The Bishop of Cottontown Part 11

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 sa.s.safras 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses 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 wors.h.i.+ped 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 alt.i.tude--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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 subst.i.tute 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 s.h.i.+mmered through the blue mist which lay around the far off purpling hill tops. Then there was the clang of a dinner bell.

"It is Mammy Maria," she said--"I must go. No--you must not walk home with me. I'd rather be alone."

She did not intend it, but it was brutal to have said it that way--to the sensitive heart it went to. He looked hurt for a moment and then tried to smile in a weak way. Then he raised his hat gallantly, turned and went off down the gulch.

Helen stood looking for the last time on the pretty arbor. Here she had lost her heart--her life. She fell on the moss again and kissed the stone. Then she walked home--in tears.

CHAPTER VII

HILLARD WATTS

It is good for the world now and then to go back to first principles in religion. It would be better for it never to get away from them; but, since it has that way of doing--of breeding away and breaking away from the innate good--it is well that a man should be born in any age with the faith of Abraham.

It matters not from what source such a man may spring. And he need have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him.

Such a man was Hillard Watts, the Cottontown preacher.

Sprung from the common people of the South, he was a most uncommon man, in that he had an absolute faith in G.o.d and His justice, and an absolute belief that some redeeming goodness lay in every human being, however depraved he may seem to the world. And so firm was his faith, so simple his religion--so contrary to the worldliness of the religion of his day,--that the very practice of it made him an uncommon man.

As the overseer of General Jeremiah Travis's large estate before the war, he proved by his success that even slaves work better for kindness. Of infinite good sense, but little education, he had a mind that went to the heart of things, and years ago the fame of his homely but pithy sayings stuck in the community. In connection with kindness to his negroes one of his sayings was, "Oh, kindness can't be cla.s.sified--it takes in the whole world or nothin'."

When General Travis got into dire financial straits once, he sent for his overseer, and advised with him as to the expediency of giving up.

The overseer, who knew the world and its ways with all the good judgment of his nature, dryly remarked: "That'll never do. Never let the world know you've quit; an' let the undertaker that buries you be the fust man to find out you're busted."