him!"
Anna shook her head: "Ah, if you could--in time! Or even--even without
him, letting him go, if just you and I--Come!" They walked to and fro in
embrace: "Dear, our front drawing-room, so ruined, you know, by that
shell, last year--"
"Ah, the front? no! The behine, yes, with those two hole' of the shell
and with thad _beegue_ hole in the floor where it cadge fiah."
"Victorine, I could go--with you--in that boat, if only I could be for
one minute in that old empty front room alone."
Victorine halted and sadly tossed a hand: "Ah! h-amptee, yes, both the
front and the back--till yes-the-day! This morning, the front, no! Juz'
sinze laz' week they 'ave brick' up bitwin them cloze by that burned
hole, to make of the front an office, and now the front 't is o'cupy!"
"Oh, not as an office, I hope?"
"Worse! The worse that can be! They 'ave stop' five prisoner' from the
boat and put them yondeh. Since an hour Col-on-el Grinleaf he tol' me
that--and she's ad the bottom, that Flora! Bicause--" The speaker
gazed. Anna was all joy.
"Because what?" demanded Anna, "because Hil--?"
"Yaas! bicause he's one of them! Ringgleadeh! I dunno, me, what is that,
but tha'z what he's accuse'--ringg-leadingg!"
Still the oblivious Anna was glad. "It is Flora's doing," she gratefully
cried. "She's done it! done it for us and our cause!"
"Ah-h! not if she know herseff!"
Anna laughed the discussion down: "Come, dear, come! the whole thing
opens to me clear and wide!"
Not so clear or wide as she thought. True, the suffering Flora was doing
this, in desperate haste; but not for Anna, if she knew herself. Yet
when Anna, in equal haste, made a certain minute, lengthy writing and,
assisted by that unshaken devotee, her maid, and by Victorine, baked
five small cakes most laughably alike (with the writing in ore) and laid
them beside some plainer food in a pretty basket, the way still seemed
wide enough for patriotism.
Now if some one would but grant Victorine leave to bestow this basket!
As she left Anna she gave her pledge to seek this favor of any one else
rather than of Greenleaf; which pledge she promptly broke, with a
success that fully reassured her cheerful conscience.
LXII
FAREWELL, JANE!
"Happiest man in New Orleans!"
So called himself, to Colonel Greenleaf, the large, dingy-gray,
lively-eyed Major Kincaid, at the sentinelled door of the room where he
and his four wan fellows, snatched back from liberty on the eve of
release, were prisoners in plain view of the vessel on which they were
to have gone free.
With kind dignity Greenleaf predicted their undoubted return to the
craft next morning. Strange was the difference between this scene and
the one in which, eighteen months before, these two had last been
together in this room. The sentry there knew the story and enjoyed it.
In fact, most of the blue occupants of the despoiled place had a
romantic feeling, however restrained, for each actor in that earlier
episode. Yet there was resentment, too, against Greenleaf's clemencies.
"Wants?" said the bedless captive to his old chum, "no, thank you, not a
want!" implying, with his eyes, that the cloud overhanging Greenleaf for
favors shown to--hmm!--certain others was already dark enough, "We've
_parlor_ furniture galore," he laughed, pointing out a number of
discolored and broken articles that had been beautiful. One was the
screen behind which the crouching Flora had heard him tell the ruin of
her Mobile home and had sworn revenge on this home and on its fairest
inmate.
During the evening the prisoners grew a bit noisy, in song; yet even
when their ditties were helped out by a rhythmic clatter of boot-heels
and chair-legs the too indulgent Greenleaf did not stop them. The voices
were good and the lines amusing not merely to the guards here and there
but to most of their epauleted superiors who, with lights out for
coolness, sat in tilted chairs on a far corner of the front veranda to
catch the river breeze. One lay was so antique as to be as good as new:
"Our duck swallowed a snail,
And her eyes stood out with wonder.
Our duck swallowed a snail,
And her eyes stood out with wonder
Till the horns grew out of her tail, tail, tail,
Tail, Tail,
Tail, Tail,
Tail, Tail,
And tore it All asunder.
Farewell, Jane!
"Our old horse fell into the well
Around behind the stable.
Our old horse fell into the well
Around behind the stable.
He couldn't fall all the way but he fell,
Fell,
Fell,
Fell,
Fell,
Fell,
Fell,
As far as he was able.
Farewell, Jane!"
