"The dove might as well envy the mocking-bird."

"If I were a dove I certainly should," she said.

"Well, you are, and you shouldn't!" said he.

All of which Flora caught; if not the words, so truly the spirit that the words were no matter.

"Just as we were starting home," soliloquized, that night, our diary, "the newsboys came crying all around, that General Beauregard had opened fire on Fort Sumter, and the war has begun. Poor Constance! it's little she'll sleep to-night."



XXVI

SWIFT GOING, DOWN STREAM

Strangely slow travelled news in '61. After thirty hours' bombardment Fort Sumter had fallen before any person in New Orleans was sure the attack had been made. When five days later a yet more stupendous though quieter thing occurred, the tidings reached Kincaid's Battery only on the afternoon of the next one in fair time to be read at the close of dress parade. But then what shoutings! The wondering Callenders were just starting for a drive up-town. At the grove gate their horses were frightened out of all propriety by an opening peal, down in the camp, from "Roaring Betsy." And listen!

The black driver drew in. From Jackson Square came distant thunders and across the great bend of the river they could see the white puff of each discharge. What could it mean?

"Oh, Nan, the Abolitionists must have sued for peace!" exclaimed the sister.

"No-no!" cried Miranda. "Hark!"

Behind them the battery band had begun—

"O, carry me back to old Vir—"

"Virginia!" sang the three. "Virginia is out! Oh, Virginia is out!" They clapped their mitted hands and squeezed each other's and laughed with tears and told the coachman and said it over and over.

In Canal Street lo! it was true. Across the Neutral Ground they saw a strange sight; General Brodnax bareheaded! bareheaded yet in splendid uniform, riding quietly through the crowd in a brilliantly mounted group that included Irby and Kincaid, while everybody told everybody, with admiring laughter, how the old Virginian, dining at the St. Charles Hotel, had sallied into the street cheering, whooping, and weeping, thrown his beautiful cap into the air, jumped on it as it fell, and kicked it before him up to one corner and down again to the other. Now he and his cavalcade came round the Clay statue and passed the carriage saluting. What glory was in their eyes! How could our trio help but wave or the crowd hold back its cheers!

Up at Odd Fellows' Hall a large company was organizing a great military fair. There the Callenders were awaited by Flora and Madame, thither they came, and there reappeared the General and his train. There, too, things had been so admirably cut and dried that in a few minutes the workers were sorted and busy all over the hall like classes in a Sunday-school.

The Callenders, Valcours, and Victorine were a committee by themselves and could meet at Callender House. So when Kincaid and Irby introduced a naval lieutenant whose amazingly swift despatch-boat was bound on a short errand a bend or so below English Turn, it was agreed with him in a twinkling—a few twinklings, mainly Miranda's—to dismiss horses, take the trip, and on the return be set ashore at Camp Callender by early moonlight.

They went aboard at the head of Canal Street. The river was at a fair stage, yet how few craft were at either long landing, "upper" or "lower," where so lately there had been scant room for their crowding prows. How few drays and floats came and went on the white, shell-paved levees! How little freight was to be seen except what lay vainly begging for export—sugar, molasses, rice; not even much cotton; it had gone to the yards and presses. That natty regiment, the Orleans Guards, was drilling (in French, superbly) on the smooth, empty ground where both to Anna's and to Flora's silent notice all the up-river foodstuffs—corn, bacon, pork, meal, flour—were so staringly absent, while down in yonder streets their lack was beginning to be felt by a hundred and twenty-five thousand consumers.

Backing out into mid-stream brought them near an anchored steamer lately razeed and now being fitted for a cloud of canvas on three lofty masts instead of the two small sticks she had been content with while she brought plantains, guava jelly, coffee, and cigars from Havana. The Sumter she was to be, and was designed to deliver some of the many agile counter-thrusts we should have to make against that "blockade" for which the Yankee frigates were already hovering off Ship Island. So said the Lieutenant, but Constance explained to him (Captain Mandeville having explained to her) what a farce that blockade was going to be.

How good were these long breaths of air off the sea marshes, enlivened by the speed of the craft! But how unpopulous the harbor! What a crowd of steamboats were laid up along the "Algiers" shore, and of Morgan's Texas steamers, that huddled, with boilers cold, under Slaughter-House Point, while all the dry-docks stood empty. How bare the ship wharves; hardly a score of vessels along the miles of city front. About as many more, the lieutenant said, were at the river's mouth waiting to put to sea, but the towboats were all up here being turned into gunboats or awaiting letters of marque and reprisal in order to nab those very ships the moment they should reach good salt water. Constance and Miranda tingled to tell him of their brave Flora's investment, but dared not, it was such a secret!

On a quarter of the deck where they stood alone, what a striking pair were Flora and Irby as side by side they faced the ruffling air, softly discussing matters alien to the gliding scene and giving it only a dissimulative show of attention. Now with her parasol he pointed to the sunlight in the tree tops of a river grove where it gilded the windows of the Ursulines' Convent.

"Hum!" playfully murmured Kincaid to Anna, "he motions as naturally as if that was what they were talking about."

"It's a lovely picture," argued Anna.

"Miss Anna, when a fellow's trying to read the book of his fate he doesn't care for the pictures."

"How do you know that's what he's doing?"

"He's always doing it!" laughed Hilary.

The word was truer than he meant. The Irby-value of things was all that ever seriously engaged the ever serious cousin. Just now his eyes had left the shore, where Flora's lingered, and he was speaking of Kincaid. "I see," he said, "what you think: that although no one of these things—uncle Brodnax's nonsense, Greenleaf's claims, Hilary's own preaching against—against, eh—"

"Making brides to-day and widows to-morrow?"

"Yes, that while none of these is large enough in his view to stop him by itself, yet combined they—"

"All working together they do it," said the girl. Really she had no such belief, but Irby's poor wits were so nearly useless to her that she found amusement in misleading them.

"Hilary tells me they do," he replied, "but the more he says it the less I believe him. Miss Flora, the fate of all my uncle holds dear is hanging by a thread, a spider's web, a young girl's freak! If ever she gives him a certain turn of the hand, the right glance of her eye, he'll be at her feet and every hope I cherish—"

"Captain Irby," Flora softly asked with her tinge of accent, "is not this the third time?"

"Yes, if you mean again that—"

"That Anna, she is my dear, dear frien'! The fate of nothing, of nobody, not even of me—or of—you—" she let that pronoun catch in her throat—"can make me to do anything—oh! or even to wish anything—not the very, very best for her!"

"Yet I thought it was our understanding—"

"Captain: There is bitwin us no understanding excep'"—the voice grew tender—"that there is no understanding bitwin us." But she let her eyes so meltingly avow the very partnership her words denied, that Irby felt himself the richest, in understandings, of all men alive.

"What is that they are looking?" asked his idol, watching Anna and Hilary. The old battle ground had been passed. Anna, gazing back toward its townward edge, was shading her eyes from the burnished water, and Hilary was helping her make out the earthwork from behind which peered the tents of Kincaid's Battery while beyond both crouched low against the bright west the trees and roof of Callender House—as straight in line from here, Flora took note, as any shot or shell might ever fly.



XXVII

HARD GOING, UP STREAM

Very pleasant it was to stand thus on the tremulous deck of the swiftest craft in the whole Confederate service. Pleasant to see on either hand the flat landscape with all its signs of safety and plenty; its orange groves, its greening fields of young sugar-cane, its pillared and magnolia-shaded plantation houses, its white lines of slave cabins in rows of banana trees, and its wide wet plains swarming with wild birds; pleasant to see it swing slowly, majestically back and melt into a skyline as low and level as the ocean's.

Anna and Kincaid went inside to see the upper and more shining portions of the boat's beautiful machinery. No one had yet made rods, cranks, and gauge-dials sing anthems; but she knew it was Hilary and an artisan or two in his foundry whose audacity in the remaking of these gliding, plunging, turning, vanishing, and returning members had given them their fine new speed-making power, and as he stood at her side and pointed from part to part they took on a living charm that was reflected into him. Pleasant it was, also, to hear two or three droll tales about his battery boys; the personal traits, propensities, and soldierly value of many named by name, and the composite character and temper that distinguished the battery as a command; this specific quality of each particular organic unit, fighting body, among their troops being as needful for commanders to know as what to count on in the individual man. So explained the artillerist while the pair idled back to the open deck. With hidden vividness Anna liked the topic. Had not she a right, the right of a silent partner? A secret joy of the bond settled on her like dew on the marshes, as she stood at his side.

Hilary loved the theme. The lives of those boys were in his hands; at times to be hoarded, at times to be spent, in sudden awful junctures to be furiously squandered. He did not say this, but the thought was in both of them and drew them closer, though neither moved. The boat rounded to, her engines stopped, an officer came aboard from a skiff, and now she was under way again and speeding up stream on her return, but Hilary and Anna barely knew it. He began to talk of the boys' sweethearts. Of many of their tender affairs he was confidentially informed. Yes, to be frank, he confessed he had prompted some fellows to let their hearts lead them, and to pitch in and win while—

"Oh! certainly!" murmured Anna in compassion, "some of them."

