LIKE THE LITTLE TRIANON
Four days after Isabey left Mrs. Tremaine and Archie returned. Colonel
Tremaine had met them on the road halfway between Richmond and Harrowby.
Mrs. Tremaine was full of courage and cheerfulness. Richard’s recovery
had been complete, and as she said the first night the family were
assembled around the supper table:
“I have never seen our son look so strong and so handsome as he did
when I parted from him the day before we reached Richmond. At first it
was terrible to me to see him ill. I have been spared the anxieties on
that account which most mothers endure, for you well know, my dear, how
hardy our sons have been from their birth. But Richard’s spirits were
so good, his determination to become thoroughly well so contagious,
that I really never felt any anxiety on his account except that he
would return to the army before he was able. However, with the help of
the surgeons I managed to keep him in his bed long enough to cure him,
and I assure you, my dear,” she continued, smiling at Colonel Tremaine,
“there is a kind of lovemaking between a mother and son which is almost
as sweet as that between lovers.”
At which Colonel Tremaine, flourishing his hand dramatically, replied:
“My dearest Sophie, I have ever felt our sons to be my only rivals.”
The only fly in the colonel’s ointment was that he felt compelled as
soon as Mrs. Tremaine arrived to resume his suit of homespun, which he
regarded very much as Nessus did his celebrated shirt.
At prayers that night the name of one son was omitted, and Neville’s
name was no longer mentioned after Angela ceased to fill Mrs.
Tremaine’s place.
Everything had gone on in an orderly manner, and Mrs. Tremaine was
particularly gratified that Angela had taken as good care of Isabey as
could be desired.
“I feel,” she said to Angela, “that in caring for Captain Isabey we
perform a patriotic as well as a pious duty. Some day during this
dreadful war it may be returned to my sons.”
“I hope so, if the occasion should come,” answered Angela. “But if I
should hear that Neville were wounded he would not be dependent upon
strangers. I should go to him whether he sent for me or not, or even if
he sent me word not to come, still I should go.”
Mrs. Tremaine turned away pale and silent, as she always was at the
rare mention of her eldest-born.
In a day or two letters arrived from Isabey, one to Colonel Tremaine
and another to Angela. Lyddon brought them on a bright spring noontime
from the post office, where there was an intermittent delivery of
letters.
She read the letter and then handed it to Mrs. Tremaine. It was
graceful and cordial and full of gratitude. After being passed around
it was returned to Angela. Half an hour afterwards Lyddon saw her walk
across the lawn and down to where the river ran wine-colored in the old
Homeric phrase.
Angela’s right hand was closed, and as she reached the shore, lapped by
the bright water, she opened her hand and dropped a hundred tiny bits
of paper into the clear green-and-gold water, and stood watching them
as they were tossed in the crystalline spray.
“It is Isabey’s letter,” said Lyddon to himself.
The orchestra of spring, as Angela had called it, was now playing
gloriously, and it seemed to her as if the ice-bound winter were but
a dream with all the beautiful unreality of a dream. She resolved to
put Isabey out of her mind, but who ever yet put the thing beloved
out of mind? All she could do whenever she thought of Isabey was to
call up a passionate loyalty to Neville Tremaine and to make herself
the most solemn of promises that never should any woman exceed her in
the kindness, tenderness, devotion, consideration that she would give
Neville Tremaine, not having the greater gift to bestow upon him.
Isabey in a camp of five thousand men found plenty for a man to do who
had not full use of his right arm and leg.
His sanguine expectation of being able to join his battery in the field
was not borne out. In riding he wrenched his arm painfully, which
revived the whole trouble, and the doctors gave him no hope that his
arm would sufficiently recover for him to rejoin his battery before the
late autumn or early winter.
Meanwhile the ugly suspicion against Angela, of which Mrs. Charteris
had told him, came back in a hundred ways. It was undoubtedly true that
information concerning the Confederates was mysteriously conveyed to
the Federal commanders.
The charge that Angela Tremaine had supplied this information was
hinted at rather than spoken before Isabey. Once only had it been said
outright--at the officers’ mess by a raw young lieutenant ignorant of
most things. Isabey had turned upon him meaning to contradict the story
in a manner as cool as it was convincing. But suddenly an impulse of
rage seized him and before he knew it he had dashed a glass of water in
the face of the offender.
