The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
She came out of the trance in a glory of religious fervor: "Jerusalem
shall be inhabited ag'in!--the Angel has told me--told me--Burn--burn,"
she cried. "Oh Lord--you have spoken and Zion has ears to hear--Amen."
Quickly she gathered up the loose cotton and placed it at the door,
piling it up to the very bolt. She struck a match, swaying and rocking
and chanting: "Yea, Lord, thy servant hath heard--thy servant hath
heard!"
The flames leaped up quickly enveloping the door. The room began to fill
with smoke, but she retreated to a far corner and fell on her knees in
prayer. The panels of the door caught first and the flames spreading
upward soon heated the lock around which the wood blazed and crackled.
It burned through. She sprang up, rushed through the blinding smoke,
struck the door as it blazed, in a broken mass, and rushed out. Down the
long main room she ran to a low window, burst it, and stepped out on the
ground:
"Jerusalem shall be inhabited again," she shouted as she ran
breathless toward home.
CHAPTER XXI
THE GREAT FIRE
Edward Conway sat on the little porch till the stars came out,
wondering why the old nurse did not return. Sober as he was and knew
he would ever be, it seemed that a keen sensitiveness came with it,
and a feeling of impending calamity.
"Oh, it's the cursed whiskey," he said to himself--"it always leaves
you keyed up like a fiddle or a woman. I'll get over it after a while
or I'll die trying," and he closed his teeth upon each other with a
nervous twist that belied his efforts at calmness.
But even Lily grew alarmed, and to quiet her he took her into the
house and they ate their supper in silence.
Again he came out on the porch and sat with the little girl in his
lap. But Lily gave him no rest, for she kept saying, as the hours
passed: "Where is she, father--oh, do go and see!"
"She has gone to Millwood through mistake," he kept telling her, "and
Mammy Maria has doubtless gone after her. Mammy will bring her back.
We will wait awhile longer--if I had some one to leave you with," he
said gently, "I'd go myself. But she will be home directly."
And Lily went to sleep in his lap, waiting.
The moon came up, and Conway wrapped Lily in a shawl, but still held
her in his arms. And as he sat holding her and waiting with a
fast-beating heart for the old nurse, all his wasted life passed
before him.
He saw himself as he had not for years--his life a failure, his
fortune gone. He wondered how he had escaped as he had, and as he
thought of the old Bishop's words, he wondered why God had been as
good to him as He had, and again he uttered a silent prayer of
thankfulness and for strength. And with it the strength came, and he
knew he could never more be the drunkard he had been. There was
something in him stronger than himself.
He was a strong man spiritually--it had been his inheritance, and the
very thought of anything happening to Helen blanched his cheek. In
spite of the faults of his past, no man loved his children more than
he, when he was himself. Like all keen, sensitive natures, his was
filled to overflowing with paternal love.
"My God," he thought, "suppose--suppose she has gone back to
Millwood, found none of us there, thinks she had been deserted,
and--and--"
The thought was unbearable. He slipped in with the sleeping Lily in
his arms and began to put her in bed without awakening her,
determined to mount his horse and go for Helen himself.
But just then the old nurse, frantic, breathless and in a delirium of
religious excitement, came in and fell fainting on the porch.
He revived her with cold water, and when she could talk she could
only pronounce Helen's name, and say they had run off with her.
"Who?"--shouted Conway, his heart stopping in the staggering shock of
it.
The old woman tried to tell Jud Carpenter's tale, and Conway heard
enough. He did not wait to hear it all--he did not know the mill was
now slowly burning.
"Take care of Lily"--he said, as he went into his room and came out
with his pistol buckled around his waist.
Then he mounted his horse and rode swiftly to Millwood.
He was astonished to find a fire in the hearth, a lamp burning, and
one of Helen's gloves lying on the table.
By it was another pair. He picked them up and looked closely. Within,
in red ink, were the initials: _R. T._
He bit his lips till the blood came. He bowed his head in his hands.
Sometimes there comes to us that peculiar mental condition in which
we are vaguely conscious that once before we have been in the same
place, amid the same conditions and surroundings which now confront
us. We seem to be living again a brief moment of our past life, where
Time himself has turned back everything. It came that instant to
Edward Conway.
"It was here--and what was it? Oh, yes:--'Some men repent to God's
smile, some to His frown, and some to His fist?'"--He groaned:--"This
is His fist. Never--never before in all the history of the Conway
family has one of its women--"
He sat down on the old sofa and buried, again, his face in his hands.
Edward Conway was sober, but he still had the instincts of the
drunkard--it never occurred to him that he had done anything to cause
it. Drunkenness was nothing--a weakness--a fault which was now behind
him. But this--this--the first of all the Conway women--and his
daughter--his child--the _beautiful one_. He sat still, and then he
grew very calm. It was the calmness of the old Conway spirit
returning. "Richard Travis," he said to himself, "knows as well what
this act of his means in the South,--in the unwritten law of our
land--as I do. He has taken his chance of life or death. I'll see
that it is death. This is the last of me and my house. But in the
fall I'll see that this Philistine of Philistines dies under its
ruins."
