CHAPTER XVITHE TONGUE OF CALUMNY
ONE Sunday morning a week or two after this, Angela announced that she intended to ride to church. The roads were still impassable for carriages, but a sure-footed horse could make his way along. Colonel Tremaine at once said that he, too, would join the enterprise. When Angela, in her riding habit, came downstairs about ten o’clock she found the horse at the door and a third one, upon which Hector was assisting Isabey. The horse was a retired cob of Colonel Tremaine’s and had passed his fifteenth birthday and being well gaited was admirably suited as a charger for a wounded officer. Just as Isabey had settled himself in the saddle and gathered the reins in his uninjured left hand, Colonel Tremaine came out.
“My dear sir,” he protested to Isabey, “this is extremely rash. You are not able to manage a horse.”
“I think I can manage this one,” answered Isabey, smiling, “and I mean to risk it. It makes me feel like a soldier once more to be on horseback.”
Colonel Tremaine swung Angela into her saddle, a privilege which Isabey envied from the bottom of his heart, and the three started off.
It was a shining winter morning, and the snow-coveredearth glittered in the crystalline light. In many places the roads had thawed, and progress was difficult, but Isabey showed himself able with one hand to manage his steed. Angela, who rode like a bird, looked well on horseback, and Isabey began to believe, as Lyddon did, that some day her girlish charms would develop into real beauty.
When they reached Petworth Church a fair-sized congregation had already assembled. There were among them a few old men and some schoolboys. Of these not one advanced to assist Angela from her horse, but this Colonel Tremaine did with old-fashioned grace. Isabey, meanwhile, managed to swing himself off his horse without much difficulty and limp up the flagged path on the one side of Angela, while Colonel Tremaine was on the other. The coldness toward Angela had in no wise abated since the May Sunday, nine months before, when her marriage to Neville Tremaine had become known, but no one until now had actually refused to speak to her. On this day, however, every eye was averted from her, and even Colonel Tremaine was avoided.
Mrs. Charteris was not at church, but George Charteris was there. He dared not refuse to speak to Angela, but the whole Harrowby party observed him skulking behind the churchyard wall, and keeping out of sight when Angela went into the church and when she passed out so that he might escape speaking to her.
Angela said no word nor did Colonel Tremaine, but both, as well as Isabey, surmised that something had gone abroad concerning her which incensed the peoplestill more against her. She was very far from insensible to the treatment she received and was silent all the way riding home. In the afternoon when, according to her custom, she went into the study to read to Isabey, he saw that she had been weeping, and guessed the cause of it. When he gently alluded to it, Angela burst into a passion of tears and left the room. Isabey clenched his one sound fist and longed to take vengeance upon the people who, as he thought, so cruelly ill-treated this innocent girl. He revolved in his mind the increase of hostility toward Angela and at last determined to go to see Mrs. Charteris and ask her if she could account for it.
Next day, having proved his ability to mount a horse, he asked for his charger of the day before and rode over to Greenhill. He was careful to time his visit so that George Charteris would be studying with Mr. Lyddon; Isabey felt that he could not answer for himself if he should catch sight of the boy that day. When he reached Greenhill he was shown into the old-fashioned drawing-room, and presently Mrs. Charteris sailed in. She sat down on a huge horsehair sofa and made Isabey sit beside her, who, not yet wholly familiar with Virginia manners, wondered whether Mrs. Charteris expected him to make love to her after such a familiarity.
“I have been very busy all day,” she said. “As you have heard, perhaps, all of my house servants have decamped, and with a family of refugee children under ten years of age there is much to be done.”
“I have no house in Virginia in which to entertainrefugees,” murmured Isabey. “God be thanked for it!”
“Oh, you wicked, inhospitable creature!” cried Mrs. Charteris. “Do you mean to say that if you had a house and your fellow countrywomen were running away from the Yankees you wouldn’t throw open your house and heart to them?”
“Oh, yes, I would throw open my house and heart to them, but, meanwhile, I should go and camp out in the forest! Five children under ten years of age! It is sweet to die for one’s country in preference to living in the house with five children.”
Mrs. Charteris was much disgusted with him for these sentiments, and so expressed herself. She then inquired after Madame Isabey and Adrienne in Richmond, and how the family at Harrowby were doing in Mrs. Tremaine’s absence, and especially after the hegira of most of the house servants.