It is here we may safest be brief. The literature of prison escapes is
already full enough. Working in the soft mortar of so new a wall and
worked by one with a foundryman's knowledge of bricklaying, the murdered
Italian's stout old knife made effective speed as it kept neat time with
the racket maintained for it. When the happiest man in New Orleans
warily put head and shoulders through the low gap he had opened,
withdrew them again and reported to his fellows, the droll excess of
their good fortune moved the five to livelier song, and as one by one
the other four heads went in to view the glad sight the five gave a yet
more tragic stanza from the farewell to Jane. The source of their
delight was not the great ragged hole just over the intruding heads, in
the ceiling's lath and plaster, nor was it a whole corner torn off the
grand-piano by the somersaulting shell as it leaped from the rent above
to the cleaner one it had left at the baseboard in the room's farther
end. It was that third hole, burned in the floor; for there it opened,
shoulder wide, almost under their startled faces, free to the basement's
floor and actually with the rough ladder yet standing in it which had
been used in putting out the fire. That such luck could last a night was
too much to hope.
Yet it lasted. The songs were hushed. The room whence they had come was
without an audible stir. Sleep stole through all the house, through the
small camp of the guard in the darkened grove, the farther tents of the
brigade, the anchored ships, the wide city, the starlit landscape. Out
in that rear garden-path where Madame Valcour had once been taken to see
the head-high wealth of roses two generals, who had been there through
all the singing, still paced to and fro and talked, like old Brodnax at
Carrollton in that brighter time, "not nearly as much alone as they
seemed." One by one five men in gray, each, for all his crouching and
gliding, as true and gallant a gentleman as either of those commanders,
stole from the house's basement and slipped in and out among the roses.
Along a back fence a guard walked up and down. Two by two, when his back
was turned, went four of the gliding men, as still as bats, over the
fence into a city of ten thousand welcome hiding-places. The fifth,
their "ringg-leadeh," for whom they must wait concealed until he should
rejoin them, lingered in the roses; hovered so close to the path that he
might have touched its occupants as they moved back and forth;
almost--to quote his uncle--
"Sat in the roses and heard the birds sing"--
heard blue birds, in soft notes not twittered, muttered as by owls,
revealing things priceless for Mobile to know.
Bragg's gray army, he heard, was in far Chattanooga facing Rosecrans,
and all the slim remnants of Johnston's were hurrying to its
reinforcement. Mobile was merely garrisoned. Little was there save
artillery. Here in New Orleans lay thousands of veterans flushed with
their up-river victories, whose best and quickest aid to Rosecrans would
be so to move as to turn Bragg's reinforcements back southward. A
cavalry dash across the pine-barrens of East Louisiana to cut the
railroad along the Mississippi-Alabama line, a quick joint movement of
land and naval forces by way of the lakes, sound, and gulf, and Mobile
would fall. These things and others, smaller yet more startling, the
listener learned of, not as pastime talk, but as a vivid scheme already
laid, a mine ready to be sprung if its secret could be kept three days
longer; and now he hurried after his four compatriots, his own brain
teeming with a counter-plot to convey this secret through the dried-up
swamps to the nearest Confederate telegraph station while Anna should
bear it (and the recovered treasure) by boat to Mobile, two messengers
being so many times surer than one.
Early next morning Madame Valcour, entering an outer room from an inner
one, found Flora writing a note. The girl kept on, conscious that her
irksome critic was taking keen note of a subtle, cruel decay of her
beauty, a spiritual corrosion that, without other fault to the eye, had
at last reached the surface in a faint hardening of lines and staleness
of bloom. Now she rose, went out, dispatched her note and returned. Her
manner, as the two sat down to bread and coffee, was bright though
tense.
"From Greenleaf?" inquired her senior, "and to the same?"
The girl shook her fair head and named one of his fellow-officers at
Callender House: "No, Colonel Greenleaf is much too busy. Hilary Kincaid
has--"
"Esca-aped?" cried the aged one, flashed hotly, laughed, flashed again
and smiled. "That Victorine kitten--with her cakes! And you--and
Greenleaf--hah! you three cats paws--of one little--Anna!"
Flora jauntily wagged a hand, then suddenly rose and pointed with a big
bread knife: "Go, dress! We'll save the kitten--if only for Charlie! Go!
_she must leave town at once_. Go! But, ah, grannie dear,"--she turned
to a window--"for Anna, spite of all we can do, I am af-raid--Ship
Island! Poor _Anna!_" At the name her beautiful arm, in one swift
motion, soared, swung, drove the bright steel deep into the window-frame
and left it quivering.
