THE VICTORYCHAPTER IHARROWBY
THE VICTORY
BRIGHT was the Christmas of 1860 at the old manor house of Harrowby in lowland Virginia. It lay upon the broad, bright river which ran laughing into the arms of the great bay, and from there bay and river rushed together to the windy floors of the wide Atlantic. Nearly two hundred years before, the first Tremaine, a discontented gentleman, who found life very uncomfortable in England after Monmouth’s rebellion, had made the beginning of the Harrowby mansion. It was built quite flat to the ground, with the low ceilings and steep, narrow stairs of the seventeenth-century country house.
This first Harrowby house, with a room clapped on here and there, as each successive inheritor fancied, answered well enough for the Tremaines until the end of the eighteenth century. Then Mr. Jefferson having brought back with him from France some noble architectural conceptions, these became embodied in many Virginia country houses, including Harrowby. There, a new and commodious house was built, with a vast entrance hall, lofty ceilings, spacious rooms, and widestaircases. It was connected by a narrow corridor with the original house, and although frankly swearing at the first incumbent of the ground, yet conformed to it enough to make the whole both picturesque and comfortable. The modern part of the house was reserved for the master and mistress, for guests, and for those Virginia dinner parties which lasted from noon until midnight, the Virginia balls where the dancers’ feet beat the floor from the first rising of the stars until the rosy dawn, and the Virginia weddings which took three weeks’ frolicking to carry through in style. There were always sons in the Tremaine family, and these sons required tutors and dogs, so that the old part of the house, with its shabby Colonial furniture, was always in possession of men and boys and dogs. The newer part, with its furniture all curves, its Empire mirrors, its elaborate cornices, and decorative fireplaces, was reserved for more ceremonious uses.
The house sat upon a great, smooth lawn, which sloped down to the river, now a dull, steel blue in the red and waning Christmas eve. A short, rude wharf lay a little way in the river, which softly lapped the wooden piles. A little distance from the house, to the left, lay a spacious, old, brick-walled garden, now all russet brown and gold and purple in ragged splendor like a beggar princess. Great bare clumps of crape-myrtle and syringas and ancient rose trees bordered the wide walk which led from the rusty iron garden gate down to the end of the garden. Here a long line of gnarled and twisted lilac bushes clung to the brick wall; lilacs and crumbling wall had held each other ina strong embrace for more than a hundred years. Outside the garden, the wide lawn was encircled by what had once been a shapely yew hedge, which had grown into a ragged rampart of ancient trees, black and squat and melancholy as yew trees always grow. A great gap in this hedge opened upon a long, straight lane leading to the highroad and beyond that lay the primeval woods. On each side of the lane were cedar trees which had once stood young and straight like soldiers, but were now, as the yew trees, old and bent like a line of veterans tottering in broken ranks.
Under the somber branches of the yew hedge was a walk of cracked flagstones, known, since Harrowby was first built, as the “Ladies’ Walk.” For when the paths and lanes about the place were too wet for the dainty feet of ladies, this flagged path was their exercise ground. The negroes, of course, peopled it with the dead and gone ladies of Harrowby, who generally took, upon those broken stones, their last walk upon earth, and who found it haunted, not by the ghosts of their predecessors but by the joys, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, the perplexities, the loves, and the hates which had walked with them there, in cool summer eves, in red autumn afternoons, in bitter winter twilights, and in the soft and dewy mornings of the springtime.
Far off in the open field beyond the garden lay the family burying ground, where, according to the Virginia custom, the dead were laid near the homestead instead of the church. The brick wall around the burying ground was decaying, and the tombstones, neverproperly set up, were beaten all manner of ways by storm and wind, and trained into strange positions by the soft insistence of the roots of huge weeping willows, those melancholy trees which give a touch of poetic beauty to the most commonplace landscape. Yet the aspect of Harrowby was usually far from melancholy. On the other side of the house from the garden, still farther off, were the negro quarters, slovenly but comfortable, and the stables, which were partly hidden by the straggling yew hedge that extended all around the lawn. In these quarters were housed the two hundred negroes on the plantation, and as twenty-five of them were occupied about the house and garden and stables there was always life and movement around the place.
