SPARTANS ALL!
The next day was Sunday, and half the county, that as to say, the
aristocratic moiety, had assembled at Petworth Church for the morning
service. The great wave of dissent which swept over Virginia after
the Revolution, and which was powerfully reënforced by the eloquence
of John Wesley and George Whitfield and other Methodist and Baptist
divines, had very much reduced the congregation of Petworth Church.
If, however, the vacant pews had been filled by the descendants of
those who had left it, these who had remained stanch to Anglicanism
would have resented it deeply. With the loss of numbers and of
political power, the social influence of the remnant remained
unimpaired and was even enhanced. The spirit of resentment which had
originally caused those who had remained true to the traditions of
Petworth and set a social ban upon those who had seceded into the newer
communions was added to the force of long custom and the indifference
of the dissenters.
Occasionally, a Baptist or Methodist family would appear in a
shamefaced way at Petworth Church, but in that age and time proselytes
were not welcomed or even desired.
The old church, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was a bit
of the seventeenth-century architecture, standing serene and undismayed
in the nineteenth century, which in that part of Virginia yet lagged
a hundred years behind the age. The church was overgrown with ivy,
in which innumerable birds nested. In summer, when the diamond-paned
windows were opened to let in the blue and limpid air, the voice of
the clergyman was almost drowned in the splendid improvisations of the
larks and blackbirds that thronged about the old, ivy-covered walls.
The dead and gone vicars were buried under the main aisle, while in
the churchyard outside were ancient tombstones covered with long
inscriptions, moss-grown like everything else about the church.
Usually, the place was as placid as peaceful Stoke Pogis at evening
time, but on this April Sunday it was alive with people all throbbing
with excitement and on fire with enthusiasm. Besides the great event
which had stirred them all, the secession of Virginia, and the sending
forth to war of all the men capable of bearing arms, was the local
tragedy--Neville Tremaine turning traitor. The Tremaines were, taken
all in all, the greatest people in the county. Their wealth was
considerable, and their heritage of brains larger still. They had
always given the county something to talk about and did not fail in
this emergency.
In the minds of the people assembled at Petworth Church on that Sunday
morning was the species of curiosity, which is miscalled sympathy, to
see how the Tremaines bore the first disgrace in their family. Colonel
Tremaine was a stanch churchman, and Mrs. Tremaine never failed, rain
or shine, on Sunday morning to walk into church upon Colonel Tremaine’s
arm and to marshal her flock before her, a flock which for many years
past had consisted only of Angela and Archie.
There was no pretense in the community of sympathy with Angela, only
inquisitiveness mixed with scorn and contempt. Many doubted whether she
would have the assurance to present herself at church after her late
disgraceful alliance, for so her marriage with Neville Tremaine was
reckoned. But Angela, surmising this and with the hot courage of youth,
would not remain away.
The Tremaines were always prompt in arriving, and on this Sunday
morning, punctually at a quarter before eleven, the great lumbering
Harrowby coach, with the big bay horses, drew up before the iron gate
of the churchyard. It was Hector’s privilege to drive the carriage
on Sundays according to the peculiar custom by which the regular
coachman was superseded whenever there seemed any real occasion for his
services. The Sunday arrangement was of Mrs. Tremaine’s making, who,
regularly on Sunday morning, directed Hector after leaving his horses
in charge of Tasso, who was on the box, to come into church and pray
to be delivered from the devil of drink. This invariably gave great
offense to Hector, but he could not forego the honor and glory of
driving the Harrowby carriage on Sunday and the pleasure of a weekly
gossip with his colleagues who drove other big lumbering coaches.
The horses were quiet enough, but it was Hector’s practice to lash
them violently just as he was entering the grove in which the church
stood and to pull them up almost upon their haunches before the
churchyard gate. This programme was executed to the letter on this
particular Sunday.
The congregation gathered about the green churchyard and, standing
upon the flagged walk which led to the door, watched Colonel Tremaine
descend and then assist Mrs. Tremaine out of the carriage. There was
some one else to alight, Angela, now Mrs. Neville Tremaine.
