“You may send for her,” replied Isabey, laughing, “but I know Madame Le Noir; you will not find her up and dressed at eleven o’clock in the morning.”
“You will stay some time?” said Angela, accustomed to lavish hospitality.
“If I am asked—yes. I shall be at the instruction camp for a week upon military business. In fact, I spent last night there with Richard Tremaine and found that my affairs could be transacted equally well at Harrowby, so Tremaine sent me down here to stay a week.”
Guests to spend a week at Harrowby were common, but the prospect of the week before her made Angela’s flush grow deeper. Just then Tasso appeared, and Angela sent him to Adrienne’s room with the message that Captain Isabey had arrived.
Then they sat down together, Angela in a corner of a deep old mahogany sofa while Isabey drew up his chair. He wondered at himself when he realized the shock of pleasure, nay, of delight, which this girl’s presence gave him. He was well into his thirties and had lived much, but Angela was as new to him as he was to her. He knew intimately the French type of woman only. He had seen many girls of other types, but seeing is not knowing. He had never known any girl in the least resembling Angela. On this occasion he was astonished and charmed by her ease and dignity as a hostess. Angela, in truth, had been accustomed to play hostess on occasions from the time she was ten years old. The combination was not rare in the Virginia woman of the day, of a childlike ignorance of the world together with a most perfect womanly self-possession and grace. But it was quite new to Isabey.
Apart from all of this, Angela had for him an interest which no other woman had ever possessed. True, he remembered the time when the presence of Adrienne had made his pulses leap, when the sweep of her delicate robe, the fragrance of her hair, would banish from him the whole world, but that had been long ago when he was a boy of twenty and Adrienne herself was then engaged to marry the eminently worthy and wealthy Le Noir, of one of the best families in New Orleans. For Isabey, that intoxication had passed, and he had rightly reasoned that it would scarcely be likely an impressionable young fellow, such as he was thirteen years before, should see a girl as charming as Adrienne and not fall precipitately in love with her.
However, he had recovered from it whole and sound as lads of twenty come out of these desperate fevers of love and when, a few years later, Adrienne was free, the fever had not returned. Isabey admired her; she pleased every artistic sense he possessed and he believed her capable of a passionate attachment. But since that early and boyish infatuation, she had never stirred love within him. He rather wished she had, because Madame Isabey was always throwing out feelers in the matter. It would be so very convenient and acceptable in every way for the marriage to take place. And the fitness of it was so obvious, too obvious, so Isabey thought.
Adrienne was too clever, too well bred, too much mistress of herself to betray whatever of chagrin she felt at Isabey’s attitude of easy and brotherly friendship, and Isabey had too much manly modesty to suppose that Adrienne yearned for him. He saw, however, that life for her was a broken dream. She had all that could awaken love, and yet love was not hers.
Men being exempt from the matchmaking mania, Isabey had not magnanimously thought of some other man whom Adrienne might bless until that very day when on his ride to Harrowby he had reflected upon Richard Tremaine’s frankly expressed admiration for her, and wondered if something more might not come of it. And at the same time he thought, with a mingling of rage and amusement in his heart, that from the hour he found that he could go to Harrowby, Angela’s face and her slim figure had been continually before him. Poor child! What fate might be hers! He had seen enough, and surmised more during that first visit at Harrowby, to suspect that Angela had arranged a loveless marriage for herself just as a loveless marriage had been arranged for Adrienne by others.
And then Isabey, manlike, began to feel genuine self-pity for himself. Here, at last, in this quiet Virginia country house, had he met the woman who could awaken his interest and perhaps stir his heart, and she had been married one week before he met her. These thoughts returned to him as he sat watching Angela in the corner of the sofa fanning herself slowly and gracefully with a great, green fan.