Kincaid's Battery Part 42

He ceased and listened. Certainly, somewhere, some one had moaned. Sounds throughout the house were growing, as if final orders had set many in motion at once. For some cause unrelated to him or to Anna, to Flora or the silent boat, bugles and drums were a.s.sembling the encamped brigade. Suddenly, not knowing why, he flashed round. Flora was within half a step of him with her right arm upthrown. He seized it, but vain was the sparring skill that had won at the willow pond. Her brow was on his breast, the knife was in her left hand, she struck with thrice her natural power, an evil chance favored her, and, hot as lightning, deep, deep, the steel plunged in. He gulped a great breath, his eyes flamed, but no cry came from him or her. With his big right hand crushing her slim fingers as they clung to the hilt, he dragged the weapon forth and hurled her off.

Before he could find speech she had regained her balance and amazed him yet again with a smile. The next instant she had lifted the dagger against herself, but he sprang and s.n.a.t.c.hed it, exclaiming as he drew back:--

"No, you sha'n't do that, either."

She strove after it. He held her off by an arm, but already his strength was failing. "My G.o.d!" he groaned, "it's you, Flora Valcour, who've killed me. Oh, how did--how did you--was it accid'--wasn't it accident? Fly!" He flung her loose. "For your life, fly! Oh, that gun! Oh, G.o.d send it! Fly! Oh, Anna, Anna Callender! Oh, your city, Flora Valcour, your own city! Fly, poor child! I'll keep up the sham for you!"

Starting now here, now there, Flora wavered as he reeled to the broken wall and seized the trowel. The knife dropped to the floor but he set foot on it, brandished the tool and began to sing:

"When I hands in my checks, O, my ladies--"

A cry for help rang from Flora. She darted for the door but was met by Greenleaf. "Stay!" he repeated, and tone, hand, eye told her she was a prisoner. He halted aghast at the crimson on her hands and brow, on Hilary's, on Hilary's lips and on the floor, and himself called, "Help here! a surgeon! help!" while Kincaid faced him gaily, still singing:

"Mighty little I espec's, O, my ladies--"

Stooping to re-exchange the tool for the weapon, the singer went limp, swayed, and as Greenleaf sprang to him, toppled over, lengthened out and relaxed on the arm of his foe and friend. Wild-eyed, Flora swept to her knees beside him, her face and form all horror and affright, crying in a voice fervid and genuine as only truth can make it in the common run of us, "He di'n' mean! Oh, he di'n' mean! 'Twas all accident! He di'n' mean!"

"Yes, Fred," said Hilary. "She--she--mere accident, old man. Keep it mum." He turned a suffering brow to Flora: "You'll explain for me--when"--he gathered his strength--"when the--boat's gone."

The room had filled with officers asking "who, how, what?" "Did it himself, to cheat the gallows," Madame heard one answer another as by some fortune she was let in. She found Greenleaf chief in a group busy over the fallen man, who lay in Flora's arms, deadly pale, yet with a strong man's will in every lineament.

"Listen, Fred," he was gasping. "It'll sound. It's got to! Oh, it will! One minute, Doctor, please. My love and a city--Fred, can't some one look and see if--?"

From a lifted window curtain the young aide who had brought Anna to the house said, "Boat's off."

"Thank G.o.d!" panted Hilary. "Oh, Fred, Fred, my girl and all! Just a minute, Doctor,--there!"

A soft, heavy boom had rolled over the land. The pain-racked listener flamed for joy and half left the arms that held him: "Oh, Fred, wasn't that heaven's own music?" He tried to finish his song:

"But whaheveh I is sent, dey mus' undehstan'--"

and swooned.

LXVII

MOBILE

About a green spot crowning one of the low fortified hills on a northern edge of Mobile sat Bartleson, Mandeville, Irby, Villeneuve and two or three lieutenants, on ammunition-boxes, fire-logs and the sod, giving their whole minds to the retention of Anna and Miranda Callender, who sat on camp-stools. The absent Constance was down in the town, just then bestowing favors not possible for any one else to offer so acceptably to a certain duplicate and very self-centered Steve aged eighty days--sh-sh-sh!

The camp group's soft discourse was on the character of one whom this earliest afternoon in August they had followed behind m.u.f.fled drums to his final rest. Beginning at Carrollton Gardens, they said, then in the flowery precincts of Callender House, later in that death-swept garden on Vicksburg's inland bluffs, and now in this one, of Flora's, a garden yet, peaceful and fragrant, though no part of its burnt house save the chimneys had stood in air these three years and a half, the old hero--

"Yes," chimed Miranda to whoever was saying it--

The old hero, despite the swarm of mortal perils and woes he and his brigade and its battery had come through in that period, had with a pleasing frequency--to use the worn-out line just this time more--

"Sat in the roses and heard the birds' song."

The old soldier, they all agreed, had had a feeling for roses and song, which had gilded the edges and angles of his austere spirit and betrayed a tenderness too deep hid for casual discovery, yet so vital a part of him that but for its lacerations--with every new public disaster--he never need have sunk under these year-old Vicksburg wounds which had dragged him down at last.