At the same moment, Richard and Archie, who preferred riding to
driving, dismounted from their horses, and Lyddon, who had walked
through the woods to church, contrived to appear upon the scene,
desiring to see for himself how Angela would be received. As Colonel
Tremaine, with Mrs. Tremaine on his arm, walked along the flagged path,
it seemed as if another twenty years had been laid upon them since
the last Sunday. Colonel Tremaine’s stiff military figure had lost
something of its rigidity, and instead of looking about him and bowing
and saluting with the elaborate and somewhat finical courtesy which
distinguished him, he looked straight ahead, neither to the right nor
to the left, and walked heavily, as if conscious of his seventy-two
years.
Mrs. Tremaine was pale and wan and it was noticed that she was all in
black, although her dress, as usual, was rich--a black silk gown with
mantle and bonnet of black lace. Behind them walked Angela. The day was
warm and she wore a white gown and a straw hat crowned with roses.
One rapid survey had showed her what to expect. The girl friends with
whom she was most associated, for she could not be considered intimate
with any, the Carey girls and Dr. Yelverton’s three granddaughters,
looked timidly at her and instead of coming forward with effusion
to greet her, as they had done all their lives, turned away. George
Charteris, who had cherished for Angela the love of a sixteen-year-old
boy for a nineteen-year-old girl, stared her angrily in the eye, and
would not have spoken to her but for a vigorous nudge given him by Mrs.
Charteris, who alone spoke kindly to Angela. She did not, however,
advance, and Angela, for the first time in her life, walked alone and
shunned across the churchyard and to the church door.
She suddenly grew conscious of Richard’s voice behind her speaking
with a stranger, evidently in surprise at seeing him, and then both
advanced. Angela turned involuntarily and recognized instantly from his
picture Philip Isabey.
He was of a type site had never seen before--the unmistakable French
creole, below rather than above middle height, his dark features well
cut and delicately finished as a woman’s, and more distinguished than
handsome. He wore a perfectly new Confederate captain’s uniform, and
gilt buttons glittered down the front of his well-fitting coat. To most
of the people present it was the first Confederate uniform they had
seen, and it stirred them with consciousness of war and conflict at
hand.
Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine had stopped at the church door, and Richard,
coming up with Isabey, introduced him to them. “My old university
friend,” he said, “and chum of my Paris days.”
Colonel Tremaine greeted Isabey with overwhelming courtesy, and Mrs.
Tremaine said with sweet reproach: “Why is it that you didn’t come
straight to Harrowby?”
“Because, my dear madam,” replied Isabey, holding his cap in his hand,
“I only reached here last night and I was told by the tavern keeper at
the courthouse that I should certainly meet my friend Tremaine at this
church to-day.”
“You went to Billy Miller’s tavern?” cried Colonel Tremaine,
aghast. “Great God, nobody goes to a tavern who has any respectable
acquaintances! We could get on very well without such a thing as a
tavern in the State of Virginia.”
Isabey smiled a winning smile which showed his white teeth under his
close-clipped black mustache, and then Richard said coolly: “Let me
introduce you to my sister, Mrs. Neville Tremaine.”
Isabey bowed, and was astonished to see Angela blush deeply when she
returned his bow. He had gathered something from the talk of those
around him, in the previous half hour, of Neville Tremaine’s action
and of Angela’s position, and he had seen the hostile glances which
attended her. Isabey, well versed in women, took a comprehensive view
of Angela, and thought her most interesting. The subdued excitement,
the smoldering wrath, the burning sense of injustice which animated
her, spoke in her air, in the expression of her red lips, and in the
angry light from her eyes. But Isabey’s glance was kind. He looked at
her as if he did not think her a criminal. On the contrary, he conveyed
to her a subtle sympathy; in truth, he thought with the good-humored
tolerance of a man of the world that these haughty provincials were
engaged in a rather cruel business toward this young girl.
The two did not exchange a single word beyond the formal introduction,
Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine taking up the few minutes which remained
before the service began in demanding and commanding that Isabey return
with them to Harrowby and bringing also any friends he might have with
him.
“No one at all is with me,” replied Isabey. “I am simply sent here on
military business which I shall be able to transact in a day or two
with the assistance of my friend Tremaine and then I must report at
Richmond, but it will give me the greatest pleasure to make Harrowby my
home the little while that I shall be in this part of the country.”
