center the flag-ship hovered just opposite Canal Street. The rear was
far down by the Mint. Up in the van the leading vessel was halting
abreast St. Mary's Market, a few hundred yards behind which, under black
clouds and on an east wind, the lone-star flag of seceded Louisiana
floated in helpless defiance from the city hall. All at once heaven's
own thunders pealed. From a warning sprinkle the women near about fled
down a roofed hatchway. One led Madame. But on such a scene Flora craved
a better curtain-fall and she lingered alone.
It came. As if all its millions of big drops raced for one prize the
deluge fell on city, harbor, and fleet and on the woe-smitten land from
horizon to horizon, while in the same moment the line of battle dropped
anchor in mid-stream. With a swirling mist wetting her fair head she
waved in dainty welcome Irby's letter and then pressed it to her lips;
not for his sake--hah!--but for his rueful word, that once more his
loathed cousin, Anna's Hilary! was riding at the head of Kincaid's
Battery.
LIV
SAME APRIL DAY TWICE
Black was that Friday for the daughters of Dixie. Farragut demanded
surrender, Lovell declined. The mayor, the council, the Committee of
Public Safety declined.
On Saturday the two sides parleyed while Lovell withdrew his forces. On
Sunday the Foreign Legion preserved order of a sort highly displeasing
to "a plain sailor," as Farragut, on the Hartford, called himself, and
to all the plain sailors of his fleet--who by that time may have been
hard to please. On Monday the "plain sailor" bade the mayor, who had
once been a plain stevedore, remove the city's women and children within
forty-eight hours. But on Tuesday, in wiser mood, he sent his own
blue-jackets, cutlasses, muskets and hand-dragged howitzers, lowered the
red-and-yellow-striped flag of one star and on mint and custom-house ran
up the stars and stripes. Constance and Miranda, from their distant
roof, saw the emblem soar to the breeze, and persuaded Anna to an act
which cost her as many hours as it need have taken minutes--the
destruction of the diary. That was on the twenty-ninth of April.
Let us not get dates confused. "On the twenty-ninth of April," says
Grant, "the troops were at Hard Times (Arkansas), and the fleet (another
fleet), under Admiral Porter, made an attack upon Grand Gulf
(Mississippi), while I reconnoitered." But that twenty-ninth was a year
later, when New Orleans for three hundred and sixty-five separate
soul-torturing days had been sitting in the twilight of her captivity,
often writhing and raving in it, starved to madness for news of Lee's
and Stonewall's victories and of her boys, her ragged, gaunt, superb,
bleeding, dying, on-pressing boys, and getting only such dubious crumbs
of rumor as could be smuggled in, or such tainted bad news as her
captors delighted to offer her through the bars of a confiscated press.
No? did the treatment she was getting merely--as Irby, with much truth,
on that twenty-ninth remarked in a group about a headquarters camp-fire
near Grand Gulf--did it merely seem so bad to poor New Orleans?
Oh, but!--as the dingy, lean-faced Hilary cried, springing from the
ground where he lay and jerking his pipe from his teeth--was it not
enough for a world's pity that to her it seemed so? How it seemed to the
Callenders in particular was a point no one dared raise where he was. To
them had come conditions so peculiarly distressing and isolating that
they were not sharers of the common lot around them, but of one
strangely, incalculably worse. Rarely and only in guarded tones were
they spoken of now in Kincaid's Battery, lately arrived here, covered
with the glory of their part in Bragg's autumn and winter campaign
through Tennessee and Kentucky, and with Perryville, Murfreesboro' and
Stone River added to the long list on their standard. Lately arrived,
yes; but bringing with them as well as meeting here a word apparently so
authentic and certainly so crushing, (as to those sweet Callenders),
that no one ever let himself hint toward it in the hearing even of
Charlie Valcour, much less of their battle-scarred, prison-wasted,
march-worn, grief-torn, yet still bright-eyed, brave-stepping,
brave-riding Major. Major of Kincaid's Battalion he was now, whose whole
twelve brass pieces had that morning helped the big iron batteries fight
Porter's gunboats.