Especially was this true at Christmas time, and on the Christmas eve of 1860, never was there more merriment, gayety, color, and loud laughter known at Harrowby. Lyddon, the English tutor there for ten years was struck by this, when returning from his afternoon’s tramp through the wintry woods, he passed across the lawn to the house. The air was sharp, like a saber, and the stars were already shining gloriously in the deep blue field of heaven. He watched a half dozen negro men who, with guttural laughter and shouts and merry gibes, carried into the house the great back log for the Christmas fire. From the time that this back log was placed upon the iron fire dogs of the yawning hall fireplace until it was entirely consumed, the negroes had holiday. According to the privileged practical joke of long custom, the log was of black gum, a wood hard to burn at any time. It had lain soaking for weeks in theinky mud of the salt marsh on the inward bend of the river, where the cows stood knee-deep in water at high tide, and hoof-deep in black ooze at low tide. The union of marsh mud and black gum was certain to insure at least a week’s holiday, when no work was required of the negroes, except the waiting on the house full of guests which always made the roof of Harrowby ring during the Christmas time. Great pyramids of wood towered at the woodpile to the left of the house, where the joyous sound of the ax was heard for a week before Christmas, that there should be oak and hickory logs to feed the great fireplaces, and lightwood knots to make the ruddy flames leap high into the wide-throated chimneys.
Lyddon, a gaunt, brown, keen-eyed man, who had watched this backlog business with great interest for ten successive Christmases, studied it anew as a type of the singular and unpractical relations existing between the master and the slave. All of these relations were singular and unpractical, and were a perpetual puzzle to Lyddon. One of the strangest things to him was that the word slave was absolutely tabooed and all sorts of euphemisms were used, such as “the servants,” “the black people,” in order to avoid this uncomely word.
Another typical puzzle was taking place on the side porch. There stood Hector, Colonel Tremaine’s body servant, and general factotum of Harrowby, engaged in his usual occupation of inciting the other negroes to work, while carefully abstaining therefrom himself. He was tall, and had by far the most imposing air andmanner of any person at Harrowby. Having accompanied his master several times to the White Sulphur Springs, to say nothing of two trips to Richmond and one to Baltimore, where he saw a panorama of the city of New York; and most wonderful of all, having attended Colonel Tremaine through a campaign in the Mexican War, Hector held a position of undisputed superiority among all the negroes in five counties. He classified himself as a perfect man of the world, a profound expounder of the Gospels, an accomplished soldier, and military critic.
As regards Hector’s heroic services during the Mexican War, he represented that he was always at General Scott’s right hand except when his presence was imperatively demanded by General Zachary Taylor. According to Hector’s further account he led the stormers at Chapultepec, supported Jefferson Davis when he made his celebrated stand at Buena Vista, and handed the sword of General Santa Anna to General Scott when the former surrendered. Colonel Tremaine, on the contrary, declared that Hector never got within five miles of the firing line during the Mexican War, and that whenever there was the remotest sign of an attack, Hector always took refuge under the nearest pile of camp furniture and had to be dragged out by the heels when the danger was overpast. He modeled his toilet upon Colonel Tremaine’s, whose cast-off wardrobe he inherited. The colonel claimed to be the last gentleman in Virginia who wore a ruffled shirt, and Hector shared this distinction. Great billows of cotton lace poured out of the breast of his blue coat, decorated withbrass buttons, which was too short in the waist and too long in the tails for Hector, and for whom the colonel’s trousers were distinctly too small, and were kept from crawling up to his knees by straps under the heels of his boots.
What Hector’s business in life was, beyond shaving Colonel Tremaine once a day, Lyddon had never been able to discover. Colonel Tremaine always said, “my boy Hector,” although, like the colonel himself, he had passed the line of seventy; but having become the colonel’s personal attendant when both were in their boyhood, he remained “my boy, sir,” until Time should hand him over, a graybeard, to Death. Another anomaly, scarcely stranger to Lyddon than Hector’s eternal boyhood, was that, having an incurable propensity to look upon the wine when it is red, he had entire charge of the cellar at Harrowby, and when upon occasions of ceremony his services might have been of some slight use, he was tolerably sure to be a little more than half-seas over. He made up for this by an Argus-eyed vigilance over his two postulates, Jim Henry and Tasso, gingerbread-colored youths, who did the work of the dining room under Hector’s iron rule. So careful was he of their morals that he made a point of himself drinking the wine left in the glasses at dinner, “jes’ to keep dem wuffless black niggers f’um turnin’ deyselves into drunkards, like Joshua did arter he got outen de ark.”
