CHAPTER XIVSNOWBOUND
ISABEY remembered that it was Christmas morning. Snow had been falling all the night through and lay white and deathlike over the land.
The Christmas was unlike any Christmas which Harrowby had ever known. There were neither wreaths nor decorations nor any Christmas cheer. After breakfast, the negro children came into the hall, where Angela distributed their Christmas stockings with such homely sweets as she could provide, and the children went away quietly.
The shadow of the war was upon them, too, and they understood dimly in their childish way the vague unrest, the fears, the agitating hopes of their elders, to whom the universe was changing daily and who knew that things would never be as they had once been.
Angela was glad of the excuse of Isabey’s illness to keep the house quiet. Colonel Tremaine retired to his library; the day to him was one of bitter introspection. Lyddon, whom no weather could daunt, went for a tramp in the snow. Angela busied herself with her household affairs and then wrote a letter to Neville and afterwards to Mrs. Tremaine, Richard, and Archie. Itwas the first time in her short life she had been separated from them all on Christmas day.
It was twelve o’clock before Isabey was dressed and helped into the study. There he found Angela sitting in a low chair reading. With Mammy Tulip’s help, she made him comfortable on the old leather sofa drawn close to the glowing fire. Hector, having cheerfully permitted Mammy Tulip to perform all the services which Isabey’s disability required, was on the spot to assume the direction of things and to compare the campaign of Joshua round the walls of Jericho with General Scott’s entrance into the City of Mexico.
He was, however, rudely cut short by Mammy Tulip hustling him out of the way while she brought Isabey the inevitable “something hot.” Hector retired with Mammy Tulip to have it out on the back porch, and Angela and Isabey were left alone together.
“Mr. Lyddon will have George Charteris in the dining room every morning after this,” she said. “This is to be your sitting room and you are to send everybody out of it when you feel like it; Uncle Tremaine, Mr. Lyddon, and me.”
“I shan’t send you away,” said Isabey in a low voice and quite involuntarily. Angela blushed deeply.
She rose and went to the window through which was seen a world all white under a menacing leaden sky. Even the river was covered with snow and its voice was frozen.
“I never mind being snowbound,” she said, coming back to the fire. “It always seems to me as if I could think and read better in winter than in summer.”
“And in summer you enjoy and feel. Is it not like that?” asked Isabey.
“Yes,” replied Angela, smiling. “When I was a little girl and Mr. Lyddon would talk to me about Nature, I thought Nature was a great goddess and was smiling in the summer when the sun shone and the birds chirped, and in the autumn, when everything was dull and gray and quiet, that the goddess was in the sulks. Then in winter when the snow and ice came I thought Nature was in a bad humor and had quarreled with her lover, the sun. What strange notions children have!”
“And what a strange, poetic little child you must have been!”
“All real children are strange and poetic, I think; but, you see, not many small girls are taught by a man like Mr. Lyddon. Now tell me what happened to you when you were wounded.”
Isabey sighed. “When I’m stronger,” he said. “But now I want to put it all away from me for a little while. I mean to give myself a whole month of peace.”
“The doctors said two months.”
“The doctors always say two months when one month will do. Then I shall be ready to go again. A soldier’s life is not all hardship. War is the game of the gods.” After a moment he added in a perfectly conventional tone: “I hope you hear good news from Captain Tremaine?”
“It’s good news that he’s well,” replied Angela. “I hear from him irregularly. I should have been with him long ago if he could have had me, but he’s out inthe far West, where there are no railroads or stages or anything. I believe,” she added, the flush, which had died from her face, returning quickly, “the very people for whom Neville sacrificed everything don’t trust him. It’s because they don’t know him. They only know that he is a Southern man in the Northern Army. I feel so sorry for Neville and so indignant for him that I could weep with grief and anger.”
“It’s also very hard for you,” said Isabey, gently.