"Finding Grand Gulf too strong," says Grant, "I moved the army below,
running the batteries there as we had done at Vicksburg. Learning here
that there was a good road from Bruinsburg up to Port Gibson" (both in
Mississippi), "I determined to cross--"
How pleasantly familiar were those names in New Orleans. Alike
commercially and socially they meant parterres, walks, bowers in her
great back-garden. From the homes of the rich planters around the towns
and landings so entitled, and from others all up and down the river from
Natchez to Vicksburg and the Bends, hailed many a Carondelet Street
nabob and came yearly those towering steamboat-loads--those floating
cliffs--of cotton-bales that filled presses, ships and bank-boxes and
bought her imports--plows, shoes, bagging, spices, silks and wines: came
also their dashing sons and daughters, to share and heighten the
splendors of her carnivals and lure away her beaux and belles to summer
outings and their logical results. In all the region there was hardly a
family with which some half-dozen of the battery were not acquainted, or
even related.
"Home again, home again from a foreign shore,"
sang the whole eighty-odd, every ladies' man of them, around out-of-tune
pianos with girls whose brothers were all away in Georgia and Virginia,
some forever at rest, some about to fight Chancellorsville. Such a
chorus was singing that night within ear-shot of the headquarters group
when Ned Ferry, once of the battery, but transferred to Harper's
cavalry, rode up and was led by Hilary to the commanding general to say
that Grant had crossed the river. Piano and song hushed as the bugles
rang, and by daybreak all camps had vanished and the gray columns were
hurrying, horse, foot, and wheels, down every southerly road to crush
the invader.
At the head of one rode General Brodnax. Hearing Hilary among his staff
he sent for him and began to speak of Mandeville, long gone to Richmond
on some official matter and daily expected back; and then he mentioned
"this fellow Grant," saying he had known him in Mexico. "And now," he
concluded, "he's the toughest old he one they've got."
On the face of either kinsman there came a fine smile that really made
them look alike. "We'll try our jaw-teeth on him to-morrow," laughed the
nephew.
"Hilary, you weren't one of those singers last evening, were you?"
"Why, no, uncle, for once you'll be pleased--"
"Not by a dam-site!" The smile was gone. "You know, my boy, that in such
a time as this if a leader--and above all such a capering, high-kicking
colt as you--begins to mope and droop like a cab-horse in the rain, his
men will soon not be worth a--what?... Oh, blast the others, when _you_
do so you're moping, and whether your men can stand it or not, I
can't!--what?... Well, then, for God's sake don't! For there's another
point, Hilary: as long as you were every night a 'ladies' man' and every
day a laugher at death you could take those boys through hell-fire at
any call; but if they once get the notion--which you came mighty near
giving them yesterday--that you hold their lives cheap merely because
you're tired of your own, they'll soon make you wish you'd never set
eyes on a certain friend of ours, worse than you or they or I have ever
wished it yet."
"I've never wished it yet, uncle. I can't. I've never believed one
breath of all we've heard. It's not true. It can't be, simply because
it can't be."
"Then why do you behave as if it were?" "I won't, uncle. Honor bright!
You watch me." And next day, in front of Port Gibson, through all the
patter, smoke, and crash, through all the charging, cheering and
volleying, while the ever-thinning, shortening gray lines were being
crowded back from rise to rise--back, back through field, grove, hedge,
worm-fence and farmyard, clear back to Grindstone Ford, Bayou Pierre,
and with the cavalry, Harper's, cut off and driven up eastward through
the town--the enraged old brigadier watched and saw. He saw far, saw
close, with blasphemous exultation, how Hilary and his guns, called
here, sent there, flashed, thundered, galloped, blazed, howled and held
on with furious valor and bleeding tenacity yet always with a
quick-sightedness which just avoided folly and ruin, and at length stood
rock fast, honor bright, at North Fork and held it till, except the
cavalry, the last gray column was over and the bridges safely burning.
That night Ned Ferry--of the cavalry withdrawn to the eastward uplands
to protect that great source of supplies and its New Orleans and Jackson
Railroad--was made a lieutenant, and a certain brave Charlotte, whom
later he loved and won, bringing New Orleans letters to camp, brought
also such news of the foe that before dawn, led by her, Ferry's Scouts
rode their first ride. All day they rode, while the main armies lay with
North Fork between them, the grays entrenching, the blues rebridging.