Then Mr. Brand’s voice was heard through the open door proclaiming
that “the Lord was in His Holy Temple.” The wags had it that the
Lord never was in His Holy Temple until Mrs. Charteris was seated in
her pew, but on this occasion Mr. Brand, after waiting ten minutes
for his congregation to finish their gossip in the churchyard, had
boldly proclaimed that “the Lord was in His Holy Temple,” while Mrs.
Charteris was still gossiping at the church door. The congregation then
flocked in and the services began. The Tremaines’ pew was one of the
old-fashioned square kind, with faded red moreen curtains. In it sat
Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine with Angela. They were followed by Richard
Tremaine and Philip Isabey. Archie had taken advantage of the occasion
to lag behind and sit in a back pew with George Charteris, where they
could whisper unheard by their respective mothers during the whole of
the sermon.
Lyddon, who could by no means stand Mr. Brand’s sermons, remained
outside, preferring to face Mrs. Tremaine’s gentle reproving glances
for having missed the words of wisdom.
To Angela, the sudden shock of seeing Isabey, this man about whom
she had dreamed her idle girlish dreams so many years, was secretly
agitating. For the first time in her life a personality overwhelmed
her, as it were. She was conscious of, rather than saw, Isabey’s
clear-cut olive profile, his black eyes, with their short, thick, black
lashes, his well-knit figure, and detected the faint aroma of cigar
smoke upon his clothes. She forgot the presence of Colonel and Mrs.
Tremaine and Richard. She heard not one word of Mr. Brand’s vaporings,
nor was she conscious of any sound whatever, except the rapturous
trilling bursting from the full heart of a blackbird upon the willow
tree just outside the window.
Isabey was different from Richard and Neville Tremaine, and yet
not in the least inferior to them. His grace in small actions was
infinite--that composed grace which only comes with thorough knowledge
of the world. His speech, even, had been new to her. It had the
correctness of a language which was first learned from books, for
Isabey’s first language was French, not English. He kept his eyes
fixed upon Mr. Brand and apparently listened with the deepest attention
to the thundering platitudes which resounded from the pulpit. In
reality he heard not a word. His heart was filled with pity for the
pale girl who sat next to him, her eyes fixed upon the open prayer
book, of which she turned not a single leaf. She looked much younger
than her nineteen years and seemed to Isabey a precocious but unformed
child. Her angles had not yet become curves and she had that charming
freshness of the April time of girlhood. The one thing about her
which indicated womanhood was her eyes. They were not the wide and
fearless eyes of a child, but downcast, sidelong, and with the varying
expression of the soul which has thought and felt. Isabey concluded
that her mind was considerably older than her body. Angela sat during
the whole service and sermon thrilled by Isabey’s personality. When the
first hymn was announced and the congregation rose she mechanically
joined in the singing. Her voice was clear and sweet, though untrained,
and Isabey, listening silent, turning upon Isabey two lustrous,
wondering eyes. She was singularly susceptible to music, and the beauty
and glory of Isabey’s voice, a robust tenor of a quality and training
more exquisite than anyone in that congregation had ever before heard,
completed the enchanting spell he had laid upon her. One by one other
voices dropped off like Angela’s, and the last verse was almost a solo
for Isabey. He was averse to displaying this gift and was almost sorry
that he had joined in the singing except for the interest he took in
surreptitiously watching Angela. She looked at him with the eyes of
a bewitched child, like those who followed the Piper of Hamelin. And
Isabey, who knew that a siren lurks in all music, felt more of pity
than of gratified vanity when he noticed Angela’s rapt gaze.
Mr. Brand preached a stormy sermon full of patriotism and breathing
forth fire and slaughter against everything north of the line drawn by
Mason and Dixon. His warlike denunciations, his tremendous philippics,
echoed to the roof of the church which had heard Cromwell denounced
by vicars who had been driven from England by the Roundheads, and who
exhorted their congregations to be true to their royal masters. It had
heard a royal master denounced at the time of the Revolution, and now
heard the union of the States condemned as roundly. The prayer for the
President of the Confederate States was followed with a sort of fierce
piety by the congregation. Meanwhile, the fair day grew suddenly dark.
