_ IT was Virginia's wish, and was therefore sacred. As for Stephen, he
little cared whither they went. And so they found themselves on that
bright afternoon in mid-April under the great trees that arch the unpaved
streets of old Annapolis.
They stopped by direction at a gate, and behind it was a green cluster of
lilac bushes, which lined the walk to the big plum-colored house which
Lionel Carvel had built. Virginia remembered that down this walk on a
certain day in June, a hundred years agone, Richard Carvel had led
Dorothy Manners.
They climbed the steps, tottering now with age and disuse, and Virginia
playfully raised the big brass knocker, brown now, that Scipio had been
wont to polish until it shone. Stephen took from his pocket the clumsy
key that General Carvel had given him, and turned it in the rusty lock.
The door swung open, and Virginia stood in the hall of her ancestors.
It was musty and damp this day as the day when Richard had come back from
England and found it vacant and his grandfather dead. But there, at the
parting of the stairs, was the triple-arched window which he had
described. Through it the yellow afternoon light was flooding now, even
as then, checkered by the branches in their first fringe of green. But
the tall clock which Lionel Carvel used to wind was at Calvert House,
with many another treasure.
They went up the stairs, and reverently they walked over the bare floors,
their footfalls echoing through the silent house. A score of scenes in
her great-grandfather's life came to Virginia. Here was the room--the
cornet one at the back of the main building, which looked out over the
deserted garden--that had been Richard's mother's. She recalled how he
had stolen into it on that summer's day after his return, and had flung
open the shutters. They were open now, for their locks were off. The
prie-dieu was gone, and the dresser. But the high bed was there,
stripped of its poppy counterpane and white curtains; and the steps by
which she had entered it.
And next they went into the great square room that had been Lionel
Carvel's, and there, too, was the roomy bed on which the old gentleman
had lain with the gout, while Richard read to him from the Spectator.
One side of it looked out on the trees in Freshwater Lane; and the other
across the roof of the low house opposite to where the sun danced on the
blue and white waters of the Chesapeake.
"Honey," said Virginia, as they stood in the deep recess of the window,
"wouldn't it be nice if we could live here always, away from the world?
Just we two! But you would never be content to do that," she said,
smiling reproachfully. "You are the kind of man who must be in the midst
of things. In a little while you will have far more besides me to think
about."
He was quick to catch the note of sadness in her voice. And he drew her
to him.
"We all have our duty to perform in the world, dear," he answered. "It
cannot be all pleasure."
"You--you Puritan!" she cried. "To think that I should have married a
Puritan! What would my great-great-great-great-grandfather say, who was
such a stanch Royalist? Why, I think I can see him frowning at me now,
from the door, in his blue velvet goat and silverlaced waistcoat."
"He was well punished," retorted Stephen, "his own grandson was a Whig,
and seems to have married a woman of spirit."
"She had spirit," said Virginia. "I am sure that she did not allow my
great-grandfather to kiss her--unless she wanted to."
And she looked up at him, half smiling, half pouting; altogether
bewitching.
"From what I hear of him, he was something of a man," said Stephen.
"Perhaps he did it anyway."
"I am glad that Marlborough Street isn't a crowded thoroughfare," said
Virginia.
When they had seen the dining room, with its carved mantel and silver
door-knobs, and the ballroom in the wing, they came out, and Stephen
locked the door again. They walked around the house, and stood looking
down the terraces,--once stately, but crumbled now,--where Dorothy had
danced on the green on Richard's birthday. Beyond and below was the
spring-house, and there was the place where the brook dived under the
ruined wall,--where Dorothy had wound into her hair the lilies of the
valley before she sailed for London.
The remains of a wall that had once held a balustrade marked the outlines
of the formal garden. The trim hedges, for seventy years neglected, had
grown incontinent. The garden itself was full of wild green things
coming up through the brown of last season's growth. But in the grass
the blue violets nestled, and Virginia picked some of these and put them
in Stephen's coat.
"You must keep them always," she said, "because we got them here."
They spied a seat beside a hoary trunk. There on many a spring day
Lionel Carvel had sat reading his Gazette. And there they rested now.
The sun hung low over the old-world gables in the street beyond the wall,
and in the level rays was an apple tree dazzling white, like a bride.
The sweet fragrance which the day draws from the earth lingered in the
air.
It was Virginia who broke the silence,
"Stephen, do you remember that fearful afternoon of the panic, when you
came over from Anne Brinsmade's to reassure me?"
