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Recto Running Head i

CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Participation and Protection

Edited by Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

This volume explores the implications and implementation of the United


Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in international and
Canadian contexts. The Convention, adopted in 1989 and subsequently rati-
fied by nearly all member nations, outlines the basic rights of all persons under
the age of 18, provides tools for the improvement of the condition of the
world’s children, and sets out a global legal framework for the enactment of
appropriate legislation and policy within individual countries.
The purpose of this collection of essays is to provoke critical debate in the
social sciences about children’s rights that goes beyond that found in the many
prescriptive and programmatic works published to date. The principal argu-
ment is that children’s rights, as defined by the CRC, provide an interdiscipli-
nary framework from which the predicaments of children can be understood
and acted upon. A recurrent theme is that children’s participation rights,
which are an important element of the Convention, remain unrecognized in
practice yet are essential as a foundation for health, identity, and citizenship.
Organized in three parts, the volume begins with essays that address the
status of children’s rights as a framework for understanding children’s
predicaments around the world. The second part explores how the CRC is
applied in efforts to protect children. The book concludes with discussion of
how persisting barriers to the inclusion of disabled, bullied, and marginalized
children can be understood as violations of their rights, and makes a strong
case for children’s participation as specified in article 12 of the Convention.
Featuring thirteen essays by distinguished and emerging scholars, Children’s
Rights provides an in-depth, multidisciplinary exploration of the major issues
in the area of children’s rights and will be an invaluable resource to scholars
and practitioners working with children and youth in institutional and educa-
tional settings.

tom o’neill and dawn zinga are associate professors in the Department of
Child and Youth Studies at Brock University.The Quest for Meaning is the
definitive guide for students and teachers exploring semiotics at the
undergraduate level and beyond.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents iii

Children’s Rights
Multidisciplinary Approaches to
Participation and Protection

Edited by Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS


Toronto Buffalo London
iv Contents

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008


Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9785-9 (cloth)


ISBN 978-0-8020-9540-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Children’s rights : multidisciplinary approaches to participation and


protection / edited by Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

ISBN 978-0-8020-9785-9 (bound) ISBN 978-0-8020-9540-4 (pbk.)

1. Children’s rights. 2. Social participation. I. O’Neill, Tom, 1957–


II. Zinga, Dawn, 1971–.

HQ789.C465 2008 323.3′52 C2008-901258-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its


publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its


publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents v

Contents

Foreword vii
senator landon pearson and judy finlay
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3
tom o’neill and dawn zinga

PART ONE: A WORLD OF CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

1 The Dilemma of Child and Youth Participation in Nepal’s


People’s War 21
tom o’neill
2 Protecting the Rights of International ‘Orphans’: Evaluating
the Alternatives 39
lucy le mare, karyn audet, and karen kurytnik

3 Becoming-Child: Ontology, Immanence, and the Production of


Child and Youth Rights 69
hans skott-myhre and donato tarulli

4 Children’s Right to Education: Contextualizing Its Expression in


Developed and Developing Countries 85
dawn zinga and sherri young
vi Contents

PART TWO: PROTECTING CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

5 Entitlement beyond the Family: Global Rights Commitments


and Children’s Health Policy in Canada 115
candace johnson

6 There’s No Place Like Home: The Child’s Right to Family 137


marjorie aunos and maurice feldman

7 Human Rights for Children and Youth with Developmental


Disabilities 163
frances owen, christine tardif-williams,
donato tarulli, glenys mcqueen-fuentes,
maurice feldman, carol sales, karen stoner,
leanne gosse, and dorothy griffiths

8 Protecting the Rights of Alleged Victims of Child Abuse in


Adult-Based Judicial Systems 195
kim p. roberts and angela evans

PART THREE: WEIGHING PROTECTION AND PARTICIPATION


RIGHTS IN SCHOOLS

9 Child Rights in Cyber-Space: Protection, Participation, and


Privacy 219
shaheen shariff and leanne johnny

10 Too Little, Too Late: The Right to Comprehensive Sexual Health


Education in Childhood and Adolescence 245
johanna van vliet and rebecca raby

11 Special Education Rights: Services for Children with Special


Needs in Ontario Schools 271
sheila bennett, don dworet, and manta zahos

12 Bullying Prevention and the Rights of Children: Psychological


and Democratic Aspects 297
monique lacharite and zopito a. marini

13 Rights and Responsibility: Secondary School Conduct Codes


and the Production of Passive Citizenship 326
rebecca raby

Contributors 347
Contents vii

Foreword

the honourable senator landon pearson 1


and judy finlay 2

This collection of papers assists in advancing the dialogue on chil-


dren’s rights. It reinforces the interconnectedness between human
rights and respect for children. Respecting children goes beyond
merely listening to what they have to say. It means hearing their words
with your eyes, your ears, your heart, and your undivided attention. It
advocates using the voice of children to inform action. We applaud this
publication as a welcome addition to the children’s rights movement.
It endorses children’s participation as citizens.
Canada was an active player in drafting the United Nations Con-
vention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). There were no long-standing
objections from the provinces and territories that have the major
responsibility for children’s policy, programs, and services. The CRC
was ratified by Canada in 1991 with 191 other nations internationally.
In Canada, once ratified, it was not self-executing. It does not become
the law of the land until it is accompanied by implementing legisla-
tion. The principles, however, have become imbedded in our laws and
jurisprudence through inclusion by reference in the law such as the
Youth Criminal Justice Act or in judgments that establish precedence
such as the Baker case.3 Nonetheless, there is no mechanism to enforce
compliance to the principles or instruments of the Convention. There
are Child and Youth Advocates appointed in nine provinces through-
out Canada. These Offices serve as an essential safeguard to ensure

1 Retired – Landon Pearson Resource Centre, Study of Childhood and Children’s


Rights, Carleton University.
2 Chief Advocate, Office of Child and Family Service Advocacy, Province of Ontario;
President, Canadian Council of Provincial Child and Youth Advocates.
3 Baker v. Canada (1999).
viii Foreword

provision of the rights and entitlements of children as defined by


provincial legislation. Indeed, the CRC serves as the foundation from
which these Offices function. There is no federally appointed equiva-
lent to the Child Advocate or Children’s Commissioner in Canada. In
the absence of enabling legislation or a mandated mechanism of com-
pliance, the commitment to the positive development and the promo-
tion of the best interests of children as rights bearers is diminished.
It is too often the belief that children should not have rights. Among
the many arguments against children’s rights are: children do not have
the capacity to handle freedom, responsibility, or participation; chil-
dren are incapable of independent judgment; children do not have a
moral capacity; parents have primacy in determining the best interests
of their children; children are inherent vulnerable and need protection.
Child protection is often erroneously equated with children’s rights.
Anne McGillivray states that ‘child protection is about incapacity ...
weakness, powerlessness, lack of status, whereas rights are about
capacity, will, power and high status.’4 Indeed, she suggests that ‘it is
the status of children and not their vulnerability which promotes their
exploitation.’5 Mr Paulo Pinheiro, the independent expert for the
United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Chil-
dren, reinforces the importance of rights and the ensuing status that
rights provide for the protection of children. He states, ‘Children are
not mini human beings with mini human rights. As long as adults con-
tinue to regard children as mini human beings, violence against chil-
dren will persist. Every boy and girl, as any human being, must have
their rights completely respected to develop with dignity.’6 The
notions of childhood as an incomplete state persist. We need to engage
children as fully participatory members of society, not as adults ‘in
becoming.’
We promote the established rhetoric of children as our future, but at
times this is at the expense of accepting children as citizens of today.7

4 Transcript of testimony of Professor Anne McGillivray before Standing Senate Com-


mittee on Human Rights, 26 September 2005, p. 2.
5 McGillivray, A. ‘Why Children Do Have Rights: In Reply to Laura Purdy,’ Interna-
tional Journal of Children’s Rights 2 (1994), 243–58.
6 Paulo Pinheiro, Statement by the Independent Expert to the North American
Regional Consultation for the United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence
against Children, Toronto, 3 June 2005, p. 6 (www.violencestudy.org).
7 Professor Al Aynsley-Green, Children’s Commissioner for England, testimony
before the Standing Committee on Human Rights, 10 October 2005, as cited in
Interim Report Who’s in Charge Here? November 2005, p. 10.
Foreword ix

Children ask that we move past the principles and practice of simple
youth engagement and accept them as fully participating citizens.
There are four dimensions of citizenship8 that need to be achieved for
this to happen:

• Rights and responsibilities


• Access to these rights and responsibilities
• Voice and meaningful participation
• The feeling of belonging to one’s community and the identity that
flows from that sense of belonging

Children understand relationships of power and authority and can


articulate (albeit differently) how power is negotiated. They under-
stand for example who makes decisions in the context of their family,
their school, and their peer group. Children communicate differently
and have a different social perspective, but can contribute from a
unique and valuable perspective to any public debate about them.
Children need to be offered the opportunity, when they have the
capacity, to influence decisions that will directly or indirectly affect
them, such as: choices in their day-to-day living; life-space choices;
policy, programs, or practice that may affect those choices; and laws
that frame those policies and practice.
We have made substantive steps in the rights revolution for children
but have a considerable way to go to create either a Canada or a world
fit for children, a world in which ‘children are loved, respected and
cherished, their rights are protected and promoted without discrimi-
nation of any kind, where their safety and well-being are paramount
and where they can develop in health, peace and dignity.’9 In our inter-
connected world we have to be more than just observers of children’s
suffering, we have to be partners with them in their struggles, talking
with them and listening to them.10 They are the experts of their lived
experience. Adults are simply the observers. Together, however, we
can act to effect change.
This text moves us a step closer to such change.