“We are doing remarkably well,” answered Isabey. “Mrs. Neville Tremaine is, you know, a very accomplished housekeeper and manages admirably the raw hands imported into the house,” Isabey continued, speaking easily and naturally of Angela, meaning to lead up to the object of his visit: but Mrs. Charteris suddenly forced his hand. She paused a moment, and then said with a sad and perplexed air:
“Captain Isabey, may I give you a caution?”
“Certainly,” replied Isabey, smiling. “I am the most cautious man alive, and have more cautions than enterprises, but I should not mind a few more.”
“It is a serious business upon which I wish to warnyou,” replied Mrs. Charteris, gravely. And then, leaning toward him, she continued in a low voice: “Be very careful what you say before Angela Tremaine!”
Isabey looked at her in astonishment, and made no reply, and Mrs. Charteris spoke again quietly:
“You know the suspicion about her which has gone all over the county.”
“I do not know of the slightest suspicion which attaches to Mrs. Neville Tremaine,” replied Isabey, in a tone which startled Mrs. Charteris. She looked at him narrowly. He had perfect command over his temper, his tongue, and his features, but the blood had suddenly poured into his dark face, and Mrs. Charteris’s eagle eye saw it and promptly grasped that Angela Tremaine possessed great interest for Isabey. It only made her more keen to put him on his guard.
“What I mean,” she said, “is that Angela Tremaine is in constant communication with Neville Tremaine, and it is believed that she sends Neville news of the Confederates which, of course, is meant to injure us.”
“In short,” said Isabey, rising and standing very erect, “that Mrs. Neville Tremaine is thought to be a spy. Excuse me, but such a suspicion never entered my mind before, nor do I feel able to entertain it now. Who is responsible for this rumor?”
“Everybody,” replied Mrs. Charteris, rising and throwing her hands wide. “It is all over the county. At church yesterday I hear that no one spoke to Angela.”
“That is true, for I was present. And this on asuspicion merely. She a young girl, grown up in this community, known to all of you since her babyhood!”
“My dear Captain Isabey, you seem unacquainted with the tricks of love. Angela probably adores Neville and may consider it her duty to tell him all she knows concerning the movements of the Confederates.”
“Never! Mrs. Neville Tremaine has too nice a sense of honor for that. I hardly think you can realize the seriousness of the charge which is made against her.”
“It is serious enough,” answered Mrs. Charteris in a grave voice.
“And what could she possibly know,” asked Isabey, “that would be of the slightest consequence? How strange are women, after all! Nothing is too gross for them to believe.”
Mrs. Charteris took this slur upon her sex with perfect calmness. She saw that, despite Isabey’s outward composure, he was shaken to the center of his soul. He was the most courteous of men, and his attitude toward women was one of delicate compliment, and these last unguarded words which had escaped from him, and that, too, in the presence of a woman, were significant. Isabey walked up and down the room. Mrs. Charteris remained standing, with one hand on the back of her chair, and, picking up a fan, fanned herself with some agitation. Isabey, after a few turns up and down the room, came back and scrutinized her as closely as she had examined him a few moments before.
“I think,” said Isabey, coolly changing the subject, “that the psychology of this war time is profoundly interesting. Not only everything is changed,but everybody. Two years ago you Virginia people were the quietest provincials that ever lived. I know you well. I have visited in Virginia, and I have seen hundreds of you at your baths and springs, and all of you are alike in some respects. I, who know the great round world well, was always impressed by these Virginia people as having been drugged. You didn’t seem to realize that the world was closing in round you, around the whole South, for that matter, and that some day a convulsion must come. I myself own three hundred negroes. My father owned nearly a thousand, but I have been preparing for a change ever since I grew a mustache. I have not gone on investing in land and negroes quite unconscious that any other values existed. If the North should succeed and the negroes should be free, I should not be penniless, but for most of the people of the South all values would be destroyed.”
Mrs. Charteris suspected that this digression was really meant by Isabey to lead away from the subject of Angela, which apparently was of such acute interest to him. But she answered promptly enough and according to her lights:
“You are not one of these crazy abolitionists, I hope. What would we do with the negroes if we freed them? Look at my place. I have a hundred of them here, happy, well-fed, well cared for, nursed in illness, provided for in old age, decently buried when they are dead. Every Sunday afternoon I give up my time to teaching a Sunday-school among them. Every negro woman on this place has one of my silk dresses whichI have given her. What do you say to that?” she cried vehemently.
