The victory

by Molly Elliot Seawell

Isabey pulled up his horse. One more hateful thing remained to be done—the delivery of General Farrington’s letter to Angela.

“I have a letter to give from General Farrington,” said Isabey gently. “I need not say that nothing could induce me to give you such a letter except the compulsion which is laid upon a soldier.”

He took the letter from his breast pocket and handed it to Angela, who opened and glanced at it, her face lighting up with anger and scorn as she read. Then, tearing the letter in half, she threw it violently from her and, turning to Isabey, said in a trembling voice: “I feel sorry that you should have been forced to give me such a letter. I know what it must have cost you.”

“Thank you for saying so,” replied Isabey. “And let me speak one more word. I would ask you not to say anything to Neville concerning the reasons for your departure from Harrowby. It would give him deep and unnecessary pain. Forgive me for mentioning this.”

In the storm and stress of the last twenty-four hours the thought had vanished from Angela’s mind. All at once it returned to her—that she was being driven away from the place of her birth and rearing by hatred and a persecuting suspicion. It roused in her soul a tempest of resentment and brought the beautiful angry blood to her cheeks.

“You need not ask my forgiveness,” she replied; “it is most thoughtful to remind me, for otherwise I might have told Neville and it would have been another pang for him, who has suffered so much. There are, however, a few persons in the world who could never believe me guilty of wrongdoing; Neville is one of them. No one who knows Neville will ever dare to say one word against me where he can hear of it. I shall always have the refuge of his love and confidence.”

Angela felt at that moment glad that she was on her way to Neville. She had ever fled to him in all her childish griefs and sorrows, and now, when the whole universe appeared changed to her, when she was brought face to face on the one hand with hate and obloquy and on the other with an unspoken love and all its mysteries and perplexities, it seemed as if she had but one refuge, Neville Tremaine’s honest and tender heart. Isabey, acute by nature and made more so by the prescience of love, seeing on Angela’s part this turning to Neville, thought to himself, “It is better so. This may be the beginning of love,” and then was stabbed to the heart by his own thoughts. Only yesterday Angela had been among the butterflies in the sun, and to-day she seemed like some beautiful flowering plant cast upon the ocean. For so the great outside world appeared to Angela.

When they came in sight of the sentry, Isabey, tying his white handkerchief to the point of his saber, rode up and asked to see the officer of the guard. He quickly appeared, a well-meaning, mild-mannered young man who had recently exchanged the ferule of a country schoolmaster for the sword of an officer. He looked keenly, with unsophisticated admiration, at Angela, and, with the careless ease of the volunteer, offered to pass Isabey and Angela to the tent of the commanding officer.

When they reached, under this escort, the headquarters tent, the commanding officer was standing before it. He was a gray-mustached veteran who had been through the Florida wars, the Mexican War, and that eternal warfare with the Indians on the frontier. The unexpected presence of a lady did not disconcert him in the least. He had escorted officers’ wives across the continent when every man in the escort had been ordered to reserve a bullet for the ladies in case the party should be overpowered by the Indians. He had himself taken his young wife to a frontier post where she was the only woman among five hundred men, and he secretly thought the ladies of the present day rather wanting in the spirit of those fearless women of forty years before.

Isabey introduced himself and then made the necessary explanations with tact and briefness. The old general’s bearing was courtesy itself, and with his expert knowledge of military and social etiquette which was a part of his training everything went smoothly.