FIRE AND SWORD.
The year the war began dates also, for New Orleans, the advent of two
better things: street-cars and the fire-alarm telegraph. The frantic
incoherence of the old alarum gave way to the few solemn, numbered
strokes that called to duty in the face of hot danger, like the electric
voice of a calm commander. The same new system also silenced, once for
all, the old nine-o'clock gun. For there were not only taps to signify
each new fire-district,--one for the first, two for the second, three,
four, five, six seven, eight, and nine,--but there was also one lone
toll at mid-day for the hungry mechanic, and nine at the evening hour
when the tired workman called his children in from the street and turned
to his couch, and the slave must show cause in a master's handwriting
why he or she was not under that master's roof.
And then there was one signal more. Fire is a dreadful thing, and all
the alarm signals were for fire except this one. Yet the profoundest
wish of every good man and tender women in New Orleans, when this
pleasing novelty of electro-magnetic warnings was first published for
the common edification, was that mid-day or midnight, midsummer or
midwinter, let come what might of danger or loss or distress, that one
particular signal might not sound. Twelve taps. Anything but that.
Dr. Sevier and Richling had that wish together. They had many wishes
that were greatly at variance the one's from the other's. The Doctor
had struggled for the Union until the very smoke of war began to rise
into the sky; but then he "went with the South." He was the only one in
New Orleans who knew--whatever some others may have suspected--that
Richling's heart was on the other side. Had Richling's bodily strength
remained, so that he could have been a possible factor, however small,
in the strife, it is hard to say whether they could have been together
day by day and night by night, as they came to be when the Doctor took
the failing man into his own home, and have lived in amity, as they did.
But there is this to be counted; they were both, though from different
directions, for peace, and their gentle forbearance toward each other
taught them a moderation of sentiment concerning the whole great issue.
And, as I say, they both together held the one longing hope that,
whatever war should bring of final gladness or lamentation, the steeples
of New Orleans might never toll--twelve.
But one bright Thursday April morning, as Richling was sitting, half
dressed, by an open window of his room in Dr. Sevier's house, leaning on
the arm of his soft chair and looking out at the passers on the street,
among whom he had begun to notice some singular evidences of excitement,
there came from a slender Gothic church-spire that was highest of all in
the city, just beyond a few roofs in front of him, the clear, sudden,
brazen peal of its one great bell.
"Fire," thought Richling; and yet, he knew not why, wondered where Dr.
Sevier might be. He had not seen him that morning. A high official had
sent for him at sunrise and he had not returned.
"Clang," went the bell again, and the softer ding--dang--dong of others,
struck at the same instant, came floating in from various distances.
And then it clanged again--and again--and again--the loud one near,
the soft ones, one by one, after it--six, seven, eight, nine--ah!
stop there! stop there! But still the alarm pealed on; ten--alas!
alas!--eleven--oh, oh, the women and children!--twelve! And then the
fainter, final asseverations of the more distant bells--twelve! twelve!
twelve!--and a hundred and seventy thousand souls knew by that sign that
the foe had passed the forts. New Orleans had fallen.
Richling dressed himself hurriedly and went out. Everywhere drums were
beating to arms. Couriers and aides-de-camp were galloping here and
there. Men in uniform were hurrying on foot to this and that rendezvous.
Crowds of the idle and poor were streaming out toward the levee.
Carriages and cabs rattled frantically from place to place; men ran
out-of-doors and leaped into them and leaped out of them and sprang up
stair-ways; hundreds of all manner of vehicles, fit and unfit to carry
passengers and goods, crowded toward the railroad depots and steam-boat
landings; women ran into the streets wringing their hands and holding
their brows; and children stood in the door-ways and gate-ways and
trembled and called and cried.
Richling took the new Dauphine street-car. Far down in the Third
district, where there was a silence like that of a village lane, he
approached a little cottage painted with Venetian red, setting in its
garden of oranges, pomegranates, and bananas, and marigolds, and
coxcombs behind its white paling fence and green gate.
The gate was open. In it stood a tall, strong woman, good-looking, rosy,
and neatly dressed. That she was tall you could prove by the gate, and
that she was strong, by the graceful muscularity with which she held
two infants,--pretty, swarthy little fellows, with joyous black eyes,
and evidently of one age and parentage,--each in the hollow of a fine,
round arm. There was just a hint of emotional disorder in her shining
hair and a trace of tears about her eyes. As the visitor drew near, a
fresh show of distressed exaltation was visible in the slight play of
her form.
"Ah! Mr. Richlin'," she cried, the moment he came within hearing, "'the
dispot's heels is on our shores!'" Tears filled her eyes again. Mike,
the bruiser, in his sixth year, who had been leaning backward against
her knees and covering his legs with her skirts, ran forward and clasped
the visitor's lower limbs with the nerve and intention of a wrestler.
