Chapter 17

FROM THE BURIAL SQUAD

The pinioned girl tried to throw back her head and bring their eyes together, but Anna, through some unconscious advantage, held it to her shoulder, her own face looking out over the garden.

"Ah, let me be glad for you, Flora, let me be glad for you! Oh, think of it! You _have_ him! have him at home, to look upon, to touch, to call by name! and to be looked upon by _him_ and touched and called by name! Oh, God in heaven! God in heaven!"

Miranda's fond protests were too timorous to check her, and Flora's ceased in the delight of hearing that last wail confess the thought of Hilary. Constance strove with tender energy for place and voice: "Nan, dearie, Nan! But listen to Flora, Nan. See, Nan, I haven't opened Steve's letter yet. Wounded and what, Flora, something worse? Ah, if worse you couldn't have left him."

"I know," sighed Anna, relaxing her arms to a caress and turning her gaze to Flora. "I see. Your brother, our dear Charlie, has come back to life, but wounded and alone. Alone. Hilary is still missing. Isn't that it? That's all, isn't it?"

Constance, in a sudden thought of what her letters might tell, began to open one, though with her eyes at every alternate moment on Flora as eagerly as Miranda's or Anna's. Flora stood hiddenly revelling in that complexity of her own spirit which enabled her to pour upon her questioner a look, even a real sentiment, of ravishing pity, while nevertheless in the depths of her being she thrilled and burned and danced and sang with joy for the very misery she thus compassionated. By a designed motion she showed her grandmother's reticule on her arm. But only Anna saw it; Constance, with her gaze in the letter, was drawing Miranda aside while both bent their heads over a clause in it which had got blurred, and looked at each other aghast as they made it out to read, "'--from the burial squad.'" The grandmother's silken bag saved them from Anna's notice.

"Oh, Flora!" said Anna again, "is there really something worse?" Abruptly, she spread a hand under the bag and with her eyes still in the eyes of its possessor slid it gently from the yielding wrist. Dropping her fingers into it she brought forth a tobacco-pouch, of her own embroidering, and from it, while the reticule fell unheeded to the floor, drew two or three small things which she laid on it in her doubled hands and regarded with a smile. Vacantly the smile increased as she raised it to Flora, then waned while she looked once more on the relics, and grew again as she began to handle them. Her slow voice took the tone of a child alone at play.

"Why, that's _my_ photograph," she said. "And this--this is his watch--watch and chain." She dangled them. A light frown came and went between her smiles.

With soft eagerness Flora called Constance, and the sister and Miranda stood dumb.

"See, Connie," the words went on, "see, 'Randa, this is my own photograph, and this is his own watch and chain. I must go and put them away--with my old gems." Constance would have followed her as she moved but she waved a limp forbiddal, prattling on: "This doesn't mean he's dead, you know. Oh, not at all! It means just the contrary! Why, I saw him alive last night, in a dream, and I can't believe anything else, and I won't! No, no, not yet!" At that word she made a misstep and as she started sharply to recover it the things she carried fell breaking and jingling at her feet.

"Oh-h!" she sighed in childish surprise and feebly dropped to her knees. Flora, closest by, sprang crouching to the rescue, but recoiled as the kneeling girl leaned hoveringly over the mementos and with distended eyes and an arm thrust forward cried aloud, "No! No! No-o!"

At once, however, her voice was tender again. "Mustn't anybody touch them but me, ever any more," she said, regathering the stuff, regained her feet and moved on. Close after her wavering steps anxiously pressed the others, yet not close enough. At the open door, smiling back in rejection of their aid, she tripped, and before they could save her, tumbled headlong within. From up-stairs, from downstairs came servants running, and by the front door entered a stranger, a private soldier in swamp boots and bespattered with the mire of the river road from his spurs to his ragged hat.

"No, bring her out," he said to a slave woman who bore Anna in her arms, "out to the air!" But the burden slipped free and with a cleared mind stood facing him.

"Ladies," he exclaimed, his look wandering, his uncovered hair matted, "if a half-starved soldier can have a morsel of food just to take in his hands and ride on with--" and before he could finish servants had sprung to supply him.

