Dimly he reflected their fond demonstrations. No gladness was in his face. His speech, as hurried as theirs, answered no queries. He asked loftily for air, soap, water and the privacy of his own room, and when they had followed him there and seen him scour face, arms, neck, and head, rub dry and resume his jacket and belt, he had grown only more careworn and had not yet let his sister"s eyes rest on his.
He had but a few hours to spend in the city, he said; had brought despatches and must carry others back by the next train. His story, he insisted, was too long to tell before he had delivered certain battery letters; one to Victorine, two to Constance Mandeville, and so on. Here was one to Flora, from Captain Irby; perhaps the story was in it. At any rate, its bearer must rush along now. He toppled his "grannie" into a rocking-chair and started away. He "would be back as soon as ever he--"
But Flora filled the doorway. He had to harden his glance to hers at last. In her breast were acutest emotions widely at war, yet in her eyes he saw only an unfeeling light, and it was the old woman behind him who alone noted how painfully the girl"s fingers were pinched upon Irby"s unopened letter. The boy"s stare betrayed no less anger than suffering and as Flora spoke he flushed.
"Charlie," she melodiously began, but his outcry silenced her:
"Now, by the eternal great G.o.d Almighty, Flora Valcour, if you dare to ask me that--" He turned to the grandmother, dropped to his knees, buried his face in her lap and sobbed.
With genuine tenderness she stroked his locks. Yet while she did so she lifted to the sister a face lighted up with a mirth of deliverance. To nod, toss, and nod again, was poor show for her glee; she smirked and writhed to the disdaining girl like a child at a mirror, and, though sitting thus confined, gave all the effects of jigging over the floor. Hilary out of the way! Kincaid eliminated, and the whole question free of him, this inheritance question so small and mean to all but her and Irby, but to him and her so large, so paramount! Silently, but plainly to the girl, her mouth widely motioned, "Il est mort! grace"--one hand stopped stroking long enough to make merrily the sign of cross--"grace au ciel, il est mort!"
No moment of equal bitterness had Flora Valcour ever known. To tell half her distresses would lose us in their tangle, midmost in which was a choking fury against the man whom unwillingly she loved, for escaping her, even by a glorious death. One thought alone--that Anna, as truly as if stricken blind, would sit in darkness the rest of her days--lightened her torture, and with that thought she smiled a stony loathing on the mincing grandam and the boy"s unlifted head. Suddenly, purpose gleamed from her. She could not break forth herself, but to escape suffocation she must and would procure an outburst somewhere. Measuredly, but with every nerve and tendon overstrung, she began to pace the room.
"Don"t cry, Charlie," she smoothly said in a voice as cold as the crawl of a snake. The brother knew the tone, had known it from childhood, and the girl, glancing back on him, was pleased to see him stiffen. A few steps on she added pensively, "For a soldier to cry--and befo" ladies--a ladies" man--of that batt"rie--tha"s hardly fair--to the ladies, eh, grandmama?"
But the boy only pressed his forehead harder down and clutched the aged knees under it till their owner put on, to the scintillant beauty, a look of alarm and warning. The girl, musingly retracing her calculated steps to where the kneeler seemed to clinch himself to his posture, halted, stroked with her slippered toe a sole of his rude shoes and spoke once more: "Do they oft-ten boohoo like that, grandma, those artillerie?"
The boy whirled up with the old woman clinging. A stream of oaths and curses appallingly original poured from him, not as through the lips alone but from his very eyes and nostrils. That the girl was first of all a fool and d.a.m.ned was but a trivial part of the cry--of the explosion of his whole year"s mistaken or half-mistaken inferences and smothered indignation. With equal flatness and blindness he accused her of rejoicing in the death of Kincaid: the n.o.blest captain (he ramped on) that ever led a battery; kindest friend that ever ruled a camp; gayest, hottest, daringest fighter of Shiloh"s field; fiercest for man"s purity that ever loved the touch of women"s fingers; sternest that ever wept on the field of death with the dying in his arms; and the scornfullest of promotion that ever was cheated of it at headquarters.
All these extravagances he cursed out, too witless to see that this same hero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna G.o.dmother of their flag, and of being in some dark league against him--"h.e.l.l only knew what"--along with that snail of a cousin whom everybody but Kincaid himself and the silly old uncle knew to be the fallen man"s most venomous foe. Throughout the storm the grandmother"s fingers pattered soothing caresses, while Flora stood as unruffled by his true surmises as by any, a look of cold interest in her narrowed eyes, and her whole bodily and spiritual frame drinking relief from his transport. Now, while he still raged, she tenderly smiled on their trembling ancestress.
"Really, you know grandmama, sometimes me also I feel like that, when to smazh the furniture "t would be a delightful--or to wring somebody the neck, yes. But for us, and to-day, even to get a li"l" mad, how is that a possibl"?" She turned again, archly, to the brother, but flashed in alarm and sprang toward him.
