XLV
STEVE--MAXIME--CHARLIE--
There was no real choice. Nothing seemed quite rational but the heaviesttask of all--to wait, and to wait right here at home.
To this queenly city must come first and fullest all news of her ownsons, and here the "five" would not themselves be "missing" shouldbetter tidings--or worse--come seeking them over the wires.
"At the front?" replied Doctor Sevier to Anna, "why, at the front you'llbe kept in the rear, lost in a storm of false rumors."
General Brodnax, in a letter rife with fatherly romantic tenderness andwith splendid praise of Hilary as foremost in the glorious feat whichhad saved old "Roaring Betsy" but lost (or mislaid) him and his threecomrades, also bade her wait. Everything, he assured her, that humansympathy or the art of war--or Beauregard's special orders--could effectwas being done to find the priceless heroes. In the retreat of a greathost--ah, me! retreat was his very word and the host wasDixie's--retreating after its first battle, and that an awful one, indeluging rains over frightful roads and brimming streams, unsheltered,ill fed, with sick and wounded men and reeling vehicles hourly breakingdown, a hovering foe to be fended off, and every dwelling in the land ahospitable refuge, even captains of artillery or staff might be mosthonorably and alarmingly missing yet reappear safe and sound. So, for aweek and more it was sit and wait, pace the floor and wait, wake in thenight and wait; so for Flora as well as for Anna (with a difference),both of them anxious for Charlie--and Steve--and Maxime, but in anguishfor another.
Then tidings, sure enough! glad tidings! Mandeville and Maxime safe incamp again and back to duty, whole, hale and in the saddle. Theirletters came by the wasted yellow hands of two or three of thehome-coming wounded, scores of whom were arriving by every south-boundtrain. From the aide-de-camp and the color-bearer came the first wholestory of how Kincaid, with his picked volunteers, barely a gundetachment, and with Mandeville, who had brought the General's consent,had stolen noiselessly over the water-soaked leaves of a thickety oakwood in the earliest glimmer of a rainy dawn and drawn off theabandoned gun by hand to its waiting horses; also how, when threatenedby a hostile patrol, Hilary, Mandeville, Maxime and Charlie had hurriedback on foot into the wood and hotly checked the pursuit long enough fortheir fellows to mount the team, lay a shoulder to every miry wheel andflounder away with the prize. But beyond that keen moment when the four,after their one volley from ambush, had sprung this way and thatshouting absurd orders to make-believe men, cheering and firing frombehind trees, and (cut off from their horses) had made for a gully andswamp, the two returned ones could tell nothing of the two unreturnedexcept that neither of them, dead or alive, was anywhere on the groundof the fight or flight as they knew it. For days, inside the enemy'sadvancing lines, they had prowled in ravines and lain in blackberrypatches and sassafras fence-rows, fed and helped on of nights by thebeggared yet still warm-hearted farm people and getting through at last,but with never a trace of Kincaid or Charlie, though after their ownperilous search they had inquired, inquired, inquired.
So, wait, said every one and every dumb condition, even the miseries ofthe great gray army, of which Anna had mind pictures again, as it toiledthrough mire and lightning, rain, sleet and hail, and as its thousandsof sick and shattered lay in Corinth dying fifty a day. And Flora andAnna waited, though with minds placid only to each other and the outerworld.
"Yes," moaned Anna to Constance, when found at dead of night staringCorinthward from a chamber window. "Yes, friends advise! All our friendsadvise! What daring thing did any one ever do who waited for friends toadvise it? Does your Steve wait for friends to advise?... Patience? Ah,lend me yours! You don't need it now.... Fortitude? Oh, I never hadany!... What? command the courage to do nothing when nothing is the onlyhard thing to do? Who, I? Connie! I don't even want it. I'm a craven; Iwant the easy thing! I want to go nurse the box-carloads andmule-wagonloads of wounded at Corinth, at Okolona and strewed all theway down to Mobile--that's full of them. Hilary may be somewhere amongthem--unidentified! They say he wore no badge of rank that morning, youknow, and carried the carbine of a wounded cavalryman to whom he hadgiven his coat. Oh, he's mine, Con, and I'm his. We're not engaged,we're _married,_ and I _must_ go. It's only a step--except in miles--andI'm going! I'm going for your sake and Miranda's. You know you'restaying on my account, not for me to settle this bazaar business but towait for news that's never coming till I go and bring it!"
