lines near by, northward, an uproar of attack, and one or two shells
burst in plain view, frightening the teams. The company leaped into the
vehicles any way they could and started townward over a miserable road
with the contest resounding on their right. As they jostled along the
edge of a wood that lay between them and the firing some mishap to the
front team caused all to alight, whereupon a shell, faultily timed, came
tearing through the tree-tops and exploded in the remains of a fence
close beyond them. Amid thunder, smoke, and brute and human terror the
remounting groups whirled away and had entirely left the scene before
that was asked which none could tell: Where was Anna?
Anna herself did not know, could not inquire of her own mind. With a
consciousness wholly disembodied she was mainly aware of a great pain
that seemed to fill all the region and atmosphere, an atmosphere charged
with mysterious dim green light and full of great boomings amid a
crackle of smaller ones; of shouts and cheers and of a placid quaking of
myriad leaves; all of which things might be things or only divers
manifestations of her undefinable self.
By and by through the pain came a dream of some one like her living in a
certain heaven of comfort and beauty, peace, joy, and love named
"Callender House"; but the pain persisted and the dream passed into a
horrible daytime darkness that brought a sense of vast changes near and
far; a sense of many having gone from that house, and of many having
most forbiddenly come to it; a sense of herself spending years and
years, and passing from world to world, in quest of one Hilary, Hilary
Kincaid, whom all others believed to be dead or false, or both, but who
would and should and must be found, and when found would be alive and
hale and true; a sense of having, with companions, been all at once
frightfully close to a rending of the sky, and of having tripped as she
fled, of having fallen and lain in a thunderous storm of invisible hail,
and of having after a time risen again and staggered on, an incalculable
distance, among countless growing things, fleeing down-hill, too weak to
turn up-hill, till suddenly the whole world seemed to strike hard
against something that sent it reeling backward.
And now her senses began feebly to regather within truer limits and to
tell her she was lying on the rooty ground of a thicket. Dimly she
thought to be up and gone once more, but could get no farther than the
thought although behind her closed lids glimmered a memory of deadly
combat. Its din had passed, but there still sounded, just beyond this
covert, fierce commands of new preparation, and hurried movements in
response--a sending and bringing, dismissing, and summoning of men and
things to rear or front, left or right, in a fury of supply and demand.
Ah, what! water? in her face? Her eyes opened wildly. A man was kneeling
beside her. He held a canteen; an armed officer in the foe's blue. With
lips parting to cry out she strove to rise and fly, but his silent
beseechings showed him too badly hurt below the knees to offer aid or
hindrance, and as she gained her feet she let him plead with stifled
eagerness for her succor from risks of a captivity which, in starving
Vicksburg and in such plight, would be death.
He was a stranger and an enemy, whose hurried speech was stealthy and
whose eyes went spying here and there, but so might it be just then
somewhere with him for whom she yet clung to life. For that one's sake,
and more than half in dream, she gave the sufferer her support, and with
a brow knit in anguish, but with the fire of battle still in his wasting
blood, he rose, fitfully explaining the conditions of the place and
hour. To cover a withdrawal of artillery from an outer to an inner work
a gray line had unexpectedly charged, and as it fell back with its guns,
hotly pressed, a part of the fight had swung down into and half across
this ravine, for which another struggle was furiously preparing on both
sides, but which, for him, in the interval, was an open way of
deliverance if she would be his crutch.
In equal bewilderment of thought and of outer sense, pleadingly assured
that she would at once be sent back under flag of truce, with compassion
deepening to compulsion and with a vague inkling that, failing the white
flag, this might be heaven's leading back to Callender House and the
jewel treasure, to Mobile and to Hilary, she gave her aid. Beyond the
thicket the way continued tangled, rough and dim. Twice and again the
stricken man paused for breath and ease from torture, though the sounds
of array, now on two sides, threatened at every step to become the cry
of onset. Presently he stopped once more, heaved, swayed and, despite
her clutch, sank heavily to the ground.
"Water!" he gasped, but before she could touch the canteen to his lips
he had fainted. She sprinkled his face, but he did not stir. She gazed,
striving for clear thought, and then sprang up and called. What word?
Ah, what in all speech should she call but a name, the name of him whose
warrant of marriage lay at that moment in her bosom, the name of him who
before God and the world had sworn her his mated, life-long protection?
"Hilary!" she wailed, and as the echoes of the green wood died,
"Hilary!" again. On one side there was more light in the verdure than
elsewhere and that way she called. That way she moved stumblingly and
near the edge of a small clear space cried once more, "Hilary!...
