The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
an exquisite old setting--inherited from his grandmother, and it had
been her engagement ring. "See, Alice, let me put this on to-night."
He took her hand--it thrilled him as he had never been thrilled
before. This impure man, who had made the winning of women a
plaything, trembled with the fear of it as he took in his own the
hand so pure that not even his touch could awaken sensuality in it.
The odor of her beautiful hair floated up to him as he bent over. A
wave of hot passion swept over him--for with him love was
passion--and his reason, for a moment, was swept from its seat. Then
almost beside himself for love of this woman, so different from any
he had ever known, he opened his arms to fold her in one
overpowering, conquering embrace.
It was but a second and more a habit than thought--he who had never
before hesitated to do it.
She stepped back and the hot blood mounted to her cheek. Her eyes
shone like outraged stars, dreaming earthward on a sleeping past,
unwarningly obscured by a passing cloud, and then flashing out into
the night, more brightly from the contrast.
She did not speak and he crunched under his feet, purposely, the turf
he was standing on, and so carrying out, naturally, the gesture of
clasping the air, in establishing his balance--as if it was an
accident.
She let him believe she thought it was, and secured relief from the
incident.
"Alice--Alice!" he exclaimed. "I love you--love you--I must have you
in my life! Can you not wear this now? See!"
He tried to place it on her finger. He held the small beautiful hand
in his own. Then it suddenly withdrew itself and left him holding his
ring and looking wonderingly at her.
She had thrown back her head, and, half turned, was looking toward
the crepe-myrtle tree from which the faint odor came.
"You had better go, Richard," was all she said.
"I'll come for my answer--soon?" he asked.
She was silent.
"Soon?" he repeated as he rose in the stirrup--"soon--and to claim
you always, Alice."
He rode off and left her standing with her head still thrown back,
her thoughtful face drinking in the odor of the crepe-myrtle.
Travis did not understand, for no crepe-myrtle had ever come into his
life. It could not come. With him all life had been a passion flower,
with the rank, strong odor of the sensuous, wild honeysuckle, which
must climb ever upon something else, in order to open and throw off
the rank, brazen perfume from its yellow and streaked and variegated
blossoms.
And how common and vulgar and all-surfeiting it is, loading the air
around it with its sickening imitation of sweetness, so that even the
bees stagger as they pass through it and disdain to stop and shovel,
for the mere asking, its musky and illicit honey.
But, O mystic odor of the crepe-myrtle--O love which never dies--how
differently it grows and lives and blooms!
In color, constant--a deep pink. Not enough of red to suggest the
sensual, nor yet lacking in it when the full moment of ripeness
comes. How delicately pink it is, and yet how unfadingly it stands
the summer's sun, the hot air, the drought! How quickly it responds
to the Autumn showers, and long after the honeysuckle has died, and
the bees have forgotten its rank memory, this beautiful creature of
love blooms in the very lap of Winter.
O love that defies even the breath of death!
The yellow lips of the honeysuckle are thick and sensual; but the
beautiful petals of this cluster of love-cells, all so daintily
transparent, hanging in pink clusters of loveliness with scalloped
lips of purity, that even the sunbeam sends a photograph of his heart
through them and every moonbeam writes in it the romance of its life.
And the skies all day long, reflecting in its heart, tells to the
cool green leaves that shadow it the story of its life, and it
catches and holds the sympathy of the tiniest zephyr, from the way it
flutters to the patter of their little feet.
All things of Nature love it--the clouds, the winds, the very stars,
and sun, because love--undying love--is the soul of God, its Maker.
The rose is red in the rich passion of love, the lily is pale in the
poverty of it; but the crepe-myrtle is pink in the constancy of it.
O bloom of the crepe-myrtle! And none but a lover ever smelled
it--none but a lover ever knew!
She ran up the gentle slope to the old-fashioned garden and threw
herself under the tree from whence the dying odor came. She fell on
her knees--the moonlight over her in fleckings of purification. She
clung to the scaly weather-beaten stem of the tree as she would have
pressed a sister to her breast. Her arms were around it--she knew
it--its very bark.
She seized a bloom that had fallen and crushed it to her bosom and
her cheek.
"O Tom--Tom--why--why did you make me love you here and then leave me
forever with only the memory of it?"
"Twice does it bloom, dear Heart,--can not my love bloom like
it--twice?"
"A-l-i-c-e!"
The voice came from out the distant woods nearby.
The blood leaped and then pricked her like sharp-pointed icicles, and
they all seemed to freeze around and prick around her heart. She
could not breathe.... Her head reeled.... The crepe-myrtle fell on
her and smothered her....
When she awoke Mrs. Westmore sat by her side and was holding her head
while her brother was rubbing her arms.
"You must be ill, darling," said her mother gently. "I heard you
scream. What--"
They helped her to rise. Her heart still fluttered violently--her
head swam.
"Did you call me before--before"--she was excited and eager.
"Why, yes"--smiled her mother. "I said, 'Alice--Alice!'"
"It was not that--no, that was not the way it sounded," she said as
they led her into the house.
CHAPTER XI
THE CASKET AND THE GHOST
Richard Travis could not sleep that night--why, he could not tell.