"Yes," said their captain, "but they are chaps—like Charlie—whose hearts won't keep unless they're salted down and barrelled, and I give the advice not in the sweethearts' interest but—"

"Why not? Why shouldn't a—" The word hung back.

"A lover?"

"Yes. Why shouldn't he confess himself in her interest? That needn't pledge her."

"Oh! do you think that would be fair?"

"Perfectly!"

"Well, now—take an actual case. Do you think the mere fact that Adolphe truly and stick-to-it-ively loves Miss Flora gives her a right to know it?"

"I do, and to know it a long, long time before he can have any right to know whether—"

"Hum! while he goes where glory waits him—?"

"Yes."

"And lets time—?"

"Yes."

"And absence and distance and rumor try his unsupported constancy?"

"Yes."

With tight lips the soldier drew breath. "You know my uncle expects now to be sent to Virginia at once?"

"Yes."

"Adolphe, of course, goes with him."

"Yes."

"Yet you think—the great principle of so-much-for-so-much to the contrary notwithstanding—he really owes it to her to—"

Anna moved a step forward. She was thinking what a sweet babe she was, thus to accept the surface of things. How did she know that this laughing, light-spoken gallant, seemingly so open and artless—oh! more infantile than her very self!—was not deep and complex? Or that it was not he and Flora on whose case she was being lured to speculate? The boat, of whose large breathings and pulsings she became growingly aware, offered no reply. Presently from the right shore, off before them, came a strain of band music out of Camp Callender.

"Anna."

"What hosts of stars!" said she. "How hoveringly they follow us."

The lover waited. The ship seemed to breathe deeper—to glide faster. He spoke again: "May I tell you a secret?"

"Doesn't the boat appear to you to tremble more than ever?" was the sole response.

"Yes, she's running up-stream. So am I. Anna, we're off this time—sure shot—with the General—to Virginia. The boys don't know it yet, but—listen."

Over in the unseen camp the strain was once more—

"I'd offer thee this hand of mine—"

"We're turning in to be landed, are we not?" asked Anna as the stars began to wheel.

"Yes. Do you really believe, Anna, that that song is not the true word for a true lover and true soldier, like Adolphe, for instance—to say to himself, of course, not to her?"

"Oh, Captain Kincaid, what does it matter?"

"Worlds to me. Anna, if I should turn that song into a solemn avowal—to you—"

"Please don't!—Oh, I mean—I don't mean—I—I mean—"

"Ah, I know your meaning. But if I love you, profoundly, abidingly, consumingly—as I do, Anna Callender, as I do!—and am glad to pledge my soul to you knowing perfectly that you have nothing to confess to me—"

"Oh, don't, Captain Kincaid, don't! You are not fair to me. You make me appear—oh—we were speaking only of your cousin's special case. I don't want your confession. I'm not ready for—for anybody's! You mustn't make it! You—you—"

"It's made, Anna Callender, and it makes me fair to you at last."

"Oh-h-h!"

"I know that matters little to you—"

"Oh, but you're farther from fair than ever, Captain Kincaid; you got my word for one thing and have used it for another!" She turned and they tardily followed their friends, bound for the gangway. A torch-basket of pine-knots blazing under the bow covered flood and land with crimson light and inky shadows. The engines had stopped. The boat swept the shore. A single stage-plank lay thrust half out from her forward quarter. A sailor stood on its free end with a coil of small line. The crouching earthwork and its fierce guns glided toward them. Knots of idle cannoneers stood along its crest. A few came down to the water's edge, to whom Anna and Hilary, still paired alone, were a compelling sight. They lifted their smart red caps. Charlie ventured a query: "It's true, Captain, isn't it, that Virginia's out?"

"I've not seen her," was the solemn reply, and his comrades tittered.

"Yes!" called Constance and Miranda, "she's out!"

"Miss Anna," murmured Hilary with a meekness it would have avenged Charlie to hear, "I've only given you the right you claim for every woman."

"Oh, Captain Kincaid, I didn't say every woman! I took particular—I—I mean I—"

"If it's any one's right it's yours."

"I don't want it!—I mean—I mean—"

"You mean, do you not? that I've no right to say what can only distress you."

"Do you think you have?—Oh, Lieutenant, it's been a perfectly lovely trip! I don't know when the stars have seemed so bright!"

"They're not like us dull men, Miss Callender," was the sailor's unlucky reply, "they can rise to any occasion a lady can make."

"Ladies don't make occasions, Lieutenant."

"Oh, don't they!" laughed the sea-dog to Hilary. But duty called. "No, no, Miss Val—! Don't try that plank alone! Captain Kincaid, will you give—? That's right, sir.... Now, Captain Irby, you and Miss Callender—steady!"

Seventh and last went the frail old lady, led by Kincaid. She would have none other. She kept his arm with definite design while all seven waved the departing vessel good-by. Then for the walk to the house she shared Irby with Anna and gave Flora to Hilary, with Miranda and Constance in front outmanoeuvred by a sleight of hand so fleeting and affable that even you or I would not have seen it.



XXVIII

THE CUP OF TANTALUS

Queer world. Can you be sure the next pair you meet walking together of a summer eve are as starry as they look? Lo, Constance and Miranda. Did the bride herself realize what a hunger of loneliness was hers? Or Anna and Irby, with Madame between them. Could you, maybe, have guessed the veritable tempest beneath the maiden's serenity, or his inward gnashings against whatever it was that had blighted his hour with the elusive Flora?

Or can any one say, in these lives of a thousand concealments and restraints, when things are happening and when not, within us or without, or how near we are now to the unexpected—to fate? See, Flora and Hilary. He gave no outward show that he was burning to flee the spot and swing his fists and howl and tear the ground.

Yet Flora knew; knew by herself; by a cold rage in her own fair bosom, where every faculty stood gayly alert for each least turn of incident, to foil or use it, while they talked lightly of Virginia's great step, or of the night's loveliness, counting the stars. "How small they look," she said, "how calm how still."

"Yes, and then to think what they really are! so fearfully far from small—or cold—or still!"

"Like ourselves," she prompted.

"Yes!" cried the transparent soldier. "At our smallest the smallest thing in us is that we should feel small. And how deep down are we calm or cold? Miss Flora, I once knew a girl—fine outside, inside. Lovers -she had to keep a turnstile. I knew a pair of them. To hear those two fellows separately tell what she was like, you couldn't have believed them speaking of the same person. The second one thought the first had—sort o'—charted her harbor for him; but when he came to sail in, 'pon my soul, if every shoal on the chart wasn't deep water, and every deep water a fortified shore—ha, ha, ha!"

Flora's smile was lambent. "Yes," she said, "that sweet Anna she's very intric-ate." Hilary flamed and caught his breath, but she met his eyes with the placidity of the sky above them.

Suddenly he laughed: "Now I know what I am! Miss Flora, I—I wish you'd be my pilot."

She gave one resenting sparkle, but then shook her averted head tenderly, murmured "Impossible," and smiled.

"You think there's no harbor there?"

"Listen," she said.

"Yes, I hear it, a horse."

"Captain Kincaid?"

"Miss Flora?"

"For dear Anna's sake and yours, shall I be that little bit your pilot, to say—?"

"What! to say. Don't see her to-night?"

Flora's brow sank.

"May I go with you, then, and learn why?" The words were hurried, for a horseman was in front and the others had so slackened pace that all were again in group. Anna caught Flora's reply:

"No, your cousin will be there. But to-morrow evening, bif-ore—"

"Yes," he echoed, "before anything else. I'll come. Why!"—a whinny of recognition came from the road—"why, that's my horse!"

The horseman dragged in his rein. Constance gasped and Kincaid exclaimed, "Well! since when and from where, Steve Mandeville?"

The rider sprang clanking to the ground and whipped out a document. All pressed round him. He gave his bride two furious kisses, held her in one arm and handed the missive to Kincaid:

"With the compliment of General Brodnax!"

Irby edged toward Flora, drawn by a look.

Hilary spoke: "Miss Anna, please hold this paper open for me while I—Thank you." He struck a match. The horse's neck was some shelter and the two pressed close to make more, yet the match flared. The others listened to Mandeville:

"And 'twas me dizcover' that tranzportation, juz' chanzing to arrive by the railroad—"

"Any one got a newspaper?" called Hilary. "Steve—yes, let's have a wisp o' that."

The paper burned and Hilary read. "Always the man of the moment, me!" said Mandeville. "And also 't is thangs to me you are the firs' inform', and if you are likewise the firs' to ripport—"

"Thank you!" cried Kincaid, letting out a stirrup leather. "Adolphe, will you take that despatch on to Bartleson?" He hurried to the other stirrup.

"Tell him no!" whispered Flora, but in vain, so quickly had Anna handed Irby the order.

"Good-night, all!" cried Hilary, mounting. He wheeled, swung his cap and galloped.

"Hear him!" laughed Miranda to Flora, and from up the dim way his song came back:

"'I can't stand the wilderness But a few days, a few days.'"

