fly. For Madame, though her lean bosom bled for the lost boy, the
fiercest pain of waiting was that its iron coercion lay in their
penury. For Flora its sharpest pangs were in her own rage; a rage not of
the earlier, cold sort against Anna and whoever belonged to Anna--that
transport had always been more than half a joy--but a new, hot rage
against herself and the finical cheapness of her scheming, a rage that
stabbed her fair complacency with the revelation that she had a heart,
and a heart that could ache after another. The knife of that rage turned
in her breast every time she cried to the grandam, "We must go!" and
that rapacious torment simpered, "No funds," adding sidewise hints
toward Anna's jewels, still diligently manoeuvred for, but still
somewhere up-stairs in Callender House, sure to go with Anna should Anna
go while the manoeuvrers were away.
A long lane to any one, was such waiting, lighted, for Anna, only by a
faint reflection of that luster of big generals' strategy and that
invincibility of the Southern heart which, to all New Orleans and even
to nations beyond seas, clad Dixie's every gain in light and hid her
gravest disasters in beguiling shadow. But suddenly one day the long
lane turned. The secret had just leaked out that the forts down the
river were furiously engaged with the enemy's mortar-boats a few miles
below them and that in the past forty-eight hours one huge bomb every
minute, three thousand in all, had dropped into those forts or burst
over them, yet the forts were "proving themselves impregnable." The lane
turned and there stood Charlie.
There he stood, in the stairway door of the front room overlooking
Jackson Square. The grandmother and sister had been keenly debating the
news and what to do about it, the elder bird fierce to stay, the younger
bent on flight, and had just separated to different windows, when they
heard, turned and beheld him there, a stranger in tattered gray and
railway dirt, yet their own coxcomb boy from his curls to his ill-shod
feet. Flora had hardly caught her breath or believed her eyes before the
grandmother was on his neck patting and petting his cheeks and head and
plying questions in three languages: When, where, how, why, how, where
and when?
Dimly he reflected their fond demonstrations. No gladness was in his
face. His speech, as hurried as theirs, answered no queries. He asked
loftily for air, soap, water and the privacy of his own room, and when
they had followed him there and seen him scour face, arms, neck, and
head, rub dry and resume his jacket and belt, he had grown only more
careworn and had not yet let his sister's eyes rest on his.
He had but a few hours to spend in the city, he said; had brought
despatches and must carry others back by the next train. His story, he
insisted, was too long to tell before he had delivered certain battery
letters; one to Victorine, two to Constance Mandeville, and so on. Here
was one to Flora, from Captain Irby; perhaps the story was in it. At any
rate, its bearer must rush along now. He toppled his "grannie" into a
rocking-chair and started away. He "would be back as soon as ever he--"
But Flora filled the doorway. He had to harden his glance to hers at
last. In her breast were acutest emotions widely at war, yet in her eyes
he saw only an unfeeling light, and it was the old woman behind him who
alone noted how painfully the girl's fingers were pinched upon Irby's
unopened letter. The boy's stare betrayed no less anger than suffering
and as Flora spoke he flushed.
"Charlie," she melodiously began, but his outcry silenced her:
"Now, by the eternal great God Almighty, Flora Valcour, if you dare to
ask me that--" He turned to the grandmother, dropped to his knees,
buried his face in her lap and sobbed.
With genuine tenderness she stroked his locks. Yet while she did so she
lifted to the sister a face lighted up with a mirth of deliverance. To
nod, toss, and nod again, was poor show for her glee; she smirked and
writhed to the disdaining girl like a child at a mirror, and, though
sitting thus confined, gave all the effects of jigging over the floor.
Hilary out of the way! Kincaid eliminated, and the whole question free
of him, this inheritance question so small and mean to all but her and
Irby, but to him and her so large, so paramount! Silently, but plainly
to the girl, her mouth widely motioned, "Il est mort! grâce"--one hand
stopped stroking long enough to make merrily the sign of cross--"grâce
au ciel, il est mort!"
No moment of equal bitterness had Flora Valcour ever known. To tell half
her distresses would lose us in their tangle, midmost in which was a
choking fury against the man whom unwillingly she loved, for escaping
her, even by a glorious death. One thought alone--that Anna, as truly as
if stricken blind, would sit in darkness the rest of her days--lightened
her torture, and with that thought she smiled a stony loathing on the
mincing grandam and the boy's unlifted head. Suddenly, purpose gleamed
from her. She could not break forth herself, but to escape suffocation
she must and would procure an outburst somewhere. Measuredly, but with
every nerve and tendon overstrung, she began to pace the room.