8 Judy Finlay, unpublished paper presented to the Centre for Children and Families
in the Justice System, 16 June 2005, p. 7.
9 UNICEF, A World Fit for Children (New York: 2002), para. 9.
10 Senator Landon Pearson, ‘Rights of the Child in the New Millennium,’ Whittier
Law School Symposium, 12 April 1999, at http://www.landonpearson.ca.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents xi

Acknowledgments

This publication has been supported by funding from Brock Univer-


sity, Canadian International Development Agency; the Department of
Canadian Heritage, Human Rights Program; and the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We would like to thank
each of these institutions for their support.
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Putting Resilience Theory into Action: Five Principles 1

CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Participation and Protection


This page intentionally left blank
Recto Running Head 3

Introduction

tom o’neill and dawn zinga

The promulgation of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child is


changing the way we think about children, and the fact that it is now
the most widely ratified international covenant in history shows that
much of the world is serious about those changes. This is something to
be celebrated, for although many of the world’s children continue to
languish in conditions of poverty, disease, and conflict, we now have
the tools that the CRC provides to improve their condition, and a
global legal framework to redress those countries that do not comply.
As formidable as this framework is, however, it is not itself enough to
make children’s rights a reality in children’s lives. For that to happen,
the concept of children’s rights must take root in our everyday prac-
tices, in homes, schools, and institutions that care for children and
youth.
Most of us are not specialists versed in the legal discourses of chil-
dren’s rights; we are scholars and researchers who share an interest in
understanding how children’s rights as defined in the CRC provide a
framework for understanding the predicaments of particular children
in a variety of contexts. Each of us shares a vital concern for children
and youth who have been disadvantaged, exploited, or oppressed by
the inequities of the adult world. For us, the notion that children have
rights is both a means by which to measure this inequity and a call for
action that is first and foremost in the best interests of children. The
children we discuss are found in diverse places; Romanian orphan-
ages, Nepalese schools, Canadian courts, classrooms, or other care
facilities; they could all use the aid of the Convention in various ways,
as victims of abuse, violence, bullying, or neglect. But for us, one of the
most sage functions of the Convention is to remind the adult world
4 Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

that children are, or ought to be, participants in the societies that shape
them. A consistent theme that emerges from this book is that we do not
advocate for children’s participation rights near well enough, that in
addition to the many articles that protect children and ensure adequate
provision for them, the CRC contains measures of child participation
that protectors and providers frequently overlook.
A rights-based approach to understanding children and youth
ought to be multidisciplinary. The preamble to both the 1989 Conven-
tion on the Rights of the Child and its 1959 forebear, the Declaration of
the Rights of the Child, states that children require special protections
and provisions because of their ‘physical and mental immaturity’.
There is much even in that seemingly basic premise that needs to be
unpacked: How are children physically and mentally immature? What
is the relationship between the two? How is ‘immaturity’ to be
defined? Who is empowered to give such a definition? These ques-
tions, and the many more that arise as one begins to read the Conven-
tion, can only be answered from a common boundary that exists be-
tween physical, social, scientific, and critical/interpretive disciplines.
This volume is situated at that boundary, across which anthropolo-
gists, educators, child and youth care advocates, psychologists, and
sociologists exchange ideas, argue, and occasionally collaborate. If we
offer no firm answers to those questions, it is because they have no
universal, supra-historical answer, something that those who framed
the Convention also had the wisdom to recognize.
In her autobiography, Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who did
so much to make children and youth a focus for professional ethno-
graphic study in the 1920s and 1930s, lamented the demise of an ambi-
tious plan to build a multidisciplinary team to study the cultures of the
South Pacific when the Second World War interfered. After the war,
her efforts to revive the plan floundered on emerging disciplinary divi-
sions that proved intractable: ‘Social scientists – cultural and social
anthropologists, social psychologists, and sociologists – were working
in a kind of crazy tandem in which the traces had been cut’ (1972, p.
201). The authors of this volume work in a similar tandem, but our
intention is to lay a foundation for dialogue that the theoretical, prac-
tical, and political implications of children’s rights demands. We are
under no illusion that this dialogue will tie us together again in the
way that Mead envisioned, but we do contend that in the multiple per-
spectives offered in this volume there is a potential for finding
common ground.
Introduction 5

A World of Children’s Rights

The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child was a product of its
time, and a document negotiated among various political, cultural,
and religious interests. Those who treat the Convention as a universal
code would do well to remember that it was not written in stone upon
some desert mountaintop; it is, like every other human creation,
socially constructed and subject to interpretation. To be effective, the
CRC had to be written in such a way as to promote universal stan-
dards while allowing for national and cultural variation. As a result,
the CRC is the most widely adopted international covenant in the
world, ratified by 140 countries. Children’s rights scholar Michael
Freeman (2007) has quipped that only two countries have not ratified
the CRC, ‘Somalia, because it has no government, and the United
States, because it does.’ Somalia did not have a functioning govern-
ment to sign the Convention when it was presented in 1989, and the
United States has so far failed to ratify it because of the unilateral ori-
entations of the legislative branch of its government (Mason, 2005).
Though broadly ratified around the world, the number of declara-
tions, reservations, and objections to the Convention show that the
world does not accept it as a monolithic code. Canada, for example,
reserves the right not to apply article 21 on adoption in the child’s best
interests when it ‘may be inconsistent with customary forms of care
among aboriginal peoples in Canada’ – a hypocritical reservation in a
country that doesn’t do nearly enough to eliminate child poverty, a
problem particularly associated with aboriginal reserves. In another
example, Iran ‘reserves the right not to apply any provisions or arti-
cles of the Convention that are incompatible with Islamic Laws,’ that
is, CRC articles apply only so long as they do not come into conflict
with Islamic sharia law. These examples show that the interpretation
of the Convention is contested even among those who agree on its
basic principles.
The CRC has been criticized on many fronts, with some critics com-
plaining that the document is founded on individualist, Western con-
ceptions of childhood that are not shared the world over (see Burr,
2002; Boyden & de Berry, 2004), while other critics are dissatisfied with
what they view as the half-way measures that neither are enforceable
nor go far enough (see Melchiorre, 2004). Kristina Anne Bentley has
recently argued that the CRC is grounded upon a ‘halcyon fantasy’ of
a universal childhood based on Western conceptions of childhood as a
6 Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

period to be protected from the harsh realities of adult life (2005, p.


121). We, however, find that the universality of CRC is minimal, and
that a careful reading of it reveals a highly nuanced document that is
inclusive of multiple voices and perspectives. Jaap Doek, chairperson
of the Committee of the Rights of the Child, urges everyone to engage
in a careful reading of the document and claims that it is a text rich in
both meaning and application (2006).
The four chapters in the first part of this volume explore the impli-
cations of children’s rights in a variety of international contexts, each
addressing the universality of rights for children in specific predica-
ments. Tom O’Neill’s chapter on the participation of children in a
Maoist insurgency in Nepal shows that universal definitions of ‘the
child’ are too easily forgotten in time of war. Rather than take the view
that children are mere victims of adult aggression, O’Neill notes that
the Maoist insurgency in Nepal has exposed a tension between the
need to protect children from the harmful effects of warfare and the
recognition that some children, for a variety of personal or ideological
reasons, volunteer to participate in violent political change. Child sol-
diers betray Western notions of childhood innocence and vulnerability
as problematic and idealistic universal standards to uphold during
violent political upheaval. O’Neill argues that the CRC should not be
used to champion unrealistic conceptions of childhood, but rather that
it contains pragmatic tools that the international community can use to
hold both guerilla and government leaders accountable for their
actions.
Many children in countries affected by rapid economic and political
change find themselves in the predicament of being abandoned by
their parents and being placed in institutional care. In their chapter,
Lucy Le Mare, Karyn Audet, and Karen Kurytnik show that Romanian
orphans, often minority ‘Roma’ children, have been not only aban-
doned but also neglected and systematically abused by child welfare
agencies set up by the state to care for them. The CRC, in article 8, pro-
tects the national and cultural identity of children and exhorts states to
ensure that it is re-established if a child should be deprived of any
aspects of his or her identity. Many contemporary critics charge that
international adoption is just such a form of deprivation, but Le Mare,
Audet, and Kurytnik argue that international adoption, in the contexts
they describe, is in the child’s best interests. Adopted children are
rescued from the brutality of institutional care that places their devel-
opment at risk, and are instead placed in an environment in which
Introduction 7