"Are you from down the river?" asked Anna, quietly putting away her sister's pleading touch and Flora's offer of support.

"I am!" spouted the renegade, for renegade he was, "I'm from the very thick of the massacre! from day turned into night, night into day, and heaven and earth into--into--"

"Hell," placidly prompted Flora.

"Yes! nothing short of it! Our defenses become death-traps and slaughter-pens--oh, how foully, foully has Richmond betrayed her sister city!"

Flora felt a new tumult of joy. "That Yankee fleet--it has pazz' those fort'?" she cried.

"My dear young lady! By this time there ain't no forts for it to pass! When I left Fort St. Philip there wa'n't a spot over in Fort Jackson as wide as my blanket where a bumbshell hadn't buried itself and blown up, and every minute we were lookin' for the magazine to go! Those _awful_ shells! they'd torn both levees, the forts were flooded, men who'd lost their grit were weeping like children--"

"Oh!" interrupted Constance, "why not leave the forts? We don't need them now; those old wooden ships can never withstand our terrible ironclads!"

"Well, they're mighty soon going to try it! Last night, right in the blaze of all our batteries, they cut the huge chain we had stretched across the river--"

"Ah, but when they see--oh, they'll never dare face even the _Manassas_--the 'little turtle,' ha-ha!--much less the great _Louisiana!_"

"Alas! madam, the _Louisiana_ ain't ready for 'em. There she lies tied to the levee, with engines that can't turn a wheel, a mere floating battery, while our gunboats--" Eagerly the speaker broke off to receive upon one hand and arm the bounty of the larder and with a pomp of gratitude to extend his other hand to Anna; but she sadly shook her head and showed on her palms Hilary's shattered tokens:

"These poor things belong to one, sir, who, like you, is among the missing. But, oh, thank God! _he_ is missing at the front, _in_ the front."

The abashed craven turned his hand to Flora, but with a gentle promptness Anna stepped between: "No, Flora dear, see; he hasn't a red scratch on him. Oh, sir, go--eat! If hunger stifles courage, eat! But eat as you ride, and ride like mad back to duty and honor! No! not under this roof--nor in sight of _these things_--can any man be a ladies' man, who is missing _from_ the front, at the rear."

He wheeled and vanished. Anna turned: "Connie, what do your letters say?"

The sister's eyes told enough. The inquirer gazed a moment, then murmured to herself, "I--don't--believe it--yet," grew very white, swayed, and sank with a long sigh into out-thrown arms.

XLVIII

FARRAGUT

The cathedral clock struck ten of the night. Yonder its dial shone, just across that quarter of Jackson Square nearest the Valcours' windows, getting no response this time except the watchman's three taps of his iron-shod club on corner curbstones.

An hour earlier its toll had been answered from near and far, up and down the long, low-roofed, curving and recurving city--"seven, eight, nine"--"eight, nine"--the law's warning to all slaves to be indoors or go to jail. Not Flora nor Anna nor Victorine nor Doctor Sevier nor Dick Smith's lone mother nor any one else among all those thousands of masters, mistresses and man-and maid-servants, or these thousands of home-guards at home under their mosquito-bars, with uniforms on bedside chairs and with muskets and cartridge-belts close by--not one of all these was aware, I say, that however else this awful war might pay its cost, it was the knell of slavery they heard, and which they, themselves, in effect, were sounding.

Lacking wilder excitement Madame sat by a lamp knitting a nubia. Victorine had flown home at sundown. Charlie lay sleeping as a soldier lad can. His sister had not yet returned from Callender House, but had been fully accounted for some time before by messenger. Now the knitter heard horses and wheels. Why should they come at a walk? It was like stealth. They halted under the balcony. She slipped out and peered down. Yes, there was Flora. Constance was with her. Also two trim fellows whom she rightly guessed to be Camp Callender lads, and a piece of luggage--was it not?--which, as they lifted it down, revealed a size and weight hard even for those siege-gunners to handle with care. Unseen, silently, they came in and up with it, led by Flora. (Camp Callender was now only a small hither end of the "Chalmette Batteries," which on both sides of the river mounted a whole score of big black guns. No wonder the Callenders were leaving.)

Presently here were the merry burden-bearers behind their radiant guide, whispered ah's and oh's and wary laughter abounding.

