Isabey

“ Isabey had seen that same flash of joy in her eyes the night he had arrived wounded at Harrowby. Now it smote him to the heart. He knew—what Angela did not know—that when a woman changes color, smiles, trembles, and casts down her eyes at the coming of a certain man, it has a tragic meaning. She half-rose from the old bench and put her slender hand into Isabey’s, a custom which, from Isabey’s French education, always seemed strange and exciting to him. ”

“ An hour passed as they sat together, as much alone as if the world held none other than themselves. Isabey, although conscious of the delicate intoxication of Angela’s nearness, was yet thoroughly alert, while Angela, with every nerve at its utmost tension, was silent and apparently composed. Isabey felt rather than saw that she was profoundly moved. As they listened and watched the opposite shore they could see that the troopers had withdrawn from the garden and that the search for Isabey, which had included the stables and the negro quarters, had been abandoned. ”

“ After a pause Isabey said: “When I have taken you to your husband I shall hope for your happiness. You are very young and life holds much for you. Some day I shall see you a happy wife.”
“I am sure you will,” replied Angela, calmly. “I have no one in the world except Neville and I shall devote my life to him, and why shouldn’t we be happy together?”
“You will be very happy together,” replied Isabey. Like Angela, he believed in a decent cloaking of the chained passions, those wild beasts which, if they are not subdued, devour men and women. ”

“ No, sir, you will remain at Harrowby.”
Colonel Tremaine’s logic was unanswerable, and Isabey remained. Nevertheless, he had waked from the soft dream in which he spent the first few weeks of his return. It was now February and the land still lay in an icy grasp, but spring would soon be at hand, and Isabey felt a soldier’s impatience to be at his post. Angela’s society was not less delicious to him; rather had he become more absolutely enchained. But being a man he put fetters upon his will, his inclination, his voice, and, taking his passion by the throat, mastered it. ”

“ Warned of this singularity, and even somewhat intimidated by it, Isabey presented himself at the diplomatist’s. His real or simulated embarrassment increased the partial good humour of the baron, who, fixing his large, blue-goggled eyes on him, replied, ‘Have a good look at me, and then you’ll be bound to admit that nature has given me too ugly a face ever to spend a penny on it for its reproduction. Nature would in reality have the laugh of me if she could convict me of such foolish vanity. ”

“ Lyddon had profound confidence in Richard’s judgment of men and was willing to believe that Isabey was all he was represented to be. It was plain that Isabey was as distinctively French in blood and training as Richard Tremaine was Anglo-Saxon. Isabey was a young man of fortune and, like Richard, contemplated entering public life. His letters, which Richard read aloud with [36] pride, were full of sound sense, acute observation of men and things, and illuminated with French wit. ”

“ All she could do whenever she thought of Isabey was to call up a passionate loyalty to Neville Tremaine and to make herself the most solemn of promises that never should any woman exceed her in the kindness, tenderness, devotion, consideration that she would give Neville Tremaine, not having the greater gift to bestow upon him.
Isabey in a camp of five thousand men found plenty for a man to do who had not full use of his right arm and leg. ”

“ Angela’s quickness of wit answered for experience in fencing, and she replied coolly: “Neither Captain Isabey nor any other man, except my husband, has any influence over me.”
A pause followed, and then Adrienne said, with more than her usual gentleness: “I do not know what made me speak Philip Isabey’s name. The truth is one leads such a retired life here. I live so constantly upon my own thoughts and feelings that when I speak it is often merely thinking aloud. ”

“ Both his gait and demeanour were marked by much nobleness. It is, above all, from the handsome design of Isabey, representing the plenipotentiaries at the Congress, that one may gain a more or less exact idea of all those outward advantages of which he himself was by no means insensible. At the first glance, one felt delighted at seeing one of those men to whom nature had vouchsafed her most seductive gifts, and whom nature, as a rule, seems to take a delight in calling only to the frivolous successes of a society life. ”

“ In war men grow not only familiar with but contemptuous of death. Isabey had, however, but one Richard Tremaine to lose, and when he remembered this he stopped in his halting and stealthy walk up and down upon the pine needles and felt as if a bolt had entered his heart. It was not meant, he thought, that he should ever have wife or friend.
At ten o’clock, when he intended to rouse Angela, he went close to her and found her sleeping so soundly he had not the heart to waken her. It would, perhaps, be just as well if they reached the lines at six o’clock in the morning. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All of them, the whole Harrowby family, were the most guileless people that Isabey had ever known. The mere saying of the words which made Angela the wife of Neville Tremaine on the wharf that April night at Harrowby was confidently felt, not only by the Harrowby family, but by the whole community, to put her definitely and forever out of the reach of any other man than her husband. Such a thing as a flirtation with a married woman had never been heard of among those patriarchal people. ”