At once there was a fierce uproar, and Isabey ended the brief but
painful scene by rising and saying with some agitation:
“I have no apology to make for resenting a shocking charge against an
innocent and defenseless woman. I believe it has never yet been known
that any man in Virginia was ever called to account for defending the
name and fame of a woman.”
With that Isabey left the mess tent. The ranking officer at once
administered a stern rebuke to the young lieutenant and forbade that
he should demand the satisfaction, common enough in those days, from
Isabey for his act. Nevertheless, when the matter had been arranged,
the officers exchanged significant glances which said: “It won’t do to
speak of it, but--” and that “but” meant that it was believed Angela
Tremaine was playing the spy. Isabey felt this and his soul was wrung
by it.
With only thirty-five miles between the two great opposing forces,
each side began to throw out feelers before the actual shock of arms
commenced. The Federals made raids and reconnoissances through the
country at unexpected times.
Incidentally, the farmsteads and estates were swept clear of horses,
mules, cattle, and sheep, and the houses were searched for Confederate
soldiers. This last was done rather in the nature of a warning than in
expectation of making any captures. Occasionally private soldiers, who
had got leave on various pretexts and slipped home for a few hours,
were picked up by the Federals; but the Confederates were wary and no
important captures were made. Small Federal gunboats ventured up the
broad, salt, shallow rivers which made in from the seas and intersected
the low-lying, fertile country. But these expeditions, like those by
land, were rather for investigation and warning than of a punitive
nature. It might be supposed that these raids by land and water were
alarming to the women and children left alone in their homes while
their husbands, sons, and brothers were in the Confederate army. On
the contrary, the Virginia ladies appear to have struck terror to the
hearts of the Northern officers, who, however bold their stand might
be against the Confederate soldiers, were pretty sure to beat a quick
retreat before the sharp language and indignant glances of the Virginia
ladies.
Mrs. Charteris, when waked in the middle of the night by a horde of
Federal soldiers around her house and a fierce pounding at the hall
door, rose and, arraying herself in her dressing gown and with a
candle in her hand, went down surrounded by her excited servants, and
opened the hall door herself.
There stood a Federal officer, who politely desired her not to be
alarmed, as he had merely come to search the place for a Confederate
officer supposed to be in hiding there.
“Thank you very much,” tartly replied Mrs. Charteris, thrusting her
candle into the officer’s face and causing him to jump back a yard or
so. “I see nothing to frighten anybody in you or any of your men. There
is no Confederate officer here; they are all waiting for you with arms
in their hands outside of Richmond.”
In vain the officer endeavored to stop the torrent of Mrs. Charteris’s
wrathful eloquence and to escape the proximity of the candle which
she persistently thrust under his nose. It ended by his beating an
ignominious retreat to the gunboat lying in the river.
A few souvenirs in the way of ducks and turkeys and Mrs. Charteris’s
coach horses were carried off, but, as she triumphantly recounted at
church the next Sunday, “It was worth losing a pair of old carriage
horses--for both of mine were getting shaky on their legs--for the
pleasure of speaking my mind to that Yankee officer and see him run
away from me!”
Nearly every place on the river was visited at some time during the
spring by the gunboats, and the inland plantations were also raided
at different times by detachments of cavalry. Harrowby, however, by a
singular chance, escaped.
This was strange in itself and mightily helped the story floating about
concerning Angela’s supposed communication with the Federal lines.
The flight of the negroes to the Yankees had come to an end because
practically all of the young and able-bodied had gone. Only the older,
feebler, and more conservative ones, and the young children and their
mothers remained. There was no doubt that the negroes who stayed
at home had advance notice of the Federal incursions and kept up a
continual intercourse with those who had fled to the Federal camp. No
one realized this more than Angela, who suddenly began to get letters
with considerable regularity from Neville.
He had been sent East and was then for a short time at Fort Monroe,
but knew not how long he would be there. It was easy enough to get
his letters as far as the Federal lines, and then there was always
opportunity of passing them from hand to hand among the negroes until
they reached Mammy Tulip, who, in turn, gave them to Angela. Neville
wrote in a spirit of sadness and even bitterness.