Isabey laughed at Mrs. Charteris’s final enumeration of the disposition of her old silk gowns, and the tension between them was somewhat relieved, but he went on:
“I say the psychology of this struggle is strange. I think it is like what the old noblesse in France went through at the time of the Revolution. They would not believe that anything was going to happen until something had happened. Two years ago this county was like a Garden of Eden for peace, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Charteris, “a great deal too much like the Garden of Eden. I was the only person in the county who ever quarreled with anybody, and nobody would ever quarrel with me with the spirit and energy I should have liked. We talked and thought of nothing except the best way to make mango pickle, the new fashions from Baltimore, and our trips to the White Sulphur Springs in summer. Now we spend our time scraping up our old linen sheets and pillowcases into lint for the soldiers, our looms and spinning wheels are going like mad, and we make jokes when we sweeten our potato coffee with honey instead of sugar. Every man in the county who can handle a musket or saber has gone to the war.”
“Except the Rev. Mr. Brand,” said Isabey, gravely, at which Mrs. Charteris suddenly rippled into laughter.
“My son is simply watching his chance to slip away to the instruction camp. He would be returned, of course, by the military authorities, because his age is known, but if he can get as far as Richmond he canpass himself off for full eighteen. Archie Tremaine is just the same, and Mrs. Tremaine and I know what is in those boys’ hearts. When my boy runs away he will take his mother’s blessing with him.”
Mrs. Charteris spoke with a kindling eye and the color suffused her smooth cheek. Isabey looked at her admiringly. Her matronly beauty was resplendent, and the high courage which made her eager to give this darling only son to her country was worthy of the brave days of old. Then Isabey spoke again of Angela, but evidently under restraint.
“I wish,” he said, “that you, with your determination and high-handedness, would stand by Mrs. Neville Tremaine and help to disprove this horrid suspicion against her. It is ridiculous, as I say. She has nothing to tell about military matters that would be worth any man’s listening. She knows nothing; how can she?”
“One can hear a good many things,” replied Mrs. Charteris.
“My dear madam, you can depend upon it, the military authorities at the North know quite as much as Mrs. Neville Tremaine or any other girl in this county can tell them. Her position is painful enough, God knows, and this frightful suspicion makes it that much worse. Only exercise your own sound sense for a moment, Mrs. Charteris, and see how impossible it is that Angela—that Mrs. Neville Tremaine should be able to communicate anything.”
But Mrs. Charteris was obstinate. She was not a military critic, and was well convinced, as she said, thatpeople knew a great many things. At last, however, she heard Isabey say under his breath: “Poor, poor Angela!” Then Mrs. Charteris’s excellent heart was touched. She put her hand impulsively into Isabey’s and said:
“After all, it may not be true, and I will stand Angela’s friend.”
Isabey pressed her plump hand softly and said in his musical, insinuating voice:
“I knew you would be intelligent enough to see the absurdity of the story, and kind enough not to hound that poor girl with the rest. I feel for her very deeply. My strong attachment to Richard Tremaine since our university days and the kindness of the Tremaines to my stepmother and her daughter has touched me deeply. The thought of the grief and mortification this story might bring to them is very painful to me.”
Mrs. Charteris, being a woman, suspected that there were other reasons than the attachment to Richard Tremaine and Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine’s kindness which accounted for Isabey’s interest in Angela. The novel thought pierced her mind that it was possible for a man to feel a deep personal and secret interest in a married woman, but he must be a very peculiar man, thought Mrs. Charteris, for she had never known such a thing to be in Virginia. She looked at Isabey, therefore, with new interest, and concluded that the French Creoles were very different from the Virginians.
“Now,” she said triumphantly, “you must have snack.”
Isabey gracefully submitted, and drank a couple ofglasses of blackberry wine, and ate some cakes with coriander seeds in them and sweetened with molasses, handed by the successor of the ex-plowman. When Isabey was leaving, Mrs. Charteris went with him out upon the porch and pointed to a great snow-covered field which the year before had been down in clover and which another season would grow cotton. She uttered at the same time the axiom of the whole South:
“As long as we can raise cotton we can whip the North. Cotton is king!”
Isabey returned to Harrowby uncertain whether or not Angela had an ally in Mrs. Charteris.