Still swinging his cap he groaned to himself and dropped his head, then lifted it high, shook his locks like a swimmer, and with a soft word to his horse sped faster.

"Yo' pardon, sir," said Mandeville to Irby, declining the despatch, "I wou'n't touch it. For why he di'n' h-ask me? But my stable is juz yondeh. Go, borrow you a horse—all night 'f you like."

Thence Irby galloped to Bartleson's tent, returned to Callender House, dismounted and came up the steps. There stood Anna, flushed and eager, twining arms with the placid Flora. "Ah," said the latter, as he offered her his escort home, "but grandma and me, we—"

Anna broke in: "They're going to stay here all night so that you may ride at once to General Brodnax. Even we girls, Captain Irby, must do all we can to help your cousin get away with the battery, the one wish of his heart!" She listened, untwined and glided into the house.

Instantly Flora spoke: "Go, Adolphe Irby, go! Ah, snatch your luck, you lucky—man! Get him away to-night, cost what cost!" Her fingers pushed him. He kissed them. She murmured approvingly, but tore them away: "Go, go, go-o!"

Anna, pacing her chamber, with every gesture of self-arraignment and distress, heard him gallop. Then standing in her opened window she looked off across the veranda's balustrade and down into the camp, where at lines of mess-fires like strings of burning beads the boys were cooking three days' rations. A tap came on her door. She snatched up a toilet brush: "Come in?"

She was glad it was only Flora. "Cherie," tinkled the visitor, "they have permit' me!"

Anna beamed. "I was coming down," she recklessly replied, touching her temples at the mirror.

"Yes," said the messenger, "'cause Mandeville he was biggening to tell about Fort Sumter, and I asked them to wait—ah"—she took Anna's late pose in the window—"how plain the camp!"

"Yes," responded Anna with studied abstraction, "when the window happens to be up. It's so warm to-night, I—"

"Ah, Anna!"

"What, dear?" In secret panic Anna came and looked out at Flora's side caressingly.

"At last," playfully sighed the Creole, "'tis good-by, Kincaid's Battery. Good-by, you hun'red good fellows, with yo' hun'red horses and yo' hun'red wheels and yo' hun'red hurras."

"And hundred brave, true hearts!" said Anna.

"Yes, and good-by, Bartleson, good-by, Tracy, good-by ladies' man!—my dear, tell me once more! For him why always that name?" Both laughed.

"I don't know, unless it's because—well—isn't it—because every lady has a piece of his heart and—no one wants all of it?"

"Ah! no one?—when so many?—"

"Now, Flora, suppose some one did! What of it, if he can't, himself, get his whole heart together to give it to any one?" The arguer offered to laugh again, but Flora was sad:

"You bil-ieve he's that way—Hilary Kincaid?"

"There are men that way, Flora. It's hard for us women to realize, but it's true!"

"Ah, but for him! For him that's a dreadful!"

"Why, no, dear, I fancy he's happiest that way."

"But not best, no! And there's another thing—his uncle! You know ab-out that, I su'pose?"

"Yes, but he—come, they'll be sending—"

"No,—no! a moment! Anna! Ah, Anna, you are too wise for me! Anna, do you think"—the pair stood in the room with the inquirer's eyes on the floor—"you think his cousin is like that?"

Anna kissed her temples, one in pity, the other in joy: "No, dear, he's not—Adolphe Irby is not."

On the way downstairs Flora seized her hands: "Oh, Anna, like always—this is just bit-win us? Ah, yes. And, oh, I wish you'd try not to bil-ieve that way—ab-out his cousin! Me, I hope no! And yet—"

"Yet what, love?" (Another panic.)

"Nothing, but—ah, he's so ki-ind to my brother! And his cousin Adolphe," she whispered as they moved on down, "I don't know, but I fear perchanze he don't like his cousin Adolphe—his cousin Adolphe—on the outside, same as the General, rough—'t is a wondrous how his cousin Adolphe is fond of him!"

Poor Anna. She led the way into the family group actually wheedled into the belief that however she had blundered with her lover, with Flora she had been clever. And now they heard the only true account of how Captain Beauregard and General Steve had taken Fort Sumter. At the same time every hearer kept one ear alert toward the great open windows. Yet nothing came to explain that Kincaid's detention up-town was his fond cousin's contriving, and Sumter's story was at its end when all started at once and then subsided with relief as first the drums and then the bugles sounded—no alarm, but only, drowsily, "taps," as if to say to Callender House as well as to the camp, "Go to slee-eep ... Go to slee-eep ... Go to bed, go to bed, go to slee-eep ... Go to slee-eep, go to slee-eep ... Go to slee-ee-eep."



XXIX

A CASTAWAY ROSE

Gone to sleep the camp except its sentinels, and all Callender House save one soul. Not Miranda, not the Mandevilles, nor Madame Valcour, nor any domestic. Flora knew, though it was not Flora. In her slumbers she knew.

Two of the morning. Had the leader, the idol of Kincaid's Battery, failed in his endeavor? Anna, on her bed, half disrobed, but sleepless yet, still prayed he might not succeed. Just this one time, oh, Lord! this one time! With Thee are not all things possible? Canst Thou not so order all things that a day or two's delay of Kincaid's Battery need work no evil to the Cause nor any such rending to any heart as must be hers if Kincaid's Battery should go to-night? Softly the stair clock boomed three. She lifted her head and for a full three minutes harkened toward the camp. Still no sound there, thank God! She turned upon her pillow.

But—what! Could that be the clock again, and had she slumbered? "Three, four," murmured the clock. She slipped from her bed and stole to the window. Just above the low, dim parapet, without a twinkle, the morning star shone large, its slender, mile-long radiance shimmering on the gliding river. In all the scented landscape was yet no first stir of dawn, but only clearness enough to show the outlines of the camp ground. She stared. She stared again! Not a tent was standing. Oh! and oh! through what bugling, what rolling of drums and noise of hoofs, wheels, and riders had she lain oblivious at last? None, really; by order of the commanding general—on a private suggestion of Irby's, please notice, that the practice would be of value—camp had been struck in silence. But to her the sole fact in reach was that all its life was gone!

Sole fact? Gone? All gone? What was this long band of darkness where the gray road should be, in the dull shadow of the levee? Oh, God of mercy, it was the column! the whole of Kincaid's Battery, in the saddle and on the chests, waiting for the word to march! Ah, thou ladies' man! Thus to steal away! Is this your profound—abiding—consuming love? The whisper was only in her heart, but it had almost reached her lips, when she caught her breath, her whole form in a tremor. She clenched the window-frame, she clasped her heaving side.

For as though in reply, approaching from behind the house as if already the producer had nearly made its circuit, there sounded close under the balustrade the walking of a horse. God grant no other ear had noted it! Now just beneath the window it ceased. Hilary Kincaid! She could not see, but as sure as sight she knew. Her warrior, her knight, her emperor now at last, utterly and forever, she his, he hers, yet the last moment of opportunity flitting by and she here helpless to speak the one word of surrender and possession. Again she shrank and trembled. Something had dropped in at the window. There it lay, small and dark, on the floor. She snatched it up. Its scant tie of ribbon, her touch told her, was a bit of the one she had that other time thrown down to him, and the thing it tied and that looked so black in the dusk was a red, red rose.

She pressed it to her lips. With quaking fingers that only tangled the true-love knot and bled on the thorns, she stripped the ribbon off and lifted a hand high to cast it forth, but smote the sash and dropped the emblem at her own feet. In pain and fear she caught it up, straightened, and glanced to her door, the knot in one hand, the rose in the other, and her lips apart. For at some unknown moment the door had opened, and in it stood Flora Valcour.

Furtively into a corner fluttered rose and ribbon while the emptied hands extended a counterfeit welcome and beckoned the visitor's aid to close the window. As the broad sash came down, Anna's heart, in final despair, sunk like lead, or like the despairing heart of her disowned lover in the garden, Flora's heart the meantime rising like a recovered kite. They moved from the window with their four hands joined, the dejected girl dissembling elation, the elated one dejection.

"I don't see," twittered Anna, "how I should have closed it! How chilly it gets toward—"

"Ah!" tremulously assented the subtler one. "And such a dream! I was oblige' to escape to you!"

"And did just right!" whispered and beamed poor Anna. "What did you dream, dear?"

"I dremp the battery was going! and going to a battle! and with the res' my brother! And now—"

"Now it's but a dream!" said her comforter.

"Anna!" the dreamer flashed a joy that seemed almost fierce. She fondly pressed the hands she held and drew their owner toward the ill-used rose. "Dearest, behold me! a thief, yet innocent!"

Anna smiled fondly, but her heart had stopped, her feet moved haltingly. A mask of self-censure poorly veiled Flora's joy, yet such as it was it was needed. Up from the garden, barely audible to ears straining for it, yet surging through those two minds like a stifling smoke, sounded the tread of the departing horseman.

"Yes," murmured Anna, hoping to drown the footfall, and with a double meaning though with sincere tenderness, "you are stealing now, not meaning to."

