The Bishop of Cottontown Part 71

"Done seen her," said Jud; "she say come on."

"Hold on," said Travis with feigned anger. "Hold on. Joe is fixin' to start a cotton-mill of his own. That'll interfere with the Acme.

No--no--we must vote it down. We mustn't let Joe do it."

Joe had already attempted to rise and start after his wives. But in the roar of laughter that followed he sat down and began to weep again for Liza.

It was nearly midnight. Only Travis, Charley Biggers and Jud remained sober enough to talk. Charley was telling of Tilly and her wondrous beauty.

"Now--it's this way," he hiccoughed--"I've got to go off to school--but--but--I've thought of a plan to marry her first, with a bogus license and preacher."

There was a whispered conversation among them, ending in a shout of applause.

"What's the matter with you takin' yo' queen at the same time?" asked Jud of Travis.

Travis, drunk as he was, winced to think that he would ever permit Jud Carpenter to suggest what he had intended should only be known to himself. His tongue was thick, his brain whirled, and there were gaps in his thoughts; but through the thickness and heaviness he thought how low he had fallen. Lower yet when, despite all his vanis.h.i.+ng reserve, all his dignity and exclusiveness, he laughed sillily and said:

"Just what I had decided to do--two queens and an ace."

They all cheered drunkenly.

CHAPTER VII

MRS. WESTMORE TAKES A HAND

"What are you playing, Alice?"

The daughter arose from the piano and kissed her mother, holding for a moment the pretty face, crowned with white hair, between her two palms.

"It--it is an old song which Tom and I used to love to sing."

The last of the sentence came so slowly that it sank almost into silence, as of one beginning a sentence and becoming so absorbed in the subject as to forget the speech. Then she turned again to the piano, as if to hide from her mother the sorrow which had crept into her face.

"You should cease to think of that. Such things are dreams--at present we are confronted by very disagreeable realities."

"Dreams--ah, mother mine"--she answered with forced cheeriness--"but what would life be without them?"

"For one thing, Alice"--and she took the daughter's place at the piano and began to play s.n.a.t.c.hes of an old waltz tune--"it would be free from all the morbid unnaturalness, the silliness, the froth of things. There is too much hardness in every life--in the world--in the very laws of life, for such things ever to have been part of the original plan. For my part, I think they are the product of man and wine or women or morphine or some other narcotic."

"We make the dreams of life, but the realities of it make us," she added.

"Oh, no, mother. 'Tis the dreams that make the realities. Not a great established fact exists but it was once the vision of a dreamer. Our dreams to-day become the realities of to-morrow."

"Do you believe Tom is not dead--that he will one day come back?"

asked her mother abruptly.

It was twilight and the fire flickered, lighting up the library. But in the flash of it Mrs. Westmore saw Alice's cheek whiten in a hopeless, helpless, stricken way.

Then she walked to the window and looked out on the darkness fast closing in on the lawn, cl.u.s.tering denser around the evergreens and creeping ghostlike toward the dim sky line which shone clear in the open.

The very helplessness of her step, her silence, her numbed, yearning look across the lawn told Mrs. Westmore of the death of all hope there.

She followed her daughter and put her arms impulsively around her.

"I should not have hurt you so, Alice. I only wanted to show you how worse than useless it is ... but to change the subject, I do wish to speak to you of--our condition."

Alice was used to her mother's ways--her brilliancy--her pointed manner of going at things--her quick change of thought--of mood, and even of temperament. An outsider would have judged Mrs. Westmore to be fickle with a strong vein of selfishness and even of egotism.

Alice only knew that she was her mother; who had suffered much; who had been reduced by poverty to a condition straitened even to hards.h.i.+ps. To help her the daughter knew that she was willing to make any sacrifice. Unselfish, devoted, clear as noonday in her own ideas of right and wrong, Alice's one weakness was her blind devotion to those she loved. A weakness beautiful and even magnificent, since it might mean a sacrifice of her heart for another. The woman who gives her time, her money, her life, even, to another gives but a small part of her real self. But there is something truly heroic when she throws in her heart also. For when a woman has given that she has given all; and because she has thrown it in cold and dead--a lifeless thing--matters not; in the poignancy of the giving it is gone from her forever and she may not recall it even with the opportunity of bringing it back to life.

