The General and his staff were just reaching it. Far down behind them shone the armed host. The march ceased, the music--"then you'll rememb'"--broke off short. The column rested. "Mon Dieu!" said even the Orleans Guards, "quel chaleur! Is it not a terrib', thad sun!" Hundreds of their blue képis, hundreds of gray shakos in the Confederate Guards, were lifted to wipe streaming necks and throats, while away down beyond our ladies' ken all the drummers of the double escort, forty by count, silently came back and moved in between the battery and its band to make the last music the very bravest. Was that Kincaid, the crowd asked, one of another; he of the thick black locks, tired cheek and brow, and eyes that danced now as he smiled and talked? "Phew! me, I shou'n' love to be tall like that, going to be shot at, no! ha, ha! But thad's no wonder they are call' the ladies' man batt'rie!"
"Hah! they are not call' so because him, but because themse'v's! Every one he is that, and they didn' got the name in Circus street neither, ha, ha!--although--Hello, Chahlie Valcour. Good-by, Chahlie. Don't ged shoot in the back--ha, ha!--"
A command! How eternally different from the voice of prattle. The crowd huddled back to either sidewalk, forced by the opening lines of the escort backed against it, till the long, shelled wagon-way gleamed white and bare. Oh, Heaven! oh, home! oh, love! oh, war! For hundreds, hundreds--beat Anna's heart--the awful hour had come, had come! She and her five companions could see clear down both bayonet-crested living walls--blue half the sun-tortured way, gray the other half--to where in red képis and with shimmering sabres, behind their tall captain, stretched the dense platoons and came and came, to the crash of horns, the boys, the boys, the dear, dear boys who with him, with him must go, must go!
"Don't cry, Connie dear," she whispered, though stubborn drops were salting her own lips, "it will make it harder for Steve."
"Harder!" moaned the doting bride, "you don't know him!"
"Oh, let any woman cry who can," laughed Flora, "I wish I could!" and verily spoke the truth. Anna meltingly pressed her hand but gave her no glance. All eyes, dry or wet, were fixed on the nearing mass, all ears drank the rising peal and roar of its horns and drums. How superbly rigorous its single, two-hundred-footed step. With what splendid rigidity the escorts' burnished lines walled in its oncome.
But suddenly there was a change. Whether it began in the music, which turned into a tune every Tom, Dick, and Harry now had by heart, or whether a moment before among the blue-caps or gray-shakos, neither Anna nor the crowd could tell. Some father in those side ranks lawlessly cried out to his red-capped boy as the passing lad brushed close against him, "Good-by, my son!" and as the son gave him only a sidelong glance he seized and shook the sabre arm, and all that long, bristling lane of bayonets went out of plumb, out of shape and order, and a thousand brass-buttoned throats shouted good-by and hurrah. Shakos waved, shoulders were snatched and hugged, blue képis and red were knocked awry, beards were kissed and mad tears let flow. And still, with a rigor the superbest yet because the new tune was so perfect to march by, fell the unshaken tread of the cannoneers, and every onlooker laughed and wept and cheered as the brass rent out to the deafening drums, and the drums roared back to the piercing brass,--
De black-snake love' de blackbird' nes',
De baby love' his mamy's bres',
An' raggy-tag, aw spick-an'-span,
De ladies loves de ladies' man.
I loves to roll my eyes to de ladies!
I loves to sympathize wid de ladies!
As long as eveh I knows sugah f'om san'
I's bound to be a ladies' man.
So the black-hatted giant with the silver staff strode into the wide shed, the puffy-cheeked band reading their music and feeling for foothold as they followed, and just yonder behind them, in the middle of the white way, untouched by all those fathers, unhailed by any brother of his own, came Hilary Kincaid with all the battery at his neat heels, its files tightly serried but its platoons in open order, each flashing its sabres to a "present" on nearing the General and back to a "carry" when he was passed, and then lengthening into column of files to enter the blessed shade of the station.
In beside them surged a privileged throng of near kin, every one calling over every one's head, "Good-by!" "Good-by!" "Here's your mother, Johnnie!" and, "Here's your wife, Achille!" Midmost went the Callenders, the Valcours, and Victorine, willy-nilly, topsy-turvy, swept away, smothering, twisting, laughing, stumbling, staggering, yet saved alive by that man of the moment Mandeville, until half-way down the shed and the long box-car train they brought up on a pile of ordnance stores and clung like drift in a flood. And at every twist and stagger Anna said in her heart a speech she had been saying over and over ever since the start from Callender House; a poor commonplace speech that must be spoken though she perished for shame of it; that must be darted out just at the right last instant if such an instant Heaven would only send: "I take back what I said last night and I'm glad you spoke as you did!"