“Yes, very, but what I endure is only a trifle compared with what Neville has to suffer. You know he had great ambitions and he’s a fine officer, everyone says that, and now all is forgotten and he has no chance. But I ought not to inflict all of my burdens and vexations upon you. Shall I read to you a little?”
“With pleasure,” answered Isabey.
Angela went to the bookcase and brought back several volumes. “These,” she said with authority, “aren’t the books which you particularly like, but the books which Mr. Lyddon says are soothing. They’re all poetry books. Poetry, you know, calms and makes one forget this workaday world.”
Isabey picked up a volume of “Childe Harold.” “I should like you to read this to me. One likes the old familiar things when he is as weak as I am. When I was in Europe I always carried ‘Childe Harold’ in my pocket and read it among the very scenes which Byron describes. You see, I was very young.”
“Youth may be wise. That’s just what I should do if I had seen Rome and Venice and the Rhine.”
“Some day you will.”
Angela shook her head. “Neville isn’t fond of travel, and besides we shall be poor because his father and mother will never give him anything after this. He was to have had Harrowby, and we should have settled down here as quietly as Uncle Tremaine and Aunt Sophia. Richard, you know, meant to enter public life, and so the place wasn’t so much to him, and he would have got, like Archie, other property instead of Harrowby. Uncle Tremaine and Aunt Sophia used to talk about it before them, but now all is changed. Neville will have nothing, not an acre, not a stick, not a stone to call his own.”
“But he will have you,” replied Isabey, in a low voice and really thinking aloud.
“And I shall have him,” responded Angela, quickly, and looking steadily into Isabey’s eyes. She had uttered no word of reproach, but Isabey after a moment said quietly:
“You must not be offended with me now for anything I say. I’m so weak in body that it affects my will. I often found myself when I was lying on the floor of that wretched hut asking the doctor for things which I knew in advance he could not have supplied to save his life. Be patient with a man who doesn’t know very well how to bear pain of any sort.”
What woman could resist that? Angela said nothing, but her eyes spoke forgiveness.
He lay watching Angela with her quick-changing expression“He lay watching Angela with her quick-changing expression.”
“He lay watching Angela with her quick-changing expression.”
“He lay watching Angela with her quick-changing expression.”
Then she opened the book and began to read. Her reading was good and her understanding of the lines perfect. Isabey knew them well, and their far-off, half-forgotten music fell softly upon his spirit. He laywatching Angela with her quick-changing expression, her easy and graceful attitude. It was all so sweetly, divinely peaceful, and then before he knew it his eyes closed and he slept.
Angela read on, the music of her voice filling the low, small room. She did not put down the book until Isabey slept soundly. Then she watched him with her heart in her eyes.
If he had returned well and strong and full of the charm, the grace, the captivations, the splendid accomplishments which had so dazzled her at their first meeting, she would have been on her guard. But who need be on her guard, she asked herself, with a wounded soldier, a man as helpless as a child, and who was entitled to have all things made soft and easy for him? And how ashy white he looked, the whiter from the blackness of his hair!
In his sleep he moved his right arm and groaned without waking. Angela rose and, changing the position of his arm a little, Isabey moaned no more. The silence in the room was broken only by his light breathing and the occasional dropping of a coal upon the ashes. Without was that deep and dreamlike silence of overwhelming snow. It seemed to Angela as if not only the face of the world but all the people in it had changed within the year.
The Christmas before she had never seen Isabey, but her mind working on the problem as women’s minds work, it seemed to her us if she had really known him ever since those days when as a little girl she saw the pictures of him taken with Richard. Her childish imaginationhad seized upon Isabey’s image with a sort of foreknowledge; she had been in love with him before she ever saw him.
When this thought occurred to her, she reasoned with herself coolly. To be in love with a name, with a fanciful image even of a real man was not love. She had been in love withLara, withChilde Harold, even some of those old Greek and Roman heroes whose names she had spelled out painfully when she was a child at Lyddon’s knee.
