The Crisis Part 97

"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 wors.h.i.+pped 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 princ.i.p.al 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 princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.ses which formed the ma.s.s 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.