University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER IV.
BYLES GRIDLEY, A. M.

THE old Master of Arts was as notable a man in his
outside presentment as one will find among five hundred
college alumni as they file in procession. His strong,
squared features, his formidable scowl, his solid-looking
head, his iron-gray hair, his positive and as it were categorical
stride, his slow, precise way of putting a statement,
the strange union of trampling radicalism in some directions
and high-stepping conservatism in others, which made it
impossible to calculate on his unexpressed opinions, his
testy ways and his generous impulses, his hard judgments
and kindly actions, were characteristics that gave him a
very decided individuality.

He had all the aspects of a man of books. His study,
which was the best room in Mrs. Hopkins's house, was
filled with a miscellaneous-looking collection of volumes,
which his curious literary taste had got together from the
shelves of all the libraries that had been broken up during
his long life as a scholar. Classics, theology, especially of
the controversial sort, statistics, politics, law, medicine, science,
occult and overt, general literature, — almost every
branch of knowledge was represented. His learning was
very various, and of course mixed up, useful and useless,
new and ancient, dogmatic and rational, — like his library,
in short; for a library gathered like his is a looking-glass
in which the owner's mind is reflected.

The common people about the village did not know

what to make of such a phenomenon. He did not preach,
marry, christen, or bury, like the ministers, nor jog around
with medicines for sick folks, nor carry cases into court for
quarrelsome neighbors. What was he good for? Not a
great deal, some of the wiseacres thought, — had “all sorts
of sense but common sense,” — “smart mahn, but not prahctical.”
There were others who read him more shrewdly.
He knowed more, they said, than all the ministers put together,
and if he 'd stan' for Ripresentative they 'd like to
vote for him, — they hed n't hed a smart mahn in the Gineral
Court sence Squire Wibird was thar.

They may have overdone the matter in comparing his
knowledge with that of all the ministers together, for Priest
Pemberton was a real scholar in his special line of study,
— as all D. D.s are supposed to be, or they would not have
been honored with that distinguished title. But Mr. Byles
Gridley not only had more learning than the deep-sea line
of the bucolic intelligence could fathom; he had more wisdom
also than they gave him credit for, even those among
them who thought most of his abilities.

In his capacity of schoolmaster he had sharpened his
wits against those of the lively city boys he had in charge,
and made such a reputation as “Master” Gridley, that he
kept that title even after he had become a college tutor and
professor. As a tutor he had to deal with many of these
same boys, and others like them, in the still more vivacious
period of their early college life. He got rid of his police
duties when he became a professor, but he still studied the
pupils as carefully as he used once to watch them, and
learned to read character with a skill which might have
fitted him for governing men instead of adolescents. But
he loved quiet and he dreaded mingling with the brawlers

of the market-place, whose stock in trade is a voice and a
vocabulary. So it was that he had passed his life in the
patient mechanical labor of instruction, leaving too many
of his instincts and faculties in abeyance.

The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance
to worldly wisdom than might have been conjectured;
much nearer, indeed, than it does in many old
instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as their blood grows
cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with anything more
practical than a gerund or a cosine. Master Gridley not
only knew a good deal of human nature, but he knew how
to keep his knowledge to himself upon occasion. He understood
singularly well the ways and tendencies of young
people. He was shrewd in the detection of trickery, and
very confident in those who had once passed the ordeal of
his well-schooled observing powers. He had no particular
tendency to meddle with the personal relations of those
about him; but if they were forced upon him in any way,
he was like to see into them at least as quickly as any of
his neighbors who thought themselves most endowed with
practical skill.