However, one of these heroes—Isabey—had taken shape and had come bodily before her, and deep down in her heart, this airy romance, this thing of dreams had become something real and menacing to her happiness.
As she sat before the fire thinking these thoughts, Isabey waked without stirring. He had been dreaming of Angela and to find her close to him, her delicate profile outlined against the dark, book-covered walls, to hear the occasional rustle of her gown, and to watch her dark, narrow-lidded eyes in the gleam from the firelight, seemed to him a continuation of his soft and witching dream. He observed that her air and expression had matured singularly since he had first seen her, when the syringas bloomed, the lilacs were in their glory, and the blue iris hid shyly under its polished leaves, but outwardly Angela was not yet a woman any more than the little rose bushes of last year’s planting were rose trees now.
The silence, the warmth, the sweetness seemed to enwrap Isabey, and without was that white and frozenworld which made each homestead a solitude. He lay thus for half an hour furtively watching Angela. Then she turned toward him and met his dark eyes.
“I thought you were asleep,” she said, stepping toward him.
“I was asleep,” he replied, smiling, “and dreamed.”
“Do you remember it is Christmas day?” she asked, arranging his pillows for him.
“I believe I knew it, but I have not exerted myself to think since I have been under this roof. Everything is too deliciously sweet.”
“It is the strangest Christmas,” said Angela, returning to her low chair. “Everything as quiet as death, not a sound in the house. I filled the stockings of all the little negro children with apples and nuts and molasses candy and gave them out early this morning. But I made them keep quiet for fear of waking you. They were quiet enough; something odd seems to have come over the negroes.”
“I should think so. With their ignorance of events and inability to read and knowing neither geography nor history, don’t you suppose they must be secret excited and bewildered by this war, in which they have so huge a stake?”
“So Mr. Lyddon says. Every one of them is different, it seems to me, since the war broke out, even Mammy Tulip and Uncle Hector. I don’t mean that they are not just as faithful, but they listen to us when we talk, and watch us, and I think repeat to each other what we say. I wonder how I shall feel when I goNorth to Neville and shan’t have any black people to wait upon me.”
“You will feel very queer, I dare say. I never grew accustomed to being waited upon by white men all the time I was abroad. It is true that I had my own boy with me, but I often felt a yearning for the kindly negro faces, and longed to hear them laugh when they were spoken to.”
While Angela and Isabey were talking, Colonel Tremaine came in. He had taken advantage of Mrs. Tremaine’s absence to array himself in a suit of before-the-war clothes, and was feeling much more at ease in them than in homespun, and so expressed himself.
“Mrs. Tremaine’s wishes, my dear Captain Isabey, are paramount in this house, and especially with me, and have been from the day that I determined to ask her to become mine. She makes it somewhat a point of conscience that I shall wear a suit of homespun, woven and spun on the estate, and made by Mrs. Tremaine herself with the assistance of her woman, Tulip. But I frankly confess that I feel more comfortable in the clothes made by my Baltimore tailor. In other respects, I submit cheerfully to the privations of the war. I have no longer any objection to tallow candles, or to blackberry wine, or to potato coffee sweetened with honey, or even to being shaved with soft soap made by Tulip and of the color and consistency of mud and molasses and presented by Hector in a gourd. And I can offer you some apple brandy manufactured last summer in the Harrowby kitchen. It is better than the alleged French brandy whichI bought from Captain Ross, the blockade-runner. I accused him of having watered it. This he strenuously denied, but it appears he had diluted it on the voyage and had inadvertently used salt water, and if you will believe me, the scoundrel swore to my face that he had not mixed any ingredients with the brandy, although it was as salt as Lot’s wife. Running the blockade appears to make great liars of all connected with the trade.”
Isabey duly sympathized with Colonel Tremaine’s grievances over the salt-watered brandy, and the Colonel continued:
“In many ways we still enjoy the comforts to which we are accustomed. The land brings forth fruitfully. The hens, ducks, and turkeys seem to vie with each other in producing a multitude of eggs. The fish still run in the river, and the oysters have not so far concerned themselves with States’ rights, so at least we shall not starve while you are with us.”