"'Such a getting up-stairs I never did see!'"

A thousand thanks to the boys as they set down their load; their thanks back for seats declined; no time even to stand; a moment, only, for new vows of secrecy. "Oui!--Ah, non!--Assurément!" (They were Creoles.) "Yes, mum 't is the word! And such a so-quiet getting down-stair'!"--to Mrs. Mandeville again--and trundling away!

When the church clock gently mentioned the half-hour the newly gleeful grandam and hiddenly tortured girl had been long enough together and alone for the elder to have nothing more to ask as to this chest of plate which the Callenders had fondly accepted Flora's offer to keep for them while they should be away. Not for weeks and weeks had the old lady felt such ease of mind on the money--and bread--question. Now the two set about to get the booty well hid before Charlie should awake. This required the box to be emptied, set in place and reladen, during which process Flora spoke only when stung.

"Ah!" thinly piped she of the mosquito voice, "what a fine day tha's been, to-day!" but won no reply. Soon she cheerily whined again:

"All day nothing but good luck, and at the end--this!" (the treasure chest).

But Flora kept silence.

"So, now," said the aged one, "they will not make such a differenze, those old jewel'."

"I will get them yet," murmured the girl.

"You think? Me, I think no, you will never."

No response.

The tease pricked once more: "Ah! all that day I am thinking of that Irbee. I am glad for Irbee. He is 'the man that waits,' that Irbee!"

The silent one winced; fiercely a piece of the shining ware was lifted high, but it sank again. The painted elder cringed. There may have been genuine peril, but the one hot sport in her fag end of a life was to play with this beautiful fire. She held the girl's eye with a look of frightened admiration, murmuring, "You are a _merveilleuse!_"

"Possible?"

"Yes, to feel that way and same time to be ab'e to smile like that!"

"Ah? how is that I'm feeling?"

"You are filling that all this, and all those jewel' of Anna, and the life of me, and of that boy in yond', you would give them all, juz' to be ab'e to bil-ieve that foolishness of Anna--that he's yet al-live, that Kin--"

The piece of plate half rose again, but--in part because the fair threatener could not help enjoying the subtlety of the case--the smile persisted as she rejoined, "Ah! when juz' for the fun, all I can get the chance, I'm making her to bil-ieve that way!"

"Yes," laughed the old woman, "but why? Only biccause that way you, you cannot bil-ieve."

The lithe maiden arose to resume their task, the heavy silver still in her hand. The next moment the kneeling grandam crouched and the glittering metal swept around just high enough to miss her head. A tinkle of mirth came from its wielder as she moved on with it, sighing, "Ah! ho! what a pity--that so seldom the aged commit suicide."

"Yes," came the soft retort, "but for yo' young grandmama tha'z not yet the time, she is still a so indispensib'."

"Very true, ma chère," sang Flora, "and in heaven you would be so uzeless."

Out in the hazy, dark, heavily becalmed night the clock tolled eleven. Eleven--one--three--and all the hours, halves and quarters between and beyond, it tolled; and Flora, near, and Anna, far, sometimes each by her own open window, heard and counted. A thin old moon was dimly rising down the river when each began to think she caught another and very different sound that seemed to arrive faint from a long journey out of the southeast, if really from anywhere, and to pulse in dim persistency as soft as breathing, but as constant. Likely enough it was only the rumble of a remote storm and might have seemed to come out of the north or west had their windows looked that way, for still the tempestuous rains were frequent and everywhere, and it was easy and common for man to mistake God's thunderings for his own.

Yet, whether those two wakeful maidens truly heard or merely fancied, in fact just then some seventy miles straight away under that gaunt old moon, there was rising to heaven the most terrific uproar this delta land had ever heard since man first moved upon its shores and waters. Six to the minute bellowed and soared Porter's awful bombs and arched and howled and fell and scattered death and conflagration. While they roared, three hundred and forty great guns beside, on river and land, flashed and crashed, the breezeless night by turns went groping-black and clear-as-day red with smoke and flame of vomiting funnels, of burning boats and fire-rafts, of belching cannon, of screaming grape and canister and of exploding magazines. And through the middle of it all, in single file--their topmasts, yards, and cordage showing above the murk as pale and dumb as skeletons at every flare of the havoc, a white light twinkling at each masthead, a red light at the peak and the stars and stripes there with it--Farragut and his wooden ships came by the forts.