"Now?" whispered the other, "how can that be?" though she knew. "Ah, if I could steal now your heart al-so! But I've stolen, I fear, only—your—confidenze!" Between the words she loosed one hand, stooped and lifted the flower. Each tried to press it to the other's bosom, but it was Anna who yielded.

"I'd make you take it," she protested as Flora pinned it on, "if I hadn't thrown it away."

"Dearest," cooed the other, "that would make me a thief ag-ain, and this time guilty."

"Can't I give a castaway rose to whom I please?"

"Not this one. Ah, sweet, a thousand thousand pardon!"—the speaker bent to her hearer's ear—"I saw you when you kiss' it—and before."

Anna's face went into her hands, and face and hands to Flora's shoulder; but in the next breath she clutched the shoulder and threw up her head, while the far strain of a bugle faintly called, "Head of column to the right."

The cadence died. "Flora! your dream is true and that's the battery! It's going, Flora. It's gone! Your brother's gone! Your brother, Flora, your brother! Charlie! he's gone." So crying Anna sprang to the window and with unconscious ease threw it up.

The pair stood in it. With a bound like the girl's own, clear day had come. Palely the river purpled and silvered. No sound was anywhere, no human sign on vacant camp ground, levee, or highroad. "Ah!"—Flora made a well pretended gesture of discovery and distress—"'tis true! That bugl' muz' have meant us good-by."

"Oh, then it was cruel!" exclaimed Anna. "To you, dear, cruel to you to steal off in that way. Run! dress for the carriage!"

Flora played at hesitation: "Ah, love, if perchanze that bugl' was to call you?"

"My dear! how could even he—the 'ladies' man,' ha, ha!—imagine any true woman would come to the call of a bugle? Go! while I order the carriage."

They had left the window. The hostess lifted her hand toward a bell-cord but the visitor stayed it, absently staring while letting herself be pressed toward the door, thrilled with a longing as wild as Anna's and for the same sight, yet cunningly pondering. Nay, waiting, rather, on instinct, which the next instant told her that Anna would inevitably go herself, no matter who stayed.

"You'll come al-long too?" she pleadingly asked.

"No, dear, I cannot! Your grandmother will, of course, and Miranda." The bell-cord was pulled.

"Anna, you must go, else me, I will not!"

"Ah, how can I? Dear, dear, you're wasting such golden moments! Well, I'll go with you! Only make haste while I call the others—stop!" Their arms fell lightly about each other's neck. "You'll never tell on me?... Not even to Miranda?... Nor h-his—his uncle?... Nor"—the petitioner pressed closer with brightening eyes—"nor his—cousin?"

Softly Flora's face went into her hands, and face and hands to Anna's shoulder, as neat a reduplication as ever was. But suddenly there were hoof-beats again. Yes, coming at an easy gallop. Now they trotted through the front gate. The eyes of the two stared. "A courier," whispered Anna, "to Captain Mandeville!" though all her soul hoped differently.

Only a courier it was. So said the maid who came in reply to the late ring, but received no command. The two girls, shut in together, Anna losing moments more golden than ever, heard the rider at the veranda steps accost the old coachman and so soon after greet Mandeville that it was plain the captain had already been up and dressing.

"It's Charlie!" breathed Anna, and Flora nodded.

Now Charlie trotted off again, and now galloped beyond hearing, while Mandeville's booted tread reascended to his wife's room. And now came Constance: "Nan, where on earth is Fl—? Oh, of course! News, Nan! Good news, Flora! The battery, you know—?"

"Yes," said Anna, with her dryest smile, "it's sneaked off in the dark."

"Nan, you're mean! It's marching up-town now, Flora. At least the guns and caissons are, so as to be got onto the train at once. And oh, girls, those poor, dear boys! the train—from end to end it's to be nothing but a freight train!"

"Hoh!" laughed the heartless Anna, "that's better than staying here."

The sister put out her chin and turned again to Flora. "But just now," she said, "the main command are to wait and rest in Congo Square, and about ten o'clock they're to be joined by all the companies of the Chasseurs that haven't gone to Pensacola and by the whole regiment of the Orleans Guards, as an escort of honor, and march in that way to the depot, led by General Brodnax and his staff—and Steve! And every one who wants to bid them good-by must do it there. Of course there'll be a perfect jam, and so Miranda's ordering breakfast at seven and the carriage at eight, and Steve—he didn't tell even me last night because—" Her words stuck in her throat, her tears glistened, she gnawed her lips. Anna laid tender hands on her.

"Why, what, Connie, dear?"

"St—Ste—Steve—"

"Is Steve going with them to Virginia?"

The face of Constance went into her hands, and face and hands to Anna's shoulder. Meditatively smiling, Flora slipped away to dress.



XXX

GOOD-BY, KINCAID'S BATTERY

At one end of a St. Charles Hotel parlor a group of natty officers stood lightly chatting while they covertly listened. At the other end, with Irby and Mandeville at his two elbows, General Brodnax conversed with Kincaid and Bartleson, the weather-faded red and gray of whose uniforms showed in odd contrast to the smartness all about them.

Now he gave their words a frowning attention, and now answered abruptly: "Humph! That looks tremendously modest in you, gentlemen,—what?... Well, then, in your whole command if it's their notion. But it's vanity at last, sirs, pure vanity. Kincaid's Battery 'doesn't want to parade its dinginess till it's done something'—pure vanity! 'Shortest way'—nonsense! The shortest way to the train isn't the point! The point is to make so inspiring a show of you as to shame the damned stay-at-homes!"

"You'll par-ade," broke in the flaming Mandeville. "worse' dress than presently, when you rit-urn conqueror'!" But that wearied the General more.

"Oh, hell," he mumbled. "Captain Kincaid, eh—" He led that officer alone to a window and spoke low: "About my girl, Hilary,—and me. I'd like to decide that matter before you show your heels. You, eh,—default, I suppose?"

"No, uncle, she does that. I do only the hopeless loving."

"The wha-at? Great Lord! You don't tell me you—?"

"Yes, I caved in last night; told her I loved her. Oh, I didn't do it just in this ashes-of-roses tone of voice, but"—the nephew smiled—the General scowled—"you should have seen me, uncle. You'd have thought it was Mandeville. I made a gorgeous botch of it."

"You don't mean she—?"

"Yes, sir, adjourned me sine die. Oh, it's no use to look at me." He laughed. "The calf's run over me. My fat's in the fire."

The General softly swore and continued his gaze. "I believe," he slowly said, "that's why you wanted to slink out of town the back way."

"Oh, no, it's not. Or at least—well, anyhow, uncle, now you can decide in favor of Adolphe."

The uncle swore so audibly that the staff heard and exchanged smiles: "I neither can nor will decide—for either of you—yet! You understand? I don't do it. Go, bring your battery."

The city was taken by surprise. Congo Square was void of soldiers before half Canal street's new red-white-and-red bunting could be thrown to the air. In column of fours—escort leading and the giant in the bearskin hat leading it—they came up Rampart street. On their right hardly did time suffice for boys to climb the trees that in four rows shaded its noisome canal; on their left not a second too many was there for the people to crowd the doorsteps, fill windows and garden gates, line the banquettes and silently gather breath and ardor while the escort moved by, before the moment was come in which to cheer and cheer and cheer, as with a hundred flashing sabres at shoulder the dismounted, heavy-knapsacked, camp-worn battery, Kincaid's Battery—you could read the name on the flag—Kincaid's Battery! came and came and passed. In Canal street and in St. Charles there showed a fierceness of pain in the cheers, and the march was by platoons. At the hotel General Brodnax and staff joined and led it—up St. Charles, around Tivoli Circle, and so at last into Calliope street.

Meantime far away and sadly belated, with the Valcours cunningly to blame and their confiding hostesses generously making light of it, up Love street hurried the Callenders' carriage. Up the way of Love and athwart the oddest tangle of streets in New Orleans,—Frenchmen and Casacalvo, Greatmen, History, Victory, Peace, Arts, Poet, Music, Bagatelle, Craps, and Mysterious—across Elysian Fields not too Elysian, past the green, high-fenced gardens of Esplanade and Rampart flecked red-white-and-red with the oleander, the magnolia, and the rose, spun the wheels, spanked the high-trotters. The sun was high and hot, shadows were scant and sharp, here a fence and there a wall were as blinding white as the towering fair-weather clouds, gowns were gauze and the parasols were six, for up beside the old coachman sat Victorine. She it was who first saw that Congo Square was empty and then that the crowds were gone from Canal street. It was she who first suggested Dryads street for a short cut and at Triton Walk was first to hear, on before, the music,—ah, those horn-bursting Dutchmen! could they never, never hit it right?—

"When other lips and other hearts Their tale of love shall tell—"

and it was she who, as they crossed Calliope street, first espied the rear of the procession, in column of fours again, it was she who flashed tears of joy as they whirled into Erato street to overtake the van and she was first to alight at the station.

