She hastened to write to him, and would have put the letter then in Mammy Tulip’s hands, but the old woman nervously refused it. She seemed to have some vague and terrifying fear of keeping Angela’s letters in her possession.
“De Cornfeds,” she whispered mysteriously to Angela, “might find out dat I’se got a letter for a Yankee officer, an’ den—good Gord A’might’! Dey might tek me up an’ k’yar me off to Richmun’ an’ hang me ’fore Jeff Davis’s door. Naw, honey; you watch out to-night an’ when I kin tek dat letter, I light de candle in de window an’ wave it up an’ down. An’ den you drap de letter on de groun’ an’ it will git to Marse Neville, sho’. But I fear to tek it now.”
It was in vain to reason with Mammy Tulip, and Angela had to follow the same routine whenever she wrote to Neville.
Meanwhile, the changes within the one year of the war concerning the negroes had been very great at Harrowby. There was no longer that superabundant life and motion made by the two hundred black people, of whom now scarcely seventy remained. As each one had left, Colonel Tremaine reiterated with stern emphasis his determination to exact full compensation to the last farthing from the Government at Washington for the loss of his negroes. The remnant of servants left at Harrowby was made up of the very old, the very young, and the mothers of the children. Not a single young man remained on the place, although ten or twelve of the older ones, headed by Hector, were still too loyal to the old régime or too indifferent to the new to run away. Peter, Richard Tremaine’s body servant, stood loyally by his young master.
Hector’s assistants in the dining room had gradually decreased in size until by midsummer of 1862 they were two small boys of fifteen, who were almost as skillful in eluding work as Hector himself.
Mrs. Tremaine, for all her executive ability, was totally unequal to doing any of the work of the household. She was accustomed to planning and contriving, ordering and directing, but her delicate hands were unable to do the smallest task requiring manual dexterity.
Not so Angela. The places of Mirandy and Sally and their colleagues had been taken by small black girls whom Angela trained with tact and patience but whose childish powers were unequal to women’s work. Angela, however, was equal to anything, and Lyddon complimented her in classic phrase the first morning he saw her with her cotton skirts pinned up, her beautiful slender arms bare to the elbow, and a red handkerchief tied with unconscious coquetry around her fair hair as she wielded the broom and swept the drawing-room.
Mrs. Tremaine nearly wept at the sight, and Colonel Tremaine groaned aloud. Angela, however, was in high spirits. She was too young, too full of vitality, too humorous to be depressed at this new turn of Fate.
“The fact is,” she cried, sweeping industriously, while Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine watched from the hall and Lyddon peered in from the window, “all we have to do is just to imagine that we are noble émigrés in England about 1793. You, Uncle Tremaine and Aunt Sophia, can do the sentimental part of the business. Archie and I with Mr. Lyddon will do the work. Archie, you know, is chopping wood at the woodpile, and I have a job for you, Mr. Lyddon.”
“What is it?” asked Lyddon helplessly. “If it’s dusting, well, I can dust books. As for chopping wood like Archie, I should not only chop off both of my feet, but my head as well. However, I will do anything in God’s name I can.”