Kincaid's Battery
Page 53
LIII
SHIPS, SHELLS, AND LETTERS
Strange! how little sense of calamity came with them--at first. Sograceful they were. So fitted--like waterfowl--to every mood of air andtide; their wings all furled, their neat bodies breasting the angryflood by the quiet power of their own steam and silent submerged wheels.So like to the numberless crafts which in kinder days, under friendlytow, had come up this same green and tawny reach and passed on to thequeenly city, laden with gifts, on the peaceful embassies of the world.
But, ah! how swiftly, threateningly they grew: the smaller, two-mastedfore-and-afts, each seemingly unarmed but for one monster gun pivotedamidships, and the towering, wide-armed three-masters, the low and thetall consorting like dog and hunter. Now, as they came on, a nice eyecould make out, down on their hulls, light patches of new repair whereour sunken fleet had so lately shot and rammed them, and, hanging overthe middle of each ship's side in a broad, dark square to protect hervitals, a mass of anchor chains. Their boarding-netting, too, one saw,drawn high round all their sides, and now more guns--and more!--andmore! the huger frowning over the bulwarks, the lesser in unbroken rows,scowling each from its own port-hole, while every masthead revealeditself a little fort bristling with arms and men. Yes, and there, highin the clouds of rigging, no longer a vague pink flutter now, butbrightly red-white-and-blue and smilingly angry--what a strangehome-coming for it! ah, what a strange home-coming after a scantyear-and-a-half of banishment!--the flag of the Union, rippling fromevery peak.
"Ain' dey neveh gwine shoot?" asked a negro lad.
"Not till they're out of line with us," said Anna so confidently as todraw a skeptical grunt from his mother, and for better heart let a tunefloat silently in and out on her breath:
"I loves to be a beau to de ladies. I loves to shake a toe wid de ladies--"
She felt her maid's touch. Charlie was aiming his great gun, and oneither side of her Isaac and Ben were repeating their injunctions. Shespoke out:
"If they all shoot true we're safe enough now."
"An' ef de ships don't," put in Isaac, "dey'll mighty soon--"
The prophecy was lost. All the shore guns blazed and crashed. The whitesmoke belched and spread. Broken window-panes jingled. Wails and moansfrom the slave women were silenced by imperious outcries from Isaac andBen. There followed a mid-air scream and roar as of fifty railway trainspassing each other on fifty bridges, and the next instant a storm of theenemy's shells burst over and in the batteries. But the house stood fastand half a dozen misquotations of David and Paul were spouted from thebraver ones of Anna's flock. In a moment a veil of smoke hid ships andshore, yet fearfully true persisted the enemy's aim. To home-guards,rightly hopeless of their case and never before in action, every hostileshot was like a volcano's eruption, and their own fire rapidly fell off.But on the veranda, amid a weeping, prattling, squealing and gesturingof women and children, Anna could not distinguish the bursting of thefoe's shells from the answering thunder of Confederate guns, and when ina bare ten minutes unarmed soldiers began to come out of the smoke andto hurry through the grove, while riders of harnessed horses andmules--harnessed to nothing--lashed up the levee road at full run, andIsaac and Ben proudly cried that one was Mahs' Chahlie and that theanimals were theirs of Callender House, she still asked over thebalustrade how the fight had gone.
For reply despairing hands pointed her back toward the river, andthere, as she and her groaning servants gazed, the great black masts andyards, with headway resumed and every ensign floating, loomed silentlyforth and began to pass the veranda. Down in the intervening garden,brightly self-contained among the pale stragglers there, appeared theone-armed reporter, with a younger brother in the weather-worn gray andred of Kincaid's Battery. They waved a pocket-soiled letter and askedhow to get in and up to her; but before she could do more than toss thema key there came, not from the ships but from close overhead under ablackening sky, one last, hideous roar and ear-splitting howl. Thebeautiful treasure-laden home heaved, quivered, lurched and settledagain, the women shrieked and crouched or fell prone with covered heads,and a huge shell, sent by some pain-crazed fugitive from a gun acrossthe river, and which had entered at the roof, exploded in the basementwith a harrowing peal and filled every corner of the dwelling withblinding smoke and stifling dust.