The General and his staff were just reaching it. Far down behind them shone the armed host. The march ceased, the music—"then you'll rememb'"—broke off short. The column rested. "Mon Dieu!" said even the Orleans Guards, "quel chaleur! Is it not a terrib', thad sun!" Hundreds of their blue kepis, hundreds of gray shakos in the Confederate Guards, were lifted to wipe streaming necks and throats, while away down beyond our ladies' ken all the drummers of the double escort, forty by count, silently came back and moved in between the battery and its band to make the last music the very bravest. Was that Kincaid, the crowd asked, one of another; he of the thick black locks, tired cheek and brow, and eyes that danced now as he smiled and talked? "Phew! me, I shou'n' love to be tall like that, going to be shot at, no! ha, ha! But thad's no wonder they are call' the ladies' man batt'rie!"

"Hah! they are not call' so because him, but because themse'v's! Every one he is that, and they didn' got the name in Circus street neither, ha, ha!—although—Hello, Chahlie Valcour. Good-by, Chahlie. Don't ged shoot in the back—ha, ha!—"

A command! How eternally different from the voice of prattle. The crowd huddled back to either sidewalk, forced by the opening lines of the escort backed against it, till the long, shelled wagon-way gleamed white and bare. Oh, Heaven! oh, home! oh, love! oh, war! For hundreds, hundreds—beat Anna's heart—the awful hour had come, had come! She and her five companions could see clear down both bayonet-crested living walls—blue half the sun-tortured way, gray the other half—to where in red kepis and with shimmering sabres, behind their tall captain, stretched the dense platoons and came and came, to the crash of horns, the boys, the boys, the dear, dear boys who with him, with him must go, must go!

"Don't cry, Connie dear," she whispered, though stubborn drops were salting her own lips, "it will make it harder for Steve."

"Harder!" moaned the doting bride, "you don't know him!"

"Oh, let any woman cry who can," laughed Flora, "I wish I could!" and verily spoke the truth. Anna meltingly pressed her hand but gave her no glance. All eyes, dry or wet, were fixed on the nearing mass, all ears drank the rising peal and roar of its horns and drums. How superbly rigorous its single, two-hundred-footed step. With what splendid rigidity the escorts' burnished lines walled in its oncome.

But suddenly there was a change. Whether it began in the music, which turned into a tune every Tom, Dick, and Harry now had by heart, or whether a moment before among the blue-caps or gray-shakos, neither Anna nor the crowd could tell. Some father in those side ranks lawlessly cried out to his red-capped boy as the passing lad brushed close against him, "Good-by, my son!" and as the son gave him only a sidelong glance he seized and shook the sabre arm, and all that long, bristling lane of bayonets went out of plumb, out of shape and order, and a thousand brass-buttoned throats shouted good-by and hurrah. Shakos waved, shoulders were snatched and hugged, blue kepis and red were knocked awry, beards were kissed and mad tears let flow. And still, with a rigor the superbest yet because the new tune was so perfect to march by, fell the unshaken tread of the cannoneers, and every onlooker laughed and wept and cheered as the brass rent out to the deafening drums, and the drums roared back to the piercing brass,—

De black-snake love' de blackbird' nes', De baby love' his mamy's bres', An' raggy-tag, aw spick-an'-span, De ladies loves de ladies' man. I loves to roll my eyes to de ladies! I loves to sympathize wid de ladies! As long as eveh I knows sugah f'om san' I's bound to be a ladies' man.

So the black-hatted giant with the silver staff strode into the wide shed, the puffy-cheeked band reading their music and feeling for foothold as they followed, and just yonder behind them, in the middle of the white way, untouched by all those fathers, unhailed by any brother of his own, came Hilary Kincaid with all the battery at his neat heels, its files tightly serried but its platoons in open order, each flashing its sabres to a "present" on nearing the General and back to a "carry" when he was passed, and then lengthening into column of files to enter the blessed shade of the station.

In beside them surged a privileged throng of near kin, every one calling over every one's head, "Good-by!" "Good-by!" "Here's your mother, Johnnie!" and, "Here's your wife, Achille!" Midmost went the Callenders, the Valcours, and Victorine, willy-nilly, topsy-turvy, swept away, smothering, twisting, laughing, stumbling, staggering, yet saved alive by that man of the moment Mandeville, until half-way down the shed and the long box-car train they brought up on a pile of ordnance stores and clung like drift in a flood. And at every twist and stagger Anna said in her heart a speech she had been saying over and over ever since the start from Callender House; a poor commonplace speech that must be spoken though she perished for shame of it; that must be darted out just at the right last instant if such an instant Heaven would only send: "I take back what I said last night and I'm glad you spoke as you did!"

Here now the moment seemed at hand. For here was the officers' box-car and here with sword in sheath Kincaid also had stopped, in conference with the conductor, while his lieutenants marched the column on, now halted it along the train's full length, now faced it against the open cars and now gave final command to break ranks. In comic confusion the fellows clambered aboard stormed by their friends' fond laughter at the awkwardness of loaded knapsacks, and their retorting mirth drowned in a new flood of good-bys and adieus, fresh waving of hats and handkerchiefs, and made-over smiles from eyes that had wept themselves dry. The tear-dimmed Victorine called gay injunctions to her father, the undimmed Flora to her brother, and Anna laughed and laughed and waved hi all directions save one. There Mandeville had joined Kincaid and the conductor and amid the wide downpour and swirl of words and cries was debating with them whether it were safer to leave the shed slowly or swiftly; and there every now and then Anna's glance flitted near enough for Hilary to have caught it as easily as did Bartleson, Tracy, every lieutenant and sergeant of the command, busy as they were warning the throng back from the cars; yet by him it was never caught.

The debate had ended. He gave the conductor a dismissing nod that sent him, with a signalling hand thrown high, smartly away toward the locomotive. The universal clatter and flutter redoubled. The bell was sounding and Mandeville was hotly shaking hands with Flora, Miranda, all. The train stirred, groaned, crept, faltered, crept on—on—one's brain tingled to the cheers, and women were crying again.

Kincaid's eyes ran far and near in final summing up. The reluctant train gave a dogged joggle and jerk, hung back, dragged on, moved a trifle quicker; and still the only proof that he knew she was here—here within three steps of him—was the careful failure of those eyes ever to light on her. Oh, heart, heart, heart! would it be so to the very end and vanishment of all?

"I take back—I take—" was there going to be no chance to begin it? Was he grief blind? or was he scorn blind? No matter! what she had sown she would reap if she had to do it under the very thundercloud of his frown. All or any, the blame of estrangement should be his, not hers! Oh, Connie, Connie! Mandeville had clutched Constance and was kissing her on lips and head and cheeks. He wheeled, caught a hand from the nearest car, and sprang in. Kincaid stood alone. The conductor made him an eager sign. The wheels of the train clicked briskly. He glanced up and down it, then sprang to Miranda, seized her hand, cried "Good-by!" snatched Madame's, Flora's, Victorine's, Connie's,—"Good-by—Good-by!"—and came to Anna.

And did she instantly begin, "I take—?" Not at all! She gave her hand, both hands, but her lips stood helplessly apart. Flora, Madame, Victorine, Constance, Miranda, Charlie from a car's top, the three lieutenants, the battery's whole hundred, saw Hilary's gaze pour into hers, hers into his. Only the eyes of the tumultuous crowd still followed the train and its living freight. A woman darted to a car's open door and gleaned one last wild kiss. Two, ten, twenty others, while the conductor ran waving, ordering, thrusting them away, repeated the splendid theft, and who last of all and with a double booty but Constance! Anna beheld the action, though with eyes still captive. With captive eyes, and with lips now shut and now apart again as she vainly strove for speech, she saw still plainer his speech fail also. His hands tightened on hers, hers in his.

"Good-by!" they cried together and were dumb again; but in their mutual gaze—more vehement than their voices joined—louder than all the din about them—confession so answered worship that he snatched her to his breast; yet when he dared bend to lay a kiss upon her brow he failed once more, for she leaped and caught it on her lips.

Dishevelled, liberated, and burning with blushes, she watched the end of the train shrink away. On its last iron ladder the conductor swung aside to make room for Kincaid's stalwart spring. So! It gained one handhold, one foothold. But the foot slipped, the soldier's cap tumbled to the ground, and every onlooker drew a gasp. No, the conductor held him, and erect and secure, with bare locks ruffling in the wind of the train, he looked back, waved, and so passed from sight.

Archly, in fond Spanish, "How do you feel now?" asked Madame of her scintillant granddaughter as with their friends and the dissolving throng they moved to the carriage; and in the same tongue Flora, with a caressing smile, rejoined, "I feel like swinging you round by the hair."

Anna, inwardly frantic, chattered and laughed. "I don't know what possessed me!" she cried.

But Constance was all earnestness: "Nan, you did it for the Cause—the flag—the battery—anything but him personally. He knows it. Everybody saw that. Its very publicity—"

"Yes?" soothingly interposed Madame, "'t was a so verrie pewblic that—"

"Why, Flora," continued the well-meaning sister, "Steve says when he came back into Charleston from Fort Sumter the ladies—"

"Of course!" said Flora, sparkling afresh. "Even Steve understands that, grandma." Her foot was on a step of the carriage. A child plucked her flowing sleeve:

"Misses! Mom-a say'"—he pressed into her grasp something made of broadcloth, very red and golden—"here yo' husband's cap."