Now, from Hector’s unctuous voice and unsteady gait, it was perfectly obvious to Lyddon that Hector had not escaped the pitfall into which he alleged Joshuahad fallen. Lyddon passed along and entered the great hall, where the work of putting up the Christmas decorations was not yet finished. A noble fire roared upon the broad hearth and the rose-red light danced upon the darkened, polished leaves of the holly wreaths, which hung on the walls and the family portraits that seemed still to live and speak. Before the fireplace stood Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine, with Archie, the sixteen-year-old son, who, with exception of Angela Vaughn, a slip of a girl older than Archie, was the best pupil Lyddon had ever known. Lyddon himself, with the abstracted eyes of a scholar and an observer of men, walked up to the fireplace and listened with patient amusement to the perplexities of Mrs. Tremaine.
She was of a type of woman which he had never seen until he came to Virginia—delicate, soft-voiced, pious, the chief and only hard worker on the estate, carrying easily the burden of thought and care for her family, her unbroken stream of guests, and army of servants. Lyddon, who looked deep into souls, knew the extraordinary courage, the singular tenacity, the silent, passionate loves and hates of women like Mrs. Tremaine. One of the ever strange problems to him was that this type of woman was remarkably pleasant to live with, and was ever full of the small, sweet courtesies of life. He reckoned these women, however, dangerous when they were roused. Mrs. Tremaine, nearly sixty, when sixty was considered old, had a faded rose beauty around which the fragrance of the summer ever lingered. She gave the impression of a woman who had lived a life of luxury and seclusion when, as a matterof fact, she had, ever since her marriage, carried the burden of a general who organizes and directs an army. She had, however, that which gives to women perpetual youth, the adoration of her husband, of her three sons, and of all who lived in daily contact with her.
Colonel Tremaine, tall, thin, and somewhat angular, with a face clear-cut like a cameo, had been reckoned the handsomest man of his day and the most superb dandy in the State of Virginia. He adhered rigidly to the fashions of forty years before, when he had been in the zenith of his beauty. He wore his hair plastered down in pigeon wings on each side of his forehead and these pigeon wings were of a beautiful dark brown in spite of Colonel Tremaine’s seventy-two years. The secret of the colonel’s lustrous locks was known only to himself and to Hector, and even Mrs. Tremaine maintained a delicate reserve concerning it. Colonel Tremaine also held tenaciously to a high collar with a black silk stock, and his shirt front was a delicate mass of thread cambric ruffles, hemstitched by Mrs. Tremaine’s own hands. His manners were as affected as his dress and he was given to genuflections, gyrations, and courtly wavings of his hands in addressing persons from Mrs. Tremaine down to the smallest black child on the estate. But under his air of an elderly Lovelace lay sense, courage, honor, and the tenderest heart in the world.
Both Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine bore all the marks of race, and Lyddon had often wondered where Archie, the youngest child by ten years of the sons of the house, could have inherited his merry, inconsequential snubnose, his round face like a young English squireling, and his frankly red hair. He had neither the beauty nor the intellect of his older brothers, Neville, the young army officer, and Richard, who after taking high honors at the university was just graduated in law; but for sweetness, courage, and an odd sort of humor, Lyddon reckoned Archie not inferior to any boy he had ever taught. He was his parents’ Benjamin, the afterclap which had come to them almost in their old age, and was in some sort different to them from their older sons. He was to be classed rather with Angela Vaughn, the baby girl whom, in her infancy, Mrs. Tremaine had taken because the child was an orphan and the stepchild of a remote cousin. Angela and Archie had grown up together, a second crop, as the colonel explained, and they would ever be but children to both Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine.
At that moment, Archie, with Jim Henry and Tasso to assist, mounted on a table, to finish the hanging of the Christmas wreaths, that the old hall might look its best when Neville, his mother’s darling, and Richard, her pride, should arrive for the Christmas time. Neville had succeeded in getting a few days’ leave from his regiment, and Richard, the most intimate of brothers, had himself driven to the river landing to meet Neville. They might arrive at any moment and would be certain to be chilled with the ten miles’ drive in the winter afternoon, and there was not a drop of liquor of any sort to give them, according to the universal custom of the time. Hector, having helped himself to a little fine old brandy left in Colonel Tremaine’s privateliquor case, was quite oblivious of what he had done with the keys both of the cellar and sideboard, and was struggling to explain this to Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine.