“I could be useful here,” he wrote, “far more than recruiting in the
West. We are as short of trained artillerists as the Confederates are,
and ordinarily I should have already had an opportunity to distinguish
myself. But I am distrusted by all except the few of my classmates of
West Point, who know me well. If ever I can get to the front then I can
prove to all that I am a true man and as ready to die for the Union
as any soldier who follows the flag. For yourself, make ready to come
to me at any day, for you may be assured that at the first possible
moment I shall send for you, the sweetest comfort left me.”
Then came a few words of deep tenderness which Angela read with tears
dropping upon the page. How hard a fate was Neville Tremaine’s, after
all!
She hastened to write to him, and would have put the letter then in
Mammy Tulip’s hands, but the old woman nervously refused it. She seemed
to have some vague and terrifying fear of keeping Angela’s letters in
her possession.
“De Cornfeds,” she whispered mysteriously to Angela, “might find
out dat I’se got a letter for a Yankee officer, an’ den--good Gord
A’might’! Dey might tek me up an’ k’yar me off to Richmun’ an’ hang me
’fore Jeff Davis’s door. Naw, honey; you watch out to-night an’ when I
kin tek dat letter, I light de candle in de window an’ wave it up an’
down. An’ den you drap de letter on de groun’ an’ it will git to Marse
Neville, sho’. But I fear to tek it now.”
It was in vain to reason with Mammy Tulip, and Angela had to follow the
same routine whenever she wrote to Neville.
Meanwhile, the changes within the one year of the war concerning the
negroes had been very great at Harrowby. There was no longer that
superabundant life and motion made by the two hundred black people,
of whom now scarcely seventy remained. As each one had left, Colonel
Tremaine reiterated with stern emphasis his determination to exact full
compensation to the last farthing from the Government at Washington
for the loss of his negroes. The remnant of servants left at Harrowby
was made up of the very old, the very young, and the mothers of the
children. Not a single young man remained on the place, although ten or
twelve of the older ones, headed by Hector, were still too loyal to the
old _régime_ or too indifferent to the new to run away. Peter, Richard
Tremaine’s body servant, stood loyally by his young master.
Hector’s assistants in the dining room had gradually decreased in size
until by midsummer of 1862 they were two small boys of fifteen, who
were almost as skillful in eluding work as Hector himself.
Mrs. Tremaine, for all her executive ability, was totally unequal to
doing any of the work of the household. She was accustomed to planning
and contriving, ordering and directing, but her delicate hands were
unable to do the smallest task requiring manual dexterity.
Not so Angela. The places of Mirandy and Sally and their colleagues
had been taken by small black girls whom Angela trained with tact
and patience but whose childish powers were unequal to women’s work.
Angela, however, was equal to anything, and Lyddon complimented her
in classic phrase the first morning he saw her with her cotton skirts
pinned up, her beautiful slender arms bare to the elbow, and a red
handkerchief tied with unconscious coquetry around her fair hair as she
wielded the broom and swept the drawing-room.
Mrs. Tremaine nearly wept at the sight, and Colonel Tremaine groaned
aloud. Angela, however, was in high spirits. She was too young, too
full of vitality, too humorous to be depressed at this new turn of
Fate.
“The fact is,” she cried, sweeping industriously, while Colonel and
Mrs. Tremaine watched from the hall and Lyddon peered in from the
window, “all we have to do is just to imagine that we are noble
_émigrés_ in England about 1793. You, Uncle Tremaine and Aunt Sophia,
can do the sentimental part of the business. Archie and I with Mr.
Lyddon will do the work. Archie, you know, is chopping wood at the
woodpile, and I have a job for you, Mr. Lyddon.”
“What is it?” asked Lyddon helplessly. “If it’s dusting, well, I can
dust books. As for chopping wood like Archie, I should not only chop
off both of my feet, but my head as well. However, I will do anything
in God’s name I can.”
“I can find you something,” knowingly replied Angela, “and something I
dare say those old Greek ragamuffins, of whom you think so much, did in
Thessaly and thereabouts.”
