The victory

by Molly Elliot Seawell

Isabey dismounted from his horse and, leaning upon the worm fence which divided the fields from the highway, asked himself if he had done wisely in coming straight to Harrowby the moment the Confederacy had ceased to exist. At the beginning of the Civil War he had been one of the rich men of Louisiana, with sugar plantations, great sugar mills with an army of negroes to work them, with a fine house in New Orleans, built and furnished after the French fashion. He had owned a racing stable and had had a box at the French opera and all the paraphernalia of a man of fortune. Only a little of this remained—how little Isabey himself did not know. The New Orleans house had been confiscated and wrecked, the sugar mills burned to the ground, the negroes dispersed over the face of the earth, and his plantations, flooded by the broken bayou, were as much water as land. His possessions in hand consisted of a shadow of a horse, a threadbare gray uniform, and a little money in his pocket.

He had reached his goal—the spot where Angela dwelt. For Isabey there were only two places in the world—the one where Angela was, the other where she was not. The current of his thoughts had flowed as steadily toward her as the broad, placid river had flowed through the ages toward the open sea. He had debated with himself whether he would seek Angela then or wait until he had collected the wreckage of his fortune. But some force within him, stronger than himself, had brought him as straight to Harrowby as his poor horse could travel. He wondered how Angela would look. She would have on a black gown, of course. She was not a woman to put on mourning lightly or take it off quickly. He had written many times to Harrowby and had received a few brief letters in reply, generally from Mrs. Tremaine, worded in the simple and moving language which she habitually used. Always there was some mention of Angela—that she was well and strong and their greatest comfort. Isabey knew that Archie had come unhurt out of the furnace of Civil War and that Lyddon was still an inmate of the house which had been home to him for so many years.

He had heard other particulars through Madame Isabey during the last year of the war. She and Adrienne had found it possible to get to New York and from thence to Paris. Their fortune was by no means wrecked as was Isabey’s, and Madame Isabey wrote saying that Adrienne had found her place still waiting for her which she had left vacant in the brilliant society of the Second Empire, but that she had apparently lost all taste for gayety and went to church at six o’clock in the morning and, Madame Isabey was very much afraid, was becoming devout.

Isabey had written in the purest and sincerest friendship to Adrienne and had received letters of the same kind in return from her. It was very plain to him that Adrienne was changed, softened, saddened, and already in possession of that inheritance which too often comes with gifts like hers—the weariness and darkness of the soul.

But Isabey had not written to Angela nor had he received a line from her. This he took as a good omen; if she had become indifferent to him she might easily have fallen into a friendly correspondence with him. But he dared to hope that she had not written because she could not.

He pressed toward this meeting with her in all eagerness. Now that he was within reach of Angela, as the case often is with the true lover, he began to feel his own rashness and unworthiness and was distrained of himself in meeting her. He recalled Angela’s invariable habit of walking and sitting in the old garden in the afternoon, and thought he would try and meet her there. Five minutes would reveal to him whether he had come in vain or not. He would not ride down the cedar lane because he might be seen from the house; but following a path through the stubble which led close by the old graveyard, and thence direct to the yew hedge where the garden gate opened, he took his way, leading his lean horse after him. When he reached the old burying ground it seemed to him the most peaceful spot he had ever seen. Not even the sheep were startled by his presence, but looking at him with black, blinking eyes, went on quietly cropping the long, lush grass. Within the graveyard was the only new thing Isabey’s eyes had rested upon. Between two graves was a great wooden slab painted white—poverty’s substitute for a gravestone. On it were the names of Neville and Richard Tremaine and the dates of their birth and death, and under this the words, “Both died in battle and in honor.”

The sight of these two graves and the thought of these two men smote Isabey poignantly. He covered his face as he leaned upon the broken wall. And the two graves brought home to him as never before the wreck and ruin and illimitable disaster of the war. He had felt long before the end came that the South must pay a frightful price for the stupendous blunder and calamity of slavery, and that price meant all she had of blood and treasure. And when it was paid it would leave her stark and starving, clothed with rags and stripped of all but honor and courage.

This thought had followed Isabey and pierced him as he marched and fought and starved through blistering days of heat and biting days of cold, through summer’s miasma and winter’s snows and storms of sleet and hail. It had torn his heart when he saw gaps in the thin gray lines filled up with tottering old men and white-faced boys, half-fed with miserable rations, half-clothed in rags and remnants, wholly unshod, but with musket barrels bright and ever ready to answer the order to advance. It was impossible that such sacrifices, such valor, should be in vain, and it came to Isabey in a great flood of illumination that the compensation would be the sweeping away of the everlasting blight, the deadening contamination of slavery. This thought comforted him a little, and he turned from the graves of his friends again to the footpath which would lead him toward Angela. The only sounds he heard were his own quiet footsteps along the stubble path and the breathing of his tired horse trudging patiently behind him. As he came to the opening in the yew hedge the realization of his dream was suddenly before him. Angela was coming toward him slowly up the broad garden walk in the veiled brilliance of the spring afternoon.

The horse, understanding the command of silence, having had time and circumstance enough to instill it into him, obeyed a touch from Isabey’s hand and remained motionless. Isabey, standing a little behind the yew hedge, had time to study Angela’s face as she came close to him, her eyes fixed upon the ground. She was dressed all in black, and around her was thrown a black mantle, the mantle which had once been a splendid crimson, but which had been dyed to the garb of widowhood. As her habit was, her head was bare, and the vagrant wind toyed with the little waving locks upon the white nape of her neck.

As the case often is, Isabey’s recollection of her had gone back to their first meeting, four years before, and he expected to see her still a girl, with a girl’s eyes. She had retained her maiden slimness, but otherwise the great change had come from childhood to womanhood. The delicately haughty poise of her head, the laughing defiance of her upward glance were gone forever. Instead of these was an air soft and appealing, a movement gentle in contrast with the quick grace, like the swallow’s flight, which Isabey had often noted and admired in days gone by. In holding her mantle around her she crossed her hands upon her breast, and it gave her a nunlike sweetness and meekness which Isabey had never seen in her before. As she reached the end of the walk she paused for a moment, and, looking upward at the opaline sky of the west in which great clouds of green and amber were changing to violet, turned and walked again to the end of the garden path. She was quite near the old bench under the lilac bushes before she heard a footstep behind her.