Night—for night and death, are they not one? A farm cabin in a little valley beyond the mountain. An Indian Summer night in November, but a little fire is pleasant, throwing its cheerful light on a room rough from puncheon floor to axe-hewn rafters, but cleanly-tidy in its very roughness. It looked sinewy, strong, honest, good-natured. There was roughness, but it was the roughness of strength. Knots of character told of the suffering, struggles and privations of the sturdy trees in the forest, of seams twisted by the tempests; rifts from the mountain rocks; fibre, steel-chilled by the terrible, silent cold of winter stars.
And now plank and beam and rafter and roof made into a home, humble and honest, and giving it all back again under the warm light of the hearth-stone.
On a bed, white and beautifully clean, lay a fragile creature, terribly white herself, save where red live coals gleamed in her cheeks beneath the bright, blazing, fever-fire burning in her eyes above.
She coughed and smiled and lay still, smiling.
She smiled because a little one—a tiny, sickly little girl—had come up to the bed and patted her cheek and said: “Little mother—little mother!”
There were four other children in the room, and they sat around in all the solemn, awe-stricken sorrow of death, seen for the first time.
Then a man in an invalid chair, helpless and with a broken spine, spoke, as if thinking aloud:
“She's all the mother the little 'uns ever had, Bishop—'pears like it's cruel for God to take her from them.”
“God's cruelty is our crown,” said the old man—“we'll understand it by and by.”
Then the beautiful woman who had come over the mountain arose from the seat by the fireside, and came to the bed. She took the little one in her arms and petted and soothed her.
The child looked at her timidly in childish astonishment. She was not used to such a beautiful woman holding her—so proud and fine—from a world that she knew was not her world.
“May I give you some nourishment now, Maggie?”
The girl shook her head.
“No—no—Miss Alice,” and then she smiled so brightly and cheerfully that the little one in Alice Westmore's arms clapped her hands and laughed: “Little mother—be up, well, to-morrow.”
Little Mother turned her eyes on the child quickly, smiled and nodded approval. But there were tears—tears which the little one did not understand.
An hour went by—the wind had ceased, and with it the rain. The children were asleep in bed; the father in his chair.
A cold sweat had broken out on the dying girl's forehead and she breathed with a terrible effort. And in it all the two watchers beside the bed saw that there was an agony there but not the fear of death. She kept trying to bite her nails nervously and saying:
“There is only— ... one thing— ... one ... thing....”
“Tell me, Maggie,” said the old man, bending low and soothing her forehead with his hands, “tell us what's pesterin' you—maybe it hadn't oughter be. You mustn't worry now—God'll make everything right—to them that loves him even to the happy death. You'll die happy an' be happy with him forever. The little 'uns an' the father, you know they're fixed here—in this nice home an' the farm—so don't worry.”
“That's it!... Oh, that's it!... I got it that way— ... all for them ... but it's that that hurts now....”
He bent down over her: “Tell us, child—me an' Miss Alice—tell us what's pesterin' you. You mustn't die this way—you who've got such a right to be happy.”
The hectic spark burned to white heat in her cheek. She bit her nails, she picked at the cover, she looked toward the bed and asked feebly: “Are they asleep? Can I talk to you two?”
The old man nodded. Alice soothed her brow.
Then she beckoned to the old preacher, who knelt by her side, and he put his arms around her neck and raised her on the pillow. And his ear was close to her lips, for she could scarcely talk, and Alice Westmore knelt and listened, too. She listened, but with a griping, strained heartache,—listened to a dying confession from the pale lips, and the truth for the first time came to Alice Westmore, and kneeling, she could not rise, but bent again her head and heard the pitiful, dying confession. As she listened to the broken, gasping words, heard the heart-breaking secret come out of the ruins of its wrecked home, her love, her temptation, her ignorance in wondering if she were really married by the laws of love, and then the great martyrdom of it all—giving her life, her all, that the others might live—a terrible tightening gathered around Alice Westmore's heart, her head fell with the flooding tears and she knelt sobbing, her bloodless fingers clutching the bed of the dying girl.
“Don't cry,” said Maggie. “I should be the one to weep, ... only I am so happy ... to think ... I am loved by the noblest, best, of men, ... an' I love him so, ... only he ain't here; ... but I wouldn't have him see me die. Now—now ... what I want to know, Bishop, ...” she tried to rise. She seemed to be passing away. The old man caught her and held her in his arms.