"Boys, our cake's all dough!" said a commander in one of the forts.

When day returned and Anna and Flora slept, the murmur they had heard may after all have been only God's thunder and really not from the southeast; but just down there under the landscape's flat rim both forts, though with colors still gallantly flying, were smoking ruins, all Dixie's brave gunboats and rams lay along the river's two shores, sunken or burned, and the whole victorious Northern fleet, save one boat rammed and gone to the bottom, was on its cautious, unpiloted way, snail-slow but fate-sure, up the tawny four-mile current and round the gentle green bends of the Mississippi with New Orleans for its goal and prey.

XLIX

A CITY IN TERROR

Before the smart-stepping lamplighters were half done turning off the street lights, before the noisy market-houses all over the town, from Camp Callender to Carrollton, with their basket-bearing thousands of jesting and dickering customers, had quenched their gaslights and candles to dicker and jest by day, or the devotees of early mass had emerged from the churches, Rumor was on the run. With a sort of muffled speed and whisper she came and went, crossed her course and reaffirmed herself, returned to her starting-point and stole forth again, bearing ever the same horrid burden, brief, persistent, unexaggerated: The Foe! The Foe! In five great ships and twice as many lesser ones--counted at Quarantine Station just before the wires were cut--the Foe was hardly twenty leagues away, while barely that many guns of ours crouched between his eight times twenty and our hundred thousand women and children.

Yet, for a brief spell, so deep are the ruts of habit, the city kept to its daily routine, limp and unmeaning though much of it had come to be. The milkman, of course, held to his furious round in his comical two-wheeled cart, whirling up to alley gates, shouting and ringing his big hand-bell. In all his tracks followed the hooded bread-cart, with its light-weight loaves for worthless money and with only the staggering news for lagnappe. Families ate breakfast, one hour and another, wherever there was food. Day cabmen and draymen trotted off to their curbstones; women turned to the dish-pan, the dust-pan, the beds, the broom; porters, clerks and merchants--the war-mill's wasteful refuse and residuum, some as good as the gray army's best, some poor enough--went to their idle counters, desks and sidewalks; the children to the public schools, the beggar to the church doorstep, physicians to their sick, the barkeeper to his mirrors and mint, and the pot-fisher to his catfish lines in the swollen, sweeping, empty harbor.

But besides the momentum of habit there was the official pledge to the people--Mayor Monroe's and Commanding-General Lovell's--that if they would but keep up this tread-mill gait, the moment the city was really in danger the wires of the new fire-alarm should strike the tidings from all her steeples. So the school teachers read Scripture and prayers and the children sang the "Bonnie Blue Flag," while outside the omnibuses trundled, the one-mule street-cars tinkled and jogged and the bells hung mute.

Nevertheless a change was coming. Invisibly it worked in the general mind as that mind gradually took in the meanings of the case; but visibly it showed as, from some outpost down the river, General Lovell, (a sight to behold for the mud on him), came spurring at full speed by Callender House, up through the Creole Quarter and across wide Canal Street to the St. Charles. Now even more visibly it betrayed itself, where all through the heart of the town began aides, couriers and frowning adjutants to gallop from one significant point to another. Before long not a cab anywhere waited at its stand. Every one held an officer or two, if only an un-uniformed bank-officer or captain of police, and rattled up or down this street and that, taking corners at breakneck risks. That later the drays began to move was not so noticeable, for a dray was but a dray and they went off empty except for their drivers and sometimes a soldier with a musket and did not return. Moreover, as they went there began to be seen from the middle of almost any cross-street, in the sky out over the river front, here one, there another, yonder a third and fourth, upheaval of dense, unusual smoke, first on the hither side of the harbor, then on the far side, yet no fire-engines, hand or steam, rushed that way, nor any alarm sounded.

From the Valcours' balcony Madame, gasping for good air after she and Flora had dressed Charlie's wound, was startled to see one of those black columns soar aloft. But it was across the river, and she had barely turned within to mention it, when up the stair and in upon the three rushed Victorine, all tears, saying it was from the great dry-dock at Slaughter-House Point, which our own authorities had set afire.

