steamboats landed--the panorama was appalling. All day Anna had hungered
for some incident or spectacle whose majesty or terror would suffice to
distract her from her own desolation; but here it was made plain to her
that a distress before which hand and speech are helpless only drives
the soul in upon its own supreme devotion and woe. One wide look over
those far flat expanses of smoke and flame answered the wonder of many
hours, as to where all the drays and floats of the town had gone and
what they could be doing. Along the entire sinuous riverside the whole
great blockaded seaport's choked-in stores of tobacco and cotton,
thousands of hogsheads, ten thousands of bales--lest they enrich the
enemy--were being hauled to the wharves and landings and were just now
beginning to receive the torch, the wharves also burning, and boats and
ships on either side of the river being fired and turned adrift.
Yet all the more because of the scene, a scene that quelled even the
haunting strain of song, that other note, that wail which, the long day
through, had writhed unreleased in her bosom, rose, silent still, yet
only the stronger and more importunate--
"Oh, Hilary, my soldier, my flag's, my country's defender, come back to
me--here!--now!--my yet living hero, my Hilary Kincaid!"
Reluctantly, she let Constance draw her down, and presently, in a voice
rich with loyal pride, as the carriage moved on, bade Charlie and
Miranda observe that only things made contraband by the Richmond
Congress were burning, while all the Coast Landing's wealth of Louisiana
foodstuffs, in barrels and hogsheads, bags and tierces, lay unharmed.
Yet not long could their course hold that way, and--it was Anna who
first proposed retreat. The very havoc was fascinating and the
courage of Constance and Miranda, though stripped of its mirth,
remained undaunted; but the eye-torture of the cotton smoke was enough
alone to drive them back to the inner streets.
[Illustration: "Ole mahs' love' wine, ole--"]
Here the direction of their caravan, away from all avenues of escape,
no less than their fair faces, drew the notice of every one, while to
the four themselves every busy vehicle--where none was idle,--every
sound remote or near, every dog in search of his master, and every
man--how few the men had become!--every man, woman or child, alone or
companioned, overladen or empty-handed, hurrying out of gates or into
doors, standing to stare or pressing intently or distractedly on,
calling, jesting, scolding or weeping--and how many wept!--bore a new,
strange interest of fellowship. So Callender House came again to view,
oh, how freshly, dearly, appealingly beautiful! As the Callender train
drew into its gate and grove, the carriage was surrounded, before it
could reach the veranda steps, by a full dozen of household slaves, male
and female, grown, half-grown, clad and half-clad, some grinning, some
tittering, all overjoyed, yet some in tears. There had been no such
gathering at the departure. To spare the feelings of the mistresses the
dominating "mammy" of the kitchen had forbidden it. But now that they
were back, Glory! Hallelujah!
"And had it really," the three home-returning fair ones asked, "seemed
so desolate and deadly perilous just for want of them? What!--had seemed
so even to stalwart Tom?--and Scipio?--and Habakkuk? And were Hettie and
Dilsie actually so in terror of the Yankees?"
"Oh, if we'd known that we'd never have started!" exclaimed Constance,
with tears, which she stoutly quenched, while from all around came sighs
and moans of love and gratitude.
And were the three verily back to stay?
Ah! that was the question. While Charlie, well attended, went on up and
in they paused on the wide stair and in mingled distress and drollery
asked each other, "_Are_ we back to stay, or not?"
A new stir among the domestics turned their eyes down into the garden.
Beyond the lingering vehicles a lieutenant from Camp Callender rode up
the drive. Two or three private soldiers hung back at the gate.
"It's horses and mules again, Nan," gravely remarked Constance, and the
three, facing toward him, with Miranda foremost, held soft debate.
Whether the decision they reached was to submit or resist, the wide ears
of the servants could not be sure, but by the time the soldier was
dismounting the ladies had summoned the nerve to jest.
"Be a man, Miranda!" murmured Constance.
"But not the kind I was!" prompted Anna.
"No," said her sister, "for this one coming is already scared to death."
"So's Miranda," breathed Anna as he came up the steps uncovering and
plainly uncomfortable. A pang lanced through her as she caught herself
senselessly recalling the flag presentation. And then--
[Illustration: Music]
"--oh! _oh!_"
"Mrs. Callender?" asked the stranger.
"Yes, sir," said that lady.
"My business"--he glanced back in nervous protest as the drivers
beneath gathered their reins--"will you kindly detain--?"