Her eyes opened: “I—is—” she went on, in the agony of it all with the same breath, “am ... am I married ... in God's sight ... as well as his—”
The old man held her tenderly as if she were a child. He smiled calmly, sweetly, into her eyes as he said:
“You believed it an' you loved only him, Maggie—poor chile!”
“Oh, yes—yes—” she smiled, “an' now—even now I love him up—right up—as you see ... to the door, ... to the shadow, ... to the valley of the shadow....”
“And it went for these, for these”—he said looking around at the room.
“For them—my little ones—they had no mother, you kno'—an' Daddy's back. Oh, I didn't mind the work, ... the mill that has killed ... killed me, ... but, ... but was I”—her voice rose to a shrill cry of agony—“am I married in God's sight?”
Alice quivered in the beauty of the answer which came back from the old man's lips:
“As sure as God lives, you were—there now—sleep and rest; it is all right, child.”
Then a sweet calmness settled over her face, and with it a smile of exquisite happiness.
She fell back on her pillow: “In God's sight ... married ... married ... my—Oh, I have never said it before ... but now, ... can't I?”
The Bishop nodded, smiling.
“My husband, ... my husband, ... dear heart, ... Good-bye....”
She tried to reach under her pillow to draw out something, and then she smiled and died.
When Alice Westmore dressed her for burial an hour afterwards, her heart was shaken with a bitterness it had never known before—a bitterness which in a man would have been a vengeance. For there was the smile still on the dead face, carried into the presence of God.
Under the dead girl's pillow lay the picture of Richard Travis.
The next day Alice sent the picture to Richard Travis, and with it a note.
“It is your's,” she wrote calmly, terribly calm—“from the girl who died believing she was your wife. I am helping bury her to-day. And you need not come to Westmoreland to-morrow night, nor next week, nor ever again.”
And Richard Travis, when he read it, turned white to his hard, bitter, cruel lips, the first time in all his life.
For he knew that now he had no more chance to recall the living than he had to recall the dead.
All that week at the mill, Richard Travis had been making preparations for his trip to Boston. Regularly twice, and often three times a year, he had made the same journey, where his report to the directors was received and discussed. After that, there were always two weeks of theatres, operas, wine-suppers and dissipations of other kinds—though never of the grossest sort—for even in sin there is refinement, and Richard Travis was by instinct and inheritance refined.
He was not conscious—and who of his class ever are?—of the effects of the life he was leading—the tightening of this chain of immoral habits, the searing of what conscience he had, the freezing of all that was generous and good within him.
Once his nature had been as a lake in midsummer, its surface shimmering in the sunlight, reflecting something of the beauty that came to it. Now, cold, sordid, callous, it lay incased in winter ice and neither could the sunlight go in nor its reflection go out. It slept on in coarse opaqueness, covered with an impenetrable crust which he himself did not understand.
“But,” said the old Bishop more than once, “God can touch him and he will thaw like a spring day. There is somethin' great in Richard Travis if he can only be touched.”
But vice cannot reason. Immorality cannot deduce. Only the moral ponders deeply and knows both the premises and the conclusions, because only the moral thinks.
Vice, like the poisonous talons of a bird of prey, while it buries its nails in the flesh of its victim, carries also the narcotic which soothes as it kills.
And Richard Travis had arrived at this stage. At first it had been with him any woman, so there was a romance—and hence Maggie. But he had tired of these, and now it was the woman beautiful as Helen, or the woman pure and lovely as Alice Westmore.
What a tribute to purity, that impurity worships it the more as itself sinks lower in the slime of things. It is the poignancy of the meteorite, which, falling from a star, hisses out its life in the mud.
The woman pure—Alice—the very thought of her sent him farther into the mud, knowing she could not be his. She alone whom he had wanted to wed all his life, the goal of his love's ambition, the one woman in the world he had never doubted would one day be his wife.
Her note to him—“Never ... never ... again”—he kept reading it over, stunned, and pale, with the truth of it. In his blindness it had never occurred to him that Alice Westmore and Maggie would ever meet. In his blindness—for Wrong, daring as a snake, which, however alert and far-seeing it may be in the hey-day of its spring, sees less clearly as the Summer advances, until, in the August of its infamy, it ceases to see altogether and becomes an easy victim for all things with hoofs.
Then, the poignant reawakening. Now he lay in the mud and above him still shone the star.
The star—his star! And how it hurt him! It was the breaking of a link in the chain of his life.
