The Bishop of Cottontown Part 13

Travis let them out a link. They flew down a soft, cool graveled stretch. He drew them in at the sound of an ominous click. It came from Sadie B.

"Sadie B.'s forging again. Didn't I tell you to have the blacksmith move her hind shoes back a little?"

"I did, sir," said Jim.

"You've got no weight on her front feet, then," said Travis critically.

"Not to-night, sir--I took off the two ounces thinking you'd not speed them to-night, sir."

"You never know when I'm going to speed them. The night is as good as the day when I want a tonic."

They had reached the big stone posts which marked the boundary of Westmoreland. A little farther on the mares wheeled into the gate, for it was open and lay, half on the ground, hanging by one hinge. It had not been painted for years. The driveway, too, had been neglected. The old home, beautiful even in its decay, sat in a fine beech grove on the slope of a hill. A wide veranda, with marble flag-stones as a base, ran across the front. Eight Corinthian pillars sentineled it, resting on a marble base which seemed to spring up out of the flag-stones themselves, and towering to the projecting entablature above.

On one side an ell could be seen, covered with ivy. On the other the roof of a hot-house, with the gla.s.s broken out.

It touched even Richard Travis--this decay. He had known the place in the days of its glory before its proprietor, Colonel Theodore Westmore, broken by the war, in spirit and in pocket, had sent a bullet into his brain and ended the bitter fight with debt. Since then, no one but the widow and her daughter knew what the fight had been, for Clay Westmore, the brother, was but a boy and in college at the time. He had graduated only a few months before, and was now at home, wrapped up, as Richard Travis had heard, in what to him was a visionary scheme of some sort for discovering a large area of coal and iron thereabouts. He had heard, too, that the young man had taken hold of what had been left, and that often he had been seen following the plough himself.

Travis drove through the driveway--then he pulled up the mares very gently, got out and felt of their flanks.

"Take them to the barn and rub them off," he said, "while you wait.

And for a half hour bandage their hind legs--I don't want any wind puffs from road work."

He started into the house. Then he turned and said: "Be here at the door, Jim, by ten o'clock, sharp. I shall make another call after this. Mind you now, ten o'clock, sharp."

At the library he knocked and walked in.

Mrs. Westmore sat by the fire. She was a small, daintily-made woman, and beautiful even at fifty-five. She had keen, black eyes and nervous, flighty ways. A smile, half cynical, half inviting, lit up continuously her face.

"Richard?" she said, rising and taking his hand.

"Cousin Alethea--I thought you were Alice and I was going to surprise her."

Mrs. Westmore laughed her metallic little laugh. It was habit. She intended it to be rea.s.suring, but too much of it made one nervous. It was the laugh without the soul in it--the eye open and lighted, but dead. It was a Damascus blade falling from the stricken arm to the stone pavement and not against the ringing steel of an opponent.

"You will guess, of course, where she is," she said after they were seated.

"No?" from Travis.

"Getting their Sunday School lesson--she, Uncle Bisco, and the Bishop."

Travis frowned and gave a nervous twitch of his shoulders as he turned around to find himself a chair.

"No one knows just how we feel towards Uncle Bisco and his wife,"

went on Mrs. Westmore in half apology--"she has been with us so long and is now so old and helpless since they were freed; their children have all left them--gone--no one knows where. And so Uncle Bisco and Aunt Charity are as helpless as babes, and but for Alice they would suffer greatly."

A sudden impulse seized Travis: "Let us go and peep in on them. We shall have a good joke on Her Majesty."

Mrs. Westmore laughed, and they slipped quietly out to Uncle Bisco's cabin. Down a shrubbery-lined walk they went--then through the woods across a field. It was a long walk, but the path was firm and good, and the moon lit it up. They came to the little cabin at last, in the edge of another wood. Then they slipped around and peeped in the window.

A small kerosene lamp sat on a table lighting up a room scrupulously clean.

Uncle Bisco was very old. His head was, in truth, a cotton plant full open. His face was intelligent, grave--such a face as Howard Weeden only could draw from memory. He had finished his supper, and from the remnants left on the plate it was plain that Alice Westmore had prepared for the old man dainties which she, herself, could not afford to indulge in.

