The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
"A long engagement will only test our love," he broke in with a show
of dignity.
"You do not understand," she went on. "Things have got so bad at home
that I must earn something."
He frowned and tapped his foot impatiently. She sat up closer to him
and put her hand on his. He did not move nor even return the
pressure.
"And so, Harry--if--if to help papa--and Millwood is sold--and I can
get a good place in the mill--one off by myself--what they call
drawer-in--at good wages,--and, if only for a little while I'd work
there--to help out, you know--what would you think?"
He sprang up from his seat and dropped her hand.
"Good God, Helen Conway, are you crazy?" he said brutally--"why, I'd
never speak to you again. Me? A Travis?--and marry a mill girl?"
The color went out of her face. She looked in her shame and sorrow
toward the sunset, where a cloud, but ten minutes before, had stood
all rosy and purple with the flush of the sunbeams behind it.
Now the beams were gone, and it hung white and bloodless.
In the crisis of our lives such trifles as these flash over us. In
the greatness of other things--often turning points in our
life--Nature sometimes points it all with a metaphor.
For Nature is the one great metaphor.
Helen knew that she and the cloud were now one.
But she was not a coward, and with her heart nerved and looking him
calmly in the face, she talked on and told him of the wretched
condition of affairs at Millwood. And as she talked, the setting sun
played over her own cheeks, touching them with a halo of such
exquisite colors that even the unpoetic soul of Harry Travis was
touched by the beauty of it all.
And to any one but Harry Travis the proper solution would have been
plain. Not that he said it or even meant it--for she was too proud a
spirit even to have thought of it--there is much that a man should
know instinctively that a woman should never know at all.
Harry surprised himself by the patience with which he listened to
her. In him, as in his cousin--his pattern--ran a vein of tact when
the crisis demanded, through and between the stratum of bold
sensuousness and selfishness which made up the basis of his
character.
And so as he listened, in the meanness and meagerness of his soul, he
kept thinking, "I will let her down easy--no need for a scene."
It was narrow and little, but it was all that could come into the
soul of his narrowness.
For we cannot think beyond our fountain head, nor can we even dream
beyond the souls of the two things who gave us birth. There are men
born in this age of ripeness, born with an alphabet in their mouths
and reared in the regal ways of learning, who can neither read nor
write. And yet had Shakespeare been born without a language, he would
have carved his thoughts as pictures on the trees.
Harry Travis was born as so many others are--not only without a
language, but without a soul within him upon which a picture might be
drawn.
And so it kept running in his mind, quietly, cold-bloodedly,
tactfully down the narrow, crooked, slum-alleys of his mind: "I
will--I will drop her--now!" She ceased--there were tears in her eyes
and her face was blanched whiter even than the cloud.
He arose quickly and glanced at the setting sun: "Oh, say, but I must
get the Gov'nor's mare back. Jim will miss her at feeding time."
There was a laugh on his lips and his foot was already in the
stirrup. "Sorry to be in such a hurry just now, too--because there
is so much I want to say to you on that subject--awful sorry--but
the Gov'nor will raise Cain if he knows what I've done. I'll just
write you a long letter to-night--and I'll be over, maybe,
soon--ta--ta--but this mare, confound her--see how she cuts up--so
sorry I can't stay longer--but I'll write--to-night."
He threw her a kiss as he rode off.
She sat dazed, numbed, with the shallowness of it all--the shale of
sham which did not even conceal the base sub-stratum of deceit below.
Nothing like it had ever come into her life before.
She dropped down behind the rock, but instead of tears there came
steel. In it all she could only say with her lips white, a defiant
poise of her splendid head, and with a flash of the eyes which came
with the Conway aroused: "Oh, and I kissed him--and--and--I loved
him!"
She sat on the rock again and looked at the sunset. She was too hurt
now to go home--she wished to be alone.
She was a strong girl--mentally--and with a deep nature; but she was
proud, and so she sat and crushed it in her pride and strength,
though to do it shook her as the leaves were now being shaken by the
breeze which had sprung up at sunset.
She thought she could conquer--that she had conquered--then, as the
breeze died away, and the leaves hung still and limp again, her pride
went with the breeze and she fell again on her knees by the big rock,
fell and buried her face there in the cool moss and cried: "Oh, and
I loved that thing!"
Ten minutes later she sat pale and smiling. The Conway pride had
conquered, but it was a dangerous conquest, for steel and tears had
mingled to make it.
In her despair she even plucked another cotton bloom from her bosom
as if trying to force herself to be happy again in saying:
"One, I love--two, I love,
Three, I love, I say--"
But this only hurt her, because she remembered that when she had said
it before she had had an idol which now lay shattered, as the petals
of the cotton-blossom which she had plucked and thrown away.
Then the breeze sprang up again and with it, borne on it, came the
click--click--click of a hammer tapping a rock. It was a small gladey
valley through which a gulley ran. Boulders cropped out here and
there, and haws, red and white elms, and sassafras grew and shaded
it.
