The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
well drawn up, but with a broad bunch of powerful muscles which
rolled from hip to back, making a sturdy back for the splendid full
tails which almost touched the ground. In front they stood up
straight, deep-chested, with clean bony heads, large luminous eyes
and long slender ears, tapering into a point as velvety and soft as
the tendril-bud on the tip of a Virginia creeper.
They stood shifting the bits nervously. The night air was cool and
they wanted to go.
Travis came out and sprang from the porch to the buggy seat with the
quick, sure footing of an athlete. Jim sat on the offside and passed
him the lines just as he sang cheerily out:
"Heigh-ho--my honies--go!"
The two mares bounded away so quickly and keenly that the near mare
struck her quarters and jumped up into the air, running. Her off mate
settled to work, trotting as steadily as a bolting Caribou, but
pulling viciously.
Travis twisted the near bit with a deft turn of his left wrist, and
as the two mares settled to their strides there was but one stroke
from their shoes, so evenly and in unison did they trot. Down the
level road they flew, Travis sitting gracefully upright and holding
the lines in that sure, yet careless way which comes to the expert
driver with power in his arms.
"How many times must I tell you, Jim," he said at last rather
gruffly--"never to bring them out, even for the road, without their
boots? Didn't you see Lizette grab her quarters and fly up just now?"
Jim was duly penitent.
Travis let them out a link. They flew down a soft, cool graveled
stretch. He drew them in at the sound of an ominous click. It came
from Sadie B.
"Sadie B.'s forging again. Didn't I tell you to have the blacksmith
move her hind shoes back a little?"
"I did, sir," said Jim.
"You've got no weight on her front feet, then," said Travis
critically.
"Not to-night, sir--I took off the two ounces thinking you'd not
speed them to-night, sir."
"You never know when I'm going to speed them. The night is as good as
the day when I want a tonic."
They had reached the big stone posts which marked the boundary of
Westmoreland. A little farther on the mares wheeled into the gate,
for it was open and lay, half on the ground, hanging by one hinge. It
had not been painted for years. The driveway, too, had been
neglected. The old home, beautiful even in its decay, sat in a fine
beech grove on the slope of a hill. A wide veranda, with marble
flag-stones as a base, ran across the front. Eight Corinthian pillars
sentineled it, resting on a marble base which seemed to spring up out
of the flag-stones themselves, and towering to the projecting
entablature above.
On one side an ell could be seen, covered with ivy. On the other the
roof of a hot-house, with the glass broken out.
It touched even Richard Travis--this decay. He had known the place in
the days of its glory before its proprietor, Colonel Theodore
Westmore, broken by the war, in spirit and in pocket, had sent a
bullet into his brain and ended the bitter fight with debt. Since
then, no one but the widow and her daughter knew what the fight had
been, for Clay Westmore, the brother, was but a boy and in college at
the time. He had graduated only a few months before, and was now at
home, wrapped up, as Richard Travis had heard, in what to him was a
visionary scheme of some sort for discovering a large area of coal
and iron thereabouts. He had heard, too, that the young man had taken
hold of what had been left, and that often he had been seen following
the plough himself.
Travis drove through the driveway--then he pulled up the mares very
gently, got out and felt of their flanks.
"Take them to the barn and rub them off," he said, "while you wait.
And for a half hour bandage their hind legs--I don't want any wind
puffs from road work."
He started into the house. Then he turned and said: "Be here at the
door, Jim, by ten o'clock, sharp. I shall make another call after
this. Mind you now, ten o'clock, sharp."
At the library he knocked and walked in.
Mrs. Westmore sat by the fire. She was a small, daintily-made woman,
and beautiful even at fifty-five. She had keen, black eyes and
nervous, flighty ways. A smile, half cynical, half inviting, lit up
continuously her face.
"Richard?" she said, rising and taking his hand.
"Cousin Alethea--I thought you were Alice and I was going to surprise
her."
Mrs. Westmore laughed her metallic little laugh. It was habit. She
intended it to be reassuring, but too much of it made one nervous. It
was the laugh without the soul in it--the eye open and lighted, but
dead. It was a Damascus blade falling from the stricken arm to the
stone pavement and not against the ringing steel of an opponent.
"You will guess, of course, where she is," she said after they were
seated.
"No?" from Travis.
"Getting their Sunday School lesson--she, Uncle Bisco, and the
Bishop."
Travis frowned and gave a nervous twitch of his shoulders as he
turned around to find himself a chair.
"No one knows just how we feel towards Uncle Bisco and his wife,"
went on Mrs. Westmore in half apology--"she has been with us so long
and is now so old and helpless since they were freed; their children
have all left them--gone--no one knows where. And so Uncle Bisco and
Aunt Charity are as helpless as babes, and but for Alice they would
suffer greatly."
A sudden impulse seized Travis: "Let us go and peep in on them. We
shall have a good joke on Her Majesty."
Mrs. Westmore laughed, and they slipped quietly out to Uncle Bisco's
cabin. Down a shrubbery-lined walk they went--then through the woods
across a field. It was a long walk, but the path was firm and good,
and the moon lit it up. They came to the little cabin at last, in the
edge of another wood. Then they slipped around and peeped in the
window.
