Kincaid's Battery
Page 40
XL
THE LICENSE, THE DAGGER
Hilary had bent an arm around Anna when Flora called his name. Irbyhanded him the order. A glance made it clear. Its reader cast a widelook over the heads of the dancers and lifting the missive high beckonedwith it to Mandeville. Then he looked for some one else: "Charlie!"
"Out on the veranda," said a passing dancer.
"Send him here!" The commander's eye came back to Irby: "Old man, howlong have you had this?"
"About an hour."
"Oh, my stars, Adolphe, you should have told me!"
It was a fair sight, though maddening to Flora yonder by the glass case,to see the two cousins standing eye to eye, Hilary's brow dark withsplendid concern while without a glance at Anna he passed her thedespatch 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 withmine."
The boy's partner was Victorine. Before she could gasp he had kissedher. Amid a laugh that stopped half the dance he waved one farewell tosister, grandmother and all and sprang away. "Dance on, fellows," calledHilary, "this means only that I'm going with you." The lads cheered andthe dance revived.
Their captain turned: "Miss Flora, I promised your brother he should gowhenever--"
"But me al-_so_ you promised!" she interrupted, and a fair sight also,grievous to Irby, startling to Anna, were this pair, standing eye toeye.
"Yes," replied Kincaid, "and I'll keep my word. In any extremity youshall come to him."
"As likewise my wive to me!" said the swelling Mandeville, openlycaressing the tearful Constance. "Wive to 'usband," he declaimed,"sizter to brother--" But his audience was lost. Hilary was speakingsoftly to Anna. She was very pale. The throng drew away. You could seethat he was asking if she only could in no extremity come to him. Hiswords were inaudible, but any one who had ever loved could read them.And now evidently he proposed something. There was ardor in hiseye--ardor and enterprise. She murmured a response. He snatched out hiswatch.
"_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 tocome, 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 hergrandmother.
Hilary laughed: "You'll see. I fixed all that a week ago. Will you getthe minister?"
"Why, Hilary, this is--"
"Yass!" 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, ifyou--why, of course I will." There was more applause.
"Steve," said Hilary, "some one must go with me to the clerk's officeto--"
"To vouch you!" broke in the aide-de-camp. "That will be SteveMandeville!" Constance sublimely approved. As the three Callenders movedto leave the room one way and the three captains another, Anna seizedthe 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 gallopedaway, truthfully told Miss Valcour that his only object in tarrying herewas to see the love-knot tied, she heard him affably, though inwardlyin flames of yearning to see him depart. She burned to see him gobecause she believed him, and also because there in the show-case stilllay the loosely heaped counterfeit of the booty whose reality she hadalready ignorantly taken and stowed away.
What should she do? Here was grandma, better aid than forty Irbys; butwith both phases of her problem to deal with at once--how to tripheadlong this wild matrimonial leap and how to seize this treasure bywhose means she might leave Anna in a fallen city and follow Hilary tothe war--she was at the end of her daintiest wits. She talked on withthe gray man, for that kept him from the show-case. In an air full ofharmonies and prattle, of fluttering draperies, gliding feet, undulatingshoulders, twinkling lights, gallantry, fans, and perfume, she dazzledhim with her approval when he enlarged on the merits of Kincaid and whenhe pledged all his powers of invention to speed the bridal. Frantic tothink what better to do, she waltzed with him, while he described thecolonel of the departing regiment as such a martinet that to ask him todelay his going would only hasten it; waltzed on when she saw hergrandmother discover the knife's absence and telegraph her a look ofcontemptuous wonder. But ah, how time was flying! Even now Kincaid mustbe returning hitherward, licensed!
The rapturous music somewhat soothed her frenzy, even helped herthought, and in a thirst for all it could give she had her partner swingher into the wide hall whence it came and where also Hilary must firstreappear. Twice through its length they had swept, when Anna, inaltered dress, came swiftly down the stair with Constance protestinglyat her side. The two were speaking anxiously together as if a choice ofnuptial adornments (for Constance bore a box that might have held theold jewels) had suddenly brought to mind a forgotten responsibility. Asthey pressed into the drawing-rooms the two dancers floated after themby another door.
When presently Flora halted beside the gun and fanned while the dancethrobbed on, the two sisters stood a few steps away behind the openedshow-case, talking with her grandmother and furtively eyed by a fewbystanders. They had missed the dagger. Strangely disregarded by Anna,but to Flora's secret dismay and rage, Constance, as she talked, wasdropping 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 Constancethat the vanished trinket was but borrowed; a thief would have taken the_jewels_, they argued; but as Flora would have joined in, every line ofAnna's face suddenly confided to her a consternation whose cause thesilenced Flora instantly mistook. "Ah, if you knew--!" Anna began, butceased as if the lost relic stood for something incommunicable even tonearest and dearest.
"They've sworn their love on it!" was the thought of Flora and thedetective in the same instant. It filled her veins with fury, yet herresponse was gentle and meditative. "To me," she said, "it seemed such agood-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, shewas startled from it by a masculine voice that gayly echoed out in thehall:
"Without a doubt!"
The dance ceased and first the short, round body of Mandeville and thenthe 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!" andproffered Anna the law's warrant for their marriage.
She pushed it away. Her words were so low that but few could hear. "Thedagger!" she said. "Haven't you got the dagger? You haven't got it?"