The wind rose and the great limbs of the willow trees dashed against
the church windows, while the landscape was flooded in a moment with a
downpour of April rain. Loud thunder was heard and the dark church was
illuminated by frightful flashes of lightning, which seemed to enter
every window at once.
As the prayer for the President of the Confederate States was
concluded, a tremendous peal of thunder, long and reverberating,
crashed overhead. It made the walls of the old church shake and the
diamond window panes rattle as if in an earthquake. The clergyman
stopped short--nothing could be heard above the roar of the thunder,
and the faces of the congregation could only be seen by the pale glare
of the lightning. It produced a sort of shock among them, but in a few
minutes the storm passed away as rapidly as it had come. The rain,
however, still descended in sheets and wrapped the green landscape in
a white mist like a muslin veil. When services were finally concluded
it was impossible to go out in the downpour. The people, however, were
determined not to lose their weekly reunion, especially as there was so
much to discuss, and gossiped cheerfully in the aisles.
The clergyman, having doffed his vestments, came out into the body of
the church in search of his Dulcinea del Tovoso. Mrs. Charteris met him
with her hands outstretched and a malicious light in her dark eyes.
“What an inspiring sermon you preached!” she said, “it’s enough to make
women fight, much more men, and how sad it is to think we are to lose
you!”
Mr. Brand looked slightly disconcerted.
“I have no intention whatever,” he said, “of leaving Petworth Church. I
feel it my duty to remain with my flock. My sheep must be shepherded.”
“Oh!” cried Mrs. Charteris, “I feel sure that your virtuous resolution
can’t withstand your martial ardor.”
“I am a man of peace----” began Mr. Brand.
“But there is a time for war and a time for peace,” tartly quoted Mrs.
Charteris, “as you said in your sermon just now. Oh, no, Mr. Brand,
we know what a sacrifice it would be to your martial spirit to remain
here, and we can’t ask it of you! The youngsters, you know, now call
you the Fire Brand, and as for the statement Mr. Wynne makes, who knows
when everybody was born and married, that you are over forty-five years
of age--why, dozens of the ladies of the congregation can prove that
you have told us you were not a day over forty.”
Mr. Brand sighed helplessly. The pursuit of ladies of spirit with sharp
tongues and considerable estates in their own right was not always a
bed of roses.
Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine both went out of their pew and mingled with
the congregation, talking freely of the epoch-making events of last
week.
Angela, however, silent and disdainful, remained in the pew, and Isabey
feeling sorry for her also remained, and began to talk with her in a
subdued tone.
“You have a very pretty voice,” he said. “Why didn’t you keep on
singing?”
“Because,” answered Angela in the same half-whisper, “I could do
nothing but listen to your singing. I never heard anyone in my life
sing so beautifully.”
Isabey smiled a little. “I am not particularly proud of the
accomplishment,” he said. “I don’t care very much for singing men
myself, and I have never taken singing very seriously since I was a
youngster in Paris. Some day I will tell you how I was taught to sing.”
Then after a pause he continued: “It is such a pleasure to me to see
Tremaine again. We were chums, as you know, and lived together in
Paris, and wore each other’s clothes and borrowed each other’s money
for two years.”
“I know all about it,” she answered.
“And I should like to have seen Neville Tremaine, your husband. We
were friends, too, although I never, of course, saw so much of him as
of his brother.”
As Isabey said “your husband,” Angela shivered a little, and her color,
which had returned again, went and left her pale. It suddenly occurred
to her with the inexperience and radicalism of youth that it was wicked
for her to take an interest in any man whatever other than Neville,
and at the same moment it flashed upon her that nothing which Neville
could say or do, that neither his coming nor going could affect her so
powerfully as the coming of this stranger.
Her marriage remained to her an astounding and disorganizing fact which
she could not wholly realize, but which made itself felt at every turn.
It made it wrong for her, so she thought, to listen so eagerly and even
breathlessly to Isabey, and yet she could not put from her his magnetic
charm.
She was conscious also that nearly every man and certainly every woman
in the congregation was surreptitiously watching her, and it seemed
that in talking so interestedly with Isabey she was showing a want
of dignity and feeling in the very face of her enemies, for so she
reckoned every person in Petworth Church that day, except, perhaps,
Mrs. Charteris.
