How would she take his message? Would she weep and wring her hands as women usually do in such emergencies? Would she turn upon him and visit him with her indignation. Or would she be angry with an icy anger? It might well seem to this unsophisticated girl a terrible thing to be thrust alone among soldiers, men whom she had never seen and whom she daily heard reviled, to depend upon them for her safe conduct to Neville.
Isabey’s heart was so tortured with this thought that he got up and, in spite of his injured knee, walked up and down like a madman. The squirrels looked at him curiously, and a family of wood robins, which was preparing to fly southward, grew frightened, suddenly rose, and with a rush of wings cleft the blue air. Isabey glanced at his watch every few minutes and when it was half past one threw the saddle on his horse, mounted, and, picking his way through the underbrush, struck the cedar lane, down which he cantered rapidly.
Time was when no guest could approach Harrowby without being heralded by a multitude of negroes, young and old, rushing in the house and announcing the coming guest as if it were the most stupendous and sensational event which had ever occurred. Not so now. There were only a few negroes left on the estate and they were not much in evidence.
As Isabey neared the house he was struck with its lonely aspect as it lay basking in the unclouded midday. No one was moving about and not even a sleeping dog was in sight. The river lay bright and still like a lake. Over the whole scene brooded the peculiar stillness of autumn noonday, broken only by the distant clanking cry of a mob of crows circling high in the blue air, while below them a vulture, silent, contemptuous, and majestically evil, winged his steady flight upon unquivering wings toward the wooded uplands.
It occurred to Isabey that Angela would most likely be in the garden, and as he came within sight of the broad main walk he glanced down toward the bench at the end and saw the flutter of a crimson mantle. He sprang from his horse and, throwing the reins over the gatepost, entered the rusty iron gateway and walked quickly toward Angela at the end of the garden.
In spite of Isabey’s jingling spurs, which announced his arrival when he was still some distance off, he had a good opportunity to observe Angela before she looked up and saw him.
The mantle had half-slipped off her shapely shoulders and her head was bare. Little vagrant breezes had ruffled her beautiful hair. Some coarse knitting lay in her lap, but she was not at work upon it. She seemed so lost in abstraction that she did not notice the sound of Isabey’s approach or even when he stopped and gazed full upon her.
The sudden sharp cry of the crows overhead seemed to rouse her at last. She raised her eyes and her glance fell upon Isabey, his trim figure, in the gray uniform, silhouetted before her and the buttons gleaming like fire in the golden light.
The change that came over her was like the lighting of a lamp in an alabaster vase. 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.
He asked how she had fared since last he saw her, but Angela, without replying, began to question him about his disabled arm and knee.