LVIII
ARACHNE
Behold, "Vicksburg and the Bends."
In one of those damp June-hot caves galleried into the sheer yellow-claysides of her deep-sunken streets, desolate streets where Porter's greatsoaring, howling, burrowing "lamp-posts" blew up like steamboats andflew forty ways in search of women and children, dwelt the Callenders.Out among Pemberton's trenches and redans, where the woods were dense onthe crowns and faces of the landside bluffs, and the undergrowth wasthick in the dark ravines, the minie-ball forever buzzed and pattered,and every now and then dabbed mortally into some head or breast. Thereever closer and closer the blue boys dug and crept while they and thegray tossed back and forth the hellish hand-grenade, the heavenlyhard-tack and tobacco, gay jokes and lighted bombs. There, mining andcountermining, they blew one another to atoms, or under shrieking shellsthat tore limbs from the trees and made missiles of them hurledthemselves to the assault and were hurled back. There, in a ruined villawhose shrubberies Kincaid named "Carrollton Gardens," quartered oldBrodnax, dining on the fare we promised him from the first, and therethe nephew sang an ancient song from which, to please his listeners, hehad dropped "old Ireland" and made it run:
"O, my heart's in New Orleans wherever I go--"
meaning, for himself, that wherever roamed a certain maiden whosewhereabouts in Dixie he could only conjecture, there was the New Orleansof his heart.
One day in the last week of the siege a young mother in the Callenders'cave darted out into the sunshine to rescue her straying babe and waskilled by a lump of iron. Bombardments rarely pause for slips like that,yet the Callenders ventured to her burial in a graveyard not far from"Carrollton Gardens." As sympathy yet takes chances with contagions ittook them then with shells.
Flora Valcour daily took both risks--with contagions in a field hospitalhard by the cemetery, and with shells and stray balls when she fled atmoments from the stinking wards to find good air and to commune with herheart's desires and designs. There was one hazard beside which foul airand stray shots were negligible, a siege within this siege. To beinsured against the mere mathematical risk that those designs, thus farso fortunate, might by any least mishap, in the snap of a finger, cometo naught she would have taken chances with the hugest shell Grant orPorter could send. For six weeks Anna and Hilary--Anna not knowing if hewas alive, he thinking her fifty leagues away--had been right here,hardly an hour's walk asunder. With what tempest of heart did thesevered pair rise at each dawn, lie down each night; but Flora sufferedno less. Let either of the two get but one glimpse, hear but one word,of the other, and--better a shell, slay whom it might.
On her granddaughter's brow Madame Valcour saw the murk of the storm."The lightning must strike some time, you are thinking, eh?" shesimpered.
"No, not necessarily--thanks to your aid!"
Thanks far more to Flora's subtlety and diligence. It refreshed Madameto see how well the fair strategist kept her purposes hid. Not even Irbycalled them--those he discerned--hers. In any case, at any time, anypossessive but my or mine, or my or mine on any lip but his, angeredhim. Wise Flora, whenever she alluded to their holding of the plightedones apart, named the scheme his till that cloyed, and then "ours" in away that made it more richly his, even when--clearly to Madame, dimlyto him, exasperatingly to both--her wiles for its success--woven aroundhis cousin--became purely feminine blandishments for purely feminineends. In her own mind she accorded Irby only the same partnership ofaims which she contemptuously shared with the grandam, who, like Irby,still harped on assets, on that estate over in Louisiana which every oneelse, save his uncle, had all but forgotten. The plantation and itsslaves were still Irby's objective, and though Flora was no less so, anychance that for jealousy of her and Hilary he might throw Anna intoHilary's arms, was offset by his evident conviction that the estatewould in that moment be lost to him and that no estate meant no Flora.Madame kept that before him and he thanked and loathed her accordingly.
Flora's subtlety and diligence, yes, indeed. By skill in phrases andsilences, by truth misshapen, by flatteries daintily fitted, artfullydistributed, never overdone; by a certain slow, basal co-operation fromIrby (his getting Mandeville sent out by Pemberton with secretdespatches to Johnston, for example), by a deft touch now and then fromMadame, by this fine pertinacity of luck, and by a sweet new charity ofspeech and her kindness of ministration on every side, the prettyschemer had everybody blundering into her hand, even to the extent ofkeeping the three Callenders convinced that Kincaid's Battery had beencut off at Big Black Bridge and had gone, after all, to Mobile. Nowonder she inwardly trembled.