After he returned from Westmoreland, Mammy Charity brought him his
cocktail, and tidied up his room, and beat up the feathers in his
pillows and bed--for she believed in the old-fashioned feather-bed
and would have no other kind in the house.
The old clock in the hall--that had sat there since long before he,
himself, could remember--struck ten, and then eleven, and then, to
his disgust, even twelve.
At ten he had taken another toddy to put himself to sleep.
There is only one excuse for drunkenness, and that is sleeplessness.
If there is a hell for the intellectual it is not of fire, as for
commoner mortals, but of sleeplessness--the wild staring eyes of an
eternity of sleeplessness following an eon of that midnight mental
anguish which comes with the birth of thoughts.
But still he slept not, and so at ten he had taken another toddy--and
still another, and as he felt its life and vigor to the ends of his
fingers, he quaffed his fourth one; then he smiled and said: "And now
I don't care if I never go to sleep!"
He arose and dressed. He tried to recite one of his favorite poems,
and it angered him that his tongue seemed thick.
His head slightly reeled, but in it there galloped a thousand
beautiful dreams and there were visions of Alice, and love, and the
satisfaction of conquering and the glory of winning.
He could feel his heart-throbs at the ends of his fingers. He could
see thoughts--beautiful, grand thoughts--long before they reached
him,--stalking like armed men, helmeted and vizored, stalking forward
into his mind.
He walked out and down the long hall.
The ticking of the clock sounded to him so loud that he stopped and
cursed it.
Because, somehow, it ticked every time his heart beat; and he could
count his heart-beats in his fingers' ends, and he didn't want to
know every time his heart beat. It made him nervous.
It might stop; but it would not stop. And then, somehow, he imagined
that his heart was really out in the yard, down under the hill, and
was pumping the water--as the ram had done for years--through the
house. It was a queer fancy, and it made him angry because he could
not throw it off.
He walked down the hall, rudely snatched the clock door open, and
stopped the big pendulum. Then he laughed sillily.
The moonbeams came in at the stained glass windows, and cast red and
yellow and pale green fleckings of light on the smooth polished
floor.
He began to feel uncanny. He was no coward and he cursed himself for
it.
Things began to come to him in a moral way and mixed in with the
uncanniness of it all. He imagined he saw, off in the big square
library across the way, in the very spot he had seen them lay out his
grandfather--Maggie, and she arose suddenly from out of his
grandfather's casket and beckoned to him with--
"I love you so--I love _you_ so!"
It was so real, he walked to the spot and put his hands on the black
mohair Davenport. And the form on it, sitting bolt upright, was but
the pillow he had napped on that afternoon.
He laughed and it sounded hollow to him and echoed down the hall:
"How like her it looked!"
He walked into Harry's room and lit the lamp there. He smiled when he
glanced around the walls. There were hunting scenes and actresses in
scant clothing. Tobacco pipes of all kinds on the tables, and stumps
of ill-smelling cigarettes, and over the mantel was a crayon picture
of Death shaking the dice of life. Two old cutlasses crossed
underneath it.
On his writing desk Travis picked up and read the copy of the note
written to Helen the day before.
He smiled with elevated eyebrows. Then he laughed ironically:
"The little yellow cur--to lie down and quit--to throw her over like
that! Damn him--he has a yellow streak in him and I'll take pleasure
in pulling down the purse for him. Why, she was born for me anyway!
That kid, and in love with Helen! Not for The Gaffs would I have him
mix up with that drunken set--nor--nor, well, not for The Gaffs to
have him quit like that."
And yet it was news to him. Wrapped in his own selfish plans, he had
never bothered himself about Harry's affairs.
But he kept on saying, as if it hurt him: "The little yellow cur--and
he a Travis!" He laughed: "He's got another one, I'll bet--got her
to-night and by now is securely engaged. So much the better--for my
plans."
Again he went into the hall and walked to and fro in the dim light.
But the Davenport and the pillow instantly formed themselves again
into Maggie and the casket, and he turned in disgust to walk into his
own room.
Above his head over the doorway in the hall, on a pair of splendid
antlers--his first trophy of the chase,--rested his deer gun, a clean
piece of Damascus steel and old English walnut, imported years
before. The barrels were forty inches and choked. The small bright
hammers rested on the yellow brass caps deep sunk on steel nippers.
They shone through the hammer slit fresh and ready for use.
He felt a cold draught of air blow on him and turned in surprise to
find the hall window, which reached to the veranda floor, open; and
he could see the stars shining above the dark green foliage of the
trees on the lawn without.
At the same instant there swept over him a nervous fear, and he
reached for his deer gun instinctively. Then there arose from the
Davenport coffin a slouching unkempt form, the fine bright eyes of
which, as the last rays of the moonlight fell on them, were the eyes
of his dead cousin, Captain Tom, and it held out its hands pleadingly
to him and tenderly and with much effort said:
"_Grandfather, forgive. I've come back again._"
Travis's heart seemed to freeze tightly. He tried to breathe--he only
gasped--and the corners of his mouth tightened and refused to open.
He felt the blood rush up from around his loins, and leave him
paralyzed and weak. In sheer desperation he threw the gun to his