
perilous search they had inquired, inquired, inquired.
So, wait, said every one and every dumb condition, even the miseries of
the great gray army, of which Anna had mind pictures again, as it toiled
through mire and lightning, rain, sleet and hail, and as its thousands
of sick and shattered lay in Corinth dying fifty a day. And Flora and
Anna waited, though with minds placid only to each other and the outer
world.
"Yes," moaned Anna to Constance, when found at dead of night staring
Corinthward from a chamber window. "Yes, friends advise! All our friends
advise! What daring thing did any one ever do who waited for friends to
advise it? Does your Steve wait for friends to advise?... Patience? Ah,
lend me yours! You don't need it now.... Fortitude? Oh, I never had
any!... What? command the courage to do nothing when nothing is the only
hard thing to do? Who, I? Connie! I don't even want it. I'm a craven; I
want the easy thing! I want to go nurse the box-carloads and
mule-wagonloads of wounded at Corinth, at Okolona and strewed all the
way down to Mobile--that's full of them. Hilary may be somewhere among
them--unidentified! They say he wore no badge of rank that morning, you
know, and carried the carbine of a wounded cavalryman to whom he had
given his coat. Oh, he's mine, Con, and I'm his. We're not engaged,
we're _married,_ and I _must_ go. It's only a step--except in miles--and
I'm going! I'm going for your sake and Miranda's. You know you're
staying on my account, not for me to settle this bazaar business but to
wait for news that's never coming till I go and bring it!"
This tiny, puny, paltry business of the bazaar--the whereabouts of the
dagger and its wealth, or of the detectives, gone for good into military
secret service at the front--she drearily smiled away the whole trivial
riddle as she lay of nights contriving new searches for that
inestimable, living treasure, whose perpetual "missing," right yonder
"almost in sight from the housetop," was a dagger in her heart.