Books: His Sombre Rivals

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"Let me see the book," cried Hilland. "Oh, yes," he continued,
laughing; "I remember it all well--the hopes, the misgivings with
which I sent the volume eastward on its mission--the hopes and fears
that rose when the book was acknowledged with no chidings or coldness,
and also with no allusions to the marked passage--the endless surmises
as to what this gentle reader would think of the sentiments within
these black lines. Ha! ha! Graham. No doubt but this is Sanscrit; and
all the professors of all the universities could not interpret it to
you."

"That's what I said in substance on the evening referred to--that
Emerson never learned this at a university. I confess that it's an
experience that is and ever will be beyond me. But it's surely good
authority for remaining here with my aunt, who needs me more than you
do."

"How is it, then, Mr. Graham, that you can leave your aunt for months
of travel?" Grace asked.

"Why, Grace," spoke up Mrs. Mayburn, quickly, "you cannot expect
Alford to transform himself into an old lady's life-long attendant. He
will enjoy his travel and come back to me."

The young girl made no answer, but thought: "Their defensive alliance
is a strong one."

"Besides," continued the old lady, after a moment, "I think it's very
kind of him to remain with me, instead of going to the beach for his
own pleasure and the marring of yours."

"Now, that's putting it much too strong," cried Hilland. "Graham never
marred our pleasure."

"And I hope he never will," was the low, earnest response. To Grace's
ear it sounded more like a vow or the expression of a controlling
purpose than like a mere friendly remark.

The next day the St. John cottage was alive with the bustle of
preparation for departure. Graham made no officious offers of
assistance, which, of course, would be futile, but quietly devoted
himself to the major. Whenever Grace appeared from the upper regions,
she found her father amused or interested, and she smiled her
gratitude. In the evening she found a chance to say in a low aside:
"Mr. Graham, you are keeping your word to be my friend. If the sea-
breezes prove as beneficial to papa as your society to-day, I shall be
glad indeed. You don't know how much you have aided me by entertaining
him so kindly."

Both her tone and glance were very gentle as she spoke these words,
and for a moment his silence and manner perplexed her. Then he replied
lightly: "You are mistaken, Miss Grace. Your father has been
entertaining me."

They were interrupted at this point, and Graham seemed to grow more
remote than ever.

Hilland was parting from his friend with evident and sincere regret.
He had made himself very useful in packing, strapping trunks, and in a
general eagerness to save his betrothed from all fatigue; but whenever
occasion offered he would sally forth upon Graham, who, with the
major, followed the shade on the piazza. Some jocular speech usually
accompanied his appearance, and he always received the same in kind
with such liberal interest that he remarked to Grace more than once,
"You are the only being in the world for whom I'd leave Graham during
his brief stay in this land."

"Oh, return to him by all means," she had said archly upon one
occasion." We did very well alone last year before we were aware of
your existence."

"YOU may not care," was his merry response, "but it is written in one
of the oldest books of the world, 'It is not good for MAN to be
alone.' Oh, Grace, what an infinite difference there is between love
for a woman like you and the strongest friendship between man and man!
Graham just suits me as a friend. After a separation of years I find
him just the same even-pulsed, half-cynical, yet genial good fellow he
always was. It's hard to get within his shell; but when you do, you
find the kernel sweet and sound to the core, even if it is rather dry.
From the time we struck hands as boys there has never been an
unpleasant jar in our relations. We supplement each other
marvellously; but how infinitely more and beyond all this is your
love! How it absorbs and swallows up every other consideration, so
that one hour with you is more to me than an age with all the men of
wit and wisdom that ever lived! No; I'm not a false friend when I say
that I am more than content to go and remain with you; and if Graham
had a hundredth part as much heart as brains he would understand me.
Indeed, his very intellect serves in the place of a heart after a
fashion; for he took Emerson on trust so intelligently as to
comprehend that I should not be inconsolable."

"Mr. Graham puzzles me," Grace had remarked, as she absently inspected
the buttons on one of her father's vests. "I never met just such a man
before."

"And probably never will again. He has been isolated and peculiar from
childhood. I know him well, and he has changed but little in
essentials since I left him over two years ago."

