Kincaid's Battery Part 9

"She's cold; that's what's the matter with Anna; cold and cruel!"

Tedious was the month of March. Mandeville devise' himself a splandid joke on that, to the effect that soon enough there would be months of tedieuse marches--ha, ha, ha!--and contribute' it to the news-pape'. Yet the tedium persisted. Always something about to occur, nothing ever occurring. Another vast parade, it is true, some two days after the marriage, to welcome from Texas that aged general (friend of the Callenders) who after long suspense to both sides had at last joined the South, and was to take command at New Orleans. Also, consequent upon the bursting of a gun that day in Kincaid's Battery, the funeral procession of poor, handsome, devil-may-care Felix de Gruy; saxhorns moaning and wailing, drums muttering from their m.u.f.fled heads, Anna's ensign furled in black, captain and lieutenants on foot, brows inclined, sabres reversed, and the "Stars and Bars," new flag of the Confederacy, draping the slow caisson that bore him past the Callenders' gates in majesty so strange for the gay boy.

Such happenings, of course; but nothing that ever brought those things for which one, wakening in the night, lay and prayed while forced by the songster's rapture to "listen to the mocking-bird."

While the Judge lived the Callenders had been used to the company of men by the weight of whose energies and counsel the clock of public affairs ran and kept time; senators, bishops, bank presidents, great lawyers, leading physicians; a Dr. Sevier, for one. Some of these still enjoyed their hospitality, and of late in the old house life had recovered much of its high charm and breadth of outlook. Yet March was tedious.

For in March nearly all notables felt bound to be up at Montgomery helping to rock the Confederacy's cradle. Whence came back sad stories of the incapacity, negligence, and bickerings of misplaced men. It was "almost as bad as at Was.h.i.+ngton." Friends still in the city were tremendously busy; yet real business--Commerce--with scarce a moan of complaint, lay heaving out her dying breath. Busy at everything but business, these friends, with others daily arriving in command of rustic volunteers, kept society tremendously gay, by gas-light; and courage and fort.i.tude and love of country and trust in G.o.d and scorn of the foe went clad in rainbow colors; but at the height of all manner of revels some pessimist was sure to explain to Anna why the war must be long, of awful cost, and with a just fighting chance to win.

"Then why do we not turn about right here?"

"Too late now."

Such reply gave an inward start, it seemed so fitted to her own irrevealable case. But it was made to many besides her, and women came home from dinings or from operas and b.a.l.l.s for the aid of this or that new distress of military need, and went up into the dark and knelt in all their jewels and wept long. In March the poor, everywhere, began to be out of work, and recruiting to be lively among them too, because for thousands of them it was soldier's pay or no bread. Among the troops from the country death had begun to reap great harvests ere a gun was fired, and in all the camps lovers nightly sang their lugubrious "Lorena," feeling that "a hundred months had pa.s.sed" before they had really dragged through one. March was so tedious, and lovers are such poor arithmeticians. Wherever Hilary Kincaid went, showing these how to cast cannon (that would not burst), those where to build fortifications, and some how to make unsickly camps, that song was begged of him in the last hour before sleep; last song but one, the very last being always--that least liked by Anna.

Tedious to Kincaid's Battery were his absences on so many errands. Behind a big earthwork of their own construction down on the river's edge of the old battle ground, close beyond the Callenders', they lay camped in pretty white tents that seemed to Anna, at her window, no bigger than visiting-cards. Rarely did she look that way but the fellows were drilling, their bra.s.s pieces and their officers' drawn sabres glinting back the sun, horses and men as furiously diligent as big and little ants, and sometimes, of an afternoon, their red and yellow silk and satin standard unfurled--theirs and hers. Of evenings small bunches of the boys would call to chat and be sung to; to threaten to desert if not soon sent to the front; and to blame all delays on colonels and brigadiers "known" by them to be officially jealous of--They gave only the tedious nickname.

"Why belittle him with that?" queried Miranda, winning Anna's silent grat.i.tude.

"It doesn't belittle him," cried Charlie. "That's the joke. It makes him loom larger!"

Others had other explanations: Their guns were "ladies' guns!" Were the guns the foremost cause? Some qualified: "Foremost, yes; fundamental, no." Rather the fact that never was a woman cited in male gossip but instantly he was her champion; or that no woman ever brought a grievance to any camp where he might be but she wanted to appeal it to him.

Anna "thought the name was all from the song."

"Oh, fully as much from his hundred and one other songs! Had he never sung to her--

"'I'd offer thee this hand of mine--'?"

Frankly, it was agreed, he did most laughably love ladies' company; that he could always find it, as a horse can find water; that although no evening in their society could be so gay or so long that he would not be certain to work harder next day than any one else, no day could be so cruelly toilsome that he could not spend half the next night dancing with the girls; and lastly, that with perfect evenness and a boyish modesty he treated them all alike.

Anna laughed with the rest, but remembered three separate b.a.l.l.s to which, though counted on, he had not come, she uninformed that military exigencies had at the last moment curtly waved him off, and he unaware that these exigencies had been created by Irby under inspiration from the daintiest and least self-a.s.sertive tactician in or about New Orleans.

XVI

CONSTANCE TRIES TO HELP

One day, in Ca.n.a.l Street, Kincaid met "Smellemout and Ketchem." It was pleasant to talk with men of such tranquil speech. He proposed a gla.s.s of wine, but just then they were "strictly temperance." They alluded familiarly to his and Greenleaf's midnight adventure. The two bull-drivers, they said, were still unapprehended.