Hilary!"
LX
HILARY'S GHOST
Faintly the bearer of that name heard the call; heard it rise from a
quarter fearfully nearer the foe's line than to his; caught it with his
trained ear as, just beyond sight of Irby, Miranda, and others, he stood
in amazed converse with Flora Valcour. Fortune, smiling on Flora yet,
had brought first to her the terrified funeral group and so had enabled
her to bear to Hilary the news of the strange estrayal, skilfully
blended with that revelation of Anna's Vicksburg sojourn which she,
Flora, had kept from him so cleverly and so long.
With mingled rapture and distress, with a heart standing as still as his
feet, as still as his lifted head and shining eyes, he listened and
heard again. Swiftly, though not with the speed he would have chosen, he
sprang toward the call; sped softly through the brush, softly and
without voice, lest he draw the enemy's fire; softly and mutely, with
futile backward wavings and frowning and imploring whispers to Flora as
in a dishevelled glow that doubled her beauty she glided after him.
Strangely, amid a swarm of keen perceptions that plagued him like a
cloud of arrows as he ran, that beauty smote his conscience; her beauty
and the worship and protection it deserved from all manhood and most of
all from him, whose unhappy, unwitting fortune it was to have ensnared
her young heart and brought it to the desperation of an unnatural
self-revealment; her uncoveted beauty, uncourted love, unwelcome
presence, and hideous peril! Was he not to all these in simplest honor
peculiarly accountable? They lanced him through with arraignment as,
still waving her beseechingly, commandingly back, with weapons undrawn
the more swiftly to part the way before him, his frenzy for Anna drew
him on, as full of introspection as a drowning man, thinking a year's
thoughts at every step. Oh, mad joy in pitiful employment! Here while
the millions of a continent waged heroic war for great wrongs and
rights, here on the fighting-line of a beleaguered and starving city,
here when at any instant the peal of his own guns might sound a fresh
onset, behold him in a lover's part, loving "not honor more," setting
the seal upon his painful alias, filching time out of the jaws of death
to pursue one maiden while clung to by another. Oh, Anna! Anna
Callender! my life for my country, but this moment for thy life and
thee! God stay the onslaught this one moment!
As he reached the edge of that narrow opening from whose farther side
Anna had called he halted, glanced furtively about, and harkened
forward, backward, through leafy distances grown ominously still. Oh,
why did the call not come again? Hardly in a burning house could time be
half so priceless. Not a breath could promise that in the next the
lightnings, thunders, and long human yell of assault would not rend the
air. Flora's soft tread ceased at his side.
"Stay back!" he fiercely breathed, and pointed just ahead: "The enemy's
skirmishers!"
"Come away!" she piteously whispered, trembling with terror. For, by a
glimpse as brief as the catch of her breath, yonder a mere rod or so
within the farther foliage, down a vista hardly wider than a man's
shoulders, an armed man's blue shoulders she had seen, under his black
hat and peering countenance. Joy filled the depth of her heart in the
belief that a thin line of such black hats had already put Anna behind
them, yet she quaked in terror, terror of death, of instant, shot-torn
death that might leave Hilary Kincaid alive.
With smiting pity he saw her affright. "Go back!" he once more gasped:
"In God's name, go back!" while recklessly he stepped forward out of
cover. But in splendid desperation, with all her soul's battle in her
eyes--horror, love, defiance, and rending chagrin striving and smiting,
she sprang after him into the open, and clutched and twined his arms.
The blue skirmish-line, without hearing, saw him; saw, and withheld
their fire, fiercely glad that tactics and mercy should for once agree.
And Anna saw.
"Come with me back!" whispered Flora, dragging on him with bending
knees. "She's lost! She's gone back to those Yankee, and to Fred
Greenleaf! And you"--the whisper rose to a murmur whose pathos grew with
her Creole accent--"you, another step and you are a deserter! Yes! to
your country--to Kincaid' Batt'ree--to me-me-me!" The soft torrent of
speech grew audible beyond them: "Oh, my God! Hilary Kincaid,
listen-to-me-listen! You 'ave no right; no ri-ight to leave me! _Ah, you
shall not!_ No right--ri-ight to leave yo' Flora--sinze she's tol' you
--sinze she's tol' you--w'at she's tol' you!"