Twice had he written to her. But each time his notes came back unopened. Twice had he gone to Westmoreland to see her. Mrs. Westmore met him at the door, cordial, sympathetic, but with a nervous jerk in the little metallic laugh. His first glance at her told him she knew everything—and yet, knew nothing. Alice was locked in her room and would not see him.
“But, oh, Richard,” and again she laughed her little insincere, unstable, society laugh, beginning with brave frankness in one corner of her mouth and ending in a hypocritical wave of forgetfulness before it had time to finish the circle, but fluttering out into a cynical twitching of a thing which might have been a smile or a sneer—
“True love—you know—dear Richard—you must remember the old saying.”
She pressed his hand sympathetically. The mouth said nothing, but the hand said plainly: “Do not despair—I am working for a home at The Gaffs.”
He pitied her, for there was misery in her eyes and in her laugh and in the very touch of her hand. Misery and insincerity, and that terrible mental state when weakness is roped up between the two and knows, for once in its life, that it has no strength at all.
And she pitied him, for never before on any human face had she seen the terrible irony of agony. Agony she had often seen—but not this irony of it—this agony that saw all its life's happiness blasted and knew it deserved it.
Richard Travis, when he left Westmoreland, knew that he left it forever.
“The Queen is dead—long live the Queen,” he said bitterly.
And then there happened what always happens to the thing in the mud—he sank deeper—desperately deeper.
Now—now he would have Helen Conway. He would have her and own her, body and soul. He would take her away—as he had planned, and keep her away. That was easy, too—too far away for the whisper of it ever to come back. If he failed in that he would marry her. She was beautiful—and with a little more age and education she would grace The Gaffs. So he might marry her and set her up, a queen over their heads.
This was his determination when he went to the mill the first of the week. All the week he watched her, talked with her, was pleasant, gallant and agreeable. But he soon saw that Helen was not the same. There was not the dull wistful resignation in her look, and despair had given way to a cheerfulness he could not understand. There was a brightness in her eyes which made her more beautiful.
The unconscious grip which the shamelessness of it all had over him was evidenced in what he did. He confided his plans to Jud Carpenter, and set him to work to discover the cause.
“See what's wrong,” he said significantly. “I am going to take that girl North with me, and away from here. After that it is no affair of yours.”
“Anything wrong?” He had reached the point of his moral degradation when right for Helen meant wrong for him.
Jud, with a characteristic shrewdness, put his finger quickly on the spot.
Edward Conway was sober. Clay saw her daily.
“But jes' wait till I see him ag'in—down there. I'll make him drunk enough. Then you'll see a change in the Queen—hey?”
And he laughed knowingly. With a little more bitterness she would go to the end of the world with him.
It was that day he held her hands in the old familiar way, but when he would kiss her at the gate she still fled, crimson, away.
The next morning Clay Westmore walked with her to the mill, and Travis lilted his eyebrows haughtily:
“If anything of that kind happens,” he said to himself, “nothing can save me.”
He watched her closely—how beautiful she looked that day—how regally beautiful! She had come wearing the blue silk gown, with the lace and beads which had been her mother's. In sheer delight Travis kept slipping to the drawing-in room door to watch her work. Her posture, beautifully Greek, before the machine, so natural that it looked not unlike a harp in her hand; her half-bent head and graceful neck, the flushed face and eyes, the whole picture was like a Titian, rich in color and life.
And she saw him and looked up smiling.
It was not the smile of happiness. He did not know it because, being blind, he could not know. It was the happiness of work—achievement.
He came in smiling. “Why are you so much happier than last week?”
“Would you really like to know?” she said, looking him frankly in the eyes.
He touched her hair playfully. She moved her head and shook it warningly.
“It is because I am at work and father is trying so hard to reform.”
“I thought maybe it was because you had found out how much I love you.”
It was his old, stereotyped, brazen way, but she did not know it and blushed prettily.
“You are kind, Mr. Travis, but—but that mustn't be thought of. Please, but I wish you wouldn't talk that way.”
“Why, it is true, my queen—of The Gaffs?” he said smiling.
She began to work again.
He came over to her and bent low:
“You know I am to take you Monday night”—
Her hands flew very rapidly—her cheeks mantled into a rich glow. One of the threads snapped. She stopped, confused.
Travis glanced around. No one was near. He bent and kissed her hair:
“My queen,” he whispered, “my beautiful queen.”
Then he walked quickly out. He went to his office, but he still saw the beautiful picture. It thrilled him and then there swept up over him another picture, and he cried savagely to himself:
“I'll make her sorry. She shall bow to that fine thing yet—my queen.”
