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The Callenders and Valcours could see, in fancy, all the first chaos of it and all the fair creation that was to arise from it. What joy of planning! The grove should be ruddy with pine-knot flares perched high, and be full of luminous tents stocked with stuffs for sale at the most patriotic prices by Zingaras, Fatimas, and Scheherazades.
A worthy setting, it was called, for the gentle manners with which the Callenders made it alluring. They, of course, had not built it. The late Judge had acquired it from the descendants of a planter of indigo and coffee who in the oldest Creole days had here made his home and lived his life as thoroughly in the ancient baronial spirit as if the Mississippi had been the mediaeval Rhine.
The next sun rose fair over the green, rolling, open land, rich in half-grown crops of cotton and corn between fence-rows of persimmon and sassafras. Before it was high the eager Callenders were out on a main road. Their Mobile boy had left them and given the reins to an old man, a disabled and paroled soldier bound homeward into Vicksburg. Delays plagued them on every turn.
Full believer likewise, and true sorrower, was Greenleaf, in Hilary's death, having its seeming proof from Constance and Miranda as well as from Flora. For in all that twelvemonth the Callenders had got no glad tidings, even from Mandeville. Battle, march and devastation, march, battle and devastation had made letters as scarce as good dreams, in brightest Dixie. But darkest Dixie was New Orleans.
When the detective, after the Callenders were gone up-stairs and the captains had galloped away, truthfully told Miss Valcour that his only object in tarrying here was to see the love-knot tied, she heard him affably, though inwardly in flames of yearning to see him depart.
The wondering Callenders were just starting for a drive up-town. At the grove gate their horses were frightened out of all propriety by an opening peal, down in the camp, from "Roaring Betsy." And listen! The black driver drew in. From Jackson Square came distant thunders and across the great bend of the river they could see the white puff of each discharge. What could it mean?
Whatever it was, there was no shadow of it in her clear eyes and frank yet timid recognition of him. Falling in with her stoical and reticent acceptance of it, he nevertheless gathered that the Callenders had lost money in some invention which James Gow had taken with him to Rio, but which was sunk in the ship.
So while the man next the hack-driver, ordered by Mandeville and laden with travelling-bags, climbed to a seat by the Callenders' coachman the aide-de-camp crowded in between Constance and Victorine, the equipage turned from the remaining soldiers, and off the ladies spun for home, Anna and Miranda riding backward to have the returned warrior next his doting wife.
Lately the Callenders had found it prudent to remove to their house situate in the region near Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street, a quarter which, having once been fashionable, abides now in the merest twilight of its former grandeur. The letting of the upper rooms of the house was a main source of income.
On the first Sunday evening in April Doctor Sevier took tea with the Callenders, self-invited, alone and firmly oblivious of his own tardy wedding-gift to Anna as it gleamed at him on the board.
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