Chapter 18

"Charlie," she said, "you 'ave yo' fight. Me, I 'ave mine. Here is grandma. Ask her--if my fight--of every day--for you and her--and not yet finish'--would not eat the last red speck of courage out of yo' blood."

She turned to Victorine: "Oh, he's brave! He 'as all that courage to go, in that condition! Well, we three women, we 'ave the courage to let him go and ourselve' to stay. But--Charlie! take with you the Callender'! Yes! You, you can protec' them, same time they can take care of you. Stop!--Grandma!--yo' bonnet and gaiter'! All three, Victorine, we will help them, all four, get away!"

On the road to Callender House, while Charlie and Victorine palavered together--"I cannot quite make out," minced the French-speaking grandmother to Flora, "the real reason why you are doing this."

"'T is with me the same!" eagerly responded the beauty, in the English she preferred. "I thing maybe 't is juz inspiration. What you thing?"

"I? I am afraid it is only your great love for Anna--making you a trifle blind."

The eyes of each rested in the other's after the manner we know and the thought passed between them, that if further news was yet to come of the lost artillerist, any soul-reviving news, it would almost certainly come first to New Orleans and from the men in blue.

"No," chanted the granddaughter, "I can't tell what is making me do that unlezz my guardian angel!"

L

ANNA AMAZES HERSELF

Once more the Carrollton Gardens.

Again the afternoon hour, the white shell-paved court, its two playing fountains, the roses, lilies, jasmines and violets, their perfume spicing all the air, and the oriole and mocking-bird enrapturing it with their songs, although it was that same dire twenty-fourth of April of which we have been telling. Townward across the wide plain the distant smoke of suicidal conflagration studded the whole great double crescent of the harbor. Again the slim railway, its frequent small trains from the city clanging round the flowery miles of its half-circle, again the highway on either side the track, and again on the highway, just reaching the gardens, whose dashing coach and span, but the Callenders'?

Dashing was the look of it, not its speed. Sedately it came. Behind it followed a team of four giant mules, a joy to any quartermaster's vision, drawing a plantation wagon filled with luggage. On the old coachman's box sat beside him a slave maid, and in the carriage the three Callenders and Charlie. Anna and Miranda were on the rear seat and for the wounded boy's better ease his six-shooter lay in Anna's lap. A brave animation in the ladies was only the more prettily set off by a pinkness of earlier dejection about their eyes. Abreast the gate they halted to ask an armed sentry whether the open way up the river coast was through the gardens or--

He said there was no longer any open way without a pass from General Lovell, and when they affably commended the precaution and showed a pass he handed it to an officer, a heated, bustling, road-soiled young Creole, who had ridden up at the head of a mounted detail. This youth, as he read it, shrugged. "Under those present condition'," he said, with a wide gesture toward the remote miles of blazing harbor, "he could not honor a pazz two weeks ole. They would 'ave to rit-urn and get it renew'."

"Oh! how? How hope to do so in all yonder chaos? And how! oh, how! could an army--in full retreat--leaving women and wounded soldiers to the mercy of a ravening foe--compel them to remain in the city it was itself evacuating?" A sweet and melodious dignity was in all the questions, but eyes shone, brows arched, lips hung apart and bonnet-feathers and hat-feathers, capes and flounces, seemed to ruffle wider, with consternation and hurt esteem.

The officer could not explain a single how. He could do no more than stubbornly regret that the questioners must even return by train, the dread exigencies of the hour compelling him to impress these horses for one of his guns and those mules for his battery-wagon.

Anna's three companions would have sprung to their feet but in some way her extended hand stayed them. A year earlier Charlie would have made sad mistakes here, but now he knew the private soldier's helplessness before the gold bars of commission, and his rage was white and dumb, as, with bursting eyes, he watched the officer pencil a blank.

"Don't write that, sir," said a clear voice, and the writer, glancing up, saw Anna standing among the seated three. Her face was drawn with distress and as pale as Charlie's, but Charlie's revolver was in her hand, close to her shoulder, pointed straight upward at full cock, and the hand was steady. "Those mules first," she spoke on, "and then we, sir, are going to turn round and go home. Whatever our country needs of us we will give, not sell; but we will not, in her name, be robbed on the highway, sir, and I will put a ball through the head of the first horse or mule you lay a hand on. Isaac, turn your team."

