Chapter 15

All at once he saw! Throwing away her hands he caught her head between his big palms. Her arms flew round his neck, her lips went to his, and for three heart-throbs they clung like bee and flower. Then he sprang down the stair, swung into the saddle, and fled after his men.

XLII

"VICTORY! I HEARD IT AS PL'--"

The last few days of March and first three or four of April, since the battery boys and the three captains had gone, were as full of frightened and angry questions as the air is of bees around a shaken hive.

So Anna had foreboded, yet it was not so for the causes she had in mind; not one fierce hum asked another where the bazaar's money was. That earlier bazaar, in the St. Louis Hotel, had taken six weeks to report its results, and now, with everybody distracted by a swarm and buzz of far larger, livelier, hotter queries, the bazaar's sponsors might report or not, as they chose. Meanwhile, was the city really in dire and shameful jeopardy, or was it as safe as the giddiest boasted? Looking farther away, over across Georgia to Fort Pulaski, so tremendously walled and armed, was the "invader" merely wasting lives, trying to take it? On North Carolina's coast, where our priceless blockade-runners plied, had Newbern, as so stubbornly rumored, and had Beaufort, already fallen, or had they really not? Had the _Virginia_ not sunk the _Monitor_ and scattered the Northern fleets? Was it _not_ by France, after all (asked the Creoles), but only by Paraguay that the Confederacy had been "reco'nize'"? Was there _no_ truth in the joyous report that McClellan had vanished from Yorktown peninsula? _Was_ the loss of Cumberland Gap a trivial matter, and did it in fact not cut in two our great strategic front? Up yonder at Corinth, our "new and far better" base, was Sidney Johnston an "imbecile," a "coward," a "traitor"? or was he not rather an unparagoned strategist who, having at last "lured the presumptuous foe" into his toils, was now, with Beauregard, notwithstanding Beauregard's protracted illness, about to make the "one fell swoop" of our complete deliverance? And after the swoop and its joy and its glory, when Johnnie should come marching home, whose Johnnies, and how many, would never return? As to your past-and-gone bazaar, law, honey--!

So, as to that item, in all the wild-eyed city shaking with its ague of anxieties only Anna was troubled when day after day no detective came back with the old mud-caked dagger and now both were away on some quite alien matter, no one could say where. She alone was troubled, for she alone knew it was the bazaar's proceeds which had disappeared. Of what avail to tell even Miranda, Connie, or Flora if they must not tell others? It would only bind three more souls on the rack. "Vanished with the dagger!" That would be all they could gasp, first amazed, then scandalized, at a scheme of safe-keeping so fantastically reckless; reckless and fantastical as her so-called marriage. Yes, they would be as scandalized as they would have been charmed had the scheme prospered. And then they would blame not her but Hilary. Blame him in idle fear of a calamity that was not going to befall!

She might have told that sternest, kindest, wisest of friends, Doctor Sevier. As the family's trustee he might yet have to be told. But on that night of fantastical recklessness he had been away, himself at Corinth to show them there how to have vastly better hospitals, and to prescribe for his old friend Beauregard. He had got back but yesterday. Or she might have told the gray detective, just to make him more careful, as Hilary, by letter, suggested. In part she had told him, through Flora; told him that to save that old curio she would risk her life. Surely, knowing that, he would safeguard it, in whatever hands, and return it the moment he could. Who ever heard of a detective not returning a thing the moment he could? Not Flora, _not_ yet Madame, they said. To be sure, thought Anna, those professional masters of delay, the photographers, might be more jewel-wise than trustworthy, but what photographer could ever be so insane as to rob a detective? So, rather ashamed of one small solicitude in this day of great ones, she urged her committees for final reports--which never came--and felt very wisely in writing her hero for his consent to things, and to assure him that at the worst her own part of the family estate would make everything good, the only harrowing question being how to keep Miranda and Connie from sharing the loss.