This tiny, puny, paltry business of the bazaar--the whereabouts of thedagger and its wealth, or of the detectives, gone for good into militarysecret service at the front--she drearily smiled away the whole trivialriddle as she lay of nights contriving new searches for thatinestimable, living treasure, whose perpetual "missing," right yonder"almost in sight from the housetop," was a dagger in her heart.
And the Valcours? Yes, they, too, had their frantic impulses to rise andfly. For Madame, though her lean bosom bled for the lost boy, thefiercest pain of waiting was that its iron coercion lay in theirpenury. For Flora its sharpest pangs were in her own rage; a rage not ofthe earlier, cold sort against Anna and whoever belonged to Anna--thattransport had always been more than half a joy--but a new, hot rageagainst herself and the finical cheapness of her scheming, a rage thatstabbed her fair complacency with the revelation that she had a heart,and a heart that could ache after another. The knife of that rage turnedin her breast every time she cried to the grandam, "We must go!" andthat rapacious torment simpered, "No funds," adding sidewise hintstoward Anna's jewels, still diligently manoeuvred for, but stillsomewhere up-stairs in Callender House, sure to go with Anna should Annago while the manoeuvrers were away.
A long lane to any one, was such waiting, lighted, for Anna, only by afaint reflection of that luster of big generals' strategy and thatinvincibility of the Southern heart which, to all New Orleans and evento nations beyond seas, clad Dixie's every gain in light and hid hergravest disasters in beguiling shadow. But suddenly one day the longlane turned. The secret had just leaked out that the forts down theriver were furiously engaged with the enemy's mortar-boats a few milesbelow them and that in the past forty-eight hours one huge bomb everyminute, three thousand in all, had dropped into those forts or burstover them, yet the forts were "proving themselves impregnable." The laneturned and there stood Charlie.
There he stood, in the stairway door of the front room overlookingJackson Square. The grandmother and sister had been keenly debating thenews and what to do about it, the elder bird fierce to stay, the youngerbent on flight, and had just separated to different windows, when theyheard, turned and beheld him there, a stranger in tattered gray andrailway dirt, yet their own coxcomb boy from his curls to his ill-shodfeet. Flora had hardly caught her breath or believed her eyes before thegrandmother was on his neck patting and petting his cheeks and head andplying questions in three languages: When, where, how, why, how, whereand when?
Dimly he reflected their fond demonstrations. No gladness was in hisface. His speech, as hurried as theirs, answered no queries. He askedloftily for air, soap, water and the privacy of his own room, and whenthey had followed him there and seen him scour face, arms, neck, andhead, rub dry and resume his jacket and belt, he had grown only morecareworn and had not yet let his sister's eyes rest on his.
He had but a few hours to spend in the city, he said; had broughtdespatches and must carry others back by the next train. His story, heinsisted, was too long to tell before he had delivered certain batteryletters; one to Victorine, two to Constance Mandeville, and so on. Herewas one to Flora, from Captain Irby; perhaps the story was in it. At anyrate, its bearer must rush along now. He toppled his "grannie" into arocking-chair and started away. He "would be back as soon as ever he--"
But Flora filled the doorway. He had to harden his glance to hers atlast. In her breast were acutest emotions widely at war, yet in her eyeshe saw only an unfeeling light, and it was the old woman behind him whoalone noted how painfully the girl's fingers were pinched upon Irby'sunopened letter.
The boy's stare betrayed no less anger than sufferingand as Flora spoke he flushed.
