They returned to the hall, and it was now the moment of parting. Neville, drawn by an irresistible impulse, ascended the stairs to where his father sat, still leaning upon Archie.
Father and son looked at each other steadily. Neville had half-extended his hand, but it dropped to his side when he saw the expression on Colonel Tremaine’s face, and then Neville, standing at attention, formally saluted his father, as a soldier salutes his superior; a salute which Colonel Tremaine returned in the same formal manner, standing as straight and rigid as Neville. Archie’s boyish heart could not see Neville go without a word. He ran forward and caught his brother around the body, crying: “Good-by, brother, good-by!”
Neville kissed the boy on the brow.
True, these Tremaines were bone of one bone and flesh of one flesh, because each of them was ready to sacrifice the heart, the soul, all present, all future happiness to the principle of honor as each understood it.
Neville went to the sofa where his mother sat. He meant to say some words of farewell, but he could not speak, and for the first time since his manhood he wept, the silent tears of a strong man, wrung from him like drops of blood. Mrs. Tremaine, too, wept, but said no word. She could bestow upon him neither her forgiveness nor her blessing, but this wrenching apart was like the separation of the flesh and the spirit. Neville could only turn to Angela and, taking her hand, place it silently within his mother’s. That was his farewell.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MEETING
ALL Virginia had caught fire and was immediately a blazing furnace of enthusiasm. The people were of a military temper and the spirit militant had always possessed them. Their ancestors, having fought stubbornly for Charles the First, had come to Virginia rather than submit to Cromwellianism. Almost as soon as these cavaliers became Virginians, they took up arms in Bacon’s Rebellion and fought so stubbornly that fifty years afterwards families who had been in the Nathaniel Bacon cause would not walk on the same side of the street or road as those who had upheld Sir William Berkeley. They welcomed fighting during the whole of the Revolution and in 1812 they again faced the Redcoats. They were a primitive and isolated people and belonged more to the eighteenth than to the nineteenth century; their place in chronology, in truth, was of a time when fighting was loved for fighting’s sake. They knew little and cared less concerning the forces against which they were hurling themselves. Being an untraveled people, they had no conception of any better or other life than their own. They gave high-sounding names to things and places and fully believed in the illusions thus created.
No people on earth ever went more seriously into a civil war than did these Virginians, and civil war is serious business always. Every family in the county was united except the Harrowby family, that one which had been the most united, the most devoted of them all.
The news of the tragic happenings of that April night were known magically through the whole community. Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine were extolled as was Virginius, the Roman father. They were considered to have performed an act of the loftiest patriotic virtue in giving up the son whom they reckoned to have given up his honor.
Angela was generally condemned and had in the whole county only one partisan; this was Mrs. Charteris, who was scarcely less of a Spartan mother than Mrs. Tremaine, but who remembered that she had once been young herself and rashly assumed that Angela must have been too desperately in love with Neville Tremaine to refuse him anything.