THE VICTORY

“Took her little hand in his and raised it to his lips.”

[Page [43]]

The
VICTORY

BY
MOLLY ELLIOTT SEAWELL
Author of
“The Sprightly Romance of Marsac,”
“The Chateau of Montplasir,” etc.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
1906

Copyright, 1906, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Published October, 1906

To the Dear Memory of
Henrietta

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE VICTORY

CHAPTER I
HARROWBY

BRIGHT was the Christmas of 1860 at the old manor house of Harrowby in lowland Virginia. It lay upon the broad, bright river which ran laughing into the arms of the great bay, and from there bay and river rushed together to the windy floors of the wide Atlantic. Nearly two hundred years before, the first Tremaine, a discontented gentleman, who found life very uncomfortable in England after Monmouth’s rebellion, had made the beginning of the Harrowby mansion. It was built quite flat to the ground, with the low ceilings and steep, narrow stairs of the seventeenth-century country house.

This first Harrowby house, with a room clapped on here and there, as each successive inheritor fancied, answered well enough for the Tremaines until the end of the eighteenth century. Then Mr. Jefferson having brought back with him from France some noble architectural conceptions, these became embodied in many Virginia country houses, including Harrowby. There, a new and commodious house was built, with a vast entrance hall, lofty ceilings, spacious rooms, and wide staircases. It was connected by a narrow corridor with the original house, and although frankly swearing at the first incumbent of the ground, yet conformed to it enough to make the whole both picturesque and comfortable. The modern part of the house was reserved for the master and mistress, for guests, and for those Virginia dinner parties which lasted from noon until midnight, the Virginia balls where the dancers’ feet beat the floor from the first rising of the stars until the rosy dawn, and the Virginia weddings which took three weeks’ frolicking to carry through in style. There were always sons in the Tremaine family, and these sons required tutors and dogs, so that the old part of the house, with its shabby Colonial furniture, was always in possession of men and boys and dogs. The newer part, with its furniture all curves, its Empire mirrors, its elaborate cornices, and decorative fireplaces, was reserved for more ceremonious uses.

The house sat upon a great, smooth lawn, which sloped down to the river, now a dull, steel blue in the red and waning Christmas eve. A short, rude wharf lay a little way in the river, which softly lapped the wooden piles. A little distance from the house, to the left, lay a spacious, old, brick-walled garden, now all russet brown and gold and purple in ragged splendor like a beggar princess. Great bare clumps of crape-myrtle and syringas and ancient rose trees bordered the wide walk which led from the rusty iron garden gate down to the end of the garden. Here a long line of gnarled and twisted lilac bushes clung to the brick wall; lilacs and crumbling wall had held each other in a strong embrace for more than a hundred years. Outside the garden, the wide lawn was encircled by what had once been a shapely yew hedge, which had grown into a ragged rampart of ancient trees, black and squat and melancholy as yew trees always grow. A great gap in this hedge opened upon a long, straight lane leading to the highroad and beyond that lay the primeval woods. On each side of the lane were cedar trees which had once stood young and straight like soldiers, but were now, as the yew trees, old and bent like a line of veterans tottering in broken ranks.

Under the somber branches of the yew hedge was a walk of cracked flagstones, known, since Harrowby was first built, as the “Ladies’ Walk.” For when the paths and lanes about the place were too wet for the dainty feet of ladies, this flagged path was their exercise ground. The negroes, of course, peopled it with the dead and gone ladies of Harrowby, who generally took, upon those broken stones, their last walk upon earth, and who found it haunted, not by the ghosts of their predecessors but by the joys, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, the perplexities, the loves, and the hates which had walked with them there, in cool summer eves, in red autumn afternoons, in bitter winter twilights, and in the soft and dewy mornings of the springtime.

Far off in the open field beyond the garden lay the family burying ground, where, according to the Virginia custom, the dead were laid near the homestead instead of the church. The brick wall around the burying ground was decaying, and the tombstones, never properly set up, were beaten all manner of ways by storm and wind, and trained into strange positions by the soft insistence of the roots of huge weeping willows, those melancholy trees which give a touch of poetic beauty to the most commonplace landscape. Yet the aspect of Harrowby was usually far from melancholy. On the other side of the house from the garden, still farther off, were the negro quarters, slovenly but comfortable, and the stables, which were partly hidden by the straggling yew hedge that extended all around the lawn. In these quarters were housed the two hundred negroes on the plantation, and as twenty-five of them were occupied about the house and garden and stables there was always life and movement around the place.

Especially was this true at Christmas time, and on the Christmas eve of 1860, never was there more merriment, gayety, color, and loud laughter known at Harrowby. Lyddon, the English tutor there for ten years was struck by this, when returning from his afternoon’s tramp through the wintry woods, he passed across the lawn to the house. The air was sharp, like a saber, and the stars were already shining gloriously in the deep blue field of heaven. He watched a half dozen negro men who, with guttural laughter and shouts and merry gibes, carried into the house the great back log for the Christmas fire. From the time that this back log was placed upon the iron fire dogs of the yawning hall fireplace until it was entirely consumed, the negroes had holiday. According to the privileged practical joke of long custom, the log was of black gum, a wood hard to burn at any time. It had lain soaking for weeks in the inky mud of the salt marsh on the inward bend of the river, where the cows stood knee-deep in water at high tide, and hoof-deep in black ooze at low tide. The union of marsh mud and black gum was certain to insure at least a week’s holiday, when no work was required of the negroes, except the waiting on the house full of guests which always made the roof of Harrowby ring during the Christmas time. Great pyramids of wood towered at the woodpile to the left of the house, where the joyous sound of the ax was heard for a week before Christmas, that there should be oak and hickory logs to feed the great fireplaces, and lightwood knots to make the ruddy flames leap high into the wide-throated chimneys.

Lyddon, a gaunt, brown, keen-eyed man, who had watched this backlog business with great interest for ten successive Christmases, studied it anew as a type of the singular and unpractical relations existing between the master and the slave. All of these relations were singular and unpractical, and were a perpetual puzzle to Lyddon. One of the strangest things to him was that the word slave was absolutely tabooed and all sorts of euphemisms were used, such as “the servants,” “the black people,” in order to avoid this uncomely word.

Another typical puzzle was taking place on the side porch. There stood Hector, Colonel Tremaine’s body servant, and general factotum of Harrowby, engaged in his usual occupation of inciting the other negroes to work, while carefully abstaining therefrom himself. He was tall, and had by far the most imposing air and manner of any person at Harrowby. Having accompanied his master several times to the White Sulphur Springs, to say nothing of two trips to Richmond and one to Baltimore, where he saw a panorama of the city of New York; and most wonderful of all, having attended Colonel Tremaine through a campaign in the Mexican War, Hector held a position of undisputed superiority among all the negroes in five counties. He classified himself as a perfect man of the world, a profound expounder of the Gospels, an accomplished soldier, and military critic.

As regards Hector’s heroic services during the Mexican War, he represented that he was always at General Scott’s right hand except when his presence was imperatively demanded by General Zachary Taylor. According to Hector’s further account he led the stormers at Chapultepec, supported Jefferson Davis when he made his celebrated stand at Buena Vista, and handed the sword of General Santa Anna to General Scott when the former surrendered. Colonel Tremaine, on the contrary, declared that Hector never got within five miles of the firing line during the Mexican War, and that whenever there was the remotest sign of an attack, Hector always took refuge under the nearest pile of camp furniture and had to be dragged out by the heels when the danger was overpast. He modeled his toilet upon Colonel Tremaine’s, whose cast-off wardrobe he inherited. The colonel claimed to be the last gentleman in Virginia who wore a ruffled shirt, and Hector shared this distinction. Great billows of cotton lace poured out of the breast of his blue coat, decorated with brass buttons, which was too short in the waist and too long in the tails for Hector, and for whom the colonel’s trousers were distinctly too small, and were kept from crawling up to his knees by straps under the heels of his boots.

What Hector’s business in life was, beyond shaving Colonel Tremaine once a day, Lyddon had never been able to discover. Colonel Tremaine always said, “my boy Hector,” although, like the colonel himself, he had passed the line of seventy; but having become the colonel’s personal attendant when both were in their boyhood, he remained “my boy, sir,” until Time should hand him over, a graybeard, to Death. Another anomaly, scarcely stranger to Lyddon than Hector’s eternal boyhood, was that, having an incurable propensity to look upon the wine when it is red, he had entire charge of the cellar at Harrowby, and when upon occasions of ceremony his services might have been of some slight use, he was tolerably sure to be a little more than half-seas over. He made up for this by an Argus-eyed vigilance over his two postulates, Jim Henry and Tasso, gingerbread-colored youths, who did the work of the dining room under Hector’s iron rule. So careful was he of their morals that he made a point of himself drinking the wine left in the glasses at dinner, “jes’ to keep dem wuffless black niggers f’um turnin’ deyselves into drunkards, like Joshua did arter he got outen de ark.”

Now, from Hector’s unctuous voice and unsteady gait, it was perfectly obvious to Lyddon that Hector had not escaped the pitfall into which he alleged Joshua had fallen. Lyddon passed along and entered the great hall, where the work of putting up the Christmas decorations was not yet finished. A noble fire roared upon the broad hearth and the rose-red light danced upon the darkened, polished leaves of the holly wreaths, which hung on the walls and the family portraits that seemed still to live and speak. Before the fireplace stood Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine, with Archie, the sixteen-year-old son, who, with exception of Angela Vaughn, a slip of a girl older than Archie, was the best pupil Lyddon had ever known. Lyddon himself, with the abstracted eyes of a scholar and an observer of men, walked up to the fireplace and listened with patient amusement to the perplexities of Mrs. Tremaine.

She was of a type of woman which he had never seen until he came to Virginia—delicate, soft-voiced, pious, the chief and only hard worker on the estate, carrying easily the burden of thought and care for her family, her unbroken stream of guests, and army of servants. Lyddon, who looked deep into souls, knew the extraordinary courage, the singular tenacity, the silent, passionate loves and hates of women like Mrs. Tremaine. One of the ever strange problems to him was that this type of woman was remarkably pleasant to live with, and was ever full of the small, sweet courtesies of life. He reckoned these women, however, dangerous when they were roused. Mrs. Tremaine, nearly sixty, when sixty was considered old, had a faded rose beauty around which the fragrance of the summer ever lingered. She gave the impression of a woman who had lived a life of luxury and seclusion when, as a matter of fact, she had, ever since her marriage, carried the burden of a general who organizes and directs an army. She had, however, that which gives to women perpetual youth, the adoration of her husband, of her three sons, and of all who lived in daily contact with her.

Colonel Tremaine, tall, thin, and somewhat angular, with a face clear-cut like a cameo, had been reckoned the handsomest man of his day and the most superb dandy in the State of Virginia. He adhered rigidly to the fashions of forty years before, when he had been in the zenith of his beauty. He wore his hair plastered down in pigeon wings on each side of his forehead and these pigeon wings were of a beautiful dark brown in spite of Colonel Tremaine’s seventy-two years. The secret of the colonel’s lustrous locks was known only to himself and to Hector, and even Mrs. Tremaine maintained a delicate reserve concerning it. Colonel Tremaine also held tenaciously to a high collar with a black silk stock, and his shirt front was a delicate mass of thread cambric ruffles, hemstitched by Mrs. Tremaine’s own hands. His manners were as affected as his dress and he was given to genuflections, gyrations, and courtly wavings of his hands in addressing persons from Mrs. Tremaine down to the smallest black child on the estate. But under his air of an elderly Lovelace lay sense, courage, honor, and the tenderest heart in the world.

Both Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine bore all the marks of race, and Lyddon had often wondered where Archie, the youngest child by ten years of the sons of the house, could have inherited his merry, inconsequential snub nose, his round face like a young English squireling, and his frankly red hair. He had neither the beauty nor the intellect of his older brothers, Neville, the young army officer, and Richard, who after taking high honors at the university was just graduated in law; but for sweetness, courage, and an odd sort of humor, Lyddon reckoned Archie not inferior to any boy he had ever taught. He was his parents’ Benjamin, the afterclap which had come to them almost in their old age, and was in some sort different to them from their older sons. He was to be classed rather with Angela Vaughn, the baby girl whom, in her infancy, Mrs. Tremaine had taken because the child was an orphan and the stepchild of a remote cousin. Angela and Archie had grown up together, a second crop, as the colonel explained, and they would ever be but children to both Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine.

At that moment, Archie, with Jim Henry and Tasso to assist, mounted on a table, to finish the hanging of the Christmas wreaths, that the old hall might look its best when Neville, his mother’s darling, and Richard, her pride, should arrive for the Christmas time. Neville had succeeded in getting a few days’ leave from his regiment, and Richard, the most intimate of brothers, had himself driven to the river landing to meet Neville. They might arrive at any moment and would be certain to be chilled with the ten miles’ drive in the winter afternoon, and there was not a drop of liquor of any sort to give them, according to the universal custom of the time. Hector, having helped himself to a little fine old brandy left in Colonel Tremaine’s private liquor case, was quite oblivious of what he had done with the keys both of the cellar and sideboard, and was struggling to explain this to Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine.

“I ’clare ’fore Gord, Mist’iss—” he protested with solemn emphasis as Lyddon came up to the fireplace.

“Come, Hector,” answered Mrs. Tremaine, in a voice of quiet authority, “don’t take the name of the Almighty in that trifling manner. What have you done with the cellar keys?”

“Mist’iss, I ’clare ’fore Gord——”

“My love,” interrupted Colonel Tremaine anxiously, addressing Mrs. Tremaine, “perhaps a little persuasion might discover the truth.” The colonel, although he swore liberally at Hector himself, never relished any fault-finding with him by anyone else, even Mrs. Tremaine. Hector, knowing by an experience of more than sixty years that he had a devoted ally in Colonel Tremaine, announced with easy confidence: “I recommember now what I done wid dem keys. I give dem cellar keys to old Marse, an’ I give him dem sidebo’d keys——”

“You did nothing of the sort,” replied Mrs. Tremaine, in her soft, even voice, but with a ring of displeasure and authority in it which was disquieting to both Hector and Colonel Tremaine. “And besides, Hector, you’ve been drinking, it is perfectly plain.”

“Mist’iss, I ’clare I ain’t tech’ one single drap o’ liquor sence I had de rheumatiz week ’fore lars’.”

Mrs. Tremaine cut him short by appealing to Colonel Tremaine. Usually she addressed him as “My dear,” and he replied with “My dearest Sophie”; but when discussions concerning Hector came about Mrs. Tremaine addressed the colonel as “Colonel” and he responded by calling her “Sophia.”

“Colonel, have you seen those keys?”

“Really, Sophia, I have not,” replied the colonel, with as much tartness as he ever used toward Mrs. Tremaine. The discussion grew warm, and Hector gave various accounts of what he had done with the keys, but no one thought of the practical solution of looking for them until Archie, having hung the last wreath, came up, and diving into Hector’s coat pockets, the first place which should have been searched, fished out two bunches of keys.

“I tole you, Missis,” began Hector, still very unsteady upon his legs, “I had done put dese yere keys somewar. I jes’ disrecollected whar it was.”

“Very well. Go at once and bring the decanter with brandy in it here, with sugar and glasses, for your young masters.” Hector walked toward the dining room, the picture of injured innocence, protesting under his breath—“I ain’t never teched a drap of liquor sence I had de rheumatiz.”

