Kincaid's Battery
Page 36
XXXVI
THUNDER-CLOUD AND SUNBURST
Could they have known half the toil, care, and trial the preparation ofthis Bazaar was to cost their friends, apologized the Callenders as itneared completion, they would never have dared propose it.
But the smiling reply was Spartan: "Oh! what are such trifles when wethink how our own fathers, husbands, and brothers have suffered--even invictory!" The "Sisters" were still living on last summer's glory, andonly by such indirections alluded to defeats.
Anna smiled as brightly as any, while through her mind flitted spectralvisions of the secondary and so needless carnage in those awfulfield-hospitals behind the battles, and of the storms so likely tofollow the fights, when the midnight rain came down in sheets on thewounded still lying among the dead. On all the teeming, bleeding frontno father, husband, or brother was hers, but amid the multitudinousexploits and agonies her thoughts were ever on him who, by no tie butthe heart's, had in the past year grown to be father, mother, sister,and brother to the superb hundred whom she so tenderly knew, who soworshipingly knew her, and still whose lives, at every chance, he washurling at the foe as stones from a sling.
"After all, in these terrible time'," remarked Miss Valcour in committeeof the whole--last session before the public opening--"any toil, evenlook' at selfishly, is better than to be idle."
"As if you ever looked at anything selfishly!" said a matron, and therewas a patter of hands.
"Or as if she were ever in danger of being idle!" fondly put in a youngbattery sister.
As these two rattled and crashed homeward in a deafening omnibus theyshouted further comments to each other on this same subject. It wasstrange, they agreed, to see Miss Valcour, right through the midst ofthese terrible times, grow daily handsomer. Concerning Anna, they wereof two opinions. The matron thought that at moments Anna seemed to haveaged three years in one, while, to the girl it appeared that herbeauty--Anna's--had actually increased; taken a deeper tone, "orsomething." This huge bazaar business, they screamed, was something agirl like Anna should never have been allowed to undertake.
"And yet," said the matron on second thought, "it may really have helpedher to bear up."
"Against what?"
"Oh,--all our general disturbance and distress, but the battery's inparticular. You know its very guns are, as we may say, hers, andeverything that happens around them, or to any one who belongs to themin field, camp, or hospital, happens, in her feeling, to her."
The girl interrupted with a knowing touch: "You realize there'ssomething else, don't you?"
Her companion showed pain: "Yes, but--I hoped you hadn't heard of it. Ican't bear to talk about it. I know how common it is for men and girlsto trifle with each other, but for such as he--who had the faith of allof us, yes, and of all his men, that he wasn't as other men are--forHilary Kincaid to dawdle with Anna--with Anna Callender--"
"Oh!" broke in the girl, a hot blush betraying her own heart, "I don'tthink you've got the thing right at all. Why, it's Anna who's making thetrouble! The dawdling is all hers! Oh, I have it from the bestauthority, though I'm not at liberty--"
"My dear girl, you've been misled. The fault is all his. I know it fromone who can't be mistaken."
The damsel blushed worse. "Well, at any rate," she said, "the casedoesn't in any slightest way involve Miss Valcour."
"Oh, I know that!" was the cocksure reply as they alighted in CanalStreet to take an up-town mule-car.
Could Madame and Flora have overheard, how they would have smiled toeach other.