Unhindered, the teamster, and then the coachman, turned and drove. Back toward, and by and by, into the vast woe-stricken town they returned in the scented airs and athwart the long shadows of that same declining sun which fourteen years before--or was it actually but fourteen months?--had first gilded the splendid maneuverings of Kincaid's Battery. The tragi-comic rencounter just ended had left the three ladies limp, gay, and tremulous, with Anna aghast at herself and really wondering between spells of shame and fits of laughter what had happened to her reason.

With his pistol buckled on again, Charlie had only a wordy wrath for the vanished officer, and grim worship of Anna, while Constance and Miranda, behind a veil of mirthful recapitulations, tenderly rejoiced in the relief of mind and heart which the moment had brought to her who had made it amazing. And now the conditions around them in streets, homes, and marts awoke sympathies in all the four, which further eased their own distresses.

The universal delirium of fright and horror had passed. Through all the city's fevered length and breadth, in the belief that the victorious ships, repairing the lacerations of battle as they came, were coming so slowly that they could not arrive for a day or two, and that they were bringing no land forces with them, thousands had become rationally, desperately busy for flight. Everywhere hacks, private carriages, cabs, wagons, light and heavy, and carts, frail or strong, carts for bread or meat, for bricks or milk, were bearing fugitives--old men, young mothers, grandmothers, maidens and children--with their trunks, bales, bundles, slaves and provisions--toward the Jackson Railroad to board the first non-military train they could squeeze into, and toward the New and Old Basins to sleep on schooner decks under the open stars in the all-night din of building deckhouses. Many of them were familiar acquaintances and chirruped good-by to the Callenders. Passes? No trouble whatever! Charlie need only do this and that and so and so, and there you were!

But Charlie was by this time so nervously spent and in such pain that the first thing must be to get him into bed again--at Callender House, since nothing could induce him to let sister, sweetheart or grandmother know he had not got away. To hurt his pride the more, in every direction military squads with bayonets fixed were smartly fussing from one small domicile to another, hustling out the laggards and marching them to encampments on the public squares. Other squads--of the Foreign Legion, appointed to remain behind in "armed neutrality"--patroled the sidewalks strenuously, preserving order with a high hand. Down this street drums roared, fifes squealed and here passed yet another stately regiment on toward and now into and down, Calliope Street, silent as the rabble it marched through, to take train for Camp Moore in the Mississippi hills.

"Good Lord!" gasped Charlie, "if that isn't the Confederate Guards! Oh, what good under heaven can those old chaps do at the front?"--the very thing the old chaps were asking themselves.

LI

THE CALLENDER HORSES ENLIST

Mere mind should ever be a most reverent servant to the soul. But in fact, and particularly in hours stately with momentous things, what a sacrilegious trick it has of nagging its holy mistress with triflet light as air--small as gnats yet as pertinacious.

To this effect, though written with a daintier pen, were certain lines but a few hours old, that twenty-fourth of April, in a diary which through many months had received many entries since the one that has already told us of its writer paired at Doctor Sevier's dinner-party with a guest now missing, and of her hearing, in the starlight with that guest, the newsboys' cry that his and her own city's own Beauregard had opened fire on Fort Sumter and begun this war--which now behold!

Of this droll impishness of the mind, even in this carriage to-day, with these animated companions, and in all this tribulation, ruin, and flight, here was a harrying instance: that every minute or two, whatever the soul's outer preoccupation or inner anguish, there would, would, would return, return and return the doggerel words and swaggering old tune of that song abhorred by the gruff General, but which had first awakened the love of so many hundreds of brave men for its brave, gay singer now counted forever lost:

"Ole mahs' love' wine, ole mis' love' silk--"

Generally she could stop it there, but at times it contrived to steal unobserved through the second line and then no power could keep it from marching on to the citadel, the end of the refrain. Base, antic awakener of her heart's dumb cry of infinite loss! For every time the tormenting inanity won its way, that other note, that unvoiced agony, hurled itself against the bars of its throbbing prison.

