"Some officer"s wife," said two very sweet and lady-like persons, of unequal age and equal good taste in dress, as their eyes took an inventory of her apparel. They wore bonnets that were quite handsome, and had real false flowers and silk ribbons on them.
"Yes, she"s been to camp somewhere to see him."
"Beautiful child she"s got," said one, as Alice began softly to smite her mother"s shoulder for private attention, and to whisper gravely as Mary bent down.
Two or three soldiers took their feet off the seats, and one of them, at the amiably murmured request of the conductor, put his shoes on.
"The car in front is your car," said the conductor to another man, in especially dirty gray uniform.
"You kin hev it," said the soldier, throwing his palm open with an air of happy extravagance, and a group of gray-headed "citizens," just behind, exploded a loud country laugh.
"D" I onderstaynd you to lafe at me, saw?" drawled the soldier, turning back with a pretence of heavy gloom on his uncombed brow.
"Laughin" at yo" friend yondeh," said one of the citizens, grinning and waving his hand after the departing conductor.
""Caze if you lafe at me again, saw,"--the frown deepened,--"I"ll thess go "ight straight out iss caw."[3]
[3] Out of this car.
The laugh that followed this dreadful threat was loud and general, the victims laughing loudest of all, and the soldier smiling about benignly, and slowly scratching his elbows. Even the two ladies smiled. Alice"s face remained impa.s.sive. She looked twice into her mother"s to see if there was no smile there. But the mother smiled at her, took off her hood and smoothed back the fine gold, then put the hood on again, and tied its strings under the upstretched chin.
Presently Alice pulled softly at the hollow of her mother"s elbow.
"Mamma--mamma!" she whispered. Mary bowed her ear. The child gazed solemnly across the car at another stranger, then pulled the mother"s arm again, "That man over there--winked at me."
And thereupon another man, sitting sidewise on the seat in front, and looking back at Alice, t.i.ttered softly, and said to Mary, with a raw drawl:--
"She"s a-beginnin" young."
"She means some one on the other side," said Mary, quite pleasantly, and the man had sense enough to hush.
The jest and the laugh ran to and fro everywhere. It seemed very strange to Mary to find it so. There were two or three convalescent wounded men in the car, going home on leave, and they appeared never to weary of the threadbare joke of calling their wounds "furloughs." There was one little slip of a fellow--he could hardly have been seventeen--wounded in the hand, whom they kept teazed to the point of exasperation by urging him to confess that he had shot himself for a furlough, and of whom they said, later, when he had got off at a flag station, that he was the bravest soldier in his company. No one on the train seemed to feel that he had got all that was coming to him until the conductor had exchanged a jest with him. The land laughed. On the right hand and on the left it dimpled and wrinkled in gentle depressions and ridges, and rolled away in fields of young corn and cotton. The train skipped and clattered along at a happy-go-lucky, twelve-miles-an-hour gait, over trestles and stock-pits, through flowery cuts and along slender, rain-washed embankments where dewberries were ripening, and whence cattle ran down and galloped off across the meadows on this side and that, tails up and heads down, throwing their horns about, making light of the screaming destruction, in their dumb way, as the people made light of the war. At stations where the train stopped--and it stopped on the faintest excuse--a long line of heads and gray shoulders was thrust out of the windows of the soldiers" car, in front, with all manner of masculine head-coverings, even b.l.o.o.d.y handkerchiefs; and woe to the negro or negress or "citizen" who, by any conspicuous demerit or excellence of dress, form, stature, speech, or bearing, drew the fire of that line! No human power of face or tongue could stand the incessant volley of stale quips and mouldy jokes, affirmative, interrogative, and exclamatory, that fell about their victim.
At one spot, in a lovely natural grove, where the air was spiced with the gentle pungency of the young hickory foliage, the train paused a moment to let off a man in fine gray cloth, whose yellow stripes and one golden star on the coat-collar indicated a major of cavalry. It seemed as though pandemonium had opened. Mules braying, negroes yodling, axes ringing, teamsters singing, men shouting and howling, and all at nothing; mess-fires smoking all about in the same hap-hazard, but roomy, disorder in which the trees of the grove had grown; the railroad side lined with a motley crowd of jolly fellows in spurs, and the atmosphere between them and the line of heads in the car-windows murky with the interchange of compliments that flew back and forth from the "web-foots"[4] to the "critter company," and from the "critter company"
to the "web-foots." As the train moved off, "I say, boys," drawled a lank, coatless giant on the roadside, with but one suspender and one spur, "tha-at"s right! Gen"l Beerygyard told you to strike fo" yo"
homes, an" I see you" a-doin" it ez fa.s.s as you kin git thah." And the "citizens" in the rear car-windows giggled even at that; while the "web-foots" he-hawed their derision, and the train went on, as one might say, with its hands in its pockets, whooping and whistling over the fields--after the cows; for the day was declining.