When at sundown she and Ned Ferry parted, and at night he bivouacked his
men for a brief rest in a black solitude from which the camp-fires of
both hosts were in full sight and the enemy's bridge-building easily
heard, he sought, uncompanioned, Kincaid's Battery and found Hilary
Kincaid. War is what Sherman called it, who two or three days later, at
Grand Gulf (evacuated), crossed into this very strife. Yet peace
(so-called) and riches rarely bind men in such loving pairs as do cruel
toil, deadly perils, common griefs, exile from woman and daily
experience of one another's sweetness, valor, and strength, and it was
for such things that this pair, loving so many besides, particularly
loved each other.
With glad eyes Kincaid rose from a log.
"Major," began the handsome scout, dapper from képi to spurs in contrast
to the worn visage and dress of his senior, but Hilary was already
speaking.
"My gentle Ned!" he cried. "_Lieutenant_--Ferry!"
Amid kind greetings from Captain Bartleson and others the eyes of the
two--Hilary's so mettlesome, Ferry's so placid--exchanged meanings, and
the pair went and sat alone on the trail of a gun; on Roaring Betsy's
knee, as it were. There Hilary heard of the strange fair guide and of
news told by her which brought him to his feet with a cry of joy that
drew the glad eyes of half the battery.
"The little mother saint of your flag, boys!" he explained to a knot of
them later, "the little godmother of your guns!" The Callenders were out
of New Orleans, banished as "registered enemies."
LV
IN DARKEST DIXIE AND OUT
Unhappy Callender House! Whether "oppressors" or "oppressed" had
earliest or oftenest in that first year of the captivity lifted against
it the accusing finger it would be hard to tell.
When the Ship Island transports bore their blue thousands up the river,
and the streets roared a new drum-thunder, before the dark columns had
settled down in the cotton-yards, public squares, Carrollton suburb and
Jackson Barracks, Callender House--you may guess by whose
indirection--had come to the notice of a once criminal lawyer, now the
plumed and emblazoned general-in-chief, to whom, said his victims
(possibly biased), no offense or offender was too small for his
hectoring or chastisement.
The women in that house, that nest of sedition, he had been told, at
second-hand, had in the very dawn of secession completely armed the
famous "Kincaid's Battery" which had early made it hot for him about
Yorktown. Later in that house they had raised a large war-fund--still
somewhere hidden. The day the fleet came up they had sent their
carriage-horses to Beauregard, helped signal the Chalmette
fortifications, locked ten slaves in the dwelling under shell fire and
threatened death to any who should stir to escape. So for these twelve
months, with only Isaac, Ben, and their wives as protectors and the
splendid freedom to lock themselves in, they had suffered the duress of
a guard camped in the grove, their every townward step openly watched
and their front door draped with the stars and stripes, under which no
feminine acquaintance could be enticed except the dear, faithful
Valcours.
But where were old friends and battery sisters? All estranged. Could not
the Callenders go to them and explain? Explain! A certain man of not
one-fifth their public significance or "secesh" record, being lightly
asked on the street if he had not yet "taken the oath" and as lightly
explaining that he "wasn't going to," had, fame said, for that alone,
been sent to Ship Island--where Anna "already belonged," as the
commanding general told the three gentle refusers of the oath, while in
black letters on the whited wall above his judgment seat in the
custom-house they read, "No distinction made here between he and she
adders."
But could not the Valcours, those strangely immune, yet unquestioned
true-lovers of poor Dixie, whose marvelous tact won priceless favors for
so many distressed Dixie-ites, have explained for the Callenders? Flora
had explained!--to both sides, in opposite ways, eagerly, tenderly, over
and over, with moist eyes, yet ever with a cunning lameness that kept
convincement misled and without foothold. Had the Callenders dwelt
up-town the truth might have won out; but where they were, as they were,
they might as well have been in unspeakable Boston. And so by her own
sweet excusings she kept alive against them beliefs or phantoms of
beliefs, which would not have lived a day in saner times.
Calumny had taken two forms: the monstrous black smoke of a vulgar
version and the superior divinings of the socially elect; a fine, hidden
flame fed from the smoke. According to the vulgate the three ladies,
incensed at a perfectly lawful effort to use their horses for the
Confederate evacuation and actually defying it with cocked revolver, had
openly abjured Dixie, renounced all purpose to fly to it and, denying
shelter to their own wounded, had with signal flags themselves guided
the conquering fleet past the town's inmost defenses until compelled to
desist by a Confederate shell in their roof. Unable to face an odium so
well earned they had clung to their hiding, glad of the blue camp in
their grove, living fatly on the bazaar's proceeds, and having high
times with such noted staff-officers as Major Greenleaf, their kindness
to whom in the days of his modest lieutenancy and first flight and of
his later parole and exchange, was not so hard now to see through.
