The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
naturally, now balked before an abyss that was bridgeless. Heretofore
he had looked into the future with the bold, true sweep of an eagle
peering from its mountain home above the clouds into the far
distance, his eyes unclouded by the mist, which cut off the vision of
mortals below. But now he was the blindest of the blind. He seemed to
stop as before a wall--a chasm which ended everything--a chasm, on
the opposite wall of which was printed: Thus far and no farther.
Think as he would, he could not think beyond it. His life seemed to
stop there. After it, he was nothing.
Our minds, our souls--are like the sun, which shines very plainly as
it moves across the sky of our life of things--showing them in all
distinctness and clearness; so that we see things as they happen to
us with our eyes of daylight. But as the sun throws its dim twilight
shadows even beyond our earth, so do the souls of men of great mind
and imagination see, faintly, beyond their own lives, and into the
shadow of things.
To-night that mysterious sight came to Richard Travis, as it comes in
the great crises of life and death, to every strong man, and he saw
dimly, ghostily, into the shadow; and the shadow stopped at the
terrible abyss which now barred his ken; and he felt, with the keen
insight of the dying eagle on the peak, that the thing was death.
In the first streak of light, he was rudely awakened to it. For there
on the rug, as naturally as if asleep, lay the only thing he now
loved in the world, the old setter, whose life had passed out in
slumber.
All animals have the dying instinct. Man, the highest, has it the
clearest. And Travis remembered that the old dog had come to his bed,
in the middle of the night, and laid his large beautiful head on his
master's breast, and in the dim light of the smouldering fire had
said good-bye to Richard Travis as plainly as ever human being said
it. And now on the rug, before the dead gray ashes of the night, he
had found the old dog forever asleep, naturally and in great peace.
His heart sank as he thought of the farewell of the night before, and
bitterness came, and sitting down on the rug by the side of the dead
dog he stroked for the last time the grand old silken head, so calm
and poised, for the little world it had been bred for, and ran his
palm over the long strong nose that had never lied to the scent of
the covey. His lips tightened and he said: "O God, I am dying myself,
and there is not a living being whom I can crawl up to, and lay my
head on its breast and know it loves and pities me, as I love you,
old friend."
The thought gripped his throat, and as he thought of the sweetness
and nobility of this dumb thing, his gentleness, faithfulness and
devotion, the sureness of his life in filling the mission he came
for, he wept tears so strange to his cheek that they scalded as they
flowed, and he bowed his head and said: "Gladstone, Gladstone,
good-bye--true to your breeding, you were what your master never
was--a gentleman."
And the old housekeeper found this strong man, who had never wept in
his life, crying over the old dead setter on the rug.
And the same feeling, the second sight--the presentiment--the
terrible balking of his mind that had always seen so clearly, ever
into the future, held him as in a vise all the morning and moved him
in a strange mysterious way to go to the church and see the woman he
had loved all his life, the being whose very look uplifted him, and
whose smile could make him a hero or a martyr, married to the man who
came home to take her, and half of his all.
Numbed, hardened, speechless, and yet with that terrible presentiment
of the abyss before him, he had stood and seen Alice Westmore made
the wife of another.
He remembered first how quickly he had caught the text of the old
man; indeed, it seemed to him now that everything he heard struck
into him like a brand of fire--for never had life appeared to him as
it did to-day.
"_For the hand of God hath touched me--_" he kept repeating over and
over--repeating and then cursing himself for repeating it--for
remembering it.
And still it stayed there all day--the unbidden ghost-guest of his
soul.
And everything the old preacher said went searing into his quivering
soul, and all the time he kept looking--looking at the woman he loved
and seeing her giving her love, her life, with a happy smile, to
another. And all the time he stood wondering why he came to see it,
why he felt as he did, why things hurt him that way, why he acted so
weakly, why his conscience had awakened at last, why life hurt him
so--life that he had played with as an edged tool--why he could not
get away from himself and his memory, but ran always into it, and why
at last with a shudder, why did nothing seem to be beyond the wall?
He saw her go off, the wife of another. He saw their
happiness--unconscious even that he lived, and he cursed himself and
kept saying: "_The hand of God hath touched me._"
Then he laughed at himself for being silly.
He rode home, but it was not home. Nothing was itself--not even he.
In the watches of one night his life had been changed and the light
had gone out.
When night came it was worse. He mounted his horse and rode--where?
And he could no more help it than he could cease to breathe.
He did not guide the saddle mare, she went herself through wood
sombre and dark with shadows, through cedar trees, dwarfed, and
making pungent the night air with aromatic breath; through old sedge
fields, garish in the faint light; up, up the mountain, over it; and
at last the mare stopped and stood silently by a newly made grave,
while Richard Travis, with strained hard mouth and wet eyes, knelt
and, knowing that no hand in the world cared to feel his repentant
face in it, he buried it in the new made sod as he cried:
"Maggie--Maggie--forgive me, for the hand of God hath touched me!"
