Chapter 12

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 képis, 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'Orléans, 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.

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

"Ah!" A stir of assent ran through all the gathering. The long married, the newly wed, the affianced, the suspected, the débutantes, 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 amusement 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 crevasse 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 titles), laces, porcelain, glass, alabaster, bales of cotton, big bank checks, hair flowers, barouches, bonds, shawls, carvings, shell-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 basement (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. Glass cases borrowed of merchants, milliners and apothecaries would receive the carefully classified 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.

XXXVI

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 multitudinous 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 cocksure reply as they alighted in Canal 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 godsends 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. God 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 Dick 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 Canal 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 passes.

The coachman named the steamer to Constance: "Yass, 'm, de ole _Genl al Quitman_; dass 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.

XXXVII