Lyddon, standing with his arm on the mantelpiece, smiled and wondered. This sort of thing had been going on, he felt sure, ever since Colonel Tremaine had been able to grow hair on his face, and would continue to the end of the chapter, and Hector, having already had more liquor than was good for him, was in a position to help himself still further. Lyddon marveled if such a state of things could exist anywhere on earth outside of Virginia, and tried to fancy a similar case of the butler in an English family, but his imagination was not equal to such a flight. When Hector appeared, however, in a minute or two with the brandy and the glasses and put them on the polished mahogany table near the fire, both Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine relaxed their air of being slightly offended with each other. Colonel Tremaine, looking at his watch, remarked, with a courtly bow:

“I think, my dearest Sophie, that our sons may be expected within half an hour, that is, if the boat was punctual.”

“A half hour, my dear, is long to wait for those we love,” answered Mrs. Tremaine, laying her small white hand affectionately on Colonel Tremaine’s sleeve, at which the colonel took the hand and kissed it gallantly.

“You will understand, Mr. Lyddon,” said he, turning to the tutor, who was still leaning on the mantelpiece, “the very great interest and importance of our army son’s visit to us at this juncture. The time will shortly be at hand when every son of Virginia must determine whether he will stand for or against his State, and it is not necessary for us to say that we feel certain the services of our son, Neville, are at the disposition of his State the instant they are required.”

Yes, Lyddon knew the whole story. He had heard it talked about ever since the news had come a week ago that South Carolina having seceded from the Union, the day must shortly come when Virginia must cast her lot either for or against the Union. One of the sources of strength most counted upon was the resignation of every Southern officer from the army and the navy, and Colonel Tremaine, having some knowledge of military life, was proud to think that he had in Neville a trained artillerist to offer to the new cause.

“The position of a Southern officer in the United States army at present is a very difficult one,” remarked Lyddon; “there is a question of honor and conscience involved which each man must settle for himself.”

“By God!” exclaiming Colonel Tremaine, and then fell silent. The mere notion of discussing such a thing was to him like discussing the morality of the Ten Commandments.

“The question is already settled,” added Mrs. Tremaine coldly, and Lyddon knew there was nothing more to be said. He had realised long before that there was really no liberty of conscience, much less of speech, concerning the separation of the South from the North, or the future of slavery. The minds of these people were made up and compromise was impossible. They scarcely tolerated what Lyddon had to say, even though he were an Englishman and an outsider, considering his doctrine of liberty of conscience concerning slavery and States’ rights to be so dangerous and pernicious that it could not be freely spoken for fear it might corrupt, as it certainly offended; and Lyddon, recognizing the adamantine prejudices around him, kept his sentiments chiefly to himself; only with Richard Tremaine, whose mind was too comprehensive to be wholly dominated by prejudice, could Lyddon speak freely. He smiled a little at Colonel Tremaine’s exclamation, but, being the last man on earth to engage in controversy, let the subject drop. And Tasso beginning vigorous operations with the broom to sweep up the remnants of the now complete decorations, Lyddon fled to his city of refuge, the old, shabby, low-ceiled study across the corridor.

In this old part of the house reigned comfort, quiet, and shabbiness, sometimes an excellent combination. This was the one room forever sacred to men, boys, dogs, books, and Angela Vaughn. There, with the door shut, all was silent, still, and serene—the serenity of books and bachelorhood. Lyddon drew up a great worn leather chair to the fire, which glowed ruddily and steadily, and, placing his feet on the fender, reflected upon the stupendous changes which he knew were at hand, and which the whole community seemed to comprehend as little as did the Harrowby family. War and revolution and evolution were imminent, the upsetting of the whole economic and social order, the leap in the dark which Lyddon felt sure meant the fall into an abyss; yet the people talked about it lightly and sentimentally, and seemed to think it would be a mere holiday parade. But if it should be otherwise, Lyddon knew enough of the character and temper of the people around him to understand that they were by nature the most furious and indomitable of fighters; that the women, if softer, were, if anything, fiercer than the men.

His thoughts then turned to Angela Vaughn. He often, in his own mind, compared himself to a gardener who has taken a ragged seedling and has nurtured it until, grown tall and fair, it is ready to burst into all the glory of its blooming and then be gathered by other hands than those which trained and watered it and gave it the fresh air and the blessed sun. He remembered her when he had first come to Harrowby to prepare Neville Tremaine for West Point, and Richard for the University of Virginia. Angela was then a nine-year-old, in pinafores, and had reminded Lyddon of a Skye terrier, being all eyes and hair. She was as light as a feather, and Lyddon, accustomed to the heavier proportions of English children, thought that this wisp of a child, with her tangle of chestnut hair hanging down her back, and her laughing, black-lashed eyes of no color and all colors, must be indeed a delicate blossom; but she led the life of the most robust boy, and had never known a day’s illness in all those ten years. Lyddon recalled her, pattering about in the snow, her red hood and mantle making her look like a redbird. He could see her swinging on the branches of the cherry trees in the orchard in the springtime, her laughing face and her little white ruffled sunbonnet making her look like a cherry blossom herself. He had often watched her scrambling, with the agility of a boy rather than a girl, on and off her pony, or merrily dancing the schottische with Archie in the big hall, their music being their own childish singing; or dashing down the garden path to a little nook on a wooden bench under the lilac trees, at the end, and always full of a strange activity. But tucked away under her arm or in her pocket was pretty sure to be found a book from her own special library, which consisted of four volumes—a book of good old fairy tales, “The Arabian Nights,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and an odd volume of the “Odyssey,” telling of Penelope and the suitors, which she frankly confessed to Lyddon she could not understand, and read because she liked to be puzzled by it. Lyddon, who had never before in his life taught a girl, and hated the thought of it, at first turned his back resolutely upon the child, but she had a way of stealing up to him and putting her little hand in his, and saying: “Please, Mr. Lyddon, won’t you read me out of this book?” The book was generally the “Odyssey,” for Angela found out by some occult means that at the mention of this book, the eyes of the grave and somewhat curt tutor would be certain to soften, and Lyddon relenting would ask the child sternly: “How do you pronounce the name of this book?”

“I don’t know,” Angela would reply, casting down her eyes and toying with her little white apron. “I can spell it, but I can’t say it, and I don’t know what it means, either, unless you read it to me.” The way in which she said those last words, accompanied with a shy, sidelong look, always captivated Lyddon, and he had begun with reading the sonorous lines to her, Angela leaning on his knee and listening with her head turned a little to one side like a watchful bird. After reading awhile, Lyddon would again ask: “Now, do you understand it?”

“No,” Angela would reply, shaking her mass of chestnut hair, “but I like it. Please go on, Mr. Lyddon.” In course of time, to Lyddon’s amazement, he found himself regularly teaching the child her lessons. There was a pretense that she was taught with Archie, but as a matter of fact, not only was she nearly four years older than Archie, but her capacity for books was so much greater that there was no classifying her with the boy or, indeed, with any pupil whom Lyddon had ever taught.

Not that Angela was universally teachable; she could not, or at least would not, learn arithmetic or mathematics in any form, and Lyddon, whose soul abhorred a mathematical woman, was not sorry for this. He loved Latin, however, as a cat loves cream, and Angela, finding this out, learned her Latin lessons with amazing facility. Lyddon had some notion of teaching her Greek, but forebore from conscientious scruples. He had no mind to make her a woman like Pallas of the green eyes, “that dreadful and indomitable virgin,” as Pantagruel says, but would rather that Angela should grow up to resemble the enchanting maid, the silver-footed Thetis. He imparted French, too, however, which she picked up readily; history she learned of herself, and the piano was taught her by Mrs. Tremaine, who played neatly in the old-fashioned style. Angela’s gift for music was considerable, and she sang and played with much natural expression and loved to accompany Archie, who fiddled prettily. There was always more or less talk of getting a governess for Angela, and Mrs. Tremaine actually proposed sending her to a finishing school, but Angela managed to evade both of these nefarious plans. All the education which was required of the women in her day consisted of graceful and housewifely accomplishments. These Angela easily mastered and under Lyddon’s instructions carefully concealed exactly how much Latin she knew, although a little boastful of knowing French.

From the first, Lyddon had been forced to yield to the soft seduction of the child’s nature. He early recognized the difference of sex in mind, the scintillant feminine intelligence, unlike that of any boy he had ever taught, sharper in some respects, far duller in others, quick of apprehension but difficult of comprehension in the large sense. All this was delightfully obvious to Lyddon as he watched the unfolding of Angela’s mind. The absence of the creative faculty in women had been borne in upon Lyddon in his general view of human achievement. He studied the convolutions in the budding mind of his pupil and it gave him insight concerning the immense interest far greater than its value which the intellectual performance of a woman arouses. He recalled that much had been written about Sappho, but the lady’s poems not having the germ of eternal life had gone to the limbo of forgotten things, all except about forty lines. He reckoned that a woman’s personality and reputation was all of her which could really survive; her work invariably perished, and Madame de Staël, as a writer, was as dead as Sappho. Nevertheless, he found himself more interested in Angela’s divination of books and things than in Neville’s keen and analytical mind, in the fine and comprehensive intellect of Richard Tremaine or Archie’s sturdy good sense. Lyddon laughed at himself for the interest with which he watched Angela’s mental growth, in preference to that of any boy whom he had ever taught, just as one watches the dancing light of a firefly with greater interest than a candle’s steady glow. Nor was Angela’s nature less interesting to him than her mind. He had been used to the simple nature of boys, but here was a creature not only of another sex, but, it seemed to Lyddon, of another order, who was not always merry when she laughed nor sad when she wept nor angry when she scowled. Angela had moreover a spirit of pure adventure stronger than he had ever known in any boy. She longed to see the outside world and was strangely conscious from the beginning of the narrowness of the life lived by her own people. Their horizon was bounded by the State of Virginia. Not so Angela’s. She was always teasing Lyddon to tell her stories of across the seas and planned with him triumphal journeys to the glorious cities of the Old World, marvelous explorations in the heart of India and to the very extremities of the earth. Lyddon humored her in these childish imaginings as he did in everything else. Angela was now nineteen years old. Like all women she was wise and simple, frank and sly, brave and timid, and consistently contradictory. When Lyddon thought of her he recalled the words of another maiden of a far-off country and a bygone time:

“Take care of thyself if thou lovest me.”

And as he sat thinking, the study door opened and Angela quietly entered.

CHAPTER II
ANGELA

THE study by that time was dark, and Angela, who had learned not to disturb Lyddon in his reveries, came softly and seated herself without speaking at the table in the middle of the room. Neither did Lyddon speak, but he recognized in himself the feeling of subtle pleasure which Angela’s nearness always gave him. It was as if the fragrance of spring had been wafted toward him, something silent, intangible, but deliciously sweet. He could catch from the corner in which he sat the outline of her slender, supple figure in a pearl-gray gown, her graceful head leaning upon her clasped hands.

The two sat silent in the dusky twilight of the firelit room for ten minutes. Then Angela with a peculiar, noiseless grace moved to the fireplace and, thrusting a wisp of paper into the bed of coals, lighted the two candles in tall, brass candlesticks which sat upon the study table and opening a book before her began to read. She had naturally a good omnivorous appetite for books, an appetite which Lyddon had sedulously cultivated. At that moment she was demurely studying a page of Adam Smith which happened to be the book before her. The two candles only half-illumined the low-ceiled, shadow-haunted room and appeared like two glowing disks amidst the gloom, but their yellow light fell full upon Angela. Lyddon, who never wearied of examining her, concluded it was doubtful whether she would ever be classed as a beauty. She was too thin, too slight, too immature as yet to be called beautiful or anything approaching it, but one day she might have much beauty. Her features were charming, though irregular, and her coloring, generally pale, was sometimes vivid. Her hair, of a rich bronze with glints of gold in it, was beautiful and abundant; and her dark lashes and delicately arched eyebrows were extremely pretty. But except those and her exquisite grace of movement and sweetness of voice, neither Lyddon nor anyone else could exactly tabulate her beauty. Her eyes were not large, but were full of expression and continually changing color. When she was pleased they were bright and light; when she was angry or thoughtful they became almost black.

The book remained open before her, but she was not turning the leaves, and Lyddon, knowing quite well of what she was thinking, said, presently: “I wonder what makes them so late?” Angela, knowing that he meant Neville and Richard Tremaine, turned her head toward him and answered quickly in the sweetest voice imaginable:

“They will be here soon; I feel it all over me. I always know in advance when I am to be happy and also when I am to be wretched.”

Lyddon smiled. What did this girl of nineteen know of the wretchedness of which she spoke so glibly?

“Uncle Tremaine and Aunt Sophia thought that Neville wouldn’t be able to come at all,” Angela kept on, “but I knew he would, even if it were only for a very little time.”

“Perhaps you wrote and urged him to come,” suggested Lyddon. “You know that is the way some people receive an answer to their prayers—by working like Trojans for the thing themselves.”

“Oh, I wrote him often enough,” answered Angela laughing. “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Neville. I recollect four perfectly dreadful Christmases when he was at West Point and couldn’t come home. I was so miserable then, I remember.”

“So do I remember,” answered Lyddon. “I remember that you made a great outcry about your misery, but you laughed and were as merry as any child I ever saw on Christmas day, and danced in the evening until Mrs. Tremaine sent you to bed.”

“Oh, yes, of course, I danced! I can’t help that. When the music is playing it runs through my veins and makes me dance in spite of myself.”

“Now that Neville is a soldier you can’t expect him to be home every Christmas.”

“Yes, I know there will be dreadful Christmas times without him——”

“And you will do as you did when you were a little girl, cry and lament and then enjoy yourself very much. That is, until the war begins.”

“Oh, that won’t make any difference,” replied Angela easily and adopting the tone of her elders; “the war won’t last long and we shall be victorious, of course, and there will be comings and goings and great happenings all the time. Anything is better than this life of deadly dullness. Neville and Richard will both be officers. Neville, I suppose, will be a general at twenty-six or seven as the young lieutenants and captains became in the time of the French Revolution.”

“‘O sancta simplicitas!’ as Mephistopheles says. So they may, my little girl, and there will be a great many things in this war, if it comes, very like the French Revolution. But you remember there were lieutenants who went away and never came back any more at all.”

“O Mr. Lyddon, nobody says such dreadful things except yourself.”

“I know it. War is a merry jest to these people in Virginia. The notion will be spoiled soon enough; meanwhile, dream your dream of victory. It is a fine dream, as Marshal Saxe said.”

“At least, let us dream while Neville is here. He will only be here at Harrowby three days, think of that!”

“And in those three days there will scarcely be a quiet minute after to-night. Let me see. To-morrow being Christmas day, there will be a hullabaloo from daylight until midnight; next morning the hunting party, dinner at Greenhill; a dance in the evening; each day festivities; and Neville leaves at daylight on Saturday morning.”

“But, then, there will be three mornings when I shall see Neville’s shoes outside of his door. Oh, what a comfort that will be! And I shall hear him swearing at Peter, and Richard swearing at Neville for swearing at Peter, because Richard says that as Peter is his boy nobody except himself shall swear at him. And Neville will waltz with me in the hall while Aunt Sophia plays the ‘Evening Star Waltz.’ You remember he taught me to waltz by that tune. And when Richard makes fun of me, Neville will say, ‘Never mind, Angela, Richard is a scoundrel and I will punch his head for him.’ And when Archie will come after me to find his things for him and to take my watch away because his own is broken, Neville will say, ‘Go away, you brat, hunt for your own things instead of asking Angela; and let her watch alone.’ Oh, I always have a friend when Neville is here! There he is now—I hear the wheels on the gravel.”

