Kincaid's Battery

by George Washington Cable

  LXI

  THE FLAG-OF-TRUCE BOAT

  September was in its first week. The news of Vicksburg--and PortHudson--ah, yes, and Gettysburg!--was sixty days old.

  From Southern Mississippi and East Louisiana all the grays who marchedunder the slanting bayonet or beside the cannon's wheel were gone. Leftwere only the "citizen" with his family and slaves, the postquartermaster and commissary, the conscript-officer, the trading Jew,the tax-in-kind collector, the hiding deserter, the jayhawker, a fewwounded boys on furlough, and Harper's cavalry. Throughout the Delta andwidely about its grief-broken, discrowned, beggared, shame-crazed,brow-beaten Crescent City the giddying heat quaked visibly over the highcorn, cotton, and cane, up and down the broken levees and ruinedhighways, empty by-ways, and grass-grown railways, on charred bridges,felled groves, and long burnt fence lines. The deep, moss-draped,vine-tangled swamps were dry.

  So quivered the same heat in the city's empty thoroughfares. Flowersrioted in the unkept gardens. The cicada's frying note fried hotterthan ever. Dazzling thunder-heads towered in the upper blue and stoodlike snow mountains of a vaster world. The very snake coiled in theshade. The spiced air gathered no freshness from the furious, infrequentshowers, the pavements burned the feet, and the blue "Yank" (whom thereno one dared call so by word or look), so stoutly clad, so uncouthlymisfitted, slept at noon face downward in the high grass under the treesof the public squares preempted by his tents, or with piece loaded andbayonet fixed slowly paced to and fro in the scant shade of someconfiscated office-building, from whose upper windows gray captiveslooked down, one of them being "the ladies' man."

  Not known of his keepers by that name, though as the famous MajorKincaid of Kincaid's Battery (the latter at Mobile with new guns), allJuly and August he had been of those who looked down from such windows;looked down often and long, yet never descried one rippling fold of onegossamer flounce of a single specimen of those far-compassionated"ladies of New Orleans," one of whom, all that same time, was AnnaCallender. No proved spy, she, no incarcerated prisoner, yet the mostgravely warned, though gentlest, suspect in all the recalcitrant city.

  Neither in those sixty days had Anna seen him. The blue sentries let noone pass in sight of that sort of windows. "Permit?" She had not soughtit, Some one in gold lace called her "blamed lucky" to enjoy theordinary permissions accorded Tom, Dick, and Harry. Indeed Tom, Dick,and Harry were freer than she. By reason of hints caught from her inwanderings of her mind on the boat, in dreams of a great service to bedone for Dixie, the one spot where she most yearned to go and to be wasforbidden her, and not yet had she been allowed to rest her hungry eyeson Callender House. Worse than idle, therefore, perilous for both ofthem and for any dream of great service, would it have been even to namethe name of Hilary Kincaid.

  What torture the double ban, the two interlocked privations! Yonder acity, little sister of New Orleans, still mutely hoping to be saved,here Hilary alive again, though Anna still unwitting whether she shouldlove and live or doubt and die. Yet what would they say when they shouldmeet? How could either explain? Surely, we think, love would have founda way; but while beyond each other's sight and hearing, no way couldHilary, at least, descry.

  To him it seemed impossible to speak to her--even to Fred Greenleaf hadFred been there!--without betraying another maiden, one who had sealedhis lips forever by confessing a heart which had as much--had more rightto love than he to live. True, Anna, above all, had right to live, tolove, to know; but in simplest honor to commonest manhood, in simplestmanhood's honor to all womankind, to Flora, to Anna herself, thisknowledge should come from any other human tongue rather than from his.From Anna he needed no explanation. That most mysteriously she shouldtwice have defaulted as keeper of sacred treasure; that she stood longaccused, by those who would most gladly have scouted the charge, ofleanings to another suitor, a suitor in the blue, and of sympathies,nay, services, treasonous to the ragged standards of the gray; that hehad himself found her in the enemy's lines, carried there by her ownsteps, and accepting captivity without a murmur, ah, what were suchlight-as-air trials of true love's faith while she was still AnnaCallender, that Anna from whom one breath saying, "I am true," wouldoutweigh all a world could show or surmise in accusation?

