Kincaid's Battery
Page 49
XLIX
A CITY IN TERROR
Before the smart-stepping lamplighters were half done turning off thestreet lights, before the noisy market-houses all over the town, fromCamp Callender to Carrollton, with their basket-bearing thousands ofjesting and dickering customers, had quenched their gaslights andcandles to dicker and jest by day, or the devotees of early mass hademerged from the churches, Rumor was on the run. With a sort of muffledspeed and whisper she came and went, crossed her course and reaffirmedherself, returned to her starting-point and stole forth again, bearingever the same horrid burden, brief, persistent, unexaggerated: The Foe!The Foe! In five great ships and twice as many lesser ones--counted atQuarantine Station just before the wires were cut--the Foe was hardlytwenty leagues away, while barely that many guns of ours crouchedbetween his eight times twenty and our hundred thousand women andchildren.
Yet, for a brief spell, so deep are the ruts of habit, the city kept toits daily routine, limp and unmeaning though much of it had come to be.The milkman, of course, held to his furious round in his comicaltwo-wheeled cart, whirling up to alley gates, shouting and ringing hisbig hand-bell. In all his tracks followed the hooded bread-cart, withits light-weight loaves for worthless money and with only the staggeringnews for lagnappe. Families ate breakfast, one hour and another,wherever there was food. Day cabmen and draymen trotted off to theircurbstones; women turned to the dish-pan, the dust-pan, the beds, thebroom; porters, clerks and merchants--the war-mill's wasteful refuse andresiduum, some as good as the gray army's best, some poor enough--wentto their idle counters, desks and sidewalks; the children to the publicschools, the beggar to the church doorstep, physicians to their sick,the barkeeper to his mirrors and mint, and the pot-fisher to his catfishlines in the swollen, sweeping, empty harbor.
But besides the momentum of habit there was the official pledge to thepeople--Mayor Monroe's and Commanding-General Lovell's--that if theywould but keep up this tread-mill gait, the moment the city was reallyin danger the wires of the new fire-alarm should strike the tidings fromall her steeples. So the school teachers read Scripture and prayers andthe children sang the "Bonnie Blue Flag," while outside the omnibusestrundled, the one-mule street-cars tinkled and jogged and the bells hungmute.
Nevertheless a change was coming. Invisibly it worked in the generalmind as that mind gradually took in the meanings of the case; butvisibly it showed as, from some outpost down the river, General Lovell,(a sight to behold for the mud on him), came spurring at full speed byCallender House, up through the Creole Quarter and across wide CanalStreet to the St. Charles. Now even more visibly it betrayed itself,where all through the heart of the town began aides, couriers andfrowning adjutants to gallop from one significant point to another.Before long not a cab anywhere waited at its stand. Every one held anofficer or two, if only an un-uniformed bank-officer or captain ofpolice, and rattled up or down this street and that, taking corners atbreakneck risks. That later the drays began to move was not sonoticeable, for a dray was but a dray and they went off empty except fortheir drivers and sometimes a soldier with a musket and did not return.Moreover, as they went there began to be seen from the middle of almostany cross-street, in the sky out over the river front, here one, thereanother, yonder a third and fourth, upheaval of dense, unusual smoke,first on the hither side of the harbor, then on the far side, yet nofire-engines, hand or steam, rushed that way, nor any alarm sounded.
From the Valcours' balcony Madame, gasping for good air after she andFlora had dressed Charlie's wound, was startled to see one of thoseblack columns soar aloft. But it was across the river, and she hadbarely turned within to mention it, when up the stair and in upon thethree rushed Victorine, all tears, saying it was from the great dry-dockat Slaughter-House Point, which our own authorities had set afire.
The enfeebled Charlie half started from his rocking-chair laughingangrily. "Incredible!" he cried, but sat mute as the girl's swift tonguetold the half-dozen other dreadful things she had just beheld on eitherside the water. The sister and grandmother sprang into the balcony andstood astounded. Out of the narrow streets beneath them--Chartres,Conde, St. Peter, St. Ann, Cathedral Alley--scores and scores of rapidlywalking men and women and scampering boys and girls streamed round andthrough the old Square by every practicable way and out upon the levee.
"Incredib'!" retorted meanwhile the pouting daughter of Maxime, pressinginto the balcony after Flora. "Hah! and look yondah another incredib'!"She pointed riverward across the Square.
"Charlie, you must not!" cried Flora, returning half into the room.
"Bah!" retorted the staggering boy, pushed out among them and withprofane mutterings stood agaze.
