The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
She said it simply, but it touched Helen.
"But I'll get my color back on the little farm--I'll be well again."
She was silent a while. "I kno' you are wonderin' how I saved and got
it." Helen saw her face sparkle and the spots deepen. "Mr. Travis
has been so kind to me in--in other ways--but that's a big secret,"
she laughed, "I'm to tell you some day, or rather you'll see yo'self,
an' then, oh--every thing will be all right an' I'll be ever so much
happier than I am now."
She jumped up impulsively and stood before Helen.
"Mightn't I kiss you once,--you're so pretty an' fresh?" And she
kissed the pretty girl half timidly on the cheek.
"It makes me so happy to think of it," she went on excitedly, "to
think of owning a little farm all by ourselves, to go out into the
air every day whenever you feel like it and not have to work in the
mill, nor ask anybody if you may, but jus' go out an' see things
grow--an' hear the birds sing and set under the pretty green trees
an' gather wild flowers if you want to. To keep house an' to clean up
an' cook instead of forever drawin'-in, an' to have a real flower
garden of yo' own--yo' very own."
They worked for hours, Maggie talking as a child who had found at
last a sympathetic listener. Twilight came and then a clang of bells
and the shaft above them began to turn slower and slower. Helen
looked up wondering why it had all stopped so suddenly. She met the
eyes of Travis looking at her.
"I am to take you home," he said to her, "the trotters are at the
door. Oh," as he looked at her work--"why, you have done first rate
for the day."
"It's Maggie's," she whispered.
He had not seen Maggie and he stood looking at Helen with such
passionate, patronizing, commanding, masterful eyes, that she shrank
for a moment, sideways.
Then he laughed: "How beautiful you are! There are queens born and
queens made--I shall call you the queen of the mill, eh?"
He reached out and tried to take her hand, but she shrank behind the
machine and then--
"Oh, Maggie!" she exclaimed--for the girl's face was now white and
she stood with a strained mouth as if ready to sob.
"Oh, Maggie's a good little girl," said Travis, catching her hand.
"Oh, please don't--please"--said Maggie.
Then she walked out, drawing her thin shawl around her.
CHAPTER II
IN THE DEPTHS
All the week the two girls worked together at the mill; a week which
was to Helen one long nightmare, filled, as it was, with the hum and
roar of machinery, the hot breath of the mill, and worst of all, the
seared and deadening thought that she was disgraced.
In the morning she entered the mill hoping it might fall on and
destroy her. At night she went home to a drunken father and a little
sister who needed, in her childish sorrow, all the pity and care of
the elder one.
And one night her father, being more brutal than ever, had called out
as Helen came in: "Come in, my mill-girl!"
Richard Travis always drove her home, and each night he became more
familiar and more masterful. She felt,--she knew--that she was
falling under his fascinating influence.
And worse than all, she knew she did not care.
There is a depth deeper even than the sin--the depth where the doer
ceases to care.
Indeed, she was beginning to make herself believe that she loved
him--as he said he wished her to do--and as he loved her, he said;
and with what he said and what he hinted she dreamed beautiful,
desperate dreams of the future.
She did not wonder, then, that on one drive she had permitted him to
hold her hand in his. What a strong hand it was, and how could so
weak a hand as her's resist it? And all the time he had talked so
beautifully and had quoted Browning and Keats. And finally he had
told her that she had only to say the word, and leave the mill with
him forever.
But where, she did not even care--only to get away from the mill,
from her disgrace, from her drunken father, from her wretched life.
And another night, when he had helped her out of the buggy, and while
she was close to him and looking downward, he had bent over her and
kissed her on the neck, where her hair had been gathered up and had
left it white and fair and unprotected. And it sent a hot flame of
shame to the depths of her brain, but she could only look up and
say--"Oh, please don't--please don't, Mr. Travis," and then dart
quickly into the old gate and run to her home.
But within it was only to meet the taunts and sneers of her father
that brought again the hot Conway blood in defying anger to her face,
and then she had turned and rushed back to the gate which Travis had
just left, crying:
"Take me now--anywhere--anywhere. Carry me away from here."
But she heard only the sound of his trotters' feet up the road, and
overcome with the reflective anguish of it all, she had tottered and
dropped beneath the tree upon the grass--dropped to weep.
After a while she sat up, and going down the long path to the old
spring, she bathed her face and hands in its cool depths. Then she
sat upon a rock which jutted out into the water. It calmed her to sit
there and feel the rush of the air from below, upon her hot cheeks
and her swollen eyes.
The moon shone brightly, lighting up the water, the rocks which held
the spring pool within their fortress of gray, and the long green
path of water-cresses, stretching away and showing where the spring
branch ran to the pasture.
Glancing down, she saw her own image in the water, and she smiled to
see how beautiful it was. There was her hair hanging splendidly down
her back, and in the mirror of water beneath she saw it was tinged
with that divine color which had set the Roman world afire in
Cleopatra's days. But then, there was her dress--her mill dress.
She sighed--she looked up at the stars. They always filled her with
great waves of wonder and reverence.