Nor would it leave him that day, and into the night he dreamed of her, and it was the same Titian picture in a background of red sunset. And her machine was a harp she was playing. He wakened and smiled:
“Am I falling in love with that girl? That will spoil it all.”
He watched her closely the next day, for it puzzled him to know why she had changed so rapidly in her manner toward him. He had ridden to Millwood to bring her to the mill, himself; and he had some exquisite roses for her—clipped in the hot-house by his own hands. It was with an unmistakable twitch of jealousy that he learned that Clay Westmore had already come by and gone with her.
“I know what it is now,” he said to Jud Carpenter at the mill that morning; “she is half in love with that slow, studious fellow.”
Jud laughed: “Say, excuse me, sah—but hanged if you ain't got all the symptoms, y'self, boss?”
Travis flushed:
“Oh, when I start out to do a thing I want to do it—and I'm going to take her with me, or die trying.”
Jud laughed again: “Leave it to me—I'll fix the goggle-eyed fellow.”
That night when the door bell rang at Westmoreland, Jud Carpenter was ushered into Clay's workshop. He sat down and looked through his shaggy eyebrows at the lint and dust and specimens of ore. Then he spat on the floor disgustedly.
“Sorry to disturb you, but be you a surveyor also?”
The big bowed glasses looked at him quietly and nodded affirmatively.
“Wal, then,” went on Jud, “I come to git you to do a job of surveying for the mill. It's a lot of timber land on the other side of the mountain—some twenty miles off. The Company's bought five thousand acres of wood and they want it surveyed. What'll you charge?”
Clay thought a moment: “Going and coming, on horse-back—it will take me a week,” said Clay thoughtfully. “I shall charge a hundred dollars.”
“An' will you go right away—to-morrow mornin'?”
Clay nodded.
“Here's fifty of it,” said Jud—“the Company is in a hurry. We want the survey by this day week. Let me see, this is Sat'dy—I'll come next Sat'dy night.”
Clay's face flushed. Never before had he made a hundred dollars in a week.
“I'll go at once.”
“To-morrow at daylight?” asked Jud, rising.
Clay looked at him curiously. There was something in the tone of the man that struck him as peculiar, but Jud went on in an easy way.
“You see we must have it quick. All our winter wood to run the mill is there an' we can't start into cordin' till it's surveyed an' the deed's passed. Sorry to hurry you”—
Clay promised to start at daylight and Jud left.
He looked at his watch. It was late. He would like to tell Helen about it—he said aloud: “Making a hundred dollars a week. If I could only keep up that—I'd—I'd—”
He blushed. And then he turned quietly and went to bed. And that was why Helen wondered the next day and the next, and all the next week why she did not see Clay, why he did not come, nor write, nor send her a message. And wondering the pang of it went into her hardening heart.
It was the middle of Saturday afternoon, and all the week Edward Conway had fought against the terrible thirst which was in him. Not since Monday morning had he touched whiskey at all, and now he walked the streets of the little town saying over and over to himself: “I am a Conway again.”
He had come to town to see Jud Carpenter about the house which had been promised him—for he could not expect to hold Millwood much longer. With his soberness some of his old dignity and manhood returned, and when Carpenter saw him, the Whipper-in knew instinctively what had happened.
He watched Edward Conway closely—the clear eye, the haughty turn of his head, the quiet, commanding way of the man sober; and the Whipper-in frowned as he said to himself:
“If he keeps this up I'll have it to do all over.”
And yet, as he looked at him, Jud Carpenter took it all in—the weakness that was still there, the terrible, restless thirst which now made him nervous, irritable, and turned his soul into a very tumult of dissatisfaction.
Carpenter, even as he talked to him, could see the fight which was going on; and now and then, in spite of it and his determination, he saw that the reformed drunkard was looking wistfully toward the bar-room of Billy Buch.
And so, as Jud talked to Edward Conway about the house, he led him along toward the bar-room. All the time he was complimenting him on his improved health, and telling how, with help from the mill, he would soon be on his feet again.
At the bar door he halted:
“Let us set down here an' res', Majah, sah, it's a good place on this little porch. Have somethin'? Billy's got a mighty fine bran' of old Tennessee whiskey in there.”
Jud watched him as he spoke and saw the fire of expectancy burn in his despairing eyes.