With now a wary forward step and now a long pause, and now another shortstep and another pause, Hilary, in his letters to Anna, despite Flora'soften successful contrivings, had ventured back toward thatunderstanding for which the souls of both were starving, until atlength he had sent one which seemed, itself, to kneel, for him, at herfeet--would have seemed, had it not miscarried. But, by no one's craft,merely through the "terribleness" of the times, it had gone foreverastray. When, not knowing this, he despatched another, this latter hadpromptly arrived, but its unintelligible allusions to lines in the lostforerunner were unpardonable for lack of that forerunner's light, and itcontained especially one remark--trivial enough--which, because writtenin the irrepressible facetiousness so inborn in him, but taken, alas! inthe ineradicable earnest so natural to her, had compelled her to replyin words which made her as they went, and him as they smote him, seemtruly to have "aged three years in one." Yet hardly had they left herbefore you would have said she had recovered the whole three years and afraction over, on finding a postscript, till then most unaccountablyoverlooked, which said that its writer had at that moment been ordered(as soon as he could accomplish this and that and so and so) to hastenhome to recruit the battery with men of his own choice, and incidentallyto bring the wounded Charlie with him. Such godsends raise thespring-tides of praise and human kindness in us, and it was on the verynext morning, after finding that postscript, that there had come to Annaher splendid first thought of the Bazaar.
And now behold it, a visible reality! Unlighted as yet, unpeopled, butgorgeous, multiform, sentinelled, and ready, it needed but the touch ofthe taper to set forth all the glories of art and wealth tenfolded byself-sacrifice for a hallowed cause. Here was the Bazaar, and yonder,far away on the southern border of Tennessee, its wasted ranks stillspruce in their tatters, the battery; iron-hearted Bartleson in command;its six yellow daughters of destruction a trifle black in the lips, butbright on the cheeks and virgins all; Charlie on the roster though notin sight, the silken-satin standard well in view, rent and pierced, butshowing seven red days of valor legended on its folds, and with thatwhite-moustached old centaur, Maxime, still upholding it in action andreview.
Intermediate, there, yonder, and here, from the farthest MississippiState line clear down to New Orleans, were the camps of instruction,emptying themselves northward, pouring forth infantry, cavalry,artillery by every train that could be put upon the worn-out rails andby every main-travelled wagon road. But homeward-bound Charlie and hiscaptain, where were they? Irby knew.
Flora, we have seen, had been willing, eager, for them to come--toarrive; not because Charlie, but because his captain, was one of thetwo. But Irby, never sure of her, and forever jealous of the ladies'man, had contrived, in a dull way, to detain the home-comers inmid-journey, with telegraphic orders to see here a commandant and therea factory of arms and hurry men and munitions to the front. So he killedtime and tortured hope for several hearts, and that was a comfort initself.
However, here was the Bazaar. After all, its sentinels were not of theCrescent Regiment, for the same grave reason which postponed the openinguntil to-morrow; the fact that to-day that last flower of the city'syoung high-life was leaving for the fields of war, as Kincaid's Batteryhad left in the previous spring. Yet, oh, how differently! Again up St.Charles Street and down Calliope the bands played, the fifes squealed;once more the old men marched ahead, opened ranks, let the serriedyoungsters through and waved and hurrahed and kissed and wept; but allin a new manner, far more poignant than the earlier. God only knew whatwas to happen now, to those who went or to those who stayed, or where orhow any two of them should ever meet again. The Callenders, as before,were there. Anna had come definitely resolved to give one particularbeardless Dick Smith a rousing kiss, purely to nullify that guilty oneof last year. But when the time came she could not, the older one hadmade it impossible; and when the returning bands broke out--
"Charlie is my darling! my darling! my darling!"
and the tears came dripping from under Connie's veil and Victorine's andMiranda's and presently her own, she was glad of the failure.
As they were driving homeward across Canal Street, she noted, out beyondthe Free Market, a steamboat softly picking its way in to the levee.Some coal-barges were there, she remembered, lading with pitch-pine anddestined as fire-ships, by that naval lieutenant of the despatch-boatwhom we know, against the Federal fleet lying at the head of the passes.
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br /> The coachman named the steamer to Constance: "Yass, 'm, de ole _Genl alQuitman_; dass her."
"From Vicksburg and the Bends!" cried the inquirer. "Why, who knows butCharlie Val--?"
With both hands she clutched Miranda and Victorine, and brightened uponAnna.
"And Flora not with us!" was the common lament.