Kate followed with the cherubs. They were Raphael's.
"Yes, it's terrible," said Richling.
"Ah! no, Mr. Richlin'," replied Kate, lifting her head proudly as she
returned with him toward the gate, "it's outrageouz; but it's not
terrible. At least it's not for me, Mr. Richlin'. I'm only Mrs. Captain
Ristofalah; and whin I see the collonels' and gin'r'ls' ladies
a-prancin' around in their carridges I feel my _humility_; but it's my
djuty to be _brave_, sur! An' I'll help to _fight_ thim, sur, if the min
can't do ud. Mr. Richlin', my husband is the intimit frind of Gin'r'l
Garrybaldy, sur! I'll help to burrin the cittee, sur!--rather nor give
ud up to thim vandjals! Come in, Mr. Richlin'; come in." She led the way
up the narrow shell-walk. "Come 'n, sur, it may be the last time ye' do
ud before the flames is leppin' from the roof! Ah! I knowed ye'd come. I
was a-lookin' for ye. I knowed _ye'd_ prove yerself that frind in need
that he's the frind indeed! Take a seat an' sit down." She faced about
on the vine-covered porch, and dropped into a rocking-chair, her eyes
still at the point of overflow. "But ah! Mr. Richlin', where's all thim
flatterers that fawned around uz in the days of tytled prosperity?"
Richling said nothing; he had not seen any throngs of that sort.
"Gone, sur! and it's a relief; it's a relief, Mr. Richlin'!" She
marshalled the twins on her lap, Carlo commanding the right, Francisco
the left.
"You mustn't expect too much of them," said Richling, drawing Mike
between his knees, "in such a time of alarm and confusion as this." And
Kate responded generously:--
"Well, I suppose you're right, sur."
"I've come down," resumed the visitor, letting Mike count off "Rich man,
poor man, beggar man, thief," on the buttons of his coat, "to give you
any help I can in getting ready to leave town. For you mustn't think of
staying. It isn't possible to be anything short of dreadful to stay in a
city occupied by hostile troops. It's almost certain the Confederates
will try to hold the city, and there may be a bombardment. The city may
be taken and retaken half-a-dozen times before the war is over."
"Mr. Richlin'," said Kate, with a majestic lifting of the hand, "I'll
nivver rin away from the Yanks."
"No, but you must _go_ away from them. You mustn't put yourself in such
a position that you can't go to your husband if he needs you, Mrs.
Ristofalo; don't get separated from him."
"Ah! Mr. Richlin', it's you as has the right to say so; and I'll do as
you say. Mr. Richlin', my husband"--her voice trembled--"may be wounded
this hour. I'll go, sur, indeed I will; but, sur, if Captain Raphael
Ristofalah wor _here_, sur, he'd be ad the _front_, sur, and Kate
Ristofalah would be at his galliant side!"
"Well, then, I'm glad he's not here," rejoined Richling, "for I'd have
to take care of the children."
"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Kate. "No, sur! I'd take the lion's whelps with
me, sur! Why, that little Mike theyre can han'le the dthrum-sticks to
beat the felley in the big hat!" And she laughed again.
They made arrangements for her and the three children to go "out
into the confederacy" within two or three days at furthest; as soon
as she and her feeble helper could hurry a few matters of business to
completion at and about the Picayune Tier. Richling did not get back to
the Doctor's house until night had fallen and the sky was set aglare by
seven miles' length of tortuous harbor front covered with millions'
worth of burning merchandise. The city was being evacuated.
Dr. Sevier and he had but few words. Richling was dejected from
weariness, and his friend weary with dejections.
"Where have you been all day?" asked the Doctor, with a touch of
irritation.
"Getting Kate Ristofalo ready to leave the city."
"You shouldn't have left the house; but it's no use to tell you
anything. Has she gone?"
"No."
"Well, in the name of common-sense, then, when is she going?"
"In two or three days," replied Richling, almost in retort.
The Doctor laughed with impatience.
"If you feel responsible for her going get her off by to-morrow
afternoon at the furthest." He dropped his tired head against the back
of his chair.
"Why," said Richling, "I don't suppose the fleet can fight its way
through all opposition and get here short of a week."
The Doctor laid his long fingers upon his brow and rolled his head from
side to side. Then, slowly raising it:--
"Well, Richling!" he said, "there must have been some mistake made when
you was put upon the earth."
Richling's thin cheek flushed. The Doctor's face confessed the bitterest
resentment.
"Why, the fleet is only eighteen miles from here now." He ceased, and
then added, with sudden kindness of tone, "I want you to do something
for me, will you?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, go to bed; I'm going. You'll need every grain of strength
you've got for to-morrow. I'm afraid then it will not be enough. This is
an awful business, Richling."
