LX
HILARY'S GHOST
Faintly the bearer of that name heard the call; heard it rise from aquarter fearfully nearer the foe's line than to his; caught it with histrained ear as, just beyond sight of Irby, Miranda, and others, he stoodin amazed converse with Flora Valcour. Fortune, smiling on Flora yet,had brought first to her the terrified funeral group and so had enabledher to bear to Hilary the news of the strange estrayal, skilfullyblended with that revelation of Anna's Vicksburg sojourn which she,Flora, had kept from him so cleverly and so long.
With mingled rapture and distress, with a heart standing as still as hisfeet, as still as his lifted head and shining eyes, he listened andheard again. Swiftly, though not with the speed he would have chosen, hesprang toward the call; sped softly through the brush, softly andwithout voice, lest he draw the enemy's fire; softly and mutely, withfutile backward wavings and frowning and imploring whispers to Flora asin a dishevelled glow that doubled her beauty she glided after him.
Strangely, amid a swarm of keen perceptions that plagued him like acloud of arrows as he ran, that beauty smote his conscience; her beautyand the worship and protection it deserved from all manhood and most ofall from him, whose unhappy, unwitting fortune it was to have ensnaredher young heart and brought it to the desperation of an unnaturalself-revealment; her uncoveted beauty, uncourted love, unwelcomepresence, and hideous peril! Was he not to all these in simplest honorpeculiarly accountable? They lanced him through with arraignment as,still waving her beseechingly, commandingly back, with weapons undrawnthe more swiftly to part the way before him, his frenzy for Anna drewhim on, as full of introspection as a drowning man, thinking a year'sthoughts at every step. Oh, mad joy in pitiful employment! Here whilethe millions of a continent waged heroic war for great wrongs andrights, here on the fighting-line of a beleaguered and starving city,here when at any instant the peal of his own guns might sound a freshonset, behold him in a lover's part, loving "not honor more," settingthe seal upon his painful alias, filching time out of the jaws of deathto pursue one maiden while clung to by another. Oh, Anna! AnnaCallender! my life for my country, but this moment for thy life andthee! God stay the onslaught this one moment!
As he reached the edge of that narrow opening from whose farther sideAnna had called he halted, glanced furtively about, and harkenedforward, backward, through leafy distances grown ominously still. Oh,why did the call not come again? Hardly in a burning house could time behalf so priceless. Not a breath could promise that in the next thelightnings, thunders, and long human yell of assault would not rend theair. Flora's soft tread ceased at his side.
"Stay back!" he fiercely breathed, and pointed just ahead: "The enemy'sskirmishers!"
"Come away!" she piteously whispered, trembling with terror. For, by aglimpse as brief as the catch of her breath, yonder a mere rod or sowithin the farther foliage, down a vista hardly wider than a man'sshoulders, an armed man's blue shoulders she had seen, under his blackhat and peering countenance. Joy filled the depth of her heart in thebelief that a thin line of such black hats had already put Anna behindthem, yet she quaked in terror, terror of death, of instant, shot-torndeath that might leave Hilary Kincaid alive.
With smiting pity he saw her affright. "Go back!" he once more gasped:"In God's name, go back!" while recklessly he stepped forward out ofcover. But in splendid desperation, with all her soul's battle in hereyes--horror, love, defiance, and rending chagrin striving and smiting,she sprang after him into the open, and clutched and twined his arms.The blue skirmish-line, without hearing, saw him; saw, and withheldtheir fire, fiercely glad that tactics and mercy should for once agree.And Anna saw.
"Come with me back!" whispered Flora, dragging on him with bendingknees. "She's lost! She's gone back to those Yankee, and to FredGreenleaf! And you"--the whisper rose to a murmur whose pathos grew withher Creole accent--"you, another step and you are a deserter! Yes! toyour country--to Kincaid' Batt'ree--to me-me-me!" The soft torrent ofspeech grew audible beyond them: "Oh, my God! Hilary Kincaid,listen-to-me-listen! You 'ave no right; no ri-ight to leave me! _Ah, youshall not!_ No right--ri-ight to leave yo' Flora--sinze she's tol' you--sinze she's tol' you--w'at she's tol' you!"
In this long history of a moment the blue skirmishers had not yetfound Anna, but it was their advance, their soft stir at her back asthey came upon their fallen leader, that had hushed her cries. At therift in the wood she had leaned on a huge oak and as body and mind againfailed had sunk to its base in leafy hiding. Vaguely thence shepresently perceived, lit from behind her by sunset beams, the fartheredge of the green opening, and on that border, while she feebly looked,came suddenly a ghost!
"You 'ave no ri-ight to leave me! _Ah, you shall not!_"]
Ah, Heaven! the ghost of Hilary Kincaid! It looked about for her! Itlistened for her call! By the tree's rough bark she drew up half herheight, clung and, with reeling brain, gazed. How tall! how gaunt! howdingy gray! How unlike her whilom "ladies' man," whom, doubtless truly,they now called dead and buried. But what--what--was troubling the poorghost? What did it so wildly avoid? what wave away with such loving,tender pain? Flora Valcour! Oh, see, see! Ah, death in life! what doesshe see? As by the glare of a bursting midnight shell all the emptygossip of two years justified--made real--in one flash of staring view.With a long moan the beholder cast her arms aloft and sank in a heap,not knowing that the act had caught Hilary's eye, but willingly awarethat her voice had perished in a roar of artillery from the fartherbrink of the ravine, in a crackle and fall of tree-tops, and in the"rebel yell" and charge.
Next morning, in a fog, the blue holders of a new line of rifle-pitsclose under the top of a bluff talked up to the grays in a trench on itscrest. Gross was the banter, but at mention of "ladies" it purified.
"Johnnie!" cried "Yank," "who is she, the one we've got?" and when toldto ask her, said she was too ill to ask. By and by to "Johnnie's"inquiries the blues replied:
"He? the giant? Hurt? No-o, not half bad enough, when we count what hecost us. If we'd known he was only stunned we"--and so on, not veryinterestingly, while back in the rear of the gray line tearful Constancepraised, to her face, the haggard Flora and, in his absence, the woundedIrby, Flora's splendid rescuer in the evening onslaught.
"A lifetime debt," Miranda thought Flora owed him, and Flora'smeditative yes, as she lifted her eyes to her grandmother's,was--peculiar.
A few days later Anna, waking in the bliss of a restored mind, andfeeling beneath her a tremor of paddlewheels, gazed on the nurse at herside.
"Am I a--prisoner?" she asked.
The woman bent kindly without reply.
"Anyhow," said Anna, with a one-sided smile, "they can't call me a spy."Her words quickened: "I'm a rebel, but I'm no spy. I was lost. And he'sno spy. He was in uniform. Is he--on this boat?"
Yes, she was told, he was, with a few others like him, taken too soonfor the general parole of the surrender. Parole? she pondered.Surrender? What surrender? "Where are we going?" she softly inquired;"not to New Orleans?"
The nurse nodded brightly.
"But how can we get--by?"
"By Vicksburg? We're already by there."
"Has Vicks--?... Has Vicksburg--fallen?"
The confirming nod was tender. Anna turned away. Presently--"But notMobile? Mobile hasn't--?"
"No, not yet. But it must, don't you think?"
"No!" cried Anna. "It must not! Oh, it must not! I--if I--Oh, if I--"
The nurse soothed her smilingly: "My poor child," she said, "_you_ can'tsave Mobile."
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