most of their basic needs are met. The ‘best interests’ principle, as
described in article 3 of the Convention, is an important guideline that
puts the interests of individual children first, superseding competing
priorities that often arise from the application of the Convention;
article 21, which specifically addresses the issue of international adop-
tion, reiterates this principle in the strongest possible way.
Hans Skott-Myhre and Donato Tarulli take a different approach by
questioning what children’s rights are and where they are located. By
taking an ontological approach to rights, Skott-Myhre and Tarulli
question epistemological frameworks that locate rights within legal
entities such as conventions, statutes, or acts of parliament and focus
instead on rights being produced within the forms of daily life, that is,
in the creative agency of children and youth. Their paper questions a
fundamental assumption of children’s rights discourse: that what dis-
tinguishes adults from children is their ‘developmental maturity.’ This
concept has acquired scientific authority in modernist anthopology,
psychology and sociology, but is increasingly questioned by postmod-
ernist scholars who argue that such a binary distinction obscures much
of the variation among individuals of many ages, as well as underval-
ues the creative potential of children and youth. Skott-Myher and
Tarulli further argue that the modernist conception of the child is inex-
orably associated with the liberal-democratic state, a central figure in
the CRC that is responsible, and accountable, for assuring children
their rights. Their paper convincingly suggests that this conception of
rights does not create a theoretical space in which the fundamental
injustices of the nation state can be challenged, but rather encourages
a view of the child as a subject of the state who can, at best, enjoy a
limited form of participation in prescribed, appropriate sociality that
does not challenge authority.
The last chapter in part 1 moves from questioning the very concep-
tualization of rights as existing in a legal framework posited by Skott-
Myher and Tarulli to considering how children’s rights are expressed
within different countries. Dawn Zinga and Sherri Young’s chapter
focuses on the importance of context and cultural relevance in the
adoption of the CRC into the laws and policies of the countries that
have ratified it. They contend that the articles of the CRC will gain
strength through their incorporation into the laws, policy, and
jurisprudence of the countries that have ratified the treaty. This incor-
poration is an important part of the process and will take different
forms in different countries. Incorporation of the CRC in each country
8 Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

provides a mechanism by which violations of children’s rights can be


dealt with domestically. Zinga and Young stress the importance of
dealing with children’s rights issues domestically, because not only
does the CRC have no mechanism under which violations of children’s
rights can be heard and adjudicated, dealing with such issues domes-
tically also requires that each country interpret the CRC. They see
common barriers to education faced by children in both developed
and developing countries; however, they demonstrate that these barri-
ers have different contexts and cultural relevance that need to be taken
into consideration. They are not arguing that the CRC does not
provide the underlying principles and the essence of what children’s
rights should be, but rather that each country gives expression to those
rights through its policies and politics. Zinga and Young also argue
that while advocates and scholars should question how well a country
enacts and addresses children’s rights, such questioning should be
done with an appreciation of context and not, as is often the case, by
oversimplifying children’s rights issues and viewing them through a
Western perspective.
The centrality of the state in children’s rights discourses is problem-
atic because far too much responsibility can be placed on the state as
the promoter and protector of children’s rights. R. Brian Howe and
Katherine Covell (2005) argue that Canada has not lived up to its obli-
gation, under the Convention, to educate children about the CRC and
their rights. While this criticism is sound, it is also perhaps intention-
ally naive; children’s rights education in Canada is subsumed, at the
federal level, under general human-rights programming which is the
responsibility of the federal department Heritage Canada, whose pro-
grams ‘promote Canadian content, foster cultural participation, active
citizenship and participation in Canada’s civic life, and strengthen
connections among Canadians.’ Children’s rights programming, then,
must compete with museums, the arts, multiculturalism, and sports
for limited resources. Several key aspects of the CRC, such as health
and education, moreover, are provincial responsibilities, and Canada’s
provinces have a checkered record when it comes to even acknowl-
edging the importance of children’s rights. Almost every country in
the world poses similar political limitations to rights education, and on
the practical application of children’s rights in general.
Children’s rights are far too important to be left to states alone to
provide and protect them. Indeed, a consistent theme in this volume is
that children are not enjoying their rights in a variety of contexts – chil-
Introduction 9

dren caught in the cross-fire of an insurgency, abandoned by their


parents, robbed of educational opportunity because of social inequal-
ity or disability, or caught in the judicial system. While the workings of
the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child through the frequent
national reporting process described in the third section of the Con-
vention is an important impetus to the reform of national legislation
for compliance with the CRC, these children cannot wait for the effects
of these changes to trickle down to them. The Convention, we contend,
must be a tool for everyone who studies, works with, or cares about
children and youth, in schools families, and institutions where those
rights are either practised or ignored.

Protecting Children’s Rights

The evolution of international standards to protect children is a


product of global modernity, which makes the international consensus
that is the basis of the CRC even possible; but this evolution is also
more necessary because global modernity has proliferated conditions
of child exploitation by redefining the functions of the family, kinship,
and community. Industrial and post-industrial society requires
autonomous individuals that some argue are an ideological premise
for capitalist modernity (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979), and a
Western conception that marginalizes alternative and collective identi-
ties (Stephens, 1995; Boyden, 1997). The preamble of the CRC states
that ‘the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her
personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmos-
phere of happiness, love and understanding.’ The 1989 Convention
offers only a minimalist definition of what ‘personality’ entails. Gary
Melton argues that ‘rather than reading the term as it is used colloqui-
ally or psychologically, policymakers would be advised to think of
personality as synonymous with “personhood,” that is, as individual
potential embedded in numerous cultural or ideological contexts’
(2005, p. 922). A covenant to protect each child as an evolving person,
with the right to be given the opportunity to fulfill his or her potential
is a historically significant and progressive step.
Previous declarations of children’s rights said little about child and
youth agency, as the notion that children ought to have a measure of
choice in matters of concern to them is comparatively recent. The 1989
Convention makes a significant contribution to the evolution of rights
by recognizing children as individuals who are capable of forming
10 Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

(their) own views and who ought to be listened to by adults. This con-
tribution is made specifically in article 12, which has no precedent in any
previous declaration. This new understanding of children as bearers of
participation rights is often in tension with notions of children as sub-
jects to be protected. While some of the authors in part 1 considered the
tension between protection and participation, the authors who focus on
the question of protecting children fully examine that tension. Many of
the authors in part 2 go further by examining not only the tension
between protection and participation but also tensions between specific
rights as outlined in the CRC and in other legal contexts.
In chapter 5, Candace Johnson addresses the tension between pro-
tection and participation from the perspective of children’s rights to
health care and the role of the family. Within this context, the prag-
matic application of rights confronts a conception of children as
dependents of their parents that fails to provide Canada’s substantial
minority of poor children with basic health needs. Johnson agrees with
other authors in this volume who have argued that the translation of
global commitments into domestic policy is often lacking in many
ways. In particular, Johnson focuses on how Canada’s health care
policy conceptualizes children as the dependents of their parents and
in doing so increases their vulnerability and can impede their ability to
access health care. She addresses the conflict between protection and
participation in her argument that Canada’s health care policies do not
allow for children’s participation except as mediated through their
families and, as a result, fail to protect children’s right to fully access
health care.
Marjorie Aunos and Maurice Feldman also directly address the
tension between protection and participation, but do so by focusing on
the question of when children should remain in their homes of origin
and when the removal of a child is justified by the need to protect the
child. Specifically, they address issues of protection as espoused by
family and children’s services when the removal of a child from the
family of origin is considered owing to one or more parents having an
intellectual disability. Their chapter concentrates on the potential con-
flicts between a child’s right to protection and a child’s right to family.
The CRC highlights the importance of being raised in one’s family of
origin and construes removal from the family of origin to be an action
of last resort, but Aunos and Feldman argue that in the case of parents
who have an intellectual disability, Canadian systems do not uphold
removal as a last resort but seem to consider it the preferred action.
Introduction 11

The authors discuss how such a system impacts children’s rights to


family, to the preservation of their identity, and to protection from dis-
crimination. They suggest that in the attempting to protect children,
policy often impairs children’s ability to participate in their own lives
and families.
Frances Owen et al. show that the agency of disabled children is too
often ignored, because their status as children is complicated by their
mental or physical disability. They propose ‘person-centred service
planning’ and rights education to ensure that the views of the disabled
child are not systematically ignored. Their chapter explores the many
ways that disabled children may be disadvantaged in such arenas as
the justice system and social services. They argue that the disabled
child is entitled to understand his/her rights and that those who work
most closely with the child should also be educated not only about
what the child’s rights are but about how best those rights can be facil-
itated. From their perspective, protection has been a long-standing
issue of much debate, but the consideration of participation has been
severely under-represented and often misconstrued.
Kim Roberts and Angela Evans observe a similar tension between
child participation and protection in the Canadian legal system. They
address these tensions within the framework of alleged child abuse, as
it seems that alleged victims of child abuse are particularly caught
between protection and participation since they must operate within
an adult-based judicial system wherein their rights are balanced with
the rights of the accused perpetrator. Roberts and Evans argue that an
ad-hoc approach works best when jurors are provided with knowl-
edge about the developmental appropriateness of the methods used to
include children in the legal process, thus interpreting the CRC
through the lens of developmental science. It is their opinion that
developmental science can help mediate this tension by teaching those
within the justice system about the capacities of children at various
ages and about how the system might best be adapted to balance chil-
dren’s rights to both protection and participation more effectively
within Canadian judicial systems.

