A FORTNIGHT afterwards Madame Isabey and Adrienne returned to Harrowby. They were received with the greatest cordiality, and were glad to be there once more, but after a year of refugeeing they had begun to feel the truth of the words uttered by the great Florentine in his wanderings:
Salt is the savor of another’s bread,
And weary are the feet which climbeth up
The stairs of others.
There seemed, however, nothing else for them to do. Madame Isabey had no more knowledge of affairs than the birds in the bushes, nor had Adrienne. They were still in receipt of a good income from foreign investments, and through Lyddon’s ingenuity they managed to receive it in gold. But the idea of offering any compensation to Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine would have shocked and offended their hosts beyond measure, and this Madame Isabey and Adrienne knew. Other plans than a return to Harrowby might have been devised by other women, but not by Madame Isabey and Adrienne. No word had been written them of the departure of all the house servants, and Angela managed by rising with the dawn to keep from the observation of their guests the shifts to which the Harrowby family was reduced in order to keep the house going with the half-grown boys and girls that took the place of a trained staff of servants. Adrienne’s maid after having spent two days at Harrowby slipped off to the Yankees. Old Celeste managed to dress Adrienne, who had never dressed herself in her life. Madame Isabey frankly gave up all attempts at a toilet and restricted herself to peignoirs, which she wore morning, noon, and night. Archie was delighted to see her back, and she was charmed with the account she heard of his behavior on the night of the Federal visitation and called him ever afterwards “my brave little red-headed angel.”
Lyddon set to work the very day after the visitation to prepare a new supply of hair tonic for Colonel Tremaine, and although not a moment was lost in the preparation, the colonel’s locks had turned a greenish brown before the tonic was ready. The aspect of Archie’s white pointer at first of a coal-black color and then shading into the same greenish brown as Colonel Tremaine’s locks was harrowing to both Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine. In vain Hector covered the unlucky pointer with soft soap and scrubbed him in boiling water until he howled in agony. Lyddon’s formula was too good to be easily obliterated. But by the time the dog became white Colonel Tremaine’s locks were again of an ebony black.
Madame Isabey received letters from Isabey at the camp fifteen miles away, who wrote that he could not expose his friends to the risk of another raid by coming to Harrowby. However, Colonel Gratiot, Colonel Tremaine’s old friend of the Mexican War, seemed unterrified by Isabey’s experience, and wrote that he promised himself the pleasure of visiting his old friend for the night on the next Sunday but one, arriving in the afternoon. He would come, however, in citizen’s clothes, and it might be as well that he should be called Mr. Gratiot, as it was perfectly well known that the negroes kept in close touch with the Federal lines twenty miles away. Colonel Tremaine told this to the family when the servants had all gone off for the night.
It was something new and exquisitely painful to be on guard against the servitors who had heretofore been regarded as a part of the family, but the expediency of it could not be disputed.
On the morning of the Sunday when Colonel Gratiot was expected to arrive in the afternoon, Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine went to church, the Colonel driving Mrs. Tremaine in a ramshackle buggy; the coach horses had long since been put to the plow. Angela had begun to find the Sunday rest very agreeable, and as her appearances at church were invariably occasions of pain and distress to her, however proudly borne, she determined to remain at home on that Sunday. Madame Isabey, as usual, stayed upstairs, as she rarely appeared before the afternoon.
Lyddon and Adrienne were pacing up and down the Ladies’ Walk. Adrienne’s graceful head was bare and she warded off the ardor of the sun with a dainty black parasol. She always felt intensely flattered when Lyddon talked to her, and strove to learn how to talk to a scholar who rarely trimmed his beard and admitted that a woman’s mind was a problem far deeper than calculus and deserved to be ranked with the insoluble things like the squaring of a circle. She never understood how Angela dared to laugh and chat so freely with Lyddon, and how a single name, an obscure phrase, half a quotation, would convey a world of meaning to them. This she felt herself powerless to achieve, but she had a sincere admiration for Lyddon, perhaps because Isabey had. Lyddon admired and pitied Adrienne. He realized all her charms, her softness, her grace, but she belonged to another world than his.