"Ole mahs' love' wine, ole mis' love'--"

"Oh, Hilary, my Hilary!"

From the Creole Quarter both carriage and wagon turned to the water front. Charlie's warning that even more trying scenes would be found there was in vain. Anna insisted, the fevered youth's own evident wish was to see the worst, and Constance and Miranda, dutifully mirthful, reminded him that through Anna they also had now tasted blood. As the equipage came out upon the Levee and paused to choose a way, the sisters sprang up and gazed abroad, sustaining each other by their twined arms.

To right, to left, near and far--only not just here where the Coast steamboats landed--the panorama was appalling. All day Anna had hungered for some incident or spectacle whose majesty or terror would suffice to distract her from her own desolation; but here it was made plain to her that a distress before which hand and speech are helpless only drives the soul in upon its own supreme devotion and woe. One wide look over those far flat expanses of smoke and flame answered the wonder of many hours, as to where all the drays and floats of the town had gone and what they could be doing. Along the entire sinuous riverside the whole great blockaded seaport's choked-in stores of tobacco and cotton, thousands of hogsheads, ten thousands of bales--lest they enrich the enemy--were being hauled to the wharves and landings and were just now beginning to receive the torch, the wharves also burning, and boats and ships on either side of the river being fired and turned adrift.

Yet all the more because of the scene, a scene that quelled even the haunting strain of song, that other note, that wail which, the long day through, had writhed unreleased in her bosom, rose, silent still, yet only the stronger and more importunate--

"Oh, Hilary, my soldier, my flag's, my country's defender, come back to me--here!--now!--my yet living hero, my Hilary Kincaid!"

Reluctantly, she let Constance draw her down, and presently, in a voice rich with loyal pride, as the carriage moved on, bade Charlie and Miranda observe that only things made contraband by the Richmond Congress were burning, while all the Coast Landing's wealth of Louisiana foodstuffs, in barrels and hogsheads, bags and tierces, lay unharmed. Yet not long could their course hold that way, and--it was Anna who first proposed retreat. The very havoc was fascinating and the courage of Constance and Miranda, though stripped of its mirth, remained undaunted; but the eye-torture of the cotton smoke was enough alone to drive them back to the inner streets.

Here the direction of their caravan, away from all avenues of escape, no less than their fair faces, drew the notice of every one, while to the four themselves every busy vehicle--where none was idle,--every sound remote or near, every dog in search of his master, and every man--how few the men had become!--every man, woman or child, alone or companioned, overladen or empty-handed, hurrying out of gates or into doors, standing to stare or pressing intently or distractedly on, calling, jesting, scolding or weeping--and how many wept!--bore a new, strange interest of fellowship. So Callender House came again to view, oh, how freshly, dearly, appealingly beautiful! As the Callender train drew into its gate and grove, the carriage was surrounded, before it could reach the veranda steps, by a full dozen of household slaves, male and female, grown, half-grown, clad and half-clad, some grinning, some tittering, all overjoyed, yet some in tears. There had been no such gathering at the departure. To spare the feelings of the mistresses the dominating "mammy" of the kitchen had forbidden it. But now that they were back, Glory! Hallelujah!

"And had it really," the three home-returning fair ones asked, "seemed so desolate and deadly perilous just for want of them? What!--had seemed so even to stalwart Tom?--and Scipio?--and Habakkuk? And were Hettie and Dilsie actually so in terror of the Yankees?"

"Oh, if we'd known that we'd never have started!" exclaimed Constance, with tears, which she stoutly quenched, while from all around came sighs and moans of love and gratitude.

And were the three verily back to stay?

Ah! that was the question. While Charlie, well attended, went on up and in they paused on the wide stair and in mingled distress and drollery asked each other, "_Are_ we back to stay, or not?"

A new stir among the domestics turned their eyes down into the garden. Beyond the lingering vehicles a lieutenant from Camp Callender rode up the drive. Two or three private soldiers hung back at the gate.

"It's horses and mules again, Nan," gravely remarked Constance, and the three, facing toward him, with Miranda foremost, held soft debate. Whether the decision they reached was to submit or resist, the wide ears of the servants could not be sure, but by the time the soldier was dismounting the ladies had summoned the nerve to jest.