Weighing Protection and Participation Rights in Schools

The extension of participatory rights to children raises other difficul-


ties. As the previous section has shown, there are many adult-based
institutions from the health care system to social services and the judi-
12 Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

cial system that face challenges in addressing both the protection and
participation rights of children. The protection of children seems easier
to conceptualize and to implement than children’s participation. This
is partially due to the fact that children take an active role in partici-
pation and may do so in ways that are not easily anticipated by adult-
based systems. In addition, Lee (1999) has argued that article 12 of the
CRC contains within it an ambiguity about children’s capacities that
makes their participation in adult institutions problematic. Lee finds
fault in the CRC in that it fails to provide a generalizable standard that
institutions can rely on in order to process children through institu-
tional systems, where deferral of the resolution of this ambiguity may
bring undue stress to children. An institutional, ‘one size fits all’ policy
risks imposing a universal conception of childhood that goes well
beyond the minimal universality needed to make children’s rights
pragmatically achievable in a diverse world.
The CRC conveys three types of rights: rights of provision, such as
the material resources for growth, education, and good health; rights
of protection from exploitative labour, sexual abuse, discrimination/
persecution, and arbitrary state intervention; and rights of participa-
tion. The first two types come from a long tradition of rights discourse,
dating from 1924, but participation rights are new and, we argue,
remain largely unrecognized by much of the world community. They
are also in tension with deeply rooted perceptions of children’s subor-
dinate social roles, ‘family values,’ and the dominant, and dominating,
cultural model of childhood as a period of innocence set apart from the
harsh realities of the adult world (see James & Prout, 1998). Children’s
participation in social life as advocated by the Convention contradicts
long-standing and institutional biases against their participation. Our
reading of the CRC suggests that resolving that tension is one of the
main challenges for the future.
While part 2 of the volume dealt with tensions between protection
and participation rights within social systems, the final part 3 exam-
ines how these tensions are embodied within educational contexts.
Each chapter focuses on educational contexts in various ways, with
some chapters offering a broad perspective while others focus on a
particular issue within education. As many children spend a signifi-
cant amount of time in educational contexts, it is not surprising that
issues of protection and participation often come into serious conflict
within schools.
Schools are also a context within which the three types of rights
(provision, protection, and participation) are all applicable. While a
Introduction 13

school’s primary responsibility is the provision of education, schools


are also responsible for keeping children safe and for teaching children
how to actively participate in society. According to the Standing Senate
Committee on Human Rights (Adreychuk & Fraser, 2007), the CRC is
not ‘solidly embedded in Canadian law, in policy, or in the national
psyche,’ but education about the CRC for children may best be
addressed through specific programming on children’s rights within
school curricula. The authors in part 3 consider how well schools rise
to the challenge not only of educating children about their rights but
also of upholding those rights within various educational systems.
Like the standing committee, they have some questions about how
well this is being done and suggestions about changes that would
make upholding children’s rights within educational settings more
effective.
Educators are constantly challenged to think about children’s rights
in new ways and often struggle with balancing the rights of the indi-
vidual with those of the student body or the staff and administration.
Some of the most recent challenges have been related to the use of
technology and the responsibility of the school therein. Cases of cyber-
bullying that initiate off school property and inappropriate comments
about teachers in media such as Facebook have challenged schools to
define the balance between the right to freedom of speech (participa-
tion) and the right to protection from discrimination or persecution
(protection).
Shaheen Shariff and Leanne Johnny open part 3 with a discussion of
the issues that are central to considerations of children’s rights within
cyberspace and the responsibility that schools have to address those
rights. Like Roberts and Evans, they concentrate on how best to
balance rights when they come into conflict, and particularly on how
protection and participation are to be addressed. Children’s rights
within cyberspace and the implications of cyber-bullying are receiving
increasing media attention and yet are just beginning to draw legal
attention. Shariff and Johnny discuss the paucity of legal precedents to
draw upon in addressing cyber-bullying and how schools need to
negotiate their responsibility for actions on and off school property.
They contend that cyberspace poses jurisdictional issues, for though
the actual entry of damaging information (threats or slanderous state-
ments) by a student may occur in the privacy of his/her own home, it
may have a significant impact on the school environment. Canadian
courts have been clear that schools are responsible for providing posi-
tive learning environments and for addressing actions that poison
14 Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

such environments. However, what has been less clear is how to


balance the student’s right to participation and freedom of speech
against protection rights. Shariff and Johnny contend that this area will
demand extensive interpretation of the CRC, along with other policy
and law. They consider the legal embodiment of children’s rights and
the challenge that remains when two or more legal rights come into
direct conflict in this new space that schools must address.
Johanna van Vliet and Rebecca Raby focus on another contentious
area within education when they tackle the question of children’s
rights to sexual health education. Unlike cyberspace, this area has been
contentious for some time, but like cyberspace it features an inherent
conflict between protection and participation rights. Van Vliet and
Raby argue that children’s rights to health, information, education,
and citizenship training, as outlined in the Convention, support their
access to comprehensive sexual health education. They explore how
conceptions of childhood innocence impede the access that a child in
Ontario, Canada, has to information about sexuality, and use the Con-
vention to argue for improved education about sexuality so that chil-
dren are able to make informed choices when those choices are
inevitably made. They also address the shortcomings that the current
curriculum has not only in addressing children’s right to access but
also in addressing other rights associated with sexual diversity and the
changing sexual culture. Sexual health education is often seen to be
controversial, but van Vliet and Raby argue that the CRC and other
international documents can provide some direction in successfully
addressing children’s rights in this area.
Sheila Bennett, Don Dworet, and Manta Zahos also address curricu-
lum and the provision of services within education. Like van Vliet and
Raby, they focus on Ontario, but instead of looking at a particular area
such as sexual health education, they focus on the provision of educa-
tion for children with special needs. After outlining a historical
account of how the rights of students with exceptionalities have not
been addressed, they move on to a consideration of how well the
Ontario system is currently addressing the rights and needs of such
students. Bennett, Dworet, and Zahos consider the role of identifica-
tion, programming, and the definition of achievement in terms of how
these elements promote inclusion or create barriers to inclusion. They
also examine the legal contexts that have supported the inclusion of
students with disabilities and consider how the education system has
responded to changes to the legal context. The authors see positive
Introduction 15

changes through educator training and parent involvement within the


education system. In the case of special education, Ontario seems to be
more effective in upholding children’s rights and in having systems to
address situations when protection and participation rights come into
conflict.
Monique Lacharite and Zopito Marini also focus on the Ontario
educational context, but from the perspective of considering how anti-
bullying programs can be grounded within the democratic rights of
students. They contend that by placing bullying within a rights
context, children and young people, along with school personnel, can
be engaged in a consideration of rights and of how to address the vio-
lation of someone’s rights. They conceptualize bullying as a form of
rights violations that schools are duty-bound to address, and argue
that incorporating education about individuals’ rights into primary
intervention is an effective way to raise awareness about bullying and
to stop it before it happens. The authors do not contend that such an
approach would eliminate bullying altogether or remove the need for
intervention, but instead assert that it would provide a better cognitive
framework for children to understand bullying from a rights perspec-
tive and to actively manage how to balance conflicts between protec-
tion and participation rights. This is a unique approach that empowers
children to critically apply their knowledge of rights to current social
issues.
In a different vein, Rebecca Raby promotes another unique approach
to participation in her consideration of the extent to which students
participate in the construction of school codes of conduct and her
argument that a deeper level of participation would also serve to
better prepare youth for active citizenship and employment. Raby
provides a powerful critique of the notion that rights are to be
awarded only for good behaviour at schools in Ontario, a misconcep-
tion that she argues leads to passive citizenship. Children who fail to
follow school ‘codes of conduct’ that are based on a specific cultural
ideal of orderly, productive, and asexual behaviour too often find that
their rights to participation and education are violated. Her discussion
neatly exemplifies the contested space between a child’s right to par-
ticipate in their own lives and the social impulse to contain children, a
space that becomes even more problematic when children are forced to
conform to social and cultural contexts to which they do not already
belong. Raby brings us fill circle back to some of the most difficult
issues in children’s rights in terms of how we conceptualize these
16 Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

rights and the difficulty that adults have in upholding children’s and
young people’s participation rights without having them overshad-
owed by either protection issues or adult conceptualizations of how
children’s participation rights should be expressed.

