brightness that meant more than the soldier guessed, and he let them
out, feeling as sweet, himself, as he tried to look sour.
"Well, good-by, Miss Nannie," said the old man, "I mus' recapitulate
back to de house; dey needs me pow'ful all de time. Good luck to you!
Gawd bless you!... Dass ow ba-aby, Mr. Gyuard--Oh, Lawd, Lawd, de days
I's held dat chile out on one o' dese ole han's!" He had Flora's feeling
for stage effects.
Toiling or resting, the Southern slaves were singers. With the pail on
his head and with every wearer of shoulder-straps busy giving or obeying
some order, it was as normal as cock-crowing that he should raise yet
another line of his song and that from the house the diligent bricklayer
should reply.
Sang the water-carrier:
"I's natch-i-ully gallant wid de ladies,--"
and along with the trowel's tinkle came softly back,
"I uz bawn wid a talent fo' de ladies."
For a signal the indoor singer need not have gone beyond that line, but
the spirit that always grew merry as the peril grew, the spirit which
had made Kincaid's Battery the fearfulest its enemies ever faced,
insisted:
"You fine it on de map o' de contrac' plan,
I's boun' to be a ladies' man!"
LXV
FLORA'S LAST THROW
Normal as cock-crowing seemed the antiphony to the common ear, which
scarcely noticed the rareness of the indoor voice. But Greenleaf's was
not the common ear, nor was Flora Valcour's.
To her that closing strain made the torture of inaction finally
unbearable. Had Anna heard? Leaving Madame she moved to a hall door of
the room where they sat. Was Anna's blood surging like her own? It could
not! Under what a tempest of conjectures she looked down and across the
great hall to the closed and sentinelled door of that front drawing-room
so rife with poignant recollections. There, she thought, was Anna. From
within it, more faintly now, came those sounds of a mason at work which
had seemed to ring with the song. But the song had ceased. About the
hall highly gilded officers conferred alertly in pairs or threes, more
or less in the way of younger ones who smartly crossed from room to
room. Here came Greenleaf! Seeking her? No, he would have passed
unaware, but her lips ventured his name.
Never had she seen such a look in his face as that with which he
confronted her. Grief, consternation, discovery and wrath were all as
one save that only the discovery and wrath meant her. She saw how for
two days and nights he had been putting this and that and this and that
and this and that together until he had guessed her out. Sternly in his
eyes she perceived contumely withholding itself, yet even while she felt
the done-for cry heave through her bosom, and the floor fail like a
sinking deck, she clung to her stage part, babbled impromptu lines.
"Doctor Sevier--?" she began--
"He had to go."
Again she read the soldier's eyes. God! he was comparing her changed
countenance--a fool could see he was!--with Anna's! both smitten with
affliction, but the abiding peace of truth in one, the abiding war of
falsehood in the other. So would Kincaid do if he were here! But the
stage waited: "Ah, Colonel, Anna! poor Anna!" Might not the
compassion-wilted supplicant see the dear, dear prisoner? She rallied
all her war-worn fairness with all her feminine art, and to her
amazement, with a gleam of purpose yet without the softening of a
lineament, he said yes, waved permission across to the guard and left
her.
She passed the guard and knocked. Quietly in the room clinked the
brick-mason's work. He strongly hummed his tune. Now he spoke, as if to
his helper, who seemed to be leaving him. Again she knocked, and bent
her ear. The mason sang aloud:
"Some day dis worl' come to an en',
I don't know how, I don't know when--"
She turned the door-knob and murmured, "Anna!"
The bricklaying clinked, tapped and scraped on. The workman hummed again
his last two lines.
"Who is it?" asked a feigned voice which she knew so instantly to be
Kincaid's that every beat of her heart jarred her frame.
"'Tis I, Anna, dear. 'Tis Flora." She was mindful of the sentry, but
all his attention was in the busy hall.
There came a touch on the inner door-knob. "Go away!" murmured the manly
voice, no longer disguised. "In God's name! for your own sake as well as
hers, go instantly!"
"No," melodiously replied Flora, in full voice for the sentry's ear, but
with resolute pressure on the door, "no, not at all.... No, I muz' not,
cannot."
"Then wait one moment till you hear me at work!"
She waited. Presently the trowel sounded again and its wielder, in a
lowered tone, sang with it:
"Dat neveh trouble Dandy Dan
Whilst de ladies loves de ladies' man."