XXXI

VIRGINIA GIRLS AND LOUISIANA BOYS

Thanks are due to Mr. Richard Thorndyke Smith for the loan of his copy of a slender and now extremely rare work which at this moment lies before me. "A History of Kincaid's Battery," it is called, "From Its Origin to the Present Day," although it runs only to February, '62, and was printed (so well printed, on such flimsy, coarse paper) just before the dreadful days of Shiloh and the fall of New Orleans.

Let us never paint war too fair; but this small volume tells of little beyond the gold-laced year of 'Sixty-one, nor of much beyond Virginia, even over whose later war-years the color effects of reminiscence show blue and green and sun-lit despite all the scarlet of carnage, the black and crimson of burning, and the grim hues of sickness, squalor, and semi-starvation; show green and blue in the sunlight of victory, contrasted with those of the states west and south of her.

It tells—this book compiled largely from correspondence of persons well known to you and me—of the first "eight-days' crawl" that conveyed the chaffing, chafing command up through Mississippi, across East Tennessee into southeast Virginia and so on through Lynchburg to lovely Richmond; tells how never a house was passed in town or country but handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs, snatched-off sunbonnets, and Confederate flags wafted them on. It tells of the uncounted railway stations where swarmed the girls in white muslin aprons and red-white-and-red bows, who waved them, in as they came, and unconsciously squinted and made faces at them in the intense sunlight. It tells how the maidens gave them dainties and sweet glances, and boutonnieres of tuberoses and violets, and bloodthirsty adjurations, and blarney for blarney; gave them seven wild well-believed rumors for as many impromptu canards, and in their soft plantation drawl asked which was the one paramount "ladies' man," and were assured by every lad of the hundred that it was himself. It tells how, having heard in advance that the more authentic one was black-haired, handsome, and overtowering, they singled out the drum-major, were set right only by the roaring laughter, and huddled backward like caged quails from Kincaid's brazen smile, yet waved again as the train finally jogged on with the band playing from the roof of the rear car,—

"I'd offer thee this hand of mine If I could love thee less!"

To Anna that part seemed not so killingly funny or so very interesting, but she was not one of the book's editors.

Two or three pages told of a week in camp just outside the Virginian capital, where by day, by night, on its rocky bed sang James river; of the business quarter, noisy with army wagons—"rattling o'er the stony street," says the page; of colonels, generals, and statesmen by name—Hampton, Wigfall, the fiery Toombs, the knightly Lee, the wise Lamar; of such and such headquarters, of sentinelled warehouses, glowing ironworks, galloping aides-de-camp and couriers and arriving and departing columns, some as trig (almost) as Kincaid's Battery, with their black servants following in grotesque herds along the sidewalks; and some rudely accoutred, shaggy, staring, dust-begrimed, in baggy butternut jeans, bearing flint-lock muskets and trudging round-shouldered after fifes and drums that squealed and boomed out the strains of their forgotten ancestors: "The Campbells are coming," "Johnnie was a piper's son," or—

"My heart is ever turning back To the girl I left behind me."

"You should have seen the girls," laughs the book.

But there were girls not of the mountains or sand-hills, whom also you should have seen, at battery manoeuvres or in the tulip-tree and maple shade of proud Franklin street, or in its rose-embowered homes by night; girls whom few could dance with, or even sit long beside in the honeysuckle vines of their porticos, without risk of acute heart trouble, testifies the callow volume. They treated every lad in the battery like a lieutenant, and the "ladies' man" like a king. You should have seen him waltz them or in quadrille or cotillon swing, balance, and change them, their eyes brightening and feet quickening whenever the tune became—

"Ole mahs' love' wine, ole mis' love' silk, De piggies, dey loves buttehmilk."

Great week! tarheel camp-sentries and sand-hill street-patrols mistaking the boys for officers, saluting as they passed and always getting an officer's salute in return! Hilary seen every day with men high and mighty, who were as quick as the girls to make merry with him, yet always in their merriment seeming, he and they alike, exceptionally upright, downright, heartright, and busy. It kept the boys straight and strong.

Close after came a month or so on the Yorktown peninsula with that master of strategic ruse, Magruder, but solely in the dreariest hardships of war, minus all the grander sorts that yield glory; rains, bad food, ill-chosen camps, freshets, terrible roads, horses sick and raw-boned, chills, jaundice, emaciation, barely an occasional bang at the enemy on reconnoissances and picketings, and marches and countermarches through blistering noons and skyless nights, with men, teams, and guns trying to see which could stagger the worst, along with columns of infantry mutinously weary of forever fortifying and never fighting. Which things the book bravely makes light of, Hilary maintaining that the battery boys had a spirit to bear them better than most commands did, and the boys reporting—not to boast the special kindness everywhere of ladies for ladies' men—that Hilary himself, oftenest by sunny, but sometimes by cyclonic, treatment of commissaries, quartermasters, surgeons, and citizens, made their burdens trivial.

So we, too, lightly pass them. After all, the things most important here are matters not military of which the book does not tell. Of such Victorine, assistant editor to Miranda, learned richly from Anna—who merely lent letters—without Anna knowing it. Yet Flora drew little from Victorine, who was as Latin as Flora, truly loved Anna, and through Charlie was a better reader of Flora's Latin than he or Flora or any one suspected.

For a moment more, however, let us stay with the chronicle. At last, when all was suffered, the infuriated boys missed Ben Butler and Big Bethel! One day soon after that engagement, returning through Richmond in new uniforms—of a sort—with scoured faces, undusty locks, full ranks, fresh horses, new harness and shining pieces, and with every gun-carriage, limber, and caisson freshly painted, they told their wrath to Franklin street girls while drinking their dippers of water. Also—"Good-by!—

"'I'd offer thee this hand of mine—'"

They were bound northward to join their own Creole Beauregard at a railway junction called—.



XXXII

MANASSAS

Femininely enough, our little borrowed book, Miranda's and Victorine's compilation of letters from the front, gives no more than a few lines to the first great battle of the war.

Fred Greenleaf was one of its wounded prisoners. Hilary cared for him and sought his exchange; but owing to some invisible wire-pulling by Flora Valcour, done while with equal privacy she showed the captive much graciousness, he was still in the Parish Prison, New Orleans, in February, '62, when the book was about to be made, though recovered of wounds and prison ills and twice or thrice out on his parole, after dusk and in civilian's dress, at Callender House.

The Callenders had heard the combat's proud story often, of course, not only from battery lads bringing home dead comrades, or coming to get well of their own hurts, or never to get well of them, but also from gold-sleeved, gray-breasted new suitors of Anna (over-staying their furloughs), whom she kept from tenderer themes by sprightly queries that never tired and constantly brought forth what seemed totally unsought mentions of the battery. And she had gathered the tale from Greenleaf as well. Constance, to scandalized intimates, marvelled at her sister's tolerance of his outrageous version; but Miranda remembered how easy it is to bear with patience (on any matter but one) a rejected lover who has remained faithful, and Flora, to grandma, smiled contentedly.

Anna's own private version (sum of all), though never written even in her diary, was illustrated, mind-pictured. Into her reveries had gradually come a tableau of the great field. Inaccurate it may have been, incomplete, even grotesquely unfair; but to her it was at least clear. Here—through the middle of her blue-skied, pensive contemplation, so to speak—flowed Bull Run. High above it, circling in eagle majesty under still, white clouds, the hungry buzzard, vainly as yet, scanned the green acres of meadow and wood merry with the lark, the thrush, the cardinal. Here she discerned the untried gray brigades—atom-small on nature's face, but with Ewell, Early, Longstreet, and other such to lead them—holding the frequent fords, from Union Mills up to Lewis's. Here near Mitchell's, on a lonesome roadside, stood Kincaid's Battery, fated there to stay for hours yet, in hateful idleness and a fierce July sun, watching white smoke-lines of crackling infantry multiply in the landscape or bursting shells make white smoke-rings in the bright air, and to listen helplessly to the boom, hurtle and boom of other artilleries and the far away cheering and counter-cheering of friend and foe. Yonder in the far east glimmered Centerville, its hitherward roads, already in the sabbath sunrise, full of brave bluecoats choking with Virginia dust and throwing away their hot blankets as they came. Here she made out Stone Bridge, guarded by a brigade called Jackson's; here, crossing it east and west, the Warrenton turnpike, and yonder north of them that rise of dust above the trees which meant a flanking Federal column and crept westward as Evans watched it, toward Sudley Springs, ford, mill, and church, where already much blue infantry had stolen round by night from Centerville. Here, leading south from these, she descried the sunken Sudley road, that with a dip and a rise crossed the turnpike and Young's Branch. There eastward of it the branch turned north-east and then southeast between those sloping fields beyond which Evans and Wheat were presently fighting Burnside; through which Bee, among bursting shells, pressed to their aid against such as Keyes and Sherman, and back over which, after a long, hot struggle, she could see—could hear—the aiders and the aided swept in one torn, depleted tumult, shattered, confounded, and made the more impotent by their own clamor. Here was the many-ravined, tree-dotted, southward rise by which, in concave line, the Northern brigades and batteries, pressing across the bends of the branch, advanced to the famed Henry house plateau—that key of victory where by midday fell all the horrid weight of the battle; where the guns of Ricketts and Griffen for the North and of Walton and Imboden for the South crashed and mowed, and across and across which the opposing infantries volleyed and bled, screamed, groaned, swayed, and drove each other, staggered, panted, rallied, cheered, and fell or fought on among the fallen. Here cried Bee to the dazed crowd, "Look at Jackson's brigade standing like a stone wall." Here Beauregard and Johnson formed their new front of half a dozen states on Alabama's colours, and here a bit later the Creole general's horse was shot under him. Northward here, down the slope and over the branch, rolled the conflict, and there on the opposite rise, among his routed blues, was Greenleaf disabled and taken.

