Kincaid's Battery Part 26

"About an hour."

"Oh, my stars, Adolphe, you should have told me!"

It was a fair sight, though maddening to Flora yonder by the gla.s.s case, to see the two cousins standing eye to eye, Hilary's brow dark with splendid concern while without a glance at Anna he pa.s.sed her the despatch and she read it.

"Steve," he said, as the Mandeville pair pressed up, "look at that! boots-and-saddles! now! to-night! for you and Adolphe and me! Yes, Charlie, and you; go, get your things and put Jerry on the train with mine."

The boy's partner was Victorine. Before she could gasp he had kissed her. Amid a laugh that stopped half the dance he waved one farewell to sister, grandmother and all and sprang away. "Dance on, fellows," called Hilary, "this means only that I'm going with you." The lads cheered and the dance revived.

Their captain turned: "Miss Flora, I promised your brother he should go whenever--"

"But me al-so you promised!" she interrupted, and a fair sight also, grievous to Irby, startling to Anna, were this pair, standing eye to eye.

"Yes," replied Kincaid, "and I'll keep my word. In any extremity you shall come to him."

"As likewise my wive to me!" said the swelling Mandeville, openly caressing the tearful Constance. "Wive to 'usband," he declaimed, "sizter to brother--" But his audience was lost. Hilary was speaking softly to Anna. She was very pale. The throng drew away. You could see that he was asking if she only could in no extremity come to him. His words were inaudible, but any one who had ever loved could read them. And now evidently he proposed something. There was ardor in his eye--ardor and enterprise. She murmured a response. He s.n.a.t.c.hed out his watch.

"Just time," he was heard to say, "time enough by soldier's measure!" His speech grew plainer: "The law's right for me to call and for you to come, that's all we want. What frightens you?"

"Nothing," she said, and smiled. "I only feared there wasn't time."

The lover faced his cousin so abruptly that all started and laughed, while Anna turned to her kindred, as red as a rose. "Adolphe," cried he, "I'm going for my marriage license. While I'm getting it, will you--?"

Irby went redder than Anna. "You can't get it at this hour!" he said. His eyes sought Flora, but she was hurriedly conferring with her grandmother.

Hilary laughed: "You'll see. I fixed all that a week ago. Will you get the minister?"

"Why, Hilary, this is--"

"Ya.s.s!" piped Madame, "he'll obtain him!"

The plaudits of the dancers, who once more had stopped, were loud. Flora's glance went over to Irby, and he said, "Why, yes, Hilary, if you--why, of course I will." There was more applause.

"Steve," said Hilary, "some one must go with me to the clerk's office to--"

"To vouch you!" broke in the aide-de-camp. "That will be Steve Mandeville!" Constance sublimely approved. As the three Callenders moved to leave the room one way and the three captains another, Anna seized the hands of Flora and her grandmother.

"You'll keep the dance going?" she solicited, and they said they would. Flora gave her a glowing embrace, and as Irby strode by murmured to him.

"Put your watch back half an hour."

In such disordered days social liberty was large. When the detective, after the Callenders were gone up-stairs and the captains had galloped away, truthfully told Miss Valcour that his only object in tarrying here was to see the love-knot tied, she heard him affably, though inwardly in flames of yearning to see him depart. She burned to see him go because she believed him, and also because there in the show-case still lay the loosely heaped counterfeit of the booty whose reality she had already ignorantly taken and stowed away.

What should she do? Here was grandma, better aid than forty Irbys; but with both phases of her problem to deal with at once--how to trip headlong this wild matrimonial leap and how to seize this treasure by whose means she might leave Anna in a fallen city and follow Hilary to the war--she was at the end of her daintiest wits. She talked on with the gray man, for that kept him from the show-case. In an air full of harmonies and prattle, of fluttering draperies, gliding feet, undulating shoulders, twinkling lights, gallantry, fans, and perfume, she dazzled him with her approval when he enlarged on the merits of Kincaid and when he pledged all his powers of invention to speed the bridal. Frantic to think what better to do, she waltzed with him, while he described the colonel of the departing regiment as such a martinet that to ask him to delay his going would only hasten it; waltzed on when she saw her grandmother discover the knife's absence and telegraph her a look of contemptuous wonder. But ah, how time was flying! Even now Kincaid must be returning hitherward, licensed!

The rapturous music somewhat soothed her frenzy, even helped her thought, and in a thirst for all it could give she had her partner swing her into the wide hall whence it came and where also Hilary must first reappear. Twice through its length they had swept, when Anna, in altered dress, came swiftly down the stair with Constance protestingly at her side. The two were speaking anxiously together as if a choice of nuptial adornments (for Constance bore a box that might have held the old jewels) had suddenly brought to mind a forgotten responsibility. As they pressed into the drawing-rooms the two dancers floated after them by another door.

When presently Flora halted beside the gun and fanned while the dance throbbed on, the two sisters stood a few steps away behind the opened show-case, talking with her grandmother and furtively eyed by a few bystanders. They had missed the dagger. Strangely disregarded by Anna, but to Flora's secret dismay and rage, Constance, as she talked, was dropping from her doubled hands into the casket the last of the gems. Now she shut the box and laid it in Anna's careless arms.