“My dearest Sophie and my dear Angela,” cried Colonel Tremaine
valiantly, “I feel that I must do my share in this domestic cataclysm.
I cannot chop wood--I am seventy-two years old--but I believe that I
could wind off the reels the cotton for the looms. I will do my best,
my dear Angela, if you will kindly instruct me.”
Angela stopped her sweeping and ran and fetched a cotton reel--a rude
contrivance consisting of a slender stick of wood about two feet high
stuck in a wooden box, with a large reel at the top on which the hanks
of cotton, fresh from the spinning wheels, were wound into balls for
the old-fashioned hand looms in the loom house.
“I think,” said Colonel Tremaine, with profound interest in the
subject, “that it would be better to carry the paraphernalia in the
drawing-room. Like most of my sex, I dislike extraneous objects in my
library.”
Just then Archie appeared, red, perspiring, but grinning with delight
at his wood-chopping performance. He was charmed with the thought of
seeing his father wind cotton, and ran with the reel, which he placed
in the drawing-room. Then Angela put a hank of cotton on it, found
the end, started the ball, and instructed Colonel Tremaine in his new
employment. Mrs. Tremaine, quite woe-begone, yet complimented Angela
and Archie upon their readiness and industry. It was as if the two were
again children.
Hector and Mammy Tulip both came in to see the extraordinary sight of
“ole Marse wukkin’.” Hector was indignant at the turn of affairs.
“I ’clare, Marse,” he said, with solemn disapproval, “I never speck
fur to see you wukkin’ like Saul an’ de witch uv Endaw in de Bible. I
tho’t you was proud enough fur to lay down an’ starve ’fore you demean
you’sef wid wuk.”
“That is what you would do, you black scoundrel,” inadvertently
responded Colonel Tremaine, forgetting that others were present, and
then hastily adding: “Not that I have ever observed in you any serious
disinclination to do your proper work.” Which showed a very great want
of observation on Colonel Tremaine’s part.
The Colonel, sitting in a large pink satin armchair with the reel
before him, began his self-imposed domestic labors, remarking grimly
to Mrs. Tremaine: “It can no longer be said, my dearest Sophie, that
there is a distaff side to our family.”
“My dear,” replied Mrs. Tremaine in pathetic admiration, “the spectacle
of you, at your time of life, eager to assist in the household labors
and to lighten our tasks as much as possible is truly a lesson to be
commended.”
Colonel Tremaine, thus encouraged, sat up straight in the pink satin
armchair and proceeded to what Angela wickedly called his “Herculean
task.”
The reel, however, was refractory, and it took Archie to mend it and
Mammy Tulip to show him how. Hector, totally unable to tear himself
away from the spectacle of Colonel Tremaine at work, remained as critic
and devil’s advocate. In the end it required the services of Mrs.
Tremaine and nearly the whole domestic staff, including an awe-stricken
circle of negro boys and girls, to assist Colonel Tremaine in winding
half a hank of cotton.
Angela was as good as her word in providing work for Lyddon. When
Colonel Tremaine was thoroughly started upon his undertaking, Angela
triumphantly called Lyddon out on the dining-room porch. There stood a
great churn with a stool by it.
“Come, Daphius,” she cried, “your Chloe has work for you to do.”
She produced a huge apron of Hector’s, and, tying it around Lyddon’s
neck and making him roll up his sleeves, duly instructed him in the art
and mystery of churning. Lyddon thought he had not seen her in such
spirits for a long time, and as she stood laughing before him, her
cotton skirts still tucked up and her beautiful bare arms crossed and
the coquettish red silk handkerchief knotted high upon her head, she
was a captivating picture.
“Now,” she cried, “you must sing in order to make the butter come.”
“_I_ sing!” cried Lyddon, wrathfully, but beginning to wield the
dasher. “When I sing pigs will fly.”
“But you must sing, ‘Come, butter, come,’ like the negro children sing,
and then if the butter won’t come you must get up and dance the back
step.”
She flung into a pretty dancing step, singing the old churning song
meanwhile.
Lyddon suddenly stopped churning and looked over Angela’s shoulder on
to the green lawn beyond. He laughed, but he was not looking at Angela.
When she finished she turned around, and there was Isabey standing with
his foot on the first step of the porch.