In leaving the duties of his office he considered himself, as
he said a little despondently, like an old horse unharnessed
and turned out to pasture. He felt that he had separated
himself from human interests, and was henceforth to live in
his books with the dead, until he should be numbered with
them himself. He had chosen this quiet village as a place
where he might pass his days undisturbed, and find a peaceful
resting-place in its churchyard, where the gravel was
dry, and the sun lay warm, and the glowing woods of autumn
would spread their many-colored counterpane over
the bed where he would be taking his rest. It sometimes

came over him painfully that he was never more to
be of any importance to his fellow-creatures. There was
nobody living to whom he was connected by any very near
ties. He felt kindly enough to the good woman in whose
house he lived; he sometimes gave a few words of counsel
to her son; he was not unamiable with the few people he
met; he bowed with great consideration to the Rev. Dr.
Pemberton; and he studied with no small interest the
physiognomy of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, to whose
sermons he listened, with a black scowl now and then, and
a nostril dilating with ominous intensity of meaning. But
he said sadly to himself, that his life had been a failure, —
that he had nothing to show for it, and his one talent was
ready in its napkin to give back to his Lord.

He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause
which many would hold of small significance. Though he
had mourned for no lost love, at least so far as was known,
though he had never suffered the pang of parting with a
child, though he seemed isolated from those joys and griefs
which come with the ties of family, he too had his private
urn filled with the ashes of extinguished hopes. He was
the father of a dead book.

Why “Thoughts on the Universe, by Byles Gridley,
A. M.,” had not met with an eager welcome and a permanent
demand from the discriminating public, it would take
us too long to inquire in detail. Indeed, he himself was
never able to account satisfactory for the state of things
which his bookseller's account made evident to him. He
had read and re-read his work; and the more familiar he
became with it, the less was he able to understand the
singular want of popular appreciation of what he could
not help recognizing as its excellences. He had a special

copy of his work, printed on large paper and sumptuously
bound. He loved to read in this, as people read over the
letters of friends who have long been dead; and it might
have awakened a feeling of something far removed from
the ludicrous, if his comments on his own production could
have been heard. “That's a thought, now, for you! —
See Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay's Essay printed six
years after this book.” “A felicitous image! — and so
everybody would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle
had hit upon it.” “If this is not genuine pathos, where
will you find it, I should like to know? And nobody to
open the book where it stands written but one poor old
man — in this generation, at least — in this generation!”
It may be doubted whether he would ever have loved his
book with such jealous fondness if it had gone through a
dozen editions, and everybody was quoting it to his face.
But now it lived only for him; and to him it was wife and
child, parent, friend, all in one, as Hector was all in all to
his spouse. He never tired of it, and in his more sanguine
moods he looked forward to the time when the world
would acknowledge its merits, and his genius would find
full recognition. Perhaps he was right: more than one
book which seemed dead and was dead for contemporary
readers has had a resurrection when the rivals who triumphed
over it lived only in the tombstone memory of antiquaries.
Comfort for some of us, dear fellow-writer!

It followed from the way in which he lived that he must
have some means of support upon which he could depend.
He was economical, if not over frugal in some of his habits;
but he bought books, and took newspapers and reviews,
and had money when money was needed; the fact
being, though it was not generally known, that a distant

relative had not long before died, leaving him a very comfortable
property.

His money matters had led him to have occasional dealings
with the late legal firm of Wibird and Penhallow,
which had naturally passed into the hands of the new
partnership, Penhallow and Bradshaw. He had entire
confidence in the senior partner, but not so much in the
young man who had been recently associated in the business.

Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, commonly called by his
last two names, was the son of a lawyer of some note for
his acuteness, who marked out his calling for him in having
him named after the great Lord Mansfield. Murray Bradshaw
was about twenty-five years old, by common consent
good-looking, with a finely formed head, a searching eye,
and a sharp-cut mouth, which smiled at his bidding without
the slightest reference to the real condition of his feeling
at the moment. This was a great convenience; for it
gave him an appearance of good-nature at the small expense
of a slight muscular movement which was as easy
as winking, and deceived everybody but those who had
studied him long and carefully enough to find that this play
of his features was what a watchmaker would call a detached
movement.