In this long history of a moment the blue skirmishers had not yet
found Anna, but it was their advance, their soft stir at her back as
they came upon their fallen leader, that had hushed her cries. At the
rift in the wood she had leaned on a huge oak and as body and mind again
failed had sunk to its base in leafy hiding. Vaguely thence she
presently perceived, lit from behind her by sunset beams, the farther
edge of the green opening, and on that border, while she feebly looked,
came suddenly a ghost!
[Illustration: "You 'ave no ri-ight to leave me! _Ah, you shall not!_"]
Ah, Heaven! the ghost of Hilary Kincaid! It looked about for her! It
listened for her call! By the tree's rough bark she drew up half her
height, clung and, with reeling brain, gazed. How tall! how gaunt! how
dingy gray! How unlike her whilom "ladies' man," whom, doubtless truly,
they now called dead and buried. But what--what--was troubling the poor
ghost? What did it so wildly avoid? what wave away with such loving,
tender pain? Flora Valcour! Oh, see, see! Ah, death in life! what does
she see? As by the glare of a bursting midnight shell all the empty
gossip of two years justified--made real--in one flash of staring view.
With a long moan the beholder cast her arms aloft and sank in a heap,
not knowing that the act had caught Hilary's eye, but willingly aware
that her voice had perished in a roar of artillery from the farther
brink of the ravine, in a crackle and fall of tree-tops, and in the
"rebel yell" and charge.
Next morning, in a fog, the blue holders of a new line of rifle-pits
close under the top of a bluff talked up to the grays in a trench on its
crest. Gross was the banter, but at mention of "ladies" it purified.
"Johnnie!" cried "Yank," "who is she, the one we've got?" and when told
to ask her, said she was too ill to ask. By and by to "Johnnie's"
inquiries the blues replied:
"He? the giant? Hurt? No-o, not half bad enough, when we count what he
cost us. If we'd known he was only stunned we"--and so on, not very
interestingly, while back in the rear of the gray line tearful Constance
praised, to her face, the haggard Flora and, in his absence, the wounded
Irby, Flora's splendid rescuer in the evening onslaught.
"A lifetime debt," Miranda thought Flora owed him, and Flora's
meditative yes, as she lifted her eyes to her grandmother's,
was--peculiar.
A few days later Anna, waking in the bliss of a restored mind, and
feeling beneath her a tremor of paddlewheels, gazed on the nurse at her
side.
"Am I a--prisoner?" she asked.
The woman bent kindly without reply.
"Anyhow," said Anna, with a one-sided smile, "they can't call me a spy."
Her words quickened: "I'm a rebel, but I'm no spy. I was lost. And he's
no spy. He was in uniform. Is he--on this boat?"
Yes, she was told, he was, with a few others like him, taken too soon
for the general parole of the surrender. Parole? she pondered.
Surrender? What surrender? "Where are we going?" she softly inquired;
"not to New Orleans?"
The nurse nodded brightly.
"But how can we get--by?"
"By Vicksburg? We're already by there."
"Has Vicks--?... Has Vicksburg--fallen?"
The confirming nod was tender. Anna turned away. Presently--"But not
Mobile? Mobile hasn't--?"
"No, not yet. But it must, don't you think?"
"No!" cried Anna. "It must not! Oh, it must not! I--if I--Oh, if I--"
The nurse soothed her smilingly: "My poor child," she said, "_you_ can't
save Mobile."
LXI
THE FLAG-OF-TRUCE BOAT
September was in its first week. The news of Vicksburg--and Port
Hudson--ah, yes, and Gettysburg!--was sixty days old.
From Southern Mississippi and East Louisiana all the grays who marched
under the slanting bayonet or beside the cannon's wheel were gone. Left
were only the "citizen" with his family and slaves, the post
quartermaster and commissary, the conscript-officer, the trading Jew,
the tax-in-kind collector, the hiding deserter, the jayhawker, a few
wounded boys on furlough, and Harper's cavalry. Throughout the Delta and
widely about its grief-broken, discrowned, beggared, shame-crazed,
brow-beaten Crescent City the giddying heat quaked visibly over the high
corn, cotton, and cane, up and down the broken levees and ruined
highways, empty by-ways, and grass-grown railways, on charred bridges,
felled groves, and long burnt fence lines. The deep, moss-draped,
vine-tangled swamps were dry.