At the first note she entered with some idle speech, closed the door,
darted her glance around, saw no one, heard only the work and the song
and sprang to the chimney-breast. She tried the panel--it would not
yield! Yet there, as if the mason's powerful hands had within that
minute reopened and reclosed it, were the wet marks of his fingers. A
flash of her instinct for concealment bade her wipe them off and she had
barely done so when he stepped from the screen, fresh from Israel's
water-bucket, drying his face on his hands, his hands on his face and
un-turbaned locks, prison-worn from top to toe, but in Dixie's full gray
and luminous with the unsmiling joy of danger.
"It's not there," he loudly whispered, showing the bare dagger. "Here it
is. She has the rest, scabbard and all."
Flora clasped her hands as in ecstasy: "And is free? surely free?"
"Almost! Surely when that despatch-boat fires!" In a few rapid words
Hilary told the scheme of Anna's flight, at the same time setting the
screen aside so as to show the hole in the wall nearly closed, humming
his tune and ringing the trowel on the brickwork.
Flora made new show of rapture. Nor was it all mere show. Anna escaping,
the treasure would escape with her, and Flora be thrown into the dungeon
of penury. Yet let them both go, both rival and treasure! Love's ransom!
All speed to them since they left her Hilary Kincaid and left him at her
mercy. But the plight was complex and suddenly her exultation changed to
affright. "My God! Hilary Kincaid," she panted, "you 'ave save' her to
deztroy yo'seff! You are--"
Proudly, gaily he shook his head: "No! No! against her will I've sent
her, to save--" He hushed. He had begun to say a city, Flora's city.
Once more a captive, he would gladly send by Flora also, could she
contrive to carry it, the priceless knowledge which Anna, after all,
might fail to convey. But something--it may have been that same outdone
and done-for look which Greenleaf had just noted--silenced him, and the
maiden resumed where she had broken off:
"My God, Hilary Kincaid, you are in denger to be hanged a spy! Thiz
minute you 'ave hide yo' dizguise in that panel!"
"You would come in," said Hilary, with a playful wave of the trowel, and
turned to his work, singing:
"When I hands in my checks--"
Flora ran and clung tenderly to his arm, but with a distressed smile he
clasped her wrists in one hand and gently forced her back again while
she asked in burning undertone, "And you 'ave run that h-awful risk for
me? for me? But, why? why? why?"
"Oh!" he laughingly said, and at the wall once more waved the ringing
trowel, "instinct, I reckon; ordinary manhood--to womanhood. If you had
recognized me in that rig--"
"And I would! In any rigue thiz heart would reco'nize you!"
"Then you would have had to betray me or else go, yourself, to Ship
Island"
"H-o-oh! I would have gone!"
"That's what I feared," said Hilary, though while he spoke she fiercely
felt that she certainly would have betrayed him; not for horror of Ship
Island but because now, _after this_, no Anna Callender nor all the
world conspired should have him from her alive.
He lifted his tool for silence, and fresh anger wrung her soul to see
joy mount in his eyes as from somewhere below the old coachman sang:
"When I hands in my checks, O, my ladies!"
Yet she showed elation: "That means Anna and Victorine they have pazz'
to the boat?"
With merry nods and airy wavings of affirmation he sang back, rang back:
"Mighty little I espec's, O, my ladies!
But whaheveh--"
Suddenly he darkened imperiously and motioned Flora away. "Now! now's
your time! go! now! this instant go!" he exclaimed, and sang on:
"--I is sent--"
"Ah!" she cried, "they'll h-ask me about her!"
"I don't believe it!" cried he, and sang again:
"--dey mus' un-deh-stan'--"
"Yes," she insisted, "--muz' undehstan', and they will surely h-ask me!"
"Well, let them ask their heads off! Go! at once! before you're further
implicated!"
"And leave you to--?"
"Oh, doggon _me_. The moment that boat's gun sounds--if only you're out
o' the way--I'll make a try. Go! for Heaven's sake, go!"
Instead, with an agony of fondness, she glided to him. Distress held him
as fast and mute as at the flag presentation. But when she would have
knelt he caught her elbows and held her up by force.
"No," he moaned, "you shan't do that."
She crimsoned and dropped her face between their contending arms while
for pure anguish he impetuously added, "Maybe in God's eyes a woman has
this right, I'm not big enough to know; but as _I'm made_ it can't be
done. I'm a man, no more, no less!"
Her eyes flashed into his: "You are Hilary Kincaid. I will stan'!"
"No,"--he loosed his hold,--"I'm _only_ Hilary Kincaid and you'll go--in
mercy to both of us--in simple good faith to every one we love--Oh,
leave me!" He swung his head in torture: "I'd sooner be shot for a spy
or a coward than be the imbecile this makes me." Then all at once he was
fierce: "Go!"