After a month of storm and snow and sleet, Nature smiled once more. The days grew long, the sun shone with the ardor of spring, and under the melting snow the first tender shoots of grass made a bold stand. Isabey watched for the first time the drama of the development of the garden—a drama interpreted by Angela.
On a still, sunny March day he limped up and down the garden path with Angela, who talked with lips and eyes to him. She examined the tracks her little feet made along the path and laughed at them.
“You see,” she said, “I am wearing a pair of new shoes made by Uncle Mat, the shoemaker who makes for the servants. I haven’t had any new shoes for more than a year, not since the war began. So I had Uncle Mat make me a pair in order to save my best shoes for the time when I shall go to Neville. Uncle Mat can’t sew shoes—he only pegs them; and see what funny marks the pegs leave in the damp ground.”
Isabey looked at the tracks of the clumsy little shoes, but not even Uncle Mat could wholly disguise the high-bred beauty of Angela’s feet.
“Last night,” she continued, “I forgot all about the shoes being pegged, and after I went upstairs sat for a long time with my feet to the fire. The heat drew every blessed peg out of the soles, and this morning Uncle Mat had to drive them back again, to stay until I put my feet to the fire again. Oh, I don’t mind this; it is just like Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth in the Temple!”
Pacing slowly up and down the broad, bright walk, she told with a grave and serious air the story of the garden.
“Now,” she said, “in the springtime the overture begins. I have never been to an opera, but I know exactly how it all goes; Mr. Lyddon and Richard and Neville have told me. First the flutes and violins begin softly, you know, and their odor is delicate. Then presently the other flowers join in this silent music; the snowballs and the syringas are added to the orchestra. I always think the big lilac bushes and the calycanthus, that delicious sweet-smelling shrub which grows all over the place, are like the bass viol and the violoncello in the orchestra, they are so strong and overpowering. And the great pink crape-myrtle is like the big drum; it blooms so loudly. The little flowers, like the lilies of the valley and the violets and the hyacinths, are like the new prima donnas, who are young and timid and afraid to sing out loud. But then come the roses. They are the great prima donnas, who are confident of themselves and know theywill be applauded and come out smiling and sing as loud as ever they please. And the whole opera begins: June, July, August, September, October, and November, when the curtain comes down and the music stops until the next performance, which begins again in March.”
Isabey smiled. After all, in many ways she was only a poetic and fanciful child. Her imagination, stimulated by the reading of many books, was vigorous, but she had in her the spirit of daring and adventure, and her eyes and cheeks quickly kindled into flame at the mere mention of action. He wondered what was to be the path her delicate feet were to tread through life. If only he might walk beside her forever!
The snow was all gone from the garden and the lane, but lingered in patches in the woods, and in the old graveyard in the field there were still white drifts upon the graves.
“In a week or two,” said Angela, “I will take you into the woods and you can see the pink buds of the chestnut trees. They have the most delicious fragrance of all the trees.”
“I shan’t be here by that time,” replied Isabey quietly. “When I am able to walk as far as the woods I shall be able to return to duty.”
He watched her as he spoke, knowing well that at the mention of separation the blood would drop out of her cheeks and her eyes would become dark and troubled, like a pool over which a cloud is passing. Nevertheless, Angela spoke quickly the thought in her heart:
“Of course. A soldier can’t shirk his duty—you least of all. I could just as soon imagine Neville or Richardseeking inglorious ease as you. Though Neville is with the North, it makes me proud to feel that no Southern man skulks at home.”
“That is true,” remarked Isabey. “Most of them want to go, and the others dare not remain behind; the ladies won’t let them.”
“Do you mean to say,” indignantly asked Angela, “that any Southern man would stay at home now?”
“A few would,” coolly replied Isabey. “But they are more afraid of their womenkind than they are of Northern bullets. I know several men of my own age in New Orleans who would have been very glad to find business in Paris until this little zephyr blows over, but not one of them ever dared to mention as much to his wife or mother or sisters.”
“How long will the war last?” asked Angela.
“Until there is not enough lead in the Confederacy to fire another round. We are not only fighting for our independence but for our whole social and economic structure. No people ever had so great a stake in war. How do we know what will happen if the war goes against us? A military despotism may be established; we may be reduced to a position like Carthage!”
Angela paused awhile and then asked:
“When will you go away from Harrowby?”
