At that, Mammy Tulip, suddenly throwing her white apron over her face, broke into loud weeping. “My chile,” she cried. “Dat boy I nus same like he wuz my own an’ ain’t never gib he mammy a impident word sence he been born, an’ now he ma an’ pa doan’ name him at pray’r time.”
Angela went up to Mammy Tulip and, putting her arm around the old woman’s neck, leaned upon her broad shoulder, her heart wrung with pity for Neville. But even in that moment she knew that she was not in love with him.
With the early summer the stupendous clamor of war and the carnival of blood began.
Richard Tremaine’s battery had been ordered to the front and was in most of the great battles of the summer of 1861. Often long periods of time passed when no news of him reached Harrowby. The Richmond newspapers, received twice in the week, which had been leisurely read two or three days after they arrived, were now seized upon with avidity, and the grewsome list of dead, wounded, and missing was scanned with anxious eyes by Colonel Tremaine.
Angela, hovering about him as he read over this direful list, would glance at it herself. Suppose she should find Isabey’s name in it. How would she take it? She had never fainted in her life, but she had a haunting fear that if she should read Isabey’s name among the killed she should faint or shriek or in some way betray herself.
Madame Isabey was keyed up also to periods of anxiety, although she showed a spirit of cheerfulness and courage which was remarkable. The life at Harrowby, so placid without, was full of fears and tumults within, and was extraordinarily different from the years of pleasuring which Madame Isabey had spent between New Orleans and Paris, but she made no complaint, nor did Adrienne, though, if anything, it was harder on her than on the older lady.
Adrienne had few resources, music being the chief. But with natural tact she forbore from spending long hours at the piano, which she would have done in her own home. Her taste for reading lay in a few pessimistic French poets and romancers, but even with these, the time was heavy on her hands. She had found life disappointing from the first. Formed for love, her first marriage had been as loveless as it was respectable. Then had come a mortal wound to her pride—when she was free Isabey no longer cared. It was not as if they had been separated and her image had gradually faded from his mind; they had been thrown constantly together during the seven years of her widowhood, and all their world was continually suggesting the appropriateness of their marriage. So that the idea of it was necessarily before Isabey’s mind, yet he had spoken no word, and Adrienne felt a sad certainty that no word would be spoken by him.
She had a quiet pride which not even jealousy could lash into resentment. She saw the sudden witchery which this nineteen-year-old Angela, this wife who was no wife, had cast over Isabey, and did not wonder at it. Angela was to Adrienne as much an unknown quantity as she herself was to Angela. Adrienne felt herself robbed of something which could be of no use to Angela, who possessed it, and Adrienne was thirty with her youth behind her while Angela, not yet twenty, was entering upon those ten years which to most women count for more than all that has gone before or can come after.
The most unfailing courtesy prevailed between these two women. They exchanged small kindnesses, spent some hours of every day together in feminine employment, but a great gulf lay between them.
Angela felt instinctively and intuitively the things which Adrienne knew, and reasoned upon them calmly and sadly. Adrienne had everything and yet she had nothing. A still and mortal antagonism had been growing steadily from the first between the women, but not the smallest indication of it was given in manner or behavior. Both were women of the highest breeding, and each was secretly ashamed of the ignoble passion of jealousy which possessed them, and had the art to conceal it.