Dropping to trifles they mentioned a knife, a rather glittering gewgaw, which, as evidence, ought--

"Oh, that one!" said Hilary. "Yes, I have it, mud, gla.s.s jewels and all. No," he laughed, "I can keep it quite as safely as you can."

So they pa.s.sed to a larger matter. "For, really, as to Gibbs and Lafontaine--"

"You can't have them either," interrupted their Captain, setting the words to a tune. Then only less melodiously--"No, sir-ee! Why, gentlemen, they weren't trying to kill the poor devil, he was trying to kill them, tell your Committee of Public Safety. And tell them times are changed. You can take Sam and Maxime, of course, if you can take the whole battery; we're not doing a retail business. By the by--did you know?--'twas Sam's gun broke the city's record, last week, for rapid firing! Funny, isn't it!--Excuse me, I must speak to those ladies."

The ladies, never prettier, were Mrs. Callender and Constance. They were just reentering, from a shop, their open carriage. In amiable reproach they called him a stranger, yet with bewitching resignation accepted and helped out his lame explanations.

"You look--" began Constance--but "careworn" was a risky term and she stopped. He suggested "weather-beaten," and the ladies laughed.

"Yes," they said, "even they were overtasked with patriotic activities, and Anna had almost made herself ill. Nevertheless if he would call he should see her too. Oh, no, not to-day; no, not to-morrow; but--well-- the day after." (Miss Valcour pa.s.sed so close as to hear the appointment, but her greeting smile failed to draw their attention.) "And oh, then you must tell us all about that fearful adventure in which you saved Lieutenant Greenleaf's life! Ah, we've heard, just heard, in a letter." The horses danced with impatience. "We shall expect you!"

As they drove into Royal Street with Constance rapturously pressing Miranda's hand the latter tried vainly to exchange bows with a third beauty and a second captain, but these were busy meeting each other in bright surprise and espied the carriage only when it had pa.s.sed.

Might the two not walk together a step or so? With pleasure. They were Flora and Irby. Presently--

"Do you know," she asked, "where your cousin proposes to be day after to-morrow evening--in case you should want to communicate with him?"

He did not. She told him.

XVII

"OH, CONNIE, DEAR--NOTHING--GO ON"

The third evening came. On all the borders of dear Dixie more tents than ever whitened sea-sh.o.r.es and mountain valleys, more sentinels paced to and fro in starlight or rain, more fifers and trumpeters woke the echoes with strains to enliven fort.i.tude, more great guns frowned silently at each other over more parapets, and more thousands of lovers reclined about camp fires with their hearts and fancies at home, where mothers and maidens prayed in every waking moment for G.o.d's mercy to keep the brave truants; and with remembrance of these things Anna strove to belittle her own distress while about the library lamp she and Miranda seemed each to be reading a book, and Constance the newspaper sent from Charleston by Mandeville.

Out in the mellow night a bird sang from the tip-top of a late-blooming orange tree, and inside, away inside, inside and through and through the poor girl's heart, the "years"--which really were nothing but the mantel clock's quarter-hours--"crept slowly by."

At length she laid her book aside, softly kissed each seated companion, and ascended to her room and window. There she stood long without sound or motion, her eyes beyond the stars, her head pressed wearily against the window frame. Then the lids closed while her lips formed soft words:

"Oh, G.o.d, he is not coming!" Stillness again. And then--"Oh, let me believe yet that only Thy hand keeps him away! Is it to save him for some one fairer and better? G.o.d, I ask but to know! I'm a rebel, but not against Thee, dear Lord. I know it's a sin for me to suffer this way; Thou dost not owe me happiness; I owe it Thee. Oh, G.o.d, am I clamoring for my week's wages before I've earned an hour's pay? Yet oh! yet oh!"--the head rocked heavily on its support--"if only--if only--"

She started--listened! A gate opened--shut. She sprang to her gla.s.s and then from it. In soft haste she needlessly closed the window and drew its shade and curtains. She bathed her eyelids and delicately dried them. At the mirror again she laid deft touches on brow and crown, harkening between for any messenger's step, and presently, without reason, began to set the room more exquisitely to rights. Now she faced the door and stood attentive, and now she took up a small volume and sat down by her lamp.

A tap: Constance entered, beaming only too tenderly. "It was better, wasn't it," she asked, hovering, "to come than to send?"

"Why, of course, dear; it always is."

A meditative silence followed. Then Anna languidly inquired, "Who is it?"

"n.o.body but Charlie."

The inquirer brightened: "And why isn't Charlie as good as any one?"

"He is, to-night," replied the elder beauty, "except--the one exception."

"Oh, Connie"--a slight flush came as the seated girl smilingly drew her sister's hands down to her bosom--"there isn't any one exception, and there's not going to be any. Now, that smile is downright mean of you!"

The offender atoned with a kiss on the brow.

"Why do you say," asked its recipient, "'as good as any one, to-night'?"

"Because," was the soft reply, "to-night he comes from--the other--to explain why the other couldn't come."

"Why!"--the flush came back stronger--"why, Connie! why, that's positively silly--ha, ha, ha!"

"I don't see how, Nan."

"My dear Con! Isn't his absence equally and perfectly innocent whether he couldn't come or wouldn't come? But an explanation sent!--by courier!--to--to shorten--ah, ha, ha!--to shorten our agony! Why, Con, wouldn't you have thought better of him than that? H-oh, me! What a man's 'bound to be' I suppose he's bound to be. What is the precious explanation?"