“Next week, I think. You see, although I am not able to go out on the firing line just yet, I can do a great many things in camp. I have written, therefore, to General Farrington at the camp of instruction, offering my services for ordinary regimental duties and saying I can report next week. And I have written my servant, whomI left with a brother officer in my battery, to report at the instruction camp as soon as possible; so you see I am preparing to break up my winter quarters.”
“Then,” said Angela, “we must do everything we can to get you in good condition and supply you with some comforts as soon as you are in camp. I shall give you some tallow candles and blackberry wine and everything else a soldier can use.”
How well fitted she was, thought Isabey, to be a soldier’s wife! No idle repining, no tears to make the parting harder, no timid apprehensions to be combated, were in this girl, but calm courage, hope, cheerfulness, and faith.
That day a letter was received from Mrs. Tremaine. Richard was well recovered and able to join his battery. His mother and Archie were then in Richmond, staying at the hotel with Madame Isabey and Adrienne. Adrienne was a great belle, and their little drawing-room was full of officers every evening, riding in from the surrounding country for an hour or two, to listen to Adrienne’s pretty French songs and delightful conversation.
Mrs. Tremaine fully expected Adrienne and Madame Isabey to return with her, but they had received a pressing invitation from some friends above Richmond to spend a month or two, and had accepted it. They promised, however, to return to Harrowby in the early summer and to remain during the war. Archie was much disappointed because Madame Isabey would not return to Harrowby with them, and declared he admired her more than any of the pretty girls he had seen so far in his career.Mrs. Tremaine hoped that Captain Isabey was improving and that Angela had omitted nothing to make him comfortable. Hard as the parting had been with Richard, Mrs. Tremaine wrote she could no longer be satisfied away from Colonel Tremaine, and hoped, as this was the longest separation of their married life, that they would never be apart again.
Colonel Tremaine was like a lover expecting his mistress, and Angela busied herself more than ever in training the green hands about the house, so that Mrs. Tremaine should not miss the familiar servants who had gone to the Yankees. There were no longer twenty-five of them to be called by the bell on the back porch. Ten only answered to the call, and most of these were half-grown boys and girls.
A few days before Mrs. Tremaine arrived Isabey left Harrowby. On the morning of his departure he lingered for a moment in the old study, recalling the exquisite hours he had spent there listening to Angela’s voice, watching her slight and supple figure and delicate hands as she ministered to him. The sweetness and pain of it was so sharp that he could not linger, and, going out, he began his farewells.
The servants were all sorry to part with him. Mammy Tulip, who had “nursed him like a baby,” as she expressed it, called down blessings on his head and warned him to keep well away from Yankee bullets, which Isabey gravely promised her he would do.
Hector declared that the parting reminded him of when he bade a last farewell to General Scott at the end of the Mexican War.
“De gineral when he shook my han’ say: ‘Hector, dis heah partin’ is de hardest I ever see, but, thank Gord, I had you while I need you most—when we was fightin’ dem damn, infernal, low-lived Mexicans. An’ as fur dat scoundrel, Gineral Santa Anna, I never would ha’ cotch him ef it hadn’t been fur you.’”
Out on the porch in the spring morning stood Angela, Colonel Tremaine, and Lyddon. Nothing could exceed the kindness of their parting words. Colonel Tremaine urged Isabey to come to see them whenever the pressure of his military duties relaxed, and especially if he fell ill to remember that Harrowby was his home. Lyddon said with truth that Isabey’s presence during the stormy winter had brightened Harrowby. When Angela bade him farewell, Isabey thanked her with French ceremony for her kindness to him and said truly it had helped more than anything else toward his recovery.
“I hope it did,” replied Angela. “You were a very good patient, and I liked to attend upon you.”
“Pray when you write to Neville give him my warm regards,” said Isabey boldly, “and tell him that I respect his course while I lament it.”
“Thank you,” answered Angela with dignity. “I shall have pleasure in writing this to Neville.”
Isabey still halted a little in his walk, but was able to mount and ride gallantly away. As he cantered down the cedar lane Angela stood watching him. All had left the porch except herself. At the end of the lane, half a mile away, she saw Isabey stop his horse and turn in his saddle and look long at the hospitable roof which had sheltered him.
Far in the distance though he was, she waved the corner of her scarlet mantle to him and he took off his cap in reply. Angela turned toward the garden with a strange feeling in her breast as if a chord had snapped, like the breaking of the G string on a violin. No other chord could replace it.