“Nothing at all,” responded Angela sweetly, “only to find out whether you were a gentleman or not. Good morning.”
She passed on leaving him consumed with inward rage.
Colonel Tremaine went nowhere except to the post office for the semioccasional mail, and to church, and no one dared mention to him the grim suspicion against Angela. But deep in his heart he himself felt sometimes a sharp and piercing doubt of Angela. He dared not speak of it even to Mrs. Tremaine, and put it away from him with all his inborn chivalry and the parental affection for the girl which was a part of his nature.
In spite of himself he could not forget the opened window, the answering signal, and the letter dropped on the lawn. He tried to assume that even if the worst were true and Angela were communicating with Federals, she did not understand her own wrongdoing, but this view was totally unconvincing even to himself. Angela was no fool, and never had been, and it was impossible to give her the credit of ignorance.
When Colonel Tremaine looked at her going about her daily tasks with fiery energy and even a feverish gayety, when he saw how this young creature, so lately a child, had grown so self-controlled, so unshakably courageous, she was acquitted in his own mind. But when he waked in the night, or when he sat in the library writing up his diary, or read in the ill-printed Richmond newspapers of Federal raids and captures, a suspicion would rise in his mind that would not be strangled.
No more Confederate officers came to Harrowby, which Colonel Tremaine reckoned a blessing.
Isabey had come no more; he remained in camp, going about his duties with unswerving regularity but without cheerfulness, and was restless at the surgeons’ prohibition against his going to the front for some months to come. There was plenty of work for him to do, but, like most men with a gnawing pain in the heart, Isabey wanted action, action, action to drive away the specter of his lost love, which had for him all the power of the first love and the last. He remembered with a grim smile his early infatuation for Adrienne, which was so natural as to be almost inevitable.
He recalled that he made verses in those days and set them to music and sang them to Adrienne. He could not have made a verse about Angela to save his life, and concluded that when men could write, as did Petrarch, Tasso, and Dante Alighieri, of a wrecked passion, it could not have hurt very much. He recalled that Paolo had not written a line about Francesca, and it seemed to him that the tragic love of those two poor souls was paralleled in his own case. For, put it away as he might, he could not deny to himself that Angela’s heart had struck an answering chord to his.
He reasoned with himself that it would have been too much happiness if Angela had been free to marry him: but at least he had what was next best and a million times better than what falls to the lot of most dwellers upon the earth—the full and perfect confidence, the completest sympathy and understanding, with the only woman he had ever loved. He remembered the ancient saying that each mortal has so much of the wine of life given to him, sweet or bitter, strong or weak, and the goblet may be of gold or of base metal. He concluded that his share was strong and bitter, but it was served to him in a golden goblet.
There was a species of lofty flattery on Angela’s part in the perfect confidence with which she treated him. She had not hesitated to spend long hours alone with him in the old study during the month when they were snowbound; and Isabey reckoned those hours as spent in the Elysian Fields of the soul.