And it soothed him, for he knew that if she were alive he might have
lain his head there--on her breast.
CHAPTER XVI
MAMMY MARIA
That Monday was a memorable day for Helen Conway. She went to the
mill with less bitterness than ever before--the sting of it all was
gone--for she felt that she was helpless to the fate that was
hers--that she was powerless in the hands of Richard Travis:
"_I will come for you Monday night. I will take you away from here.
You shall belong to me forever--My Queen!_"
These words had rung in her ears all Saturday night, when, after
coming home, she had found her father fallen by the wayside.
In the night she had lain awake and wondered. She did not know where
she was going--she did not care. She did not even blush at the
thought of it. She was hardened, steeled. She knew not whether it
meant wife or mistress. She knew only that, as she supposed, God had
placed upon her more than she could bear.
"If my life is wrecked," she said as she lay awake that Sunday
night--"God himself will do it. Who took my mother before I knew her
influence? Who made me as I am and gave me poverty with this fatal
beauty--poverty and a drunken father and this terrible temptation?"
"Oh, if I only had her, Mammy--negro that she is."
Lily was asleep with one arm around her sister's neck.
"What will become of Lily, in the mill, too?" She bent and kissed
her, and she saw that the little one, though asleep, had tears in her
own eyes.
Young as she was, Helen's mind was maturer than might have been
supposed. And the problem which confronted her she saw very clearly,
although she was unable to solve it. The problem was not new, indeed,
it has been Despair's conundrum since the world began: Whose fault
that my life has been as it is? In her despair, doubting, she cried:
"Is there really a God, as Mammy Maria told me? Does He interpose in
our lives, or are we rushed along by the great moral and physical
laws, which govern the universe; and if by chance we fail to
harmonize with them, be crushed for our ignorance--our ignorance
which is not of our own making?"
"By chance--by chance," she repeated, "but if there be great fixed
laws, how can there be any--chance?"
The thought was hopeless. She turned in her despair and hid her face.
And then out of the darkness came the strong fine face of Clay
Westmore--and his words: "We must all work--it is life's badge of
nobility."
How clearly and calmly they came to her. And then her heart
fluttered. Suppose Clay loved her--suppose this was her solution? He
had never pressed his love on her. Did he think a woman could be
loved that way--scientifically--as coal and iron are discovered?
She finally slept, her arms around her little sister. But the last
recollection she had was Clay's fine face smiling at her through the
darkness and saying: "We must all work--it is life's badge of
nobility."
It was Monday morning, and she would take Lily with her to the mill;
for the child's work at the spinning frames was to begin that day.
There was no alternative. Again the great unknown law rushed her
along. Her father had signed them both, and in a few days their home
would be sold.
They were late at the mill, but the little one, as she trudged along
by the side of her sister, was happier than she had been since her
old nurse had left. It was great fun for her, this going to the mill
with her big sister.
The mill had been throbbing and humming long before they reached it.
Helen turned Lily over to the floor manager, after kissing her
good-bye, and bade her do as she was told. Twice again she kissed
her, and then with a sob hurried away to her own room.
Travis was awaiting her in the hall. She turned pale and then crimson
when she saw him. And yet, when she ventured to look at him as she
was passing, she was stopped with the change which lay on his face.
It was a sad smile he gave her, sad but determined. And in the
courtly bow was such a look of tenderness that with fluttering heart
and a strange new feeling of upliftedness--a confidence in him for
the first time, she stopped and gave him her hand with a grateful
smile. It was a simple act and so pretty that the sadness went from
Travis' face as he said:
"I was not going to stop you--this is kind of you. Saturday, I
thought you feared me."
"Yes," she smiled, "but not now--not when you look like that."
"Have I changed so much since then?" and he looked at her curiously.
"There is something in your face I never saw before. It made me
stop."
"I am glad it was there, then," he said simply, "for I wished you to
stop, though I did not want to say so."
"Saturday you would have said so," she replied with simple frankness.
He came closer to her with equal frankness, and yet with a tenderness
which thrilled her he said:
"Perhaps I was not so sure Saturday of many things that I am positive
of to-day."
"Of what?" she asked flushing.
He smiled again, but it was not the old smile which had set her to
trembling with a flurry of doubt and shame. It was the smile of
respect. Then it left him, and in its stead flashed instantly the old
conquering light when he said:
"To-night, you know, you will be mine!"
The change of it all, the shock of it, numbed her. She tried to
smile, but it was the lifeless curl of her lips instead--and the look
she gave him--of resignation, of acquiescence, of despair--he had
seen it once before, in the beautiful eyes of the first young doe
that fell to his rifle. She was not dead when he bounded to the spot
where she lay--and she gave him that look.
Edward Conway watched his two daughters go out of the gate on their
way to the mill, sitting with his feet propped up, and drunker than
he had been for weeks. But indistinct as things were, the poignancy
of it went through him, and he groaned. In a dazed sort of way he