grandam and hiddenly tortured girl had been long enough together and
alone for the elder to have nothing more to ask as to this chest of
plate which the Callenders had fondly accepted Flora's offer to keep for
them while they should be away. Not for weeks and weeks had the old lady
felt such ease of mind on the money--and bread--question. Now the two
set about to get the booty well hid before Charlie should awake. This
required the box to be emptied, set in place and reladen, during which
process Flora spoke only when stung.
"Ah!" thinly piped she of the mosquito voice, "what a fine day tha's
been, to-day!" but won no reply. Soon she cheerily whined again:
"All day nothing but good luck, and at the end--this!" (the treasure
chest).
But Flora kept silence.
"So, now," said the aged one, "they will not make such a differenze,
those old jewel'."
"I will get them yet," murmured the girl.
"You think? Me, I think no, you will never."
No response.
The tease pricked once more: "Ah! all that day I am thinking of that
Irbee. I am glad for Irbee. He is 'the man that waits,' that Irbee!"
The silent one winced; fiercely a piece of the shining ware was lifted
high, but it sank again. The painted elder cringed. There may have been
genuine peril, but the one hot sport in her fag end of a life was to
play with this beautiful fire. She held the girl's eye with a look of
frightened admiration, murmuring, "You are a _merveilleuse!_"
"Possible?"
"Yes, to feel that way and same time to be ab'e to smile like that!"
"Ah? how is that I'm feeling?"
"You are filling that all this, and all those jewel' of Anna, and the
life of me, and of that boy in yond', you would give them all, juz' to
be ab'e to bil-ieve that foolishness of Anna--that he's yet al-live,
that Kin--"
The piece of plate half rose again, but--in part because the fair
threatener could not help enjoying the subtlety of the case--the smile
persisted as she rejoined, "Ah! when juz' for the fun, all I can get the
chance, I'm making her to bil-ieve that way!"
"Yes," laughed the old woman, "but why? Only biccause that way you, you
cannot bil-ieve."
The lithe maiden arose to resume their task, the heavy silver still in
her hand. The next moment the kneeling grandam crouched and the
glittering metal swept around just high enough to miss her head. A
tinkle of mirth came from its wielder as she moved on with it, sighing,
"Ah! ho! what a pity--that so seldom the aged commit suicide."
"Yes," came the soft retort, "but for yo' young grandmama tha'z not yet
the time, she is still a so indispensib'."
"Very true, ma chère," sang Flora, "and in heaven you would be so
uzeless."
Out in the hazy, dark, heavily becalmed night the clock tolled eleven.
Eleven--one--three--and all the hours, halves and quarters between and
beyond, it tolled; and Flora, near, and Anna, far, sometimes each by her
own open window, heard and counted. A thin old moon was dimly rising
down the river when each began to think she caught another and very
different sound that seemed to arrive faint from a long journey out of
the southeast, if really from anywhere, and to pulse in dim persistency
as soft as breathing, but as constant. Likely enough it was only the
rumble of a remote storm and might have seemed to come out of the north
or west had their windows looked that way, for still the tempestuous
rains were frequent and everywhere, and it was easy and common for man
to mistake God's thunderings for his own.
Yet, whether those two wakeful maidens truly heard or merely fancied, in
fact just then some seventy miles straight away under that gaunt old
moon, there was rising to heaven the most terrific uproar this delta
land had ever heard since man first moved upon its shores and waters.
Six to the minute bellowed and soared Porter's awful bombs and arched
and howled and fell and scattered death and conflagration. While they
roared, three hundred and forty great guns beside, on river and land,
flashed and crashed, the breezeless night by turns went groping-black
and clear-as-day red with smoke and flame of vomiting funnels, of
burning boats and fire-rafts, of belching cannon, of screaming grape and
canister and of exploding magazines. And through the middle of it all,
in single file--their topmasts, yards, and cordage showing above the
murk as pale and dumb as skeletons at every flare of the havoc, a white
light twinkling at each masthead, a red light at the peak and the stars
and stripes there with it--Farragut and his wooden ships came by the
forts.
"Boys, our cake's all dough!" said a commander in one of the forts.
