Kincaid's Battery Part 23

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.

x.x.xV

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.

This, he said, was a women's--a gentlewomen's--war.

"Ah!" A stir of a.s.sent ran through all the gathering. The long married, the newly wed, the affianced, the suspected, the debutantes, the post-marriageable, every one approved. Yes, a gentlewomen's war--for the salvation of society!

Hardly had this utterance thrilled round, however, when the speaker fell into an error which compelled Anna softly to interrupt, her amazed eyes and protesting smile causing a general hum of amus.e.m.e.nt and quickening of fans. "No-o!" she whispered to him, "she was not chairman of the L.S.C.A., but only one small secretary of that vast body, and chairman pro tem.--nothing more!--of this mere contingent of it, these 'Sisters of Kincaid's Battery.'"

Pro tem., nothing more! But that is how--silly little Victorine leading the hue and cry which suddenly overwhelmed all counter-suggestion as a levee creva.s.se sweeps away sand-bags--that is how the permanent and combined chairmanship of Sisters and Bazaar came to be forcibly thrust upon Anna instead of Flora.

Experienced after Odd-Fellows' Hall and St. Louis Hotel, the ladies were able to take up this affair as experts. Especially they had learned how to use men; to make them as handy as--"as hairpins," prompted Miranda, to whom Anna had whispered it; and of men they needed all they could rally, to catch the first impact of the vast and chaotic miscellany of things which would be poured into their laps, so to speak, and upon their heads: bronzes, cutlery, blankets, watches, thousands of brick (orders on the brick-yards for them, that is), engravings, pianos, paintings, books, cosmetics, marbles, building lots (their t.i.tles), laces, porcelain, gla.s.s, alabaster, bales of cotton, big bank checks, hair flowers, barouches, bonds, shawls, carvings, sh.e.l.l-work boxes, jewellery, silks, ancestral relics, curios from half round the world, wax fruits, tapestries, and loose sapphires, diamonds, rubies, and pearls. The Callenders and Valcours could see, in fancy, all the first chaos of it and all the fair creation that was to arise from it.

What joy of planning! The grove should be ruddy with pine-knot flares perched high, and be full of luminous tents stocked with stuffs for sale at the most patriotic prices by Zingaras, Fatimas, and Scheherazades. All the walks of the garden would be canopied with bunting and gemmed with candles blinking like the fireflies round that bower of roses by Bendermere's stream. The verandas would be enclosed in canvas and be rich in wares, textiles, and works of art. Armed sentries from that splendid command, the Crescent Regiment, would be everywhere in the paved and latticed bas.e.m.e.nt (gorged with wealth), and throughout the first and second floors. The centrepiece in the arrangement of the double drawing-rooms would be a great field-piece, one of Hilary's casting, on its carriage, bright as gold, and flanked with stacks of muskets. The leading item in the hall would be an allegorical painting--by a famous Creole artist of nearly sixty years earlier--Louisiana Refusing to Enter the Union. Gla.s.s cases borrowed of merchants, milliners and apothecaries would receive the carefully cla.s.sified smaller gifts of rare value, and a committee of goldsmiths, art critics, and auctioneers, would set their prices. If one of those torrential hurricanes--however, there came none.

How much, now, could they hope to clear? Well, the women of Alabama, to build a gun-boat, had raised two hundred thousand dollars, and--

"They will 'ave to raise mo'," twittered Madame Valcour, "if New Orleans fall'."

"She will not fall," remarked Anna from the chair, and there was great applause, as great as lace mitts could make.

Speaking of that smaller stronghold, Flora had a capital suggestion: Let this enterprise be named "for the common defence." Then, in the barely conceivable event of the city's fall, should the proceeds still be in women's hands--and it might be best to keep them so--let them go to the defence of Mobile!

Another idea--Miranda's and Victorine's--quite as gladly accepted, and they two elected to carry it out--was, to compile, from everybody's letters, a history of the battery, to be sold at the bazaar. The large price per copy which that work commanded was small compared with what it would bring now.

x.x.xVI

THUNDER-CLOUD AND SUNBURST

Could they have known half the toil, care, and trial the preparation of this Bazaar was to cost their friends, apologized the Callenders as it neared completion, they would never have dared propose it.