In a quarter of an hour the rain ceased. The sun burst forth in noonday
splendor, and the people on leaving the church went out into a world of
green and gold and dripping diamonds.
Isabey, who had driven to church in the tavern keeper’s gig, thankfully
accepted a seat in the Harrowby carriage. As the old coach jolted along
the country road by green fields and through woodland glades, the
whole world shining with sun and rain, Angela found herself listening
with the same intensity to all Isabey said in his soft, rich voice.
Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine were charmed with him, for Isabey had an
extraordinary power of pleasing. He mentioned that his stepmother,
Madame Isabey, and her daughter by her first marriage, Madame Le Noir,
were then in Richmond as refugees from New Orleans.
“They must not remain in Richmond,” cried Colonel Tremaine decisively,
and, turning to Mrs. Tremaine, said: “My dearest Sophie, it is
impossible to think of these ladies left alone in Richmond while their
natural protector, Captain Isabey, is in the field. They must come to
Harrowby to remain during the war.”
“Certainly,” responded Mrs. Tremaine, “and bring their servants, of
course.”
Isabey opened his black eyes wide. He had heard of Virginia
hospitality, but this invitation to house a whole family for an
indefinite time amazed and touched him.
“I thank you very much,” he said, “not only for myself but for my
stepmother and Madame Le Noir. It is certainly most kind of you.”
“I shall not be satisfied with your thanks,” replied Colonel Tremaine,
putting his hand on Isabey’s knee. “Those ladies must come to Harrowby
at once.”
“The weather is warm,” murmured Mrs. Tremaine, “and it must be terrible
in a city during warm weather.”
“Your relatives are at the Exchange Hotel probably, as that is the only
place to stay in Richmond. When I was a boy it was the Eagle Tavern.”
“Yes, they’re there,” answered Isabey.
“We must both write to-morrow,” said Mrs. Tremaine, “inviting Madame
Isabey and Madame Le Noir to come to Harrowby. We should write to-day
except that it is Sunday.”
Isabey had heard of the Sabbatarianism in Virginia and perceived that
it was extreme, like Virginia hospitality.
Angela said little, but she felt a silent pleasure at the thought that
Madame Isabey and her daughter, Madame Le Noir, would be established at
Harrowby. It would be something different from what she had known so
far and break the quiet monotony against which she chafed. She already
pictured Madame Isabey as looking like a French marquise, and the
daughter, Madame Le Noir, as the feminine replica of Isabey. She did
not reflect that neither one was the least blood relation to Isabey.
When the carriage reached Harrowby, Angela went up to her own room,
and, taking off her flower-crowned hat, studied herself carefully in
the glass.
Was she really pretty, and what did Isabey think of her? And did he
like her voice? And the hundred other questions which an imaginative
and unsophisticated girl asks herself when she meets, for the first
time, the man who has power over her, followed. She had dreamed and
speculated so much about Isabey--what he would look like, what he would
talk about--and, now that she had seen him, he was twice as charming as
she had ever imagined.
And then it came over her as it did at intervals, like a cold blast
from the north, that she was Mrs. Neville Tremaine, and that a great
gulf lay between the Angela Vaughn of last Sunday and the Angela
Tremaine of this Sunday.
She remained in her room until the bell sounded for the three o’clock
dinner, when she went downstairs.
Isabey, who had spent the time with Richard in the old study, was
surprised to find himself eager to see Angela again, and wondering what
expression she would wear.
It was a very different one from what he had first seen upon her face,
for as she came downstairs Richard advanced, and putting his arm around
her, said affectionately, “Little sister, where have you been all this
time?”
Angela, who had been all wrath and vengeance, was soothed by this
tenderness, and smiled prettily.
Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine were both kind to her, but there was no more
tenderness in their manner to her. She was a part and parcel of their
disgraced son, and without a word being spoken on either side, Angela
felt the icy chill which had fallen between them.
Richard alone, of all the Tremaines, was quite unchanged toward her.
When they were at table Isabey’s presence, together with Richard’s
kindness, put new animation into Angela. She talked gayly and laughed
merrily. Isabey was as much enchanted with the beauty of Angela’s
speaking voice as she had been with his singing voice.