All these, I say, were in Anna's changing picture. Here from the left, out of the sunken road, came Howard, Heintzelman, and their like, and here in the oak wood that lay across it the blue and gray lines spent long terms of agony mangling each other. Here early in that part of the struggle—sent for at last by Beauregard himself, they say—came Kincaid's Battery, whirling, shouting, whip-cracking, sweating, with Hilary well ahead of them and Mandeville at his side, to the ground behind the Henry house when it had been lost and retaken and all but lost again. Here Hilary, spurring on away from his bounding guns to choose them a vantage ground, broke into a horrid melee alone and was for a moment made prisoner, but in the next had handed his captors over to fresh graycoats charging; and here, sweeping into action with all the grace and precision of the drill-ground at Camp Callender, came his battery, his and hers! Here rode Bartleson, here Villeneuve, Maxime with the colors, Tracy, Sam Gibbs; and here from the chests sprang Violett, Rareshide, Charlie and their scores of fellows, unlimbered, sighted, blazed, sponged, reloaded, pealed again, sent havoc into the enemy and got havoc from them. Here one and another groaned, and another and another dumbly fell. Here McStea, and St. Ange, Converse, Fusilier, Avendano, Ned Ferry and others limbered up for closer work, galloped, raced, plunged, reared, and stumbled, gained the new ground and made it a worse slaughter-pen than the first, yet held on and blazed, pealed, and smoked on, begrimed and gory. Here was Tracy borne away to field hospital leaving Avendano and McStea groveling in anguish under the wheels, and brave Converse and young Willie Calder, hot-headed Fusilier and dear madcap Jules St. Ange lying near them out of pain forever. Yet here their fellows blazed on and on, black, shattered, decimated, short of horses, one caisson blown up, and finally dragged away to bivouac, proud holders of all their six Callender guns, their silken flag shot-torn but unsoiled and furled only when shells could no longer reach the flying foe.



XXXIII

LETTERS

Hardly any part of this picture had come to Anna from Hilary himself.

Yes, they were in correspondence—after a fashion. That signified nothing, she would have had you understand; so were Charlie and Victorine, so were—oh!—every girl wrote to somebody at the front; one could not do less and be a patriot. Some girl patriots had a dozen on their list. Some lads had a dozen on theirs.

Ah, me! those swan-white, sky-blue, rose-pink maidens who in every town and on every plantation from Memphis to Charleston, from Richmond to New Orleans, despatched their billets by the forlornly precarious post only when they could not send them by the "urbanity" of such or such a one! Could you have contrasted with them the homeless, shelterless, pencil-borrowing, elbow-scratching, musty, fusty tatterdemalions who stretched out on the turfless ground beside their mess fires to extort or answer those cautious or incautious missives, or who for the fortieth time drew them from hiding to reread into their guarded or unguarded lines meanings never dreamed by their writers, you could not have laughed without a feeling of tears, or felt the tears without smiling. Many a chap's epistle was scrawled, many a one even rhymed, in a rifle-pit with the enemy's shells bursting over. Many a one was feebly dictated to some blessed, unskilled volunteer nurse in a barn or smoke-house or in some cannon-shattered church. From the like of that who with a woman's heart could withhold reply? Yes, Anna and Hilary were in correspondence.

So were Flora and Irby. So were Hilary and Flora. Was not Flora Anna's particular friend and Hilary's "pilot"? She had accepted the office on condition that, in his own heart's interest, their dear Anna should not know of it.

"The better part of life"—she wrote—"is it not made up of such loving concealments?"

And as he read the words in his tent he smilingly thought, "That looks true even if it isn't!"

Her letters were much more frequent than Anna's and always told of Anna fondly, often with sweet praises—not so sweet to him—of her impartial graciousness to her semicircle of brass-buttoned worshippers. Lately Flora had mentioned Greenleaf in a modified way especially disturbing.

If Anna could have made any one a full confidante such might have been Flora, but to do so was not in her nature. She could trust without stint. Distrust, as we know, was intolerable to her. She could not doubt her friends, but neither could she unveil her soul. Nevertheless, more than once, as the two exchanged—in a purely academical way—their criticisms of life, some query raised by Anna showed just what had been passing between her and Hilary and enabled Flora to keep them steered apart.

No hard task, the times being so highly calculated to make the course of true love a "hard road to travel," as the singing soldier boys called "Jordan." Letters, at any time, are sufficiently promotive of misunderstandings, but in the Confederacy they drifted from camp to camp, from pocket to pocket, like letters in bottles committed to the sea. The times being such, I say, and Hilary and Anna as they were: he a winner of men, yes! but by nature, not art; to men and women equally, a grown up, barely grown up, boy. That is why women could afford to like him so frankly. The art of courtship—of men or women—was not in him. Otherwise the battery—every gun of which, they say, counted for two as long as he was by—must have lost him through promotion before that first year was half out. The moment he became a conscious suitor, to man or woman, even by proxy, his power went from him; from pen, from tongue, from countenance. And Anna—I may have shown the fact awkwardly, but certainly you see—Anna was incurably difficult.

Too much else awaits our telling to allow here a recital of their hearts' war while love—and love's foes—hid in winter quarters, as it were. That is to say, from the season of that mad kiss which she had never forgiven herself (much less repented), to the day of Beauregard's appeal, early in '62, to all the plantations and churches in Dixie's Land to give him their bells, bells, bells—every bit of bronze or brass they could rake up or break off—to be cast into cannon; and to his own Louisiana in particular to send him, hot speed, five thousand more men to help him and Albert Sidney Johnston drive Buel and Grant out of Tennessee.

Before the battery had got half way to Virginia Hilary had written back to Anna his inevitable rhapsody over that amazing performance of hers, taking it as patent and seal of her final, utter, absolute self-bestowal. And indeed this it might have turned out to be had he but approached it by a discreet circuit through the simplest feminine essentials of negative make-believe. But to spring out upon it in that straightforward manner—! From May to February her answer to this was the only prompt reply he ever received from her. It crowds our story backward for a moment, for it came on one of those early Peninsula days previous to Manassas, happening, oddly, to reach him—by the hand of Villeneuve—as he stood, mounted, behind the battery, under a smart skirmish fire. With a heart leaping in joyous assurance he opened the small missive and bent his eyes upon its first lines.

As he did so a hostile shell, first that had ever come so near, burst just in front of his guns. A big lump of metal struck one of them on the chase, glanced, clipped off half the low top of his forage-cap and struck in the trunk of an oak behind him, and as his good horse flinched and quivered he looked unwillingly from the page toward a puff of white smoke on a distant hill, and with a broad smile said—a mere nonsense word; but the humor of such things has an absurd valuation and persistency in camps, and for months afterward, "Ah-r?—indeed!" was the battery's gay response to every startling sound. He had luck in catchwords, this Hilary. He fought the scrimmage through with those unread pages folded slim between a thumb and forefinger, often using them to point out things, and when after it he had reopened them and read them through—and through again—to their dizzying close, the battery surgeon came murmuring privately—

"Cap, what's wrong; bad news?"

"Oh!" said Hilary, looking up from a third reading, "what, this? No-o! nothing wrong in this. I was wrong. I'm all right now."

"No, you're not, Captain. You come along now and lie down. The windage of that chunk of iron has—"

"Why, Doc, I shouldn't wonder! If you'll just keep everybody away from me awhile, yourself included, I will lie down," said the unnerved commander, and presently, alone and supine, softly asked himself with grim humor, "Which chunk of iron?"