Before Lyddon could turn in his chair Angela had sped swiftly out of the room. Lyddon rose and went to the small uncurtained window which looked out upon the front of the house toward the highroad. An open trap was coming rapidly around the gravel drive, the horses snorting in the keen night air. Already a dozen negroes were running out, and the heavy doors of the hall leading upon the pillared portico were open and Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine were standing on the threshold, while Archie rushed down the steps. As Richard Tremaine pulled up the horses with a sharp turn, Neville sprang to the ground, the negroes already greeting him with “Howdy, Marse Neville, howdy, suh.” Neville, straight, soldierly, and keen-eyed, threw a rapid glance around as if looking for some one. He ran up the steps and was within reach of his mother when Angela slipped into his arms. He kissed her frankly and openly as a brother might, then let her go and the next moment held his mother close to his heart. Her head barely reached his shoulder. She was small to be the mother of such stalwart sons. Then Neville grasped both of his father’s hands while Archie claimed a boy’s privilege and kissed him on the cheek. The Tremaines were a demonstrative family; they loved each other well and were not ashamed to show it. Neville next found himself in the embrace of his mammy, Aunt Tulip, inky black, the size and shape of a hogshead, wearing a white apron of vast circumference, and a big plaid handkerchief wound round about her head.

“‘Bres de lam’,” shouted Aunt Tulip. “I done got my chile home agin. The Lord done heah my pra’r.” Here Mammy Tulip was rudely interrupted by Hector.

“You heish your mouf,” he remarked. “Gord A’mighty, he didn’ sen’ Marse Neville hom’ cuz you bawls out ‘Amen, bres de Lord,’ ev’y night at pra’r time. Marse Neville, I hopes I sees you well, suh, an’ in de enjoyment ob your profession, suh.”

“Thank you, Hector,” answered Neville, shaking hands cordially with him. “Of course, I haven’t enjoyed such advantages in my profession as you did, campaigning in Mexico, but I’m doing pretty well just the same.”

Then all trooped into the hall, where Lyddon was found.

“How do you do, Mr. Lyddon,” cried Neville. “It is pleasant to see you once more. I hope you will keep on teaching these two brats, Angela and Archie, for the next ten years.”

Angela, who had drawn a little away from Neville, smiled with the superiority of nineteen at being classed as a brat. And then Lyddon watched one of the sights always amusing and unintelligible to him—all the negroes crowding around Neville asking him innumerable questions and being questioned in return while his father and mother, his brothers and Angela withdrew into the background until these children of another race had made their greetings. By the time the negroes were through, Richard had come in, and the family group was assembled around the great hall fire. Lyddon compared the two elder brothers, who were singularly alike in figure and carriage, both men of medium height and size, well made, sinewy, and graceful. They were, however, quite unlike in feature, Richard resembling Colonel Tremaine, while Neville had the darker coloring and more irregular features of his mother. But each had what Lyddon called a fighting eye. Their minds were as unlike as their features, yet in character they resembled each other as in figure. Richard had a softness of manner and subtlety of speech which differentiated him strongly from Neville, who was taciturn and spoke with soldierly plainness.

Home-coming at Christmas time when there are no yawning gaps in the circle, no vacant places at the board, no empty chairs round the fire is full of joy, and Lyddon thought he had never in his life seen more of family peace and love than the roof of Harrowby that night sheltered. Mrs. Tremaine sat on the old-fashioned sofa close to the hall fire with Neville’s arm around her. She patted him on the shoulder, speaking meanwhile to Richard and Archie.

“Dear sons, I love you as much as this one, but you I have all the year round while he I have for only three days.” When Mrs. Tremaine said that all her sons were equally dear to her she uttered an unconscious falsehood. Neville, her firstborn, had ever been her favorite, if a favorite can be known where all were so much loved. And between Neville and his father also existed a peculiar bond in Colonel Tremaine’s fondness for military life and his attachment to old friends and comrades who were known only to Neville. The father and son talked animatedly of army life and military matters in which neither Richard nor Archie could bear any part. To Colonel Tremaine, Neville’s visits home were a special delight in this respect, and the two exchanged stories, theories, and reminiscences to which the others listened with sympathy, but in silence. When supper was announced, all gathered around the old mahogany table in the large dining room. There was enough to feed a regiment and all specially provided for Neville. Jim Henry forced upon him mountains of batter cakes cooked to a turn, while Tasso handed him oysters done in four different ways. Hector whispered in Neville’s ear recommendations of everything on the table. Neville was indeed lord and master of the feast. All talked to him at once except Angela, who looked at him with wide sparkling eyes of pleasure and suddenly electrified everybody by asking in a voice pitched high so as to be heard over the others, “Neville, are you engaged to be married?”

“Good God, no,” replied Neville with the utmost sincerity, at which Tasso suddenly burst into a guffaw and retired to the pantry to indulge.

“You don’t think he would tell you if he was,” remarked Archie, with the cool assumption of sixteen. “Girls do ask such foolish questions.”

“I shall select my successor,” said Mrs. Tremaine, smiling placidly. “She shall be a Virginia girl of good lineage and she must know how to make mango pickle. In every other respect, my son, you may please yourself.”

“Now, I, as a good father,” cried Colonel Tremaine, beaming and pulling up his high collar, “shall welcome my son’s wife even if she be a Mexican señorita. Women, my dearest Sophie, are invariably jealous of each other, even you. That you are the most judicious of your sex, I have shown by leaving my estate absolutely to you in the event of my death. Nevertheless, I would be inclined to doubt your judgment when it comes to selecting wives for our sons.” Colonel Tremaine’s heart, like his thread cambric ruffles, was perpetually rushing out of his bosom and no matter how generous Mrs. Tremaine might be, the colonel had to be more generous still.

Lyddon looked, listened, and quietly relished this all-embracing family affection. It was something so new to him. In England, the law of primogeniture set a ban upon it. He knew something of the antagonism between the incumbent and the heir, of the niggardliness toward younger sons and daughters, and the inconvenience of a large jointure upon an estate. But here everything was different. Like the patriarchs of old all shared alike.

After supper they went back to the hall where, according to the custom established when Angela was a little girl, Mrs. Tremaine played the piano in the drawing-room while out in the hall Angela and Archie danced polkas, waltzes, and schottisches. Colonel Tremaine and his two elder sons with Lyddon, sitting around the fire, listened to the quiet music and watched Angela’s willowy figure as she floated around the hall with Archie, who, short and stocky, yet danced beautifully. Outside on the back porch could be heard the shuffling of feet. It was Jim Henry with Lucy Anne, whose business was to keep the flies off of “ole Missus,” as Mrs. Tremaine was called, in the summer, and to bring the eggs in from the chicken houses in the winter, and Mirandy, whose sole occupation was to hunt for “ole Marse’s” specks, and Sally, whose business no one exactly knew, were disporting themselves in the dance.

Presently Neville turned and asked, “Have you two children learned to dance the French two-step?”

Angela and Archie had never heard of it before, but immediately Angela seized Neville and, dragging him from his comfortable corner on the old sofa, obliged him to teach her the new dance. In two minutes she had acquired it; her sense of rhythm was perfect, and for ten minutes she and Neville danced around the hall together. He was a good dancer, doing his steps with military precision, but nothing like so exquisitely graceful as the red-haired Archie. Lyddon, who had been accustomed to seeing Angela skipping about the hall with Archie, realized that she was now a woman grown and almost as tall as Neville, but among them all she was yet treated as a child, and when she begged Neville for a second dance he tweaked her ear and told her to go and dance with Archie; he himself was too old to dance with children.

At half past nine, according to invariable custom, the whole family, including the house servants, assembled in the library for family prayers. This, like all the other rooms in the new part, was spacious and high-ceiled. It was lined with those books which no gentleman’s library should be without: solemn sets of library books with undimmed gilt lettering and which were only taken from their library shelves to be dusted. All the books which were ever read were in the shabby old study across the corridor. Everything at Harrowby was done in a certain fixed and unvarying manner. The candles used at prayers were always of wax, in tall silver candlesticks, which were placed with the great open Bible on a round mahogany table in the middle of the room. The family sat ranged about in chairs, the servants standing, Hector behind Colonel Tremaine and Mammy Tulip behind Archie, who as a small boy had required watching at “pra’r time.” Colonel Tremaine read in a deep sonorous voice the Gospel, and Mrs. Tremaine made a prayer short and conventional, but with sometimes a phrase or two added that stirred the heart. To-night she thanked God for all their blessings adding, “and last of all for having our children Neville, Richard, Archibald, and Angela about us in health and well-being.”

Angela Vaughn had ever been included as a child of Harrowby since as a wailing infant she had first been held in Mrs. Tremaine’s arms. She was no blood relationship to them and had no fortune, but she had never felt the want of either love or money.

After prayers, it was bedtime for Mrs. Tremaine and Angela. The girl kissed Colonel Tremaine good night to which he responded, “Good night, my daughter, and God keep you.” Latterly, in the dignity of her nineteen years, she had acquired the habit of putting up her cheek to be kissed by Richard and Archie instead of placing her arms about their necks as she did with Colonel Tremaine. When she held her smooth, pale cheek toward Neville, he brushed his dark mustache over it, and Lyddon saw something which amazed him—a deep red color showed suddenly under Neville’s tan and sunburn. Richard saw it, too; nothing escaped his vigilant eye.

Another Harrowby custom was that after the ladies had retired Lyddon with his pupils would repair to their own habitat, the old study, where they read and smoked until the small hours. Colonel Tremaine took that time for writing his diary, a voluminous record of seedtime and harvest, colts and calves, and all the minutiæ of a landed estate, together with moral reflections and sage observations on the weather, and long excerpts from Pope’s “Iliad” and Wordsworth’s “Excursion.” He therefore bade his sons and Lyddon good night, who began their symposium in the study. Little had been said about the great impending struggle in those first hours of Neville’s home-coming. Once or twice during Colonel Tremaine’s inquiries about his old friends in the army, he had said of certain Southern officers, “I suppose they will resign their commissions when their States secede,” to which Neville had replied calmly, “I suppose so, sir, or it is generally understood that such will be the case.”

Lyddon, Neville, and Richard, once in the study with a roaring fire going and with pipes and cigars, began to enjoy those evening hours which are to men the cream of the day. Archie by virtue of his sixteen years was good-humoredly allowed in the company of his elders, but strictly forbidden to touch either pipe or cigar, cigarettes being unknown in that time and place. Finding the conversation beyond his years, Archie soon grew tired and marched off to bed. Lyddon had never acquired the American habit of cocking his feet up over his head, but stretching his legs out toward the ruddy blaze, he began to speak of the impending conflict in terms which were perfectly familiar to both his listeners.

“The doom of slavery is sounded,” he said. “All the forces of civilization are arrayed against it. Up to 1830 the problem of slavery was manageable; the South let the golden moment pass and after 1830 the problem became unmanageable. So the South shut its eyes and passed within the gates of sleep. You know that island in the Euxine Sea whose inhabitants never dream—well, the South has done nothing but dream for the last thirty years. Meanwhile the genie of slavery has got out of the box. Rivers of blood will be shed in settling this question because everything of value in the life of a nation has its blood price. But the emancipation of the negroes really means your emancipation, my dear fellows, and that of your children.”

Richard combated this with all the brilliant sophistries of the school of Calhoun which lost nothing in the handling. Richard was a born reasoner, and Lyddon always admired his masterly presentation of the case of the South. He frankly admitted that the South must return to the teachings of the fathers and some day abolish slavery, but never under the pressure of threats and fanaticism from the North and from Great Britain. As for defeat in battle, Richard could not grasp this idea at all. This caused Lyddon to smile.

“Your unmixed Anglo-Saxon blood makes it impossible for you to imagine defeat, and like all men and women of your race you prove to be bad losers. You will appeal to the arbitrament of the sword, but you will never abide by it. After the South has been drenched in blood will come the great problem of reorganization and the birth of a national life which slavery has stifled. Now you are all Virginians or Georgians or Louisianians, but the day will come when you will all be Americans.”

Neville sat and smoked in silence except for an occasional word full of pith and sense interjected in the conversation. It had always been like this. Neville was the listener, even as a boy, while Lyddon and Richard delighted in the attrition of minds. Their talk usually ranged far afield, but to-night they spoke of nothing except the coming conflict, and matters referring to it.

“By the way,” said Richard, “I had a letter this afternoon from Philip Isabey in New Orleans. He returned from Paris months earlier than he expected because he foresees war, and the first news that reached him was of the secession of South Carolina. I have always looked forward to having you, Mr. Lyddon, know Isabey. He writes that he is already taking steps toward raising a battery of artillery, just the branch of the service which I shall join when the war breaks out. Isabey is a man born for success at whatever he undertakes as you well know by all I have told you of him.”

Ever since Richard’s college days Isabey had been a part of Richard’s life. Many plans had been made for Isabey to visit Harrowby, but so far accident had prevented any of the family from knowing him except Neville, who had readily adopted his brother’s friend as his own during their brief periods of intercourse. After Richard’s graduation from the University of Virginia, of which Isabey was also an alumnus, they had spent two years together in Europe and the tie between them had thus become more closely knit. Lyddon had profound confidence in Richard’s judgment of men and was willing to believe that Isabey was all he was represented to be. It was plain that Isabey was as distinctively French in blood and training as Richard Tremaine was Anglo-Saxon. Isabey was a young man of fortune and, like Richard, contemplated entering public life. His letters, which Richard read aloud with pride, were full of sound sense, acute observation of men and things, and illuminated with French wit. There was a daguerreotype of him hanging in Richard’s room, representing him as a dark, slender young man, rather handsome, and unmistakably thoroughbred. There were, besides, half a dozen pen and pencil sketches of him illustrating some of the gay scenes through which he had lived with Richard in the Latin quarter. Each, while in Paris, had a handsome allowance which permitted him to enter the best society, to which each had the right of entrance. But it being contrary to the traditions of the Latin quarter that students should always have money to pay their bills, Richard and Isabey managed to squander their respective allowances in plenty of time to know the conventional delights of impecuniosity before their next checks arrived. The stories of their student days were infinitely diverting, and so linked were the two that Isabey’s personality actually seemed to have a place at Harrowby. Between war and politics, it was one o’clock in the morning before Neville, rising, said: “The fire is out and so are the cigars. I have been traveling for two days, so I shall go to bed. Good night.”

He went out of the room and Lyddon watching him was struck, as he often was, at the resemblance in the air and figure of the two brothers, while their faces and voices were so dissimilar that they gave no indication of a blood relationship.

As Neville closed the door behind him, Richard turning to Lyddon said significantly, “Neville will not resign from the army when the war breaks out.”

Lyddon remained silent for five minutes and then replied, “That is the most tragic thing I have heard for a long time.”

“Yes,” said Richard. “It will break my father’s heart and my mother’s, too.”

“Has Neville told you that he didn’t mean to resign?” asked Lyddon.

“Not in so many words, but on our way here this afternoon he made me understand it. You know we have always understood each other perfectly without going into details.”

“Yes, I have never seen two men with a better understanding than you and your brother. And it seems never to have been interrupted.”

“Well, we don’t need to thresh things out, Neville and I. He was always rather a silent fellow and a word from him means a good deal. I am quite certain he feels that this is perhaps his last visit to Harrowby and also he knows that whoever may turn against him, I shall not, but I shall be probably the only one who will not.”

“Except Angela,” said Lyddon coolly. “I always thought that Neville’s fondness for Angela would develop into a strong passion as soon as she was grown and I saw it to-night with my own eyes, but nobody else did, unless it be yourself.”

“I saw it. Neville’s face turned red when he kissed Angela on the cheek and Neville is not given to blushing. However, I am by no means certain that Angela will stand by him. She is like most of our Southern women—a creature outwardly all impulse, inwardly of the most fixed and determined character. It is a chance whether love or patriotism will win the day.”

“Yes, it depends upon whether she falls in love with Neville or not. Come, the fire is out, let us go. It is already Christmas day.”