"I wish I had your complacent belief about him," was her mental
conclusion. "I sometimes think you are right, and again I feel as if
some one in almost mortal pain is near me, and that I am to blame in
part."

Whist was dispensed with the last night they were together, for the
evening was close, and all were weary. Grace thought Graham looked
positively haggard; but, whether by design or chance, he kept in the
shadows of the piazza most of the time. Still she had to admit that he
was the life of the party. Mrs. Mayburn was apparently so overcome by
the heat as to be comparatively silent; and Hilland openly admitted
that the July day and his exertions had used him up. Therefore the
last gathering at the St. Johns' cottage came to a speedy end; and
Graham not only said good-night, but also good-by; for, as he
explained, business called him to town early the following morning. He
parted fraternally with Hilland, giving a promise to spend a day with
him before he sailed for Europe. Then he broke away, giving Grace as a
farewell only a strong, warm pressure of the hand, and hastened after
his aunt, who had walked on slowly before. The major, after many
friendly expressions, had retired quite early in the evening.

Grace saw the dark outline of Graham's form disappear like a shadow,
and every day thereafter he grew more shadowy to her. To a degree she
did not imagine possible he had baffled her scrutiny and left her in
doubt. Either he had quietly and philosophically accepted the
situation, or he wished her to think so. In either case there was
nothing to be done. Once away with father and lover she had HER world
with her; and life grew richer and more full of content every day.

Lassitude and almost desperate weariness were in Graham's step as he
came up the path the following evening, for there was no further
reason to keep up the part he was acting. When he greeted his aunt he
tried to appear cheerful, but she said gently, "Put on no mask before
me, Alford. Make no further effort. You have baffled even Grace, and
thoroughly satisfied your friend that all is well. Let the strain
cease now; and let my home be a refuge while you remain. Your wound is
one that time only can heal. You have made an heroic struggle not to
mar their happiness, and I am proud of you for it. But don't try to
deceive me or put the spur any longer to your jaded spirit. Reaction
into new hopes and a new life will come all the sooner if you give way
for the present to your mood."

The wise old woman would have been right in dealing with most natures.
But Graham would not give way to his bitter disappointment, and for
him there would come no reaction. He quietly read to her the evening
papers, and after she had retired stole out and gazed for hours on the
St. John cottage, the casket that had contained for him the jewel of
the world. Then, compressing his lips, he returned to his room with
the final decision, "I will be her friend for life; but it must be an
absent friend. I think my will is strong; but half the width of the
world must be between us."

For the next two weeks he sought to prepare his aunt for a long
separation. He did not hide his feeling; indeed, he spoke of it with a
calmness which, while it surprised, also convinced her that it would
dominate his life. She was made to see clearly the necessity of his
departure, if he would keep his promise to live and do his best. He
promised to be a faithful and voluminous correspondent, and she knew
she would live upon his letters. After the lapse of three weeks he had
arranged his affairs so as to permit a long absence, and then parted
with his aunt as if he had been her son.

"Alford," she said, "all that I have is yours, as you will find in my
will."

"Dear aunty," was his reply, "in giving me your love you have given me
all that I crave. I have more than enough for my wants. Forgive me
that I cannot stay; but I cannot. I have learned the limit of my power
of endurance. I know that I cannot escape myself or my memories, but
new scenes divert my thoughts. Here, I believe, I should go mad, or
else do something wild and desperate. Forgive me, and do not judge me
harshly because I leave you. Perhaps some day this fever of unrest
will pass away, When it does, rest assured you shall see me again."

He then went to the seaside resort where Hilland with the major and
his daughter was sojourning, and never had they seen a man who
appeared so far removed from the lackadaisical, disconsolate lover.
His dress was elegant, although very quiet, his step firm and prompt,
and his manner that of a man who is thoroughly master of the
situation. The major was ill from an indiscretion at the table during
the preceding day, and Grace could not leave him very long. He sent to
his favorite companion and antagonist at whist many feeling messages
and sincere good wishes, and they lost nothing in hearty warmth as
they came from Grace's lips; and for some reason, which she could
scarcely explain to herself, tears came into her eyes as she gave him
her hand in parting.