When day returned and Anna and Flora slept, the murmur they had heard
may after all have been only God's thunder and really not from the
southeast; but just down there under the landscape's flat rim both
forts, though with colors still gallantly flying, were smoking ruins,
all Dixie's brave gunboats and rams lay along the river's two shores,
sunken or burned, and the whole victorious Northern fleet, save one boat
rammed and gone to the bottom, was on its cautious, unpiloted way,
snail-slow but fate-sure, up the tawny four-mile current and round the
gentle green bends of the Mississippi with New Orleans for its goal and
prey.
XLIX
A CITY IN TERROR
Before the smart-stepping lamplighters were half done turning off the
street lights, before the noisy market-houses all over the town, from
Camp Callender to Carrollton, with their basket-bearing thousands of
jesting and dickering customers, had quenched their gaslights and
candles to dicker and jest by day, or the devotees of early mass had
emerged from the churches, Rumor was on the run. With a sort of muffled
speed and whisper she came and went, crossed her course and reaffirmed
herself, returned to her starting-point and stole forth again, bearing
ever the same horrid burden, brief, persistent, unexaggerated: The Foe!
The Foe! In five great ships and twice as many lesser ones--counted at
Quarantine Station just before the wires were cut--the Foe was hardly
twenty leagues away, while barely that many guns of ours crouched
between his eight times twenty and our hundred thousand women and
children.
Yet, for a brief spell, so deep are the ruts of habit, the city kept to
its daily routine, limp and unmeaning though much of it had come to be.
The milkman, of course, held to his furious round in his comical
two-wheeled cart, whirling up to alley gates, shouting and ringing his
big hand-bell. In all his tracks followed the hooded bread-cart, with
its light-weight loaves for worthless money and with only the staggering
news for lagnappe. Families ate breakfast, one hour and another,
wherever there was food. Day cabmen and draymen trotted off to their
curbstones; women turned to the dish-pan, the dust-pan, the beds, the
broom; porters, clerks and merchants--the war-mill's wasteful refuse and
residuum, some as good as the gray army's best, some poor enough--went
to their idle counters, desks and sidewalks; the children to the public
schools, the beggar to the church doorstep, physicians to their sick,
the barkeeper to his mirrors and mint, and the pot-fisher to his catfish
lines in the swollen, sweeping, empty harbor.
But besides the momentum of habit there was the official pledge to the
people--Mayor Monroe's and Commanding-General Lovell's--that if they
would but keep up this tread-mill gait, the moment the city was really
in danger the wires of the new fire-alarm should strike the tidings from
all her steeples. So the school teachers read Scripture and prayers and
the children sang the "Bonnie Blue Flag," while outside the omnibuses
trundled, the one-mule street-cars tinkled and jogged and the bells hung
mute.
Nevertheless a change was coming. Invisibly it worked in the general
mind as that mind gradually took in the meanings of the case; but
visibly it showed as, from some outpost down the river, General Lovell,
(a sight to behold for the mud on him), came spurring at full speed by
Callender House, up through the Creole Quarter and across wide Canal
Street to the St. Charles. Now even more visibly it betrayed itself,
where all through the heart of the town began aides, couriers and
frowning adjutants to gallop from one significant point to another.
Before long not a cab anywhere waited at its stand. Every one held an
officer or two, if only an un-uniformed bank-officer or captain of
police, and rattled up or down this street and that, taking corners at
breakneck risks. That later the drays began to move was not so
noticeable, for a dray was but a dray and they went off empty except for
their drivers and sometimes a soldier with a musket and did not return.
Moreover, as they went there began to be seen from the middle of almost
any cross-street, in the sky out over the river front, here one, there
another, yonder a third and fourth, upheaval of dense, unusual smoke,
first on the hither side of the harbor, then on the far side, yet no
fire-engines, hand or steam, rushed that way, nor any alarm sounded.
From the Valcours' balcony Madame, gasping for good air after she and
Flora had dressed Charlie's wound, was startled to see one of those
black columns soar aloft. But it was across the river, and she had
barely turned within to mention it, when up the stair and in upon the
three rushed Victorine, all tears, saying it was from the great dry-dock
at Slaughter-House Point, which our own authorities had set afire.
The enfeebled Charlie half started from his rocking-chair laughing
angrily. "Incredible!" he cried, but sat mute as the girl's swift tongue
told the half-dozen other dreadful things she had just beheld on either
side the water. The sister and grandmother sprang into the balcony and
stood astounded. Out of the narrow streets beneath them--Chartres,
Condé, St. Peter, St. Ann, Cathedral Alley--scores and scores of rapidly
walking men and women and scampering boys and girls streamed round and
through the old Square by every practicable way and out upon the levee.