So quivered the same heat in the city's empty thoroughfares. Flowers
rioted in the unkept gardens. The cicada's frying note fried hotter
than ever. Dazzling thunder-heads towered in the upper blue and stood
like snow mountains of a vaster world. The very snake coiled in the
shade. The spiced air gathered no freshness from the furious, infrequent
showers, the pavements burned the feet, and the blue "Yank" (whom there
no one dared call so by word or look), so stoutly clad, so uncouthly
misfitted, slept at noon face downward in the high grass under the trees
of the public squares preempted by his tents, or with piece loaded and
bayonet fixed slowly paced to and fro in the scant shade of some
confiscated office-building, from whose upper windows gray captives
looked down, one of them being "the ladies' man."
Not known of his keepers by that name, though as the famous Major
Kincaid of Kincaid's Battery (the latter at Mobile with new guns), all
July and August he had been of those who looked down from such windows;
looked down often and long, yet never descried one rippling fold of one
gossamer flounce of a single specimen of those far-compassionated
"ladies of New Orleans," one of whom, all that same time, was Anna
Callender. No proved spy, she, no incarcerated prisoner, yet the most
gravely warned, though gentlest, suspect in all the recalcitrant city.
Neither in those sixty days had Anna seen him. The blue sentries let no
one pass in sight of that sort of windows. "Permit?" She had not sought
it, Some one in gold lace called her "blamed lucky" to enjoy the
ordinary permissions accorded Tom, Dick, and Harry. Indeed Tom, Dick,
and Harry were freer than she. By reason of hints caught from her in
wanderings of her mind on the boat, in dreams of a great service to be
done for Dixie, the one spot where she most yearned to go and to be was
forbidden her, and not yet had she been allowed to rest her hungry eyes
on Callender House. Worse than idle, therefore, perilous for both of
them and for any dream of great service, would it have been even to name
the name of Hilary Kincaid.
What torture the double ban, the two interlocked privations! Yonder a
city, little sister of New Orleans, still mutely hoping to be saved,
here Hilary alive again, though Anna still unwitting whether she should
love and live or doubt and die. Yet what would they say when they should
meet? How could either explain? Surely, we think, love would have found
a way; but while beyond each other's sight and hearing, no way could
Hilary, at least, descry.
To him it seemed impossible to speak to her--even to Fred Greenleaf had
Fred been there!--without betraying another maiden, one who had sealed
his lips forever by confessing a heart which had as much--had more right
to love than he to live. True, Anna, above all, had right to live, to
love, to know; but in simplest honor to commonest manhood, in simplest
manhood's honor to all womankind, to Flora, to Anna herself, this
knowledge should come from any other human tongue rather than from his.
From Anna he needed no explanation. That most mysteriously she should
twice have defaulted as keeper of sacred treasure; that she stood long
accused, by those who would most gladly have scouted the charge, of
leanings to another suitor, a suitor in the blue, and of sympathies,
nay, services, treasonous to the ragged standards of the gray; that he
had himself found her in the enemy's lines, carried there by her own
steps, and accepting captivity without a murmur, ah, what were such
light-as-air trials of true love's faith while she was still Anna
Callender, that Anna from whom one breath saying, "I am true," would
outweigh all a world could show or surmise in accusation?
And Anna: What could she say after what she had seen? Could she tell
him--with Flora, as it were, still in his arms--could she explain that
she had been seeking him to cast herself there? Or if she stood mute
until he should speak, what could he say to count one heart-throb
against what she had seen? Oh, before God! before God! it was not
_jealousy_ that could make her dumb or deaf to either of them. She
confessed its pangs. Yes! yes! against both of them, when she remembered
certain things or forgot this and that, it raged in her heart, tingled
in the farthest reach of her starved and fever-dried veins. Yet to God
himself, to whom alone she told it, to God himself she protested on her
knees it did not, should not, could not rule her. What right had she to
give it room? Had she not discerned from the beginning that those two
were each other's by natural destiny? Was it not well, was it not
God-sent to all three, that in due time, before too late, he and
she--that other, resplendent she--should be tried upon each other alone
--together? Always hitherto she, Anna, had in some way, some degree,
intervened, by some chance been thrust and held between them; but at
length nature, destiny, had all but prevailed, when once more
she--stubbornly astray from that far mission of a city's rescue so
plainly hers--had crashed in between to the shame and woe of all, to the
gain of no cause, no soul, no sweet influence in all love's universe.
Now, meeting Hilary, what might she do or say?