But the smiling reply was Spartan: "Oh! what are such trifles when we think how our own fathers, husbands, and brothers have suffered--even in victory!" The "Sisters" were still living on last summer's glory, and only by such indirections alluded to defeats.

Anna smiled as brightly as any, while through her mind flitted spectral visions of the secondary and so needless carnage in those awful field-hospitals behind the battles, and of the storms so likely to follow the fights, when the midnight rain came down in sheets on the wounded still lying among the dead. On all the teeming, bleeding front no father, husband, or brother was hers, but amid the mult.i.tudinous exploits and agonies her thoughts were ever on him who, by no tie but the heart's, had in the past year grown to be father, mother, sister, and brother to the superb hundred whom she so tenderly knew, who so worshipingly knew her, and still whose lives, at every chance, he was hurling at the foe as stones from a sling.

"After all, in these terrible time'," remarked Miss Valcour in committee of the whole--last session before the public opening--"any toil, even look' at selfishly, is better than to be idle."

"As if you ever looked at anything selfishly!" said a matron, and there was a patter of hands.

"Or as if she were ever in danger of being idle!" fondly put in a young battery sister.

As these two rattled and crashed homeward in a deafening omnibus they shouted further comments to each other on this same subject. It was strange, they agreed, to see Miss Valcour, right through the midst of these terrible times, grow daily handsomer. Concerning Anna, they were of two opinions. The matron thought that at moments Anna seemed to have aged three years in one, while, to the girl it appeared that her beauty--Anna's--had actually increased; taken a deeper tone, "or something." This huge bazaar business, they screamed, was something a girl like Anna should never have been allowed to undertake.

"And yet," said the matron on second thought, "it may really have helped her to bear up."

"Against what?"

"Oh,--all our general disturbance and distress, but the battery's in particular. You know its very guns are, as we may say, hers, and everything that happens around them, or to any one who belongs to them in field, camp, or hospital, happens, in her feeling, to her."

The girl interrupted with a knowing touch: "You realize there's something else, don't you?"

Her companion showed pain: "Yes, but--I hoped you hadn't heard of it. I can't bear to talk about it. I know how common it is for men and girls to trifle with each other, but for such as he--who had the faith of all of us, yes, and of all his men, that he wasn't as other men are--for Hilary Kincaid to dawdle with Anna--with Anna Callender--"

"Oh!" broke in the girl, a hot blush betraying her own heart, "I don't think you've got the thing right at all. Why, it's Anna who's making the trouble! The dawdling is all hers! Oh, I have it from the best authority, though I'm not at liberty--"

"My dear girl, you've been misled. The fault is all his. I know it from one who can't be mistaken."

The damsel blushed worse. "Well, at any rate," she said, "the case doesn't in any slightest way involve Miss Valcour."

"Oh, I know that!" was the c.o.c.ksure reply as they alighted in Ca.n.a.l Street to take an up-town mule-car.

Could Madame and Flora have overheard, how they would have smiled to each other.

With now a wary forward step and now a long pause, and now another short step and another pause, Hilary, in his letters to Anna, despite Flora's often successful contrivings, had ventured back toward that understanding for which the souls of both were starving, until at length he had sent one which seemed, itself, to kneel, for him, at her feet--would have seemed, had it not miscarried. But, by no one's craft, merely through the "terribleness" of the times, it had gone forever astray. When, not knowing this, he despatched another, this latter had promptly arrived, but its unintelligible allusions to lines in the lost forerunner were unpardonable for lack of that forerunner's light, and it contained especially one remark--trivial enough--which, because written in the irrepressible facetiousness so inborn in him, but taken, alas! in the ineradicable earnest so natural to her, had compelled her to reply in words which made her as they went, and him as they smote him, seem truly to have "aged three years in one." Yet hardly had they left her before you would have said she had recovered the whole three years and a fraction over, on finding a postscript, till then most unaccountably overlooked, which said that its writer had at that moment been ordered (as soon as he could accomplish this and that and so and so) to hasten home to recruit the battery with men of his own choice, and incidentally to bring the wounded Charlie with him. Such G.o.dsends raise the spring-tides of praise and human kindness in us, and it was on the very next morning, after finding that postscript, that there had come to Anna her splendid first thought of the Bazaar.