Isabey replied with truth that in lowland Virginia one might live like a lord as long as the sun rose and the rivers ran.
At three o’clock the Christmas dinner was served, and around the great mahogany table gathered a group smaller than it had ever held before—Colonel Tremaine, Lyddon, Angela, and Isabey for a part of the time. The dinner was rich in oysters, fishes, meats, and vegetables, but deficient in sweets. When, according to the old custom, the cloth was removed and the decanters on coasters were sent around the table, Colonel Tremaine proposed the Christmas toast to “our absent ones—thelady who reigns over this mansion and also over the heart of its master, to its sons—” here he paused.
Angela said in a quick, tremulous voice, “Neville, Richard, and Archie.”
Colonel Tremaine’s face darkened. The mention of his traitor son, as he regarded Neville, was always painful to him, but he did not refuse to drink the toast.
When the dinner was over the short wintry afternoon was closing in. Snow was again falling heavily in a world already wrapped in whiteness and silence. There were no sounds of merrymaking from the negro quarters. All seemed to share the mood of tenseness and somber expectation.
Colonel Tremaine was visibly depressed. It was the first Christmas he had spent in forty years apart from Mrs. Tremaine and he felt it deeply.
As the twilight closed in, Angela, wrapped in her red mantle, with the hood over her head, went out into a misty world of snow and faint moonshine, which penetrated a break in the overhanging clouds. A pathway had been cut through the snow to the garden gate and thence down the main walk to the old brick wall at the end. Angela began to pace up and down her favorite walk. Her sense of aloneness and aloofness was complete. The swirling white eddies shut everything from her except the bare shrubs in the garden standing like ghosts in the faint spectral glare of the moon on a snowy night.
She began to question herself. Would she, if she were entirely free to act, go at once to Neville? She answered her own question and satisfactorily. Certainlyshe would. Did she love Neville? Yes, just as she had always done, from the time she was a little girl and never felt so safe with anyone as when her tiny hand lay in Neville’s boyish palm. Was she in love with him? Ah, no! And would she ever be? To that, too, her heart gave no doubtful answer, but a strong negative. She was never to have a dream of love, any of those soft illusions which make a young girl’s heart tremble.
Then relentlessly she asked herself if she was in love with Isabey. She stopped in her walk and looked about her with scared eyes, as if love were a specter to affright her. She was enveloped in the misty veil of the falling snow which eddied about her and which was lighted by that ghostly and silvery sheen of the hobgoblin moon.
Did she not feel the color come to her face whenever she caught Isabey’s eyes fixed upon her? Did not her heart beat at his footsteps, and did not his mere presence electrify the atmosphere?
Then another question forced itself into her mind, like a dagger into an open wound. Was Isabey in love with her?
She had never thought or even suspected such a thing until he had returned, the pitiful wreck of his former self. But Angela being, like all the rest of her sex, learned in the secrets of the heart, had found out what Isabey in truth was too ill, too weak, to conceal—that she was dear to him.
Had they met one week earlier!
“But then,” she replied to herself, “it would havemade no difference; I could not have refused to stand by Neville when all the world was arrayed against him.”
Whatever she or Isabey might suffer, Neville’s heart should be at peace. She would be to him so tender, so affectionate, so watchful to please him, that he would never suspect she had not given him her whole treasure. And, feeling this, she had an expansion of the soul which seemed to raise her in her own esteem.
Why need she be on her guard against Isabey? He had suffered so much. He was the object which most appeals to a woman’s heart—a wounded soldier. He was so weak, so worn, that no woman on earth could refuse him her pity. And of his integrity, his delicacy, she had not the smallest doubt. It seemed to her then so easy to be loyal both to the real and to the ideal.