And there was yet another reason: since coming into Vicksburg, allunaware yet why Anna so inordinately prized the old dagger, she had toldher where it still lay hid in Callender House. To a battery lad who hadbeen there on the night of the weapon's disappearance and who had diedin her arms at Champion's Hill, she had imputed a confession that,having found the moving panel, a soldier boy's pure wantonness hadprompted him to the act which, in fact, only she had committed. So shehad set Anna's whole soul upon getting back to New Orleans to regain thetrinket-treasure and somehow get out with it to Mobile, imperiledMobile, where now, if on earth anywhere, her hope was to find HilaryKincaid.
Does it not tax all patience, that no better intuition of heart, nofrenzy of true love in either Hilary or Anna--suffering the frenziesthey did--should have taught them to rend the poor web that held themseparate almost within the sound of each other's cry? No, not when weconsider other sounds, surrounding conditions: miles and miles ofriflemen and gunners in so constant a whirlwind of destruction andanguish that men like Maxime Lafontaine and Sam Gibbs went into openhysterics at their guns, and even while sleeping on their arms, underhumming bullets and crashing shells and over mines ready to be sprung,sobbed and shivered like babes, aware in their slumbers that they might"die before they waked." In the town unearthly bowlings and volcanicthunders, close overhead, cried havoc in every street, at every cavedoor. There Anna, in low daily fevers, with her "heart in New Orleans,"had to be "kept quiet" by Miranda and Constance, the latter as widowedas Anna, wondering whether "Steve was alive or not."
This is a history of hearts. Yet, time flying as it does, the wildfightings even in those hearts, the famishing, down-breaking sieges inthem, must largely be left untold--Hilary's, Anna's, Flora's, all.Kincaid was in greater temptation than he knew. Many a battery boy,sick, sound or wounded--Charlie for one--saw it more plainly than he.Anna, supposed to be far away and away by choice, was still under thewhole command's impeachment, while Flora, amid conditions that gaveevery week the passional value of a peacetime year, was here at hand, anever-ministering angel to them and to their hero; yet they neverincluded him and Flora in one thought together but to banish it, thoughwith tender reverence. Behind a labored disguise of inattention theyjealously watched lest the faintest blight or languor should mar, inhim, the perfect bloom of that invincible faith to, and faith in, thefaithless Anna, which alone could satisfy their worship of him. Care forthese watchers brought the two much together, and in every privatemoment they talked of the third one; Flora still fine in the role ofAnna's devotee and Hilary's "pilot," rich in long-thought-outfabrications, but giving forth only what was wrung from her and partingwith each word as if it cost her a pang. Starving and sickening,fighting and falling, the haggard boys watched; yet so faultless was themaiden's art that when in a fury of affright at the risks of time sheone day forced their commander to see her heart's starvation for him thebattery saw nothing, and even to him she yet appeared faultless inmodesty and utterly, marvelously, splendidly ignorant of what she haddone.
"Guide right!" he mused alone. "At last, H.K., your nickname's got ameaning worth living up to!"
While he mused, Flora, enraged both for him and against him, and withthe rage burning in her eye and on her brow, stood before her seatedgrandmother, mutely giving gaze for gaze until the elder knew.
The old woman resumed her needle. "And all you have
for it," was thefirst word, "is his pity, eh?"
"Wait!" murmured the girl. "I will win yet, if I have to lose--"
"Yes?" skeptically simpered the grandam, "--have to lose yourself to doit?"
The two gazed again until the maiden quietly nodded and her seniorsprang half up:
"No, no! ah, no-no-no! There's a crime awaiting you, but not that! Oh,no, you are no such fool!"
"No?" The girl came near, bent low and with dancing eyes said, "I'll befool enough to lead him on till his sense of honor--"
"Sense of--oh, ho, ho!"
"Sense of his honor and _mine_--will make him my prisoner. Or else--!"The speaker's eyes burned. Her bosom rose and fell.
"Yes," said the seated one--to her needle--"or else his sense thatCharlie--My God! don't pinch my ear off!"
"Happy thought," laughed Flora, letting go, "but a very poor guess."
Kincaid's Battery Page 58