Miranda retold the splendid antic he had cut in St. Charles Street the day Virginia seceded. Steve recounted how the aged warrior had regained strength from Chickamauga's triumph and lost it again after Chattanooga. Two or three recalled how he had suffered when Banks' Red River Expedition desolated his fair estate and "forever lured away" his half-a-thousand "deluded people." He must have succ.u.mbed then, they said, had not the whole "invasion" come to grief and been driven back into New Orleans. New Orleans! younger sister of little Mobile, yet toward which Mobile now looked in a daily torture of apprehension. And then Hilary's beloved Bartleson put in what Anna sat wishing some one would say.

"With what a pa.s.sion of disowned anxiety," he remarked, "had the General, to the last, watched every step, slip and turn in what Steve had once called 'the multifurieuse carreer' of Hilary Kincaid."

So turned the talk upon the long-time absentee, and instances were cited of those outbreaks of utter nonsense which were wont to come from him in awful moments: gibes with which no one reporting them to the uncle could ever make the "old man" smile. The youngest lieutenant (a gun-corporal that day the Battery left New Orleans) told how once amid a fearful havoc, when his piece was so short of men that Kincaid was himself down on the ground sighting and firing it, and an aide-de-camp galloped up asking hotly, "Who's in command here!" the powder-blackened Hilary had risen his tallest and replied,--

"I!... b, e, x, bex, Ibex!"

A gentle speculation followed as to which of all Hilary's utterances had taken finest effect on the boys, and it was agreed that most potent for good was the brief talk away back at Camp Callender, in which he had told them that, being artillery, they must know how to wait unmurmuring through months of "rotting idleness" from one deadly "tea-party" to another. For a year, now, they had done that, and done it the better because he had all that same time been forced to do likewise in New Orleans, a prisoner in hospital, long at death's door, and only now getting well.

Anna remained silent. While there was praise of him what more could she want for sweet calm?

"True," said somebody, "in these forty-odd months between March, 'Sixty-one, and August, 'Sixty-four, all hands had got their fill of war; laurels gained were softer to rest on than laurels unsprouted, and it ought to be as easy as rolling off a log for him to lie on his prison-hospital cot in 'rotting idleness,' lulled in the proud a.s.surance that he had saved Mobile, or at least postponed for a year--"

"Hilary?" frowningly asked Adolphe.

"Yes," with a firm quietness said Anna.

Villeneuve gallantly amended that somebody else owned an undivided half in the glory of that salvation and would own more as soon as the Union fleet (daily growing in numbers) should try to enter the bay: a hint at Anna, of course, and at the great ram Tennessee, which the Confederate admiral, Buchanan, had made his flag-ship, and whose completion, while nothing else was ready but three small wooden gunboats, was due--they had made even Anna believe--to the safe delivery of the Bazaar fund.

So then she, forced to talk, presently found herself explaining how such full news of Hilary had so often come in these awful months; to wit, by the long, kind letters of a Federal nurse--and Federal officer's wife--but for whose special devotion the captive must have perished, and who, Anna revealed, was the schoolmistress banished North in 'Sixty-one. What she kept untold was that, by favor of Greenleaf, Hilary had been enabled to auction off the poor remains of his home belongings and thus to restore the returned exile her gold. The speaker let her eyes wander to an approaching orderly, and a lieutenant took the chance to mention that early drill near Carrollton, which the General had viewed from the Callenders' equipage. Their two horses, surviving the sh.e.l.ls and famine of Vicksburg, had been among the mere half-dozen of good beasts retained at the surrender by some ruse, and--

The orderly brought Bartleson a doc.u.ment and Mandeville a newspaper--

And it was touching, to-day, the lieutenant persisted, to see that once so beautiful span, handsome yet, leading in the team of six that drew the draped caisson which--

"Ah, yes!" a.s.sented all.

Mandeville hurried to read out the news from Virginia, which could still reach them through besieged Atlanta. It was of the Petersburg mine and its slaughter, and thrilled every one. Yet Anna watched Bartleson open his yellow official envelope.

"Marching orders?" asked Miranda, and while his affirming smile startled every one, Steve, for some reason in the newspaper itself, put it up.

"Are the enemy's ships--?" began Anna--

"We're ordered down the bay," replied Bartleson.

"Then so are we," she dryly responded, at which all laughed, though the two women had spent much time of late on a small boat which daily made the round of the bay's defenses. In a dingy borrowed rig they hastened away toward their lodgings.

As they drove, Anna pressed Miranda's hand and murmured, "Oh, for Hilary Kincaid!"

"Ah, dear! not to be in this--'tea-party'?"

"Yes! Yes! His boys were in so many without him, from Shiloh to Port Gibson, and now, with all their first guns lost forever--theirs and ours--lost for them, not by them--and after all this year of idleness, and the whole battery hanging to his name as it does--oh, 'Randy, it would do more to cure his hurts than ten hospitals, there or here."

"But the new risks, Nan, as he takes them!"

"He'll take them wherever he is. I can't rest a moment for fear he's trying once more to escape."

(In fact, that is what, unknown to her, he had just been doing.)

"But, 'Randa?"