“Do you remember it is Christmas day?” she asked, arranging his pillows for him.
“I believe I knew it, but I have not exerted myself to think since I have been under this roof. Everything is too deliciously sweet.”
“It is the strangest Christmas,” said Angela, returning to her low chair. “Everything as quiet as death, not a sound in the house. I filled the stockings of all the little negro children with apples and nuts and molasses candy and gave them out early this morning. But I made them keep quiet for fear of waking you. They were quiet enough; something odd seems to have come over the negroes.”
“I should think so. With their ignorance of events and inability to read and knowing neither geography nor history, don’t you suppose they must be secret excited and bewildered by this war, in which they have so huge a stake?”
“So Mr. Lyddon says. Every one of them is different, it seems to me, since the war broke out, even Mammy Tulip and Uncle Hector. I don’t mean that they are not just as faithful, but they listen to us when we talk, and watch us, and I think repeat to each other what we say. I wonder how I shall feel when I go North to Neville and shan’t have any black people to wait upon me.”
“You will feel very queer, I dare say. I never grew accustomed to being waited upon by white men all the time I was abroad. It is true that I had my own boy with me, but I often felt a yearning for the kindly negro faces, and longed to hear them laugh when they were spoken to.”
While Angela and Isabey were talking, Colonel Tremaine came in. He had taken advantage of Mrs. Tremaine’s absence to array himself in a suit of before-the-war clothes, and was feeling much more at ease in them than in homespun, and so expressed himself.
“Mrs. Tremaine’s wishes, my dear Captain Isabey, are paramount in this house, and especially with me, and have been from the day that I determined to ask her to become mine. She makes it somewhat a point of conscience that I shall wear a suit of homespun, woven and spun on the estate, and made by Mrs. Tremaine herself with the assistance of her woman, Tulip. But I frankly confess that I feel more comfortable in the clothes made by my Baltimore tailor. In other respects, I submit cheerfully to the privations of the war. I have no longer any objection to tallow candles, or to blackberry wine, or to potato coffee sweetened with honey, or even to being shaved with soft soap made by Tulip and of the color and consistency of mud and molasses and presented by Hector in a gourd. And I can offer you some apple brandy manufactured last summer in the Harrowby kitchen. It is better than the alleged French brandy which I bought from Captain Ross, the blockade-runner. I accused him of having watered it. This he strenuously denied, but it appears he had diluted it on the voyage and had inadvertently used salt water, and if you will believe me, the scoundrel swore to my face that he had not mixed any ingredients with the brandy, although it was as salt as Lot’s wife. Running the blockade appears to make great liars of all connected with the trade.”
Isabey duly sympathized with Colonel Tremaine’s grievances over the salt-watered brandy, and the Colonel continued:
“In many ways we still enjoy the comforts to which we are accustomed. The land brings forth fruitfully. The hens, ducks, and turkeys seem to vie with each other in producing a multitude of eggs. The fish still run in the river, and the oysters have not so far concerned themselves with States’ rights, so at least we shall not starve while you are with us.”