Almost below her breath she instantly replied, "I will not!" She stood
at her full, beautiful height. "Together we go or together stay.
List-en!--no-no, not for _that_." (Meaning the gun.) In open anger she
crimsoned again: "'Twill shoot, all right, and Anna, _she'll_ go. Yes,
she will _leave_ you. She can do that. And you, you can sen' her away!"
He broke in with a laugh of superior knowledge and began to draw back,
but she caught his jacket in both hands, still pouring forth,--"She
_has_ leave you--to me! me to you! My God! Hilary Kincaid, could she do
that if she love' you? She don't! She knows not how--and neither you!
But you, ah, you shall learn. She, she never can!" Through his jacket
her knuckles felt the bare knife. Her heart leapt.
"Let go," he growled, backing away and vainly disengaging now one of her
hands and now the other. "My trowel's too silent."
But she clung and dragged, speaking on wildly: "You know, Hilary, you
know? _You love me_. Oh, no-no-no, don' look like that, I'm not crazee."
Her deft hands had got the knife, but she tossed it into the
work-basket: "Ah, Hilary Kincaid, oft-en we love where we thing we do
not, and oft-en thing we love where we do not--"
He would not hear: "Oh, Flora Valcour! You smother me in my own
loathing--oh, God send that gun!" The four hands still strove.
"Hilary, list-en me yet a moment. See me. Flora Valcour. Could Flora
Valcour do like this--_ag-ains' the whole nature of a woman_--if she--?"
"Stop! stop! you shall not--"
"If she di'n' know, di'n' feel, di'n' see, thad you are loving her?"
"Yet God knows I've never given cause, except as--"
"A ladies' man?" prompted the girl and laughed.
The blood surged to his brow. A wilder agony was on hers as he held her
from him, rigid; "Enough!" he cried; "We're caged and doomed. Yet you
still have this one moment to save us, _all of us_, from life-long shame
and sorrow."
She shook her head.
"Yes, yes," he cried. "You can. I cannot. I'm helpless now and forever.
What man or woman, if I could ever be so vile as to tell it, could
believe the truth of this from me? In God's name, then, go!" He tenderly
thrust her off: "Go, live to honor, happiness and true love, and let
me--"
"Ezcape, perchanze, to Anna?"
"Yes, if I--" He ceased in fresh surprise. Not because she toyed with
the dagger lying on Anna's needlework, for she seemed not to know she
did it; but because of a strange brightness of assent as she nodded
twice and again.
"I will go," she said. Behind the brightness was the done-for look,
plainer than ever, and with it yet another, a look of keen purpose,
which the grandam would have understood. He saw her take the dirk, so
grasping it as to hide it behind wrist and sleeve; but he said only,
beseechingly, "Go!"
"Stay," said another voice, and at the small opening still left in the
wall, lo! the face of Greenleaf and the upper line of his blue and gilt
shoulders. His gaze was on Flora. She could do nothing but gaze again.
"I know, now," he continued, "your whole two-years' business. Stay just
as you are till I can come round and in. Every guard is doubled and has
special orders."
She dropped into a seat, staring like one demented, now at door and
windows, now from one man to the other, now to the floor, while Kincaid
sternly said, "Colonel Greenleaf, the reverence due from any soldier to
any lady--" and Greenleaf interrupted--
"The lady may be sure of."
"And about this, Fred, you'll be--dumb?"
"Save only to one, Hilary."
"Where is she, Fred?"
"On that boat, fancying herself disguised. Having you, we're only too
glad not to have her."
The retaken prisoner shone with elation: "And those fellows of last
night?--got them back?"
Greenleaf darkened, and shook his head.
"Hurrah," quietly remarked the smiling Hilary.
"Wait a moment," said the blue commander, and vanished.
LXVI
"WHEN I HANDS IN MY CHECKS"
Kincaid glanced joyfully to Flora, but her horrified gaze held him
speechless.
"Now," she softly asked, "who is the helplezz--the cage'--the doom'? You
'ave kill' me."
"I'll save you! There's good fighting yet, if--"
"H-oh! already, egcep' inside me, I'm dead."
"Not by half! There's time for a last shot and I've seen it win!" He
caught up the trowel, turned to his work and began to sing once more:
"When I hands in my checks, O, my ladies,
Mighty little I espec's, O, my ladies--"
[Illustration: She dropped into a seat, staring like one demented.]
He ceased and listened. Certainly, somewhere, some one had moaned.