She resumed her walk in the swirling snow. At the same moment Isabey, lying on the couch in the study watching the pallid twilight of the snowstorm without and the rosy glow of the fire within, was asking himself some of the same questions which Angela put to herself in the storm-swept garden.
Was he in love with this girl? Yes. And more, he loved her with all his heart. She was already the wife of a man whom he admired and honored; she was born among different surroundings from his own: bred differently from any girl he had ever known; of different blood and religion and customs to his own, and yet an unbreakable chain had been forged between them.
The first circumstance of this was strange to him—Angela’s suddenly putting her hand in his that summer day, now six months past. He was accustomed to theFrench method of training girls, and here was Angela, who enjoyed even greater freedom than was usually accorded to those girls of colder climes than Louisiana. This wife of barely twenty was trusted as if she were a woman of sixty, and although this was new to Isabey, it touched and enlightened him.
In place of Angela’s inexperience he had a thorough knowledge of the world; hence he did not adopt Angela’s innocent delusion that it would be easy to reconcile the real and the ideal. But for her, he would at some time or other have acquiesced in one of those marriages which are arranged with a view to fitness in every respect except the perfect union of hearts. Often this union came; Isabey was by no means prepared to condemn those methods concerning marriage which he had been accustomed to all his life. A conventional marriage, however, no longer was possible for him, but at least he could enjoy the month in paradise which had come to him out of the blue.
The thought that he would be tended by Angela, that he would be able to command, by the royal will of a wounded man, her sweet presence, her soft voice in reading to him, her conversation, which was full of archness and simplicity, captivated him. The delicious glow which overspread his spirit extended to his body and gave him an exquisite sense of ease and comfort. In that month which he allowed himself he would become well acquainted with Angela’s mind. He had taken but small interest in women’s minds before, although he keenly appreciated their accomplishments. Angela had few of these accomplishments, but as well expect accomplishments of a wood nymph. The study of her intelligence,however, was like exploring a beautiful pleasance where there were groves, gardens, and crystal fountains. She was one of the few women he had ever seen whom he felt convinced age could not wither nor custom stale.
He was so lost in his delicious reverie that he did not hear the quiet opening of the door, and then Angela with her usually pale cheeks scarlet with the tingling cold, her eyes sparkling, and the snowflakes still lying on her red mantle, stood by him.
She shook the snow off the mantle and cried: “I had such an exciting walk! It was only up and down the garden path from the gate to the bench under the lilac bushes, but it seemed to me as if I had never before seen the garden look quite as it did. You know, there is a moon, although there is a snowstorm. That doesn’t happen often. And then I had such strange thoughts!”
“Were they unhappy thoughts?” asked Isabey, turning his black eyes upon her.
“N—o, not at all unhappy, but singular. You see, up to a year ago nothing had ever happened to me, and now all things are happening, all things are changing.”
Isabey rose weakly from the couch, and, taking Angela’s hand in his, kissed it with the tenderest respect.
“I hope,” he said, “that all will work toward your happiness. I hope some day you will be happy with Neville Tremaine, but you can afford to be a little kind to me.”
“Yes,” replied Angela, looking into his face quite calmly. “I can afford to be kind to you. One of the things which came to me just now in the garden was that as soon as Neville and I are together I must do everythingI can for his happiness. You see, he has always done everything for me, and I’m afraid I haven’t given much thought to doing anything for him. But now you may depend upon it I shall really study Neville’s happiness; I shall be as generous as he is.”
“You have already been very generous. You married him when all the world had turned against him.”
“Then I shouldn’t be generous halfway. I ought to be with him and make him happy.”
She sat down in the low chair in which she had read to him. It seemed to her if Isabey and she had spent hours in explanations they could not have understood each other better.
So thought Isabey. Angela could never be his, but at least he had found that jewel which all men seek and few discover—that other half of his being, the woman who perfectly understood him. He remembered that the hearts of men and women are like the cello and the violin—both are required to form the perfect strain of music.