Richard alone, of all the Tremaines, was quite unchanged toward her.
When they were at table Isabey’s presence, together with Richard’s kindness, put new animation into Angela. She talked gayly and laughed merrily. Isabey was as much enchanted with the beauty of Angela’s speaking voice as she had been with his singing voice.
When dinner was over, Mrs. Tremaine and Angela went into the garden, where all the little negroes of the place were assembled for their weekly Sunday-school. In winter this was held in the spinning house beyond the hedge but in spring and summer the old garden was the place of learning. Mrs. Tremaine read the Bible to these black urchins, while Angela, with the self-confidence of nineteen, expounded the catechism to them and taught them to sing simple hymns.
Isabey and Richard Tremaine were standing on the little wharf jutting into the blue river, which danced in the afternoon light, when the fresh young voices of the negro children rose in a hymn.
“Come,” said Richard, “I know that you are ashamed of singing so well, but give these little darkies a treat and sing their hymns with them.”
Isabey went willingly enough with Richard into the garden. As they walked down the long, broad path, he saw Mrs. Tremaine enthroned upon the wooden bench under the lilacs at the end of the garden, while twenty-five or thirty negro children, from tall boys and girls down to small tots of four years old, were ranged in a semicircle around her. Angela was acting as concert master and led the simple singing. The voices of the negro children had the sweetness mixed with the shrillness of childhood, but for precision of attack and correctness of tone they would have put white children to the blush.
As Isabey came up, Angela held out the prayer book to him and he sang with her from the same page. The negro children instantly turned their beady eyes upon him, but with a truer artistic sense than the congregation of Petworth Church, they kept on singing.
Isabey’s supposed familiarity with the hymn tunes, which he had heard for the first time that day, pleased Mrs. Tremaine immensely, who had an idea that all well-bred persons were Episcopalians, and that Catholicism, in which Isabey had been bred, was a dark dream of the middle ages, which had now happily almost disappeared from the earth.
When the Sunday-school was over and the little negro children had scampered back to the “quarters,” as the negro houses were called, Richard proposed the Sunday afternoon walk. This was as much a part of the Harrowby Sunday as was the three o’clock dinner.
Usually, the whole family went upon this promenade up the cedar-bordered lane along which a footpath ran, edged with wild roses and blackberry bushes. But on this Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Tremaine gently declined, and took her exercise upon the broken flags of the Ladies’ Walk, Colonel Tremaine, with the air of a Louis Fourteenth courtier, escorting her. Archie begged off in order to ride over and spend the night at Greenhill with George Charteris, so only Angela and Lyddon were left to accompany Richard and Isabey.