Sounds throughout the house were growing, as if final orders had set
many in motion at once. For some cause unrelated to him or to Anna, to
Flora or the silent boat, bugles and drums were assembling the encamped
brigade. Suddenly, not knowing why, he flashed round. Flora was within
half a step of him with her right arm upthrown. He seized it, but vain
was the sparring skill that had won at the willow pond. Her brow was on
his breast, the knife was in her left hand, she struck with thrice her
natural power, an evil chance favored her, and, hot as lightning, deep,
deep, the steel plunged in. He gulped a great breath, his eyes flamed,
but no cry came from him or her. With his big right hand crushing her
slim fingers as they clung to the hilt, he dragged the weapon forth and
hurled her off.
Before he could find speech she had regained her balance and amazed him
yet again with a smile. The next instant she had lifted the dagger
against herself, but he sprang and snatched it, exclaiming as he drew
back:--
"No, you sha'n't do that, either."
She strove after it. He held her off by an arm, but already his strength
was failing. "My God!" he groaned, "it's you, Flora Valcour, who've
killed me. Oh, how did--how did you--was it accid'--wasn't it accident?
Fly!" He flung her loose. "For your life, fly! Oh, that gun! Oh, God
send it! Fly! Oh, Anna, Anna Callender! Oh, your city, Flora Valcour,
your own city! Fly, poor child! I'll keep up the sham for you!"
Starting now here, now there, Flora wavered as he reeled to the broken
wall and seized the trowel. The knife dropped to the floor but he set
foot on it, brandished the tool and began to sing:
"When I hands in my checks, O, my ladies--"
A cry for help rang from Flora. She darted for the door but was met by
Greenleaf. "Stay!" he repeated, and tone, hand, eye told her she was a
prisoner. He halted aghast at the crimson on her hands and brow, on
Hilary's, on Hilary's lips and on the floor, and himself called, "Help
here! a surgeon! help!" while Kincaid faced him gaily, still singing:
"Mighty little I espec's, O, my ladies--"
Stooping to re-exchange the tool for the weapon, the singer went limp,
swayed, and as Greenleaf sprang to him, toppled over, lengthened out and
relaxed on the arm of his foe and friend. Wild-eyed, Flora swept to her
knees beside him, her face and form all horror and affright, crying in a
voice fervid and genuine as only truth can make it in the common run of
us, "He di'n' mean! Oh, he di'n' mean! 'Twas all accident! He di'n'
mean!"
"Yes, Fred," said Hilary. "She--she--mere accident, old man. Keep it
mum." He turned a suffering brow to Flora: "You'll explain for
me--when"--he gathered his strength--"when the--boat's gone."
The room had filled with officers asking "who, how, what?" "Did it
himself, to cheat the gallows," Madame heard one answer another as by
some fortune she was let in. She found Greenleaf chief in a group busy
over the fallen man, who lay in Flora's arms, deadly pale, yet with a
strong man's will in every lineament.
"Listen, Fred," he was gasping. "It'll sound. It's got to! Oh, it will!
One minute, Doctor, please. My love and a city--Fred, can't some one
look and see if--?"
From a lifted window curtain the young aide who had brought Anna to the
house said, "Boat's off."
"Thank God!" panted Hilary. "Oh, Fred, Fred, my girl and _all_! Just a
minute, Doctor,--_there_!"
A soft, heavy boom had rolled over the land. The pain-racked listener
flamed for joy and half left the arms that held him: "Oh, Fred, wasn't
that heaven's own music?" He tried to finish his song:
"But whaheveh I is sent, dey mus' undehstan'--"
and swooned.
LXVII
MOBILE
About a green spot crowning one of the low fortified hills on a northern
edge of Mobile sat Bartleson, Mandeville, Irby, Villeneuve and two or
three lieutenants, on ammunition-boxes, fire-logs and the sod, giving
their whole minds to the retention of Anna and Miranda Callender, who
sat on camp-stools. The absent Constance was down in the town, just then
bestowing favors not possible for any one else to offer so acceptably
to a certain duplicate and very self-centered Steve aged eighty
days--sh-sh-sh!
The camp group's soft discourse was on the character of one whom this
earliest afternoon in August they had followed behind muffled drums to
his final rest. Beginning at Carrollton Gardens, they said, then in the
flowery precincts of Callender House, later in that death-swept garden
on Vicksburg's inland bluffs, and now in this one, of Flora's, a garden
yet, peaceful and fragrant, though no part of its burnt house save the
chimneys had stood in air these three years and a half, the old hero--
"Yes," chimed Miranda to whoever was saying it--
The old hero, despite the swarm of mortal perils and woes he and his
brigade and its battery had come through in that period, had with a
pleasing frequency--to use the worn-out line just this time more--
"Sat in the roses and heard the birds' song."