"Really," said a courteous staff-officer as he and Doctor Sevier
alighted at the garden stair of Callender House and helped Anna and her
maid from a public carriage, "only two or three of us will know
you're"--His smile was awkward. The pale doctor set his jaw. Anna
musingly supplied the term:
"A prisoner." She looked fondly over the house's hard-used front as they
mounted the steps. "If they'd keep me here, Doctor," she said at the
top, "I'd be almost happy. But"--she faced the aide-de-camp--"they
won't, you know. By this time to-morrow I shall be"--she waved
playfully--"far away."
"Mainland, or island?" grimly asked the Doctor.
She did not know. "But I know, now, how a rabbit feels with the hounds
after her. Honestly," she said again to the officer, "I wish I might
have her cunning." And the soldier murmured, "Amen."
LXIII
THE IRON-CLAD OATH
Under Anna's passive air lay a vivid alertness to every fact in range of
eye or ear.
Any least thing now might tip the scale for life or death, and while at
the head of the veranda steps she spoke of happiness her distressed
thought was of Hilary's madcap audacity, how near at hand he might be
even then, under what fearful risk of recognition and capture. She was
keenly glad to hear two men complain that the guard about the house and
grounds was to-day a new one awkward to the task. Of less weight now it
seemed that out on the river the despatch-boat had shifted her berth
down-stream and with steam up lay where the first few wheel turns would
put her out of sight. Indoors, where there was much official activity,
it relieved her to see that neither Hilary's absence nor her coming
counted large in the common regard. The brace of big generals were in
the library across the hall, busy on some affair much larger than this
of "ourn."
The word was the old coachman Israel's. What a tender joy it was to find
him in the wretched drawing-room trying to make it decent for her and
dropping his tears as openly as the maid. With what a grace, yet how
boldly, he shut the door between them and blue authority. While the girl
arranged on a table, for Anna's use, a basket of needlework brought with
them he honestly confessed his Union loyalty, yet hurriedly, under his
breath, bade Anna not despair, and avowed a devotion to the safety and
comfort of "ole mahs's and mis's sweet baby" as then and forever his
higher law. He was still autocrat of the basement, dropsied with the
favor of colonels and generals, deferential to "folks," but a
past-master in taking liberties with things. As he talked he so
corrected the maid's arrangement of the screen that the ugly hole in the
wall was shut from the view of visitors, though left in range of Anna's
work-table, and as Anna rose at a tap on the door, with the gentle
ceremony of the old home he let in Doctor Sevier and Colonel Greenleaf
and shut himself out.
"Anna," began the Doctor, "There's very little belief here that you're
involved in this thing."
"Why, then," archly said Anna, "who is?"
"Ah, that's the riddle. But they say if you'll just take the oath of
allegiance--"
Anna started so abruptly as to imperil her table. Her color came and her
voice dropped to its lowest note as she said between long breaths:
"No!--no!--no!"
But the Doctor spoke on:
"They believe that if you take it you'll keep it, and they say that the
moment you take it you may go free, here or anywhere--to Mobile if you
wish."
Again Anna flinched: "Mobile!" she murmured, and then lifting her eyes
to Greenleaf's, repeated, "No! No, not for my life. Better Ship Island."
Greenleaf reddened. "Anna," put in the Doctor, but she lifted a hand:--
"They've never offered it to you, Doctor? H-oh! They'd as soon think of
asking one of our generals. They'd _almost_ as soon"--the corners of her
lips hinted a smile--"ask Hilary Kincaid."
"I've never advised any one against it, Anna."
"Well, I do!--every God-fearing Southern man and woman. A woman is all I
am and I may be short-sighted, narrow, and foolish, but--Oh, Colonel
Greenleaf, you shouldn't have let Doctor Sevier take this burden for
you. It's hard enough--"
The Doctor intervened: "Anna, dear, this old friend of yours"--laying a
finger on Greenleaf--"is in a tight place. Both you and Hilary--"
"Yes, I know, and I know it's not fair to him. Lieutenant--Colonel, I
mean, pardon me!--you sha'n't be under odium for my sake or his. As far
as I stand accused I must stand alone. The one who must go free is that
mere child Victorine, on her pass, to-day, this morning. When I hear the
parting gun of that boat down yonder I want to know by it that Victorine
is safely on her way to Mobile, as she would be had she not been my
messenger yesterday."
"She carried nothing but a message?"
"Nothing but a piece of writing--mine! Colonel, I tell you faithfully,
whatever Major Kincaid broke prison with was not brought here yesterday
by any one and was never in Victorine's hands."