"Don't cry, Charlie," she smoothly said in a voice as cold as the crawl
of a snake. The brother knew the tone, had known it from childhood, and
the girl, glancing back on him, was pleased to see him stiffen. A few
steps on she added pensively, "For a soldier to cry--and befo' ladies--a
ladies' man--of that batt'rie--tha's hardly fair--to the ladies, eh,
grandmama?"
But the boy only pressed his forehead harder down and clutched the aged
knees under it till their owner put on, to the scintillant beauty, a
look of alarm and warning. The girl, musingly retracing her calculated
steps to where the kneeler seemed to clinch himself to his posture,
halted, stroked with her slippered toe a sole of his rude shoes and
spoke once more: "Do they oft-ten boohoo like that, grandma, those
artillerie?"
The boy whirled up with the old woman clinging. A stream of oaths and
curses appallingly original poured from him, not as through the lips
alone but from his very eyes and nostrils. That the girl was first of
all a fool and damned was but a trivial part of the cry--of the
explosion of his whole year's mistaken or half-mistaken inferences and
smothered indignation. With equal flatness and blindness he accused her
of rejoicing in the death of Kincaid: the noblest captain (he ramped on)
that ever led a battery; kindest friend that ever ruled a camp; gayest,
hottest, daringest fighter of Shiloh's field; fiercest for man's purity
that ever loved the touch of women's fingers; sternest that ever wept on
the field of death with the dying in his arms; and the scornfullest of
promotion that ever was cheated of it at headquarters.
All these extravagances he cursed out, too witless to see that this same
hero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose
life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary
for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some dark
league against him--"hell only knew what"--along with that snail of a
cousin whom everybody but Kincaid himself and the silly old uncle knew
to be the fallen man's most venomous foe. Throughout the storm the
grandmother's fingers pattered soothing caresses, while Flora stood as
unruffled by his true surmises as by any, a look of cold interest in her
narrowed eyes, and her whole bodily and spiritual frame drinking relief
from his transport. Now, while he still raged, she tenderly smiled on
their trembling ancestress.
"Really, _you_ know grandmama, sometimes me also I feel like that, when
to smazh the furniture 't would be a delightful--or to wring somebody
the neck, yes. But for us, and to-day, even to get a li'l' mad, how is
that a possibl'?" She turned again, archly, to the brother, but flashed
in alarm and sprang toward him.
His arm stiffly held her off. With failing eyes bent on the whimpering
grandmother he sighed a disheartened oath and threshed into a chair
gasping--
"My wound--opened again."
XLVI
THE SCHOOL OF SUSPENSE
Thus it fell to Flora to be letter-bearer and news-bearer in her
brother's stead. Yet he had first to be cared for by her and the
grandmother in a day long before "first aid" had become common
knowledge. The surgeon they had hailed in had taken liberal time to show
them how, night and morning, to unbandage, cleanse and rebind, and to
tell them (smiling into the lad's mutinous eyes) that the only other
imperative need was to keep him flat on his back for ten days. Those
same weeks of downpour which had given the Shiloh campaign two-thirds of
its horrors had so overfed the monstrous Mississippi that it was running
four miles an hour, overlapping its levees and heaving up through the
wharves all along the city's front, until down about the Convent and
Barracks and Camp Callender there were streets as miry as Corinth. And
because each and all of these hindrances were welcome to Flora as giving
leisure to read and reread Irby's long letter about his cousin and
uncle, and to plan what to say and do in order to reap all the fell
moment's advantages, the shadows were long in the Callender's grove when
she finally ascended their veranda steps.
She had come round by way of Victorine's small, tight-fenced garden of
crape-myrtles, oleanders and pomegranates--where also the water was in
the streets, backwater from the overflowed swamp-forests between city
and lake--and had sent her to Charlie's bedside. Pleasant it would be
for us to turn back with the damsel and see her, with heart as open as
her arms, kiss the painted grandam, and at once proceed to make herself
practically invaluable; or to observe her every now and then dazzle her
adored patient with a tear-gem of joy or pity, or of gratitude that she
lived in a time when heroic things could happen right at home and to the
lowliest, even to her; sweet woes like this, that let down, for virtuous
love, the barriers of humdrum convention. But Flora draws us on, she and
Anna. As she touched the bell-knob Constance sprang out to welcome her,
though not to ask her in--till she could have a word with her alone, the
young wife explained.