His arm stiffly held her off. With failing eyes bent on the whimpering grandmother he sighed a disheartened oath and threshed into a chair gasping--
"My wound--opened again."
XLVI
THE SCHOOL OF SUSPENSE
Thus it fell to Flora to be letter-bearer and news-bearer in her brother"s stead. Yet he had first to be cared for by her and the grandmother in a day long before "first aid" had become common knowledge. The surgeon they had hailed in had taken liberal time to show them how, night and morning, to unbandage, cleanse and rebind, and to tell them (smiling into the lad"s mutinous eyes) that the only other imperative need was to keep him flat on his back for ten days. Those same weeks of downpour which had given the Shiloh campaign two-thirds of its horrors had so overfed the monstrous Mississippi that it was running four miles an hour, overlapping its levees and heaving up through the wharves all along the city"s front, until down about the Convent and Barracks and Camp Callender there were streets as miry as Corinth. And because each and all of these hindrances were welcome to Flora as giving leisure to read and reread Irby"s long letter about his cousin and uncle, and to plan what to say and do in order to reap all the fell moment"s advantages, the shadows were long in the Callender"s grove when she finally ascended their veranda steps.
She had come round by way of Victorine"s small, tight-fenced garden of c.r.a.pe-myrtles, oleanders and pomegranates--where also the water was in the streets, backwater from the overflowed swamp-forests between city and lake--and had sent her to Charlie"s bedside. Pleasant it would be for us to turn back with the damsel and see her, with heart as open as her arms, kiss the painted grandam, and at once proceed to make herself practically invaluable; or to observe her every now and then dazzle her adored patient with a tear-gem of joy or pity, or of grat.i.tude that she lived in a time when heroic things could happen right at home and to the lowliest, even to her; sweet woes like this, that let down, for virtuous love, the barriers of humdrum convention. But Flora draws us on, she and Anna. As she touched the bell-k.n.o.b Constance sprang out to welcome her, though not to ask her in--till she could have a word with her alone, the young wife explained.
"I saw you coming," she said, drawing her out to the bal.u.s.trade. "You didn"t get Anna"s note of last night--too bad! I"ve just found out--her maid forgot it! What do you reckon we"ve been doing all day long? Packing! We"re going we don"t know where! Vicksburg, Jackson, Meridian, Mobile, wherever Anna can best hunt Hilary from--and Charlie too, of course."
"Yes," said Flora, one way to the speaker and quite another way to herself.
"Yes, she wants to do it, and Doctor Sevier says it"s the only thing for her. Ah, Flora, how well you can understand that!"
"Indeed, yes," sighed the listener, both ways again.
"We know how absolutely you believe the city"s our best base, else we"d have asked you to go with us." The ever genuine Constance felt a mortifying speciousness in her words and so piled them on. "We know the city is best--unless it should fall, and it won"t--oh, it won"t, G.o.d"s not going to let so many prayers go unanswered, Flora! But we"ve tossed reason aside and are going by instinct, the way I always feel safest in, dear. Ah, poor Anna! Oh, Flora, she"s so sweet about it!"
"Yes? Ab-out what?"
"You, dear, and whoever is suffering the same--"
Flora softly winced and Constance blamed herself so to have pained another sister"s love. "And she"s so quiet," added the speaker, "but, oh, so pale--and so hard either to comfort or encourage, or even to discourage. There"s nothing you can say that she isn"t already heart-sick of saying herself, to herself, and I beg you, dear, in your longing to comfort her, please don"t bring up a single maybe-this or maybe-that; any hope, I mean, founded on a mere doubt."
"Ah, but sometime" the doubt--it is the hope!"
"Yes, sometimes; but not to her, any more. Oh, Flora, if it"s just as true of you, you won"t be--begrudge my saying it of my sister--that no saint ever went to her matyrdom better prepared than she is, right now, for the very worst that can be told. There"s only one thing to which she never can and never will resign herself, and that is doubt. She can"t breathe its air, Flora. As she says herself, she isn"t so built; she hasn"t that gift."
The musing Flora nodded compa.s.sionately, but inwardly she said that, gift or no gift, Anna should serve her time in Doubting Castle, with her, Flora, for turnkey. Suddenly she put away her abstraction and with a summarizing gesture and chastened twinkle spoke out: "In short, you want to know for w"at am I come."
"Flora!"
"Ah, but, my dear, you are ri-ight. That is "all correct," as they say, and one thing I"m come for--"t is--" She handed out Mandeville"s two letters.
The wife caught them to her bosom, sprang to her tiptoes, beamed on the packet a second time and read aloud, "Urbanity of Corporal Valcour!" She heaved an ecstatic breath to speak on, but failed. Anna and Miranda had joined them and Flora had risen from her seat on the bal.u.s.trade, aware at once that the role she had counted on was not to be hers, the role of comforter to an undone rival.