Greenleaf had come back with General Banks when Banks had succeeded
Butler. Oppressed with military cares, he had barely time to be, without
scrutiny, a full believer in the Valcours' loyalty to the Union. Had
they not avowed it to him when to breathe it was peril, on that early
day when Irby's command became Kincaid's Battery, and in his days of
Parish Prison and bazaar? How well those words fitly spoken had turned
out! "Like apples of gold," sang Flora to the timorous grandmother, "in
wrappers of greenbacks."
All the more a believer was he because while other faithfuls were making
their loyalty earn big money off the government this genteel pair
reminding him, that they might yet have to risk themselves inside the
gray lines again to extricate Charlie, had kept their loyalty as
gracefully hidden as of old except from a general or two. Preoccupied
Greenleaf, amiable generals, not to see that a loyalist in New Orleans
stood socially at absolute zero, whereas to stand at the social
ebullition point was more to the Valcours than fifty Unions, a hundred
Dixies and heaven beside. It was that fact, more than any other, save
one, which lent intrepidity to Flora's perpetual, ever quickening dance
on the tight-rope of intrigue; a performance in which her bonny face had
begun to betray her discovery that she could neither slow down nor dance
backward. However, every face had come to betray some cruel strain;
Constance's, Anna's, even Victorine's almond eyes and Miranda's baby
wrinkles. Yes, the Valcours, too, had, nevertheless, their monetary
gains, but these were quiet and exclusively from their ever dear,
however guilty, "rebel" friends, who could not help making presents to
Madame when brave Flora, spurning all rewards but their love, got for
them, by some spell they could not work, Federal indulgences; got them
through those one or two generals, who--odd coincidence!--always knew
the "rebel" city's latest "rebel" news and often made stern use of it.
Full believer likewise, and true sorrower, was Greenleaf, in Hilary's
death, having its seeming proof from Constance and Miranda as well as
from Flora. For in all that twelvemonth the Callenders had got no glad
tidings, even from Mandeville. Battle, march and devastation, march,
battle and devastation had made letters as scarce as good dreams, in
brightest Dixie. But darkest Dixie was New Orleans. There no three
"damned secesh" might stop on a corner in broadest sunlight and pass the
time of day. There the "rebel" printing-presses stood cold in dust and
rust. There churches were shut and bayonet-guarded because their
ministers would not read the prayers ordered by the "oppressor," and
there, for being on the street after nine at night, ladies of society,
diners-out, had been taken to the lock-up and the police-court. In New
Orleans all news but bad news was contraband to any "he or she adder,"
but four-fold contraband to the Callenders, the fairest member of whose
trio, every time a blue-and-gold cavalier forced her conversation, stung
him to silence with some word as mild as a Cordelia's. And yet,(you
demur,) in the course of a whole year, by some kind luck, surely the
blessed truth--Ah, the damsel on the tight-rope took care against that!
It was part of her dance to drop from that perch as daintily as a
bee-martin way-laying a hive, devour each home-coming word as he devours
bees, and flit back and twitter and flutter as a part of all nature's
harmony, though in chills of dismay at her peril and yet burning to go
to Hilary, from whom this task alone forever held her away.
So throughout that year Anna had been to Greenleaf the veiled widow of
his lost friend, not often or long, and never blithely met; loved more
ardently than ever, more reverently; his devotion holding itself in a
fancied concealment transparent to all; he defending and befriending
her, yet only as he could without her knowledge, and incurring-a certain
stigma from his associates and superiors, if not an actual distrust. A
whole history of itself would be the daily, nightly, monthly war of
passions between him, her, Flora, and those around them, but time flies.