They went upstairs together. As they were parting at its top Richling
said:--
"You told me a few days ago that if the city should fall, which we
didn't expect"--
"That I'd not leave," said the Doctor. "No; I shall stay. I haven't the
stamina to take the field, and I can't be a runaway. Anyhow, I couldn't
take you along. You couldn't bear the travel, and I wouldn't go and
leave you here, Richling--old fellow!"
He laid his hand gently on the sick man's shoulder, who made no
response, so afraid was he that another word would mar the perfection of
the last.
When Richling went out the next morning the whole city was in an ecstasy
of rage and terror. Thousands had gathered what they could in their
hands, and were flying by every avenue of escape. Thousands ran hither
and thither, not knowing where or how to fly. He saw the wife and son
of the silver-haired banker rattling and bouncing away toward one of the
railway depots in a butcher's cart. A messenger from Kate by good chance
met him with word that she would be ready for the afternoon train of the
Jackson Railroad, and asking anew his earliest attention to her
interests about the lugger landing.
He hastened to the levee. The huge, writhing river, risen up above the
town, was full to the levee's top, and, as though the enemy's fleet was
that much more than it could bear, was silently running over by a
hundred rills into the streets of the stricken city.
As far as the eye could reach, black smoke, white smoke, brown smoke,
and red flames rolled and spread, and licked and leaped, from unnumbered
piles of cotton bales, and wooden wharves, and ships cut adrift, and
steam-boats that blazed like shavings, floating down the harbor as they
blazed. He stood for a moment to see a little revenue cutter,--a pretty
topsail schooner,--lying at the foot of Canal street, sink before his
eyes into the turbid yellow depths of the river, scuttled. Then he
hurried on. Huge mobs ran to and fro in the fire and smoke, howling,
breaking, and stealing. Women and children hurried back and forth like
swarms of giant ants, with buckets and baskets, and dippers and bags,
and bonnets, hats, petticoats, anything,--now empty, and now full of
rice and sugar and meal and corn and syrup,--and robbed each other, and
cursed and fought, and slipped down in pools of molasses, and threw live
pigs and coops of chickens into the river, and with one voiceless rush
left the broad levee a smoking, crackling desert, when some shells
exploded on a burning gunboat, and presently were back again like a
flock of evil birds.
It began to rain, but Richling sought no shelter. The men he was in
search of were not to be found. But the victorious ships, with bare
black arms stretched wide, boarding nettings up, and the dark muzzles of
their guns bristling from their sides, came, silently as a nightmare,
slowly around the bend at Slaughterhouse Point and moved up the middle
of the harbor. At the French market he found himself, without
forewarning, witness of a sudden skirmish between some Gascon and
Sicilian market-men, who had waved a welcome to the fleet, and some
Texan soldiers who resented the treason. The report of a musket rang
out, a second and third reechoed it, a pistol cracked, and another,
and another; there was a rush for cover; another shot, and another,
resounded in the market-house, and presently in the street beyond. Then,
in a moment, all was silence and emptiness, into which there ventured
but a single stooping, peeping Sicilian, glancing this way and that,
with his finger on trigger, eager to kill, gliding from cover to cover,
and presently gone again from view, leaving no human life visible nearer
than the swarming mob that Richling, by mounting a pile of ship's
ballast, could see still on the steam-boat landing, pillaging in the
drenching rain, and the long fleet casting anchor before the town in
line of battle.
Late that afternoon Richling, still wet to the skin, amid pushing and
yelling and the piping calls of distracted women and children, and
scuffling and cramming in, got Kate Ristofalo, trunks, baskets, and
babes, safely off on the cars. And when, one week from that day, the
sound of drums, that had been hushed for a while, fell upon his ear
again,--no longer the jaunty rataplan of Dixie's drums, but the heavy,
monotonous roar of the conqueror's at the head of his dark-blue
columns,--Richling could not leave his bed.
Dr. Sevier sat by him and bore the sound in silence. As it died away and
ceased, Richling said:--
"May I write to Mary?"
Then the Doctor had a hard task.
"I wrote for her yesterday," he said. "But, Richling, I--don't think
she'll get the letter."
"Do you think she has already started?" asked the sick man, with glad
eagerness.
"Richling, I did the best I knew how"--
"Whatever you did was all right, Doctor."
"I wrote to her months ago, by the hand of Ristofalo. He knows she got
the letter. I'm afraid she's somewhere in the Confederacy, trying to get
through. I meant it for the best, my dear boy."
"It's all right, Doctor," said the invalid; but the physician could see
the cruel fact slowly grind him.
"Doctor, may I ask one favor?"
"One or a hundred, Richling."
"I want you to let Madame Zenobie come and nurse me."
"Why, Richling, can't I nurse you well enough?"
The Doctor was jealous.
"Yes," answered the sick man. "But I'll need a good deal of attention.
She wants to do it. She was here yesterday, you knew. She wanted to ask
you, but was afraid."
His wish was granted.