On the first Sunday evening in April Doctor Sevier took tea with the Callenders, self-invited, alone and firmly oblivious of his own tardy wedding-gift to Anna as it gleamed at him on the board. To any of a hundred hostesses he would have been a joy, to share with as many friends as he would consent to meet; for in the last week he had eaten "hog and hominy," and sipped corn-meal coffee, in lofty colloquy with Sidney Johnston and his "big generals"; had talked confidentially with Polk, so lately his own bishop; had ridden through the miry streets of Corinth with all the New Orleans commanders of division or brigade--Gibson, Trudeau, Ruggles, Brodnax; out on the parapets, between the guns, had chatted with Hilary and his loved lieutenants; down among the tents and mess-fires had given his pale hand, with Spartan injunctions and all the home news, to George Gregory, Ned Ferry, Dick Smith, and others of Harper's cavalry, and--circled round by Charlie Valcour, Sam Gibbs, Maxime, and scores of their comrades in Kincaid's Battery--had seen once more their silken flag, so faded! and touched its sacred stains and tatters. Now at the tea table something led him to remark that here at home the stubborn illness of this battery sister for whom Anna was acting as treasurer had compelled him to send her away.

Timely topic: How to go into the country, and whither. The Callenders were as eager for all the facts and counsel he could give on it as if they were the "big generals" and his facts and counsel were as to the creeks, swamps, ridges, tangled ravines, few small clearings, and many roads and by-roads in the vast, thinly settled, small-farmed, rain-drenched forests between Corinth and the clay bluffs of the Tennessee. For now the Callenders also were to leave the city, as soon as they could be ready.

"Don't wait till then," crisply said the Doctor.

"We must wait till Nan winds up the bazaar."

He thought not. In what bank had she its money?

When she said not in any he frowned. Whereupon she smilingly stammered that she was told the banks themselves were sending their treasure into the country, and that even ten days earlier, when some one wanted to turn a fund into its safest portable form, three banks had declined to give foreign exchange for it at any price.

"Hmm!" he mused. "Was that your, eh,--?"

"My husband, yes," said Anna, so quietly that the sister and stepmother exulted in her. As quietly her eyes held the doctor's, and his hers, while the colour mounted to her brow. He spoke:

"Still he got it into some good shape for you, the fund, did he not?" Then suddenly he clapped a hand to a breast pocket and stared: "He gave me a letter for you. Did I--? Ah, yes, I have your written thanks. Anna, I thoroughly approve what you and he have done."

Constance and Miranda were overjoyed. He turned to them: "I told Hilary so up in camp. I told Steve. Yes, Anna, you were wise. You are wise. I've no doubt you're doing wisely about that fund."

It was hard for the wise one not to look guilty.

"Have you told anybody," he continued, "in what form you have it, or where?"

"No!" put in the aggrieved Constance, "not even her blood kin!"

"Wise again. Best for all of you. Now just hang to the lucre. It comes too late to be of use here; this brave town will have to stand or fall without it. But it's still good for Mobile, and Mobile saved may be New Orleans recovered."

On a hint from the other women, and urged by their visitor, Anna brought the letter and read him several closely written pages on the strategic meaning of things. The zest with which he discussed the lines made her newly proud of their source.

"They're so like his very word o' mouth," said he, "they bring him right back here among us. Yes, and the whole theatre of action with him. They draw it about us so closely and relate it all to us so vitally that it--"

"Seems," broke in the delighted Constance, "as if we saw it all from the top of this house!"

The Doctor's jaw set. Who likes phrases stuffed into his mouth? Yet presently he allowed himself to resume. It confirmed, he said, Beauregard's word in his call for volunteers, that there, before Corinth, was the place to defend Louisiana. Soon he had regained his hueless ardor, and laid out the whole matter on the table for the inspiration of his three confiding auditors. Here at Chattanooga, so impregnably ours, issued Tennessee river and the Memphis and Charleston railroad from the mountain gateway between our eastern and western seats of war. Here they swept down into Alabama, passed from the state's north-east to its north-west corner and parted company. Here the railway continued westward, here it crossed the Mobile and Ohio railroad at Corinth, here the Mississippi Central at Grand Junction, and pressed on to Memphis, our back-gate key of the Mississippi.

"In war," said the Doctor, "rivers and railro'--"

"Are the veins and arteries of--oh, pardon!" The crime was Anna's this time.