  And Anna: What could she say after what she had seen? Could she tellhim--with Flora, as it were, still in his arms--could she explain thatshe had been seeking him to cast herself there? Or if she stood muteuntil he should speak, what could he say to count one heart-throbagainst what she had seen? Oh, before God! before God! it was not_jealousy_ that could make her dumb or deaf to either of them. Sheconfessed its pangs. Yes! yes! against both of them, when she rememberedcertain things or forgot this and that, it raged in her heart, tingledin the farthest reach of her starved and fever-dried veins. Yet to Godhimself, to whom alone she told it, to God himself she protested on herknees it did not, should not, could not rule her. What right had she togive it room? Had she not discerned from the beginning that those twowere each other's by natural destiny? Was it not well, was it notGod-sent to all three, that in due time, before too late, he andshe--that other, resplendent she--should be tried upon each other alone--together? Always hitherto she, Anna, had in some way, some degree,intervened, by some chance been thrust and held between them; but atlength nature, destiny, had all but prevailed, when once moreshe--stubbornly astray from that far mission of a city's rescue soplainly hers--had crashed in between to the shame and woe of all, to thegain of no cause, no soul, no sweet influence in all love's universe.Now, meeting Hilary, what might she do or say?

  One thing! Bid him, on exchange or escape--if Heaven should grant thelatter--find again Flora, and in her companionship, at last unhindered,choose! Yes, that would be justice and wisdom, mercy and true love, allin one. But could she do it, say it? She sprang up in bed to answer,"No-o-o!" no, she was no bloodless fool, she was a woman! Oh, God ofmercy and true love, no! For reasons invincible, no! but most of all forone reason, one doubt, vile jealousy's cure and despair's antidote, slowto take form but growing as her strength revived, clear at last andall-sufficing; a doubt infinitely easier, simpler, kinder, and moreblessed than to doubt true love. Nay, no doubt, but a belief! therational, life-restoring belief, that in that awful hour of twilightbetween the hosts, of twilight and delirium, what she had seemed to seeshe had but seemed to see. Not all, ah, no, not all! Hilary alive againand grappling with death to come at her call had been real, proved real;the rest a spectre of her fevered brain! Meeting him now--and, oh, tomeet him now!--there should be no questionings or explainings, but whilehe poured forth a love unsullied and unshaken she, scarce harkening,would with battle haste tell him, her life's commander, the one thing ofvalue, outvaluing all mere lovers' love: The fact that behind achimney-panel of Callender House, in its old trivial disguise, lay yetthat long-lost fund pledged to Mobile's defense--by themselves aslovers, by poor war-wasted Kincaid's Battery, and by all its scatteredsisters; the fund which must, as nearly on the instant as his and herdaring could contrive, be recovered and borne thither for the unlockingof larger, fate-compelling resources of deliverance.

  One day Victorine came to Anna with ecstasy in her almond eyes and muchnews on her lips. "To bigin small," she said, Flora and her grandmotherhad "arrive' back ag-ain" at dawn that morning! Oddly, while Anna forceda smile, her visitor's eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. So theysat, Anna's smile fading out while her soul's troubles inwardly burnedafresh, Victorine's look growing into clearer English than her Creoletongue could have spoken. "I trust her no more," it said. "Long have Idoubted her, and should have told you sooner but for--Charlie; but now,dead in love as you know me still to be, you have my conviction. That isall for the present. There is better news."

  The ecstasy gleamed again and she gave her second item. These weeks shehad been seeking, for herself and a guardian aunt, a passport into theConfederacy and lo! here it lay in her pretty hand.

  "Deztitution!" she joyfully confessed to be the plea on which it had be
enprocured--by Doctor Sevier through Colonel--guess!--"Grinleaf!--juz'riturn'" from service in the field.

  And how were the destitute pair to go?

  Ah! did Anna "rim-emb'r" a despatch-boat of unrivalled speed whoseengines Hilary Kin--?

  Yes, ah, yes!

  On which she and others had once--?

  Yes, yes!