Constance and Miranda met Anna groping and staggering out of the chaos.Unharmed, herself, and no one badly hurt? Ah, hear the sudden wail ofthat battery boy as he finds his one-armed brother! Anna kneels with himover the writhing form while women fly for the surgeon, and men, at hercry, hasten to improvise a litter. No idle song haunts her now, yet aclamoring whisper times itself with every pulsation of her bosom: "Theletter? the letter?"
Pity kept it from her lips, even from her weeping eyes; yet somehow thefallen boy heard, but when he tried to answer she hushed him. "Oh, nevermind that," she said, wiping away the sweat of his agony, "it isn'timportant at all."
"Dropped it," he gasped, and had dropped it where the shell had buriedit forever.
Each for the other's sake the lads rejected the hospital, with its riskof capture. The younger had the stricken one hurried off toward therailway and a refugee mother in the hills, Constance tenderly protestinguntil the surgeon murmured the truth:
"It'll be all one to him by to-morrow."
As the rearmost ship was passing the house Anna, her comelinessrestored, half rose from her bed, where Miranda stood trying to keepher. From all the far side of the house remotely sounded the smart trampand shuffle of servants clearing away wreckage, and the din of theirmakeshift repairs. She was "all right again," she said as she sat, butthe abstraction of her eyes and the harkening droop of her head showedthat inwardly she still saw and heard the death-struck boy.
Suddenly she stood. "Dear, brave Connie!" she exclaimed, "we must gohelp her, 'Randa." And as they went she added, pausing at the head of astair, "Ah, dear! if we, poor sinners all, could in our dull minds onlymultiply the awful numbers of war's victims by the woes that gatherround any one of them, don't you think, 'Randa--?"
Yes, Miranda agreed, certainly if man--yes, and woman--had that giftwars would soon be no more.
On a high roof above their apartment stood our Valcour ladies. Aboutthem babbling feminine groups looked down upon the harbor landings blackwith male vagabonds and witlings smashing the precious food freight (sosacred yesterday), while women and girls scooped the spoils from mireand gutter into buckets, aprons or baskets, and ran home with it throughJackson Square and scurried back again with grain-sacks andpillow-slips, and while the cotton burned on and the ships, so broadlydark aloft, so pale in their war paint below and so alive with silent,motionless men, came through the smoking havoc.
"No uze to hope," cooed the grandmother to Flora, whose gaze clung tothe tree-veiled top of Callender House. "It riffuse' to burn. 'Tis not aso inflammab' like that rope and tar." The rope and tar meant their ownburnt ship.
"Ah, well," was the light reply, "all shall be for the bes'! Those whowatch the game close and play it with courage--"
"And cheat with prudenze--?"
"Yes! to them God is good. How well you know that! And Anna, too, she'slearning it--or she shall--dear Anna! Same time me, I am well content."
"Oh, you are joyful! But not because God is good, neither juz' biccausethose Yankee' they arrive. Ah, that muz' bring some splandid news, thatlett'r of Irbee, what you riscieve to-day and think I don't know it. 'Tis maybe ab-out Kincaid's Batt'rie, eh?" At Flora's touch the speakerflinched back from the roof's edge, the maiden aiding the recoil.
"Don't stand so near, like that," she said. "It temp' me to shove youover."
They looked once more to the fleet. Slowly it came on. Near its line'scenter the flag-ship hovered just opposite Canal Street. The rear wasfar down by the Mint. Up in the van the leading vessel was haltingabreast St. Mary's Market, a few hundred yards behind which, under blackclouds and on an east wind, the lone-star flag of seceded Louisianafloated in helpless defian
ce from the city hall. All at once heaven'sown thunders pealed. From a warning sprinkle the women near about fleddown a roofed hatchway. One led Madame. But on such a scene Flora craveda better curtain-fall and she lingered alone.
It came. As if all its millions of big drops raced for one prize thedeluge fell on city, harbor, and fleet and on the woe-smitten land fromhorizon to horizon, while in the same moment the line of battle droppedanchor in mid-stream. With a swirling mist wetting her fair head shewaved in dainty welcome Irby's letter and then pressed it to her lips;not for his sake--hah!--but for his rueful word, that once more hisloathed cousin, Anna's Hilary! was riding at the head of Kincaid'sBattery.