"Are the lines fought for," resumed the speaker, "and wherever two or three of them join or cross you may look for a battle." His long finger dropped again to the table. Back here in Alabama the Tennessee turned north to seek the Ohio, and here, just over the Mississippi state line, in Tennessee, some twenty miles north of Corinth, it became navigable for the Ohio's steamboats--gunboats--transports--at a place called in the letter "Pittsburg Landing."

Yes, now, between Hilary's pages and the Doctor's logic, with Hilary almost as actually present as the physician, the ladies saw why this great Memphis-Chattanooga fighting line was, not alone pictorially, but practically, right at hand! barely beyond sight and hearing or the feel of its tremor; a veritable back garden wall to them and their beloved city; as close as forts Jackson and St. Philip, her front gate. Yes, and--Anna ventured to point out and the Doctor grudgingly admitted--if the brave gray hosts along that back wall should ever--could ever--be borne back so far southward, westward, the last line would have to run from one to another of the Crescent City's back doorsteps and doors; from Vicksburg, that is, eastward through Jackson, Mississippi's capital, cross the state's two north-and-south railways, and swing down through Alabama to Mobile on the Gulf. This, she silently perceived, was why the letter and the Doctor quite agreed that Connie, Miranda, and she ought to find their haven somewhere within the dim region between New Orleans and those three small satellite cities; not near any two railways, yet close enough to a single one for them to get news, public or personal, in time to act on it.

At leave-taking came the guest's general summing up of fears and faiths. All his hope for New Orleans, he said, was in the forts down at the Passes. Should they fall the city could not stand. But amid their illimitable sea marshes and their impenetrable swamp forests, chin-deep in the floods of broken levees, he truly believed, they would hold out. Let them do so only till the first hot breath of real Delta summer should bring typhoid, breakbone, yellow, and swamp fevers, the last by all odds the worst, and Butler's unacclimated troops would have to reëmbark for home pell-mell or die on Ship Island like poisoned fish. So much for the front gate. For the back gate, Corinth, which just now seemed--the speaker harkened.

"Seemed," he resumed, "so much more like the front--listen!" There came a far, childish call.

"An extra," laughed Constance. "Steve says we issue one every time he brushes his uniform."

"But, Con," argued Anna, "an extra on Sunday evening, brought away down here--" The call piped nearer.

"Victory!" echoed Constance. "I heard it as pl'--"

"Beauregard! Tennessee!" exclaimed both sisters. They flew to the veranda, the other two following. Down in the gate could be seen the old coachman, already waiting to buy the paper. Constance called to him their warm approval. "I thought," murmured Miranda, "that Beauregard was in Miss'--"

Anna touched her, and the cry came again: "Great victory--!" Yes, yes, but by whom, and where? Johnston? Corinth? "Great victory at--!" Where? Where, did he say? The word came again, and now again, but still it was tauntingly vague. Anna's ear seemed best, yet even she could say only, "I never heard of such a place--out of the bible. It sounds like--Shiloh."

Shiloh it was. At a table lamp indoors the Doctor bent over the fresh print. "It's true," he affirmed. "It's Beauregard's own despatch. 'A complete victory,' he says. 'Driving the enemy'--" The reader ceased and stared at the page. "Why, good God!" Slowly he lifted his eyes upon those three sweet women until theirs ran full. And then he stared once more into the page: "Oh, good God! Albert Sidney Johnston is dead."

XLIII

THAT SABBATH AT SHILOH

"Whole theatre of action."

The figure had sounded apt to Anna on that Sunday evening when the Doctor employed it; apt enough--until the outburst of that great and dreadful news whose inseparable implications and forebodings robbed her of all sleep that night and made her the first one astir at daybreak. But thenceforward, and now for half a week or more, the aptness seemed quite to have passed. Strange was the theatre whose play was all and only a frightful reality; whose swarming, thundering, smoking stage had its audience, its New Orleans audience, wholly behind it, and whose curtain of distance, however thin, mocked every bodily sense and compelled all to be seen and heard by the soul's eye and ear, with all the joy and woe of its actuality and all its suspense, terror, triumph, heartbreak, and despair.