When dinner was over, Mrs. Tremaine and Angela went into the garden,
where all the little negroes of the place were assembled for their
weekly Sunday-school. In winter this was held in the spinning house
beyond the hedge but in spring and summer the old garden was the place
of learning. Mrs. Tremaine read the Bible to these black urchins, while
Angela, with the self-confidence of nineteen, expounded the catechism
to them and taught them to sing simple hymns.
Isabey and Richard Tremaine were standing on the little wharf jutting
into the blue river, which danced in the afternoon light, when the
fresh young voices of the negro children rose in a hymn.
“Come,” said Richard, “I know that you are ashamed of singing so well,
but give these little darkies a treat and sing their hymns with them.”
Isabey went willingly enough with Richard into the garden. As they
walked down the long, broad path, he saw Mrs. Tremaine enthroned upon
the wooden bench under the lilacs at the end of the garden, while
twenty-five or thirty negro children, from tall boys and girls down
to small tots of four years old, were ranged in a semicircle around
her. Angela was acting as concert master and led the simple singing.
The voices of the negro children had the sweetness mixed with the
shrillness of childhood, but for precision of attack and correctness of
tone they would have put white children to the blush.
As Isabey came up, Angela held out the prayer book to him and he sang
with her from the same page. The negro children instantly turned
their beady eyes upon him, but with a truer artistic sense than the
congregation of Petworth Church, they kept on singing.
Isabey’s supposed familiarity with the hymn tunes, which he had heard
for the first time that day, pleased Mrs. Tremaine immensely, who
had an idea that all well-bred persons were Episcopalians, and that
Catholicism, in which Isabey had been bred, was a dark dream of the
middle ages, which had now happily almost disappeared from the earth.
When the Sunday-school was over and the little negro children had
scampered back to the “quarters,” as the negro houses were called,
Richard proposed the Sunday afternoon walk. This was as much a part of
the Harrowby Sunday as was the three o’clock dinner.
Usually, the whole family went upon this promenade up the
cedar-bordered lane along which a footpath ran, edged with wild roses
and blackberry bushes. But on this Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Tremaine
gently declined, and took her exercise upon the broken flags of the
Ladies’ Walk, Colonel Tremaine, with the air of a Louis Fourteenth
courtier, escorting her. Archie begged off in order to ride over and
spend the night at Greenhill with George Charteris, so only Angela and
Lyddon were left to accompany Richard and Isabey.
They started off a little after five o’clock and soon reached the woods
across the high road. The declining sun shone through the branches on
which the delicate foliage was not yet fully out. The grass under their
feet was starred with the tiny blue forget-me-nots, and Angela knew
where to find the trailing arbutus.
Isabey, whose association with women had been almost wholly French, was
secretly astonished at a young girl standing upon such a footing with
men. Neither Lyddon nor Richard addressed much conversation to her, and
that always half-joking, but it was plain to see that she had a part
in their companionship and understood well what they were talking about.
They spoke of books, and Angela was evidently familiar with those which
were meat and drink to Richard and Lyddon. Isabey was not so good a
classical scholar as either of the other two men, but in modern French
literature and in the Romance languages he was far superior to either.
“Do you remember,” asked Richard, “the craze you had for Alfred de
Musset, Gustav Nadaud, and those other delicious rapscallions of their
time?”
“Certainly I do,” answered Isabey.
“And can you spout them as you did when we lived together in the Latin
quarter?”
“Rather more, I think,” answered Isabey. “The better I know those
rapscallion poets, as you call them, the more I like the fellows.”
“Then give us some of them, such as you used to do in the old days,
when I would have to collar you and choke you in order to make you
leave off.”
They were standing in a little open glade, across which a great
ash tree had fallen prone and dead. Isabey, half-sitting upon the
tree trunk, began with his favorite Alfred de Musset. His voice and
enunciation were admirable, and his French as superior in tone to
Lyddon’s as the French of Paris is superior to that of Stratford-le-bow.
If the spell of Isabey’s singing enchanted Angela, so even in a greater
degree did his repetition of these latter-day poets, who, leaving the
simple external things, tune their lutes to the music of the soul, a
music always touched with melancholy and ever finding an echo in every
heart.
Isabey, with a strong and increasing interest, watched Angela slyly.