Pale indeed was the rival, pale as rivalry could wish. Yet instantly Flora saw, with a fiery inward sting, how beautiful pallor may be. And more she saw: with the chagrin then growing so common on every armed front--the chagrin of finding one"s foe entrenched--she saw how utterly despair had failed to crush a gentle soul. Under cover of affliction"s night and storm Anna, this whole Anna Callender, had been reinforced, had fortified and was a new problem.
She greeted Flora with a welcoming beam, but before speaking she caught her sister"s arm and glanced herself, at the superscription.
"Flora!" she softly cried, "oh, Flora Valcour! has your brother--your Charlie!--come home alive and well?--What; no?--No, he has not?"
The visitor was shaking her head: "No. Ah, no! home, yes, and al-I"ve; but--"
"Oh, Flora, Flora! alive and at home! home and alive!" While the words came their speaker slowly folded her arms about the bearer of tidings, and with a wholly unwonted strength pressed her again to the rail and drew bosom to bosom, still exclaiming, "Alive! alive! Oh, whatever his plight, be thankful, Flora, for so much! Alive enough to come home!"
XLVII
FROM THE BURIAL SQUAD
The pinioned girl tried to throw back her head and bring their eyes together, but Anna, through some unconscious advantage, held it to her shoulder, her own face looking out over the garden.
"Ah, let me be glad for you, Flora, let me be glad for you! Oh, think of it! You have him! have him at home, to look upon, to touch, to call by name! and to be looked upon by him and touched and called by name! Oh, G.o.d in heaven! G.o.d in heaven!"
Miranda"s fond protests were too timorous to check her, and Flora"s ceased in the delight of hearing that last wail confess the thought of Hilary. Constance strove with tender energy for place and voice: "Nan, dearie, Nan! But listen to Flora, Nan. See, Nan, I haven"t opened Steve"s letter yet. Wounded and what, Flora, something worse? Ah, if worse you couldn"t have left him."
"I know," sighed Anna, relaxing her arms to a caress and turning her gaze to Flora. "I see. Your brother, our dear Charlie, has come back to life, but wounded and alone. Alone. Hilary is still missing. Isn"t that it? That"s all, isn"t it?"
Constance, in a sudden thought of what her letters might tell, began to open one, though with her eyes at every alternate moment on Flora as eagerly as Miranda"s or Anna"s. Flora stood hiddenly revelling in that complexity of her own spirit which enabled her to pour upon her questioner a look, even a real sentiment, of ravishing pity, while nevertheless in the depths of her being she thrilled and burned and danced and sang with joy for the very misery she thus compa.s.sionated. By a designed motion she showed her grandmother"s reticule on her arm. But only Anna saw it; Constance, with her gaze in the letter, was drawing Miranda aside while both bent their heads over a clause in it which had got blurred, and looked at each other aghast as they made it out to read, ""--from the burial squad."" The grandmother"s silken bag saved them from Anna"s notice.
"Oh, Flora!" said Anna again, "is there really something worse?" Abruptly, she spread a hand under the bag and with her eyes still in the eyes of its possessor slid it gently from the yielding wrist. Dropping her fingers into it she brought forth a tobacco-pouch, of her own embroidering, and from it, while the reticule fell unheeded to the floor, drew two or three small things which she laid on it in her doubled hands and regarded with a smile. Vacantly the smile increased as she raised it to Flora, then waned while she looked once more on the relics, and grew again as she began to handle them. Her slow voice took the tone of a child alone at play.
"Why, that"s my photograph," she said. "And this--this is his watch--watch and chain." She dangled them. A light frown came and went between her smiles.
With soft eagerness Flora called Constance, and the sister and Miranda stood dumb.
"See, Connie," the words went on, "see, "Randa, this is my own photograph, and this is his own watch and chain. I must go and put them away--with my old gems." Constance would have followed her as she moved but she waved a limp forbiddal, prattling on: "This doesn"t mean he"s dead, you know. Oh, not at all! It means just the contrary! Why, I saw him alive last night, in a dream, and I can"t believe anything else, and I won"t! No, no, not yet!" At that word she made a misstep and as she started sharply to recover it the things she carried fell breaking and jingling at her feet.
"Oh-h!" she sighed in childish surprise and feebly dropped to her knees. Flora, closest by, sprang crouching to the rescue, but recoiled as the kneeling girl leaned hoveringly over the mementos and with distended eyes and an arm thrust forward cried aloud, "No! No! No-o!"
At once, however, her voice was tender again. "Mustn"t anybody touch them but me, ever any more," she said, regathering the stuff, regained her feet and moved on. Close after her wavering steps anxiously pressed the others, yet not close enough. At the open door, smiling back in rejection of their aid, she tripped, and before they could save her, tumbled headlong within. From up-stairs, from downstairs came servants running, and by the front door entered a stranger, a private soldier in swamp boots and bespattered with the mire of the river road from his spurs to his ragged hat.
"No, bring her out," he said to a slave woman who bore Anna in her arms, "out to the air!" But the burden slipped free and with a cleared mind stood facing him.