"If you wish, sir," she replied, visibly trembling. "Isaac--"
From the rear of the group came the voice of Anna: "Miranda, dear, I
wouldn't stop them." The men regathered the lines. She moved half a step
down and stayed herself on her sister's shoulder. Miranda wrinkled back
at her in an ecstasy of relief:
"Oh, Anna, do speak for all of us!"
The teams started away. A distress came into the soldier's face, but
Anna met it with a sober smile: "Don't be troubled, sir, you shall have
them. Drive round into the basement, Ben, and unload." The drivers went.
"You shall have them, sir, on your simple word of honor as--"
"Of course you will be reimbursed. I pledge--"
"No, sir," tearfully put in Constance, "we've given our men, we can't
sell our beasts."
"They are not ours to sell," said Anna.
"Why, Nan!"
"They belong to Kincaid's Battery," said Anna, and Constance, Miranda,
and the servants smiled a proud approval. Even the officer flushed with
a fine ardor:
"You have with you a member of that command?"
"We have."
"Then, on my honor as a Southern soldier, if he will stay by them and us
as far as Camp Moore, to Kincaid's Battery they shall go. But, ladies--"
"Yes," knowingly spoke Miranda. "Hettie, Scipio, Dilsie, you-all can go
'long back to your work now." She wrinkled confidentially to the
officer.
"Yes," he replied, "we shall certainly engage the enemy's ships
to-morrow, and you ladies must--"
"Must not desert our home, sir," said Anna.
"Nor our faithful servants," added the other two.
"Ah, ladies, but if we should have to make this house a field hospital,
with all the dreadful--"
"Oh, that settles it," cried the three, "we stay!"
LII
HERE THEY COME!
What a night! Yet the great city slept. Like its soldiers at their
bivouac fires it lay and slumbered beside its burning harbor. Sleep was
duty.
Callender House kept no vigil. Lighted by the far devastation, its roof
shone gray, its cornice white, its tree-tops green above the darkness of
grove and garden. From its upper windows you might have seen the
townward bends of the river gleam red, yellow, and bronze, or the
luminous smoke of destruction (slantingly over its flood and farther
shore) roll, thin out, and vanish in a moonless sky. But from those
windows no one looked forth. After the long, strenuous, open-air day,
sleep, even to Anna, had come swiftly.
Waking late and springing to her elbow she presently knew that every one
else was up and about. Her maid came and she hastened to dress. Were the
hostile ships in sight? Not yet. Was the city still undestroyed? Yes,
though the cotton brought out to the harbor-side was now fifteen
thousand bales and with its blazing made a show as if all the town were
afire. She was furiously hungry; was not breakfast ready? Yes, Constance
and Miranda--"done had breakfuss and gone oveh to de cottage fo' to fix
it up fo' de surgeon ... No, 'm, not dis house; he done change' his
mine." Carriage horses--mules? "Yass, 'm, done gone. Mahs' Chahlie gone
wid 'm. He gone to be boss o' de big gun what show' f'om dese windehs."
Oh, but that was an awful risk, wounded as he was! "Yass, 'm, but he
make his promise to Miss Flo'a he won't tech de gun hisseff." What! Miss
Flora--? "Oh, she be'n, but she gone ag'in. Law'! she a brave un! It
e'en a'most make me brave, dess to see de high sperits she in!" The
narrator departed.
How incredible was the hour. Looking out on the soft gray sky and river
and down into the camp, that still kept such quiet show of routine, or
passing down the broad hall stair, through the library and into the
flowery breakfast room, how keenly real everything that met the eye, how
unreal whatever was beyond sight. How vividly actual this lovely home in
the sweet ease and kind grace of its lines and adornments. How hard to
move with reference to things unseen, when heart and mind and all power
of realizing unseen things were far away in the ravaged fields, mangled
roads and haunted woods and ravines between Corinth and Shiloh.
But out in the garden, so fair and odorous as one glided through it to
the Mandeville cottage, things boldly in view made sight itself hard to
believe. Was that bespattered gray horseman no phantom, who came
galloping up the river road and called to a servant at the gate that the
enemy's fleet was in sight from English Turn? Was that truly New
Orleans, back yonder, wrapped in smoke, like fallen Carthage or
Jerusalem? Or here! this black-and-crimson thing drifting round the bend
in mid-current and without a sign of life aboard or about it, was this
not a toy or sham, but one more veritable ship in veritable flames? And
beyond and following it, helpless as a drift-log, was that lifeless
white-and-crimson thing a burning passenger steamer--and that behind it
another? Here in the cottage, plainly these were Constance and Miranda,
and, on second view, verily here were a surgeon and his attendants. But
were these startling preparations neither child's play nor dream?
