The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
there.
She followed her daughter and put her arms impulsively around her.
"I should not have hurt you so, Alice. I only wanted to show you how
worse than useless it is ... but to change the subject, I do wish to
speak to you of--our condition."
Alice was used to her mother's ways--her brilliancy--her pointed
manner of going at things--her quick change of thought--of mood, and
even of temperament. An outsider would have judged Mrs. Westmore to
be fickle with a strong vein of selfishness and even of egotism.
Alice only knew that she was her mother; who had suffered much; who
had been reduced by poverty to a condition straitened even to
hardships. To help her the daughter knew that she was willing to make
any sacrifice. Unselfish, devoted, clear as noonday in her own ideas
of right and wrong, Alice's one weakness was her blind devotion to
those she loved. A weakness beautiful and even magnificent, since it
might mean a sacrifice of her heart for another. The woman who gives
her time, her money, her life, even, to another gives but a small
part of her real self. But there is something truly heroic when she
throws in her heart also. For when a woman has given that she has
given all; and because she has thrown it in cold and dead--a lifeless
thing--matters not; in the poignancy of the giving it is gone from
her forever and she may not recall it even with the opportunity of
bringing it back to life.
She who gives her all, but keeps her heart, is as a priest reading
mechanically the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible. But she who
gives her heart never to take it back again gives as the Christ dying
on the Cross.
"Now, here is the legal paper about"--
Her voice failed and she did not finish the sentence.
Alice took the paper and glanced at it. She flushed and thrust it
into her pocket. They were silent a while and Mrs. Westmore sat
thinking of the past. Alice knew it by the great reminiscent light
which gleamed in her eyes. She thought of the time when she had
servants, money, friends unlimited--of the wealth and influence of
her husband--of the glory of Westmoreland.
Every one has some secret ambition kept from the eyes of every living
soul--often even to die in its keeper's breast. It is oftenest a mean
ambition of which one is ashamed and so hides it from the world. It
is often the one weakness. Alice never knew what was her mother's.
She did not indeed know that she had one, for this one thing Mrs.
Westmore had kept inviolately secret. But in her heart there had
always rankled a secret jealousy when she thought of The Gaffs. It
had been there since she could remember--a feeling cherished
secretly, too, by her husband: for in everything their one idea had
been that Westmoreland should surpass The Gaffs,--that it should be
handsomer, better kept, more prosperous, more famous.
Now, Westmoreland was gone--this meant the last of it. It would be
sold, even the last hundred acres of it, with the old home on it.
Gone--gone--all her former glory--all her family tradition, her
memories, her very name.
Gone, and The Gaffs remained!
Remained in all its intactness--its beauty--its well equipped barns
with all the splendor of its former days. For so great was the
respect of Schofield's army for the character of Colonel Jeremiah
Travis that his home escaped the torch when it was applied to many
others in the Tennessee Valley. And Richard Travis had been shrewd
enough after the war to hold his own. Joining the party of the negro
after the war, he had been its political ruler in the county. And the
Honorable Richard Travis had been offered anything he wanted. At
present he was State Senator. He with others called himself a
Republican--one of the great party of Lincoln to which the negroes
after their enfranchisement united themselves. It was a fearful
misnomer. The Republican party in the South, composed of ninety-nine
ignorant negroes to one renegade white, about as truly represented
the progressive party of Lincoln as a black vampire the ornithology
of all lands. Indeed, since the war, there has never been in the
South either a Republican or a Democratic party. The party line is
not drawn on belief but on race and color. The white men, believing
everything they please from free trade to protection, vote a ticket
which they call Democratic. The negroes, and a few whites who allied
themselves with them for the spoils of office, vote the other ticket.
Neither of them represent anything but a race issue.
To this negro party belonged Richard Travis--and the price of his
infamy had been _Honorable_ before his name.
But Mrs. Westmore cared nothing for this. She only knew that he was a
leader of men, was handsome, well reared and educated, and that he
owned The Gaffs, her old rival. And that there it stood, a fortune--a
refuge--a rock--offered to her and her daughter, offered by a man
who, whatever his other faults, was brave and dashing, sincere in his
idolatrous love for her daughter. That he would make Alice happy she
did not doubt; for Mrs. Westmore's idea of happiness was in having
wealth and position and a splendid name. Having no real heart, how
was it possible for her to know, as Alice could know, the happiness
of love?
An eyeless fish in the river of Mammoth Cave might as well try to
understand what light meant.
He would make Alice happy, of course he would; he would make her happy
by devotion, which he was eager to give her with an unstinted hand.
Alice needed it, she herself needed it. It was common sense to accept
it,--business sense. It was opportunity--fate. It was the reward of a
life--the triumph of it--to have her old rival--enemy--bound and
presented to her.
And nothing stood between her and the accomplishment of it all but the
foolish romance of her daughter's youth.
And so she sat building her castles and thinking:
"With The Gaffs, with Richard Travis and his money would come all I
wish, both for her and for me. Once more I would hold the social
position I once held: once more I would be something in the world.