CHAPTER III
THE POINT OF HONOR

WHILE it was yet dark on Christmas morning, the silvery notes of a bugle, like the horns of elfland, floated out upon the wintry fields, the black flowing river, and lost itself in the echoing woods and far-off uplands. It was the signal for the awakening of life upon the estate. The bugle was played by Hector from his bachelor quarters over the carriage house. Hector scorned matrimony and, like Benedick, thought he should not live until he were married. It was Hector’s duty by this call to rouse the sleeping black people—a duty which he cheerfully and punctually performed and then went back to his own bed to snooze comfortably until he felt like getting up to perform his sole, regular duty in life—the shaving of Colonel Tremaine.

On Christmas morning, however, all were awake before the sounding of the bugle call; candles and fires were lighted in the old house and crowds of negro children with shining eyes and gleaming teeth came trooping in the early dawn toward the old mansion. Shouts of laughter resounded, the older negroes appearing and joining in the merry hubbub and laughing excitement. Santa Claus for them was in the hall of Harrowby, where were piled up gifts for everyone on the estate. Each negro child was given a coarse woolen stocking filled to the top with sweets, and in each stocking was a switch which was understood as an admonishment to good behavior. The dogs about the place waked; long, lean, red deerhounds and short-legged beagles, all yelping and barking in unison. Within the house, as each servant entered the sleeping rooms to make the fires, the occupant was greeted with “Chris’mus gif’,” “Chris’mus gif’,” the theory being that the first who claimed a Christmas gift should get it. There was no more sleeping in the house after daylight. By seven o’clock all were up and dressed and the hall doors were opened for the negroes to come in and get their Christmas gifts. These were distributed by Angela and Archie, the children of the house.

It was a happy, noisy, primitive occasion and had about it the true Christmas spirit, the making of a holiday for each dependent. After the younger negroes had departed, half a dozen old negro men, the veterans of the place, long since retired from work, remained to have a glass of apple toddy with Colonel Tremaine. The great family punch bowl was filled with this concoction of apple brandy, sugar, and roasted apples. And Colonel Tremaine, filling the glass of each of the old men, wished him health and long life, to which each responded with the politeness characteristic of his race, “Sarvint, suh, the same to you, suh, an’ ole Missis an’ young Marse an’ de little Missis.” Hector departed from this form as not being elegant enough for a person who had been to Richmond, Baltimore, had seen a panorama of the city of New York, and who had accompanied his master during the Mexican War, and always answered as follows: “Colonel Tremaine’s felicitations. I beg, suh, you will accept, suh, the assurances of my distinguished consideration,” a phrase which he had mastered with great effort and which invariably revealed how much liquor Hector had imbibed. He was able to say it without hesitation at taking his first swig of apple toddy in the morning, but was likely to become a little mixed in his phrasing as the day wore on.

Breakfast was late, and as there was to be a large dinner at five o’clock, the fashionable hour of the day, and a dance in the evening, there was much to be done by the house servants. But the negroes, like all their race, reckoned it a holiday when they were preparing for a festival. As the case was under the old régime, the burden of preparation fell upon Mrs. Tremaine and Angela. Colonel Tremaine, his three sons, and Lyddon went for a long ride in the morning for the express purpose of being out of the way while the making ready for the dinner and the dance created turmoil in the house. Mrs. Tremaine, with a masterly hand and with Angela to assist her, carried through the infinite details of the work of preparation for a hundred persons, where everything had to be done with only the forces and implements of one household. Hector, as usual, in his determination to save Tasso and Jim Henry from the danger of strong drink, had consumed the remainder of the apple toddy himself and, in consequence, soon took no note of time or anything else, mislaid his keys, misplaced everything he touched, and, although barely able to keep his feet, harangued eloquently upon the sin of drunkenness. Mrs. Tremaine had struggled with this complication for thirty-five years and encountered it as usual with patience and authority. In spite of Hector everything was in readiness by four o’clock, for, as the guests came from considerable distances, they were liable to arrive half an hour before the time or half an hour afterward.

At four o’clock Angela, dressed for the festivity, took the last look in her mirror with the happy satisfaction of a nineteen-year-old girl. She wore a gown of pale blue of trailing length; wide sleeves with frills of filmy lace fell back from her slender arms. Her gown was cut away squarely back and front like one she had seen in an old print of a Romney portrait. Her delicate throat and neck were thin but exquisitely white. She had longed for a headdress of lace and flowers, such as Mrs. Tremaine wore, but that had been forbidden as being too old, and she had only been permitted to twine a long strand of gold beads in and out among the masses of her chestnut hair. She passed out of her room and as she reached the top of the staircase the hall door opened and Neville entered in his riding dress. He walked slowly toward the staircase, keeping his eyes fixed upon Angela as she came down the stairs. She was smiling and blushing with the self-consciousness of first youth and fixed her laughing eyes on Neville as the nearest masculine object in view from whom to exact tribute. The tribute, however, was readily paid and in a coin upon which Angela had not counted. As they met upon the broad landing of the stairs there was a look in Neville’s eyes which Angela had never seen there before; love had taken the place of kindness, Neville did what he had never done before in his life to her—took her little hand in his and raised it to his lips. Like all women, she recognized the master passion at the first glance and under all disguises. Neville in an instant of time had changed from the indulgent elder brother, the friend, the grown-up companion of her childhood, and had become her lover, a being to be reckoned with and different in many ways. The feeling was not one of rapture to Angela any more than an electric shock is rapture.

“How pretty you are, Angela!” said Neville, still holding her hand. Angela, with a scarlet face, tried to hark back to their old relations.

“It is the first time you ever called me pretty in my life,” she said. “I remember how furious I was once a long time ago when I heard you telling Aunt Sophia that you didn’t believe I should ever have any good looks, I was so—skinny.”

“It must, indeed, have been a long time ago,” answered Neville in the tone of a lover. “The truth is, Angela, you are to-day grown up for the first time. Until now you have been a child, but after this you will be a child no longer, for you are loved by a man—by me.” The words had come involuntarily and the next moment Neville called himself a fool a thousand times over for taking such a place and such a time to make such an acknowledgment. Richard Tremaine had suddenly entered the hall by a small door close to the stairs and coming rapidly up the steps caught Neville and Angela standing hand in hand with every evidence of guilt. Neville dropped Angela’s hand and scowled at Richard, who gave one comprehensive glance at Angela’s crimson, downcast face, and then, turning to Neville, winked portentously. Angela, turning from them both, ran lightly down the stairs while Richard followed Neville back down the stairs into his own room. The brothers had adjoining rooms, small and low, on the ground floor in the old part of the house and next the study. There was a door of communication between the two rooms which always stood open. When the brothers were alone, Neville condescended to smile a little as Richard said laughing, “By Jove, I didn’t mean to do such an ungentlemanlike thing as interrupt a love scene.”

“And I didn’t mean to make it a love scene,” responded Neville grimly.

“Oh, never mind, old fellow, those things will happen, you know! I knew a man once who made an offer to a girl at twelve o’clock on the Fourth of July in front of the custom house in New Orleans and they were married and lived happy ever after. I hope this affair may turn out likewise.”

“But it is no merry jest, as you know, Richard. This may be the last Christmas I shall ever be permitted to spend under my father’s roof. When I see and feel my mother’s tenderness, my father’s kindness, and know how it may change in the twinkling of an eye, it staggers me.”

“I shall not change,” replied Richard briefly. And the two brothers clasped hands for a moment. Whatever else might be torn apart, the tie of brotherly love could never be severed. When Neville spoke next it was only to tell Richard what he had known before.

“If Virginia goes out of the Union,” he said, “I shall not resign from the army. Of course, I want to and would if my conscience permitted, but I can’t. I have gone all over it a thousand times; everything draws me to the South, even my own interests. My position in the United States Army will be a frightful one. I shall be hated by my own people and distrusted by those with whom I must remain. I shan’t have the approval of anyone except”—he struck himself on the breast—“here.”

“Have you reasoned it out, Neville? Do you think it can be possible that you alone should be right and nine-tenths of the men in your position, nay, ninety-nine out of a hundred, should be wrong?”

“I am a soldier, Richard. I haven’t your subtlety. I can only ask myself this question, ‘Does the oath I took on entering the army still bind me?’ I feel that it does. Incidentally, this course wrecks me, but if I do otherwise, my honor is wrecked.”

There was a pause as the two brothers stood facing each other in the little room with its small windows filled with the dull glow of the dying December sun. They loved each other well and it seemed as if the hour of separation and doom were coming fast. Their intimacy was such that although their first parting had come when Neville was seventeen and Richard but sixteen, it had made not the smallest change in either. Each had many friends, but his intimates, except Philip Isabey, were found only under the roof tree of Harrowby. Both men grew pale as they stood silent and reflective. Then Richard said: “It is just as well to keep it from our father——”

“And from our mother.”

“Yes, by all means from our mother.”

“Think how strange it is when I leave Harrowby this time, I don’t know whether I shall ever be permitted to come here again.”

“At least, while you are here you are the favored son. Yes, Neville, mother loves you better than anything on earth and father is more in sympathy with you than with me because he loves military life. I am not thinking so much of you as I am of them. Great God, what a deathblow they must receive!” Richard turned and went into the next room.

Neville walked to the window and looked out upon the sweet, familiar landscape now all red and gold in the declining afternoon. He peopled it with all the events of his boyhood and youth and through all was a vision of Angela in her little white frock—the spoiled darling of the family. Mrs. Tremaine was a good disciplinarian and her own three sons were brought up under wholesome restraint, but Angela, being fatherless, motherless, and penniless, had been treated with an indulgence which would have ruined an ordinary nature. Neville remembered with a smile that on the few occasions when Mrs. Tremaine had undertaken to administer some mild punishment to the child, Colonel Tremaine had always frowned and called Mrs. Tremaine “Sophia” during the rest of the day. And when Archie and Angela had got into mischief together, justice was sternly meted out to Archie while Angela was always let off with a promise to be good in the future. But under this excess of kindness Angela had developed as a peach ripens on the sunny side of a wall. Neville glanced through the open door and saw Richard, still in his riding clothes, sitting before the fire with his feet stretched out to the blaze. He was reflecting upon the blow which was to fall at Harrowby. Neville went into his brother’s room and, leaning against the mantelpiece, said: “When I go away, take care of Angela for me.”

“I had forgotten all about Angela,” answered Richard frankly. “I was thinking of our father and mother.”

“You must think also of Angela; she will have her share of pain—that is, if she stands by me.”

Neither had noticed how the time had passed or that the early twilight of winter had fallen upon them until Peter, Richard’s boy, suddenly burst into the room and cried out, “Good Gord A’might’, Marse Richard, de company is comin’ an’ Unc’ Hector he done knocked ober an’ broke one o’ ole Marse’ bes’ decanters, an’ Missis say fur de Lord’s sake to come in ’long to her right ’way.”

The company had come indeed, and by the time Richard and Neville had scrambled through their dressing, the whole party was assembled in the drawing-room—a fine large apartment with many mirrors and a grand piano as large as a small house. The guests were the usual types of country gentry; the men, full-blooded, hard-riding, and sometimes hard-drinking, but full of an Old World courtesy and grace; the women, gentle, soft-voiced, with a certain provincial grace. Mrs. Tremaine, in a brown brocade with fine old lace and a lace headdress which was admired and envied by Angela, wore an air of serene triumph as the mothers of sons always wear. As the young men came in and greeted their guests, Neville was overwhelmed with kindly welcome. He came from the great outside world which was strange to most of these people, whose travels rarely extended beyond Baltimore in one direction and the White Sulphur Springs in another. Standing close to Mrs. Tremaine was Mrs. Charteris, her friend and schoolmate, the richest widow in five counties, with one only son, a boy not yet eighteen years of age. Neville greeted her with fine courtesy and Richard with charming impudence, and kissing her on the cheek, inquired when her wedding would come off with Mr. Brand, the rector of Petworth Church. As this affair had been going on for at least twenty years and Mr. Brand had made no perceptible headway, it had become a county joke.

“I declare the impudence of the young men of the present day is perfectly intolerable,” cried Mrs. Charteris, delighted with Richard’s presumption. “There’s Mr. Brand now, just coming in. Go and ask him.”

The rector, who was at that time shaking hands with Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine, was the tallest and by all odds the handsomest man in the room, with a voice of melodious thunder, and it may be added that Mr. Brand was commonly considered the most chicken-hearted of his species. He escaped from Colonel Tremaine’s bowing and scraping and elaborate welcome to march over to his inamorata, Mrs. Charteris, who, like the rest of her sex, enjoyed tormenting a lover and promptly hit upon the subject most painful to the rector’s feelings.

“Well, Mr. Brand,” she cried, “I sympathize with you more than I can express. We all know your warlike spirit and that you would be in the forefront of the hottest battle if you could, but Colonel Tremaine has just been telling us that when the war breaks out only the services of men under forty-five years will be required. Of course, however, you can volunteer, and with your splendid physique, you are certain to be accepted.”

Mr. Brand winced. He was oratorically patriotic and took the ground that when the conflict came, every able-bodied man should shoulder his musket and go to the front, that is to say, except himself. Moreover, his age, which was well beyond the fifty mark, was a tender point with him, and it was exactly like Mrs. Charteris, who was a notorious meddler, to be raking up these unpleasant subjects and laughing irreverently.

“My calling, my dear Mrs. Charteris,” began Mr. Brand lamely. “My cloth——”

“Oh, chaplains will be needed in our armies; you don’t suppose that the Southern soldiers will be a set of heathens, do you? And you can have a chance to march——”

“And sleep in the mud and catch rheumatism and starve——”

“And be a target for Yankee bullets like the rest of us,” added Richard Tremaine maliciously, who was a secret partisan of Mrs. Charteris. The conversation then grew general all about the coming war. The news of South Carolina’s secession was still fresh and vivid, and it was realized that the parting of the ways had come. The ladies professed their willingness to wear their old hats and bonnets indefinitely, to scrape up all the linen sheets for lint and to outdo the women of the French Revolution in patriotism. The gentlemen encouraged the ladies by their laughter and applause except Neville Tremaine, but as he was usually a reticent man, no one was surprised at his silence. Mrs. Tremaine, as the mother of two gallant sons to give the Cause, assumed unconsciously the arrogance of proud motherhood and exchanged strange glances with Mrs. Charteris, who with one seventeen-year-old boy knew herself to be envious of the other woman.

It was after five o’clock before the last belated carriage load had arrived and the guests were marshaled into the dining room. A great table, bright with candles, was laid the full length of the room with side tables at intervals where the younger and merrier members of the party sat. It was a feast which would have delighted a Crusader. A huge turkey was set before Colonel Tremaine, who with elaborate apologies to the whole table, was forced to rise in order to carve the gigantic bird. Everything eatable that grew in the earth or walked upon it or could be found in the depths of the sea or winged its way through the air was found upon that Virginia dinner table. Hector was still able to keep his feet in spite of halcyon incursions upon the bowl of apple toddy in the hall, and was in great form and imitated with more than usual success all of Colonel Tremaine’s affectations. He spilled the wine upon the cloth, liberally distributed gravy over some of the ladies’ dresses, and in a fit of absent-mindedness served the custard with the ham. But these trifles were borne suavely by all present except Lyddon, who reckoned Hector to be about as much use in the world as the fifth wheel to a coach or a second tail to a dog. There was much laughter, as became a Christmas feast, and Mrs. Tremaine, with a pride which she called humility, recognized that of all the young men present, her two sons easily bore away the palm. They had seats at the main table, but Angela with Archie and half a dozen youngsters were seated at the side tables.