"I saw you coming," she said, drawing her out to the balustrade. "You
didn't get Anna's note of last night--too bad! I've just found out--her
maid forgot it! What do you reckon we've been doing all day long?
Packing! We're going we don't know where! Vicksburg, Jackson, Meridian,
Mobile, wherever Anna can best hunt Hilary from--and Charlie too, of
course."
"Yes," said Flora, one way to the speaker and quite another way to
herself.
"Yes, she wants to do it, and Doctor Sevier says it's the only thing for
her. Ah, Flora, how well _you_ can understand that!"
"Indeed, yes," sighed the listener, both ways again.
"We know how absolutely you believe the city's our best base, else we'd
have asked you to go with us." The ever genuine Constance felt a
mortifying speciousness in her words and so piled them on. "_We_ know
the city is best--unless it should fall, and it won't--oh, it won't,
God's not going to let so many prayers go unanswered, Flora! But we've
tossed reason aside and are going by instinct, the way I always feel
safest in, dear. Ah, poor Anna! Oh, Flora, she's so sweet about it!"
"Yes? Ab-out what?"
"You, dear, and whoever is suffering the same--"
Flora softly winced and Constance blamed herself so to have pained
another sister's love. "And she's so quiet," added the speaker, "but,
oh, so pale--and so hard either to comfort or encourage, or even to
discourage. There's nothing you can say that she isn't already
heart-sick of saying herself, _to_ herself, and I beg you, dear, in your
longing to comfort her, please don't bring up a single maybe-this or
maybe-that; any hope, I mean, founded on a mere doubt."
"Ah, but sometime' the doubt--it is the hope!"
"Yes, sometimes; but not to her, any more. Oh, Flora, if it's just as
true of you, you won't be--begrudge my saying it of my sister--that no
saint ever went to her matyrdom better prepared than she is, right now,
for the very worst that can be told. There's only one thing to which she
never can and never will resign herself, and that is doubt. She can't
breathe its air, Flora. As she says herself, she isn't so built; she
hasn't that gift."
The musing Flora nodded compassionately, but inwardly she said that,
gift or no gift, Anna should serve her time in Doubting Castle, with
her, Flora, for turnkey. Suddenly she put away her abstraction and with
a summarizing gesture and chastened twinkle spoke out: "In short, you
want to know for w'at am I come."
"Flora!"
"Ah, but, my dear, you are ri-ight. That is 'all correct,' as they say,
and one thing I'm come for--'t is--" She handed out Mandeville's two
letters.
The wife caught them to her bosom, sprang to her tiptoes, beamed on the
packet a second time and read aloud, "Urbanity of Corporal Valcour!" She
heaved an ecstatic breath to speak on, but failed. Anna and Miranda had
joined them and Flora had risen from her seat on the balustrade, aware
at once that the rôle she had counted on was not to be hers, the rôle of
comforter to an undone rival.
Pale indeed was the rival, pale as rivalry could wish. Yet instantly
Flora saw, with a fiery inward sting, how beautiful pallor may be. And
more she saw: with the chagrin then growing so common on every armed
front--the chagrin of finding one's foe entrenched--she saw how utterly
despair had failed to crush a gentle soul. Under cover of affliction's
night and storm Anna, this whole Anna Callender, had been reinforced,
had fortified and was a new problem.
She greeted Flora with a welcoming beam, but before speaking she caught
her sister's arm and glanced herself, at the superscription.
"Flora!" she softly cried, "oh, Flora Valcour! has your brother--your
Charlie!--come home alive and well?--What; no?--No, he has not?"
The visitor was shaking her head: "No. Ah, no! home, yes, and al-I've;
but--"
"Oh, Flora, Flora! alive and at home! home and alive!" While the words
came their speaker slowly folded her arms about the bearer of tidings,
and with a wholly unwonted strength pressed her again to the rail and
drew bosom to bosom, still exclaiming, "Alive! alive! Oh, whatever his
plight, be thankful, Flora, for so much! Alive enough to _come_ home!"
XLVII
FROM THE BURIAL SQUAD
The pinioned girl tried to throw back her head and bring their eyes
together, but Anna, through some unconscious advantage, held it to her
shoulder, her own face looking out over the garden.