She was so unsophisticated and had led the life so like the snowdrops
in the garden that things overimpressed her. She listened with her
heart upon her lips to the verses which Isabey repeated, and her color
came and went with an almost painful rapidity. The latter-day French
poets had been until then an unopened book to her, and the effect upon
her was overmastering. They introduced her into a whole new world of
passionate feeling, and it seemed to her that Isabey, who had opened
the gateway into that garden of the soul, was the most dazzling man on
earth.
Isabey saw this, for Angela was easily read. It was a new problem for
him, these young feminine creatures, who cultivate their emotions and
live upon them; who cleverly simulate intellect, but who are at bottom
all feeling; who can listen, unmoved, to the tale of Troy Town, but
who blush and tremble at a canzonet which tells the story of a kiss.
When Angela listened with rapt attention or when, as presently, she
spoke freely and gayly, Isabey thought her handsome, although not
strictly beautiful, nor likely to become so. But what freshness, what
unconscious grace was hers! She might have been one of Botticelli’s
nymphs, with the woods and fields her natural haunts and proper setting.
When the quartet turned homeward through the purple dusk, Angela felt
as if the familiar, everyday world were steeped in a glow, new and
strange and iridescent. Isabey had given her the first view of art as
art, of music, of world-beauty, and hers was a soul thirsty for all
these things.
He seemed to her the most accomplished man on earth. She knew well
enough, however, that Isabey was not a man merely of accomplishments.
If that had been the case she would not have been so impressed by those
accomplishments. But she knew that he was a man of parts intrusted with
serious business, and it was this which made his graces and his charm
so captivating.
Lyddon, too, was a man of parts, but Lyddon was awkward beyond words;
was bored by music, and although he could repeat with vigor and
earnestness the sonorous verse of Rome and Greece, it was too grave,
too ancient, too much overlaid with the weight of centuries to appeal
to Angela as did this modern poetry.
The instinct of concealment, which is the salvation of women, kept
Angela from showing too obviously the spell cast upon her by Isabey. It
was noticeable, however, that she was more animated than usual.
When supper was over, Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine, contrary to their
usual custom, went to the old study with the rest of the household and
their guest. Colonel Tremaine was deeply interested in what Isabey had
to tell him of the military situation at the South, and Angela listened
in a way which showed she was accustomed to hearing and understanding
serious things.
Isabey found out in a dozen ways that the study was quite as much
Angela’s habitat as anyone’s. There was her little chair in a
corner with her small writing table; above it were the books which
were peculiarly hers, besides her childish library of four or five
volumes. The flowerpots in the windows were hers, and when Richard
Tremaine, pulling her pretty pink ear, declared that he would throw the
flowerpots out of the window, Angela boldly responded that the study
belonged as much to her as to him, and that she would have as many
flowerpots in it as she pleased.
At half past nine o’clock the great bell rang for prayers, and the
whole family and all of the house servants were assembled as usual in
the big library.
Isabey liked this patriarchal custom of family prayers and listened
with interest to Colonel Tremaine’s reading of the Gospel for the day,
and Mrs. Tremaine’s soft and reverent voice in her extemporary prayer.
He noticed, however, the strange omission of Neville’s name, and when
the point came where it might have been mentioned, there was a little
pause, and Mrs. Tremaine placed her hand upon her heart, as if she felt
a knife within a wound. Perhaps she made a silent prayer for Neville,
whose unspoken name was in the mind of each present. Isabey glanced
toward Angela and observed her face suddenly change. She raised her
downcast eyes, and stood up for a moment or two, then sat down again.
In truth, Angela experienced a shock of remorse and amazement. She,
Neville Tremaine’s wife, had scarcely thought of him since she had
first seen Isabey that day, nor had Neville, at any moment of her life,
absorbed her attention as had this newcomer to Harrowby.
The thought came to her that, perhaps, it was after all because she had
seen in her life so few strangers that Isabey so impressed her, yet he
was a man likely to attract attention anywhere. But deep in her heart
Angela realized that Isabey possessed for her an inherent interest
which no other human being ever had possessed or could possess.
He left the next afternoon. He had had plenty of time to observe Angela
and had found out a great deal about her. He was filled with pity for
her, that pity which is akin to love.