Conclusion

The contributors to this volume have all approached the Convention


from different disciplinary backgrounds, but are in agreement that the
Convention is a tool to be utilized and contextualized by individuals,
institutions, communities, and nations. Many of us have also identi-
fied tensions that exist and continue to present challenges to the CRC’s
implementation. Even though the preamble of the CRC defines the
child as any individual under the age of eighteen (unless state laws
place the age of majority earlier), this threshold exists more on paper
than in practice: there is no global definition of the ‘child,’ nor any uni-
versal conceptualization of ‘childhood.’ If the Convention had been
stronger in imposing specific models of children’s development, by
appealing to scientific or political authority, then critics would have
been correct in stating that the CRC was a hegemonic document. The
Convention is not, however, in the business of imposing Western
ideals; it a document that requires interpretation in a variety of cir-
cumstances, and can only be realized through our diverse uses of it.
In order for the Convention to protect children, however they are
defined, it must become integrated into the policies and laws of the
ratifying nations. The way the CRC is written facilitates its interpreta-
tion and adoption into diverse nations’ laws and policies. The chair of
the Committee on the Rights of the Child, Jaap Doek (2004), argues
that various national and cultural contexts must be taken into account
in setting priorities and pursuing goals related to the CRC, but also
that by ratifying the CRC each nation has committed itself to achiev-
ing the general goals it outlines. All of us must struggle with resolving
the tensions between how the CRC is interpreted and applied. These
tensions must be faced, as the Convention’s reporting procedures con-
sistently remind nations of their obligations under the Convention and
promote the CRC at the grass-roots level, in schools, welfare agencies,
and justice institutions.
Most of the authors in this volume point out that a child’s rights to
participation pose an even greater challenge to the implementation of
the CRC, particularly when it contradicts institutional interests in
Introduction 17

raising, educating, and disciplining children. We need not reach for an


exotic example to illustrate this conflict drawn from another culture, as
it is readily apparent much closer to home: in the ideology of the
family that subordinates the interests of children, in educational insti-
tutions that trade off rights and responsibilities in an effort to enforce
conformity, and in institutions that assume that the participation of
handicapped children is cognitively untenable. Article 12 of the CRC is
one of the most challenging to interpret, as it extends to children the
right to be heard in matters that pertain to them, which adults must
recognize in ways that contradict conceptions of children as passive
and irrational, or as dangers to themselves and society. This not to
uncritically avoid questions about children’s social, emotional, or cog-
nitive ability to act in their own best interests, but it does require that
the answers address specific children and contexts, and not universal
ideals. We view child participation as a fundamental basis for good cit-
izenship, which will lead to an educated and aware public culture that
can make the progressive changes the world so direly needs.
This volume is not meant to provide definitive answers any more
than the CRC was written to define ‘child,’ ‘childhood,’ or ‘family.’ It
has been written to anticipate the future’s tensions, contradictions, and
challenges. The multidisciplinarity of this book illustrates a variety of
perspectives that illuminate these challenges from competing perspec-
tives. It also underscores the need to cooperate across disciplines,
because, as we have argued, the nature of children as beings in a
period of profound growth and transition requires it. A rights-based
perspective holds the promise of retying the traces of the social sci-
ences that were severed long ago, but this volume also puts us on
notice that this task may not be easy; mere invocations of multidisci-
plinary or interdisciplinary intentions ought not to distract us from
engaging in sober debate when this arises. What we learn from those
debates will challenge our own conceptualizations, our own preju-
dices, our own disciplinary hubris. It is our hope that interdisciplinary
and multidisciplinary approaches will not only expose challenges and
tensions, but will also provide the tools to address them.

REFERENCES

Adreychuk, R., & Fraser, J. (2007). Children: The silenced citizens; effective
implementation of Canada’s international obligations with respect to the rights of
18 Tom O’Neill and Dawn Zinga

children. Final Report of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights.


Ottawa.
Bentley, Kristina Anne (2005). Can there be any universal children’s rights?
International Journal of Human Rights, 9(1), 107–123.
Boyden, J. (1997). Childhood and the policy makers: A comparative perspec-
tive on the globalization of childhood. In A. James & A. Prout (eds.) Con-
structing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological
study of childhood. London: Falmer Press.
Boyden, J., & de Berry, J. (2004). Children and youth on the front line: Ethnogra-
phy, armed conflict and displacement. New York: Bergahan Books.
Burr, R. (2002). Global and local approaches to children’s rights in Vietnam.
Childhood, 9, 49–61.
Doek, J. (2006). Keynote address. Children’s Rights and International Develop-
ment: Research, Challenges and Change Conference, Ottawa, Ontario.
Freeman, M. (2007). Children’s rights and children’s welfare. Plenary address at
Investment and Citizenship: Towards a Transdisciplinary Dialogue on
Child and Youth Rights Conference, St Catharines, ON.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1979). The dialectic of enlightenment. New York:
Verso.
Howe, R.B., & Covell, K. (2005). Empowering children: Children’s rights educa-
tion as a pathway to citizenship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood, New York:
Teacher’s College Press.
Lee, N. (1999). The challenge of childhood: Distributions of childhood ambi-
guity in adult institutions. Childhood 6(4), 455–474.
Mason, M. (2005). The U.S. and the international children’s rights crusade:
Leader or laggard? Journal of Social History, 38(4), 955–963.
Mead, M. (1972). Blackberry winter: My early years. New York: Touchstone
Books.
Melchiorre, A. (2004). At what age? 2nd ed., Right to Education Project.
Melton, G.B. (2005). Building humane communities respectful of children:
The significance of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. American
Psychologist, 60(8), 918–926.
Stevens, S. (1995). Children and the politics of culture. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
United Nations (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Understanding Adolescent Self-Injury from a Resilience Perspective 19

PART ONE

A World of Children’s Rights


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Recto Running Head 21

1 The Dilemma of Child and Youth


Participation in Nepal’s People’s War

tom o’neill

Like the Vietnam War, the successes and failures of the Maoist insur-
gency in Nepal have been largely measured in body counts. The Infor-
mal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), a Nepalese human rights organi-
zation, publishes frequent tallies of numbers of dead, missing, and
tortured, all organized into tidy categories of ethnicity, gender, occu-
pation, and district. Thus, from February 1996, when the ‘People’s
War’ began, to March 2004 there were 9170 dead, or, as they neatly
summarize, 3.16 deaths per day. The numbers of dead police officers,
soldiers, agricultural workers, and Maoist insurgents among others
were separately counted. INSEC’s periodical bulletins have evolved
over the course of the insurgency, reflecting the growing impact of the
violence at all levels of Nepalese society. Its March 2004 bulletin intro-
duced a new variable into the calculus; for the first time, the numbers
of dead children was given (INSEC, 2004). The relative age of the
victims is central to an emerging debate on the effects of war on chil-
dren, and on the recruitment, conscription and ‘abduction’ of child
combatants by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in particular
that speaks to the very legitimacy of the conflict.
In this chapter I explore the implications that the ‘People’s War’ has
on Nepal’s children and youth from the standpoint of their prescribed
‘right’ to protection from conflict, which comes into profound conflict
with their right to political participation. Nepal’s civil conflict is, as I
write, increasing with an unpredictable momentum (even though
Maoist leaders claim that theirs is a ‘scientific revolution’) that makes
predictive statements difficult to make. Ethnographic accounts of the
violence are sketchy and often laden with their own ideological
assumptions, and though Nepal’s media has enjoyed until recently
22 Tom O’Neill

some latitude in covering the conflict, it has been subjected to official


censorship and threat from both the state and Maoist forces. State-
ments made by the leadership of both are blatantly unreliable, all of
which makes any assessment of the conflict tenuous at best. Using
what I consider the best available descriptions of the ‘People’s War,’ I
am therefore limited to a reflection on the problem of child and youth
recruitment into violent political conflict as both moral and epistemo-
logical: moral because it calls into question the legitimacy of violence
as a political tool and epistemological because it must address how
we understand competing claims to political, cultural, and historical
legitimacy.
It is somewhat obvious to state that the eight-year-old ‘People’s
War’ in Nepal has been a human rights disaster, with rights violations
documented on both sides. But rights violations are not only a conse-
quence of the insurgency; claims and counter-claims about violations
are part of the arsenal of this political struggle. A fundamental issue in
insurgency has always been the legitimacy of the nation state or the
struggle against it, and in a world permeated with the discourse of
universal human rights that legitimacy must be articulated through a
language of rights that is not easily applied to intra-national armed
conflict. Legitimate nation states provide the ‘rule of law’ that protects
human rights, but non-state insurgencies that for all intents and pur-
poses are performing state functions – law, taxation, and, central to my
purposes here, raising military forces – are in an ambiguous position.
While pressing the claim that the nation state is violating human
rights, they all too often commit their own violations, citing the strug-
gle itself as the principal reason. The NCP (M) strategy seems to have
been to provoke rights violations on the other side in order to legiti-
mate its insurgency, but its current efforts to recruit young combatants
risks rendering the party vulnerable to international criticisms that
may undermine its own claim to legitimacy.

A ‘Zone of Peace’?