"Be a man, Miranda!" murmured Constance.

"But not the kind I was!" prompted Anna.

"No," said her sister, "for this one coming is already scared to death."

"So's Miranda," breathed Anna as he came up the steps uncovering and plainly uncomfortable. A pang lanced through her as she caught herself senselessly recalling the flag presentation. And then--

"--oh! _oh!_"

"Mrs. Callender?" asked the stranger.

"Yes, sir," said that lady.

"My business"--he glanced back in nervous protest as the drivers beneath gathered their reins--"will you kindly detain--?"

"If you wish, sir," she replied, visibly trembling. "Isaac--"

From the rear of the group came the voice of Anna: "Miranda, dear, I wouldn't stop them." The men regathered the lines. She moved half a step down and stayed herself on her sister's shoulder. Miranda wrinkled back at her in an ecstasy of relief:

"Oh, Anna, do speak for all of us!"

The teams started away. A distress came into the soldier's face, but Anna met it with a sober smile: "Don't be troubled, sir, you shall have them. Drive round into the basement, Ben, and unload." The drivers went. "You shall have them, sir, on your simple word of honor as--"

"Of course you will be reimbursed. I pledge--"

"No, sir," tearfully put in Constance, "we've given our men, we can't sell our beasts."

"They are not ours to sell," said Anna.

"Why, Nan!"

"They belong to Kincaid's Battery," said Anna, and Constance, Miranda, and the servants smiled a proud approval. Even the officer flushed with a fine ardor:

"You have with you a member of that command?"

"We have."

"Then, on my honor as a Southern soldier, if he will stay by them and us as far as Camp Moore, to Kincaid's Battery they shall go. But, ladies--"

"Yes," knowingly spoke Miranda. "Hettie, Scipio, Dilsie, you-all can go 'long back to your work now." She wrinkled confidentially to the officer.

"Yes," he replied, "we shall certainly engage the enemy's ships to-morrow, and you ladies must--"

"Must not desert our home, sir," said Anna.

"Nor our faithful servants," added the other two.

"Ah, ladies, but if we should have to make this house a field hospital, with all the dreadful--"

"Oh, that settles it," cried the three, "we stay!"

LII

HERE THEY COME!

What a night! Yet the great city slept. Like its soldiers at their bivouac fires it lay and slumbered beside its burning harbor. Sleep was duty.

Callender House kept no vigil. Lighted by the far devastation, its roof shone gray, its cornice white, its tree-tops green above the darkness of grove and garden. From its upper windows you might have seen the townward bends of the river gleam red, yellow, and bronze, or the luminous smoke of destruction (slantingly over its flood and farther shore) roll, thin out, and vanish in a moonless sky. But from those windows no one looked forth. After the long, strenuous, open-air day, sleep, even to Anna, had come swiftly.

Waking late and springing to her elbow she presently knew that every one else was up and about. Her maid came and she hastened to dress. Were the hostile ships in sight? Not yet. Was the city still undestroyed? Yes, though the cotton brought out to the harbor-side was now fifteen thousand bales and with its blazing made a show as if all the town were afire. She was furiously hungry; was not breakfast ready? Yes, Constance and Miranda--"done had breakfuss and gone oveh to de cottage fo' to fix it up fo' de surgeon ... No, 'm, not dis house; he done change' his mine." Carriage horses--mules? "Yass, 'm, done gone. Mahs' Chahlie gone wid 'm. He gone to be boss o' de big gun what show' f'om dese windehs." Oh, but that was an awful risk, wounded as he was! "Yass, 'm, but he make his promise to Miss Flo'a he won't tech de gun hisseff." What! Miss Flora--? "Oh, she be'n, but she gone ag'in. Law'! she a brave un! It e'en a'most make me brave, dess to see de high sperits she in!" The narrator departed.

How incredible was the hour. Looking out on the soft gray sky and river and down into the camp, that still kept such quiet show of routine, or passing down the broad hall stair, through the library and into the flowery breakfast room, how keenly real everything that met the eye, how unreal whatever was beyond sight. How vividly actual this lovely home in the sweet ease and kind grace of its lines and adornments. How hard to move with reference to things unseen, when heart and mind and all power of realizing unseen things were far away in the ravaged fields, mangled roads and haunted woods and ravines between Corinth and Shiloh.