She who gives her all, but keeps her heart, is as a priest reading mechanically the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible. But she who gives her heart never to take it back again gives as the Christ dying on the Cross.

"Now, here is the legal paper about"--

Her voice failed and she did not finish the sentence.

Alice took the paper and glanced at it. She flushed and thrust it into her pocket. They were silent a while and Mrs. Westmore sat thinking of the past. Alice knew it by the great reminiscent light which gleamed in her eyes. She thought of the time when she had servants, money, friends unlimited--of the wealth and influence of her husband--of the glory of Westmoreland.

Every one has some secret ambition kept from the eyes of every living soul--often even to die in its keeper's breast. It is oftenest a mean ambition of which one is ashamed and so hides it from the world. It is often the one weakness. Alice never knew what was her mother's.

She did not indeed know that she had one, for this one thing Mrs.

Westmore had kept inviolately secret. But in her heart there had always rankled a secret jealousy when she thought of The Gaffs. It had been there since she could remember--a feeling cherished secretly, too, by her husband: for in everything their one idea had been that Westmoreland should surpa.s.s The Gaffs,--that it should be handsomer, better kept, more prosperous, more famous.

Now, Westmoreland was gone--this meant the last of it. It would be sold, even the last hundred acres of it, with the old home on it.

Gone--gone--all her former glory--all her family tradition, her memories, her very name.

Gone, and The Gaffs remained!

Remained in all its intactness--its beauty--its well equipped barns with all the splendor of its former days. For so great was the respect of Schofield's army for the character of Colonel Jeremiah Travis that his home escaped the torch when it was applied to many others in the Tennessee Valley. And Richard Travis had been shrewd enough after the war to hold his own. Joining the party of the negro after the war, he had been its political ruler in the county. And the Honorable Richard Travis had been offered anything he wanted. At present he was State Senator. He with others called himself a Republican--one of the great party of Lincoln to which the negroes after their enfranchis.e.m.e.nt united themselves. It was a fearful misnomer. The Republican party in the South, composed of ninety-nine ignorant negroes to one renegade white, about as truly represented the progressive party of Lincoln as a black vampire the ornithology of all lands. Indeed, since the war, there has never been in the South either a Republican or a Democratic party. The party line is not drawn on belief but on race and color. The white men, believing everything they please from free trade to protection, vote a ticket which they call Democratic. The negroes, and a few whites who allied themselves with them for the spoils of office, vote the other ticket.

Neither of them represent anything but a race issue.

To this negro party belonged Richard Travis--and the price of his infamy had been _Honorable_ before his name.

But Mrs. Westmore cared nothing for this. She only knew that he was a leader of men, was handsome, well reared and educated, and that he owned The Gaffs, her old rival. And that there it stood, a fortune--a refuge--a rock--offered to her and her daughter, offered by a man who, whatever his other faults, was brave and das.h.i.+ng, sincere in his idolatrous love for her daughter. That he would make Alice happy she did not doubt; for Mrs. Westmore's idea of happiness was in having wealth and position and a splendid name. Having no real heart, how was it possible for her to know, as Alice could know, the happiness of love?

An eyeless fish in the river of Mammoth Cave might as well try to understand what light meant.

He would make Alice happy, of course he would; he would make her happy by devotion, which he was eager to give her with an unstinted hand.

Alice needed it, she herself needed it. It was common sense to accept it,--business sense. It was opportunity--fate. It was the reward of a life--the triumph of it--to have her old rival--enemy--bound and presented to her.

And nothing stood between her and the accomplishment of it all but the foolish romance of her daughter's youth.

And so she sat building her castles and thinking:

"With The Gaffs, with Richard Travis and his money would come all I wish, both for her and for me. Once more I would hold the social position I once held: once more I would be something in the world.

And Alice, of course, she would be happy; for her's is one of those trusting natures which finds first where her duty points and then makes her heart follow."