He had been laughing and jesting vivaciously a moment before; but as
he looked into her face, so full of kindly feeling which she could not
wholly repress, his own seemed to grow rigid, and the hand she held
was so cold and tense as to remind her of a steel gauntlet. In the
supreme effort of his spiritual nature he belied his creed. His
physical being was powerless in the grasp of the dominant soul. No
martyr at the stake ever suffered more than he at that moment, but he
merely said with quiet emphasis, "Good-by, Grace St. John. I shall not
forget my promise, nor can there come a day on which I shall not wish
you all the happiness you deserve."

He then bowed gravely and turned away. She hastily sought her room,
and then burst into an irrepressible passion of tears. "It's all in
vain," she sobbed. "I felt it. I know it. He suffers as I should
suffer, and his iron will cannot disguise the truth."

The friends strolled away up the beach for their final talk, and at
length Hilland came back in a somewhat pensive but very complacent
mood. Grace looked at him anxiously, but his first sentences reassured
her.

"Well," he exclaimed, "if Graham is odd, he's certainly the best and
most sensible fellow that ever lived, and the most steadfast of
friends. Here we've been separated for years, and yet, for any change
in his attitude toward me, we might have parted overnight at the
university. He was as badly smitten by the girl I love as a man of his
temperament could be; but on learning the facts he recognizes the
situation with a quiet good taste which leaves nothing to be desired.
He made it perfectly clear to me that travel for the present was only
a broader and more effective way of continuing his career as a
student, and that when tired of wandering he can go back to books with
a larger knowledge of how to use them. One thing he has made clearer
still--if we do not see each other for ten years, he will come back
the same stanch friend."

"I think you are right, Warren. He certainly has won my entire
respect."

"I'm glad he didn't win anything more, sweetheart."

"That ceased to be possible long before he came, but I--I wish he had
known it," was her hesitating response, as she pushed Hilland's hair
back from his heated brow.

"Nonsense, you romantic little woman! You imagine he has gone away
with a great gaping wound in his heart. Graham is the last man in the
world for that kind of thing, and no one would smile more broadly than
he, did he know of your gentle solicitude."

Grace was silent a moment, and then stole away to her father's side.

The next tidings they had of Graham was a letter dated among the
fiords and mountains of Norway.

At times no snowy peak in that wintry land seemed more shadowy or
remote to Grace than he. Again, while passing to and fro between their
own and Mrs. Mayburn's cottage in the autumn, she would see him, with
almost the vividness of life, deathly pale as when he leaned against
the apple-tree at their well-remembered interview.

CHAPTER XVI

THE CLOUD IN THE SOUTH

The summer heat passed speedily, and the major returned to his cottage
invigorated and very complacent over his daughter's prospects. Hilland
had proved himself as manly and devoted a lover as he had been an
ardent and eventually patient suitor. The bubbling, overflowing stream
of happiness in Grace's heart deepened into a wide current, bearing
her on from day to day toward a future that promised to satisfy every
longing of her woman's heart. There was, of course, natural regret
that Hilland was constrained to spend several months in the West in
order to settle up his large interests with a due regard to the rights
of others, and yet she would not have it otherwise. She was happy in
his almost unbounded devotion; she would have been less happy had this
devotion kept him at her side when his man's part in the world
required his presence elsewhere. Therefore she bade him farewell with
a heart that was not so very heavy, even though tears gemmed her eyes.

The autumn and early winter months lapsed quietly and uneventfully,
and the inmates of the two cottages ever remembered that period of
their lives as the era of letters--Graham's from over the sea
abounding in vivid descriptions of scenes that to Mrs. Mayburn's
interested eyes were like glimpses of another world, and Hilland's,
even more voluminous and infinitely more interesting to one fair
reader, to whom they were sacred except as she doled out occasional
paragraphs which related sufficiently to the general order of things
to be read aloud.