Child's play persistently seemed, at any rate, the small bit of yellow
stuff produced as a hospital flag. Oh, surely! would not a much larger
be far safer? It would. Well, at the house there was some yellow
curtaining packed in one of the boxes, Isaac could tell which--
"I think I know right where it is!" said Anna, and hurried away to find
and send it. The others, widow and wife, would stay where they were and
Anna would take command at the big house, where the domestics would soon
need to be emboldened, cheered, calmed, controlled. Time flies when
opening boxes that have been stoutly nailed and hooped over the nails.
When the goods proved not to be in the one where Anna "knew" they were
she remembered better, of course, and in the second they were found.
Just as the stuff had been drawn forth and was being hurried away by
the hand of Dilsie, a sergeant and private from the camp, one with a
field glass, the other with a signal flag, came asking leave to use them
from the belvedere on the roof. Anna led them up to it.
How suddenly authentic became everything, up here. Flat as a map lay
river, city, and plain. Almost under them and amusingly clear in detail,
they looked down into Camp Callender and the Chalmette fortifications.
When they wigwagged, "Nothing in sight," to what seemed a very real toy
soldier with a very real toy flag, on a green toy mound in the midst of
the work (the magazine), he wigwagged in reply, and across the river a
mere speck of real humanity did the same from a barely definable
parapet.
With her maid beside her Anna lingered a bit. She loved to be as near
any of the dear South's defenders as modesty would allow, but these two
had once been in Kincaid's Battery, her Hilary's own boys. As lookouts
they were not yet skilled. In this familiar scene she knew things by the
eye alone, which the sergeant, unused even to his glass, could hardly be
sure of through it.
Her maid looked up and around. "Gwine to rain ag'in," she murmured, and
the mistress assented with her gaze in the southeast. In this humid air
and level country a waterside row of live-oaks hardly four miles off
seemed at the world's edge and hid all the river beyond it.
"There's where the tips of masts always show first," she ventured to the
sergeant. "We can't expect any but the one kind now, can we?"
"'Fraid not, moving up-stream."
"Then yonder they come. See? two or three tiny,
needle-like--h-m-m!--just over that farth'--?"
He lowered the glass and saw better without it.
The maid burst out: "Oh, Lawd, _I_ does! Oh, good Gawd A'mighty!" She
sprang to descend, but with a show of wonder Anna spoke and she halted.
"If you want to leave me," continued the mistress, "you need only ask."
"Law, Miss Nannie! Me leave you? I--"
"If you do--now--to-day--for one minute, I'll never take you back. I'll
have Hettie or Dilsie."
"Missie,"--tears shone--"d' ain't nothin' in Gawd's worl' kin eveh make
me a runaway niggeh f'om you! But ef you tell me now fo' to go fetch
ev'y dahky we owns up to you--"
"Yes! on the upper front veranda! Go, do it!"
"Yass, 'm! 'caze ef us kin keep 'em anywahs it'll be in de bes' place
fo' to see de mos' sights!" She vanished and Anna turned to the
soldiers. Their flagging had paused while they watched the far-away
top-gallants grow in height and numbers. Down in the works the long-roll
was sounding and from every direction men were answering it at a run.
Across the river came bugle notes. Sighingly the sergeant lowered his
glass:
"Lordy, it's the whole kit and b'ilin'! Wag, John. When they swing up
round this end of the trees I'll count 'em. Here they come! One, ...
two, ... why, what small--oh, see this big fellow! Look at the width of
those yards! And look at all their hulls, painted the color of the
river! And see that pink flutter--look!" he said to Anna, "do you get
it? high up among the black ropes? that pink--"
"Yes," said Anna solemnly, "I see it--"
"That's the old--"
"Yes. Must we fire on that? and fire first?"
"We'd better!" laughed the soldier, "if we fire at all. Those chaps have
got their answer ready and there won't be much to say after it." The
three hurried down, the men to camp, Anna to the upper front veranda.
There, save two or three with Constance and Miranda, came all the
servants, shepherded by Isaac and Ben with vigilant eyes and smothered
vows to "kill de fuss he aw she niggeh dat try to skedaddle"; came and
stood to gaze with her over and between the grove trees. Down in the
fortification every man seemed to have sprung to his post. On its outer
crest, with his adjutant, stood the gilded commander peering through his
glass.