"Nor in yours, either?" kindly asked Greenleaf.
Anna caught her breath and went redder than ever. Doctor Sevier stirred
to speak, but Anna's maid gave her a soft thrust, pointed behind the
screen, and covered a bashful smile with her apron. Anna's blush became
one of mirth. Her eyes went now to the Doctor and again to the broken
wall.
"Israel!" she laughed, "why do you enter--?"
"On'y fitten' way, missie. House so full o' comin' and goin', and me
havin' dis cullud man wid me."
Out on the basement ladder, at the ragged gap of Israel's "on'y fittin'
way," was visible, to prove his word, another man's head, white-turbaned
like his own, and two dark limy hands passing in a pail of mortar.
Welcome distraction. True, Greenleaf's luckless question still stood
unanswered, but just then an orderly summoned him to the busy generals
and spoke aside to Doctor Sevier.
"Miss Valcour," explained the Doctor to Anna.
"Oh, Doctor," she pleaded, "I want to see her! Beg them, won't you, to
let her in?"
LXIV
"NOW, MR. BRICK-MASON,--"
Amid the much coming and going that troubled Israel--tramp of spurred
boots, clank of sabres, seeking, meeting and parting of couriers and
aides--Madame Valcour, outwardly placid, inwardly terrified, found
opportunity to warn her granddaughter, softly, that unless she, the
granddaughter, could get that look of done-for agony out of her eyes,
the sooner and farther they fled this whole issue, this fearful
entanglement, the better for them.
But brave Flora, knowing the look was no longer in the eyes alone but
had for days eaten into her visage as age had for decades into the
grandam's, made no vain effort to paint it out with smiles but accepted
and wore it in show of a desperate solicitude for Anna. Yet this, too,
was futile, and before Doctor Sevier had exchanged five words with her
she saw that to him the make-up was palpable and would be so to
Greenleaf. Poor Flora! She had wrestled her victims to the edge of a
precipice, yet it was she who at this moment, this dazzling September
morning, seemed doomed to go first over the brink. Had not both Hilary
and Anna met again this Greenleaf and through him found answer for all
their burning questions? She could not doubt her web of deceptions had
been torn to shreds, cast to the winds. Not one of the three could she
now hope to confront successfully, much less any two of them together.
To name no earlier reason--having reached town just as Kincaid was being
sent out of it, she had got him detained on a charge so frivolous that
how to sustain it now before Greenleaf and his generals she was tortured
to contrive.
Yet something must be done. The fugitive must be retaken and retained,
the rival deported, and, oh, Hilary Kincaid! as she recalled her last
moment with you on that firing-line behind Vicksburg, shame and rage
outgrew despair, and her heart beat hot in a passion of chagrin and then
hotter, heart and brain, in a frenzy of ownership, as if by spending
herself she had bought you, soul and body, and if only for
self-vindication would have you from all the universe.
"The last wager and the last card," she smilingly remarked to her
kinswoman, "they sometimes win out," and as the smile passed added, "I
wish I had that bread-knife."
To Doctor Sevier her cry was, "Oh, yes, yes! Dear Anna! Poor Anna! Yes,
before I have to see any one else, even Colonel Greenleave! Ah, please,
Doctor, beg him he'll do me that prizelezz favor, and that for the good
God's sake he'll keep uz, poor Anna and me, not long waiting!"
Yet long were the Valcours kept. It was the common fate those days. But
Flora felt no title to the common fate, and while the bustle of the
place went on about them she hiddenly suffered and, mainly for the
torment it would give her avaricious companion, told a new reason for
the look in her eyes. Only a few nights before she had started wildly
out of sleep to find that she had _dreamed_ the cause of Anna's
irreconcilable distress for the loss of the old dagger. The dream was
true on its face, a belated perception awakened by bitterness of soul,
and Madame, as she sat dumbly marvelling at its tardiness, chafed the
more against each minute's present delay, seeing that now to know if
Kincaid, or if Anna, held the treasure was her liveliest hankering.
Meantime the captive Anna was less debarred than they. As Greenleaf and
the Doctor, withdrawing, shut her door, and until their steps died away,
she had stood by her table, her wide thought burning to know the
whereabouts, doings, and plight of him, once more missing, with whom a
scant year-and-a-half earlier--if any war-time can be called scant--she
had stood on that very spot and sworn the vows of marriage: to know his
hazards now, right now! with man; police, informer, patrol, picket,
scout; and with nature; the deadly reptiles, insects, and maladies of
thicketed swamp and sun-beaten, tide-swept marsh; and how far he had got
on the splendid mission which her note, with its words of love and faith
and of patriotic abnegation, had laid upon him.