"Incredib'!" retorted meanwhile the pouting daughter of Maxime, pressing
into the balcony after Flora. "Hah! and look yondah another incredib'!"
She pointed riverward across the Square.
"Charlie, you must not!" cried Flora, returning half into the room.
"Bah!" retorted the staggering boy, pushed out among them and with
profane mutterings stood agaze.
Out across the Square and the ever-multiplying flow of people through
and about it, and over the roof of the French Market close beyond, the
rigging of a moored ship stood pencilled on the sky. It had long been a
daily exasperation to his grandmother's vision, being (unknown to
Charlie or Victorine), the solitary winnings of Flora's privateering
venture, early sold, you will remember, but, by default of a buyer,
still in some share unnegotiably hers and--in her own and the
grandmother's hungry faith--sure to command triple its present value the
moment the fall of the city should open the port. Suddenly the old lady
wheeled upon Flora with a frantic look, but was checked by the
granddaughter's gleaming eyes and one inaudible, visible word: "Hush!"
The gazing boy saw only the ship. "Oh, great Lord!" he loathingly
drawled, "is it Damned Fools' Day again?" Her web of cordage began to
grow dim in a rising smoke, and presently a gold beading of fire ran up
and along every rope and spar and clung quivering. Soon the masts
commenced, it seemed, to steal nearer to each other, and the vessel
swung out from her berth and started down the wide, swift river, a mass
of flames.
"Oh, Mother of God," cried Victorine with a new gush of tears! "'ave
mercy upon uz women!" and in the midst of her appeal the promised alarum
began to toll--here, yonder, and far away--here, yonder, and far
away--and did not stop until right in the middle of the morning it had
struck twelve.
"Good-by! poor betrayed New Orleans!" exclaimed Charlie, turning back
into the room. "Good-by, sweetheart, I'm off! Good-by, grannie--Flo'!"
The three followed in with cries of amazement, distress, indignation,
command, reproach, entreaty, all alike vain. As if the long-roll of his
own brigade were roaring to him, he strode about the apartment preparing
to fly.
His sister tried to lay preventing hands on him, saying, "Your life!
your life! you are throwing it away!"
"Well, what am I in Kincaid's Battery for?" he retorted, with a sweep of
his arm that sent her staggering. He caught the younger girl by the
shoulders: "Jularkie, if you want to go, too, with or without grannie
and Flo', by Jove, come along! I'll take care of you!"
The girl's eyes melted with yearning, but the response was Flora's:
"Simpleton! When you haven' the sense enough to take care of yourself!"
"Ah, shame!" ventured the sweetheart. "He's the lover of his blidding
country, going ag-ain to fighd for her--and uz--whiles he
can!--to-day!--al-lone!--now!" Her fingers clutched his wrists, that
still held her shoulders, and all her veins surged in the rapture of his
grasp.
But Charlie stared at his sister. It could not enter his mind that her
desires were with the foe, yet his voice went deep in scorn: "And have
you too turned coward?"
The taunt stung. Its victim flashed, but in the next breath her smile
was clemency itself as she drew Victorine from him and shot her neat
reply, well knowing he would never guess the motives behind it--the bow
whence flew the shaft: the revenge she owed the cause that had burned
their home; her malice against Anna; the agony of losing him they now
called dead and buried; the new, acute loathing that issued from that
agony upon the dismal Irby; her baffled hunger for the jewels; her plans
for the chest of plate; hopes vanishing in smoke with yonder burning
ship; thought of Greenleaf's probable return with the blue army, of the
riddles that return might make, and of the ruin, the burning and sinking
riot and ruin, these things were making in her own soul as if it, too,
were a city lost.
"Charlie," she said, "you 'ave yo' fight. Me, I 'ave mine. Here is
grandma. Ask her--if my fight--of every day--for you and her--and not
yet finish'--would not eat the last red speck of courage out of yo'
blood."
She turned to Victorine: "Oh, he's brave! He 'as all that courage to go,
in that condition! Well, we three women, we 'ave the courage to let him
go and ourselve' to stay. But--Charlie! take with you the Callender'!
Yes! You, you can protec' them, same time they can take care of you.