  And which had been captured when the city fell? That boat was now lyingoff Callender House! Did Anna _not_ know that her shattered home, solong merely the headquarters of a blue brigade, had lately become oflarge, though very quiet, importance as a rendezvous of big generals whoby starlight paced its overgrown garden alleys debating and planningsomething of great moment? Doctor Sevier had found that out and hadcharged Victorine to tell it with all secrecy to the biggest general inMobile the instant she should reach there. For she was to go by thatdespatch-boat.

  "Aw-dinner-illy," she said, a flag-of-truce craft might be any old tuband would go the short way, from behind the city and across the lakes,not all round by the river and the Chandeleur Islands. But thistime--that very morning--a score or so of Confederate prisoners(officers, for exchange) had been put aboard that boat, bound forMobile. Plainly the whole affair was but a mask for reconnaissance, theboat, swiftest in all the Gulf, to report back at top speed by way ofthe lakes. But!--the aunt would not go at all! Never having been a milefrom her door, she was begging off in a palsy of fright, and here wasthe niece with a deep plot--ample source of her ecstasy--a plot forAnna, duly disguised, to go in the aunt's place, back to freedom, Dixie,and the arms of Constance and Miranda.

  Anna trembled. She could lovingly call the fond schemer, over and over,a brave, rash, generous little heroine and lay caresses on her twice andagain, but to know whether this was Heaven's leading was beyond her.She paced the room. She clasped her brow. A full half of her own greatpurpose (great to her at least) seemed all at once as good as achieved,yet it was but the second half, as useless without the first as half abridge on the far side of the flood. "I cannot go!" she moaned. For thefirst half was Hilary, and he--she saw it without asking--was on thiscartel of exchange.

  Gently she came and took her rescuer's hands: "Dear child! If--if whilethere was yet time--I had only got a certain word to--_him_--you know?But, ah, me! I keep it idle yet; a secret, Victorine, a secret worth ourthree lives! oh, three times three hundred lives! Even now--"

  "Give it me, Anna! Give it! Give it me, that sick-rate! I'll take ithim!"

  Anna shook her head: "Ah, if you could--in time! Or even--even withouthim, letting him go, if just you and I--Come!" They walked to and fro inembrace: "Dear, our front drawing-room, so ruined, you know, by thatshell, last year--"

  "Ah, the front? no! The behine, yes, with those two hole' of the shelland with thad _beegue_ hole in the floor where it cadge fiah."

  "Victorine, I could go--with you--in that boat, if only I could be forone minute in that old empty front room alone."

  Victorine halted and sadly tossed a hand: "Ah! h-amptee, yes, both thefront and the back--till yes-the-day! This morning, the front, no! Juz'sinze laz' week they 'ave brick' up bitwin them cloze by that burnedhole, to make of the front an office, and now the front 't is o'cupy!"

  "Oh, not as an office, I hope?"

  "Worse! The worse that can be! They 'ave stop' five prisoner' from theboat and put them yondeh. Since an hour Col-on-el Grinleaf he tol' methat--and she's ad the bottom, that Flora! Bicause--" The speakergazed. Anna was all joy.

  "Because what?" demanded Anna, "because Hil--?"

  "Yaas! bicause he's one of them! Ringgleadeh! I dunno, me, what is that,but tha'z what he's accuse'--ringg-leadingg!"

  Still the oblivious Anna was glad. "It is Flora's doing," she gratefullycried. "She's done it! done it for us and our cause!"

  "Ah-h! not if she know herseff!"

  Anna laughed the discussion down: "Come, dear, come! the whole thingopens to me clear and wide!"

  Not so clear or wide as she thought. True, the suffering Flora was doingthis, in desperate haste; but not for Anna, if she knew herself. Yetwhen Anna, in equal haste, made a certain minute, lengthy writing and,assisted by that unshaken devotee, her maid, and by Victorine, bakedfive small cakes most laughably alike (with the writing in ore) and laidthem beside some plainer food in a pretty basket, the way still seemedwide enough for patriotism.

  Now if some one would but grant Victorine leave to bestow this basket!As she left Anna she gave her pledge to seek this favor of any one elserather than of Greenleaf; which pledge she promptly broke, with asuccess that fully reassured her cheerful conscience.