THE AFTERMATH
Two years and a half afterwards, on an April afternoon, Isabey, riding
the ghost of a war horse, came in sight of the old manor house of
Harrowby. It was a soft, mild afternoon, as soft and sunny as that
day, now four years past, when he had first seen the place. From the
top of the cedar lane Isabey’s keen eyes could view the whole scene in
its minutest details. The broad fields, which he remembered as green
in spring and gold in summer with wheat, were unfilled and grown up in
blackberry bushes, wild roses, poppies, and the blue cornflower, those
bold marauders who seize upon the earth as soon as it is no longer
plowed or reaped. Over all brooded a sad peacefulness, a quiet decay
and mournful silence; Nature seemed in a melancholy reverie. Spring had
come in all the soft splendor of its beauty, and yet no hand seemed
uplifted to do her bidding of cheerful toil. There were no sounds
of jocund plowmen or cheerful laborers, of laughing, brown-skinned
milkmaids who sang at their work. Isabey’s eyes traveled toward the old
graveyard in the field. The brick wall had fallen into still greater
decay than he remembered, and a few lean sheep were browsing among the
graves. Isabey looked farther on toward the house. The fences were
down, and the negro quarters, which were wont to be alive with those
merry, brown creatures, were silent and deserted. The carriage drive
was overgrown with weeds--there were no carriages any more to traverse
it. And the yew hedge was more ragged and decrepit than ever before.
The old brick mansion stood out dark and clear against the violet sky,
while the river, a darker violet, went upon its ceaseless way singing
its eternal refrain. Isabey noticed that most of the shutters in the
old mansion were closed; one or two of them had fallen to the ground,
and the top of one of the great chimneys showed a huge gap where the
mortar of a hundred years had decayed and the bricks had tumbled in.
This gave the house a look of desolation.
Isabey dismounted from his horse and, leaning upon the worm fence which
divided the fields from the highway, asked himself if he had done
wisely in coming straight to Harrowby the moment the Confederacy had
ceased to exist. At the beginning of the Civil War he had been one of
the rich men of Louisiana, with sugar plantations, great sugar mills
with an army of negroes to work them, with a fine house in New Orleans,
built and furnished after the French fashion. He had owned a racing
stable and had had a box at the French opera and all the paraphernalia
of a man of fortune. Only a little of this remained--how little Isabey
himself did not know. The New Orleans house had been confiscated and
wrecked, the sugar mills burned to the ground, the negroes dispersed
over the face of the earth, and his plantations, flooded by the broken
bayou, were as much water as land. His possessions in hand consisted
of a shadow of a horse, a threadbare gray uniform, and a little money
in his pocket.
He had reached his goal--the spot where Angela dwelt. For Isabey there
were only two places in the world--the one where Angela was, the other
where she was not. The current of his thoughts had flowed as steadily
toward her as the broad, placid river had flowed through the ages
toward the open sea. He had debated with himself whether he would seek
Angela then or wait until he had collected the wreckage of his fortune.
But some force within him, stronger than himself, had brought him as
straight to Harrowby as his poor horse could travel. He wondered how
Angela would look. She would have on a black gown, of course. She was
not a woman to put on mourning lightly or take it off quickly. He had
written many times to Harrowby and had received a few brief letters in
reply, generally from Mrs. Tremaine, worded in the simple and moving
language which she habitually used. Always there was some mention of
Angela--that she was well and strong and their greatest comfort. Isabey
knew that Archie had come unhurt out of the furnace of Civil War and
that Lyddon was still an inmate of the house which had been home to him
for so many years.
He had heard other particulars through Madame Isabey during the last
year of the war. She and Adrienne had found it possible to get to New
York and from thence to Paris. Their fortune was by no means wrecked as
was Isabey’s, and Madame Isabey wrote saying that Adrienne had found
her place still waiting for her which she had left vacant in the
brilliant society of the Second Empire, but that she had apparently
lost all taste for gayety and went to church at six o’clock in the
morning and, Madame Isabey was very much afraid, was becoming devout.
Isabey had written in the purest and sincerest friendship to Adrienne
and had received letters of the same kind in return from her. It was
very plain to him that Adrienne was changed, softened, saddened, and
already in possession of that inheritance which too often comes with
gifts like hers--the weariness and darkness of the soul.
But Isabey had not written to Angela nor had he received a line from
her. This he took as a good omen; if she had become indifferent to him
she might easily have fallen into a friendly correspondence with him.
But he dared to hope that she had not written because she could not.
