Kincaid's Battery

by George Washington Cable

And the Valcours? Yes, they, too, had their frantic impulses to rise and fly. For Madame, though her lean bosom bled for the lost boy, the fiercest pain of waiting was that its iron coercion lay in their penury. For Flora its sharpest pangs were in her own rage; a rage not of the earlier, cold sort against Anna and whoever belonged to Anna--that transport had always been more than half a joy--but a new, hot rage against herself and the finical cheapness of her scheming, a rage that stabbed her fair complacency with the revelation that she had a heart, and a heart that could ache after another. The knife of that rage turned in her breast every time she cried to the grandam, "We must go!" and that rapacious torment simpered, "No funds," adding sidewise hints toward Anna's jewels, still diligently manoeuvred for, but still somewhere up-stairs in Callender House, sure to go with Anna should Anna go while the manoeuvrers were away.

A long lane to any one, was such waiting, lighted, for Anna, only by a faint reflection of that luster of big generals' strategy and that invincibility of the Southern heart which, to all New Orleans and even to nations beyond seas, clad Dixie's every gain in light and hid her gravest disasters in beguiling shadow. But suddenly one day the long lane turned. The secret had just leaked out that the forts down the river were furiously engaged with the enemy's mortar-boats a few miles below them and that in the past forty-eight hours one huge bomb every minute, three thousand in all, had dropped into those forts or burst over them, yet the forts were "proving themselves impregnable." The lane turned and there stood Charlie.

There he stood, in the stairway door of the front room overlooking Jackson Square. The grandmother and sister had been keenly debating the news and what to do about it, the elder bird fierce to stay, the younger bent on flight, and had just separated to different windows, when they heard, turned and beheld him there, a stranger in tattered gray and railway dirt, yet their own coxcomb boy from his curls to his ill-shod feet. Flora had hardly caught her breath or believed her eyes before the grandmother was on his neck patting and petting his cheeks and head and plying questions in three languages: When, where, how, why, how, where and when?

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 God 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! grâce"--one hand stopped stroking long enough to make merrily the sign of cross--"grâce 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.