Angela was glad of this until she found that she was in full view of Neville across the room, and instantly she became conscious of his observation. As the dinner progressed the war talk increased, and as the wine circulated freely and the decanters spun around the table upon the old-fashioned coasters, the conversation grew louder and graver. The war spirit in this people was strong. They loved fighting for fighting’s sake, and were eager to begin the conflict. The last stupendous course, a huge plum pudding, having been served, according to the old custom, the cloth was removed and the shining mahogany table bore only the nuts and wine. Then the drinking of toasts began. Colonel Tremaine’s usually pale and high-bred face was flushed, as it might well be after such a Christmas dinner and Christmas wine, and it grew still more so when he proposed a toast.

“My friends,” said he, “let us drink to the gallant State of South Carolina. She has shown us the way, and Virginia will soon follow. Let us drink this toast with all honors.” He rose and there was the noise of thirty persons pushing back their chairs and coming to their feet. All glasses were filled and raised except one, and that was Neville Tremaine’s. Colonel Tremaine looked at him inquiringly, and Neville, smiling, said pleasantly to his father, “You, sir, as a soldier understand that as long as Virginia stays in the Union, I, as an officer of the United States Army, cannot drink the toast you propose.”

“Certainly,” answered Colonel Tremaine quickly. “You are excused, my son. We understand perfectly how you are situated at present, but the day will come when you will be able to drink to this sentiment with us.” The toast was drunk standing and then Mrs. Tremaine in a soft, clear voice at the head of the table added:

“And let us now drink to secession.” At this there was a burst of applause, and Mrs. Tremaine, sipping the last of her wine, did what only a woman bursting with patriotism could do, struck the slender stem of the wine glass on the edge of the table and smashed it to bits. Mrs. Charteris raised her hand.

“Spare the wine glasses,” she cried. “They’re cut glass, every one of them, and the breaking of one is enough to show Sophie Tremaine’s patriotism.”

The wine glasses were spared, but the fighting spirit was mightily increased by this simple action on Mrs. Tremaine’s part. By the time thirty persons had been served the fiddles were heard tuning up in the hall. There Uncle Josh, the plantation fiddler, with a couple of hirelings were running the bows across the strings. Other guests were arriving for the evening party. And to them coming from long distances in the December evening, another kind of a meal had to be immediately served; hot biscuits, sandwiches, and coffee were reckoned to be a mere appetizer for the substantial supper which was due at midnight. Ladies muffled up in wraps and gentlemen in riding cloaks were pouring in a steady stream up the broad stairs and in a little while the large drawing-room was full, while in the library the card tables were set out for the elderly persons who liked a quiet rubber. The hall into which the piano had been wheeled was given up to the dancers, and half a dozen sets of quadrilles were formed. In those days gentlemen of all ages danced and usually made havoc in the lancers, which were just then coming into fashion, and of which the figures were only perfectly done by the young and modish. General round dancing was considered improper, and when Uncle Josh and his postulants played the few waltzes and polkas and schottisches in their repertory, girls danced with each other or with their brothers.

The apple toddy was going steadily the whole evening. In that day and time it was thought a mark of spirit in a man to become what was euphemistically called “a little mellow.” Colonel Tremaine was decidedly mellow and Mr. Brand mellower still. Dr. Yelverton, the great medical luminary of the county, had already requested Hector’s assistance up the stairs to the gentlemen’s dressing room, where he proposed to take a short nap. Hector, who was the mellowest man at Harrowby, attempted to assist the doctor up the steps, and but for Lyddon, who sustained them both, the pair would have come to grief on the first landing. Other elderly gentlemen did the double shuffle and cut pigeon wings after the manner of 1830, and several, following Dr. Yelverton’s example, sought refuge at various times in the haven of the dressing room. About three o’clock in the morning, after seven hours of continuous dancing, the move was made to break up so that the driving home along the country roads could be made by the light of a late moon. Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine pressed each guest who hinted at departure to remain longer, but at last the order was given to play the reel with which all Virginia parties break up. This was the great dance of the evening, and the fiddlers put renewed energy into their sawing and scraping. Every gentleman asking a lady’s hand for the reel paid her a special compliment. Neville had danced with every lady in the room except Angela, but early in the evening he had whispered to her, “You’ll save the reel for me, won’t you?” And Angela had replied out loud, “Yes.” No one was excused from this last dance; even Lyddon, the most awkward man alive, was pressed into service and forced to walk through it. Colonel Tremaine led with Mrs. Charteris and executed the most beautiful and difficult steps ever seen, meanwhile blowing kisses to the ladies. When the march figure was executed, the rhythmic hand-clapping accentuated the music and put new life into the fiddlers. As the partners of the dance were in full view every moment, there was no opportunity for Neville to exchange a word with Angela, but as they passed fleetly down the middle she felt the warm pressure of his hand. It was an hour before the reel was over, and then when the last strain was played and the formation broken up, Angela, running up to Colonel Tremaine, whispered something in his ear. Then she went to the piano, and Archie, following a signal, appeared with his violin and bow in his hand. Colonel Tremaine in a voice as mellow as himself called out:

“My friends, one thing more remains for this Christmas night. The daughter of our family and my youngest son have made themselves proficient in the new patriotic air called ‘Dixie,’ which is destined to become the national air of the South, and they will now have pleasure in performing it for you.” The voices and bustle of a crowd of persons stopped instantly, and Angela, playing the opening chord of ‘Dixie,’ Archie struck into the first inspiring strain of the air. The two played it through with immense fire and spirit and then a storm of applause burst forth. Gentlemen shook hands, ladies clasped each other and fell into a rapture of hand-clapping and cries of applause. The air had to be repeated a half dozen times, and each time the tempest of enthusiasm rose and swept with magic force the souls and hearts of all present. Two persons alone were excepted, Neville Tremaine and Lyddon. They stood together near the fireplace while the music and cheering echoed around them and exchanged significant glances. “It is the ça ira of to-day,” said Lyddon in Neville’s ear.

At last, after an hour of excitement, enthusiasm, laughter, cheering, and glorious anticipation of victory, the last guest had driven off, and the ghostly light of a pallid moon and the dawn was creeping in at the windows. The candles had burnt down in their sockets and the hall fire was low when the Harrowby family said good night, or rather good morning. Lyddon noticed that Angela, although in appearance so fragile, seemed as fresh as when the dancing had begun eight hours before, and in fact she and Archie, after the fiddlers had gone, danced a final polka without music and had to be sent ignominiously to their rooms by Mrs. Tremaine’s authority. When Lyddon with Richard and Neville went into the study for a smoke before a three hours’ morning nap, they found Hector snoring comfortably on the hearth rug.

“I wonder if any people in the world except you easy-going Virginians would stand this sort of thing?” said Lyddon, who had never been able to accustom himself to the spectacle of a butler who had got tipsy on every possible occasion for forty years.

“Oh, that’s nothing!” replied Richard easily. “You never have understood our peculiar institution, Mr. Lyddon; it is strictly feudal, you know!”

“It is a little too infernally feudal for me,” replied Lyddon. “It is worse than the feudalism in the Highlands of Scotland.”

CHAPTER IV
LOVE IN A MIST

IT was broad daylight before the entire household at Harrowby was asleep, but Angela, in the great four-posted bed with curtains and valance, had fallen asleep—young, healthy being that she was—the instant her head touched the pillow. The day came dull and quiet, and no light penetrated the closed shutters and drawn curtains of the large room in which Angela slept. It was twelve o’clock before she opened her eyes and then closed them again. She felt a delicious sense of languor after her hours of dancing and gay excitement, and the large, soft bed invited continued repose. She could not, however, go to sleep again. Wandering thoughts of what had happened the night before stole upon her, and then all at once Neville’s image, his looks, the pressure of his hand, so different from anything she had ever known, flashed upon her. She tried to put the thought away and, closing her eyes resolutely, lay still as a statue with that determination to go to sleep which always defeats its object. Presently, she sighed and turned restlessly; there was no more sweet repose for her, she had come face to face with that insistent passion which questions and demands an answer.

For the first time in her life the thought of meeting Neville made her feel shy. She loved him, oh, yes! Better than Richard, better than Archie! Neville had always been her champion who stood between her and disappointment, who warded off justice, who always approved of her, but Neville as a lover, as a husband—for Angela’s vivid mind traveled quickly—ah! that was different. If she married Neville it would be like the continuation of a story of which she already knew the best part. She yearned for life, movement, knowledge, a view of the great outside world, which to her in imagination appeared far more fascinating than any world could be, and yet on the threshold she was to be handed back to settle in the same groove, to see the same faces, do the same things as she had done all her life. She loved Harrowby with all her soul, but longed to try her wings in flight. It seemed as if the great book of life lay open before her, but she could not be permitted to read any part which she had not already read. Prince Charming, that other half of her heart and soul, that unknown being about whom it was so delicious to wonder, would never come to her.

Suddenly it came to her that Prince Charming was an entity and had a name—he was Philip Isabey. That straight-featured, black-eyed man of whom she had heard so much, whose wit, courage, daring, grace, and accomplishments Richard proudly recounted. In the still, abstracted life Angela led, with its narrow round of small duties, its larger but tamer pleasures, Angela’s imagination had felt the need of some object around which to weave its spell. Philip Isabey had become that object. Angela’s imagination was already in love with him and Angela and her imagination were one. She had never seen him, but that only made her long the more to see him. He had dominated her girlish dreams as far back as she could remember. She recalled slipping into Richard’s room and looking with a delicious sense, half rapture, half guilt, at the daguerreotype of Isabey and the sketches of him which were pinned to the walls. This apotheosis of Philip Isabey was her only secret, and being watched and tended, it grew fast and was cherished. When the recollection of this dream idyl came to Angela, she sat up in bed and clasped her hands with dismay. It must now come to an end, for Neville loved her—Neville, the best and truest man on earth, but not Prince Charming.

Just then the door opened quietly and Mirandy entered with a breakfast tray. On it lay a note—a few lines from Neville wishing her good morning. Angela’s first impulse was to smile, then to scowl. She told Mirandy sharply that it was not yet time for rising and after making the fire to go out and leave her. Soon the blaze lighted up the great darkened room, and Angela tried to persuade herself that it was midnight and not day as she lay in the great white bed watching the firelight dancing on the ceiling. She thrust the note under her pillow, but she could not forget that it was there and it disturbed her. It was four o’clock in the afternoon before she came downstairs. The house was still, Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine having gone out for a drive, Lyddon, Richard, and Archie being off on different expeditions and the servants, more asleep than awake, in a general state of collapse. Angela went into the study and there sitting by the window was Neville with a book in his hand. He rose at once as she entered and closed the door after her.

“I have been waiting to see you, Angela,” he said, taking her hand and leading her to the old leather-covered sofa; and then briefly and simply as a man who is a man speaks his love, he asked Angela to marry him. She had never said “no” to Neville in her life and it was clearly impossible now. Her shyness, her coldness, neither surprised nor disconcerted Neville. She was in many respects younger than her nineteen years, and this was her first acquaintance with love. But Neville knew or thought he knew that Angela’s intimacy with him was so great, her dependence on him so absolute, her affection for him of such long standing that she could not only be happy with him, but that she could not be happy with another man—for Neville Tremaine thought first of the woman he loved and secondly of himself. And in this belief he had a little time of rapture. But his dream was broken when he mentioned marriage to Angela.

“I shouldn’t have spoken so soon, Angela, but for the time in which we live. You know I am leaving day after to-morrow, and God knows when, if ever, I shall return.”

“You will come back when the State secedes,” said Angela positively. They were sitting on the sofa with Angela’s bright head close to Neville’s dark one.

“Ah, my dearest,” he said, “I don’t know whether I shall ever come back. I haven’t yet said whether I would resign from the army or not, and if I feel as I do now I shan’t.” Angela drew away from him and looked at him with wide, startled eyes.

“I—I don’t understand,” she said. “Of course you will resign; everybody expects that you will.”

“I know it. It would be a great deal easier for me if I could. But a soldier, Angela, has not the same attitude of conscience that any other man has. You know honor should come first with every man, but military honor takes possession of a man and disposes of him; so it will dispose of me.”

Angela gazed at him with dark and troubled eyes. She did not fully understand all that Neville’s words implied, but they gave her pain and amazement and Neville seeing this gently explained to her. “What I mean is if the choice were given me on the one hand of having you, beloved, of fulfilling my father’s and mother’s wishes, of inheriting Harrowby as my father and mother have always told me, and on the other hand of giving up you and all whom I love and my inheritance, I should be compelled to do it if I felt that my duty as a soldier required me to remain in the United States Army, and at this moment it so appears to me.”

Angela fell back and withdrew her hand from Neville’s, and he made no effort to detain it. “You have promised to marry me, Angela,” he said quietly, “but if you are frightened at what you have done, I am the last man in the world to hold you to your word.”

The profoundest art could not have hit upon an idea more likely to influence Angela than the one which Neville had used without any art whatever. Angela, like all young creatures of high and untried courage, spurned the faintest suggestion of fear. “I am not afraid of anything,” she said. “I never was afraid to keep my word.”

“Child, you were never called upon to keep such a promise as this, and what I may do may mean that I shall never again be recognized by any whom I love unless it be yourself; it may mean the same to you.”

“If it does, I hope I should not be less brave than you.” Angela put her hand again into Neville’s, and he saw that he was victor. They had one hour together sitting in the dusk of the old study where they spent so many hours in the past when Angela was a little girl in a white frock and Neville was already a young man. The one fascination which Neville had for Angela was in his courage, that quality most adorable, most compelling to all women. She had not asked herself whether she were in love with him or not; it seemed so impossible to go against Neville or to desert him, and yet it was not to her what she had dreamed first love to be. Neville was not Isabey. When at last in the twilight they heard the servants moving about in the other part of the house and the carriage with Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine drive up to the door, Angela rose hurriedly, confused for the first time in her life at being found alone with Neville. As they reached the door she caught his arm and said hurriedly: “Shouldn’t we keep this a secret?”

“Perhaps it would be better for you,” answered Neville after a moment. “You see the test is yet to come.” They passed into the hall and Neville went out to assist his mother from the carriage. As the great hall door opened a gust of icy air came in; the evening had grown bitterly cold. Mrs. Tremaine came up the steps with Neville’s arm around her, who, with the other arm, offered to assist the colonel, who repulsed him indignantly, meanwhile putting his arm around Neville’s neck.

“A pretty pass, sir, it is when you imply that I am too old to get up the steps alone. I defy you, sir, or any fellow of your age to dance the Virginia reel as long as I can. I observed you youngsters last night. None of you had the life and spirit in you of your elders. Upon my soul, the youngsters of to-day are the most solemn, old-maidish, milk-and-watery set I ever knew. You should have been with us in Mexico. Ah, my dearest Sophie, the dark eyes of those Mexican Señoritas haunt me still!” And the colonel slapped himself upon the heart, and ogled Mrs. Tremaine as if she were sixteen and he were twenty.

That night there was to be a party at Greenhill and, as early hours were the fashion, the Harrowby carriage was to start at seven o’clock to make the five miles to Greenhill. In a little while Lyddon with Richard and Archie appeared, and they all sat round the hall fire discussing the ball of the night before. Colonel Tremaine was charmed with Angela and Archie’s delightful surprise of playing “Dixie” for the first time and insisted that Archie should take his violin to Greenhill that night and repeat the performance.

Angela had a very good excuse for not appearing at supper, saying that she was obliged to dress. But this was something new on her part, because usually when Neville was at home she had to be dragged away from him in order to make her toilet if they were going to a party. Colonel Tremaine, who was an arrant sentimentalist, had noticed one or two things between Angela and Neville, and when Mrs. Tremaine was putting on her lace headdress in her bedroom, the colonel tapped at the door and asked her to step into his dressing room. Then, closing the door, he remarked: “My dearest Sophie, have you noticed anything of a suspicious nature, I mean an agreeably suspicious nature, between Angela and Neville?”

