Kincaid's Battery
Page 48
XLVIII
FARRAGUT
The cathedral clock struck ten of the night. Yonder its dial shone, justacross that quarter of Jackson Square nearest the Valcours' windows,getting no response this time except the watchman's three taps of hisiron-shod club on corner curbstones.
An hour earlier its toll had been answered from near and far, up anddown the long, low-roofed, curving and recurving city--"seven, eight,nine"--"eight, nine"--the law's warning to all slaves to be indoors orgo to jail. Not Flora nor Anna nor Victorine nor Doctor Sevier nor DickSmith's lone mother nor any one else among all those thousands ofmasters, mistresses and man-and maid-servants, or these thousands ofhome-guards at home under their mosquito-bars, with uniforms on bedsidechairs and with muskets and cartridge-belts close by--not one of allthese was aware, I say, that however else this awful war might pay itscost, it was the knell of slavery they heard, and which they,themselves, in effect, were sounding.
Lacking wilder excitement Madame sat by a lamp knitting a nubia.Victorine had flown home at sundown. Charlie lay sleeping as a soldierlad can. His sister had not yet returned from Callender House, but hadbeen fully accounted for some time before by messenger. Now the knitterheard horses and wheels. Why should they come at a walk? It was likestealth. They halted under the balcony. She slipped out and peered down.Yes, there was Flora. Constance was with her. Also two trim fellowswhom she rightly guessed to be Camp Callender lads, and a piece ofluggage--was it not?--which, as they lifted it down, revealed a size andweight hard even for those siege-gunners to handle with care. Unseen,silently, they came in and up with it, led by Flora. (Camp Callender wasnow only a small hither end of the "Chalmette Batteries," which on bothsides of the river mounted a whole score of big black guns. No wonderthe Callenders were leaving.)
Presently here were the merry burden-bearers behind their radiant guide,whispered ah's and oh's and wary laughter abounding.
"'Such a getting up-stairs I never did see!'"
A thousand thanks to the boys as they set down their load; their thanksback for seats declined; no time even to stand; a moment, only, for newvows of secrecy. "Oui!--Ah, non!--Assurement!" (They were Creoles.)"Yes, mum 't is the word! And such a so-quiet getting down-stair'!"--toMrs. Mandeville again--and trundling away!
When the church clock gently mentioned the half-hour the newly gleefulgrandam and hiddenly tortured girl had been long enough together andalone for the elder to have nothing more to ask as to this chest ofplate which the Callenders had fondly accepted Flora's offer to keep forthem while they should be away. Not for weeks and weeks had the old ladyfelt such ease of mind on the money--and bread--question. Now the twoset about to get the booty well hid before Charlie should awake. Thisrequired the box to be emptied, set in place and reladen, during whichprocess Flora spoke only when stung.
"Ah!" thinly piped she of the mosquito voice, "what a fine day tha'sbeen, to-day!" but won no reply. Soon she cheerily whined again:
"All day nothing but good luck, and at the end--this!" (the treasurechest).
But Flora kept silence.
"So, now," said the aged one, "they will not make such a differenze,those old jewel'."
"I will get them yet," murmured the girl.
"You think? Me, I think no, you will never."
No response.
The tease pricked once more: "Ah! all that day I am thinking of thatIrbee. I am glad for Irbee. He is 'the man that waits,' that Irbee!"
The silent one winced; fiercely a piece of the shining ware was liftedhigh, but it sank again. The painted elder cringed. There may have beengenuine peril, but the one hot sport in her fag end of a life was toplay with this beautiful fire. She held the girl's eye with a look offrightened admiration, murmuring, "You are a _merveilleuse!_"
"Possible?"
"Yes, to feel that way and same time to be ab'e to smile like that!"
"Ah? how is that I'm feeling?"
"You are filling that all this, and all those jewel' of Anna, and thelife of me, and of that boy in yond', you would give them all, juz' tobe ab'e to bil-ieve that foolishness of Anna--that he's yet al-live,that Kin--"
The piece of plate half rose again, but--in part because the fairthreatener could not help enjoying the subtlety of the case--the smilepersisted as she rejoined, "Ah! when juz' for the fun, all I can get thechance, I'm making her to bil-ieve that way!"
"Yes," laughed the old woman, "but why? Only biccause that way you, youcannot bil-ieve."
The lithe maiden arose to resume their task, the heavy silver still inher hand. The next moment the kneeling grandam crouched and theglittering metal swept around just high enough to miss her head. Atinkle of mirth came from its wielder as she moved on with it, sighing,"Ah! ho! what a pity--that so seldom the aged commit suicide."
"Yes," came the soft retort, "but for yo' young grandmama tha'z not yetthe time, she is still a so indispensib'."
"Very true, ma chere," sang Flora, "and in heaven you would be souzeless."
Out in the hazy, dark, heavily becalmed night the clock tolled eleven.Eleven--one--three--and all the hours, halves and quarters between andbeyond, it tolled; and Flora, near, and Anna, far, sometimes each by herown open window, heard and counted. A thin old moon was dimly risingdown the river when each began to think she caught another and verydifferent sound that seemed to arrive faint from a long journey out ofthe southeast, if really from anywhere, and to pulse in dim persistencyas soft as breathing, but as constant. Likely enough it was only therumble of a remote storm and might have seemed to come out of the northor west had their windows looked that way, for still the tempestuousrains were frequent and everywhere, and it was easy and common for manto mistake God's thunderings for his own.
Yet, whether those two wakeful maidens truly heard or merely fancied, infact just then some seventy miles straight away under that gaunt oldmoon, there was rising to heaven the most terrific uproar this deltaland had ever heard since man first moved upon its shores and waters.Six to the minute bellowed and soared Porter's awful bombs and archedand howled and fell and scattered death and conflagration. While theyroared, three hundred and forty great guns beside, on river and land,flashed and crashed, the breezeless night by turns went groping-blackand clear-as-day red with smoke and flame of vomiting funnels, ofburning boats and fire-rafts, of belching cannon, of screaming grape andcanister and of exploding magazines. And through the middle of it all,in single file--their topmasts, yards, and cordage showing above themurk as pale and dumb as skeletons at every flare of the havoc, a whitelight twinkling at each masthead, a red light at the peak and the starsand stripes there with it--Farragut and his wooden ships came by theforts.
"Boys, our cake's all dough!" said a commander in one of the forts.
When day returned and Anna and Flora slept, the murmur they had heardmay after all have been only God's thunder and really not from thesoutheast; but just down there under the landscape's flat rim bothforts, though with colors still gallantly flying, were smoking ruins,all Dixie's brave gunboats and rams lay along the river's two shores,sunken or burned, and the whole victorious Northern fleet, save one boatrammed and gone to the bottom, was on its cautious, unpiloted way,snail-slow but fate-sure, up the tawny four-mile current and round thegentle green bends of the Mississippi with New Orleans for its goal andprey.