Since the beginning of the ‘People’s War’ the insurgent leadership and
the government of Nepal have twice suspended violence and
attempted dialogue. One month after the last ceasefire broke down, in
August 2003, insurgents held a cultural program at a remote school in
Mudbara, Doti, in far Western Nepal. Sometime after the rebels can-
celled all classes and assembled the students for a ‘cultural program,’
Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
“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.
“I have the pleasure of knowing your husband, madam,” he said,
with old-fashioned grace, to Angela. “I was once his instructor at the
Military Academy. His command is, I judge, about forty miles from
here and I can readily communicate with him by military telegraph. If
Captain Isabey will allow me to take charge of you, I can have you
conveyed, under proper escort, to Captain Tremaine—or is it Major
Tremaine? Promotion is rapid in these days.”
“He is still Captain Tremaine,” replied Angela, a slight blush coming
into her face. There had been no promotion for Neville, and Angela
well knew why.
Nothing remained for Isabey to do. He had been directed to place
Mrs. Neville Tremaine in safe hands and he felt that he had done so
when he put her in charge of the chivalrous old general. Then came
the formal farewell, which each wished to make brief—their real
farewell had been said the dawn before under the whispering pines.
Angela put her hand in Isabey’s and, with a smile both of the lips and
eyes, said: “I thank you more than I can say, and I also thank you in
Nev—in Captain Tremaine’s name. He will express his gratitude to
you himself and far better than I can.”
“It is nothing,” responded Isabey, calmly and gracefully. “I shall
always be happy to do a service to any of the Tremaine family, and
particularly to Captain Tremaine, whom I consider only a little farther
off as a friend than Richard Tremaine. When I recall all your
kindness to me at the time that I was wounded, I feel that I can never
do enough to show my appreciation of it. Pray remember me to
Neville Tremaine. Adieu—or good-by, as you say.”
“Good-by,” replied Angela, gently pressing his hand. And in another
moment he was gone.
Then the general, with antique courtesy, himself showed Angela into
a compartment of the headquarters tent which he desired her to
consider her own until she should depart to join her husband. It held
a small iron bed and some boxes which did duty for a toilet table and
washstand. The general apologized to Angela for the plainness of
her surroundings, but reminded her that she was a soldier’s wife and
must not mind trifles.
Then, the general leaving her, an orderly brought in Angela’s
portmanteau and she exchanged her riding habit for a conventional
costume, and combed and plaited her long, fair hair. In half an hour
the orderly, who was deputed to be Angela’s lady’s maid, informed
her that the general sent his compliments and begged the honor and
pleasure of her company at breakfast with him alone. Angela went
into the outer tent, where she found a small table laid for two and the
gallant old general waiting to receive her.
“Everything is arranged, my dear madam,” he said, as they seated
themselves. “I have secured a conveyance for you, not very stylish,
perhaps, but it will do—a small carriage and a pair of army mules,
with a soldier-driver. Your escort will be Lieutenant Farley, a nephew
of mine. I think it fair to tell you what, of course, I could not mention
before Captain Isabey, that your husband’s command is on the
march, and there is fighting going on. But, nevertheless, there is a
point at which you can intercept Captain Tremaine about thirty miles
from here and can, at least, have a brief interview.”
“Thank you,” replied Angela. “As you say, I am a soldier’s wife and
so must learn to bear a little hardship in order to see my husband,
even for a short time. Then he will decide what I shall do.”
Nothing could exceed the delicacy, tact, and thoughtfulness of the
old officer. He told Angela that she could send a dispatch by military
telegraph to Neville which would reach him within a few hours and
prepare him for her arrival. Angela thanked him again and felt as if
she had found a second Colonel Tremaine in this gray-mustached,
soft-voiced general. She began to speak with the frankness of an
unsophisticated nature of Neville Tremaine and his action in
remaining in the United States army. The general listened with the
utmost suavity, but made no comment. Angela had expected high
commendation from him for Neville, but instead was merely this
smooth courtesy, an attitude gracefully sympathetic but wholly
noncommittal. Against Neville Tremaine was an iron wall of prejudice
which Angela’s soft hands could not batter down. Some intuitive
knowledge of this forced itself upon her mind and cut her to the
heart. The unspoken enmity of his own people against Neville was
easier than this secret distrust on the part of those to whom Neville
gave his service from the deepest principle of conscience. This
thought aroused something of the pride and sensitiveness of
wifehood in Angela. She changed from the attitude of a young girl to
that of a self-possessed woman, and told the general, with the
coolness and composure of twice her age, of the obloquy visited
upon Neville among his own people, “which,” she said, with dignity
and even stateliness, “is most undeserved. My husband lost his
inheritance; for that he does not grieve, but the disapproval of his
father and mother and of all those dear to him, except myself, is very
hard to bear. His brother Richard, who was killed only six days ago,
understood my husband better than anyone, and there was never
any breach between them. Richard Tremaine knew that only the
strongest conviction of his duty would keep his brother in your army.”
To this the general bowed again politely and sympathetically, but
said no word. Suspicion, that impalpable poison, that nameless
destroyer, had gone forth against Neville Tremaine and was
withering him.
All at once the general’s kindness and hospitality grew irksome to
Angela. She asked when she could leave, and the general, who had
been all courtesy, felt that his guest wished to depart. He told her
that a boat was at her command, and the carriage would be waiting
on the other side. Then the general escorted her to the dock, his
orderly carrying her portmanteau, and there the young lieutenant, the
general’s nephew, who was to take charge of her for the next twenty-
four hours, met them.
The general introduced him. He was a pink-and-white boy who had
left Harvard, where he had luxuriated on a large allowance, in order
to become a soldier. The general had no mind to trust Angela with
any man not of her own class in life, and had selected the greatest
coxcomb, who was also one of the bravest of his youngsters, to
escort her.
Nothing could have pleased Farley better. He knew more of drawing-
rooms than of camps, and was delighted to figure as the guardian of
anything so charming as this young girl who was already a matron.
The general, assuming himself to be the obliged party and thanking
Angela for the privilege of serving her, put her into the boat in which
the river was crossed. On the other side was a rickety carriage
drawn by a couple of stout mules.
Farley took his seat by the side of the soldier who drove. The
coachman’s seat was on the same level as those within, and the roof
of the carriage overhung it. Farley had fully expected to be asked to
take a place within, but Angela totally forgot to ask him.
It was close upon ten o’clock when the carriage started off, and
soon, clearing the camp, passed through a flat green country,
interspersed with woods, along a road which had been cut up by
artillery and commissary wagons. The morning was beautifully fair
and bright, and Angela, leaning back in the carriage, had the feeling
that she was beginning a new volume of life. That other volume,
which had begun with her childhood as bright and fair as the
morning, and had closed in blood and tears and agony, was now
locked and laid away forever.
A new perplexity occurred to her. If Neville had not heard of
Richard’s death, should she tell him? She was too inexperienced to
know what was judicious, but some instinct of the heart told her that
the little time she could spend with Neville, that one hour of
brightness in his life of undeserved hardship, should not be marred
in any way. If he did not know of Richard’s death already, he would
learn it soon enough.
Thinking these thoughts, Angela, grave and preoccupied, with
downcast eyes, sat back in the corner of the carriage and took no
note of whither she went or how.
Farley had supposed that it was pure bashfulness which kept Mrs.
Neville Tremaine from inviting him to sit in the carriage with her, but
as they jolted steadily along the heavy road and the morning grew
into noon, and Angela was obviously unconscious of his existence,
he began to feel himself a much-injured man. He glanced back at
her occasionally and did not see her once look up, and, like most
men, every time he looked at her he thought her nearer to beauty.
But she was no nearer to conversation. Farley would have dearly
liked to find out if her talk were as interesting as her appearance, but
she gave him no opportunity of judging.
At sunset they reached a farmhouse where it had been arranged that
Angela should spend the night. It was a homely, tumble-down place,
and the mistress of it, Sarah Brown, a little withered, bloodless
creature, had clung to it, although it lay in the debatable ground
between contending armies. Sarah always ran away whenever a
shot was fired, but invariably trudged back to work and tremble and
palpitate until her fears drove her off again. She welcomed Angela
with a kind of furtive pleasure, she whose guests were usually
embattled men, and showed her a little plain room up a rickety flight
of stairs where Angela might rest for the night.
Farley thought it certain that he would meet Angela at supper, which
was served by Sarah in the kitchen. Angela, however, sent a polite
message asking to be excused from coming down and her supper
was served in her own little room.
Farley, reduced to his own society, soon went to his sleeping place,
which was on the floor of the “settin’ room.”
The next morning dawned mild and bright, and at eight o’clock the
mules were harnessed and the carriage was ready to start. Again
was Farley disappointed; he only saw Angela as she came tripping
down the narrow stair and bade him good morning.
She thanked Sarah Brown cordially, and, not daring to offer money
for her accommodation, took off a little gold brooch she wore, one of
her few ornaments, and handed it to Sarah. It was received in
speechless gratitude and admiration. Then Angela, smiling at Farley
but without seeing him, took her seat in the carriage. Farley by this
time was thoroughly exasperated with her for her want of
appreciation of his society, and he concluded that the surest
punishment would be to leave her to herself.
They drove on steadily through the same flat country, but around
them were evidences of fighting, past and to come. There were
dreary piles of brick, showing where humble houses had been
destroyed by the fortunes of war. The fences were all gone and
gates had ceased to exist. The people in the few homesteads they
passed kept within doors and the whole scene was one of
desolation.
Presently, however, the stillness of the autumn day was broken by
ominous sounds. Afar off could be heard the dull thunder made by
the movement of troops, and about midday the highroad was
suddenly blocked by artillery wagons. For the first time Angela
roused herself and asked Farley, with interest, what it meant.
“Fighting, madam,” he replied promptly and expecting Angela’s face
to grow pale. On the contrary, she showed no tremor whatever and
only said:
“I hope it will not interfere with my seeing Captain Tremaine, if only
for an hour.”
“I don’t think it will,” responded Farley. “This movement on the part of
the enemy is not entirely unexpected and we knew that Captain
Tremaine’s regiment would be on the march.”
Angela said no more and the carriage jolted on. The shadows were
growing long when the carriage, drawing up on the side of a wide
road leading through a belt of woods, stopped, and Farley, opening
the door and standing, cap in hand, said stiffly to Angela: “This is the
point, Mrs. Tremaine, where we are instructed to wait. Captain
Tremaine’s regiment will pass within a mile of us in half an hour and
he will be on the lookout for us.”
“Thank you,” Angela responded sweetly, and, accepting Farley’s
proffered hand, she descended from the carriage. “I think,” she said,
“I will walk a little way into the woods; but I shall keep within sight of
the road, so Captain Tremaine will see me as soon as he arrives.”
Farley, whose instructions were to remain with Angela and to place
himself at Neville Tremaine’s disposal, stood discontentedly
watching her as she walked daintily through the thicket, and he
thought her one of the most ungrateful women that ever lived.
When a little out of sight of the road Angela looked about her. It
might have been the same spot in which she had taken her real
farewell of Isabey—the same dark overhanging pine trees, their
resonant aroma filling the air, and the same slippery carpet of brown
pine needles lay under her feet. Angela, hitherto so calm, began to
feel a strange agitation. Neville Tremaine had been so much a part
of her life since her babyhood that she had never had any right
conception of him as her husband, but now all was changed. Her
whole life was cast behind her and Neville was her only refuge and
her sole possession.
She wished, however, to forget all the past and set about resolutely
at forgetting. She had put Isabey out of her mind so far as she could,
but it is quite possible to throttle a thought and yet hear it breathing
in one’s ear. So it was with Angela. She fixed her consciousness
upon Neville Tremaine, but her subconsciousness was with Isabey.
One thing was certain: she could ever count upon Neville Tremaine’s
tenderness, chivalry, and unshakable kindness.
As she walked up and down with her own peculiar and airy grace,
she kept her eyes fixed on the open roadway. A mile off she could
hear distinctly the clanking of ammunition wagons, the steady tramp
of thousands of feet, the dull beating of the earth by horses’ hoofs.
Ten minutes had passed when she saw a horseman coming at a
hard gallop along the woodland road. It was Neville Tremaine. In a
minute or two he reached the carriage and flung himself off his