The enfeebled Charlie half started from his rocking-chair laughing angrily. "Incredible!" he cried, but sat mute as the girl's swift tongue told the half-dozen other dreadful things she had just beheld on either side the water. The sister and grandmother sprang into the balcony and stood astounded. Out of the narrow streets beneath them--Chartres, Condé, St. Peter, St. Ann, Cathedral Alley--scores and scores of rapidly walking men and women and scampering boys and girls streamed round and through the old Square by every practicable way and out upon the levee.

"Incredib'!" retorted meanwhile the pouting daughter of Maxime, pressing into the balcony after Flora. "Hah! and look yondah another incredib'!" She pointed riverward across the Square.

"Charlie, you must not!" cried Flora, returning half into the room.

"Bah!" retorted the staggering boy, pushed out among them and with profane mutterings stood agaze.

Out across the Square and the ever-multiplying flow of people through and about it, and over the roof of the French Market close beyond, the rigging of a moored ship stood pencilled on the sky. It had long been a daily exasperation to his grandmother's vision, being (unknown to Charlie or Victorine), the solitary winnings of Flora's privateering venture, early sold, you will remember, but, by default of a buyer, still in some share unnegotiably hers and--in her own and the grandmother's hungry faith--sure to command triple its present value the moment the fall of the city should open the port. Suddenly the old lady wheeled upon Flora with a frantic look, but was checked by the granddaughter's gleaming eyes and one inaudible, visible word: "Hush!"

The gazing boy saw only the ship. "Oh, great Lord!" he loathingly drawled, "is it Damned Fools' Day again?" Her web of cordage began to grow dim in a rising smoke, and presently a gold beading of fire ran up and along every rope and spar and clung quivering. Soon the masts commenced, it seemed, to steal nearer to each other, and the vessel swung out from her berth and started down the wide, swift river, a mass of flames.

"Oh, Mother of God," cried Victorine with a new gush of tears! "'ave mercy upon uz women!" and in the midst of her appeal the promised alarum began to toll--here, yonder, and far away--here, yonder, and far away--and did not stop until right in the middle of the morning it had struck twelve.

"Good-by! poor betrayed New Orleans!" exclaimed Charlie, turning back into the room. "Good-by, sweetheart, I'm off! Good-by, grannie--Flo'!"

The three followed in with cries of amazement, distress, indignation, command, reproach, entreaty, all alike vain. As if the long-roll of his own brigade were roaring to him, he strode about the apartment preparing to fly.

His sister tried to lay preventing hands on him, saying, "Your life! your life! you are throwing it away!"

"Well, what am I in Kincaid's Battery for?" he retorted, with a sweep of his arm that sent her staggering. He caught the younger girl by the shoulders: "Jularkie, if you want to go, too, with or without grannie and Flo', by Jove, come along! I'll take care of you!"

The girl's eyes melted with yearning, but the response was Flora's: "Simpleton! When you haven' the sense enough to take care of yourself!"

"Ah, shame!" ventured the sweetheart. "He's the lover of his blidding country, going ag-ain to fighd for her--and uz--whiles he can!--to-day!--al-lone!--now!" Her fingers clutched his wrists, that still held her shoulders, and all her veins surged in the rapture of his grasp.

But Charlie stared at his sister. It could not enter his mind that her desires were with the foe, yet his voice went deep in scorn: "And have you too turned coward?"

The taunt stung. Its victim flashed, but in the next breath her smile was clemency itself as she drew Victorine from him and shot her neat reply, well knowing he would never guess the motives behind it--the bow whence flew the shaft: the revenge she owed the cause that had burned their home; her malice against Anna; the agony of losing him they now called dead and buried; the new, acute loathing that issued from that agony upon the dismal Irby; her baffled hunger for the jewels; her plans for the chest of plate; hopes vanishing in smoke with yonder burning ship; thought of Greenleaf's probable return with the blue army, of the riddles that return might make, and of the ruin, the burning and sinking riot and ruin, these things were making in her own soul as if it, too, were a city lost.