CHAPTER IXSPARTANS 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. ColonelTremaine 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’spractice 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 strawhat 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 thechurch 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, withfaded 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, notEnglish. 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 displayingthis 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 panesrattle 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 roadby 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 thehedge 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, pleasedMrs. 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 shehad 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 alwaystouched 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 heartAngela 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.