By him sat his old wife, and on the other side of the fireplace was the old overseer, his head also white, his face strong and thoughtful. He was clean shaven, save a patch of short white chin-whiskers, and his big straight nose had a slight hook of shrewdness in it.

Alice Westmore was reading the chapter--her voice added to it an hundred fold: "Let not your heart be troubled.... Ye believe in G.o.d, believe also in me.... In my Father's house are many mansions...!"

The lamplight fell on her hair. It was brown where the light flashed over it, and lay in rippling waves around her temples in a splendid coil down the arch of her neck, and s.h.i.+ning in strong contrast through the gauzy dark sheen of her black gown. But where the light fell, there was that suspicion of red which the last faint tendril a dying sunbeam throws out in a parting clutch at the bosom of a cloud.

It gave one a feeling of the benediction of twilight.

And when she looked up, her eyes were the blessings poured out--luminous, helpful, uplifting, restful,--certain of life and immortality, full of all that which one sees not, when awake, but only when in the borderland of sleep, and memory, unleashed, tracks back on the trail of sweet days which once were.

They spake indeed always thus: "Let not your heart be troubled....

Peace, be still."

Her face did not seem to be a separate thing--apart--as with most women. For there are women whose hair is one thing and whose face is another. The hair is beautiful, pure, refined. The face beautiful, merely. The hair decorous, quiet, unadorned and debauched not by powder and paint, stands aloof as Desdemona, Ophelia or Rosalind. The face, brazen, with a sharp-tongued, vulgar queen of a thing in its center, on a throne, surrounded by perfumed nymphs, under the sensual glare of two rose-colored lamps, sits and holds a Du Barry court.

They are neighbors, but not friends, and they live in the same sphere, held together only by the law of gravity which holds to one spot of earth the rose and the ragwort. And the hair, like the rose, in all the purity of its own rich sweetness, all the naturalness of its soul, sits and looks down upon the face as a queen would over the painted yellow thing thrust by the law of life into her presence.

But the face of Alice Westmore was companion to her hair. The firelight fell on it; and while the glow from the lamp fell on her hair in sweet twilight shadows of good night, the rosy, purple beams of the cheerful firelight lit up her face with the sweet glory of a perpetual good morning.

Travis stood looking at her forgetful of all else. His lips were firmly set, as of a strong mind looking on its life-dream, the quarry of his hunter-soul all but in his grasp. Flashes of hope and little twists of fear were there; then, as he looked again, she raised, half timidly, her face as a Madonna asking for a blessing; and around his, crept in the smile which told of hope long deferred.

Selfish, impure, ambitious, forceful and masterful as he was, he stood hopeless and hungry-hearted before this pure woman. She had been the dream of his life--all times--always--since he could remember.

To own her--to win her!

As he looked up, the hardness of his face attracted even Mrs.

Westmore, smiling by his side at the scene before her. She looked up at Travis, but when she saw his face the smile went out of hers. It changed to fear.

All the other pa.s.sions in his face had settled into one cruel cynical smile around his mouth--a smile of winning or of death.

For the first time in her life she feared Richard Travis.

"I must go now," said Alice Westmore to the old men--"but I'll sing you a verse or two."

The overseer leaned back in his chair. Uncle Bisco stooped forward, his chin resting on his hickory staff.

And then like the clear notes of a spring, dripping drop by drop with a lengthening cadence into the covered pool of a rock-lined basin, came a simple Sunday School song the two old men loved so well.

There were tears in the old negro's eyes when she had finished. Then he sobbed like a child.

Alice Westmore arose to go.

"Now, Bishop--" she smiled at the overseer--"don't keep Uncle Bisco up all night talking about the war, and if you don't come by the house and chat with mamma and me awhile, we'll be jealous."

The overseer looked up: "Miss Alice--I'm an ole man an' we ole men all dream dreams when night comes. Moods come over us and, look where we will, it all leads back to the sweet paths of the past. To-day--all day--my mind has been on"--he stopped, afraid to p.r.o.nounce the word and hunting around in the scanty lexicon of his mind for some phrase of speech, some word even that might not awaken in Alice Westmore memories of the past.