And Alice, of course, she would be happy; for her's is one of those
trusting natures which finds first where her duty points and then
makes her heart follow."
But Mrs. Westmore wisely kept silent. She did not think aloud. She
knew too well that Alice's sympathetic, unselfish, obedient spirit
was thinking it over.
She sat down by her mother and took up a pet kitten which had come
purring in, begging for sympathy. She stroked it thoughtfully.
Mrs. Westmore read her daughter's thoughts:
"So many people," the mother said after a while, "have false ideas of
love and marriage. Like ignorant people when they get religion, they
think a great and sudden change must come over them--changing their
very lives."
She laughed her ringing little laugh: "I told you of your father's
and my love affair. Why, I was engaged to three other men at the same
time--positively I was. And I would have been just as happy with any
of them."
"Why did you marry father, then?"
Her mother laughed and tapped the toe of her shoe playfully against
the fender: "It was a silly reason; he swam the Tennessee River on
his horse to see me one day, when the ferry-boat was a wreck. I
married him."
"Would not the others have done as well?"
"Yes, but I knew your father was brave. You cannot love a coward--no
woman can. But let a man be brave--no matter what his faults are--the
rest is all a question of time. You would soon learn to love him as I
did your father."
Mrs. Westmore was wise. She changed the subject.
"Have you noticed Uncle Bisco lately, mother?" asked Alice after a
while.
"Why, yes; I intended to ask you about him."
"He says there are threats against his life--his and Aunt Charity's.
He had a terrible dream last night, and he would have me to interpret
it."
"Quite Biblical," laughed her mother. "What was it?"
"They have been very unhappy all day--you know the negroes have been
surly and revengeful since the election of Governor Houston--they
believe they will be put back into slavery and they know that Uncle
Bisco voted with his white friends. It is folly, of course--but they
beat Captain Roland's old body servant nearly to death because he
voted with his old master. And Uncle Bisco has heard threats that he
and Aunt Charity will be visited in a like manner. I think it will
soon blow over, though at times I confess I am often worried about
them, living alone so far off from us, in the cabin in the wood."
"What was Uncle Bisco's dream?" asked Mrs. Westmore.
"Why, he said an angel had brought him water to drink from a
Castellonian Spring. Now, I don't know what a Castellonian Spring is,
but that was the word he used, and that he was turned into a live-oak
tree, old and moss-grown. Then he stood in the forest surrounded by
scrub-oaks and towering over them and other mean trees when suddenly
they all fell upon him and cut him down. Now, he says, these
scrub-oaks are the radical negroes who wish to kill him for voting
with the whites. You will laugh at my interpretation," she went on.
"I told him that the small black oaks were years that still stood
around him, but that finally they would overpower him and he would
sink to sleep beneath them, as we must all eventually do. I think it
reassured him--but, mamma, I am uneasy about the two old people."
"If the Bishop were here--"
"He would sleep in the house with a shotgun, I fear," laughed Alice.
They were silent at last: "When did you say Richard was coming again,
Alice?"
"To-morrow night--and--and--I hear Clay in his laboratory. I will go
and talk to him before bed time."
She stooped and kissed her mother. To her surprise, she found her
mother's arms around her neck and heard her whisper brokenly:
"Alice--Alice--you could solve it all if you would.
Think--think--what it would mean to me--to all of us--oh, I can stand
this poverty no longer--this fight against that which we cannot
overcome."
She burst into a flood of tears. Never before had Alice seen her show
her emotions over their condition, and it hurt her, stabbed her to
the vital spot of all obedience and love.
With moistened eyes she went into her brother's room.
And Mrs. Westmore wrote a note to Richard Travis. It did not say so
in words but it meant: "_Come and be bold--you have won._"
CHAPTER VIII
A QUESTION BROUGHT HOME
"I shall go to Boston next week to meet the directors of the mill and
give in my annual report."
The three had been sitting in Westmoreland library this Sunday
night--for Richard Travis came regularly every Sunday night, and he
had been talking about the progress of the mill and the great work it
was doing for the poor whites of the valley. "I imagine," he added,
"that they will be pleased with the report this year."
"But are you altogether pleased with it in all its features?" asked
Alice thoughtfully.
"Why, what do you mean, Alice?" asked her mother, surprised.
"Just this, mother, and I have been thinking of talking to Richard
about it for some time."
Travis took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at her quizzically.
She flushed under his gaze and added: "If I wasn't saying what I am
for humanity's sake I would be willing to admit that it was
impertinent on my part. But are you satisfied with the way you work
little children in that mill, Richard, and are you willing to let it
go on without a protest before your directors? You have such a fine
opportunity for good there," she added in all her old beautiful
earnestness.
"Oh, Alice, my dear, that is none of our affair. Now I should not
answer her, Richard," and Mrs. Westmore tapped him playfully on the
arm.
"Frankly, I am not," he said to Alice. "I think it is a horrible