Graham's letters, however, had a deep interest to Grace, who sought to
trace in them the working of his mind in regard to herself. She found
it difficult, for his letters were exceedingly impersonal, while the
men and things he saw often stood out upon his page with vivid
realism. It seemed to her that he grew more shadowy, and that he was
wandering rather than travelling, drifting whithersoever his fancy or
circumstances pointed the way. It was certain he avoided the beaten
paths, and freely indulged his taste for regions remote and
comparatively unknown. His excuse was that life was far more
picturesque and unhackneyed, with a chance for an occasional
adventure, in lands where one was not jostled by people with guide-
books--that he saw men and women as the influences of the ages had
been fashioning them, and not conventionalized by the mode of the
hour. "Chief of all," he concluded, jestingly, "I can send to my dear
aunt descriptions of people and scenery that she will not find better
set forth in half a dozen books within her reach."

After a month in Norway, he crossed the mountains into Sweden, and as
winter approached drifted rapidly to the south and east. One of his
letters was dated at the entrance of the Himalayas in India, and
expressed his purpose to explore one of the grandest mountain systems
in the world.

Mrs. Mayburn gloated over the letters, and Grace laughingly told her
she had learned more about geography since her nephew had gone abroad
than in all her life before. The major, also, was deeply interested in
them, especially as Graham took pains in his behalf to give some
account of the military organizations with which he came in contact.
They had little of the nature of a scientific report. The soldier, his
life and weapons, were sketched with a free hand merely, and so became
even to the ladies a picturesque figure rather than a military
abstraction. From time to time a letter appeared in Mrs. Mayburn's
favorite journal signed by the initials of the traveller; and these
epistles she cut out and pasted most carefully in a book which Grace
jestingly called her "family Bible."

But as time passed, Graham occupied less and less space in the
thoughts of all except his aunt. The major's newspaper became more
absorbing than ever, for the clouds gathering in the political skies
threatened evils that seemed to him without remedy. Strongly Southern
and conservative in feeling, he was deeply incensed at what he termed
"Northern fanaticism." Only less hateful to him was a class in the
South known in the parlance of the times as "fire-eaters."

All through the winter and spring of 1860 he had his "daily growl," as
Grace termed it; and she assured him it was growing steadily deeper
and louder. Yet it was evidently a source of so much comfort to him
that she always smiled in secret over his invective--noting, also,
that while he deplored much that was said and done by the leaders of
the day, the prelude of the great drama interested him so deeply that
he half forgot his infirmities. In fact, she had more trouble with
Hilland, who had returned, and was urging an early date for their
marriage. Her lover was an ardent Republican, and hated slavery with
New England enthusiasm. The arrogance and blindness of the South had
their counterpart at the North, and Hilland had not escaped the
infection. He was much inclined to belittle the resources of the
former section, to scoff at its threats, and to demand that the North
should peremptorily and imperiously check all further aggressions of
slavery. At first it required not a little tact on the part of Grace
to preserve political harmony between father and lover; but the latter
speedily recognized that the major's age and infirmities, together
with his early associations, gave him almost unlimited privilege to
think and say what he pleased. Hilland soon came to hear with good-
natured nonchalance his Northern allies berated, and considered
himself well repaid by one mirthful, grateful glance from Grace.

After all, what was any political squabble compared with the fact that
Grace had promised to marry him in June? The settlement of the
difference between the North and South was only a question of time,
and that, too, in his belief, not far remote.

"Why should I worry about it?" he said to Grace. "When the North gets
angry enough to put its foot down, all this bluster about State-
rights, and these efforts to foist slavery on a people who are
disgusted with it, will cease."

"Take care," she replied, archly. "I'm a Southern girl. Think what
might happen if I put my foot down."

"Oh, when it comes to you," was his quick response, "I'm the
Democratic party. I will get down on my knees at any time; I'll yield
anything and stand everything."

"I hope you will be in just such a frame of mind ten years hence."

It was well that the future was hidden from her.

Hilland wrote to his friend, asking, indeed almost insisting, that he
should return in time for the wedding. Graham did not come, and
intimated that he was gathering materials which might result in a
book. He sent a letter, however, addressed to them both, and full of a
spirit of such loyal good-will that Hilland said it was like a
brother's grip. "Well, well," he concluded, "if Graham has the book-
making fever upon him, we shall have to give him up indefinitely."