Leaving the gray man by the gun, Flora sprang near. Anna was enduring, with distracted smiles, the eager reasonings of Madame and Constance that the vanished trinket was but borrowed; a thief would have taken the jewels, they argued; but as Flora would have joined in, every line of Anna's face suddenly confided to her a consternation whose cause the silenced Flora instantly mistook. "Ah, if you knew--!" Anna began, but ceased as if the lost relic stood for something incommunicable even to nearest and dearest.

"They've sworn their love on it!" was the thought of Flora and the detective in the same instant. It filled her veins with fury, yet her response was gentle and meditative. "To me," she said, "it seemed such a good-for-nothing that even if I saw it is gone, me, I think I wouldn' have take' notice." All at once she brightened: "Anna! without a doubt! without a doubt Captain Kincaid he has it!" About to add a caress, she was startled from it by a masculine voice that gayly echoed out in the hall:

"Without a doubt!"

The dance ceased and first the short, round body of Mandeville and then the tall form of Hilary Kincaid pushed into the room. "Without a doubt!" repeated Hilary, while Mandeville asked right, asked left, for Adolphe. "Without a doubt," persisted the lover, "Captain Kincaid he has it!" and proffered Anna the law's warrant for their marriage.

She pushed it away. Her words were so low that but few could hear. "The dagger!" she said. "Haven't you got the dagger? You haven't got it?"

XLI

FOR AN EMERGENCY

Hilary stared, reddened as she paled, and with a slow smile shook his head. She murmured again: "It's lost! the dagger! with all--"

"Why,--why, Miss Anna,"--his smile grew playful, but his thought ran back to the exploded powder-mill, to the old inventor, to Flora in those days, the deported schoolmistress's gold still unpaid to him, the jeweller and the exchanged gems, the Sterling bill--"Why, Miss Anna! how do you mean, lost?"

"Taken! gone! and by my fault! I--I forgot all about it."

He laughed aloud and around: "Pshaw! Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is some joke you're"--he glanced toward the show-case--

"No," insisted Anna, "it's taken! Here are the other things." She displayed the box.

Madame, very angry, smiled from it to Flora: "Oh, thou love's fool! not to steal that and leave the knife, with which, luckily! now that you have it, you dare not strike!"

All this the subtle girl read in the ancient lady's one small "ahem!" and for reply, in some even more unvoiced way, warned her against the eye of the gray man near the gun. To avoid whose scrutiny herself she returned sociably to his side.

"The other things!" scoffed meantime the gay Hilary, catching up Anna's word. "No! if you please, here is the only other thing!" and boyishly flaunted the license at Mandeville and all the Callenders, the throng merrily approving. His eye, falling upon the detective, kindled joyfully: "Oh, you G.o.dsend! You hunt up the lost frog-sticker, will you--while we--?" He flourished the doc.u.ment again and the gray man replied with a cordial nod. Kincaid waved thanks and glanced round. "Adolphe!" he called. "Steve, where in the d.i.c.kens--?"

Whether he so designed it or not, the contrast between his levity and Anna's agitation convinced Flora, Madame, all, that the weapon's only value to the lovers was sentimental. "Or religious," thought the detective, whose adjectives could be as inaccurate as his divinations. While he conjectured, Anna spoke once more to Hilary. Her vehement words were too soft for any ear save his, but their tenor was so visible, her distress so pa.s.sionate and her firmness of resolve so evident that every mere beholder fell back, letting the Callender-Valcour group, with Steve and the gentle detective, press closer. With none of them, nor yet with Hilary, was there anything to argue; their plight seemed to her hopeless. For them to marry, for her to default, and for him to fly, all in one mad hour--one whirlwind of incident--"It cannot be!" was all she could say, to sister, to stepmother, to Flora, to Hilary again: "We cannot do it! I will not!--till that lost thing is found!"

With keen sympathy the detective, in the pack, enjoyed the play of Hilary's face, where martial animation strove inspiringly against a torture of dashed hopes. Glancing aside to Flora's as she turned from Anna, he caught there no sign of the storm of joy which had suddenly burst in her bosom; but for fear he might, and to break across his insight and reckoning, she addressed him.

"Anna she don't give any reason" she exclaimed. "Ask her, you, the reason!"

"'Tain't reason at all," he softly responded, "it's superst.i.tion. But hold on. Watch me." He gestured for the lover's attention and their eyes met. It made a number laugh, to see Hilary's stare gradually go senseless and then blaze with intelligence. Suddenly, joyfully, with every eye following his finger, he pointed into the gray man's face:

"Smellemout, you've got it!"

The man shook his head for denial, and his kindly twinkle commanded the belief of all. Not a glint in it showed that his next response, however well-meant, was to be a lie.

"Then Ketchem has it!" cried Kincaid.

The silent man let his smile mean yes, and the alert company applauded. "Go h-on with the weddingg!" ordered the superior Mandeville.

"Where's Adolphe?" cried Kincaid, and "On with the wedding!" clamored the lads of the battery, while Anna stood gazing on the gray man and wondering why she had not guessed this very thing.

"Yes," he quietly said to her, "it's all right. You'll have it back to-morrow. 'Twon't cut love if you don't."