"Ah, let me be glad for you, Flora, let me be glad for you! Oh, think of
it! You _have_ him! have him at home, to look upon, to touch, to call by
name! and to be looked upon by _him_ and touched and called by name! Oh,
God in heaven! God in heaven!"
Miranda's fond protests were too timorous to check her, and Flora's
ceased in the delight of hearing that last wail confess the thought of
Hilary. Constance strove with tender energy for place and voice: "Nan,
dearie, Nan! But listen to Flora, Nan. See, Nan, I haven't opened
Steve's letter yet. Wounded and what, Flora, something worse? Ah, if
worse you couldn't have left him."
"I know," sighed Anna, relaxing her arms to a caress and turning her
gaze to Flora. "I see. Your brother, our dear Charlie, has come back to
life, but wounded and alone. Alone. Hilary is still missing. Isn't that
it? That's all, isn't it?"
Constance, in a sudden thought of what her letters might tell, began to
open one, though with her eyes at every alternate moment on Flora as
eagerly as Miranda's or Anna's. Flora stood hiddenly revelling in that
complexity of her own spirit which enabled her to pour upon her
questioner a look, even a real sentiment, of ravishing pity, while
nevertheless in the depths of her being she thrilled and burned and
danced and sang with joy for the very misery she thus compassionated. By
a designed motion she showed her grandmother's reticule on her arm. But
only Anna saw it; Constance, with her gaze in the letter, was drawing
Miranda aside while both bent their heads over a clause in it which had
got blurred, and looked at each other aghast as they made it out to
read, "'--from the burial squad.'" The grandmother's silken bag saved
them from Anna's notice.
"Oh, Flora!" said Anna again, "is there really something worse?"
Abruptly, she spread a hand under the bag and with her eyes still in the
eyes of its possessor slid it gently from the yielding wrist. Dropping
her fingers into it she brought forth a tobacco-pouch, of her own
embroidering, and from it, while the reticule fell unheeded to the
floor, drew two or three small things which she laid on it in her
doubled hands and regarded with a smile. Vacantly the smile increased as
she raised it to Flora, then waned while she looked once more on the
relics, and grew again as she began to handle them. Her slow voice took
the tone of a child alone at play.
"Why, that's _my_ photograph," she said. "And this--this is his
watch--watch and chain." She dangled them. A light frown came and went
between her smiles.
With soft eagerness Flora called Constance, and the sister and Miranda
stood dumb.
"See, Connie," the words went on, "see, 'Randa, this is my own
photograph, and this is his own watch and chain. I must go and put them
away--with my old gems." Constance would have followed her as she moved
but she waved a limp forbiddal, prattling on: "This doesn't mean he's
dead, you know. Oh, not at all! It means just the contrary! Why, I saw
him alive last night, in a dream, and I can't believe anything else, and
I won't! No, no, not yet!" At that word she made a misstep and as she
started sharply to recover it the things she carried fell breaking and
jingling at her feet.
"Oh-h!" she sighed in childish surprise and feebly dropped to her knees.
Flora, closest by, sprang crouching to the rescue, but recoiled as the
kneeling girl leaned hoveringly over the mementos and with distended
eyes and an arm thrust forward cried aloud, "No! No! No-o!"
At once, however, her voice was tender again. "Mustn't anybody touch
them but me, ever any more," she said, regathering the stuff, regained
her feet and moved on. Close after her wavering steps anxiously pressed
the others, yet not close enough. At the open door, smiling back in
rejection of their aid, she tripped, and before they could save her,
tumbled headlong within. From up-stairs, from downstairs came servants
running, and by the front door entered a stranger, a private soldier in
swamp boots and bespattered with the mire of the river road from his
spurs to his ragged hat.
"No, bring her out," he said to a slave woman who bore Anna in her
arms, "out to the air!" But the burden slipped free and with a cleared
mind stood facing him.
"Ladies," he exclaimed, his look wandering, his uncovered hair matted,
"if a half-starved soldier can have a morsel of food just to take in his
hands and ride on with--" and before he could finish servants had sprung
to supply him.
"Are you from down the river?" asked Anna, quietly putting away her
sister's pleading touch and Flora's offer of support.
"I am!" spouted the renegade, for renegade he was, "I'm from the very
thick of the massacre! from day turned into night, night into day, and
heaven and earth into--into--"
"Hell," placidly prompted Flora.
"Yes! nothing short of it! Our defenses become death-traps and
slaughter-pens--oh, how foully, foully has Richmond betrayed her sister
city!"