Stop!--Grandma!--yo' bonnet and gaiter'! All three, Victorine, we will
help them, all four, get away!"
On the road to Callender House, while Charlie and Victorine palavered
together--"I cannot quite make out," minced the French-speaking
grandmother to Flora, "the real reason why you are doing this."
"'T is with me the same!" eagerly responded the beauty, in the English
she preferred. "I thing maybe 't is juz inspiration. What you thing?"
"I? I am afraid it is only your great love for Anna--making you a trifle
blind."
The eyes of each rested in the other's after the manner we know and the
thought passed between them, that if further news was yet to come of the
lost artillerist, any soul-reviving news, it would almost certainly come
first to New Orleans and from the men in blue.
"No," chanted the granddaughter, "I can't tell what is making me do that
unlezz my guardian angel!"
L
ANNA AMAZES HERSELF
Once more the Carrollton Gardens.
Again the afternoon hour, the white shell-paved court, its two playing
fountains, the roses, lilies, jasmines and violets, their perfume
spicing all the air, and the oriole and mocking-bird enrapturing it with
their songs, although it was that same dire twenty-fourth of April of
which we have been telling. Townward across the wide plain the distant
smoke of suicidal conflagration studded the whole great double crescent
of the harbor. Again the slim railway, its frequent small trains from
the city clanging round the flowery miles of its half-circle, again the
highway on either side the track, and again on the highway, just
reaching the gardens, whose dashing coach and span, but the Callenders'?
Dashing was the look of it, not its speed. Sedately it came. Behind it
followed a team of four giant mules, a joy to any quartermaster's
vision, drawing a plantation wagon filled with luggage. On the old
coachman's box sat beside him a slave maid, and in the carriage the
three Callenders and Charlie. Anna and Miranda were on the rear seat and
for the wounded boy's better ease his six-shooter lay in Anna's lap. A
brave animation in the ladies was only the more prettily set off by a
pinkness of earlier dejection about their eyes. Abreast the gate they
halted to ask an armed sentry whether the open way up the river coast
was through the gardens or--
He said there was no longer any open way without a pass from General
Lovell, and when they affably commended the precaution and showed a pass
he handed it to an officer, a heated, bustling, road-soiled young
Creole, who had ridden up at the head of a mounted detail. This youth,
as he read it, shrugged. "Under those present condition'," he said, with
a wide gesture toward the remote miles of blazing harbor, "he could not
honor a pazz two weeks ole. They would 'ave to rit-urn and get it
renew'."
"Oh! how? How hope to do so in all yonder chaos? And how! oh, how!
could an army--in full retreat--leaving women and wounded soldiers to
the mercy of a ravening foe--compel them to remain in the city it was
itself evacuating?" A sweet and melodious dignity was in all the
questions, but eyes shone, brows arched, lips hung apart and
bonnet-feathers and hat-feathers, capes and flounces, seemed to ruffle
wider, with consternation and hurt esteem.
The officer could not explain a single how. He could do no more than
stubbornly regret that the questioners must even return by train, the
dread exigencies of the hour compelling him to impress these horses for
one of his guns and those mules for his battery-wagon.
Anna's three companions would have sprung to their feet but in some way
her extended hand stayed them. A year earlier Charlie would have made
sad mistakes here, but now he knew the private soldier's helplessness
before the gold bars of commission, and his rage was white and dumb, as,
with bursting eyes, he watched the officer pencil a blank.
"Don't write that, sir," said a clear voice, and the writer, glancing
up, saw Anna standing among the seated three. Her face was drawn with
distress and as pale as Charlie's, but Charlie's revolver was in her
hand, close to her shoulder, pointed straight upward at full cock, and
the hand was steady. "Those mules first," she spoke on, "and then we,
sir, are going to turn round and go home. Whatever our country needs of
us we will give, not sell; but we will not, in her name, be robbed on
the highway, sir, and I will put a ball through the head of the first
horse or mule you lay a hand on. Isaac, turn your team."
Unhindered, the teamster, and then the coachman, turned and drove. Back
toward, and by and by, into the vast woe-stricken town they returned in
the scented airs and athwart the long shadows of that same declining sun
which fourteen years before--or was it actually but fourteen
months?--had first gilded the splendid maneuverings of Kincaid's
Battery. The tragi-comic rencounter just ended had left the three ladies
limp, gay, and tremulous, with Anna aghast at herself and really
wondering between spells of shame and fits of laughter what had happened
to her reason.