He had been a good scholar in college, not so much by
hard study as by skilful veneering, and had taken great
pains to stand well with the Faculty, at least one of whom,
Byles Gridley, A. M., had watched him with no little interest
as a man with a promising future, provided he were not
so astute as to outwit and overreach himself in his excess
of contrivance. His classmates could not help liking
him; as to loving him, none of them would have thought

of that. He was so shrewd, so keen, so full of practical
sense, and so good-humored as long as things went on to
his liking, that few could resist his fascination. He had a
way of talking with people about what they were interested
in, as if it were the one matter in the world nearest to
his heart. But he was commonly trying to find out something,
or to produce some impression, as a juggler is working
at his miracle while he keeps people's attention by his
voluble discourse and make-believe movements. In his
lightest talk he was almost always edging towards a practical
object, and it was an interesting and instructive
amusement to watch for the moment at which he would
ship the belt of his colloquial machinery on to the tight
pulley. It was done so easily and naturally that there
was hardly a sign of it. Master Gridley could usually
detect the shifting action, but the young man's features
and voice never betrayed him.

He was a favorite with the other sex, who love poetry
and romance, as he well knew, for which reason he often
used the phrases of both, and in such a way as to answer
his purpose with most of those whom he wished to please.
He had one great advantage in the sweepstakes of life:
he was not handicapped with any burdensome ideals. He
took everything at its market-value. He accepted the
standard of the street as a final fact for to-day, like the
broker's list of prices.

His whole plan of life was laid out. He knew that law
was the best introduction to political life, and he meant to
use it for this end. He chose to begin his career in the
country, so as to feel his way more surely and gradually to
its ultimate aim; but he had no intention of burying his
shining talents in a grazing district, however tall its grass

might grow. His business was not with these stiff-jointed,
slow-witted graziers, but with the supple, dangerous, far-seeing
men who sit scheming by the gas-light in the great cities,
after all the lamps and candles are out from the Merrimac
to the Housatonic. Every strong and every weak point
of those who might probably be his rivals were laid down
on his charts, as winds and currents and rocks are marked
on those of a navigator. All the young girls in the country,
and not a few in the city, with which, as mentioned,
he had frequent relations, were on his list of possible
availabilities in the matrimonial line of speculation, provided
always that their position and prospects were such
as would make them proper matches for so considerable a
person as the future Hon. William Murray Bradshaw.

Master Gridley had made a careful study of his old
pupil since they had resided in the same village. The
old professor could not help admiring him, not withstanding
certain suspicious elements in his character; for after
muddy village talk, a clear stream of intelligent conversation
was a great luxury to the hard-headed scholar. The
more he saw of him, the more he learned to watch his
movements, and to be on his guard in talking with him.
The old man could be crafty, with all his simplicity, and
he had found out that under his good-natured manner
there often lurked some design more or less worth noting,
and which might involve other interests deserving protection.

For some reason or other the old Master of Arts had
of late experienced a certain degree of relenting with regard
to himself, probably brought about by the expressions
of gratitude from worthy Mrs. Hopkins for acts of kindness
to which he himself attached no great value. He

had been kind to her son Gifted; he had been fatherly
with Susan Posey, her relative and boarder; and he had
shown himself singularly and unexpectedly amiable with
the little twins who had been adopted by the good woman
into her household. In fact, ever since these little creatures
had begun to toddle about and explode their first
consonants, he had looked through his great round spectacles
upon them with a decided interest; and from that
time it seemed as if some of the human and social sentiments
which had never leafed or flowered in him, for want
of their natural sunshine, had begun growing up from
roots which had never lost their life. His liking for the
twins may have been an illustration of that singular law
which old Dr. Hurlbut used to lay down, namely, that at
a certain period of life, say from fifty to sixty and upward,
the grand-paternal instinct awakens in bachelors, the
rhythms of Nature reaching them in spite of her defeated
intentions; so that when men marry late they love their
autumn child with a twofold affection, — father's and
grandfather's both in one.