"Is mother in one of you?" she asked. "Oh, mother, why were you taken
from your two little girls? and if the dead are immortal, can they
forget us of earth? Can they be indifferent to our fate? How could
they be happy if they knew--" She stopped and looking up, picked out
a single star that shone brighter than the others, clinging so close
to the top of Sunset Rock as to appear a setting to his crown.
"I will imagine she is there"--she whispered--"in that world--O
mother--mother--will you--cannot you help me?"
She was weeping and had to bathe her face again. Then another impulse
seized her--an impulse of childhood. Pulling off her stockings, she
dipped her feet in the cool water and splashed them around in sheer
delight.
The moonbeams falling on them under the water turned the pink into
white, and she smiled to see how like the pictures of Diana her
ankles looked.
She had forgotten that the old spring was near the public road and
that the rail fence was old and fallen. Her revery was interrupted by
a bantering, half drunken, jolly laugh:
"Well, I must say I never saw anything quite so pretty!"
She sprang up in shame. Leaning on the old fence, she saw Harry
Travis, a roguish smile on his face. She thought she would run, then
she remembered her bare feet and she sat down on the grass, covering
her ankles with her skirt. At first she wanted to cry, then she grew
indignant as he came tipsily toward her and sat down by her side.
She was used to the smell of whiskey on the breath. Its slightest
odor she knew instantly. To her it was the smell of death.
"Got to the Gov'nor's private bottle to-night," he said familiarly,
"and took a couple of cocktails. Going over to see Nellie, but
couldn't resist such beauties as"--he pointed to her feet.
"It was mean of you to slip upon me as you did," she said. Then she
turned the scorn of her eyes on him and coolly looked him over, the
weak face, the boyish, half funny smile, the cynical eyes,--trying to
be a man of the world and too weak to know what it all meant.
The Conway spirit had come to her--it always did in a critical
moment. She no longer blushed or even feared him.
"How, how," she said slowly and looking him steadily over, "did I
ever love such a thing as you?"
He moved up closer. "You will have to kiss me for that," he said
angrily. "I've kissed you so often I know just how to do it," and he
made an attempt to throw his arms around her.
She sprang away from him into the spring branch, standing knee deep
in the water and among the water-cresses.
He arose hot with insolence: "Oh, you think you are too good for me
now--now that the Gov'nor has set his heart on you. Damn him--you
were mine before you were his. He may have you, but he will take you
with Cassius' kisses on your lips."
He sprang forward, reached over the rock and seized her by the arm.
But she jerked away from him and sprang back into the deeper water of
the spring. She did not scream, but it seemed that her heart would
burst with shame and anger. She thought of Ophelia, and as she looked
down into the water she wiped away indifferently and silently the
cool drops which had splashed up into her face, and she wondered if
she might not be able to drop down flat and drown herself there, and
thus end it all.
He had come to the edge of the rock and stood leering drunkenly down
on her.
"I love you," he laughed ironically.
"I hate you," she said, looking up steadily into his eyes and moving
back out of his reach.
The water had wet her dress, and she stooped and dipped some of it up
and bathed her hot cheeks.
"I'll kiss you if I have to wade into that spring."
"If I had a brother,--oh, if I even had a father," she said, looking
at him with a flash of Conway fire in her eyes--"and you did--you
would not live till morning--you know you wouldn't."
She stood now knee-deep in water. Above her the half-drunken boy,
standing on the rock which projected into the spring, emboldened with
drink and maddened by the thought that she had so easily given him
up, had reached out and seized her around the neck. He was rough, and
it choked her as he drew her to him.
She screamed for the first time--for she thought she heard hoof beats
coming down the road; then she heard a horseman clear the low fence
and spur into the spring branch. The water from the horse's feet
splashed over her. She remembered it only faintly--the big
glasses--the old straw hat,--the leathern bag of samples around his
shoulders.
"Most unusual," she heard him say, with more calmness it seemed to
Helen than ever: "Quite unusual--insultingly so!"
Instinctively she held up her arms and he stooped in the saddle and
lifted her up and set her on the stone curbing on the side farthest
from Harry Travis.
Then he turned and very deliberately reached over and seized Harry
Travis, who stood on the rock, nearly on a line with the pommel of
the saddle. But the hand that gripped the back of Harry's neck was
anything but gentle. It closed around the neck at the base of the
brain, burying its fingers in the back muscles with paralyzing pain
and jerked him face downward across the saddle with a motion so swift
that he was there before he knew it. Then another hand seized him and
rammed his mouth, as he lay across the pommel of the saddle, into the
sweaty shoulders below the horse's withers, and he felt the horse
move out and into the road and up to the crossing of the ways just as
a buggy and two fast bay mares came around the corner.
The driver of the bays stopped as he saw his cousin thrown like a pig
over the pommel and held there kicking and cursing.
"I was looking for him," said Richard Travis quietly, "but I would
like to know what it all means."
The big glasses shone in kindly humor. They did not reflect any
excitement in the eyes behind them.
"I am afraid it means that he is drunk. Perhaps he will tell you