It was Stephen who rose to meet him, and with her eyes the girl followed his motions. The broad and loosely built frame of the Northerner, his shoulders slightly stooping, contrasted with Clarence"s slighter figure, erect, compact, springy. The Southerner"s eye, for that moment, was flint struck with the spark from the steel. Stephen"s face, thinned by illness, was grave. The eyes kindly, yet penetrating. For an instant they stood thus regarding each other, neither offering a hand. It was Stephen who spoke first, and if there was a trace of emotion in his voice, one who was listening intently failed to mark it.
"I am glad to see that you have recovered, Colonel Colfax," he said.
"I should indeed be without grat.i.tude if I did not thank Captain Brice for my life," answered Clarence. Virginia flushed. She had detected the undue accent on her cousin"s last words, and she glanced apprehensively at Stephen. His forceful reply surprised them both.
"Miss Carvel has already thanked me sufficiently, sir," he said. "I am happy to have been able to have done you a good turn, and at the same time to have served her so well. It was she who saved your life. It is to her your thanks are chiefly due. I believe that I am not going too far, Colonel Colfax," he added, "when I congratulate you both."
Before her cousin could recover, Virginia slid down from the desk and had come between them. How her eyes shone and her lip trembled as she gazed at him, Stephen has never forgotten. What a woman she was as she took her cousin"s arm and made him a curtsey.
"What you have done may seem a light thing to you, Captain Brice," she said. "That is apt to be the way with those who have big hearts. You have put upon Colonel Colfax, and upon me, a life"s obligation."
When she began to speak, Clarence raised his head. As he glanced, incredulous, from her to Stephen, his look gradually softened, and when she had finished, his manner had become again frank, boyish, impetuous--nay, penitent. He seized Stephen"s hand.
"Forgive me, Brice," he cried. "Forgive me. I should have known better. I--I did you an injustice, and you, Virginia. I was a fool--a scoundrel." Stephen shook his head.
"No, you were neither," he said. Then upon his face came the smile of one who has the strength to renounce, all that is dearest to him--that smile of the unselfish, sweetest of all. It brought tears to Virginia.
She was to see it once again, upon the features of one who bore a cross,--Abraham Lincoln. Clarence looked, and then he turned away toward the door to the stairway, as one who walks blindly, in a sorrow.
His hand was on the k.n.o.b when Virginia seemed to awake. She flew after him:
"Wait!" she whispered.
Then she raised her eyes, slowly, to Stephen, who was standing motionless beside his chair.
"Captain Brice!"
"Yes," he answered.
"My father is in the Judge"s room," she said.
"Your father!" he exclaimed. "I thought--"
"That he was an officer in the Confederate Army. So he is." Her head went up as she spoke.
Stephen stared at her, troubled. Suddenly her manner, changed. She took a step toward him, appealingly.
"Oh, he is not a spy," she cried. "He has given Mr Brinsmade his word that he came here for no other purpose than to see me. Then he heard that the Judge was dying--"
"He has given his word to Mr. Brinsmade?
"Yes."
"Then," said Stephen, "what Mr. Brinsmade sanctions is not for me to question."
She gave him yet another look, a fleeting one which he did not see. Then she softly opened the door and pa.s.sed into the room of the dying man.
Stephen followed her. As for Clarence, he stood for a s.p.a.ce staring after them. Then he went noiselessly down the stairs into the street.
CHAPTER XI. LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT
When the Judge opened his eyes for the last time in this world, they fell first upon the face of his old friend, Colonel Carvel. Twice he tried to speak his name, and twice he failed. The third time he said it faintly.
"Comyn!"
"Yes, Silas."
"Comyn, what are you doing here?
"I reckon I came to see you, Silas," answered the Colonel.
"To see me die," said the Judge, grimly.
Colonel Carvel"s face twitched, and the silence in that little room seemed to throb.
"Comyn," said the Judge again, "I heard that you had gone South to fight against your country. I see you here. Can it be that you have at last returned in your allegiances to the flag for which your forefathers died?"
Poor Colonel Carvel
"I am still of the same mind, Silas," he said.
The Judge turned his face away, his thin lips moving as in prayer. But they knew that he was not praying, "Silas," said Mr. Carvel, "we were friends for twenty years. Let us be friends again, before--"
"Before I die," the Judge interrupted, "I am ready to die. Yes, I am ready. I have had a hard life, Comyn, and few friends. It was my fault.
I--I did not know how to make them. Yet no man ever valued those few more than! But," he cried, the stern fire unquenched to the last, "I would that G.o.d had spared me to see this Rebellion stamped out. For it will be stamped out." To those watching, his eyes seemed fixed on a distant point, and the light of prophecy was in them. "I would that G.o.d had spared me to see this Union supreme once more. Yes, it will be supreme. A high destiny is reserved for this nation--! I think the highest of all on this earth." Amid profound silence he leaned back on the pillows from which he had risen, his breath coming fast. None dared look at the neighbor beside them.
It was Stephen"s mother who spoke. "Would you not like to see a clergyman, Judge?" she asked.
The look on his face softened as he turned to her.
"No, madam," he answered; "you are clergyman enough for me. You are near enough to G.o.d--there is no one in this room who is not worthy to stand in the presence of death. Yet I wish that a clergyman were here, that he might listen to one thing I have to say. When I was a boy I worked my way down the river to New York, to see the city. I met a bishop there.
He said to me, "Sit down, my son, I want to talk to you. I know your father in Albany. You are Senator Whipple"s son." I said to him, "No, sir, I am not Senator Whipple"s son. I am no relation of his." If the bishop had wished to talk to me after that, Mrs. Brice, he might have made my life a little easier--a little sweeter. I know that they are not all like that. But it was by just such things that I was embittered when I was a boy." He stopped, and when he spoke again, it was more slowly, more gently, than any of them had heard him speak in all his life before. "I wish that some of the blessings which I am leaving now had come to me then--when I was a boy. I might have done my little share in making the world a brighter place to live in, as all of you have done.
Yes, as all of you are now doing for me. I am leaving the world with a better opinion of it than I ever held in life. G.o.d hid the sun from me when I was a little child. Margaret Brice," he said, "if I had had such a mother as you, I would have been softened then. I thank G.o.d that He sent you when He did."
The widow bowed her head, and a tear fell upon his pillow.
"I have done nothing," she murmured, "nothing."
"So shall they answer at the last whom He has chosen," said the Judge.
"I was sick, and ye visited me. He has promised to remember those who do that. Hold up your head, my daughter. G.o.d has been good to you. He has given you a son whom all men may look in the face, of whom you need never be ashamed. Stephen," said the Judge, "come here."
Stephen made his way to the bedside, but because of the moisture in his eyes he saw but dimly the gaunt face. And yet he shrank back in awe at the change in it. So must all of the martyrs have looked when the fire of the f.a.ggots licked their feet. So must John Bunyan have stared through his prison bars at the sky.
"Stephen," he said, "you have been faithful in a few things. So shall you be made ruler over many things. The little I have I leave to you, and the chief of this is an untarnished name. I know that you will be true to it because I have tried your strength. Listen carefully to what I have to say, for I have thought over it long. In the days gone by our fathers worked for the good of the people, and they had no thought of gain. A time is coming when we shall need that blood and that bone in this Republic. Wealth not yet dreamed of will flow out of this land, and the waters of it will rot all save the pure, and corrupt all save the incorruptible. Half-tried men wilt go down before that flood. You and those like you will remember how your fathers governed,--strongly, sternly, justly. It was so that they governed themselves.
"Be vigilant. Serve your city, serve your state, but above all serve your country."