Yet here was that theatre, and the Doctor's metaphor was still good enough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour ladies, to whom Anna had quoted it. And here, sprinkled through the vast audience of that theatre, with as keen a greed for its play as any, were all the various non-combatants with whom we are here concerned, though not easily to be singled out, such mere units were they of the impassioned multitude every mere unit of which, to loved and loving ones, counted for more than we can tell.

However, our favourites might be glimpsed now and then. On a certain midday of that awful half-week the Callenders, driving, took up Victorine at her gate and Flora at her door and sped up-town to the newspaper offices in Camp street to rein in against a countless surge of old men in fine dress, their precious dignity thrown to the dogs, each now but one of the common herd, and each against all, shouldering, sweating, and brandishing wide hands to be the first purchaser and reader of the list, the long, ever-lengthening list of the killed and wounded. Much had been learned of the great two-days' battle, and many an infantry sister, and many a battery sister besides Anna, was second-sighted enough to see, night and day, night and day, the muddy labyrinth of roads and by-roads that braided and traversed the wide, unbroken reaches of dense timber--with their deep ravines, their long ridges, and their creek-bottom marshes and sloughs--in the day's journey from Corinth to the bluffs of the Tennessee. They saw them, not empty, nor fearlessly crossed by the quail, the wild turkey, the fox, or the unhunted deer, nor travelled alone by the homespun "citizen" or by scouts or foragers, but slowly overflowed by a great gray, silent, tangled, armed host--cavalry, infantry, ordnance trains, batteries, battery wagons and ambulances: Saw Hilary Kincaid and all his heroes and their guns, and all the "big generals" and their smart escorts and busy staffs: Saw the various columns impeding each other, taking wrong ways and losing priceless hours while thousands of inexperienced boys, footsore, drenched and shivering yet keen for the fight, ate their five-days' food in one, or threw it away to lighten the march, and toiled on in hunger, mud, cold and rain, without the note of a horn or drum or the distant eye of one blue scout to tell of their oncoming.

They saw, did Anna and those sisters (and many and many a wife and mother from Callender House to Carrollton), the vast, stealthy, fireless bivouac at fall of night, in ear-shot of the enemy's tattoo, unsheltered from the midnight storm save by raked-up leaves: Saw, just in the bivouac's tortuous front, softly reddening the low wet sky, that huge, rude semicircle of camps in the dark ridged and gullied forests about Shiloh's log meeting-house, where the victorious Grant's ten-thousands--from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, as new to arms as their foe, yet a band of lions in lair--lay dry-tented, full fed and fast asleep, safely flanked by swollen streams, their gunboats behind them and Buell coming, but without one mounted outpost, a scratch of entrenchment or a whisper of warning.

Amid the eager carriage talk, in which Anna kept her part, her mind's eye still saw the farther scene as it changed again and the gray dawn and gray host furtively rose together and together silently spread through the deep woods. She watched the day increase and noon soar up and sink away while the legions of Hardee, Bragg, Polk and Breckinridge slowly writhed out of their perplexed folds and set themselves, still undetected in their three successive lines of battle. She beheld the sun set calm and clear, the two hosts lie down once more, one in its tents, the other on its arms, the leafy night hang over them resplendent with stars, its watches near by, the Southern lines reawaken in recovered strength, spring up and press forward exultantly to the awful issue, and the Sabbath dawn brighten into a faultless day with the boom of the opening gun.

As the ladies drew up behind the throng and across the throat of Commercial Alley the dire List began to flutter from the Picayune office in greedy palms and over and among dishevelled heads like a feeding swarm of white pigeons. News there was as well as names, but every eye devoured the names first and then--unless some name struck lightning in the heart, as Anna saw it do every here and there and for that poor old man over yonder--after the names the news.

"Nan, we needn't stay if you--"

"Oh, Miranda, isn't all this ours?"