One day Greenleaf, returning from a week-long circuit of outposts, found
awaiting him a letter bearing Northern imprints of mailing and
forwarding, from Hilary Kincaid, written long before in prison and
telling another whole history, of a kind so common in war that we have
already gone by it; a story of being left for dead in the long stupor of
a brain hurt; of a hairbreadth escape from living burial; of weeks in
hospital unidentified, all sense of identity lost; and of a daring feat
of surgery, with swift mental, not so swift bodily, recovery. Inside the
letter was one to Anna. But Anna was gone. Two days earlier, without
warning, the Callenders--as much to Flora's affright as to their
relief, and "as much for Fred's good as for anything," said his obdurate
general when Flora in feigned pity pleaded for their stay--had been
deported into the Confederacy.
"Let me carry it to her," cried Flora to Greenleaf, rapturously clasping
the letter and smiling heroically. "We can overtague them, me and my
gran'mama! And then, thanks be to God! my brother we can bring him back!
Maybe also--ah! maybee! I can obtain yo' generals some uzeful news!"
After some delay the pair were allowed to go. At the nearest gray
outpost, in a sudden shower of the first true news for a week--the
Mississippi crossed, Grant victorious at Port Gibson and joined by
Sherman at Grand Gulf--Flora learned, to her further joy, that the
Callenders, misled by report that Brodnax's brigade was at Mobile, had
gone eastward, as straight away from Brodnax and the battery as
Gulf-shore roads could take them, across a hundred-mile stretch of
townless pine-barrens with neither railway nor telegraph.
Northward, therefore, with Madame on her arm, sprang Flora,
staggeringly, by the decrepit Jackson Railroad, along the quiet eastern
bound of a region out of which, at every halt, came gloomy mention of
Tallahala River and the Big Black; of Big Sandy, Five Mile and Fourteen
Mile creeks; of Logan, Sherman and Grant; of Bowen, Gregg, Brodnax and
Harper, and of daily battle rolling northward barely three hours' canter
away. So they reached Jackson, capital of the state and base of General
Joe Johnston's army. They found it in high ferment and full of
stragglers from a battle lost that day at Raymond scarcely twenty miles
down the Port Gibson road, and on the day following chanced upon
Mandeville returning at last from Richmond. With him they turned west,
again by rail, and about sundown, at Big Black Bridge, ten miles east of
Vicksburg, found themselves clasping hands in open air with General
Brodnax, Irby and Kincaid, close before the torn brigade and the wasted,
cheering battery. Angels dropped down they seemed, tenderly begging off
from all talk of the Callenders, who, Flora distressfully said, had been
"grozzly exaggerated," while, nevertheless, she declared herself, with
starting tears, utterly unable to explain why on earth they had gone to
Mobile--"unlezz the bazaar." No doubt, however, they would soon
telegraph by way of Jackson. But next day, while she, as mistress of a
field hospital, was winning adoration on every side, Jackson, only
thirty miles off but with every wire cut, fell, clad in the flames of
its military factories, mills, foundries and supplies and of its
eastern, Pearl River, bridge.
LVI
BETWEEN THE MILLSTONES
Telegraph! They had been telegraphing for days, but their telegrams have
not yet been delivered.
On the evening when the camps of Johnston and Grant with burning Jackson
between them put out half the stars a covered carriage, under the
unsolicited escort of three or four gray-jacketed cavalrymen and driven
by an infantry lad seeking his command after an illness at home, crossed
Pearl River in a scow at Ratcliff's ferry just above the day's
battlefield.
"When things are this bad," said the boy to the person seated beside him
and to two others at their back, his allusion being to their
self-appointed guard, "any man you find straggling to the _front_ is the
kind a lady can trust."
This equipage had come a three hours' drive, from the pretty town of
Brandon, nearest point to which a railway train from the East would
venture, and a glimpse into the vehicle would have shown you, behind
Constance and beside Miranda, Anna, pale, ill, yet meeting every inquiry
with a smiling request to push on. They were attempting a circuit of
both armies to reach a third, Pemberton's, on the Big Black and in and
around Vicksburg.
Thus incited they drove on in the starlight over the gentle hills of
Madison county and did not accept repose until they had put Grant ten
miles behind and crossed to the south side of the Vicksburg and Jackson
Railroad at Clinton village with only twenty miles more between them and
Big Black Bridge. The springs of Anna's illness were more in spirit than
body. Else she need not have lain sleepless that night at Clinton's many
cross-roads, still confronting a dilemma she had encountered in Mobile.