CHAPTER XIII
WARP AND WOOF
WHEN Isabey left Harrowby, Angela had again that fearful sense of loss which with the young follows upon the going away of any person who fills a great place in the mind.
She remembered having that feeling of desolation when she was barely ten years old and Neville had first gone to West Point. Afterwards, however, although she always parted from him reluctantly and made a loud lament, the feeling had not been so poignant as when she was a child.
Now, however, it returned in full force and not for Neville but for Philip Isabey. She began to think as Lyddon did, that the sooner she joined Neville the better.
When she had parted from him it had not occurred to her that she should not soon see him again. She knew not what war was, but as time passed on and the first great conflicts began, she realized that every parting with a soldier might mean a last farewell. She might hear any day of Neville’s death and also of Philip Isabey’s.
But it was the thought of the latter which made her heart stand still, then beat tempestuously.
Her letters to Neville were frequent, and she managed to forward them through Lyddon, who, as a British subject, could communicate with the British Consul at Norfolk and the British Minister at Washington.
After much delay, these letters reached Neville. His replies were far more irregular. He was not at the front, but engaged in recruiting duty in the far West—a duty he always disliked and which he felt now to be a practical illustration of how little he was trusted by those among whom he had cast his lot. He accepted it with outward stoicism, but inwardly it humiliated him to the very marrow of his bones. His work led him to the roughest part of the then thinly settled West. It was no place for a woman and least of all for a girl like Angela, who had never been outside of her native county three times in her life.
When Angela got a letter from Neville she always went immediately to Mrs. Tremaine and told her what was in the letter. Mrs. Tremaine received this in perfect silence, but she was always tremulous for a day or two afterwards. She, who had heretofore possessed a sort of calm alertness, went about now with a strange preoccupation. Neville’s room had been closed and locked and Mrs. Tremaine kept the key. In it were some of his boyish books and belongings, but Mrs. Tremaine made no offer of them to Angela. There were times when she would disappear for an hour or so, and all at Harrowby knew that she spent those stolen hours in Neville’s dark and dismantled room. She paid these visits secretly, and would not even speak of them to Colonel Tremaine, although once or twice he met her coming out of the door, and his eyes, full of pain and sympathy, tried to meet her averted gaze.
Every night at prayer time when the moment came that Neville’s name had once been mentioned, Mrs. Tremaine could not control a slight agitation, and once at the omission Colonel Tremaine groaned aloud.