“I ’clare ’fore Gord, Mist’iss—” he protested with solemn emphasis as Lyddon came up to the fireplace.
“Come, Hector,” answered Mrs. Tremaine, in a voice of quiet authority, “don’t take the name of the Almighty in that trifling manner. What have you done with the cellar keys?”
“Mist’iss, I ’clare ’fore Gord——”
“My love,” interrupted Colonel Tremaine anxiously, addressing Mrs. Tremaine, “perhaps a little persuasion might discover the truth.” The colonel, although he swore liberally at Hector himself, never relished any fault-finding with him by anyone else, even Mrs. Tremaine. Hector, knowing by an experience of more than sixty years that he had a devoted ally in Colonel Tremaine, announced with easy confidence: “I recommember now what I done wid dem keys. I give dem cellar keys to old Marse, an’ I give him dem sidebo’d keys——”
“You did nothing of the sort,” replied Mrs. Tremaine, in her soft, even voice, but with a ring of displeasure and authority in it which was disquieting to both Hector and Colonel Tremaine. “And besides, Hector, you’ve been drinking, it is perfectly plain.”
“Mist’iss, I ’clare I ain’t tech’ one single drap o’ liquor sence I had de rheumatiz week ’fore lars’.”
Mrs. Tremaine cut him short by appealing to Colonel Tremaine. Usually she addressed him as “My dear,” and he replied with “My dearest Sophie”; but whendiscussions concerning Hector came about Mrs. Tremaine addressed the colonel as “Colonel” and he responded by calling her “Sophia.”
“Colonel, have you seen those keys?”
“Really, Sophia, I have not,” replied the colonel, with as much tartness as he ever used toward Mrs. Tremaine. The discussion grew warm, and Hector gave various accounts of what he had done with the keys, but no one thought of the practical solution of looking for them until Archie, having hung the last wreath, came up, and diving into Hector’s coat pockets, the first place which should have been searched, fished out two bunches of keys.
“I tole you, Missis,” began Hector, still very unsteady upon his legs, “I had done put dese yere keys somewar. I jes’ disrecollected whar it was.”
“Very well. Go at once and bring the decanter with brandy in it here, with sugar and glasses, for your young masters.” Hector walked toward the dining room, the picture of injured innocence, protesting under his breath—“I ain’t never teched a drap of liquor sence I had de rheumatiz.”
Lyddon, standing with his arm on the mantelpiece, smiled and wondered. This sort of thing had been going on, he felt sure, ever since Colonel Tremaine had been able to grow hair on his face, and would continue to the end of the chapter, and Hector, having already had more liquor than was good for him, was in a position to help himself still further. Lyddon marveled if such a state of things could exist anywhere on earth outside of Virginia, and tried to fancy a similar caseof the butler in an English family, but his imagination was not equal to such a flight. When Hector appeared, however, in a minute or two with the brandy and the glasses and put them on the polished mahogany table near the fire, both Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine relaxed their air of being slightly offended with each other. Colonel Tremaine, looking at his watch, remarked, with a courtly bow:
“I think, my dearest Sophie, that our sons may be expected within half an hour, that is, if the boat was punctual.”
“A half hour, my dear, is long to wait for those we love,” answered Mrs. Tremaine, laying her small white hand affectionately on Colonel Tremaine’s sleeve, at which the colonel took the hand and kissed it gallantly.
“You will understand, Mr. Lyddon,” said he, turning to the tutor, who was still leaning on the mantelpiece, “the very great interest and importance of our army son’s visit to us at this juncture. The time will shortly be at hand when every son of Virginia must determine whether he will stand for or against his State, and it is not necessary for us to say that we feel certain the services of our son, Neville, are at the disposition of his State the instant they are required.”
Yes, Lyddon knew the whole story. He had heard it talked about ever since the news had come a week ago that South Carolina having seceded from the Union, the day must shortly come when Virginia must cast her lot either for or against the Union. One of the sources of strength most counted upon was the resignationof every Southern officer from the army and the navy, and Colonel Tremaine, having some knowledge of military life, was proud to think that he had in Neville a trained artillerist to offer to the new cause.
“The position of a Southern officer in the United States army at present is a very difficult one,” remarked Lyddon; “there is a question of honor and conscience involved which each man must settle for himself.”