And now behold it, a visible reality! Unlighted as yet, unpeopled, but gorgeous, multiform, sentinelled, and ready, it needed but the touch of the taper to set forth all the glories of art and wealth tenfolded by self-sacrifice for a hallowed cause. Here was the Bazaar, and yonder, far away on the southern border of Tennessee, its wasted ranks still spruce in their tatters, the battery; iron-hearted Bartleson in command; its six yellow daughters of destruction a trifle black in the lips, but bright on the cheeks and virgins all; Charlie on the roster though not in sight, the silken-satin standard well in view, rent and pierced, but showing seven red days of valor legended on its folds, and with that white-moustached old centaur, Maxime, still upholding it in action and review.

Intermediate, there, yonder, and here, from the farthest Mississippi State line clear down to New Orleans, were the camps of instruction, emptying themselves northward, pouring forth infantry, cavalry, artillery by every train that could be put upon the worn-out rails and by every main-travelled wagon road. But homeward-bound Charlie and his captain, where were they? Irby knew.

Flora, we have seen, had been willing, eager, for them to come--to arrive; not because Charlie, but because his captain, was one of the two. But Irby, never sure of her, and forever jealous of the ladies' man, had contrived, in a dull way, to detain the home-comers in mid-journey, with telegraphic orders to see here a commandant and there a factory of arms and hurry men and munitions to the front. So he killed time and tortured hope for several hearts, and that was a comfort in itself.

However, here was the Bazaar. After all, its sentinels were not of the Crescent Regiment, for the same grave reason which postponed the opening until to-morrow; the fact that to-day that last flower of the city's young high-life was leaving for the fields of war, as Kincaid's Battery had left in the previous spring. Yet, oh, how differently! Again up St. Charles Street and down Calliope the bands played, the fifes squealed; once more the old men marched ahead, opened ranks, let the serried youngsters through and waved and hurrahed and kissed and wept; but all in a new manner, far more poignant than the earlier. G.o.d only knew what was to happen now, to those who went or to those who stayed, or where or how any two of them should ever meet again. The Callenders, as before, were there. Anna had come definitely resolved to give one particular beardless d.i.c.k Smith a rousing kiss, purely to nullify that guilty one of last year. But when the time came she could not, the older one had made it impossible; and when the returning bands broke out--

"Charlie is my darling! my darling! my darling!"

and the tears came dripping from under Connie's veil and Victorine's and Miranda's and presently her own, she was glad of the failure.

As they were driving homeward across Ca.n.a.l Street, she noted, out beyond the Free Market, a steamboat softly picking its way in to the levee. Some coal-barges were there, she remembered, lading with pitch-pine and destined as fire-ships, by that naval lieutenant of the despatch-boat whom we know, against the Federal fleet lying at the head of the pa.s.ses.

The coachman named the steamer to Constance: "Ya.s.s, 'm, de ole Genl al Quitman; da.s.s her."

"From Vicksburg and the Bends!" cried the inquirer. "Why, who knows but Charlie Val--?"

With both hands she clutched Miranda and Victorine, and brightened upon Anna.

"And Flora not with us!" was the common lament.

x.x.xVII

"TILL HE SAID, 'I'M COME HAME, MY LOVE'"

How absurdly poor the chance! Yet they bade the old coachman turn that way, and indeed the facts were better than the hope of any one of them. Charlie, very gaunt and battered, but all the more enamored of himself therefor and for the new chevrons of a gun corporal on his dingy sleeve, was actually aboard that boat. In one of the small knots of pa.s.sengers on her boiler deck he was modestly companioning with a captain of infantry and two of staff, while they now exchanged merry anecdotes of the awful retreat out of Tennessee into Mississippi, now grimly d.a.m.ned this or that bad strategy, futile destruction, or horrible suffering, now re-discussed the comical chances of a bet of General Brodnax's, still pending, and now, with the crowd, moved downstairs to the freight deck as the boat began to nose the wharf.