The old soldier, they all agreed, had had a feeling for roses and song,
which had gilded the edges and angles of his austere spirit and betrayed
a tenderness too deep hid for casual discovery, yet so vital a part of
him that but for its lacerations--with every new public disaster--he
never need have sunk under these year-old Vicksburg wounds which had
dragged him down at last.
Miranda retold the splendid antic he had cut in St. Charles Street the
day Virginia seceded. Steve recounted how the aged warrior had regained
strength from Chickamauga's triumph and lost it again after Chattanooga.
Two or three recalled how he had suffered when Banks' Red River
Expedition desolated his fair estate and "forever lured away" his
half-a-thousand "deluded people." He must have succumbed then, they
said, had not the whole "invasion" come to grief and been driven back
into New Orleans. New Orleans! younger sister of little Mobile, yet
toward which Mobile now looked in a daily torture of apprehension. And
then Hilary's beloved Bartleson put in what Anna sat wishing some one
would say.
"With what a passion of disowned anxiety," he remarked, "had the
General, to the last, watched every step, slip and turn in what Steve
had once called 'the multifurieuse carreer' of Hilary Kincaid."
So turned the talk upon the long-time absentee, and instances were cited
of those outbreaks of utter nonsense which were wont to come from him in
awful moments: gibes with which no one reporting them to the uncle could
ever make the "old man" smile. The youngest lieutenant (a gun-corporal
that day the Battery left New Orleans) told how once amid a fearful
havoc, when his piece was so short of men that Kincaid was himself down
on the ground sighting and firing it, and an aide-de-camp galloped up
asking hotly, "Who's in command here!" the powder-blackened Hilary had
risen his tallest and replied,--
"I!... b, e, x, bex, Ibex!"
A gentle speculation followed as to which of all Hilary's utterances had
taken finest effect on the boys, and it was agreed that most potent for
good was the brief talk away back at Camp Callender, in which he had
told them that, being artillery, they must know how to wait unmurmuring
through months of "rotting idleness" from one deadly "tea-party" to
another. For a year, now, they had done that, and done it the better
because he had all that same time been forced to do likewise in New
Orleans, a prisoner in hospital, long at death's door, and only now
getting well.
Anna remained silent. While there was praise of him what more could she
want for sweet calm?
"True," said somebody, "in these forty-odd months between March,
'Sixty-one, and August, 'Sixty-four, all hands had got their fill of
war; laurels gained were softer to rest on than laurels unsprouted, and
it ought to be as easy as rolling off a log for him to lie on his
prison-hospital cot in 'rotting idleness,' lulled in the proud assurance
that he had saved Mobile, or at least postponed for a year--"
"Hilary?" frowningly asked Adolphe.
"Yes," with a firm quietness said Anna.
Villeneuve gallantly amended that somebody else owned an undivided half
in the glory of that salvation and would own more as soon as the Union
fleet (daily growing in numbers) should try to enter the bay: a hint at
Anna, of course, and at the great ram _Tennessee_, which the Confederate
admiral, Buchanan, had made his flag-ship, and whose completion, while
nothing else was ready but three small wooden gunboats, was due--they
had made even Anna believe--to the safe delivery of the Bazaar fund.
So then she, forced to talk, presently found herself explaining how such
full news of Hilary had so often come in these awful months; to wit, by
the long, kind letters of a Federal nurse--and Federal officer's
wife--but for whose special devotion the captive must have perished,
and who, Anna revealed, was the schoolmistress banished North in
'Sixty-one. What she kept untold was that, by favor of Greenleaf, Hilary
had been enabled to auction off the poor remains of his home belongings
and thus to restore the returned exile her gold. The speaker let her
eyes wander to an approaching orderly, and a lieutenant took the chance
to mention that early drill near Carrollton, which the General had
viewed from the Callenders' equipage. Their two horses, surviving the
shells and famine of Vicksburg, had been among the mere half-dozen of
good beasts retained at the surrender by some ruse, and--
The orderly brought Bartleson a document and Mandeville a newspaper--
And it was touching, to-day, the lieutenant persisted, to see that once
so beautiful span, handsome yet, leading in the team of six that drew
the draped caisson which--
"Ah, yes!" assented all.
Mandeville hurried to read out the news from Virginia, which could still
reach them through besieged Atlanta. It was of the Petersburg mine and
its slaughter, and thrilled every one. Yet Anna watched Bartleson open
his yellow official envelope.
"Marching orders?" asked Miranda, and while his affirming smile startled
every one, Steve, for some reason in the newspaper itself, put it up.
"Are the enemy's ships--?" began Anna--
"We're ordered down the bay," replied Bartleson.