Mrs. Tremaine, gorgeous in blue satin, and adding a white feather to her headdress, stopped for a moment as if she had been shot, and put her hand to her heart. No woman ever hears with composure that she has been deposed from the throne in the heart of her favorite son. She remained silent for half a minute trying to collect her wits, for no such idea as that suggested by Colonel Tremaine had ever occurred to her before.

“No,” she said presently in a low voice. “I haven’t noticed anything. What have you observed, my dear?”

“Oh, only trifles, but they mark the beginning of love! Who should know them better than you and I?” The delicious flattery, the distinction of being made love to by a husband after more than thirty years of married life, was not lost on Mrs. Tremaine. When Colonel Tremaine added: “Should we not wish, my dearest Sophie, that our children should have the same happy married life that we have had?” Mrs. Tremaine smiled a faint, tremulous smile, and then Colonel Tremaine added: “Is it not much better that Neville’s future wife should already be a daughter to us? We have agreed that Neville shall inherit Harrowby, and how agreeable is the thought that there will be neither break nor intrusion between the present régime and those who are to inherit after us.”

There had ever been in Mrs. Tremaine’s mind a little haunting fear of the future unknown daughter-in-law, and at Colonel Tremaine’s words a deep feeling of relief and satisfaction came to her. Yes, if she were to yield her dominion, it was best to yield it to Angela, the child loved almost as her own, and who would carry out the traditions of Harrowby and make mango pickle by the same recipe which had been in Mrs. Tremaine’s family for more than a hundred years.

Although Angela had begun dressing before six o’clock, the whole family were assembled in the hall ready to start before she came downstairs. She wore a white gown and had a little pearl necklace around her milk-white throat. The dress set off her girlish beauty or rather promise of beauty, and the thought of being under Neville’s eye brought a wild-rose bloom to her usually pale cheeks.

“Why, Angela,” cried Archie, “you are really getting good-looking, and not half as ugly as you promised to be.” He was rewarded with a sisterly slap.

Lyddon, who usually had to be dragged to evening parties, went willingly enough now. He was immensely interested in the psychologic developments of the time and lost no opportunity of seeing these people together and studying how they were to meet the great convulsion ahead of them, but that it would be a great convulsion, they seemed totally unaware. Usually when the Harrowby family went to parties the carriage was reserved for Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine and Angela. Richard and Neville preferred a trap of their own, and Lyddon always elected to go with them. For some inscrutable reason whenever the Harrowby carriage went out at night Hector occupied the box instead of the regular coachman, Colonel Tremaine protesting that he would rather be driven by Hector drunk than any other man sober. The result was, however, that on the return journey, Colonel Tremaine invariably had to sit on the box beside Hector, who to Lyddon’s mind by no means deserved Colonel Tremaine’s good opinion of his driving when tipsy, and who had upset the carriage more than once. But the custom had been by no means upset, and Lyddon, not caring to risk his neck in such circumstances, always elected to go with the young men of the family. When Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine and Angela stood before the old-fashioned coach, new when Mrs. Tremaine was married, Neville helped his mother and Angela in; then Colonel Tremaine got in and Neville to everybody’s surprise took the fourth seat. “The fact is,” he said coolly, “I don’t mean to lose one minute of being with you, mother and father, and Angela.”

Angela sat back mute in her corner of the carriage while Colonel Tremaine observed with equal coolness: “It is most gratifying, my son, that you should be with us; perhaps the society of our charming Angela may have something to do with it.”

“It has a great deal to do with it,” replied Neville boldly. That was enough for Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine to understand all. No word was spoken, but Mrs. Tremaine put her arm around Angela and then Neville leaned over and kissed his mother. Their hearts were full of love and peace, except Angela’s. She felt a secret dissatisfaction; the pain of a coming disappointment and with it a sharp self-reproach, and all were so affectionate to her, so full of tenderness, it flashed upon her that she was a penniless orphan and that she was being welcomed in her new relation as if she had brought with her a royal dowry. This thought only made her feel like an ingrate. Her silence was attributed to bashfulness, and Colonel Tremaine, meaning to relieve her, began to talk with Neville of the coming national struggle. Neville listened attentively and responded with animation. Only Angela noticed that he made no promise of resigning from the army when the crisis should come.

The party at Greenhill was a replica of the one at Harrowby. The Greenhill house was almost as spacious, and held the same people who had assembled the night before; the supper, the fiddlers, and all were exactly the same. Angela was a great belle, as she excelled in dancing, and her little feet twinkled the night through. Neville danced with her twice, whispering to her, “Don’t you remember the story my father tells about having danced ten consecutive quadrilles with my mother at a ball at Greenhill, and being very much surprised when the report got around that they were engaged?”

Angela smiled. She knew all of these old family jokes quite as well as Neville did. There could be no revelations between them.

Again was the coming war the absorbing topic of conversation among the older people, while the young men whispered sentimentally to the girls concerning the coming separation when all of these gallants expected to return covered with glory. No one asked any direct question of Neville, as it was understood that he was in honor bound to remain in the United States Army until the secession of Virginia, and after that his resignation was supposed to be as voluntary on his part as it was inevitable. Again the dance broke up while the pallid moon was struggling with the ghostly dawn. Colonel Tremaine, as usual, mounted the box on starting for home, as Hector was in his customary state of exhilaration after a party, and saw four horses before him where there were only two. Not, however, until the carriage had been driven into a ditch did Colonel Tremaine take the reins from Hector, who with folded arms and profound indignation declared according to his invariable formula: “’Fo’ Gord, I ain’t teched a drap.”

That day there was a hunting party and a dinner afterwards at Barn Elms, an estate half across the county. Angela rode with Neville, but there was little time for lovers’ colloquy in the midst of a screeching run after the hounds, an uproarious country dinner, and the return afterwards by the light of the stars. The last evening of Neville’s stay was spent at Harrowby, and the tenderness of his parents toward him seemed redoubled. Angela, Richard, and Lyddon all knew that might be the last night which Neville would ever spend under that roof, but Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine were blindly unsuspecting. At half past nine, when the family assembled for prayers in the library as usual and Mrs. Tremaine asked God’s blessing upon “our son now departing from us,” her voice broke a little, and Angela, glancing toward Neville, saw that he was pale, and his eyes, the resolute eyes of a soldier, were wet with tears. He went upstairs with his father and mother and sat by his mother’s dressing table while Mammy Tulip, according to immemorial custom, brushed and plaited Mrs. Tremaine’s hair, still abundant although streaked with silver. Neville was to leave at daylight and mother and son would meet again, but this was their last chance for that soft intercourse which Mrs. Tremaine had ever maintained with her sons as with her husband. Mrs. Tremaine felt the delicate homage which Neville paid her in giving her this last hour, and when Mammy Tulip had left the room, held out her hand to Neville and said sweetly: “My son, we see how it is between you and Angela, and your father and I will take care of her for you.”

Neville drew his chair up to his mother’s, and the mother and son talked together as they had done when Neville was a little bright-eyed boy and Mrs. Tremaine was almost as slender as Angela. Neville’s heart was in his mouth. He dreaded every moment that Mrs. Tremaine would ask him the direct question of what he meant to do when the State seceded and he knew that no kind of evasion would serve him then. But Mrs. Tremaine, like Colonel Tremaine, took everything for granted. While they were still sitting together Colonel Tremaine came in from his dressing room. In the old days that had been the signal that the boys should leave, and Neville, remembering this, rose to go.

“Never mind, my son,” said the colonel. “You may remain a while longer.”

“I thought it was contrary to regulations,” answered Neville, placing a chair for his father.

“Oh, the regulations are suspended on this, your last night at home. I will say, however, if it hadn’t been for my discipline, you and your brothers would long since have worn your mother to a thread with your demonstrative affection.” The colonel’s discipline had always consisted in letting his sons do exactly as they had pleased, and their demonstrative affection was directly inherited from him. All this Mrs. Tremaine knew perfectly well and smiled, but, like a discreet wife, permitted the colonel to think that it was his iron hand which had kept everything in order at Harrowby. In the study below, Lyddon and Richard Tremaine sat smoking while Archie in a corner by the fireplace dreamily played his fiddle. Angela, whose bedtime was supposed to be when Mrs. Tremaine went upstairs, flitted in and out of the room. She felt it due to Neville that she should give him a little time before that last hurried parting at dawn the next morning. Presently the sound of Neville’s step in the hall was heard. Archie stopped his fiddling and cried: “There’s Neville! I want to see him again to-night. I’m going to ask him to send me a new bird gun like the one he had here last year.”

“Stay where you are, you little whipper-snapper,” said Richard with authority.

“What for?” asked Archie, wondering. Richard looked at Lyddon and then answered Archie.

“Because Neville is with Angela, you little idiot.”

“Well, suppose he is,” answered the unsuspecting Archie. “Angela’s always with Neville for that matter.” And Richard, rising and taking him by the back of his neck, plumped him down in a chair and told him to stay there until his brother should come in. In a little while Neville entered, and Archie began on the subject of the bird gun, which Neville promised to send to him, and then the boy went off to bed.

The three men, left together with cigars and whisky and a good fire, settled themselves for a symposium such as they had enjoyed a thousand times before. As Lyddon looked at the two young men before him, a sense of impending disaster suddenly overwhelmed him. The thought of a break in this family, so passionately attached to each other, so much in sympathy, was poignant to him. Strangely enough he felt and saw that in this case the tie of brotherhood would stand a greater strain than that even of fatherhood or motherhood. Richard Tremaine had a largeness of mind which was totally unknown to Colonel Tremaine, and Mrs. Tremaine never pretended to think; she only felt. The talk inevitably drifted toward the state of public affairs. Richard Tremaine was the only man in the whole county so far as Lyddon knew who had any just appreciation of the magnitude of the coming conflict. Richard coolly reckoned upon the war lasting until one side or the other was exhausted—the North in money, the South in men. Neville naturally looked at it with the eye of a military man. There all was chaos. Neville was too good a student of military history to underrate the strength of five million homogeneous people fighting upon their own ground. He had observed that the North had the same undervaluation of the fighting strength of the South which the South unquestionably had of the North. He spoke of this. “Those dangerous delusions,” he said, “will soon pass away on both sides, then will come a struggle the like of which has not often been seen. If the United States had a trained army of two or three hundred thousand men to start with, the result could be better predicated. As it is, great multitudes of men on both sides will have to be trained to be soldiers and the real fighting won’t begin until that is done.” This was controverted by Richard, who believed that the Southern armies would need far less training than the Northern, and that the first successes of the South would be so brilliant as to stagger the North and incline it for peace. Lyddon listened, occasionally interjecting a word. The discussion, earnest but not bitter, lasted until near midnight, when Richard, rising, said to Neville:

“Come along, old boy, you must have some sleep before starting.” The two went off, their arms around each other’s necks as Lyddon had often seen them in their boyhood, and passed into their little low-ceiled rooms next the study. As Lyddon followed them to his own room, he heard Neville rousing Peter, who lay asleep on the hearth rug before Richard’s fire. One of the continuing marvels to Lyddon was this universal practice of the negroes making the fire at night in the bedrooms and then lying down and going to sleep on the hearth rug. None of them so far as Lyddon knew had yet been burnt up, but why any of them had escaped, he never could understand.

Next morning in the ghostly dawning hour, Neville Tremaine left his father’s roof. His farewell to his mother and her last blessing had been given him in her bedroom. Angela met him on the landing of the stair and gave him a shy parting kiss. They went down together into the hall where Colonel Tremaine, Lyddon, Richard, and Archie and a crowd of servants waited to tell him good-by. The farewells were hurried, as there was no time to spare. Neville said little, but under his self-control he was inwardly agitated. When he was in the act of stepping into the trap, Richard holding in two impatient horses, Neville turned back to grasp his father’s hand once more. At the same moment an old, blind hound came up to Neville and putting a humble, deprecating paw upon Neville’s knee, licked his hand, whining mournfully meanwhile. It seemed to Neville a sad portent.

“Good-by, father,” he said. “If you should never shake hands with me again, remember if I haven’t been as good a son as I should be, no son ever loved a father and mother better than I loved you and my mother.”

Colonel Tremaine, holding Neville’s hand, grew a little pale; some premonition of Neville’s meaning flashed upon him. He could only say brokenly: “You have ever been the best of sons to us.” And the next moment Neville was gone.

CHAPTER V
THE HOUR OF FATE

THE beginning of the fateful year of 1861 was full of events as dramatic as they were stupendous. State after State left the Union, her representatives withdrawing from the floors of Congress and her naval and military officers promptly resigning from the service of the United States. While these extraordinary and momentous changes were taking place all eyes were fixed upon the great State of Virginia, standing sentinel at the gateway between the North and the South. In case of Civil War all the world knew that she would be the battle ground. Her fields, rich and peaceful, where the harvesters had gleaned for two hundred years, would be drenched with blood and be swept by hurricanes of fire; the primeval woods over which an eternal peace had brooded would be torn by shot and riven by shell. The quiet towns would be starved and beleaguered and the placid country harried by fire and sword. Her people, who in the nineteenth century still lived in the calm and isolation of the eighteenth century and who had fallen into a happy lethargy, were to be suddenly transformed into an army of fighting men, and her women were to work and pray by night and day. Out of their placidity, which often degenerated into slothfulness, was to be evolved an almost superhuman energy. Her resources for war and siege would have been insignificant except that she held in reserve, ready to sacrifice at a moment’s notice, all the blood, all the powers, and all the possessions of a race justly described as a strong, resolute, and ofttimes violent people.

By the opening of the year 1861 there was no longer doubt of what these people meant to do; but they thought and acted slowly, and they were long in doing what they had resolved from the beginning to do. Early in February a call had been issued for a convention to meet at Richmond to determine the destiny of Virginia. Richard Tremaine announced his candidacy for the honor of representing his county in this convention. He was so young, being barely twenty-seven years of age, that if he should get the suffrages of the people he would certainly be the youngest man in the whole assembly to which he aspired. His claims, however, put forward as they were with modesty and dignity, were received with favor.

Richard Tremaine, himself, with the self-command of a well-balanced mind, was able to disguise the gratification he felt at the prospect before him. Not so his womenkind or Colonel Tremaine, who was never tired of quoting the triumphs of William Pitt and Henry Clay at Richard’s age and confidently predicted these triumphs would be paralleled in Richard’s case. Lyddon would not have been surprised at any great thing which Richard Tremaine might achieve either in public life or in war. Richard had fully made up his mind, even if he should be elected to the convention, he would resign as soon as decisive action was taken and enter the military service of the Confederacy. He had already begun the study of strategy and tactics and especially of artillery. Lyddon, helping and admiring, could only compare Richard’s mind to a beacon light moving upon a pivot which illuminated every object upon which it was concentrated. Never had Lyddon in all his life before lived so strenuous an intellectual life as from the Christmas of 1860 until the February day when he rode with Richard Tremaine from one polling place to another in the county only to feel assured long before the votes were counted that Richard Tremaine had triumphed over men of twice his age and twenty times his actual experience. Lyddon, however, had no distrust of young men and particularly in the great coming crisis when the theory of the government of the people was to be put upon trial. He thought it the time for men in the full flush of energy and with the splendid philosophy of youth to come to the front.