However this may be, there is no doubt that Mr. Byles
Gridley was beginning to take a part in his neighbors'
welfare and misfortunes, such as could hardly have been
expected of a man so long lost in his books and his scholastic
duties. And among others, Myrtle Hazard had
come in for a share of his interest. He had met her now
and then in her walks to and from school and meeting,
and had been taken with her beauty and her apparent unconsciousness
of it, which he attributed to the forlorn kind
of household in which she had grown up. He had got so
far as to talk with her now and then, and found himself
puzzled, as well he might be, in talking with a girl who

had been growing into her early maturity in antagonism
with every influence that surrounded her.

“Love will reach her by and by,” he said, “in spite
of the dragons up at the den yonder.

But there was something about Myrtle — he hardly
knew whether to call it dignity, or pride, or reserve, or
the mere habit of holding back brought about by the system
of repression under which she had been educated —
which kept even the old Master of Arts at his distance.
Yet he was strongly drawn to her, and had a sort of presentiment
that he might be able to help her some day, and
that very probably she would want his help; for she was
alone in the world, except for the dragons, and sure to be
assailed by foes from without and from within.

He noticed that her name was apt to come up in his
conversations with Murray Bradshaw; and, as he himself
never introduced it, of course the young man must have
forced it, as conjurers force a card, and with some special
object. This set him thinking hard; and, as a result of it,
he determined the next time Mr. Bradshaw brought her
name up to set him talking. So he talked, not suspecting
how carefully the old man listened.

“It was a demonish hard case,” he said, “that old
Malachi had left his money as he did. Myrtle Hazard
was going to be the handsomest girl about, when she came
to her beauty, and she was coming to it mighty fast. If
they could only break that will, — but it was no use trying.
The doctors said he was of sound mind for at least
two years after making it. If Silence Withers got the

land claim, there 'd be a pile, sure enough. Myrtle
Hazard ought to have it. If the girl had only inherited
that property — whew! She 'd have been a match for
any fellow. That old Silence Withers would do just as
her minister told her, — even chance whether she gives it
to the Parson-factory, or marries Bellamy Stoker, and
gives it to him — after his wife's dead. He 'd take it if he
had to take her with it. Earn his money, — hey, Master
Gridley?”

“Why, you don't seem to think very well of the Rev.
Joseph Bellamy Stoker?” said Mr. Gridley, smiling.

“Think well of him? Too fond of using the Devil's
pitchfork for my fancy! Forks over pretty much all the
world but himself and his lot into — the bad place, you
know; and toasts his own cheese with it with very much
the same kind of comfort that other folks seem to take in
that business. Besides, he has a weakness for pretty
saints — and sinners. That 's an odd name he has. More
belle amie than Joseph about him, I rather guess!”

The old professor smiled again. “So you don't think
he believes all the mediæval doctrines he is in the habit
of preaching, Mr. Bradshaw?”

“No, sir; I think he belongs to the class I have seen
described somewhere. `There are those who hold the
opinion that truth is only safe when diluted, — about one
fifth to four fifths lies, — as the oxygen of the air is with
its nitrogen. Else it would burn us all up.”'

Byles Gridley colored and started a little. This was
one of his own sayings in “Thoughts on the Universe.”
But the young man quoted it without seeming to suspect
its authorship.

“Where did you pick up that saying, Mr. Bradshaw?”

“I don't remember. Some paper, I rather think. It 's
one of those good things that get about without anybody's
knowing who says 'em. Sounds like Coleridge.”

“That 's what I call a compliment worth having,” said
Byles Gridley to himself, when he got home. “Let me
look at that passage.”

He took down “Thoughts on the Universe,” and got
so much interested, reading on page after page, that he
did not hear the little tea-bell, and Susan Posey volunteered
to run up to his study and call him down to tea.