The bulletin boards were already telling in outline, ahead of the list, thrilling things about the Orleans Guards, the whirlwind onset of whose maiden bayonets had captured double its share of the first camp taken from the amazed, unbreakfasted enemy, and who again and again, hour by hour, by the half-mile and mile, had splendidly helped to drive him--while he hammered back with a deadly stubbornness all but a match for their fury. Through forests, across clearings, over streams and bogs and into and out of ravines and thickets they had swept, seizing transiently a whole field battery, permanently hundreds of prisoners, and covering the strife's broad wake with even more appalling numbers of their own dead and wounded than of the foe's: wailing wounded, ghastly, grimy dead, who but yesterday were brothers, cousins and playmates of these very men snatching and searching the list. They told, those boards, of the Washington Artillery (fifth company, never before under fire) being thanked on the field by one of the "big generals," their chests and wheels shot half to splinters but no gun lost. They told of all those Louisiana commands whose indomitable lines charged and melted, charged and withered, over and over the torn and bloody ground in that long, horrible struggle that finally smoked out the "Hornets' Nest." They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on all these sidewalks and away up to and beyond their Bishop-General Polk's Trinity Church, whose desperate gallantry had saved that same Washington Artillery three of its pieces, and to whose thinned and bleeding ranks swarms of the huddled Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as their captors and as glorious, had at last laid down their arms. And they told of Kincaid's Battery, Captain Kincaid commanding; how, having early lost in the dense oak woods and hickory brush the brigade--Brodnax's--whose way they had shelled open for a victorious charge, they had followed their galloping leader, the boys running beside the wheels, from position to position, from ridge to ridge, in rampant obedience of an order to "go in wherever they heard the hottest firing", how for a time they had fought hub to hub beside the Washington Artillery; how two of their guns, detached for a special hazard and sweeping into fresh action on a flank of the "Hornets' Nest," had lost every horse at a single volley of the ambushed foe, yet had instantly replied with slaughterous vengeance; and how, for an hour thereafter, so wrapped in their own smoke that they could be pointed only by the wheel-ruts of their recoil, they had been worked by their depleted gunners on hands and knees with Kincaid and Villeneuve themselves at the trails and with fuses cut to one second. So, in scant outline said the boards, or more in detail read one man aloud to another as they hurried by the carriage.

"But," said Anna, while Flora enjoyed her pallor, "all that is about the first day's fight!"

"No," cried Constance, "it's the second day's, that Beauregard calls 'a great and glorious victory!'"

"Yes," interposed Flora, "but writing from behind his fortification' at Corinth, yes!"

XLIV

"THEY WERE ALL FOUR TOGETHER"

Both Constance and Victorine flashed to retort, but saw the smiling critic as pale as Anna and recalled the moment's truer business, the list still darting innumerably around them always out of reach. The carriage had to push into the very surge, and Victorine to stand up and call down to this man and that, a fourth and fifth, before one could be made to hear and asked to buy for the helpless ladies. Yet in this gentlewomen's war every gentlewoman's wish was a military command, and when at length one man did hear, to hear was to vanish in the turmoil on their errand. Now he was back again, with the list, three copies! Oh, thank you, thank you and thank you!

Away trotted the handsome span while five pairs of beautiful eyes searched the three printed sheets, that bore--oh, marvellous fortune!--not one of the four names writ largest in those five hearts. Let joy be--ah, let joy be very meek while to so many there is unutterable loss. Yet let it meekly abound for the great loved cause so splendidly advanced. Miranda pointed Anna to a bit of editorial:

"Monday was a more glorious day than Sunday. We can scarcely forbear to speculate upon the great results that are to flow from this decisive victory. An instant pursuit of the flying enemy should--"

Why did the carriage halt at a Gravier Street crossing obliquely opposite the upper front corner of the St. Charles Hotel? Why did all the hotel's gold-braided guests and loungers so quietly press out against its upper balustrades? Why, under its arches, and between balcony posts along the curbstones clear down to Canal Street, was the pathetically idle crowd lining up so silently? From that point why, now, did the faint breeze begin to waft a low roar of drums of such grave unmartial sort? And why, gradually up the sidewalks' edges in the hot sun, did every one so solemnly uncover? Small Victorine stood up to see.