One thing! Bid him, on exchange or escape--if Heaven should grant the
latter--find again Flora, and in her companionship, at last unhindered,
choose! Yes, that would be justice and wisdom, mercy and true love, all
in one. But could she do it, say it? She sprang up in bed to answer,
"No-o-o!" no, she was no bloodless fool, she was a woman! Oh, God of
mercy and true love, no! For reasons invincible, no! but most of all for
one reason, one doubt, vile jealousy's cure and despair's antidote, slow
to take form but growing as her strength revived, clear at last and
all-sufficing; a doubt infinitely easier, simpler, kinder, and more
blessed than to doubt true love. Nay, no doubt, but a belief! the
rational, life-restoring belief, that in that awful hour of twilight
between the hosts, of twilight and delirium, what she had seemed to see
she had but seemed to see. Not all, ah, no, not all! Hilary alive again
and grappling with death to come at her call had been real, proved real;
the rest a spectre of her fevered brain! Meeting him now--and, oh, to
meet him now!--there should be no questionings or explainings, but while
he poured forth a love unsullied and unshaken she, scarce harkening,
would with battle haste tell him, her life's commander, the one thing of
value, outvaluing all mere lovers' love: The fact that behind a
chimney-panel of Callender House, in its old trivial disguise, lay yet
that long-lost fund pledged to Mobile's defense--by themselves as
lovers, by poor war-wasted Kincaid's Battery, and by all its scattered
sisters; the fund which must, as nearly on the instant as his and her
daring could contrive, be recovered and borne thither for the unlocking
of larger, fate-compelling resources of deliverance.
One day Victorine came to Anna with ecstasy in her almond eyes and much
news on her lips. "To bigin small," she said, Flora and her grandmother
had "arrive' back ag-ain" at dawn that morning! Oddly, while Anna forced
a smile, her visitor's eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. So they
sat, Anna's smile fading out while her soul's troubles inwardly burned
afresh, Victorine's look growing into clearer English than her Creole
tongue could have spoken. "I trust her no more," it said. "Long have I
doubted her, and should have told you sooner but for--Charlie; but now,
dead in love as you know me still to be, you have my conviction. That is
all for the present. There is better news."
The ecstasy gleamed again and she gave her second item. These weeks she
had been seeking, for herself and a guardian aunt, a passport into the
Confederacy and lo! here it lay in her pretty hand.
"Deztitution!" she joyfully confessed to be the plea on which it had been
procured--by Doctor Sevier through Colonel--guess!--"Grinleaf!--juz'
riturn'" from service in the field.
And how were the destitute pair to go?
Ah! did Anna "rim-emb'r" a despatch-boat of unrivalled speed whose
engines Hilary Kin--?
Yes, ah, yes!
On which she and others had once--?
Yes, yes!
And which had been captured when the city fell? That boat was now lying
off Callender House! Did Anna _not_ know that her shattered home, so
long merely the headquarters of a blue brigade, had lately become of
large, though very quiet, importance as a rendezvous of big generals who
by starlight paced its overgrown garden alleys debating and planning
something of great moment? Doctor Sevier had found that out and had
charged Victorine to tell it with all secrecy to the biggest general in
Mobile the instant she should reach there. For she was to go by that
despatch-boat.
"Aw-dinner-illy," she said, a flag-of-truce craft might be any old tub
and would go the short way, from behind the city and across the lakes,
not all round by the river and the Chandeleur Islands. But this
time--that very morning--a score or so of Confederate prisoners
(officers, for exchange) had been put aboard that boat, bound for
Mobile. Plainly the whole affair was but a mask for reconnaissance, the
boat, swiftest in all the Gulf, to report back at top speed by way of
the lakes. But!--the aunt would not go at all! Never having been a mile
from her door, she was begging off in a palsy of fright, and here was
the niece with a deep plot--ample source of her ecstasy--a plot for
Anna, duly disguised, to go in the aunt's place, back to freedom, Dixie,
and the arms of Constance and Miranda.
Anna trembled. She could lovingly call the fond schemer, over and over,
a brave, rash, generous little heroine and lay caresses on her twice and
again, but to know whether this was Heaven's leading was beyond her.
She paced the room. She clasped her brow. A full half of her own great
purpose (great to her at least) seemed all at once as good as achieved,
yet it was but the second half, as useless without the first as half a
bridge on the far side of the flood. "I cannot go!" she moaned. For the
first half was Hilary, and he--she saw it without asking--was on this
cartel of exchange.
Gently she came and took her rescuer's hands: "Dear child! If--if while
there was yet time--I had only got a certain word to--_him_--you know?
But, ah, me! I keep it idle yet; a secret, Victorine, a secret worth our
three lives! oh, three times three hundred lives! Even now--"