Grace was at first inclined to take the same view, feeling that, even
if he had been sorely wounded, his present life and the prospects it
gave of authorship had gained so great a fascination that he would
come back eventually with only a memory of what he had suffered. Her
misgivings, however, returned when, on seeing the letter, Mrs.
Mayburn's eyes became suddenly dimmed with tears. She turned away
abruptly and seemed vexed with herself for having shown the emotion,
but only said quietly, "I once thought Alford had no heart; but that
letter was not written 'out of his head,' as we used to say when
children."

She gave Grace no reason to complain of any lack of affectionate
interest in her preparations; and when the wedding day came she
assured the blushing girl that "no one had ever looked upon a lovelier
bride."

Ever mindful of her father, Grace would take no wedding journey,
although her old friend offered to come and care for him. She knew
well how essential her voice and hand were to his comfort; and she
would not permit him to entertain, even for a moment, the thought that
in any sense he had lost her. So they merely returned to his favorite
haunt by the sea, and Hilland was loyal to the only condition in their
engagement--that she should be permitted to keep her promise to her
dying mother, and never leave her father to the care of others, unless
under circumstances entirely beyond her control.

Later in the season Mrs. Mayburn joined them at the beach, for she
found her life at the cottage too lonely to be endured.

It was a summer of unalloyed happiness to Hilland and his wife, and
the major promised to renew his youth in the warm sunlight of his
prosperity. The exciting presidential canvass afforded abundant theme
for the daily discussions in his favorite corner of the piazza, where,
surrounded by some veteran cronies whom he had known in former years,
he joined them in predictions and ominous head-shakings over the
monstrous evils that would follow the election of Mr. Lincoln.
Hilland, sitting in the background with Grace, would listen and stroke
his tawny beard as he glanced humorously at his wife, who knew that he
was working, quietly out of deference to his father-in-law, but most
effectively, in the Republican campaign. Although Southern born she
had the sense to grant to men full liberty of personal opinion--a
quality that it would be well for many of her sisterhood to imitate.
Indeed, she would have despised a man who had not sufficient force to
think for himself; and she loved her husband all the more because in
some of his views he differed radically with her father and herself.

Meantime the cloud gathering in the South grew darker and more
portentous; and after the election of President Lincoln the lightning
of hate and passion began to strike from it directly at the nation's
life. The old major was both wrong and right in regard to the most
prominent leaders of the day. Many whom he deemed the worst fanatics
in the land were merely exponents of a public opinion that was rising
like an irresistible tide from causes beyond human control--from the
God-created conscience illumined by His own truth. In regard to the
instigators of the Rebellion, he was right. Instead of representing
their people, they deceived and misled them; and, with an astute
understanding of the chivalrous, hasty Southern temper, they so
wrought upon their pride of section by the false presentation of
fancied and prospective wrongs, that loyalty to the old flag, which at
heart they loved, was swept away by the madness which precedes
destruction. Above all and directing all was the God of nations; and
He had decreed that slavery, the gangrene in the body politic, must be
cut out, even though it should be with the sword. The surgery was
heroic, indeed; but as its result the slave, and especially the master
and his posterity, will grow into a large, healthful, and prosperous
life; and the evidences of such life are increasing daily.

At the time of which I am writing, however, the future was not dreamed
of by the sagacious Lincoln even, or his cabinet, much less was it
foreseen by the humbler characters of my story. Hilland after reading
his daily journal would sit silent for a long time with contracted
brow. The white heat of anger was slowly kindling in his heart and in
that of the loyal North; and the cloud in the South began to throw its
shadow over the hearth of the happy wife.

Although Hilland hated slavery it incensed him beyond measure that the
South could be made to believe that the North would break through or
infringe upon the constitutional safeguards thrown around the
institution. At the same time he knew, and it seemed to him every
intelligent man should understand, that if a sufficient majority
should decide to forbid the extension of the slave system to new
territory, that should end the question, or else the Constitution was
not worth the paper on which it was written. "Law and order," was his
motto; and "All changes and reforms under the sanction of law, and at
the command of the majority," his political creed.

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