"Yes, dear," he said. "But what made you think of it now?"
She did not answer him directly.
"I believed what you said, Stephen. But you were so strong, so calm, so
sure of yourself. I think that made me angry when I thought how
ridiculous I must have been."
He pressed her hand.
"You were not ridiculous, Jinny." She laughed.
"I was not as ridiculous as Mr. Cluyme with his bronze clock. But do you
know what I had under my arm--what I was saving of all the things I
owned?"
"No," he answered; "but I have often wondered." She blushed.
"This house--this place made me think of it. It was Dorothy Manners's
gown, and her necklace. I could not leave them. They were all the
remembrance I had of that night at Mr. Brinsmade's gate, when we came so
near to each other."
"Virginia," he said, "some force that we cannot understand has brought us
together, some force that we could not hinder. It is foolish for me to
say so, but on that day of the slave auction, when I first saw you, I had
a premonition about you that I have never admitted until now, even to
myself."
She started.
"Why, Stephen," she cried, "I felt the same way!" And then," he
continued quickly, "it was strange that I should have gone to Judge
Whipple, who was an intimate of your father's--such a singular intimate.
And then came your party, and Glencoe, and that curious incident at the
Fair."
"When I was talking to the Prince, and looked up and saw you among all
those people."
He laughed.
"That was the most uncomfortable of all, for me."
"Stephen," she said, stirring the leaves at her feet, "you might have
taken me in your arms the night Judge Whipple died--if you had wanted to.
But you were strong enough to resist. I love you all the more for that."
Again she said:--
It was through your mother, dearest, that we were most strongly drawn
together. I worshipped her from the day I saw her in the hospital.
I believe that was the beginning of my charity toward the North."
"My mother would have chosen you above all women, Virginia," he answered.
In the morning came to them the news of Abraham Lincoln's death. And the
same thought was in both their hearts, who had known him as it was given
to few to know him. How he had lived in sorrow; how he had died a martyr
on the very day of Christ's death upon the cross. And they believed that
Abraham Lincoln gave his life for his country even as Christ gave his for
the world.
And so must we believe that God has reserved for this Nation a destiny
high upon the earth.
Many years afterward Stephen Brice read again to his wife those sublime
closing words of the second inaugural:--
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him
who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his children
--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
among ourselves and with all nations."
AFTERWORD
The author has chosen St. Louis for the principal scene of this story
for many reasons. Grant and Sherman were living there before the Civil
War, and Abraham Lincoln was an unknown lawyer in the neighboring state
of Illinois. It has been one of the aims of this book to show the
remarkable contrasts in the lives of these great men who came out of the
West. This old city of St. Louis, which was founded by Laclede in 1765,
likewise became the principal meeting-place of two great streams of
emigration which had been separated, more or less, since Cromwell's day.
To be sure, they were not all Cavaliers who settled in the tidewater
Colonies. There were Puritan settlements in both Maryland and Virginia.
But the life in the Southern states took on the more liberal tinge which
had characterized that of the Royalists, even to the extent of affecting
the Scotch Calvinists, while the asceticism of the Roundheads was the
keynote of the Puritan character in New England. When this great country
of ours began to develop, the streams moved westward; one over what
became the plain states of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, and the other
across the Blue Ridge Mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee. They mixed
along the line of the Ohio River. They met at St. Louis, and, farther
west, in Kansas.
Nor can the German element in St. Louis be ignored. The part played by
this people in the Civil War is a matter of history. The scope of this
book has not permitted the author to introduce the peasantry and trading
classes which formed the mass in this movement. But Richter, the type of
the university-bred revolutionist which emigrated after '48, is drawn
more or less from life. And the duel described actually took place in
Berlin.
St. Louis is the author's birthplace, and his home, the home of those
friends whom he has known from childhood and who have always treated him
with unfaltering kindness. He begs that they will believe him when he
says that only such characters as he loves are reminiscent of those he
has known there. The city has a large population,--large enough to
include all the types that are to be found in the middle West.
One word more. This book is written of a time when feeling ran high.
It has been necessary to put strong speech into the mouths of the
characters. The breach that threatened our country's existence is healed
now. There is no side but Abraham Lincoln's side. And this side, with
all reverence and patriotism, the author has tried to take.
Abraham Lincoln loved the South as well as the North.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Freedom meant only the liberty to earn their own living
Simple men who command by force of character
THE END.
The Crisis, by Winston Churchill (An American Novelist - not Sir Winston Churchill) _