Out across the Square and the ever-multiplying flow of people throughand about it, and over the roof of the French Market close beyond, therigging of a moored ship stood pencilled on the sky. It had long been adaily exasperation to his grandmother's vision, being (unknown toCharlie or Victorine), the solitary winnings of Flora's privateeringventure, early sold, you will remember, but, by default of a buyer,still in some share unnegotiably hers and--in her own and thegrandmother's hungry faith--sure to command triple its present value themoment the fall of the city should open the port. Suddenly the old ladywheeled upon Flora with a frantic look, but was checked by thegranddaughter's gleaming eyes and one inaudible, visible word: "Hush!"
The gazing boy saw only the ship. "Oh, great Lord!" he loathinglydrawled, "is it Damned Fools' Day again?" Her web of cordage began togrow dim in a rising smoke, and presently a gold beading of fire ran upand along every rope and spar and clung quivering. Soon the mastscommenced, it seemed, to steal nearer to each other, and the vesselswung out from her berth and started down the wide, swift river, a massof flames.
"Oh, Mother of God," cried Victorine with a new gush of tears! "'avemercy upon uz women!" and in the midst of her appeal the promised alarumbegan to toll--here, yonder, and far away--here, yonder, and faraway--and did not stop until right in the middle of the morning it hadstruck twelve.
"Good-by! poor betrayed New Orleans!" exclaimed Charlie, turning backinto the room. "Good-by, sweetheart, I'm off! Good-by, grannie--Flo'!"
The three followed in with cries of amazement, distress, indignation,command, reproach, entreaty, all alike vain. As if the long-roll of hisown brigade were roaring to him, he strode about the apartment preparingto fly.
His sister tried to lay preventing hands on him, saying, "Your life!your life! you are throwing it away!"
"Well, what am I in Kincaid's Battery for?" he retorted, with a sweep ofhis arm that sent her staggering. He caught the younger girl by theshoulders: "Jularkie, if you want to go, too, with or without grannieand Flo', by Jove, come along! I'll take care of you!"
The girl's eyes melted with yearning, but the response was Flora's:"Simpleton! When you haven' the sense enough to take care of yourself!"
"Ah, shame!" ventured the sweetheart. "He's the lover of his bliddingcountry, going ag-ain to fighd for her--and uz--whiles hecan!--to-day!--al-lone!--now!" Her fingers clutched his wrists, thatstill held her shoulders, and all her veins surged in the rapture of hisgrasp.
But Charlie stared at his sister. It could not enter his mind that herdesires were with the foe, yet his voice went deep in scorn: "And haveyou too turned coward?"
The taunt stung. Its victim flashed, but in the next breath her smilewas clemency itself as she drew Victorine from him and shot her neatreply, well knowing he would never guess the motives behind it--the bowwhence flew the shaft: the revenge she owed the cause that had burnedtheir home; her malice against Anna; the agony of losing him they nowcalled dead and buried; the new, acute loathing that issued from thatagony upon the dismal Irby; her baffled hunger for the jewels; her plansfor the chest of plate; hopes vanishing in smoke with yonder burningship; thought of Greenleaf's probable return with the blue army, of theriddles that return might make, and of the ruin, the burning and sinkingriot and ruin, these things were making in her own soul as if it, t
oo,were a city lost.
"Charlie," she said, "you 'ave yo' fight. Me, I 'ave mine. Here isgrandma. Ask her--if my fight--of every day--for you and her--and notyet finish'--would not eat the last red speck of courage out of yo'blood."
She turned to Victorine: "Oh, he's brave! He 'as all that courage to go,in that condition! Well, we three women, we 'ave the courage to let himgo and ourselve' to stay. But--Charlie! take with you the Callender'!Yes! You, you can protec' them, same time they can take care of you.Stop!--Grandma!--yo' bonnet and gaiter'! All three, Victorine, we willhelp them, all four, get away!"
On the road to Callender House, while Charlie and Victorine palaveredtogether--"I cannot quite make out," minced the French-speakinggrandmother to Flora, "the real reason why you are doing this."
"'T is with me the same!" eagerly responded the beauty, in the Englishshe preferred. "I thing maybe 't is juz inspiration. What you thing?"
"I? I am afraid it is only your great love for Anna--making you a trifleblind."
The eyes of each rested in the other's after the manner we know and thethought passed between them, that if further news was yet to come of thelost artillerist, any soul-reviving news, it would almost certainly comefirst to New Orleans and from the men in blue.
"No," chanted the granddaughter, "I can't tell what is making me do thatunlezz my guardian angel!"