“No—no—Carpenter—no—I am obliged to you—but I have sworn never to touch another drop of it. I'll just rest here with you.” He threw up his head and Jud Carpenter saw how eagerly he inhaled the odor which came out of the door. He saw the quivering lips, the tense straining of the throat, the wavering eyes which told how sorely he was tempted.
It was cool, but the sweat stood in drops on Edward Conway's temple. He gulped, but swallowed only a dry lump, which immediately sprang back into his throat again and burned as a ball of fire.
“No—no—Carpenter,” he kept saying in a dazed, abstracted way—“no—no—not any more for me. I've promised—I've promised.”
And yet even while saying it his eyes were saying: “For God's sake—bring it to me—quick—quick.”
Jud arose and went into the bar and whispered to Billy Buch. Then he came back and sat down and talked of other things. But all the time he was watching Edward Conway—the yearning look—turned half pleadingly to the bar—the gulpings which swallowed nothing.
Presently Jud looked up. He heard the tinkle of glasses, and Billy Buch stood before them with two long toddies on a silver waiter. The ice tinkled and glittered in the deep glasses—the cherries and pineapple gleamed amid it and the whiskey—the rich red whiskey!
“My treat—an' no charges, gentlemen! Compliments of Billy Buch.”
Conway looked at the tempting glass for a moment in the terrible agony of indecision. Then remorse, fear, shame, frenzy, seized him:
“No—no—I've sworn off, Billy—I'll swear I have. My God, but I'm a Conway again”—and before the words were fairly out of his mouth he had seized the glass and swallowed the contents.
It was nearly dark when Helen, quitting the mill immediately on its closing, slipped out of a side door to escape Richard Travis and almost ran home across the fields. Never had she been so full of her life, her plans for the future, her hopes, her pride to think her father would be himself again.
“For if he will,” she whispered, “all else good will follow.”
Just at the gate she stopped and almost fell in the agony of it all. Her father lay on the dry grass by the roadside, unable to walk.
She knelt by his side and wept. Her heart then and there gave up—her soul quit in the fight she was making.
With bitterness which was desperate she went to the spring and brought water and bathed his face. Then when he was sufficiently himself to walk, she led him, staggering, in, and up the steps.
Jud Carpenter reached the mill an hour after dark: He sought out Richard Travis and chuckled, saying nothing.
Travis was busy with his books, and when he had finished he turned and smiled at the man.
“Tell me what it is?”
“Oh, I fixed him, that's all.”
Then he laughed:
“He was sober this morning an' was in a fair way to knock our plans sky high—as to the gal, you kno'. Reformed this mornin', but you'll find him good and drunk to-night.”
“Oh,” said Travis, knitting his brows thoughtfully.
“Did you notice how much brighter, an' sech, she's been for a day or two?” asked Jud.
“I notice that she has shunned me all day”—said Travis—“as if I were poison.”
“She'll not shun you to-morrow,” laughed Jud. “She is your's—for a woman desperate is a woman lost—” and he chuckled again as he went out.
Never had the two old servants been so happy as they were that night after their rescue. At first they looked on it as a miracle, in which the spirits of their young master and his body-servant, their only son, had come back to earth to rescue them, and for a while their prayers and exhortations took on the uncanny tone of superstition. But after they had heard them talk in the old natural way and seen Captain Tom walking in the living flesh, they became satisfied that it was indeed their young master whom they had supposed to be dead.
Jack Bracken, with all the tenderness of one speaking to little children, explained it all to them—how he had himself carried Captain Tom off the battle-field of Franklin; how he had cared for him since—even to the present time; how Ephraim would not desert his young master, but had stayed with them, as cook and house boy. And how Captain Tom had now become well again.
Jack was careful not to go too much into details—especially Ephraim having lived for two years within a few miles of his parents and not making himself known! The truth was, as Jack knew, Ephraim had become infatuated with the free-booting life of Jack Bracken. He had gone with him on many a raid, and gold came too easy that way to dig it out of the soil, as in a cotton field.
The old people supposed all this happened far away, and in another country, and that they had all come home as soon as they could.
With this they were happy.
“And now,” added Jack, “we are going to hide with you a week or so, until Captain Tom can lay his plans.”
“Thank God—thank God!”—said Uncle Bisco, and he would feel of his young master and say: “Jes' lak he allus wus, only his hair is a leetle gray. An' in the same uniform he rid off in—the same gran' clothes.”