“ Lyddon, know Isabey. He writes that he is already taking steps toward raising a battery of artillery, just the branch of the service which I shall join when the war breaks out. Isabey is a man born for success at whatever he undertakes as you well know by all I have told you of him.”
Ever since Richard’s college days Isabey had been a part of Richard’s life. Many plans had been made for Isabey to visit Harrowby, but so far accident had prevented any of the family from knowing him except Neville, who had readily adopted his brother’s friend as his own during their brief periods of intercourse. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Men being exempt from the matchmaking mania, Isabey had not magnanimously thought of some other man whom Adrienne might bless until that very day when on his ride to Harrowby he had reflected upon Richard Tremaine’s frankly expressed admiration for her, and wondered if something more might not come of it. And at the same time he thought, with a mingling of rage and amusement in his heart, that from the hour he found that he could go to Harrowby, Angela’s face and her slim figure had been continually before him. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ But it is not in masculine nature to refrain from inhaling the odor of a delicious flower which belongs to another man or of breathing the air of heaven, although it may be in the garden of another.
Any thought of betraying himself to Angela, or acquiring any ascendency over her, was very far from Isabey’s mind, but when at last they had met he had seen enough of agitation in her to know that the meeting meant something to her as well as to him. And being a very human man, he was penetrated with secret joy. ”

“ 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, [147] and that a great gulf lay between the Angela Vaughn of last Sunday and the Angela Tremaine of this Sunday. ”

“ 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-covered [265] earth 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. ”

“ There was no gainsaying this, and Isabey, unconscious that he called her by her first name, replied: “Angela, since you command me, I must tell you the truth. There is a cruel and most unjust suspicion abroad against you. The people in the county think and say that you are conveying information from the Confederate side to your husband.” ”

“ Tremaine and Colonel Tremaine remarked to each other upon Captain Isabey’s filial attention to his stepmother. Madame Isabey was quite willing outwardly to take Isabey’s attentions, but inwardly she hoped that it was Adrienne’s presence which drew him to Harrowby.
Not so Adrienne. Perfect man of the world as Isabey was, and careful as he might be that he should not betray the compelling interest which Angela possessed for him, he could not disguise it from the other woman. ”

“ But when at nine o’clock they had still half the distance before them, he noticed how pale and tired Angela looked. They stopped their horses to drink of a little brook that ran silvery in the moonlight and then rippled darkling under a rude bridge and into a thicket beyond where the autumn leaves still hung withered upon the overhanging branches. Beyond lay a belt of pine woods, and when they came to a little clear space within it Isabey said: “Here is a spot where you may rest in safety and unseen. You can scarcely sit your horse.” ”

“ We do our duty, expecting to render an account to the Great Commander. We know no more and it is certain we can do no more.”
Isabey smiled a little at his brief preachment to Angela, but she was so young and had read so few pages in the book of life that in many ways she was a child in her questioning.
“I never talked with anyone about this,” she said. “It seemed to me always as if it was impossible that anything could separate us at Harrowby. Yet you see what has come—a frightful separation for Neville, and Richard gone we know not where or how or even why.” ”

“ When supper was announced Madame Isabey had not yet appeared, and Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine would have died rather than gone in the dining room without her.
“I am afraid you will not find my mother very punctual,” said Adrienne with a smile. “Even Captain Isabey [166] has never been able to make her punctual, and she will do more for him than for anyone else in the world. I often tell her that he is her favorite child, not I.”
“It is most delightful,” said Colonel Tremaine grandly, “to see so affectionate a relation existing between a stepmother and a stepson. ”

“ The steady march of negroes to the Federal lines revealed easily to Angela what became of her letters.
The month which Isabey had given himself had passed quickly, and at the end of that time he was ready, as far as his health was concerned, to take the road. But broken and lacerated limbs are not mended in a month, and Colonel Tremaine put an absolute veto upon Isabey’s leaving Harrowby.
“My dear sir,” he said, authoritatively, “I am an old campaigner and I can assure you that a soldier who is practically legless and armless is no help to an army, and merely serves to eat up the provender. ”