With his pistol buckled on again, Charlie had only a wordy wrath for the
vanished officer, and grim worship of Anna, while Constance and Miranda,
behind a veil of mirthful recapitulations, tenderly rejoiced in the
relief of mind and heart which the moment had brought to her who had
made it amazing. And now the conditions around them in streets, homes,
and marts awoke sympathies in all the four, which further eased their
own distresses.
The universal delirium of fright and horror had passed. Through all the
city's fevered length and breadth, in the belief that the victorious
ships, repairing the lacerations of battle as they came, were coming so
slowly that they could not arrive for a day or two, and that they were
bringing no land forces with them, thousands had become rationally,
desperately busy for flight. Everywhere hacks, private carriages, cabs,
wagons, light and heavy, and carts, frail or strong, carts for bread or
meat, for bricks or milk, were bearing fugitives--old men, young
mothers, grandmothers, maidens and children--with their trunks, bales,
bundles, slaves and provisions--toward the Jackson Railroad to board
the first non-military train they could squeeze into, and toward the New
and Old Basins to sleep on schooner decks under the open stars in the
all-night din of building deckhouses. Many of them were familiar
acquaintances and chirruped good-by to the Callenders. Passes? No
trouble whatever! Charlie need only do this and that and so and so, and
there you were!
But Charlie was by this time so nervously spent and in such pain that
the first thing must be to get him into bed again--at Callender House,
since nothing could induce him to let sister, sweetheart or grandmother
know he had not got away. To hurt his pride the more, in every direction
military squads with bayonets fixed were smartly fussing from one small
domicile to another, hustling out the laggards and marching them to
encampments on the public squares. Other squads--of the Foreign Legion,
appointed to remain behind in "armed neutrality"--patroled the sidewalks
strenuously, preserving order with a high hand. Down this street drums
roared, fifes squealed and here passed yet another stately regiment on
toward and now into and down, Calliope Street, silent as the rabble it
marched through, to take train for Camp Moore in the Mississippi hills.
"Good Lord!" gasped Charlie, "if that isn't the Confederate Guards! Oh,
what good under heaven can those old chaps do at the front?"--the very
thing the old chaps were asking themselves.
LI
THE CALLENDER HORSES ENLIST
Mere mind should ever be a most reverent servant to the soul. But in
fact, and particularly in hours stately with momentous things, what a
sacrilegious trick it has of nagging its holy mistress with triflet
light as air--small as gnats yet as pertinacious.
To this effect, though written with a daintier pen, were certain lines
but a few hours old, that twenty-fourth of April, in a diary which
through many months had received many entries since the one that has
already told us of its writer paired at Doctor Sevier's dinner-party
with a guest now missing, and of her hearing, in the starlight with that
guest, the newsboys' cry that his and her own city's own Beauregard had
opened fire on Fort Sumter and begun this war--which now behold!
Of this droll impishness of the mind, even in this carriage to-day, with
these animated companions, and in all this tribulation, ruin, and
flight, here was a harrying instance: that every minute or two, whatever
the soul's outer preoccupation or inner anguish, there would, would,
would return, return and return the doggerel words and swaggering old
tune of that song abhorred by the gruff General, but which had first
awakened the love of so many hundreds of brave men for its brave, gay
singer now counted forever lost:
"Ole mahs' love' wine, ole mis' love' silk--"
Generally she could stop it there, but at times it contrived to steal
unobserved through the second line and then no power could keep it from
marching on to the citadel, the end of the refrain. Base, antic awakener
of her heart's dumb cry of infinite loss! For every time the tormenting
inanity won its way, that other note, that unvoiced agony, hurled itself
against the bars of its throbbing prison.
"Ole mahs' love' wine, ole mis' love'--"
"Oh, Hilary, my Hilary!"
From the Creole Quarter both carriage and wagon turned to the water
front. Charlie's warning that even more trying scenes would be found
there was in vain. Anna insisted, the fevered youth's own evident wish
was to see the worst, and Constance and Miranda, dutifully mirthful,
reminded him that through Anna they also had now tasted blood. As the
equipage came out upon the Levee and paused to choose a way, the sisters
sprang up and gazed abroad, sustaining each other by their twined arms.