Captain Tom laughed: “No, not the same, but like them. You see, I reported at Washington and explained it to the Secretary of War, Jack. It seems that Mr. Lincoln had been kind enough to write a personal letter about me to my grandfather,—they were old friends. It was a peculiar scene—my interview with the Secretary. My grandfather had filed this letter at the War Department before he died, and my return to life was a matter of interest and wonder to them. And so I am still Captain of Artillery,” he smiled.
In the little cabin the old servants gave him the best room, cleanly and sweet with an old-fashioned feather-bed and counterpane. Jack Bracken had a cot by his bed, and on the wall was a picture of Miss Alice.
Long into the night they talked, the young man asking them many questions and chief of all, of Alice. They could see that he was thinking of her, and often he would stop before the picture and look at it and fall into a reverie.
“It seems to me but yesterday,” he said, “since I left her and went off to the war. She is not to know that I am here—not yet. You must hide me if she runs in,” he smiled. “I must see her first in my own way.”
He noticed Jack Bracken's cot by his bedside and smiled.
“You see, I have been takin' keer of you so long,” said Jack after the old servants had left them to themselves, “that I can't git out of the habit. I thought you wus never comin' home.”
“It's good we came when we did, Jack.”
“You ought to have let me shoot.”
The young Captain shook his head: “O Jack—Jack, I've seen murder enough—it seems but yesterday since I was at Franklin.”
“Do you know who's at the head of all this?” asked Jack. “It's Richard Travis.”
“The Bishop told me all, Jack—and about my grandfather's will. But I shall divide it with him—it is not fair.”
Jack watched the strong, tall man, as he walked to and fro in the room, and a proud smile spread over the outlaw's face.
“What a man you are—what a man you are, Cap'n Tom!”
“It's good to be one's self again, Jack. How can I ever repay you for what you have done for me?”
“You've paid it long ago—long ago. Where would Jack Bracken have been if you hadn't risked yo' life to cut me down, when the rope”—
Captain Tom put his hand on Jack's shoulder affectionately: “We'll forget all those horrible things—and that war, which was hell, indeed. Jack—Jack—there is a new life ahead for us both,” he said, smiling happily.
“For you—yes—but not for me”—and he shook his head.
“Do you remember little Jack, Cap'n Tom—him that died? I seem to think mo' of him now than ever—”
“It is strange, Jack—but I do distinctly; an' our home in the cave, an' the beautiful room we had, an' the rock portico overlaid with wild honeysuckle and Jackson vines overlooking the grand river.”
“Jack, do you know we must go there this week and see it again? I have plans to carry out before making my identity known.”
An hour afterwards the old servants heard Captain Tom step out into the yard. It was then past midnight—the most memorable night of all their lives. Neither of the old servants could sleep, for hearing Ephraim talk, and that lusty darkey had sadly mixed his imagination and his facts.
The old man went out: “Don't be uneasy,” said Captain Tom. “I am going to saddle John Paul Jones and ride over the scenes of my youth. They might see me by daylight, and the moonlight is so beautiful to-night. I long to see The Gaffs, and Westmoreland, my grandfather's grave,” and then in a tenderer tone—“and my father's; he lies buried in the flag I love.”
He smiled sadly and went out.
John Paul Jones had been comfortably housed in the little stable nearby. He nickered affectionately as his master came up and led him out.
The young officer stood a few moments looking at the splendid horse, and with the look came a flood of memories so painful that he bowed his head in the saddle.
When he looked up Jack Bracken stood by his side: “I don't much like this, Cap'n Tom. Not to-night, after all we've done to them. They've got out spies now—I know them; a lot of negroes calling themselves Union League, but secretly waylaying, burning and killing all who differ with them in politics. They've made the Klu-Klux a necessity. Now, I don't want you to turn me into a Klu-Klux to-night.”
“Ah, they would not harm me, Jack, not me, after all I have suffered. It has all been so hazy,” he went on, as if trying to recall it all, “so hazy until now. Now, how clear it all is! Here is the creek, yonder the mountain, and over beyond that the village. And yonder is Westmoreland. I remember it all—so distinctly. And after Franklin, my God, it was so hazy, with something pressing me down as if I were under a house which had fallen on me and pinned me to the ground. But now, O God, I thank Thee that I am a man again!”
Jack went back into the cabin.
Captain Tom stood drinking it all in—the moonlight, on the roof of Westmoreland, shining through the trees. Then he thought of what the old Bishop had told him of Alice, the great pressure brought to bear on her to marry Richard Travis, and of her devotion to the memory of her first love.
“And for her love and her constancy, oh, God, I thank Thee most of all,” he said, looking upward at the stars.
