Kincaid's Battery
Page 9
IX
HER HARPOON STRIKES
The home of the Callenders was an old Creole colonial plantation-house,large, square, strong, of two stories over a stoutly piered basement,and surrounded by two broad verandas, one at each story, beneath a greathip roof gracefully upheld on Doric columns. It bore that air ofuncostly refinement which is one of the most pleasing outward featuresof the aloof civilization to which it, though not the Callenders,belonged.
Inside, its aspect was exceptional. There the inornate beauty of itsfinish, the quiet abundance of its delicate woodwork, and the highspaciousness and continuity of its rooms for entertainment wonadmiration and fame. A worthy setting, it was called, for the gentlemanners with which the Callenders made it alluring.
They, of course, had not built it. The late Judge had acquired it fromthe descendants of a planter of indigo and coffee who in the oldestCreole days had here made his home and lived his life as thoroughly inthe ancient baronial spirit as if the Mississippi had been the mediaevalRhine. Only its perfect repair was the Judge's touch, a touch somodestly true as to give it a charm of age and story which the youth andbeauty of the Callender ladies only enhanced, enhancing it the morethrough their lack of a male protector--because of which they werealways going to move into town, but never moved.
Here, some nine or ten days after Greenleaf's flight, Hilary Kincaid, inuniform at last, was one of two evening visitors, the other beingMandeville. In the meantime our lover of nonsense had received a "hardjolt." So he admitted in a letter to his friend, boasting, however, thatit was unattended by any "internal injury." In the circuit of a singleweek, happening to be thrown daily and busily into "her" society, "theharpoon had struck."
He chose the phrase as an honest yet delicate reminder of the compactmade when last the two chums had ridden together.
All three of the Callenders were in the evening group, and the fivetalked about an illumination of the city, set for the following night.In the business centre the front of every building was already beinghung with fittings from sidewalk to cornice. So was to be celebrated theglorious fact (Constance and Mandeville's adjective) that in theprevious month Louisiana had seized all the forts and lighthouses in herborders and withdrawn from the federal union by a solemn ordinancesigned in tears. This great lighting up, said Hilary, was to be thesmile of fortitude after the tears. Over the city hall now floated dailythe new flag of the state, with the colors of its stripes--
"Reverted to those of old Spain," murmured Anna, mainly to herself yetsomewhat to Hilary. Judge Callender had died a Whig, and politicsinterested the merest girls those days.
Even at the piano, where Anna played and Hilary hovered, in pausesbetween this of Mozart and that of Mendelssohn, there was much for herto ask and him to tell about; for instance, the new "ConfederateStates," a bare fortnight old! Would Virginia come into them?Eventually, yes.
"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" cried Constance, overhearing. (Whatever did notbegin with oh, those times, began with ah.)
"And _must_ war follow?" The question was Anna's again, and Hilary satdown closer to answer confidentially:
"Yes, the war was already a fact."
"And might not the Abolitionists send their ships and soldiers againstNew Orleans?"
"Yes, the case was supposable."
"And might not Jackson's battlefield of 1815, in close view from thesewindows, become a new one?"
To avoid confessing that old battlefields have that tendency the Captainrose and took up a guitar; but when he would have laid it on her kneeshe pushed it away and asked the song of him; asked with somethingintimate in her smiling undertone that thrilled him, yet on the nextinstant seemed pure dream stuff. The others broke in and Constancebegged a song of the new patriotism; but Miranda, the pretty stepmother,spoke rather for something a thousand miles and months away from thetroubles and heroics of the hour; and when Anna seconded this motion byone fugitive glance worth all their beseechings Hilary, as he stood,gayly threw open his smart jacket lest his brass buttons mar theinstrument, and sang with a sudden fervor that startled and delightedall the group:
"Drink to me only with thine eyes."
In the midst of which Constance lifted a knowing look across to Miranda,and Miranda sent it back.
There was never an evening that did not have to end, and at last thegentlemen began to make a show of leaving. But then came a lively chat,all standing in a bunch. To-morrow's procession, the visitors said,would form in Canal Street, move up St. Charles, return down Camp Streetinto Canal, pass through it into Rampart, take the Bayou Road and marchto a grand review away out in the new camp of instruction at the CreoleRace-Course. Intermediately, from a certain Canal Street balcony, Florawould present the flag! the gorgeous golden, silken, satin battlestandard which the Callenders and others had helped her to make. So--good-night--good-night.
The last parting was with Mandeville, at the levee-road gate, just belowwhich he lived in what, during the indigo-planter's life, had been theoverseer's cottage. At a fine stride our artillerist started townward,his horse being stabled near by in that direction. But presently hehalted, harkened after the Creole's receding step, thought long, softlycalled himself names, and then did a small thing which, although itresulted in nothing tragic at the time, marked a turning point in hislife. He leapt the grove fence, returned to the shadows of the garden,and silently made his way to its eastern, down-river side. Already thedwelling's lower lights were going out while none yet shone above, andhe paused in deep shade far enough away to see, over its upper veranda'sedge, the tops of its chamber windows.