“By God!” exclaiming Colonel Tremaine, and then fell silent. The mere notion of discussing such a thing was to him like discussing the morality of the Ten Commandments.
“The question is already settled,” added Mrs. Tremaine coldly, and Lyddon knew there was nothing more to be said. He had realised long before that there was really no liberty of conscience, much less of speech, concerning the separation of the South from the North, or the future of slavery. The minds of these people were made up and compromise was impossible. They scarcely tolerated what Lyddon had to say, even though he were an Englishman and an outsider, considering his doctrine of liberty of conscience concerning slavery and States’ rights to be so dangerous and pernicious that it could not be freely spoken for fear it might corrupt, as it certainly offended; and Lyddon, recognizing the adamantine prejudices around him, kept his sentiments chiefly to himself; only with Richard Tremaine, whose mind was too comprehensive to be wholly dominated by prejudice, could Lyddon speak freely. He smiled a little at Colonel Tremaine’s exclamation, but, being the last man on earth to engage in controversy, let thesubject drop. And Tasso beginning vigorous operations with the broom to sweep up the remnants of the now complete decorations, Lyddon fled to his city of refuge, the old, shabby, low-ceiled study across the corridor.
In this old part of the house reigned comfort, quiet, and shabbiness, sometimes an excellent combination. This was the one room forever sacred to men, boys, dogs, books, and Angela Vaughn. There, with the door shut, all was silent, still, and serene—the serenity of books and bachelorhood. Lyddon drew up a great worn leather chair to the fire, which glowed ruddily and steadily, and, placing his feet on the fender, reflected upon the stupendous changes which he knew were at hand, and which the whole community seemed to comprehend as little as did the Harrowby family. War and revolution and evolution were imminent, the upsetting of the whole economic and social order, the leap in the dark which Lyddon felt sure meant the fall into an abyss; yet the people talked about it lightly and sentimentally, and seemed to think it would be a mere holiday parade. But if it should be otherwise, Lyddon knew enough of the character and temper of the people around him to understand that they were by nature the most furious and indomitable of fighters; that the women, if softer, were, if anything, fiercer than the men.
His thoughts then turned to Angela Vaughn. He often, in his own mind, compared himself to a gardener who has taken a ragged seedling and has nurtured it until, grown tall and fair, it is ready to burst into all the glory of its blooming and then be gathered by other hands than those which trained and watered itand gave it the fresh air and the blessed sun. He remembered her when he had first come to Harrowby to prepare Neville Tremaine for West Point, and Richard for the University of Virginia. Angela was then a nine-year-old, in pinafores, and had reminded Lyddon of a Skye terrier, being all eyes and hair. She was as light as a feather, and Lyddon, accustomed to the heavier proportions of English children, thought that this wisp of a child, with her tangle of chestnut hair hanging down her back, and her laughing, black-lashed eyes of no color and all colors, must be indeed a delicate blossom; but she led the life of the most robust boy, and had never known a day’s illness in all those ten years. Lyddon recalled her, pattering about in the snow, her red hood and mantle making her look like a redbird. He could see her swinging on the branches of the cherry trees in the orchard in the springtime, her laughing face and her little white ruffled sunbonnet making her look like a cherry blossom herself. He had often watched her scrambling, with the agility of a boy rather than a girl, on and off her pony, or merrily dancing the schottische with Archie in the big hall, their music being their own childish singing; or dashing down the garden path to a little nook on a wooden bench under the lilac trees, at the end, and always full of a strange activity. But tucked away under her arm or in her pocket was pretty sure to be found a book from her own special library, which consisted of four volumes—a book of good old fairy tales, “The Arabian Nights,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and an odd volume of the “Odyssey,” telling of Penelope and the suitors,which she frankly confessed to Lyddon she could not understand, and read because she liked to be puzzled by it. Lyddon, who had never before in his life taught a girl, and hated the thought of it, at first turned his back resolutely upon the child, but she had a way of stealing up to him and putting her little hand in his, and saying: “Please, Mr. Lyddon, won’t you read me out of this book?” The book was generally the “Odyssey,” for Angela found out by some occult means that at the mention of this book, the eyes of the grave and somewhat curt tutor would be certain to soften, and Lyddon relenting would ask the child sternly: “How do you pronounce the name of this book?”