Now eagerly she took her first quick survey of the room she knew so
well. Her preoccupied maid was childishly questioning the busy Israel as
he and the man out on the basement ladder removed bricks from the edges
of the ragged opening between them.
"Can't build solid ef you don't staht solid," she heard the old
coachman say. She glided to the chimney-breast, searching it swiftly
with her eyes and now with her hands. Soilure and scars had kept the
secret of the hidden niche all these months, and neither stain, scar,
nor any sign left by Hilary or Flora betrayed it now. Surely _this_ was
the very panel Flora had named. Yet dumbly, rigidly it denied the truth,
for Hilary, having reaped its spoil, had, to baffle his jailors,
cunningly made it fast. And time was flying! Tremblingly the searcher
glanced again to the door, to the screen, to the veranda windows--though
these Israel had rudely curtained--and then tried another square, keenly
harkening the while to all sounds and especially to the old negro's
incessant speech:
"Now, Mr. Brick-mason, ef you'll climb in hyuh I'll step out whah you is
and fetch a bucket o' warteh. Gal, move one side a step, will you?"
While several feet stirred lightly Anna persisted in her trembling
quest--not to find the treasure, dear Heaven, but only to find it gone.
Would that little be denied? So ardent was the mute question that she
seemed to have spoken it aloud, and in alarm looked once more at the
windows, the door, the screen--the screen! A silence had settled there
and as her eye fell on it the stooping mason came from behind it,
glancing as furtively as she at windows and door and then exaltedly to
her. She stiffened for outcry and flight, but in the same instant he
straightened up and she knew him; knew him as right here she had known
him once before in that same disguise, which the sad fortunes of their
cause had prevented his further use of till now. He started forward,
but with beseeching signs and whispers, blind to everything between them
but love and faith, she ran to him. He caught her to his heart and drew
her behind the screen under the enraptured eyes of her paralyzed maid.
For one long breath of ecstasy the rest of the universe was nothing. But
then--
"The treasure?" she gasped. "The dagger?"
He showed the weapon in its precious scabbard and sought to lay it in
her hands, but--"Oh, why! why!" she demanded, though with a gaze that
ravished his,--. "Why are you not on your way--?"
"Am!" he softly laughed. "Here, leave me the dirk, but take the sheath.
Everything's there that we put there long ago, beloved, and also a
cypher report of what I heard last night in the garden--never mind
what!--_take it_, you will save Mobile! Now both of you slip through
this hole and down the ladder and quietly skedaddle--quick--come!"
"But the guards?"
"Just brass it out and walk by them. Victorine's waiting out behind with
all her aunt's things at a house that old Israel will tell you
of--listen!" From just outside the basement, near the cisterns, a single
line of song rose drowsily and ceased:
"Heap mo' dan worteh-million juice--"
"That's he. It means come on. Go!" He gathered a brick and trowel and
rang them together as if at work. The song answered:
"Aw 'possum pie aw roasted goose--"
The trowel rang on. Without command from her mistress the maid was
crouching into the hole. In the noise Anna was trying to press an
anxious query upon Hilary, but he dropped brick and tool and snatched
her again into his embrace.
"Aw soppin's o' de gravy pan--"
called the song. The maid was through!
"But you, Hilary, my life?" gasped Anna as he forced her to the opening.
"The swamp for me!" he said, again sounding the trowel. "I take
this"--the trowel--"and walk out through the hall. Go, my soul's
treasure, go!"
Anna, with that art of the day which remains a wonder yet, gathered her
crinoline about her feet and twisted through and out upon the ladder.
Hilary seized a vanishing hand, kissed it madly, and would have loosed
it, but it clung till his limy knuckles went out and down and her lips
sealed on them the distant song's fourth line as just then it came:
"De ladies loves de ladies' man!"
As mistress and maid passed in sight of the dark singer he hurried to
them, wearing the bucket of water on his turban as lightly as a hat. "Is
you got to go so soon?" he asked, and walked beside them. Swiftly, under
his voice, he directed them to Victorine and then spoke out again in
hearing of two or three blue troopers. "You mus' come ag'in, whensomeveh
you like."
They drew near a guard: "Dese is ole folks o' mine, Mr. Gyuard, ef you
please, suh, dess a-lookin' at de ole home, suh."