He mounted his horse and rode slowly out into the night, a commanding figure, for the horse and rider were one, and John Paul Jones tossed his head as if to show his joy, tossed his head proudly and was in for a gallop.
Captain Tom's pistols were buckled to his side, for he had had experience enough in the early part of the night to show him the unsettled state of affairs still existing in the country under negro domination.
There were no lights at Westmoreland, but he knew which was Alice's room, and in the shadow of a tree he stopped and looked long at the window. Oh, to tear down the barriers which separated him from her! To see her once more—she the beautiful and true—her hair—her eyes, and to place again the kiss of a new betrothal on her lips, the memory of which, in all his sorrows and afflictions, had never left him. And now they told him she was more beautiful than ever. Twelve years—twelve years out of his life—years of forgetfulness—and yet it seemed but a few months since he had bade Alice good-bye—here—here under the crepe-myrtle tree where he now stood. He knelt and kissed the holy sod. A wave of triumphant happiness came over him. He arose and threw passionate kisses toward her window. Then he mounted and rode off.
At The Gaffs he looked long and earnestly. He imagined he saw the old Colonel, his grandfather, sitting in his accustomed place on the front porch, his feet propped on the balcony, his favorite hound by his side. Long he gazed, looking at every familiar place of his youth. He knew now that every foot of it would be his. He had no bitterness in his heart. Not he, for in the love and constancy of Alice Westmore all such things seemed unspeakable insignificance to the glory of that.
In the old family cemetery, which lay hid among the cedars on the hill, he stood bare-headed before the grave of his grandsire and silently the tears fell:
“My noble old grandsire,” he murmured, “if the spirits of the dead look down on the living, tell me I have not proved unworthy. It was his flag—my father's, and he lies by you wrapped in it. Tell me I have not been unworthy the same, for I have suffered.”
And from the silent stars, as he looked up, there fell on him a benediction of peace.
Then he drew himself up proudly and gave each grave a military salute, mounted and rode away.
All the week, since the scene at Maggie's deathbed, Alice Westmore had remained at home, while strange, bitter feelings, such as she had never felt before, surged in her heart. Her brother was away, and this gave her more freedom to do as she wished—to remain in her room—and her mother's presence now was not altogether the solace her heart craved.
Of the utmost purity of thought herself, Alice Westmore had never even permitted herself to harbor anything reflecting on the character of those she trusted; and in the generosity of her nature, she considered all her friends trustworthy. Thinking no evil, she knew none; nor would she permit any idle gossip to be repeated before her. In her case her unsuspecting nature was strengthened by her environment, living as she was with her mother and brother only.
It is true that she had heard faint rumors of Richard Travis's life; but the full impurity of it had never been realized by her until she saw Maggie die. Then Richard Travis went, not only out of her life, but out of her very thoughts. She remembered him only as she did some evil character read of in fiction or history. Perhaps in this she was more severe than necessary—since the pendulum of anger swings always farthest in the first full stroke of indignation. And then the surprise of it—the shock of it! Never had she gone through a week so full of unhappiness, since it had come to her, years before, that Tom Travis had been killed at Franklin.
Her mother's entreaties—tears, even—affected her now no more than the cries of a spoiled child.
“Oh, Alice,” she said one night when she had been explaining and apologizing for Richard Travis—“you should know now, child, really, you ought to know by now, that all men may not have been created alike, but they are all alike.”
“I do not believe it,” said Alice with feeling—“I never want to believe it—I never shall believe it.”
“My darling,” said the mother, laying her face against Alice's, “I have reared you too far from the world.”
But for once in her life Mrs. Westmore knew that her daughter, who had heretofore been willing to sacrifice everything for her mother's comfort, now halted before such a chasm as this, as stubborn and instinctively as a wild doe in her flight before a precipice.
Twice Alice knew that Richard Travis had called; and she went to her room and locked the door. She did not wish even to think of him; for when she did it was not Richard Travis she saw, but Maggie dying, with the picture of him under her pillow.
She devised many plans for herself, but go away she must, perhaps to teach.
In the midst of her perplexity there came to her Saturday afternoon a curiously worded note, from the old Cottontown preacher, telling her not to forget now that he had returned and that Sunday School lessons at Uncle Bisco's were in order. He closed with a remark which, read between the lines, she saw was intended to warn and prepare her for something unexpected, the greatest good news, as he said, of her life. Then he quoted:
“And Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to his strength when the morning appeared.”