"Missie," sighed Anna's maid, "see Mahs' Chahlie dah? stan'in' on de
woodworks o' dat big gun?"
"Yes," said Anna carelessly, but mutely praying that some one would make
him get down. Her brain teemed with speculations: Where, how occupied
and in what state of things, what frame of mind, was Victorine, were
Flora and Madame? Here at Steve's cottage with what details were 'Randa
and Connie busy? But except when she smiled round on the slaves, her
gaze, like theirs, abode on the river and the shore defenses, from whose
high staffs floated brightly the Confederate flag. How many a time in
this last fearful year had her own Hilary, her somewhere still living,
laughing, loving Hilary, stood like yon commander, about to deal havoc
from, and to draw it upon, Kincaid's Battery. Who would say that even
now he might not be so standing, with her in every throb of his
invincible heart?
Something out in the view disturbed the servants.
"Oh, Lawd 'a' massy!" moaned a woman.
"Trus' Him, Aun' Jinnie!" prompted Anna's maid. "Y' always is trus'
Him!"
"Whoeveh don't trus' Him, I'll bus' him!" confidentially growled Isaac
to those around him.
"We all of us must and will!" said Anna elatedly, though with shameful
inward sinkings and with no sustaining word from any of the flock, while
out under the far gray sky, emerging from a slight angle of the shore
well down the water's long reach the battle line began to issue, each
ship in its turn debouching into full relief from main-truck to
water-line.
LIII
SHIPS, SHELLS, AND LETTERS
Strange! how little sense of calamity came with them--at first. So
graceful they were. So fitted--like waterfowl--to every mood of air and
tide; their wings all furled, their neat bodies breasting the angry
flood by the quiet power of their own steam and silent submerged wheels.
So like to the numberless crafts which in kinder days, under friendly
tow, had come up this same green and tawny reach and passed on to the
queenly city, laden with gifts, on the peaceful embassies of the world.
But, ah! how swiftly, threateningly they grew: the smaller, two-masted
fore-and-afts, each seemingly unarmed but for one monster gun pivoted
amidships, and the towering, wide-armed three-masters, the low and the
tall consorting like dog and hunter. Now, as they came on, a nice eye
could make out, down on their hulls, light patches of new repair where
our sunken fleet had so lately shot and rammed them, and, hanging over
the middle of each ship's side in a broad, dark square to protect her
vitals, a mass of anchor chains. Their boarding-netting, too, one saw,
drawn high round all their sides, and now more guns--and more!--and
more! the huger frowning over the bulwarks, the lesser in unbroken rows,
scowling each from its own port-hole, while every masthead revealed
itself a little fort bristling with arms and men. Yes, and there, high
in the clouds of rigging, no longer a vague pink flutter now, but
brightly red-white-and-blue and smilingly angry--what a strange
home-coming for it! ah, what a strange home-coming after a scant
year-and-a-half of banishment!--the flag of the Union, rippling from
every peak.
"Ain' dey neveh gwine shoot?" asked a negro lad.
"Not till they're out of line with us," said Anna so confidently as to
draw a skeptical grunt from his mother, and for better heart let a tune
float silently in and out on her breath:
"I loves to be a beau to de ladies.
I loves to shake a toe wid de ladies--"
She felt her maid's touch. Charlie was aiming his great gun, and on
either side of her Isaac and Ben were repeating their injunctions. She
spoke out:
"If they all shoot true we're safe enough now."
"An' ef de ships don't," put in Isaac, "dey'll mighty soon--"
The prophecy was lost. All the shore guns blazed and crashed. The white
smoke belched and spread. Broken window-panes jingled. Wails and moans
from the slave women were silenced by imperious outcries from Isaac and
Ben. There followed a mid-air scream and roar as of fifty railway trains
passing each other on fifty bridges, and the next instant a storm of the
enemy's shells burst over and in the batteries. But the house stood fast
and half a dozen misquotations of David and Paul were spouted from the
braver ones of Anna's flock. In a moment a veil of smoke hid ships and
shore, yet fearfully true persisted the enemy's aim. To home-guards,
rightly hopeless of their case and never before in action, every hostile
shot was like a volcano's eruption, and their own fire rapidly fell off.