The actual text of Anna's chunk was never divulged, even to Flora. We do not need it. Neither did Flora. One of its later effects was to give the slender correspondence which crawled after it much more historical value to the battery and the battery's beloved home city than otherwise it might have had. From Virginia it told spiritedly of men, policies, and movements; sketched cabinet officers, the president, and the great leaders and subleaders in the field—Stuart, Gordon, Fitzhugh Lee. It gave droll, picturesque accounts of the artillerist's daily life; of the hard, scant fare and the lucky feast now and then on a rabbit or a squirrel, turtles' eggs, or wild strawberries. It depicted moonlight rides to dance with Shenandoah girls; the playing of camp charades; and the singing of war, home, and love songs around the late camp fire, timed to the antic banjo or the sentimental guitar. Drolly, yet with tenderness for others, it portrayed mountain storm, valley freshet, and heart-breaking night marches beside tottering guns in the straining, sucking, leaden-heavy, red clay, and then, raptly, the glories of sunrise and sunset over the contours of the Blue Ridge. And it explained the countless things which happily enable a commander to keep himself as busy as a mud-dauber, however idle the camp or however torn his own heart.

From Anna's side came such stories as that of a flag presentation to the Sumter, wherein she had taken some minor part; of seeing that slim terror glide down by Callender House for a safe escape through the blockading fleet to the high seas and a world-wide fame; of Flora's towboat privateer sending in one large but empty prize whose sale did not pay expenses, and then being itself captured by the blockaders; of "Hamlet" given by amateurs at the St. Charles Theatre; of great distress among the poor, all sorts of gayeties for their benefit, bad money, bad management, a grand concert for the army in Arkansas, women in mourning as numerous as men in uniform, and both men and women breaking down in body and mind under the universal strain.

Historically valuable, you see. Yet through all this impersonal interchange love shone out to love like lamplight through the blinds of two opposite closed windows, and every heart-hiding letter bore enough interlinear revealment of mind and character to keep mutual admiration glowing and growing. We might very justly fancy either correspondent saying at any time in those ten months to impatient or compassionate Cupid what Hilary is reported to have said on one of the greatest days between Manassas and Shiloh, in the midst of a two-sided carnage: "Yes, General, hard hit, but please don't put us out of action."



XXXIV

A FREE-GIFT BAZAAR

Again it was February. The flag of Louisiana whose lone star and red and yellow stripes still hovered benignly over the Ionic marble porch of the city hall, was a year old. A new general, young and active, was in command of all the city's forces, which again on the great Twenty-second paraded. Feebly, however; see letters to Irby and Mandeville under Brodnax in Tennessee, or to Kincaid's Battery and its commander in Virginia. For a third time the regimental standards were of a new sort. They were the battle-flag now. Its need had been learned at Manassas; eleven stars on St. Andrew's Cross, a field blood red, and the cross spanning all the field!

Again marched Continentals, Chasseurs, and so on. Yet not as before; all their ranks were of new men; the too old, the too frail, the too young, they of helpless families, and the "British subjects." Natives of France made a whole separate "French Legion," in red kepis, blue frocks, and trousers shaped like inverted tenpins, as though New Orleans were Paris itself. The whole aspect of things was alert, anxious, spent.

But it was only now this spent look had come. Until lately you might have seen entire brigades of stout-hearted men in camps near by: Camps Benjamin, Walker, Pulaski and, up in the low pine hills of Tangipahoa, Camp Moore. From Camp Lewis alone, in November, on that plain where Kincaid's Battery had drilled before it was Kincaid's, the Bienville, Crescent City and many similar "Guards," Miles' Artillery, the Orleans Light Horse, the Orleans Howitzers, the Orleans Guards, the Tirailleurs d'Orleans, etc., had passed in front of Governor Moore and half a dozen generals, twenty-four thousand strong.

Now these were mostly gone—to Bragg—to Price—to Lee and Joe Johnston, or to Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard. For the foe swarmed there, refusing to stay "hurled back." True he was here also, and not merely by scores as battle captives, but alarmingly near, in arms and by thousands. Terrible Ship Island, occupied by the boys in gray and fortified, anathematized for its horrid isolation and torrid sands, had at length been evacuated, and on New Year's Day twenty-four of the enemy's ships were there disembarking bluecoats on its gleaming white dunes. Fair Carrollton was fortified (on those lines laid out by Hilary), and down at Camp Callender the siege-guns were manned by new cannoneers; persistently and indolently new and without field-pieces or brass music or carriage company.

The spent look was still gallant, but under it was a feeling of having awfully miscalculated: flour twelve dollars a barrel and soon to be twenty. With news in abundance the papers had ceased their evening issues, so scarce was paper, and morning editions told of Atlantic seaports lost, of Johnston's retreat from Kentucky, the fall of Fort Donelson with its fifteen thousand men, the evacuation of Columbus (one of the Mississippi River's "Gibraltars") and of Nashville, which had come so near being Dixie's capital. And yet the newspapers—

"'We see no cause for despondency,'" read Constance at the late breakfast table—"oh, Miranda, don't you see that with that spirit we can never be subjugated?" She flourished the brave pages, for which Anna vainly reached.

"Yes!" said Anna, "but find the report of the Bazaar!"—while Constance read on: "'Reverses, instead of disheartening, have aroused our people to the highest pitch of animation, and their resolution to conquer is invincible.'"

"Oh, how true! and ah, dearie!"—she pressed her sister's hand amid the silver and porcelain on the old mahogany—"that news (some item read earlier, about the battery), why, Miranda, just that is a sign of impending victory! Straws tell! and Kincaid's Battery is the—"

"Biggest straw in Dixie!" jeered Anna, grasping the paper, which Constance half yielded with her eye still skimming its columns.

"Here it is!" cried both, and rose together.

'"Final Figures of the St. Louis Hotel Free-Gift Lottery and Bazaar'!" called Constance, while Anna's eyes flew over the lines.

"What are they?" exclaimed Miranda.

"Oh, come and see! Just think, Nan: last May, in Odd-Fellows' Hall, how proud we were of barely thirteen thousand, and here are sixty-eight thousand dollars!"

Anna pointed Miranda to a line, and Miranda, with their cheeks together, read out: "'Is there no end to the liberality of the Crescent City?'"

"No-o!" cried gesturing Constance, "not while one house stands on another! Why, 'Randa, though every hall and hotel from here to Carrollton—"

Anna beamingly laid her fingers on the lips of the enthusiast: "Con!—Miranda!—we can have a bazaar right in this house! Every friend we've got, and every friend of the bat'—Oh, come in, Flora Valcour! you're just in the nick o' time—a second Kirby Smith at Manassas!"

Thus came the free-gift lottery and bazaar of Callender House. For her own worth as well as to enlist certain valuable folk from Mobile, Flora was, there and then—in caucus, as it were—nominated chairman of everything. "Oh, no, no, no!"—"Oh, yes, yes, yes!"—she "yielded at last to overpowering numbers."

But between this first rapturous inception and an all-forenoon argumentation on its when, who, how, what, and for what, other matters claimed notice. "Further news from Charlie! How was his wound? What! a letter from his own hand—with full account of—what was this one? not a pitched battle, but—?"

"Anyhow a victory!" cried Constance.

"You know, Flora, don't you," asked Miranda, "that the battery's ordered away across to Tennessee?"

Flora was genuinely surprised.

"Yes," put in Constance, "to rejoin Beauregard—and Brodnax!"

Flora turned to Anna: "You have that by letter?"

"No!" was the too eager reply, "It's here in the morning paper." They read the item. The visitor flashed as she dropped the sheet.

"Now I see!" she sorely cried, and tapped Charlie's folded letter. "My God! Anna, wounded like that, Hilary Kincaid is letting my brother go with them!"

"Oh-h-h!" exclaimed the other two, "but—my dear! if he's so much better that he can be allowed—"

"Allowed!—and in those box-car'!—and with that snow—rain—gangrene—lockjaw—my God! And when 'twas already arrange' to bring him home!"

Slow Callenders! not to notice the word "bring" in place of "send": "Ah, good, Flora! ah, fine! You'll see! The dear boy's coming that far with the battery only on his way home to us!"

"H-m-m!" Flora nodded in sore irony, but then smiled with recovered poise: "From Tennessee who will bring him—before they have firs' fight another battle?—and he—my brother?"—her smile grew droll.

"Your brother sure to be in it!" gasped Anna. The Callenders looked heart-wrung, but Flora smiled on as she thought what comfort it would be to give each of them some life-long disfigurement.

Suddenly Constance cheered up: "Flora, I've guessed something! Yes, I've guessed who was intending—and, maybe, still intends—to bring him!"

Flora turned prettily to Anna: "Have you?"

Quite as prettily Anna laughed. "Connie does the guessing for the family," she said.

Flora sparkled: "But don't you know—perchanze?"

Anna laughed again and blushed to the throat as she retorted, "What has that to do with our bazaar?"

It had much to do with it.



XXXV

THE "SISTERS OF KINCAID'S BATTERY"

A week or two ran by, and now again it was March. Never an earlier twelvemonth had the women of New Orleans—nor of any town or time—the gentlewomen—spent in more unselfish or arduous toil.

At any rate so were flutteringly construed the crisp declarations of our pale friend of old, Doctor Sevier, as in Callender House he stood (with Anna seated half behind him as near as flounced crinoline would allow) beside a small table whose fragile beauty shared with hers the enthralled contemplation of every member of a numerous flock that nevertheless hung upon the Doctor's words; such a knack have women of giving their undivided attention to several things at once. Flora was getting her share.