horse. Farley spoke a word to him. Throwing his bridle toward the
soldier-driver, Neville made straight through the thicket to where
Angela stood. Angela felt herself taken in his strong arms and his
mustached lips against hers. She clung to him, and it seemed to her
as if it were Neville and yet not Neville. Only one thing was
unmistakable: the old sense of well-being and protection when he
was near came sweetly back to her. But of all else that passed in
those first few minutes she scarcely knew, except that Neville held
her to his strong beating heart and told her how dear she was to him.
Then he put her off a little way and gazed at her with tender
admiration. Angela saw the great changes made in Neville by time
and war. He looked much older and his naturally dark skin had
grown darker with tan and sunburn. She could see, where his cap
was raised a little from his brow, the whiteness of his forehead
contrasted with the brownness of his face. He was campaigning, but
otherwise there was the same immaculateness about him—neatly
shaven, smartly uniformed, his accoutrement shining, all the marks
of the trained officer.
As for Neville, his admiration for Angela burst from him as he looked
at her. “Dearest,” he said, holding both her hands, “you have become
beautiful. You are a woman now and not a child. You have grown up
since that night on the wharf at Harrowby.”
“I have gone through that which makes a girl into a woman,” replied
Angela, softly. “Until two nights ago I had every night at family
prayers to hear every name called except yours, but I called your
name in my heart.”
“I know it, I know it.”
“Two nights ago all was changed. Your mother once more mentioned
your name and your father sent you his blessing.”
“Thank God!” replied Neville, lifting his cap.
“And here is a letter from your mother. They sent you a thousand
messages, and so did Archie and Mr. Lyddon and all the servants.
You are forgiven.”
“Yes, forgiven by all who thought that I acted dishonorably. One
person, however, I shall never need any forgiveness from, because
he knows and respects my motives—my brother Richard.”
Richard’s name, spoken so suddenly, disconcerted Angela for a
moment. She trembled a little and looked away and then her pitying
eyes sought Neville’s, but she replied calmly: “Yes, Richard never
said one word in condemnation of you.”
“That is like him. Of all men I ever knew in my life, I think best of
Richard. Not because he is my brother, but because he is better,
larger-minded, braver, than any other man I ever knew. I had a letter
from him by flag of truce a fortnight ago and managed to reply by the
same means. He has no doubt got my letter by this time. I have so
many things to ask you, so many things to tell you, the chief of which
is how much I love you; and I only have one hour with you.”
And then Angela, with tender sophistry, replied: “I would not miss the
chance of spending this one hour with you; but surely I can be near
you—nearer than at Harrowby.”
“Yes,” answered Neville gravely; “we shall be fighting probably, if not
to-night, certainly from early in the morning, and a soldier cannot
look beyond the present hour. If I am alive, we shall meet again
within the week. If I am killed, you will return at once to Harrowby.”
Angela caught Neville’s arm. The thought of a world without him
staggered her. “Don’t say that,” she cried breathlessly, and then
stopped. In another moment the tragedy of Richard’s death would
have burst from her involuntarily.
Neville, thinking he saw in Angela’s face and words and tone that a
love for him, like his love for her, had been born in her soul, caught
her to his breast in rapture. The hour passed so quickly to Neville it
seemed as if they had but scarcely exchanged their first confidences
when it was time for him to go.
He gave Angela his last instructions—to remain for at least three
days, or until she should hear from him, at the little farmhouse where
she had spent the night.
“I shall do exactly as you say,” answered Angela quietly. “And you
may depend upon it that I shan’t fall into a panic and run away.”
“I know that you will never fall into a panic,” answered Neville,
smiling. “I think the Southern women are very like the great captain
who asked when he was a boy, ‘What is fear?’ I don’t think you know
as much about fear as I do.”
Then, as the moment of parting approached, their voices and eyes
grew grave, and presently Neville kissed Angela in the shade of the
pine trees. They walked through the purple shadows of the late
afternoon back to the road where the carriage still stood and the
orderly led Neville’s horse up and down.
Farley, consumed with chagrin and impatience, still maintained a
gentlemanlike outside. Neville thanked him with sincere gratitude,
and Angela added some graceful phrases without taking any more
interest in him than in the orderly, a fact which Farley bitterly
realized. Neville put Angela in the carriage, and, laying a letter upon
her lap, said to her:
“Good-by. Keep this letter, but do not open it unless you hear bad
news of me. You will hear something from me within three days, in
any event.”
Farley turned his back and the orderly looked hard in the opposite
direction as Neville kissed Angela for the last time.
When a soldier says good-by it may be the last farewell. Angela’s
heart was suddenly pierced with this thought, and when Neville
would have turned quickly away, she drew him back to her and
kissed him once again. The next moment he was gone.
The sun was setting when Angela found herself once more upon the
road. It seemed to her as if that brief hour with Neville had been a
dream; but all had been dreamlike with her of late. Until a year or so
ago nothing had happened. That had been her grievance: she had
so longed for life, movement, color, love, even grief, anything to
move the silent pool in which she thought herself, at twenty,
anchored for life.
All at once everything came. War, persecution, estrangement, love,
death, all those things most moving in human life. She looked at the
letter addressed to her in Neville’s firm handwriting, and knew well
enough what it meant—it was what she was to do in the event of his
death; but like most young creatures brimming with life, Angela could
scarcely believe in death. It seemed to her an anachronism so
frightful as to be almost incredible.
When the carriage reached once more the public road there was,
even to Angela’s untrained eyes, every sign of approaching battle. A
great, dark blue stream, with glittering muskets which the dying sun
tipped with fire, poured along the highroad. Officers were riding at a
steady pace with their commands, while constantly orderlies dashed
back and forth, silent, grimly concentrated upon their errands.
Over the quiet autumn landscape, which should have been all
peace, brooded the spirit of coming battle. The red sun itself seemed
to Angela’s mind a great bloody disk dropping behind the dreary
woods. How many of these men marching cheerfully along would
live to see another sun set?
Suddenly a sound, distant but unmistakable, smote Angela’s ear—
the reverberation across the distant hills and far-off wide river of
heavy guns. Angela had never before in her life heard a cannon
fired, but that menacing thunder, that wolfish howl before the
banquet of death begins, could not be misunderstood. Angela felt a
sensation of horror, but nothing like fear; she came of good fighting
stock, and the thought of battle did not intimidate her. Then the far-
off roar was overborne by a loud, quick crashing of guns within half
the distance. Instantly the thrill of conflict seemed to animate the
long blue line, and there were a few quick evolutions, like a lion
crouching before his spring.
Farley, who had been leaning forward listening intently, took the whip
out of the hands of the soldier-driver and laid it heavily on the mules,
and they sprang ahead. Then turning to Angela, sitting upright within
the carriage, and now fully awake to all that was going on around
her, he said:
“Pray, don’t be alarmed, Mrs. Tremaine. I can get you to the
farmhouse within an hour, where you will be quite safe and out of
danger.”
“Don’t disturb yourself on my account,” replied Angela. “I only regret
that I am giving you trouble when I am sure you wish to be with your
command.”
As she spoke, the soldier-driver, with the familiarity of the volunteer,
glancing back at her, said to Farley, above the rattle of the rickety
carriage: “I don’t believe she is afeered, but it’s more ’an some of
them fellows on both sides can say.”
Angela said no more, but watched with a fast-beating heart what
seemed to be tumult passing before her, but was really expedition
and apparent confusion which meant order.
In a little while the carriage struck off from the highroad and passed
into a region all quietude and peace. The distant roar of the guns
stopped for a time, and the intervening hill and valley shut off the
sounds of the marching troops. The red sun was gone and the short,
enchanted autumn twilight had fallen. When the carriage drew up at
the door of the farmhouse Angela, when Farley had assisted her to
alight, said: “I think that I should now release you from your kind
attendance on me. Captain Tremaine directed me to remain here
until I should hear from him. I shan’t need any protection, and I beg
that you will feel no hesitation in leaving me.”
Farley, whose orders were to place himself at Mrs. Tremaine’s
disposal and who had looked forward to days of inaction for himself
while fighting was going on, felt a thrill of gratitude.
“Thank you,” he replied, bowing low. “If I thought there was any
possibility of danger to you, I assure you I should not leave you; but
this place is well out of the way, and, besides, we hardly expect a
general engagement.”
Sarah Brown, slatternly, frightened, helpless, but sympathetic, came
out to greet Angela, and suddenly began to wring her hands. “I
thought,” she cried hysterically, “we would have a man here in case
the Yankees, or the Confederates either, wanted to burn the house
down, and then he would stand up for us and wouldn’t let ’em do it.
Oh, my, oh, my!”
“Nonsense!” cried Angela sharply, catching Sarah by the arm. “If
anything like that should happen, no one could help us. We are just
as well off alone. Good-by, Mr. Farley, and thank you.” And bowing
politely to the soldier-driver, she fairly dragged her hostess within.
Once inside, she managed to somewhat calm Sarah Brown’s chronic
trepidation. Sarah gave her supper, and then would, out of pure good
nature, have remained with her during the night, but this Angela
declined.
When darkness fell, all grew still, and Sarah Brown took Angela’s
advice and went to bed. Angela herself did not follow her own
recommendation, and felt a strange disinclination to go to bed.
Usually her strong young nerves had given her sleep whenever she
had desired it, but this night, when every nerve was on quivering
edge, sleep eluded and defied her. She threw her mantle around her
and sat for a long time at the open window watching the moon as it
rose in silvery splendor over the half-bare woods. How still and sad
and woe-begone was the aspect of the country! Only two nights
before she had been riding with Isabey through a region almost as
still and sad and woe-begone as this, along the weed-grown highway
and untraveled forest roads, and now that time was as far removed
as if æons had passed.
As the thought of Isabey occurred to her she put it resolutely out of
her mind and began to think of Neville—how he looked, what he
said.
She took from her pocket the letter he had given her, and then thrust
it back out of sight. She was not to open it unless she had bad news
of him. Existence with Neville absent had been strange enough, but
with him dead—Angela could scarcely conceive of a world without
him. Her heart was oppressed with a thousand griefs and
perplexities. If only Isabey had not come into her life, how much
easier would all things have been! She remembered Lyddon having
told her once, long ago, that human beings in this world suffer or
enjoy according to the imagination with which they are endowed, and
he had added, “You have a tremendous imagination.”
This and many other half-forgotten things came back to her memory,
and all suggested struggle and conflict. After midnight she lay down
across her hard, coarse bed and fell into a restless and uneasy
sleep, haunted by painful dreams. She was glad to waken from it,
and, looking at her watch, found that it was four o’clock. Just the
time, two nights before, when she had said farewell to Isabey. Life
appeared to her all farewells. She rose and went again to the open
window, and the scene of two nights before seemed to repeat itself
before her eyes, until the miracle of the dawning came. Then
Angela’s head dropped upon the window sill and she fell for the first
time into a quiet and dreamless sleep.
The sun rose in splendor, and the whole fresh and dewy world was
sparkling when Angela was awakened by a terrible sound—the
crash of bursting shells. She looked toward the woods a mile away
and heard through the stillness of the autumn morning the fearful
thunder, the shouts and cries of conflict. Almost immediately she saw
half a dozen ambulances with their attendants driving into the open
field and making straight for the farmhouse. She knew well what it
meant. Those were the wounded seeking a place of refuge. As the
ambulances reached the house she opened her door and ran quickly
down the narrow stair. The passage door was wide open, and two
soldiers, carrying a stretcher, were coming in. On it lay a figure
covered up in a blue cloak. They took their burden and laid it down in
the room to the right on the ground floor. Following them came a
surgeon, grimy, bloody, anxious-eyed, but cool. He scarcely saw
Angela, and paid no heed to her, but followed the stretcher into the
little room. Then Angela heard him say, in a quick voice: “He is gone;
there is nothing more to be done here, but plenty to be done
outside.”
He passed again through the hall, followed by the two soldiers.
Three stretchers, with wounded men groaning and moaning in their
agony, were carried into the narrow hall.
Something quite outside of her own volition made Angela walk
toward the room in which the dead officer lay. As she reached the
door she felt a hand upon her arm, and the surgeon was saying to
her: “Excuse me, but you had better not go in there. The officer is
dead and much disfigured.”
“What is his name?” asked Angela.
“Captain Neville Tremaine,” was the surgeon’s answer. “Killed
leading the Forlorn Hope; as brave a man as ever lived or died.”