In those weeks since Christmas, life had gone on in outward quiet at Harrowby. Immediately after the Christmas time all dancing and frolicking in the county had suddenly come to an end. In one psychic moment the people realized that they had great business in hand. The women became more thoughtful and yet more enthusiastic than the men, and patriotism with them speedily assumed the form of a religion. This was singularly marked in the ladies of Harrowby. No human beings can live in the closeness of intimacy of the Harrowby family without a prescience concerning each other. A dreadful doubt had begun to haunt Mrs. Tremaine concerning Neville, her best beloved—he might give his sword not to his State, but to her enemies. Mrs. Tremaine dared not put this fear in words even to Colonel Tremaine. The same grim suspicion was likewise haunting him. He avoided Mrs. Tremaine’s eyes when they spoke together of Neville, each striving to hide from the other this specter which walked with them and sat at meat with them and was always within touch of them by day and by night. In the wintry afternoons when Mrs. Tremaine paced up and down the Ladies’ Walk a certain number of times, according to her daily habit for more than thirty years, those who approached her saw a strange expression on her face—an expression of fear and anxiety. Colonel Tremaine, watching her from his library window, forebore to go out and join her as he usually did, but instead strode restlessly like a caged lion up and down the library. Mrs. Tremaine, observing his figure as he passed the window, knew that the same fear was gnawing at his heart as at hers—the fear that their eldest-born should prove a renegade and a traitor, for so both parents considered the question of Neville’s remaining in the army.

As the weeks wore on the tension of minds grew more acute, and it soon came to the point that Lyddon could no longer openly express his political views, which were totally opposed to slavery; the Southern people allowed no man freedom of conscience in the matter. Slavery, which for the first thirty years of the century had been frankly condemned and anxiously sought to be abolished by Washington, Jefferson, and all thinking men in the State, had in the next thirty years fastened itself, in all its monstrosity, upon the body politic and had stifled remonstrance. As John Randolph said: “The South had a wolf by the ears and was afraid to let go and afraid to hold on”; but as their fear of letting go was greater than their fear of holding on, they held on until they were half-devoured by this wolf called Slavery.

Lyddon, watching and observing, could not speak his mind on the past and future of slavery even to Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine. Until then Lyddon’s views had been accepted with good-humored tolerance and looked upon as the cranky notions of a stranger from beyond the ocean seas. Now, however, the matter had become too acute, too exquisitely painful, and after one or two fierce contradictions from the usually mild-mannered Colonel Tremaine, followed by profuse apologies, Lyddon sat silent whenever the subject of the coming war was under discussion. But he could still talk with Richard Tremaine and to Lyddon’s sardonic amusement with Angela. She was, of course, red-hot for the South, but condescended to exchange views with Lyddon sometimes on the subject when they sat together on winter evenings in the study. The Harrowby family had long ago instinctively formed itself into three groups—Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine, whose habitat was the colonel’s big library full of unread books, Lyddon with Richard and Neville, when he was at home, in the study, and Angela and Archie, who were graduated from the nursery, also in the study as the schoolroom.

The habit still kept up, and while in the big, handsome library Mrs. Tremaine in the evenings stitched thread cambric ruffles for the colonel’s shirt fronts and Colonel Tremaine read aloud to her from the “Lake Poets,” a practice that he had formed during their courtship days when between compliments and lovemaking, he had read to her the whole of Wordsworth’s “Excursion.” At the same hour in the evening Angela and Archie were supposed to be learning their lessons in the study, which after they went to bed was given over to smoking and the talk of grown-ups like Lyddon and Richard. Archie had always depended upon Angela to help him with his lessons and although she no longer studied regularly herself, she was always there to encourage Archie. While the boy with his fingers in his ears was struggling with his Latin and Greek, Angela would listen to Lyddon and flash back at him those quick intuitive truths which women acquire without knowing how they do it. As Lyddon often quoted to Angela:

“A man with much labor and difficulty climbs to the top of a high mountain; when he arrives he finds a woman there already, but she could not tell to save her life how she got there.”

“But she is there all the same, Mr. Lyddon,” Angela would reply with demure eyes and a saucy smile.

Neville’s letters, as affectionate as ever, came regularly, for the mails with the North were not yet interrupted. These letters were brief. Neville had not Richard’s powers of language; he was distinctively a man of action, but he expressed himself with simplicity and vigor which is the embodiment of the best eloquence. Once a week Angela received from him a letter full of affection. It was a model love letter, quite beyond the power of the professedly accomplished letter writer. Angela read it with a blush not of pleasure but of that secret discomfort of which she was ashamed and actually afraid, and at this thought the discomfort increased. “Did ever any girl before feel as she did when receiving her lover’s letters?” she asked herself.

On the assembling of the convention Richard Tremaine left Harrowby for Richmond. As soon as the body assembled, the result of its deliberations were easily foreseen and from that day the whole of Virginia became a great camp of instruction. The initial steps were taken toward the organization of regiments. The women were not a whit behind in their eagerness to begin the work of equipping hospitals, of furnishing the soldiers with stockings and other comforts, and of raising funds for the presentation of flags to the different companies. Mrs. Tremaine, the soul of modesty and retirement, was the chief mover in all these plans and was ably seconded by Mrs. Charteris. The men were fiercely determined; the women were more fiercely indomitable. Colonel Tremaine at seventy-two and much troubled with rheumatism was full of military ardor, and proposed to take the field with Hector as soon as Virginia seceded. Hector did not receive this proposition with unalloyed delight, and argued with Colonel Tremaine.

“Ole Marse, you got de rheumatiz an’ I got de ager an’ we cyarn’ do much fightin’ when you is cussin’ de rheumatiz an’ my teef is rattlin’ wid de ager.”

“With cowardice, you mean, you black scoundrel,” answered Colonel Tremaine, who spoke his mind freely to Hector, although by no means allowing anyone else so great a liberty. “When I had you in Mexico, by gad, you had the ague every time you got within ten miles of a Mexican and you would run like a rabbit at the sight of a green uniform.”

“Good Gord A’might’, Marse! You done forgot——”

“No, I haven’t, sirrah, but when we go to fight the Yankees, I shall make it a point to keep you within ten feet of me whenever we are under fire.” As Colonel Tremaine was utterly insensible to fear, as Hector knew by sad experience, and bowed and scraped and flourished exactly the same when bullets were whistling around his head as when asking a lady to dance the Virginia reel, Hector was appalled at the prospect.

On a March day the lists for volunteers in the event of war were opened at the courthouse. Colonel Tremaine in high feather, mounted his horse and rode off to offer, as he magniloquently expressed it, “his sword to his State.” He was a fine rider and wore a handsome plum-colored riding dress with top-boots such as had been the fashion in 1830. About the same hour Archie mysteriously disappeared and when lesson time came could not be found high or low.

Lyddon was in the study standing with his back to the fire and wondering what had become of Archie when Angela entered. One look at her eloquent and speaking face revealed what no woman can conceal—that she had a secret. “I believe you know where the boy is,” said Lyddon.

“Yes,” replied Angela, coming up to him and laughing. “He is off to the courthouse to put his name down. Of course, he is not eighteen, but he means to swear he is.”

“Unluckily for him there are too many people in the county who know just how old he is.”

“Mrs. Charteris is quite inconsolable because George Charteris is only seventeen. She says she almost wishes the State would not secede until next year so that she would be able to contribute her only son to the Cause.”

“The women haven’t been like this since the Peloponnesian War, when the ladies of Sparta encouraged their sons to go forth to meet the Athenians and to return either with their shields or upon them. One would think that these Virginians were like those old Spartans who fashioned their doors with the sword and their ceilings with the ax.”

“I suppose,” said Angela, “it is in our blood. You see, we came to Virginia most of us after fighting in England; then, you see, we had to fight the Indians, and we had to fight the British twice, you know——”

“Oh, yes, I know, you Americans have regular Berserker outbreaks when nothing can keep you from fighting! This time, however, you will be obliged to fight. Nothing but a blood bath can rid you of slavery now.”

“And would you have us turn all these negroes out upon the cold world,” cried Angela, arguing as she had been taught. “What would become of Mammy Tulip! Who would give Uncle Hector his bread? Because neither one of them could earn it.”

“Quite true, my little girl. But you will see Peter and Mirandy and Lucy Ann and Sally and Jim Henry and Tasso and the rest of them all developing into Aunt Tulips and Uncle Hectors and eating up the substance of their masters.”

“Well, we won’t say anything more on that subject.”

“But you should be cautious in expressing your opinion in these dangerous times if things are as they appear to be between you and Neville.” It was the first time that Lyddon had ever alluded to the secret tie between Angela and Neville. Angela’s face grew pale when she should have blushed. She drew back and scrutinized Lyddon closely under her narrow lids with their long, dark lashes.

“Of course, Neville will go with his State,” she said after a pause. But there was no note of conviction in her voice.

“Don’t be sure of that; Neville will do what he thinks right, but his ideas may not be yours nor even those of his father and mother, and you must make up your mind in advance what to do when the hour of fate strikes. It will be asking more courage of you than even a courageous woman possesses, to take sides with Neville in case he remains in the United States Army.”

Lyddon, like Neville, had unwittingly touched the responsive cord in Angela’s heart. The idea that if she refused to stand by Neville she would be reckoned a coward was the strongest motive in the world to incline her to go with Neville.

Toward twelve o’clock Colonel Tremaine, accompanied by Archie, was seen coming down the lane and presently dismounted disconsolately. He was anxiously awaited by Hector, who had not the slightest desire to keep within ten feet of Colonel Tremaine in case the colonel’s military services should be accepted. Mrs. Tremaine and Angela were in the garden superintending the trimming up of the shrubbery and hastened to the gate to meet the returning absentees. Lyddon, who was sauntering about with a book in his pocket, came up to hear the history of the morning’s adventures. Peter was on hand to take the horses and as he had aspirations to “go wif Marse Richard to de war,” took the liberty after the negro fashion of listening to what his superiors had to say. But Peter’s interest was not a patch on Hector’s, whose black face had taken on a queer shade of ash color at the prospect of accompanying Colonel Tremaine upon a campaign.

“Well, my dearest Sophie,” said the colonel petulantly, as soon as Mrs. Tremaine had got through the garden gate, “I have been most unhandsomely treated this day, most unhandsomely, and by two men whom I regarded as lifelong friends and between whose ancestors and mine an intimacy of generations has subsisted. I allude to Dr. Yelverton and Colonel Carey.”

“They treated me as mean as dirt,” growled Archie.

“They did, my son?” asked Mrs. Tremaine.

“Yes, they treated this boy very ill. Colonel Carey, you know, aspires to the colonelcy of the regiment to be raised in the county and has got himself elected the head of the committee in charge of enlistments. Carey knows my record in the Mexican War perfectly well when I was his superior in rank. This morning when I reached the room in the clerk’s office where Carey was presiding over what he calls a board of enlistment or something of the sort, there I found this boy. All they had to do was to look at him to know that he is fully capable of bearing arms and accustomed to an outdoor life, but because he was not eighteen they simply refused to listen to him and told him to go back to his Latin grammar. This was most humiliating to the boy’s feelings.”

“It made me so mad I wanted to knock ’em both down,” cried Archie angrily.

“And were you going to enlist, my little boy?” said Mrs. Tremaine, the light of proud motherhood coming into her eyes. She put her arm around the boy’s neck and kissed him on his forehead.

“Yes, I was, mother, and I can shoot as straight as either Richard or Neville.”

Here Lyddon, who had come up, spoke. “That is true, my lad, but all experience proves that although boys like you can fight as well as men, they can’t march as well and they only fill up the hospitals.”

“But,” continued Colonel Tremaine, his wrath rising, “the language and conduct of Carey and Yelverton to me was far more exasperating. I did not attempt to disguise my age, seventy-two next September, but as hardy as any one of my sons. I took a high tone with Carey and I think he would have accepted my services. But then Yelverton, whom I have known as boy and man for nearly sixty-five years, who was born and brought up within four miles of Harrowby, took it upon himself to inform Carey that I had rheumatism, sciatica, lumbago, and half a dozen other diseases that I never heard of before, and absolutely laughed at the notion of my doing military duty; laughed in my face.”

“My hero,” said Mrs. Tremaine softly, as if she were sixteen and the colonel were twenty, while Angela, slipping her hand into Colonel Tremaine’s, kissed him on the cheek and said, “What a brave old warrior you are! If I were a Yankee I should certainly run when I saw you coming at me.”

The colonel’s list of injuries was not yet exhausted and he continued wrathfully: “But then what do you suppose I discovered? Yelverton, whose age I know as well as mine—he will be sixty-four this very month—I find had already enlisted as surgeon and proposes to accompany the troops to the front. I am as robust a man as Yelverton, more so, in fact, and told him so to his face when I found out his unhandsome conduct. Anthony Yelverton is young enough to serve in the Southern Army, but I am not.” The colonel struck himself dramatically in the breast with his left hand, while his right arm, stiffly extended, held his riding crop as if it were a sword. Mrs. Tremaine duly condoled with the colonel upon Dr. Yelverton’s reprehensible conduct.

One of those present, however, heard with unmixed satisfaction of the result of the colonel’s expedition. This was Hector, who, as soon as he found there was no chance of the colonel’s going to war, professed the most reckless valor and assumed the air of a military daredevil. “Never you min’, ole Marse,” he said, confidentially, “me’be you an’ me kin run ’way an’ jine de army. Doan’ you ’member de song dey used to sing in de Mex’can War, ‘Ef you wants to have a good time, jine de cava’ry!’”

“Yes, you black rascal, I do, and I also remember that I had to drag you by the hair of your head from Harrowby to the City of Mexico, but nobody made better time than you coming back.”

This was deeply mortifying to Hector repeated in the presence of Peter, who thrust his tongue in his cheek and winked disrespectfully at Hector, which caused the latter to say viciously: “You teck dem ho’ses to de stables right ’way, you black nigger. When Marse Richard gwine to de war I lay he teck me stid you.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Angela, putting her arm through Archie’s, “if you and Uncle Tremaine didn’t both run away together some day, but anyhow Harrowby has two men to give the State, Richard and Neville.”

A short silence followed. Mrs. Tremaine looked down upon the ground, and Colonel Tremaine’s troubled eyes turned from the frank and questioning looks of Archie and Angela and Lyddon’s inscrutable gaze. Nobody knew whether Harrowby had two men to defend Virginia or whether there was but one, while the other should draw his sword to shed the blood of his brethren.

CHAPTER VI
THE QUAKING OF THE EARTH

WITH the opening of the books of enlistment the whole county caught fire. When the people met at the old Petworth Church on Sundays there was nothing but talk of the coming war. The sermons of Mr. Brand, the rector, were one long war cry against the Yankees and exhortations to go forth and fight to the death in the great cause of States’ Rights. The clergyman was remorselessly badgered by Mrs. Charteris, who had extorted from him the secret of his age, which was considerably over forty-five. Dr. Yelverton, who, in spite of his sixty-five years, thought Mrs. Charteris, who was not yet forty years old, none too young for him, immediately grew in favor with the lady. Mrs. Charteris had played them off one against the other with consummate skill for fifteen years. But when the trumpet of war resounded and Mr. Brand elected to stay at home, while Dr. Yelverton, examining himself as a surgeon, pronounced himself entirely fit for duty in the army, he at once gained a tremendous lead in the lady’s favor.

George Charteris, the only son of his mother, was at school near Baltimore, but by command of Mrs. Charteris he was to make straight for Greenhill as soon as Virginia should secede.