He arose and started out. He saw the lap robe in the hall, and this
put him to investigating. The mares and buggy he found under the
shed. It was all a mystery to him, but of one thing he was sure: "He
will soon come back for them. I can wait."
Choosing a spot in the shadow of a great tree, he sat down with his
pistol across his knees. The moon had arisen and cast ghostly shadows
over everything. It was a time for repentance, for thoughts of the
past with him, and as he sat there, that terrible hour, with murder
in his heart, bitterness and repentance were his.
He was a changed man. Never again could he be the old self. "But the
blow--the blow," he kept saying, "I thought it would fall on me--not
on her--my beautiful one--not on a Conway woman's chastity--not my
wife's daughter--"
He heard steps coming down the path. His heart ceased a moment, it
seemed to him, and then beat wildly. He drew a long breath to relieve
it--to calm it with cool oxygen, and then he cocked the five chambered
pistol and waited as full of the joy of killing as if the man who was
now walking down the path was a wolf or a mad dog--down the path and
right into the muzzle of the pistol, backed by the arm which could kill.
He saw Richard Travis coming, slowly, painfully, his left arm tied up,
and his step, once so quick and active, so full of strength and life,
now was as if the blight of old age had come upon it.
In spite of his bitter determination Conway noticed the great change,
and instinct, which acts even through anger and hatred and revenge and
the maddening fury of murder,--instinct, the ever present--whispered its
warning to his innermost ear.
Still, he could not resist. Rising, he threw his pistol up within a few
yards of Richard Travis's breast, his hand upon the trigger. But he
could not fire, although Travis stood quietly under its muzzle and
looked without surprise into his face.
Conway glanced along the barrel of his weapon and into the face of
Richard Travis. And then he brought his pistol down with a quick
movement.
The face before him was begging him to shoot!
"Why don't you shoot?" said Travis at last, breaking the silence and
in a tone of disappointment.
"Because you are not guilty," said Conway--"not with that look in
your face."
"I am sorry you saw my face, then," he smiled sadly--"for it had been
such a happy solution for it all--if you had only fired."
"Where is my child?"
"Do you think you have any right to ask--having treated her as you
have?"
Conway trembled, at first with rage, then in shame:
"No,"--he said finally. "No, you are right--I haven't."
"That is the only reply you could have made me that would make it
obligatory on my part to answer your question. In that reply I see
there is hope for you. So I will tell you she is safe, unharmed,
unhurt."
"I felt it," said Conway, quietly, "for I knew it, Richard Travis, as
soon as I saw your face. But tell me all."
"There is little to tell. I had made up my mind to run off with her,
marry her, perhaps, since she had neither home nor a father, and was
a beautiful young thing which any man might be proud of. But things
have come up--no, not come up, fallen, fallen and crushed. It has
been a crisis all around--so I sent for Clay--a fine young fellow and
he loves her--I had him meet me here and--well, he has taken her to
Westmoreland to-night. You know she is safe there. She will come to
you to-morrow as pure as she left, though God knows you do not
deserve it."
Something sprang into Edward Conway's throat--something kin to a
joyous shout. He could not speak. He could only look at the strange,
calm, sad man before him in a gratitude that uplifted him. He stared
with eyes that were blinded with tears.
"Dick--Dick," he said, "we have been estranged, since the war. I
misjudged you. I see I never knew you. I came to kill, but here--" He
thrust the grip of his pistol toward Travis--"here, Dick, kill
me--shoot me--I am not fit to live--but, O God, how clearly I see
now; and, Dick--Dick--you shall see--the world shall see that from
now on, with God's help, as Lily makes me say--Dick, I'll be a Conway
again."
The other man pressed his hand: "Ned, I believe it--I believe it. Go
back to your little home to-night. Your daughter is safe. To-morrow
you may begin all over again. To-morrow--"
"And you, Dick--I have heard--I can guess, but why may not you,
to-morrow--"
"There will be no to-morrow for me," he said sadly. "Things stop
suddenly before me to-night as before an abyss--"
He turned quickly and looked toward the low lying range of mountains.
A great red flush as of a rising sun glowed even beyond the rim of
them, and then out of it shot tinges of flame.
Conway saw it at the same instant:
"It's the mill--the mill's afire," he said.
CHAPTER XXII
A CONWAY AGAIN
It was a great fire the mill made, lighting the valley for miles. All
Cottontown was there to see it burn, hushed, with set faces, some of
anger, some of fear--but all in stricken numbness, knowing that their
living was gone.
It was not long before Jud Carpenter was among them, stirring them
with the story of how the old negro woman had burned it--for he knew
it was she. Indeed, he was soon fully substantiated by others who
heard her when she had run home heaping her maledictions on the mill.
Soon among them began the whisper of lynching. As it grew they became
bolder and began to shout it: _Lynch her!_
Jud Carpenter, half drunk and wholly reckless, stood on a stump, and
after telling his day's experience with Mammy Maria, her defiance of
the mill's laws, her arrogance, her burning of the mill, he shouted
that he himself would lead them.
"Lynch her!" they shouted. "Lead us, Jud Carpenter! We will lynch
her."
Some wanted to wait until daylight, but "Lynch her--lynch her now,"
was the shout.
The crowd grew denser every moment.