There was but one great good news that Alice Westmore cared for, and, strange to say, all the week she had been thinking of it. It came about involuntarily, as she compared men with one another.
It came as the tide comes back to the ocean, as the stars come with the night. She tried to smother it, but it would not be smothered. At last she resigned herself to the wretchedness of it—as one when, despairing of throwing off a mood, gives way to it and lets it eat its own heart out.
She could scarcely wait until night. Her heart beat at intervals, in agitated fierceness, and flushes of red went through her cheek all the afternoon, at the thought in her heart that at times choked her.
Then came the kindly old man himself, his face radiant with a look she had not seen on a face for many weeks. After the week she had been through, this itself was a comfort. She met him with feigned calmness and a little laugh.
“You promised to tell me where you had been, Bishop, all these weeks. It must have made you very, very happy.”
“I'll tell you down at the cabin, if you'll dress yo' very pretties'. There's friends of yo's down there you ain't seen in a long time—that's mighty anxious to see you.”
“Oh, I do indeed feel ashamed of myself for having neglected the old servants so long; but you cannot know what has been on my mind. Yes, I will go with you directly.”
The old man looked at her admiringly when she was ready to go—at the dainty gown of white, the splendid hair of dark auburn crowning her head, the big wistful eyes, the refined face. Upon him had devolved the duty of preparing Alice Westmore for what she would see in the cabin, and never did he enter more fully into the sacredness of such an occasion.
And now, when she was ready and stood before him in all her superb womanhood, a basket of dainties on her arm for the old servants, he spoke very solemnly as he handed her an ambrotype set in a large gold breast-pin.
“You'll need this to set you off—around yo' neck.”
At sight of it all the color left her cheeks.
“Why, it is mine—I gave it to—to—Tom. He took it to the war with him. Where”—A sob leaped into her throat and stopped her.
“On my journey,” said the old man quickly, “I heard somethin' of Cap'n Tom. You must prepare yo'se'f for good news.”
Her heart jumped and the blood surged back again, and she grew weak, but the old man laughed his cheery laugh, and, pretending to clap her playfully on the shoulder, he held her firmly with his great iron hand, as he saw the blood go out of her cheeks, leaving them as white as white roses:
“Down there,” he added, “I'll tell you all. But God is good—God is good.”
Bewildered, pale, and with throbbing heart, she let him take her basket and lead her down the well-beaten path. She could not speak, for something, somehow, said to her that Captain Tom Travis was alive and that she would see him—next week perhaps—next month or year—it mattered not so that she would see him. And yet—and yet—O all these years—all these years! She kept saying over the words of the old Bishop, as one numbed, and unable to think, keeps repeating the last thing that enters the mind. Trembling, white, her knees weak beneath her, she followed saying:
“God is good—oh, Bishop—tell me—why—why—why—”
“Because Cap'n Tom is not dead, Miss Alice, he is alive and well.”
They had reached the large oak which shadowed the
little cabin. She stopped suddenly in the agony of
happiness, and the strong old man, who had been watching
her, turned and caught her with a firm grasp, while
the stars danced frantically above her. And half-unconscious
she felt another one come to his aid, one who
took her in his arms and kissed her lips and her eyes
... and carried her into the bright fire-lighted
cabin, ... carried her in strength and happiness
that made her lay her cheek against his, ... and
there were tears on it, and somehow she lay as if she
were a child in his arms, ... a child again and
she was happy, ... and there were silence and
sweet dreams and the long-dead smell of the crepe-myrtle....
She did not remember again until she sat
up on the cot in the clean little cabin, and Tom Travis,
tall and in the splendor of manhood, sat holding her
hands and stroking her hair and whispering: “Alice,
my darling—it is all well—and I have come back for
you, at last!”
And the old servants stood around smiling and happy, but so silent and composed that she knew that they had been schooled to it, and a big man, who seemed to watch Captain Tom as a big dog would his master, kept blowing his nose and walking around the room. And by the fire sat the old Cottontown preacher, his back turned to them and saying just loud enough to be heard: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, ... he restoreth my soul— ... my cup runneth over....”
And then sillily, as Alice thought, she threw her arms around the neck of the man she loved and burst into the tears which brought the sweetness of assurance, the calmness of a reality that meant happiness.
And for an hour she sobbed, her arms there, and he holding her tight to his breast and talking in the old way, natural and soothing and reassuring and taking from her heart all fear and the shock of it, until at last it all seemed natural and not a dream, ... and the sweetness of it all was like the light which cometh with the joy of the morning.