One night, a week later, Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine sat together in
the library at Harrowby. Usually they were alone, but since the family
circle had grown so pitifully small, Lyddon had left his ancient habitat,
the old study, and sat with them in the evenings. He was pretending
to read, and so was Colonel Tremaine, but both were really
absorbed in reverie. Mrs. Tremaine, with more self-possession than
either, sat knitting. Lyddon, watching her furtively, thought how like
she was to those Spartan women who bade their sons return with
their shields or upon them. Only with Mrs. Tremaine this sublime
courage was accompanied with a gentleness and softness like a
Lesbian air.
The stillness remained unbroken for an hour, when there was a
sound of hoofs and wheels upon the carriage drive. As they listened
the hall door was quickly opened and some one entered.
“That is Angela,” said Mrs. Tremaine. And the next moment Angela
entered the library. She wore a black gown, which Mrs. Tremaine
instantly noticed. The two women, looking into each other’s eyes,
opened their arms, and then were clasped together.
“Neville is gone!” cried Angela. “He is with Richard.”
CHAPTER XXIII
THE AFTERMATH

TWO years and a half afterwards, on an April afternoon, Isabey,


riding the ghost of a war horse, came in sight of the old manor house
of Harrowby. It was a soft, mild afternoon, as soft and sunny as that
day, now four years past, when he had first seen the place. From the
top of the cedar lane Isabey’s keen eyes could view the whole scene
in its minutest details. The broad fields, which he remembered as
green in spring and gold in summer with wheat, were unfilled and
grown up in blackberry bushes, wild roses, poppies, and the blue
cornflower, those bold marauders who seize upon the earth as soon
as it is no longer plowed or reaped. Over all brooded a sad
peacefulness, a quiet decay and mournful silence; Nature seemed in
a melancholy reverie. Spring had come in all the soft splendor of its
beauty, and yet no hand seemed uplifted to do her bidding of
cheerful toil. There were no sounds of jocund plowmen or cheerful
laborers, of laughing, brown-skinned milkmaids who sang at their
work. Isabey’s eyes traveled toward the old graveyard in the field.
The brick wall had fallen into still greater decay than he
remembered, and a few lean sheep were browsing among the
graves. Isabey looked farther on toward the house. The fences were
down, and the negro quarters, which were wont to be alive with
those merry, brown creatures, were silent and deserted. The
carriage drive was overgrown with weeds—there were no carriages
any more to traverse it. And the yew hedge was more ragged and
decrepit than ever before. The old brick mansion stood out dark and
clear against the violet sky, while the river, a darker violet, went upon
its ceaseless way singing its eternal refrain. Isabey noticed that most
of the shutters in the old mansion were closed; one or two of them
had fallen to the ground, and the top of one of the great chimneys
showed a huge gap where the mortar of a hundred years had
decayed and the bricks had tumbled in. This gave the house a look
of desolation.
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

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