"Charlie," she melodiously began, but his outcry silenced her:
"Now, by the eternal great God Almighty, Flora Valcour, if you dare toask me that--" He turned to the grandmother, dropped to his knees,buried his face in her lap and sobbed.
With genuine tenderness she stroked his locks. Yet while she did so shelifted to the sister a face lighted up with a mirth of deliverance. Tonod, toss, and nod again, was poor show for her glee; she smirked andwrithed to the disdaining girl like a child at a mirror, and, thoughsitting thus confined, gave all the effects of jigging over the floor.Hilary out of the way! Kincaid eliminated, and the whole question freeof him, this inheritance question so small and mean to all but her andIrby, but to him and her so large, so paramount! Silently, but plainlyto the girl, her mouth widely motioned, "Il est mort! grace"--one handstopped stroking long enough to make merrily the sign of cross--"graceau ciel, il est mort!"
No moment of equal bitterness had Flora Valcour ever known. To tell halfher distresses would lose us in their tangle, midmost in which was achoking fury against the man whom unwillingly she loved, for escapingher, even by a glorious death. One thought alone--that Anna, as truly asif stricken blind, would sit in darkness the rest of her days--lightenedher torture, and with that thought she smiled a stony loathing on themincing grandam and the boy's unlifted head. Suddenly, purpose gleamedfrom her. She could not break forth herself, but to escape suffocationshe must and would procure an outburst somewhere. Measuredly, but withevery nerve and tendon overstrung, she began to pace the room.
"Don't cry, Charlie," she smoothly said in a voice as cold as the crawlof a snake. The brother knew the tone, had known it from childhood, andthe girl, glancing back on him, was pleased to see him stiffen. A fewsteps on she added pensively, "For a soldier to cry--and befo' ladies--aladies' man--of that batt'rie--tha's hardly fair--to the ladies, eh,grandmama?"
But the boy only pressed his forehead harder down and clutched the agedknees under it till their owner put on, to the scintillant beauty, alook of alarm and warning. The girl, musingly retracing her calculatedsteps to where the kneeler seemed to clinch himself to his posture,halted, stroked with her slippered toe a sole of his rude shoes andspoke once more: "Do they oft-ten boohoo like that, grandma, thoseartillerie?"
The boy whirled up with the old woman clinging. A stream of oaths andcurses appallingly original poured from him, not as through the lipsalone but from his very eyes and nostrils. That the girl was first ofall a fool and damned was but a trivial part of the cry--of theexplosion of his whole year's mistaken or half-mistaken inferences andsmothered indignation. With equal flatness and blindness he accused herof rejoicing in the death of Kincaid: the noblest captain (he ramped on)that ever led a battery; kindest friend that ever ruled a camp; gayest,hottest, daringest fighter of Shiloh's field; fiercest for man's puritythat ever loved the touch of women's fingers; sternest that ever wept onthe field of death with the dying in his arms; and the scornfullest ofpromotion that ever was cheated of it at headquarters.
All these extravagances he cursed out, too witless to see that this samehero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whoselife his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilaryfor making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some darkleague against him--"hell only knew what"--along with that snail of acousin whom everybody but Kincaid himself and the silly old uncle knewto be the fallen man's most venomous foe. Throughout the storm thegrandmother's fingers pattered soothing caresses, while Flora stood asunruffled by his true surmises as by any, a look of cold interest in hernarrowed eyes, and her whole bodily and spiritual frame drinking relieffrom his transport. Now, while he still raged, she tenderly smiled ontheir trembling ancestress.
"Really, _you_ know grandmama, sometimes me also I feel like that, whento smazh the furniture 't would be a delightful--or to wring somebodythe neck, yes. But for us, and to-day, even to get a li'l' mad, how isthat a possibl'?" She turned again, archly, to the brother, but flashedin alarm and sprang toward him.
His arm stiffly held her off. With failing eyes bent on the whimperinggrandmother he sighed a disheartened oath and threshed into a chairgasping--
"My wound--opened again."
Kincaid's Battery Page 45