Flora felt a new tumult of joy. "That Yankee fleet--it has pazz' those
fort'?" she cried.
"My dear young lady! By this time there ain't no forts for it to pass!
When I left Fort St. Philip there wa'n't a spot over in Fort Jackson as
wide as my blanket where a bumbshell hadn't buried itself and blown up,
and every minute we were lookin' for the magazine to go! Those _awful_
shells! they'd torn both levees, the forts were flooded, men who'd lost
their grit were weeping like children--"
"Oh!" interrupted Constance, "why not leave the forts? We don't need
them now; those old wooden ships can never withstand our terrible
ironclads!"
[Illustration: "No! not under this roof--nor in sight of _those
things_"]
"Well, they're mighty soon going to try it! Last night, right in the
blaze of all our batteries, they cut the huge chain we had stretched
across the river--"
"Ah, but when they see--oh, they'll never dare face even the
_Manassas_--the 'little turtle,' ha-ha!--much less the great
_Louisiana!_"
"Alas! madam, the _Louisiana_ ain't ready for 'em. There she lies tied
to the levee, with engines that can't turn a wheel, a mere floating
battery, while our gunboats--" Eagerly the speaker broke off to receive
upon one hand and arm the bounty of the larder and with a pomp of
gratitude to extend his other hand to Anna; but she sadly shook her head
and showed on her palms Hilary's shattered tokens:
"These poor things belong to one, sir, who, like you, is among the
missing. But, oh, thank God! _he_ is missing at the front, _in_ the
front."
The abashed craven turned his hand to Flora, but with a gentle
promptness Anna stepped between: "No, Flora dear, see; he hasn't a red
scratch on him. Oh, sir, go--eat! If hunger stifles courage, eat! But
eat as you ride, and ride like mad back to duty and honor! No! not under
this roof--nor in sight of _these things_--can any man be a ladies' man,
who is missing _from_ the front, at the rear."
He wheeled and vanished. Anna turned: "Connie, what do your letters
say?"
The sister's eyes told enough. The inquirer gazed a moment, then
murmured to herself, "I--don't--believe it--yet," grew very white,
swayed, and sank with a long sigh into out-thrown arms.
XLVIII
FARRAGUT
The cathedral clock struck ten of the night. Yonder its dial shone, just
across that quarter of Jackson Square nearest the Valcours' windows,
getting no response this time except the watchman's three taps of his
iron-shod club on corner curbstones.
An hour earlier its toll had been answered from near and far, up and
down the long, low-roofed, curving and recurving city--"seven, eight,
nine"--"eight, nine"--the law's warning to all slaves to be indoors or
go to jail. Not Flora nor Anna nor Victorine nor Doctor Sevier nor Dick
Smith's lone mother nor any one else among all those thousands of
masters, mistresses and man-and maid-servants, or these thousands of
home-guards at home under their mosquito-bars, with uniforms on bedside
chairs and with muskets and cartridge-belts close by--not one of all
these was aware, I say, that however else this awful war might pay its
cost, it was the knell of slavery they heard, and which they,
themselves, in effect, were sounding.
Lacking wilder excitement Madame sat by a lamp knitting a nubia.
Victorine had flown home at sundown. Charlie lay sleeping as a soldier
lad can. His sister had not yet returned from Callender House, but had
been fully accounted for some time before by messenger. Now the knitter
heard horses and wheels. Why should they come at a walk? It was like
stealth. They halted under the balcony. She slipped out and peered down.
Yes, there was Flora. Constance was with her. Also two trim fellows
whom she rightly guessed to be Camp Callender lads, and a piece of
luggage--was it not?--which, as they lifted it down, revealed a size and
weight hard even for those siege-gunners to handle with care. Unseen,
silently, they came in and up with it, led by Flora. (Camp Callender was
now only a small hither end of the "Chalmette Batteries," which on both
sides of the river mounted a whole score of big black guns. No wonder
the Callenders were leaving.)
Presently here were the merry burden-bearers behind their radiant guide,
whispered ah's and oh's and wary laughter abounding.
"'Such a getting up-stairs I never did see!'"
A thousand thanks to the boys as they set down their load; their thanks
back for seats declined; no time even to stand; a moment, only, for new
vows of secrecy. "Oui!--Ah, non!--Assurément!" (They were Creoles.)
"Yes, mum 't is the word! And such a so-quiet getting down-stair'!"--to
Mrs. Mandeville again--and trundling away!