But out in the garden, so fair and odorous as one glided through it to the Mandeville cottage, things boldly in view made sight itself hard to believe. Was that bespattered gray horseman no phantom, who came galloping up the river road and called to a servant at the gate that the enemy's fleet was in sight from English Turn? Was that truly New Orleans, back yonder, wrapped in smoke, like fallen Carthage or Jerusalem? Or here! this black-and-crimson thing drifting round the bend in mid-current and without a sign of life aboard or about it, was this not a toy or sham, but one more veritable ship in veritable flames? And beyond and following it, helpless as a drift-log, was that lifeless white-and-crimson thing a burning passenger steamer--and that behind it another? Here in the cottage, plainly these were Constance and Miranda, and, on second view, verily here were a surgeon and his attendants. But were these startling preparations neither child's play nor dream?

Child's play persistently seemed, at any rate, the small bit of yellow stuff produced as a hospital flag. Oh, surely! would not a much larger be far safer? It would. Well, at the house there was some yellow curtaining packed in one of the boxes, Isaac could tell which--

"I think I know right where it is!" said Anna, and hurried away to find and send it. The others, widow and wife, would stay where they were and Anna would take command at the big house, where the domestics would soon need to be emboldened, cheered, calmed, controlled. Time flies when opening boxes that have been stoutly nailed and hooped over the nails. When the goods proved not to be in the one where Anna "knew" they were she remembered better, of course, and in the second they were found. Just as the stuff had been drawn forth and was being hurried away by the hand of Dilsie, a sergeant and private from the camp, one with a field glass, the other with a signal flag, came asking leave to use them from the belvedere on the roof. Anna led them up to it.

How suddenly authentic became everything, up here. Flat as a map lay river, city, and plain. Almost under them and amusingly clear in detail, they looked down into Camp Callender and the Chalmette fortifications. When they wigwagged, "Nothing in sight," to what seemed a very real toy soldier with a very real toy flag, on a green toy mound in the midst of the work (the magazine), he wigwagged in reply, and across the river a mere speck of real humanity did the same from a barely definable parapet.

With her maid beside her Anna lingered a bit. She loved to be as near any of the dear South's defenders as modesty would allow, but these two had once been in Kincaid's Battery, her Hilary's own boys. As lookouts they were not yet skilled. In this familiar scene she knew things by the eye alone, which the sergeant, unused even to his glass, could hardly be sure of through it.

Her maid looked up and around. "Gwine to rain ag'in," she murmured, and the mistress assented with her gaze in the southeast. In this humid air and level country a waterside row of live-oaks hardly four miles off seemed at the world's edge and hid all the river beyond it.

"There's where the tips of masts always show first," she ventured to the sergeant. "We can't expect any but the one kind now, can we?"

"'Fraid not, moving up-stream."

"Then yonder they come. See? two or three tiny, needle-like--h-m-m!--just over that farth'--?"

He lowered the glass and saw better without it.

The maid burst out: "Oh, Lawd, _I_ does! Oh, good Gawd A'mighty!" She sprang to descend, but with a show of wonder Anna spoke and she halted.

"If you want to leave me," continued the mistress, "you need only ask."

"Law, Miss Nannie! Me leave you? I--"

"If you do--now--to-day--for one minute, I'll never take you back. I'll have Hettie or Dilsie."

"Missie,"--tears shone--"d' ain't nothin' in Gawd's worl' kin eveh make me a runaway niggeh f'om you! But ef you tell me now fo' to go fetch ev'y dahky we owns up to you--"

"Yes! on the upper front veranda! Go, do it!"

"Yass, 'm! 'caze ef us kin keep 'em anywahs it'll be in de bes' place fo' to see de mos' sights!" She vanished and Anna turned to the soldiers. Their flagging had paused while they watched the far-away top-gallants grow in height and numbers. Down in the works the long-roll was sounding and from every direction men were answering it at a run. Across the river came bugle notes. Sighingly the sergeant lowered his glass: