Kincaids Battery | Page 5

lip, and the floral tenderness with which it so faintly overhung the
nether, wherefrom it seemed ever about to part yet parted only when
she spoke or smiled.
"A child's mouth and a woman's eyes," he mused.
When her smiles came the mouth remained as young as before, yet
suddenly, as truly as the eyes, showed--showed him at
least--steadfastness of purpose, while the eyes, where fully half the
smile was, still unwittingly revealed their depths of truth.
"Poor Fred!" he pondered as the General and Mandeville entered the
carriage and it turned away.
A mile or two from Carrollton down the river and toward the city lay
the old unfenced fields where Hilary had agreed with Irby to help him
manoeuvre his very new command. Along the inland edge of this plain
the railway and the common road still ran side by side, but the river
veered a mile off. So Mandeville pointed out to the two ladies as they,
he, and the General drove up to the spot with Kincaid and Greenleaf as
outriders. The chosen ground was a level stretch of wild turf maybe a
thousand yards in breadth, sparsely dotted with shoulder-high acacias.
No military body was yet here, and the carriage halted at the first good
view point.
Mrs. Callender, the only member of her family who was of Northern
birth and rearing, was a small slim woman whose smile came whenever
she spoke and whose dainty nose went all to merry wrinkles whenever
she smiled. It did so now, in the shelter of her diminutive sunshade

opened flat against its jointed handle to fend off the strong afternoon
beams, while she explained to Greenleaf--dismounted beside the
wheels with Mandeville--that Constance, Anna's elder sister, would
arrive by and by with Flora Valcour. "Connie", she said, had been left
behind in the clutches of the dressmaker!
"Flora," she continued, crinkling her nose ever so kind-heartedly at
Greenleaf, "is Lieutenant Mandeville's cousin, you know. Didn't he tell
you something back yonder in Carrollton?"
Greenleaf smiled an admission and her happy eyes closed to mere
chinks. What had been told was that Constance had yesterday accepted
Mandeville.
"Yes," jovially put in the lucky man, "I have divulge' him that, and he
seem' almoze as glad as the young lady herseff!"
Even to this the sweet widow's misplaced wrinkles faintly replied,
while Greenleaf asked, "Does the Lieutenant's good fortune account for
the--'clutches of the dressmaker'?"
It did. The Lieutenant hourly expecting to be ordered to the front, this
wedding, like so many others, would be at the earliest day possible. "A
great concession," the lady said, turning her piquant wrinkles this time
upon Mandeville. But just here the General engrossed attention. His
voice had warmed sentimentally and his kindled eye was passing back
and forth between Anna seated by him and Hilary close at hand in the
saddle. He waved wide:
"This all-pervading haze and perfume, dew and dream," he was saying,
"is what makes this the Lalla Rookh's land it is!" He smiled at himself
and confessed that Carrollton Gardens always went to his head. "Anna,
did you ever hear your mother sing--
"'There's a bower of roses--'?"
She lighted up to say yes, but the light was all he needed to be lured on
through a whole stanza, and a tender sight--Ocean silvering to

brown-haired Cynthia--were the two, as he so innocently strove to
recreate out of his own lost youth, for her and his nephew, this
atmosphere of poetry.
"'To sit in the roses and hear the bird's song!'"
he suavely ended--"I used to make Hilary sing that for me when he was
a boy."
"Doesn't he sing it yet?" asked Mrs. Callender.
"My God, madame, since I found him addicted to comic songs I've
never asked him!"
Kincaid led the laugh and the talk became lively. Anna was merrily
accused by Miranda (Mrs. Callender) of sharing the General's
abhorrence of facetious song. First she pleaded guilty and then reversed
her plea with an absurd tangle of laughing provisos delightful even to
herself. At the same time the General withdrew from his nephew all
imputation of a frivolous mind, though the nephew avowed himself
nonsensical from birth and destined to die so. It was a merry moment,
so merry that Kincaid's bare mention of Mandeville as Mandy made
even the General smile and every one else laugh. The Creole, to whom
any mention of himself, (whether it called for gratitude or for pistols
and coffee,) was always welcome, laughed longest. If he was Mandy,
he hurried to rejoin, the absent Constance "muz be Candy--ha, ha, ha!"
And when Anna said Miranda should always thenceforth be Randy, and
Mrs. Callender said Anna ought to be Andy, and the very General was
seduced into suggesting that then Hilary would be Handy,