A small kerosene lamp sat on a table lighting up a room scrupulously
clean.
Uncle Bisco was very old. His head was, in truth, a cotton plant full
open. His face was intelligent, grave--such a face as Howard Weeden
only could draw from memory. He had finished his supper, and from the
remnants left on the plate it was plain that Alice Westmore had
prepared for the old man dainties which she, herself, could not
afford to indulge in.
By him sat his old wife, and on the other side of the fireplace was
the old overseer, his head also white, his face strong and
thoughtful. He was clean shaven, save a patch of short white
chin-whiskers, and his big straight nose had a slight hook of
shrewdness in it.
Alice Westmore was reading the chapter--her voice added to it an
hundred fold: "Let not your heart be troubled.... Ye believe in God,
believe also in me.... In my Father's house are many mansions...!"
The lamplight fell on her hair. It was brown where the light flashed
over it, and lay in rippling waves around her temples in a splendid
coil down the arch of her neck, and shining in strong contrast
through the gauzy dark sheen of her black gown. But where the light
fell, there was that suspicion of red which the last faint tendril a
dying sunbeam throws out in a parting clutch at the bosom of a cloud.
It gave one a feeling of the benediction of twilight.
And when she looked up, her eyes were the blessings poured
out--luminous, helpful, uplifting, restful,--certain of life and
immortality, full of all that which one sees not, when awake, but
only when in the borderland of sleep, and memory, unleashed, tracks
back on the trail of sweet days which once were.
They spake indeed always thus: "Let not your heart be troubled....
Peace, be still."
Her face did not seem to be a separate thing--apart--as with most
women. For there are women whose hair is one thing and whose face is
another. The hair is beautiful, pure, refined. The face beautiful,
merely. The hair decorous, quiet, unadorned and debauched not by
powder and paint, stands aloof as Desdemona, Ophelia or Rosalind. The
face, brazen, with a sharp-tongued, vulgar queen of a thing in its
center, on a throne, surrounded by perfumed nymphs, under the sensual
glare of two rose-colored lamps, sits and holds a Du Barry court.
They are neighbors, but not friends, and they live in the same
sphere, held together only by the law of gravity which holds to one
spot of earth the rose and the ragwort. And the hair, like the rose,
in all the purity of its own rich sweetness, all the naturalness of
its soul, sits and looks down upon the face as a queen would over the
painted yellow thing thrust by the law of life into her presence.
But the face of Alice Westmore was companion to her hair. The
firelight fell on it; and while the glow from the lamp fell on her
hair in sweet twilight shadows of good night, the rosy, purple beams
of the cheerful firelight lit up her face with the sweet glory of a
perpetual good morning.
Travis stood looking at her forgetful of all else. His lips were
firmly set, as of a strong mind looking on its life-dream, the quarry
of his hunter-soul all but in his grasp. Flashes of hope and little
twists of fear were there; then, as he looked again, she raised, half
timidly, her face as a Madonna asking for a blessing; and around his,
crept in the smile which told of hope long deferred.
Selfish, impure, ambitious, forceful and masterful as he was, he
stood hopeless and hungry-hearted before this pure woman. She had
been the dream of his life--all times--always--since he could
remember.
To own her--to win her!
As he looked up, the hardness of his face attracted even Mrs.
Westmore, smiling by his side at the scene before her. She looked up
at Travis, but when she saw his face the smile went out of hers. It
changed to fear.
All the other passions in his face had settled into one cruel cynical
smile around his mouth--a smile of winning or of death.
For the first time in her life she feared Richard Travis.
"I must go now," said Alice Westmore to the old men--"but I'll sing
you a verse or two."
The overseer leaned back in his chair. Uncle Bisco stooped forward,
his chin resting on his hickory staff.
And then like the clear notes of a spring, dripping drop by drop with
a lengthening cadence into the covered pool of a rock-lined basin,
came a simple Sunday School song the two old men loved so well.
There were tears in the old negro's eyes when she had finished. Then
he sobbed like a child.
Alice Westmore arose to go.
"Now, Bishop--" she smiled at the overseer--"don't keep Uncle Bisco up
all night talking about the war, and if you don't come by the house and
chat with mamma and me awhile, we'll be jealous."
The overseer looked up: "Miss Alice--I'm an ole man an' we ole men all
dream dreams when night comes. Moods come over us and, look where we
will, it all leads back to the sweet paths of the past. To-day--all
day--my mind has been on"--he stopped, afraid to pronounce the word and
hunting around in the scanty lexicon of his mind for some phrase of
speech, some word even that might not awaken in Alice Westmore memories
of the past.
Richard Travis had an intuition of things as naturally as an eagle has
the homing instinct, however high in air and beyond all earth's
boundaries he flies. In this instance Mrs. Westmore also had it, for she
looked up quickly at the man beside her. All the other emotions had
vanished from his face save the one appealing look which said: "Come,
let us go--we have heard enough."
Then they slipped back into the house.
Alice Westmore had stopped, smiling back from the doorway.
"On what, Bishop?" she finally asked.
He shook his head. "Jus' the dream of an ole man," he said. "Don't
bother about us two ole men. I'll be 'long presently."
"Bisco," said the old preacher after a while, "come mighty nigh