[4] Infantry.
Mary was awed. As she had been forewarned to do, she tried not to seem unaccustomed to, or out of harmony with, all this exuberance. But there was something so brave in it, coming from a people who were playing a losing game with their lives and fortunes for their stakes; something so gallant in it, laughing and gibing in the sight of blood, and smell of fire, and shortness of food and raiment, that she feared she had betrayed a stranger"s wonder and admiration every time the train stopped, and the idlers of the station platform lingered about her window and silently paid their ungraceful but complimentary tribute of simulated casual glances.
For, with all this jest, it was very plain there was but little joy. It was not gladness; it was bravery. It was the humor of an invincible spirit--the gayety of defiance. She could easily see the grim earnestness beneath the jocund temper, and beneath the unrepining smile the privation and the apprehension. What joy there was, was a martial joy. The people were confident of victory at last,--a victorious end, whatever might lie between, and of even what lay between they would confess no fear. Richmond was safe, Memphis safer, New Orleans safest.
Yea, notwithstanding Porter and Farragut were pelting away at Forts Jackson and St. Philip. Indeed, if the rumor be true, if Farragut"s ships had pa.s.sed those forts, leaving Porter behind, then the Yankee sea-serpent was cut in two, and there was an end of him in that direction. Ha! ha!
"Is to-day the twenty-sixth?" asked Mary, at last, of one of the ladies in real ribbons, leaning over toward her.
"Yes, ma"am."
It was the younger one who replied. As she did so she came over and sat by Mary.
"I judge, from what I heard your little girl asking you, that you are going beyond Jackson."
"I"m going to New Orleans."
"Do you live there?" The lady"s interest seemed genuine and kind.
"Yes. I am going to join my husband there."
Mary saw by the reflection in the lady"s face that a sudden gladness must have overspread her own.
"He"ll be mighty glad, I"m sure," said the pleasant stranger, patting Alice"s cheek, and looking, with a pretty fellow-feeling, first into the child"s face and then into Mary"s.
"Yes, he will," said Mary, looking down upon the curling locks at her elbow with a mother"s happiness.
"Is he in the army?" asked the lady.
Mary"s face fell.
"His health is bad," she replied.
"I know some nice people down in New Orleans," said the lady again.
"We haven"t many acquaintances," rejoined Mary, with a timidity that was almost trepidation. Her eyes dropped, and she began softly to smooth Alice"s collar and hair.
"I didn"t know," said the lady, "but you might know some of them. For instance, there"s Dr. Sevier."
Mary gave a start and smiled.
"Why, is he your friend too?" she asked. She looked up into the lady"s quiet, brown eyes and down again into her own lap, where her hands had suddenly knit together, and then again into the lady"s face. "We have no friend like Dr. Sevier."
"Mother," called the lady softly, and beckoned. The senior lady leaned toward her. "Mother, this lady is from New Orleans and is an intimate friend of Dr. Sevier."
The mother was pleased.
"What might one call your name?" she asked, taking a seat behind Mary and continuing to show her pleasure.
"Richling."
The mother and daughter looked at each other. They had never heard the name before.
Yet only a little while later the mother was saying to Mary,--they were expecting at any moment to hear the whistle for the terminus of the route, the central Mississippi town of Canton:--
"My dear child, no! I couldn"t sleep to-night if I thought you was all alone in one o" them old hotels in Canton. No, you must come home with us. We"re barely two mile" from town, and we"ll have the carriage ready for you bright and early in the morning, and our coachman will put you on the cars just as nice--Trouble?" She laughed at the idea. "No; I tell you what would trouble me,--that is, if we"d allow it; that"d be for you to stop in one o" them hotels all alone, child, and like" as not some careless servant not wake you in time for the cars to-morrow." At this word she saw capitulation in Mary"s eyes. "Come, now, my child, we"re not going to take no for an answer."
Nor did they.
But what was the result? The next morning, when Mary and Alice stood ready for the carriage, and it was high time they were gone, the carriage was not ready; the horses had got astray in the night. And while the black coachman was on one horse, which he had found and caught, and was scouring the neighboring fields and lanes and meadows in search of the other, there came out from townward upon the still, country air the long whistle of the departing train; and then the distant rattle and roar of its far southern journey began, and then its warning notes to the scattering colts and cattle.
"Look away!"--it seemed to sing--"Look away!"--the notes fading, failing, on the ear,--"away--away--away down south in Dixie,"--the last train that left for New Orleans until the war was over.