But on the veranda, amid a weeping, prattling, squealing and gesturing
of women and children, Anna could not distinguish the bursting of the
foe's shells from the answering thunder of Confederate guns, and when in
a bare ten minutes unarmed soldiers began to come out of the smoke and
to hurry through the grove, while riders of harnessed horses and
mules--harnessed to nothing--lashed up the levee road at full run, and
Isaac and Ben proudly cried that one was Mahs' Chahlie and that the
animals were theirs of Callender House, she still asked over the
balustrade how the fight had gone.
For reply despairing hands pointed her back toward the river, and
there, as she and her groaning servants gazed, the great black masts and
yards, with headway resumed and every ensign floating, loomed silently
forth and began to pass the veranda. Down in the intervening garden,
brightly self-contained among the pale stragglers there, appeared the
one-armed reporter, with a younger brother in the weather-worn gray and
red of Kincaid's Battery. They waved a pocket-soiled letter and asked
how to get in and up to her; but before she could do more than toss them
a key there came, not from the ships but from close overhead under a
blackening sky, one last, hideous roar and ear-splitting howl. The
beautiful treasure-laden home heaved, quivered, lurched and settled
again, the women shrieked and crouched or fell prone with covered heads,
and a huge shell, sent by some pain-crazed fugitive from a gun across
the river, and which had entered at the roof, exploded in the basement
with a harrowing peal and filled every corner of the dwelling with
blinding smoke and stifling dust.
Constance and Miranda met Anna groping and staggering out of the chaos.
Unharmed, herself, and no one badly hurt? Ah, hear the sudden wail of
that battery boy as he finds his one-armed brother! Anna kneels with him
over the writhing form while women fly for the surgeon, and men, at her
cry, hasten to improvise a litter. No idle song haunts her now, yet a
clamoring whisper times itself with every pulsation of her bosom: "The
letter? the letter?"
Pity kept it from her lips, even from her weeping eyes; yet somehow the
fallen boy heard, but when he tried to answer she hushed him. "Oh, never
mind that," she said, wiping away the sweat of his agony, "it isn't
important at all."
"Dropped it," he gasped, and had dropped it where the shell had buried
it forever.
Each for the other's sake the lads rejected the hospital, with its risk
of capture. The younger had the stricken one hurried off toward the
railway and a refugee mother in the hills, Constance tenderly protesting
until the surgeon murmured the truth:
"It'll be all one to him by to-morrow."
As the rearmost ship was passing the house Anna, her comeliness
restored, half rose from her bed, where Miranda stood trying to keep
her. From all the far side of the house remotely sounded the smart tramp
and shuffle of servants clearing away wreckage, and the din of their
makeshift repairs. She was "all right again," she said as she sat, but
the abstraction of her eyes and the harkening droop of her head showed
that inwardly she still saw and heard the death-struck boy.
Suddenly she stood. "Dear, brave Connie!" she exclaimed, "we must go
help her, 'Randa." And as they went she added, pausing at the head of a
stair, "Ah, dear! if we, poor sinners all, could in our dull minds only
multiply the awful numbers of war's victims by the woes that gather
round any one of them, don't you think, 'Randa--?"
Yes, Miranda agreed, certainly if man--yes, and woman--had that gift
wars would soon be no more.
On a high roof above their apartment stood our Valcour ladies. About
them babbling feminine groups looked down upon the harbor landings black
with male vagabonds and witlings smashing the precious food freight (so
sacred yesterday), while women and girls scooped the spoils from mire
and gutter into buckets, aprons or baskets, and ran home with it through
Jackson Square and scurried back again with grain-sacks and
pillow-slips, and while the cotton burned on and the ships, so broadly
dark aloft, so pale in their war paint below and so alive with silent,
motionless men, came through the smoking havoc.
"No uze to hope," cooed the grandmother to Flora, whose gaze clung to
the tree-veiled top of Callender House. "It riffuse' to burn. 'Tis not a
so inflammab' like that rope and tar." The rope and tar meant their own
burnt ship.
"Ah, well," was the light reply, "all shall be for the bes'! Those who
watch the game close and play it with courage--"
"And cheat with prudenze--?"
"Yes! to them God is good. How well you know that! And Anna, too, she's
learning it--or she shall--dear Anna! Same time me, I am well content."
"Oh, you are joyful! But not because God is good, neither juz' biccause
those Yankee' they arrive. Ah, that muz' bring some splandid news, that
lett'r of Irbee, what you riscieve to-day and think I don't know it. 'T
is maybe ab-out Kincaid's Batt'rie, eh?" At Flora's touch the speaker
flinched back from the roof's edge, the maiden aiding the recoil.
"Don't stand so near, like that," she said. "It temp' me to shove you
over."