He pressed toward this meeting with her in all eagerness. Now that he
was within reach of Angela, as the case often is with the true lover,
he began to feel his own rashness and unworthiness and was distrained
of himself in meeting her. He recalled Angela’s invariable habit of
walking and sitting in the old garden in the afternoon, and thought he
would try and meet her there. Five minutes would reveal to him whether
he had come in vain or not. He would not ride down the cedar lane
because he might be seen from the house; but following a path through
the stubble which led close by the old graveyard, and thence direct to
the yew hedge where the garden gate opened, he took his way, leading
his lean horse after him. When he reached the old burying ground it
seemed to him the most peaceful spot he had ever seen. Not even the
sheep were startled by his presence, but looking at him with black,
blinking eyes, went on quietly cropping the long, lush grass. Within
the graveyard was the only new thing Isabey’s eyes had rested upon.
Between two graves was a great wooden slab painted white--poverty’s
substitute for a gravestone. On it were the names of Neville and
Richard Tremaine and the dates of their birth and death, and under this
the words, “Both died in battle and in honor.”
The sight of these two graves and the thought of these two men smote
Isabey poignantly. He covered his face as he leaned upon the broken
wall. And the two graves brought home to him as never before the
wreck and ruin and illimitable disaster of the war. He had felt long
before the end came that the South must pay a frightful price for the
stupendous blunder and calamity of slavery, and that price meant all
she had of blood and treasure. And when it was paid it would leave her
stark and starving, clothed with rags and stripped of all but honor and
courage.
This thought had followed Isabey and pierced him as he marched and
fought and starved through blistering days of heat and biting days of
cold, through summer’s miasma and winter’s snows and storms of sleet
and hail. It had torn his heart when he saw gaps in the thin gray lines
filled up with tottering old men and white-faced boys, half-fed with
miserable rations, half-clothed in rags and remnants, wholly unshod,
but with musket barrels bright and ever ready to answer the order to
advance. It was impossible that such sacrifices, such valor, should be
in vain, and it came to Isabey in a great flood of illumination that
the compensation would be the sweeping away of the everlasting blight,
the deadening contamination of slavery. This thought comforted him
a little, and he turned from the graves of his friends again to the
footpath which would lead him toward Angela. The only sounds he heard
were his own quiet footsteps along the stubble path and the breathing
of his tired horse trudging patiently behind him. As he came to the
opening in the yew hedge the realization of his dream was suddenly
before him. Angela was coming toward him slowly up the broad garden
walk in the veiled brilliance of the spring afternoon.
The horse, understanding the command of silence, having had time
and circumstance enough to instill it into him, obeyed a touch from
Isabey’s hand and remained motionless. Isabey, standing a little behind
the yew hedge, had time to study Angela’s face as she came close to
him, her eyes fixed upon the ground. She was dressed all in black, and
around her was thrown a black mantle, the mantle which had once been a
splendid crimson, but which had been dyed to the garb of widowhood. As
her habit was, her head was bare, and the vagrant wind toyed with the
little waving locks upon the white nape of her neck.
As the case often is, Isabey’s recollection of her had gone back to
their first meeting, four years before, and he expected to see her
still a girl, with a girl’s eyes. She had retained her maiden slimness,
but otherwise the great change had come from childhood to womanhood.
The delicately haughty poise of her head, the laughing defiance of her
upward glance were gone forever. Instead of these was an air soft and
appealing, a movement gentle in contrast with the quick grace, like
the swallow’s flight, which Isabey had often noted and admired in days
gone by. In holding her mantle around her she crossed her hands upon
her breast, and it gave her a nunlike sweetness and meekness which
Isabey had never seen in her before. As she reached the end of the walk
she paused for a moment, and, looking upward at the opaline sky of the
west in which great clouds of green and amber were changing to violet,
turned and walked again to the end of the garden path. She was quite
near the old bench under the lilac bushes before she heard a footstep
behind her.
Isabey put out his hand, and, taking hers, said: “Let us sit once again
where we parted.”
Without a word he led her to the old bench, where they sat. They were
as much alone as if they had been in the green heart of the forest.
Isabey continued in silence to hold her hand, which lay without a
flutter in his. Manlike, he found it difficult to speak when stirred by
a great emotion, but was unable to take his eyes from her face.
As he studied Angela, so Angela studied him. In four years he had grown
ten years older, his trim, black mustache was streaked with gray, and
under his officer’s cap she could see the gray threads also in his
black hair. His face was bronzed and beaten by the weather. His eyes
and his figure had the indescribable but unmistakable mark of the man
who had been long fighting and marching. Both were changed and yet
unchanged.
After a moment or two Isabey spoke, the plain, simple words of a
soldier:
“I have thought of you every day and hour since we parted.”
His words met a sweet, like response in Angela’s eyes. Together they
sat until the dusky twilight fell upon the odorous old garden and the
stars came out softly in the darkening heavens. A night bird close to
them uttered a few notes, soft and low, which waked them from a dream
of paradise.
“Come,” said Angela, “I think we must have been here a long time. See,
the windows are lighted. To-morrow we can come again into the garden.”
“Every day of our lives, after this, we can walk together in a garden,”
replied Isabey, smiling. “Our flowering time has come.”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.