L
ANNA AMAZES HERSELF
Once more the Carrollton Gardens.
Again the afternoon hour, the white shell-paved court, its two playingfountains, the roses, lilies, jasmines and violets, their perfumespicing all the air, and the oriole and mocking-bird enrapturing it withtheir songs, although it was that same dire twenty-fourth of April ofwhich we have been telling. Townward across the wide plain the distantsmoke of suicidal conflagration studded the whole great double crescentof the harbor. Again the slim railway, its frequent small trains fromthe city clanging round the flowery miles of its half-circle, again thehighway on either side the track, and again on the highway, justreaching the gardens, whose dashing coach and span, but the Callenders'?
Dashing was the look of it, not its speed. Sedately it came. Behind itfollowed a team of four giant mules, a joy to any quartermaster'svision, drawing a plantation wagon filled with luggage. On the oldcoachman's box sat beside him a slave maid, and in the carriage thethree Callenders and Charlie. Anna and Miranda were on the rear seat andfor the wounded boy's better ease his six-shooter lay in Anna's lap. Abrave animation in the ladies was only the more prettily set off by apinkness of earlier dejection about their eyes. Abreast the gate theyhalted to ask an armed sentry whether the open way up the river coastwas through the gardens or--
He said there was no longer any open way without a pass from GeneralLovell, and when they affably commended the precaution and showed a passhe handed it to an officer, a heated, bustling, road-soiled youngCreole, who had ridden up at the head of a mounted detail. This youth,as he read it, shrugged. "Under those present condition'," he said, witha wide gesture toward the remote miles of blazing harbor, "he could nothonor a pazz two weeks ole. They would 'ave to rit-urn and get itrenew'."
"Oh! how? How hope to do so in all yonder chaos? And how! oh, how!could an army--in full retreat--leaving women and wounded soldiers tothe mercy of a ravening foe--compel them to remain in the city it wasitself evacuating?" A sweet and melodious dignity was in all thequestions, but eyes shone, brows arched, lips hung apart andbonnet-feathers and hat-feathers, capes and flounces, seemed to rufflewider, with consternation and hurt esteem.
The officer could not explain a single how. He could do no more thanstubbornly regret that the questioners must even return by train, thedread exigencies of the hour compelling him to impress these horses forone of his guns and those mules for his battery-wagon.
Anna's three companions would have sprung to their feet but in some wayher extended hand stayed them. A year earlier Charlie would have madesad mistakes here, but now he knew the private soldier's helplessnessbefore the gold bars of commission, and his rage was white and dumb, as,with bursting eyes, he watched the officer pencil a blank.
"Don't write that, sir," said a clear voice, and the writer, glancingup, saw Anna standing among the seated three. Her face was drawn withdistress and as pale as Charlie's, but Charlie's revolver was in herhand, close to her shoulder, pointed straight upward at full cock, andthe hand was steady. "Those mules first," she spoke on, "and then we,sir, are going to turn round and go home. Whatever our country needs ofus we will give, not sell; but we will not, in her name, be robbed onthe highway, sir, and I will put a ball through the head of the firsthorse or mule you lay a hand on. Isaac, turn your team."
Unhindered, the teamster, and then the coachman, turned and drove. Backtoward, and by and by, into the vast woe-stricken town they returned inthe scented airs and athwart the long shadows of that same declining sunwhich fourteen years before--or was it actually but fourteenmonths?--had first gilded the splendid maneuverings of Kincaid'sBattery. The tragi-comic rencounter just ended had left the three ladieslimp, gay, and tremulous, with Anna aghast at herself and reallywondering between spells of shame and fits of laughter what had happenedto her reason.
With his pistol buckled on again, Charlie had only a wordy wrath for thevanished officer, and grim worship of Anna, while Constance and Miranda,behind a veil of mirthful recapitulations, tenderly rejoiced in therelief of mind and heart which the moment had brought to her who hadmade it amazing. And now the conditions around them in streets, homes,and marts awoke sympathies in all the four, which further eased theirown distresses.
The universal delirium of fright and horror had passed. Through all thecity's fevered length and breadth, in the belief that the victoriousships, repairing the lacerations of battle as they came, were coming soslowly that they could not arrive for a day or two, and that they werebringing no land forces with them, thousands had become rationally,desperately busy for flight. Everywhere hacks, private carriages, cabs,wagons, light and heavy, and carts, frail or strong, carts for bread ormeat, for bricks or milk, were bearing fugitives--old men, youngmothers, grandmothers, maidens and children--with their trunks, bales,bundles, slaves and provisions--toward the Jackson Railroad to boardthe first non-military train they could squeeze into, and toward the Newand Old Basins to sleep on schooner decks under the open stars in theall-night din of building deckhouses. Many of them were familiaracquaintances and chirruped good-by to the Callenders. Passes? Notrouble whatever! Charlie need only do this and that and so and so, andthere you were!
But Charlie was by this time so nervously spent and in such pain thatthe first thing must be to get him into bed again--at Callender House,since nothing could induce him to let sister, sweetheart or grandmotherknow he had not got away. To hurt his pride the more, in every directionmilitary squads with bayonets fixed were smartly fussing from one smalldomicile to another, hustling out the laggards and marching them toencampments on the public squares. Other squads--of the Foreign Legion,appointed to remain behind in "armed neutrality"--patroled the sidewalksstrenuously, preserving order with a high hand. Down this street drumsroared, fifes squealed and here passed yet another stately regiment ontoward and now into and down, Calliope Street, silent as the rabble itmarched through, to take train for Camp Moore in the Mississippi hills.
"Good Lord!" gasped Charlie, "if that isn't the Confederate Guards! Oh,what good under heaven can those old chaps do at the front?"--the verything the old chaps were asking themselves.
Kincaid's Battery Page 50