Down in the gulch, not a hundred yards from her, she saw a pair of
broad shoulders overtopped by a rusty summer hat--the worse for a
full season's wear. Around the shoulders was strung a leathern
satchel, and she could see that the person beneath the hat was
closely inspecting the rocks he chipped off and put into the satchel.
Then his hammer rang out again.
She sat and watched him and listened to the tap of his hammer half
sadly--half amused. Harry Travis had crushed her as she had never
been crushed before in her life, and the pride in a woman which
endureth a fall is not to be trifled with afterwards.
She grew calmer--even quiet. The old spirit returned. She knew that
she had never been as beautiful in her life, as now--just now--in the
halo of the sunset shining on her hair and reflected in the rare old
gown she wore.
The person with the leathern satchel was oblivious of everything but
his work. The old straw hat bobbed energetically--the big shoulders
nodded steadily beneath it. She watched him silently a few minutes
and then she called out pleasantly:
"You do seem to be very busy, Clay!"
He stopped and looked up. Then he took off his hat and, awkwardly
bowing, wiped his brow, broad, calm and self-reliant, and a
deliberate smile spread over his face. Everything he did was
deliberate. The smile began in the large friendly mouth and spread in
kindred waves upward until it flashed out from his kindly blue eyes,
through the heavy double-lens glasses that covered them.
Without a word he picked up the last rock he had broken off and put
it into his satchel. Very deliberate, too, was his walk up the hill
toward the grape arbor, mopping his brow as he came along--a brow big
and full of cause and effect and of quiet deductions and deliberate
conclusions. His coat was seedy, his trousers bagged at the knees,
his shoes were old, and there were patches on them, but his collar
and linen were white and very much starched, and his awkward,
shambling gait was honest to the last footfall. A world of depth and
soul was in his strong, fine face, lit up now with an honest, humble
smile, but, at rest, full of quiet dignity.
He shuffled along and sat down in a big brotherly way by the girl's
side.
She sat still, looking at him with a half amused smile on her lips.
He smiled back at her abstractedly. She could see that he had not yet
really seen her. He was looking thoughtfully across at the hill
beyond:
"It puzzles me," he said in a fine, mellow voice, "why I should find
this rotten limestone cropping out here. Now, in the blue limestone
of the Niagara period I was as sure of finding it as I am--"
"Of not finding me at all,"--it came queenly, haughtily from her.
He turned, and the thick lenses of his glasses were focused on her--a
radiant, superb being. Then there were swept away all his
abstractions and deductions, and in their place a real smile--a
lover's smile of satisfaction looking on the paradise of his dreams.
"You know I have always worshiped you," he said simply and
reverently.
She moved up in a sisterly way to him and looked into his face.
"Clay--Clay--but you must not--I have told you--I am engaged."
He did not appear to hear her. Already his mind was away off in the
hills where his eyes were. He went on: "Now, over there I struck a
stratum of rotten limestone--it's a curious thing. I traced that vein
of coal from Walker County--clear through the carboniferous period,
and it is bound to crop out somewhere in this altitude--bound to do
it."
"Now it's just this way," he said, taking her hand without being
conscious of it and counting off the periods with her fingers. "Here
is the carboniferous, the sub-carboniferous--" She jerked her hand
away with what would have been an amused laugh except that in a half
conscious way she remembered that Harry had held her hand but half an
hour ago; and it ended in a frigid shaft feathered with a smile--the
arrow which came from the bow of her pretty mouth.
He came to himself with a boyish laugh and a blush that made Helen
look at him again and watch it roll down his cheek and neck, under
the fine white skin there.
Then he looked at her closely again--the romantic face, the coil of
brown hair, the old gown of rich silk, the old-fashioned corsage and
the rich old gold necklace around her throat.
"If there's a queen on earth--it's you," he said simply.
He reddened again, and to divert it felt in his satchel and took out
a rock. Then he looked across at the hills again:
"If I do trace up that vein of coal and the iron which is needed with
it--when I do--for I know it is here as well as Leverrier knew that
Neptune was in our planetary system by the attraction exerted--when I
do--"
He looked at her again. He could not say the words. Real love has
ideas, but never words. It feels, but cannot speak. That which comes
out of the mouth, being words, is ever a poor substitute for that
which comes from the heart and is spirit.
"Clay," she said, "you keep forgetting. I say I--I am--was--" She
stopped confused.
He looked hurt for a moment and smiled in his frank way: "I know it
is here," he said holding up a bit of coal--"here, by the million
tons, and it is mine by right of birth and education and breeding. It
is my heritage to find it. One day Alabama steel will outrank
Pittsburgh's. Oh, to put my name there as the discoverer!"
"Then you"--he turned and said it fondly--reverently--"you should be
mine by right of--of love."
She sighed.
"Clay--I am sorry for you. I can never love you that way. You have
told me that, since--oh, since I can remember, and I have always told
you--you know we are cousins, anyway--second cousins." She shook her
head.
"Under the heart of the flinty hill lies the coal," he said simply.
But she did not understand him. She had looked down and seen Harry's
foot-track on the moss.
And so they sat until the first star arose and shimmered through the
blue mist which lay around the far off purpling hill tops. Then there