All the boys in the county of Archie Tremaine’s and George Charteris’s age were burning to enlist and formed companies of their own, studying and drilling with the utmost ardor. The interest in events was not confined to the white people. The negroes, knowing that the whole future of their race depended upon the issue of the coming struggle, took a feverish, furtive interest in the unfolding of each day’s happenings and listened slyly to all that was said by the white people. At night they collected at their quarters and, sitting around in a ring, listened to what the house servants had to tell them of the talk that went on at the “gret house.” They were no longer permitted to visit the different estates freely at night, but were kept as far as possible from communicating with each other. Lyddon saw this and trembled for the fate of the women and children to be left defenseless in the power of the black race, and thought the white people madly optimistic when they expressed no fear whatever of the negroes in case of war—a confidence which was nobly sustained when the hour came.

The outward peace was not broken; Lyddon had ever thought lowland Virginia the most entirely peaceful spot he had ever known in his life, but the earthquake was at hand. He said this to Angela, who in Richard’s absence in Richmond attending the convention had come to be the only person to whom Lyddon could speak his mind freely.

“You have always been restless and yearning for something to happen,” he said to her one day in the garden as she was snipping dead twigs off a rose bush. “But you won’t be able to complain of that any more; stupendous things will happen and that very shortly.”

Angela’s eyes flashed with pleasure. “I don’t mind things happening,” she said. “I have red blood in me; I don’t like stagnation.” Lyddon, looking at her, felt pity welling up in his heart; the pity which maturity, having already suffered, feels for youth—pathetic youth, which has still to suffer. Whether Angela went with Neville or against him it would be hard for her. The idea of turning against Neville would be to her as if the sun rose in the west or water ran uphill. She had for him a sublimated friendship which was like love and yet was not love.

The mail came only three times a week and every mail brought long letters from Richard in Richmond. He told precisely the progress of events in the convention, the efforts of the Peace Commission, the calm hearing given to the men who wished Virginia to stay in the Union; but he never changed his opinion that the State would secede and that the day of blood was at hand.

Neville’s letters began to be irregular; only two were received from him in March and one in April. He spoke of others which he had written, but which had never been received. When Mrs. Tremaine opened these letters her face always grew pale, and it was paler still when she had finished reading them and passed them over to Colonel Tremaine. Angela read hers, too, in silence; she could not be expected to show them to anyone, but she spoke no word indicating any knowledge of what Neville meant to do.

Neville’s last letter came the middle of April. Lyddon, who had ridden to the post office, handed it to Angela in the study. She was sitting at the window reading, and Lyddon as he came in thought her a charming picture of youth and happiness. She wore a gown the color of the iris which was blooming in the box upon the window sill, for Angela claimed the right to put her flowerpots in the study windows. The April day was warm and bright, and the sunny air which was wafted in at the window had in it the intoxication of the spring. Angela’s book evidently amused her, for she was laughing as she raised her eyes to Lyddon’s when he held out the letter. Instantly her face clouded. She broke the seal and read her letter rapidly. But more rapid was the change which came over her. She sat quite still for a long time looking at the letter lying in her lap, and then, pale and quiet, rose and passed out of the room.

Meanwhile the April sky had suddenly clouded, and a few heavy drops of rain like tears had begun to fall. Lyddon’s heart ached for the girl. She was different to him from any human being he had ever known. The simile which so often occurred to him came back with strange force—that he was a gardener cultivating an exquisite flower for some one else. He had cultivated already two sturdy trees in Richard and Neville and a beautiful hardy sapling in Archie, but never before had he trained a flower in the person of a young girl. Her acquirements, which would have been nothing in a man, were extraordinary for a woman, and Lyddon in view of this would have been alarmed for her except that she understood and practiced housewifery well, was devotedly fond of music, loved to dance, and like the normal woman made dress a species of religion. Thus were the sweet femininities maintained.

Lyddon realized one price which Angela had to pay for the training he had given her—she had no intimate girl friends. She had plenty of girl companions—Dr. Yelverton’s granddaughters, Colonel Carey’s daughters; but there was no real community of soul between these young creatures and Angela. These other girls were satisfied with the quiet country life in which they dwelt as their mothers and grandmothers had dwelt, but their ideas of splendor were confined to a larger house and more servants than they possessed at present and to an annual trip to the White Sulphur Springs. Not so Angela Vaughn. She longed for palaces and parks and for the mysterious joys and splendors which she imagined therein could be found. The Greeks were her soul ancestors, and she had an adoration for beauty in form, color, and sound. She made Lyddon, who was quite insensible to music, repeat to her all the details of the few operas to which he had been dragged and which had bored him to excess during his European life. Richard’s years in Paris and Neville’s visits to New York and Saratoga had filled Angela’s girlish heart with longing, a longing which Mrs. Tremaine thought positively wicked and the girls of Angela’s acquaintance considered eminently foolish.

Lyddon, in his profession as a trainer of youth, had always reckoned as a positive detriment any education which segregated a human being from his fellows. He had reckoned all education which is totally derived from books as light without warmth. He had good reason for this belief, his own passion for books having separated him from men in general and having quenched in him most of the living and vivifying emotions. He had not been able to quench love, although he had hid it in a sepulcher and closed the door with a great stone. It was his fate, not having children of his own, to love the children of others and when he had grown to love them, they slipped easily from his grasp, except Richard and Neville Tremaine. But Lyddon believed that he should still hold to Archie and to that charming child Angela, for he could never reckon Angela as wholly grown up. There was an eternal simplicity about her, the frankness of a child in which Lyddon had never perceived any change from the time she wore pinafores.

Lyddon, thinking these thoughts, stood before the study window watching the changing April day, alternately fair and stormy. He felt convinced from Angela’s face on reading her letter that she was struggling with the great problem of whether she should stand by Neville or abandon him. Lyddon, whose knowledge of her was acute, and who knew the generous impulses of her nature, believed she would stand by Neville. But would she be happy in so doing? Ah, of that he was very far from certain! No one but Angela and himself knew that she had received a letter from Neville and the silence maintained about it proved that the letter contained something painful. At dinner that day Angela sat silent and constrained until rallied by Archie; she then assumed her usual air of gayety. In the afternoon she went for a long walk alone and coming back at twilight paced up and down the garden until Mrs. Tremaine sent a message out to her that she must come in because the night was damp and chilly. The long walk at the end of the garden, where the old wooden bench sat against the wall and the gnarled and twisted lilacs flourished in green old age, was as much Angela’s beat as the Ladies’ Walk was Mrs. Tremaine’s. She passed Lyddon on the stairs as she went up to her room to make ready for supper, and her face was so wan and woe-begone that Lyddon felt sorry for her. At supper, however, she appeared in her usual spirits. She had brought back from her walk in the woods some sprays of the trailing arbutus and wore them in her shining hair.

The talk as usual was about the coming war. The Richmond newspapers had been received that day, and Lyddon had got his English newspapers. Colonel Tremaine inquired about the state of opinion in England concerning the outbreak of civil war in America, and although Lyddon was guarded in his replies Colonel Tremaine became irritated by them. While the brief discussion lasted Lyddon was confirmed in a suspicion concerning the negroes. They were intently listening and watching all that went on, and the white family was never left alone. Formerly at meal times with Hector, Tasso, and Jim Henry to wait it was sometimes difficult to get any one of them in the room. Tasso and Jim Henry would be engaged in transporting from the kitchen hot batter cakes, hot muffins, and all the other varieties of hot bread of which the formula invariably was, “Take two and butter them while they are hot.” Meanwhile, Hector would be in the pantry resting himself from the arduous labors of directing Tasso and Jim Henry. But now one or the other of the subordinates was always at hand. Lyddon was convinced that they were the purveyors of news to all the negroes on the plantation. There was a bell on the back porch, and every one of the twenty-five servants engaged in the house, the garden, and the stables had a number. Sometimes Lyddon had known the whole gamut of this bell to be rung before a single servant appeared on the spot, but now they were always at hand.

Usually in these discussions of the coming war Angela took a prominent part. She wished to be like the maidens of Sparta and thought she could have done the act of Charlotte Corday, and talked enthusiastically of nursing, like a Sister of Mercy, soldiers in the hospitals. To-night, however, she seemed not interested in that subject, but willing to talk on any other. After supper Archie got out his violin and the two played together as usual. They generally wound up their performances with “Dixie,” but to-night Angela omitted it. No one noticed this except Lyddon.

As she took her candle from the hall table she went to the fireplace and, holding the candle above her head, studied the picture of Penelope and the Suitors. Seeing Lyddon coming out of the study she turned quickly and went upstairs. Lyddon, who was a bad sleeper, waked in the middle of the night and, going to the window to look at the night sky, saw that candles were still burning in Angela’s room. He lighted the lamp at his bedside and read an hour and then went again to the window. Angela’s light was still burning. Lyddon’s heart ached for her.

It was then the middle of April. Two days afterwards when the Richmond newspapers arrived it was proclaimed that the Federal Government had called on Virginia for her quota of troops to subdue the seceding States. This at once forced the issue. The convention then went into secret session, and the beginning of the crisis was at hand. The tension of men’s minds grew fiercely acute. Colonel Tremaine no longer sent to the post office for the letters, but went himself, riding hard both ways. At any moment now Virginia might be riven from the Union. Every mail brought a long letter from Richard Tremaine. Any day, any hour, might bring the great news; but as fate generally wills it the unexpected happened.

One evening, just as the soft spring night had closed in and the Harrowby family were assembled in the hall waiting for the announcement of supper, a sudden wild commotion was heard at the hall door. Archie ran and opened it. Outside a crowd of negroes were delightedly welcoming and “howdying” Richard Tremaine. He flung himself off his horse, ran up the steps, burst into the hall, and waving his hat in the air cried out in a ringing voice, “Hurrah for States’ Rights! Yesterday afternoon the deed was done. Virginia is out of the Union forever.” He clasped his mother with his left arm while he seized his father’s hand, who said solemnly:

“God save the Commonwealth.”

As soon as the first greetings were over an account was demanded of the portentous event of the day before, all hanging on Richard’s words. As he spoke in his clear resonant voice, his countenance full of animation, Lyddon who stood on the edge of the group fell in love with his pupil over again. Richard Tremaine had the best sort of masculine beauty—the beauty of grace, strength and skill. His eyes, a light penetrating blue, had a lambent fire in them and seemed to illuminate his speech.

“It was the most solemn scene that could be imagined,” he said. “After four days of secret session, in which we wrestled together like gladiators, the striking of the clock told us that the hour had come. When the presiding officer’s gavel fell and he asked, ‘Shall this ordinance pass?’ there was not a dry eye in the assemblage. I felt the tears warm upon my face and was ashamed of my weakness, thinking that I was acting the boy after all among those graybeards. Then suddenly I looked up; the presiding officer was in tears and made no secret of it. The clerk who called the roll, an old man with long white hair, could not control the trembling of his voice. As each name was spoken I saw a strange sight, a man unable to give his vote without tears upon his face. It was the most moving, the most extraordinary sight ever witnessed in the legislative body. Not a sound was heard except the calling of the roll and the ‘aye’ or the ‘no’ which answered. There were fifty-five ‘noes.’ When my name was reached I meant to shout out the ‘aye’ but I couldn’t; all was too deathlike, too solemn. At last the final vote was recorded and then it was as if a cable had snapped; it was like the change from the funeral dirge to the quick step of a march past. A great shout went up—I found my voice then. I couldn’t think as wisely as some of those old men, but I could cheer louder than any of them. I wish I could make you see and feel the solemnity, the strangeness, the intoxication of that hour. Our vote didn’t take us into the Confederacy, although it severed us from the Union. We stood midway between them ready, like Quintus Curtius, to leap into the abyss. Oh, how great a thing it is to live in this time!”

Lyddon’s eye left for a moment Richard’s eloquent face and traveled round the hall. At the doors dark faces were peering in. The negroes were listening breathlessly to that which meant as much to them as to the race which mastered them.

“As soon as an adjournment was reached,” Richard continued, “I asked for a week’s leave and got it. I wanted to be the first man in Virginia to enlist in the army and I believe I can make it. By the way, I hear from Philip Isabey that he was the first man to enlist in Louisiana and has been elected captain of the first battery of artillery raised in the State.”

So far not one word had been spoken of Neville. Richard, looking about him, suddenly realized this and then in a cool voice asked, “What news is there from my brother?”

There was a silence for a moment or two and then Colonel Tremaine said tremulously, “There is no news from your brother.”

At the same moment all became conscious of the peering and listening negroes. Richard at once said carelessly, “We shall probably see Neville in a few days. He can easily sail up from Fort Monroe where he was last week when I had a short note from him brought by private hand.” Richard took the note out and handed it to his mother. Her hands trembled a little as she read it. It was brief, merely saying he was well and had heard good news from home and expecting to be at Harrowby within the week. Then they trooped into supper. Richard’s story was not yet half told and he had to answer innumerable questions from Colonel Tremaine. Mrs. Tremaine sat strangely silent, her brooding eyes turning toward her right, where at table was Neville’s place. Through it all Angela, too, remained singularly silent. The reins of discipline which Mrs. Tremaine had held strictly enough over Neville and Richard had been relaxed in the case of the Benjamin of her flock and Angela, the child of her adoption, and they were generally audible as well as visible. Not so Angela to-night. She sat quiet and Lyddon thought stunned by what was happening around her.

Archie then brought forth his tale of injuries in not being allowed to enlist. Richard good-naturedly cuffed him and reminded him that he was but a baby in years.

After supper was served, Colonel Tremaine called for champagne. A bottle was fetched by Hector, who took occasion to remark, “Dis heah is outen de las’ basket. I speck you hav’ to order sum mo’, old Marse.”

“I do not expect to order any more champagne at present,” remarked Colonel Tremaine grimly.

“And the few bottles which are left,” added Mrs. Tremaine, “must be saved for the hospitals.”

Colonel Tremaine then rose and all at the table followed his example. “Let us drink,” he said, “to the cause of the South.” A ringing cheer which the listening negroes heard burst from Archie as they all drank.

Richard had so much to tell that the family sat up unusually late listening to him, and it was near midnight before he and Lyddon went to the old study for their usual smoke and talk. Richard’s enthusiasm had by no means expended itself. “I know what you are thinking, Mr. Lyddon,” he said, standing in his familiar argumentative attitude, his back to the fireplace and his arms folded.

“Yes,” replied Lyddon, lighting his pipe. “Yesterday you performed a great act. You sounded the death knell of slavery, you have emancipated yourselves and your children forever from that curse.”

“So we may have done. The fathers of the Republic sought to emancipate us and when we can act freely and without fear of Northern coercion we shall perhaps follow the council of the patriarchs, but never under threats, by God!” The two talked animatedly for a couple of hours. Lyddon had feared that Richard, beguiled by the glamour of a soldier’s life, would choose the army as a permanent career while in truth his greater gifts lay in the domain of statecraft. But Lyddon’s mind was relieved by Richard’s saying that he felt no inclination to adopt a military life permanently.

Then as the case always was with Lyddon, their talk fell upon books. Richard took down a battered volume and was reading aloud to Lyddon what both knew by heart, the story of that Athenian night when Agatho returned with the prize of Tragedy from the Olympian games and the symposium was held at the house of Phædrus, and when the night was far spent Alcibiades coming in with the tipsy crowd of Greek boys swore that Socrates should drink two measures of wine to every other man’s one; and Socrates, accepting this challenge, drank them all under the table except Aristodemus, the old physician, and when day broke Socrates after taking a bath went and taught philosophy in the groves while the dew was still wet upon the grass.

As Lyddon and Richard Tremaine laughed over this old tale time went backward. They forgot the storm and stress of to-day, the rise and fall of empires, the fierce combat of body and soul in which the human race had struggled for almost three thousand years since that Hellenic night. Again they lived the life of those undying Greeks, and Richard, who drew cleverly, was making a pen-and-ink sketch of the beautiful tipsy Alcibiades when he suddenly laid down his pen and said after listening for a moment, “There’s Neville. I hear a boat grating against the wharf.”