“I don’t know,” Angela would reply, casting down her eyes and toying with her little white apron. “I can spell it, but I can’t say it, and I don’t know what it means, either, unless you read it to me.” The way in which she said those last words, accompanied with a shy, sidelong look, always captivated Lyddon, and he had begun with reading the sonorous lines to her, Angela leaning on his knee and listening with her head turned a little to one side like a watchful bird. After reading awhile, Lyddon would again ask: “Now, do you understand it?”
“No,” Angela would reply, shaking her mass of chestnut hair, “but I like it. Please go on, Mr. Lyddon.” In course of time, to Lyddon’s amazement, he found himself regularly teaching the child her lessons. There was a pretense that she was taught with Archie, but as a matter of fact, not only was she nearly four years older than Archie, but her capacity forbooks was so much greater that there was no classifying her with the boy or, indeed, with any pupil whom Lyddon had ever taught.
Not that Angela was universally teachable; she could not, or at least would not, learn arithmetic or mathematics in any form, and Lyddon, whose soul abhorred a mathematical woman, was not sorry for this. He loved Latin, however, as a cat loves cream, and Angela, finding this out, learned her Latin lessons with amazing facility. Lyddon had some notion of teaching her Greek, but forebore from conscientious scruples. He had no mind to make her a woman like Pallas of the green eyes, “that dreadful and indomitable virgin,” as Pantagruel says, but would rather that Angela should grow up to resemble the enchanting maid, the silver-footed Thetis. He imparted French, too, however, which she picked up readily; history she learned of herself, and the piano was taught her by Mrs. Tremaine, who played neatly in the old-fashioned style. Angela’s gift for music was considerable, and she sang and played with much natural expression and loved to accompany Archie, who fiddled prettily. There was always more or less talk of getting a governess for Angela, and Mrs. Tremaine actually proposed sending her to a finishing school, but Angela managed to evade both of these nefarious plans. All the education which was required of the women in her day consisted of graceful and housewifely accomplishments. These Angela easily mastered and under Lyddon’s instructions carefully concealed exactly how much Latin she knew, although a little boastful of knowing French.
From the first, Lyddon had been forced to yield to the soft seduction of the child’s nature. He early recognized the difference of sex in mind, the scintillant feminine intelligence, unlike that of any boy he had ever taught, sharper in some respects, far duller in others, quick of apprehension but difficult of comprehension in the large sense. All this was delightfully obvious to Lyddon as he watched the unfolding of Angela’s mind. The absence of the creative faculty in women had been borne in upon Lyddon in his general view of human achievement. He studied the convolutions in the budding mind of his pupil and it gave him insight concerning the immense interest far greater than its value which the intellectual performance of a woman arouses. He recalled that much had been written about Sappho, but the lady’s poems not having the germ of eternal life had gone to the limbo of forgotten things, all except about forty lines. He reckoned that a woman’s personality and reputation was all of her which could really survive; her work invariably perished, and Madame de Staël, as a writer, was as dead as Sappho. Nevertheless, he found himself more interested in Angela’s divination of books and things than in Neville’s keen and analytical mind, in the fine and comprehensive intellect of Richard Tremaine or Archie’s sturdy good sense. Lyddon laughed at himself for the interest with which he watched Angela’s mental growth, in preference to that of any boy whom he had ever taught, just as one watches the dancing light of a firefly with greater interest than a candle’s steady glow. Nor was Angela’s nature less interestingto him than her mind. He had been used to the simple nature of boys, but here was a creature not only of another sex, but, it seemed to Lyddon, of another order, who was not always merry when she laughed nor sad when she wept nor angry when she scowled. Angela had moreover a spirit of pure adventure stronger than he had ever known in any boy. She longed to see the outside world and was strangely conscious from the beginning of the narrowness of the life lived by her own people. Their horizon was bounded by the State of Virginia. Not so Angela’s. She was always teasing Lyddon to tell her stories of across the seas and planned with him triumphal journeys to the glorious cities of the Old World, marvelous explorations in the heart of India and to the very extremities of the earth. Lyddon humored her in these childish imaginings as he did in everything else. Angela was now nineteen years old. Like all women she was wise and simple, frank and sly, brave and timid, and consistently contradictory. When Lyddon thought of her he recalled the words of another maiden of a far-off country and a bygone time:
“Take care of thyself if thou lovest me.”
And as he sat thinking, the study door opened and Angela quietly entered.