Love is love and there is nothing in all the world like it. Its romance comes but once, and it is the perfume that precedes the ripened fruit of all after life. It is not amenable to any of the laws of reason; nor subject to any law of logic; nor can it be explained by the analogy of anything in heaven or earth. Do not, therefore, try to reason about it. Only love once—and in youth—and be forever silent.
One of the mysteries of love to older ones is that two young people may become engaged and never a word be spoken. Put the girl in a convent, even, and let the boy but walk past, and the thing is done. They look and love, and the understanding is complete. They see and sigh, and read each other's secret thoughts, past and present—each other's hopes, fears.
They sigh and are engaged, and there is perfect understanding.
Time and Romance travel not together. Time must hurry on. Romance would loiter by the way. And so Romance, in her completeness, loves to dwell most where Time, traveling over the mile-tracks of the tropics, which belong by heredity to Alabama—stalks slower than on those strenuous half-mile tracks that spin around the earth in latitudes which grow smaller as they approach the frozen pole.
The sun had reached, in his day's journey, the bald knob of Sunset Peak, and there, behind it, seemed to stop. At least to Helen Conway, born and reared under the brow of Sand Mountain, he seemed every afternoon, when he reached the mountain peak, to linger, in a friendly way, behind it.
And a bold warrior-looking crest it was, helmeted with a stratum of sand-stone, jutting out in visor-shaped fullness about his head, and feathery above with scrub-oak and cedar.
Perhaps it had been a fancy which lingered from childhood; but from the time when Mammy Maria had first told her that the sun went to bed in the valley beyond the mountain until now,—her eighteenth year,—Helen still loved to think it was true, and that behind the face of Sunset Rock he still lingered to undress; and, lingering, it made for her the sweetest and most romantic period of the day.
True to her antebellum ideas, Mammy Maria dressed her two girls every afternoon before dinner. It is also true that she cooked the dinner herself and made their dresses with her own fingers, and that of late years, in the poverty of her drunken master, she had little to dress them with and less to cook.
But the resources of the old woman seemed wonderful—to the people round about,—for never were two girls more gorgeously gowned than Helen and Lily. It was humorous, it was pathetic—the way it was done.
From old bureau drawers and cedar chests, stored away in the attic and unused rooms of Millwood, where she herself had carefully put them in days long gone—days of plenty and thrift—she brought forth rich gowns of another age, and made them over for Helen and Lily.
“Now, this gown was Miss Clara's,” she would say as she took out a bundle of satin and old lace. She looked at it fondly—often with tears in her honest black eyes. “Lor', how well I disremember the night she fust wore it—the night of the ball we give to Jineral Jackson when he first come to see old Marster. This flowered silk with pol'naize she wore at the Gov'nor's ball and the black velvet with cut steel I've seed her wearin' at many an' many a dinner here in this very house.”
And so the old woman would go over all her treasures. Then, in a few days the gossipy and astounded neighbors would behold Helen and Lily, dressed, each, in a gown of white brocaded satin, with a dinner gown of black velvet, and for Sunday, old point lace, with petticoats of finest hand-made Irish linen and silk stockings—all modernized with matchless deft and skill.
“I guess my gals will shine as long as the old chist lasts,” she would say, “an' I ain't started on 'em yet. I'm a-savin' some for their weddin', bless Gord, if I ever sees a man fitten for 'em.”
It was an hour yet before dinner, and Aunt Maria had dressed Helen, this Saturday afternoon, with great care—for after a little frost, each day and night in Alabama becomes warmer and warmer until the next frost.
Mammy Maria knew things by intuition, and hence her care to see that Helen looked especially pretty to-day.
There was no sun save where he streamed his ribbon rays from behind Sunset Rock, and threw them in pearl and ivory fan handles—white and gold and emerald, across the mackerel sky beyond.
Helen's silk skirt fitted her well, and one of those beautiful old ribbons, flowered in broad leaf and blossoms, wound twice around her slender waist and fell in broad streamers nearly to the ground. The bodice was cut V-shaped at the throat—the corsage being taken from one of her grandmother's made in 1822, and around her neck was a long chain of pure gold beads.
She was a type of Southern beauty obtained only after years of gentle dames and good breeding.
Her face was pure and fine, rather expressionless at her age, with a straight nose and rich fine lips. Her heavy hair was coiled gracefully about her head and fell in a longer coil, almost to her shoulders. She was tall with a sloping, angular form, the flat outlines of which were not yet filled with that fullness that time would soon add.
Her waist was well turned, her shoulders broad and slightly rounded, with that fullness of chest and breast which Nature, in her hour of generosity, gives only to the queenly woman. The curves of her sloping neck were perfect and carried not a wave-line of grossness. It was as unsensual as a swan's.
Her gown, low cut, showed slight bony shoulders of classic turn and whiteness, waiting only for time to ripen them to perfection; and the long curved lines which ran up to where the deep braid of her rich brown hair fell over them, together with the big joints of her arms and the long, fine profile of her face were forerunners of a beauty that is strong—like that of the thoroughbred brood mare after a year's run on blue-grass.
Her eyes were her only weakness. They were deep and hazel, and given to drooping too readily with that feigned modesty wherein vanity clothes boldness. Down in their depths, also, shone that bright, penetrating spark of a taper by which Folly lights, in woman, the lamp of ambition.
Her forehead was high—her whole bearing the unconscious one of a born lady.
Romance—girlish, idealized romance—was her's to-day. A good intentioned, but thoughtless romance—and therefore a weak one. And worse still, one which, coupled with ambition, might be led to ruin.
Down through the tangled box-planted walks she strolled, swinging her dainty hat of straw and old lace in her hand; on through the small gate that bound the first yard, then through the shaded lawn, unkept now and rank with weeds, but still holding the old trees which, in other days, looked down over the well kept lawn of grass beneath. Now gaunt hogs had rooted it up and the weeds had taken it, and the limbs of the old trees, falling, had been permitted to lie as they fell.
The first fence was down. She walked across the road and took a path leading through a cottonfield, which, protected on all sides by the wood, and being on the elevated plateau on which the residence stood, had escaped the severer frosts.
And so she stopped and stood amid it, waist high.
The very act of her stopping showed the romance of her nature.
She had seen the fields of cotton all her life, but she could never pass through one in bloom and in fruit—the white and purple blossoms, mingled with the green of the leaves and all banked over billows of snowy lint,—that she did not stop, thrilled with the same childhood feeling that came with the first reading of the Arabian Nights.
She had seen the field when it was first plowed, in the spring, and the small furrows were thrown up by the little turning shovels. Then, down the entire length of the ridge the cotton-planter had followed, its two little wheels straddling the row, while the small bull-tongue in front opened the shallow furrow for the linty, furry, white seeds to fall in and be covered immediately by the mold-board behind. She had seen it spring up from one end of the ridge to the other, like peas, then chopped out by the hoe, the plants left standing, each the width of the hoe apart. Then she had watched it all summer, growing under the Southern sun, throwing out limb above limb of beautiful delicate leaves, drawing their life and sustenance more from the air and sunshine above than from the dark soil beneath. Drawing it from the air and sunshine above, and therefore cotton, silken, snowy cotton—with the warmth of the sun in the skein of its sheen and the purity of heaven in the fleece of its fold.
Child of the air and the sky and sun; therefore, cotton—and not corn, which draws its life from the clay and mud and decay which comes from below.
She had seen the first cream-white bloom come.
She had found it one sweet day in July, early in the morning, on the tip end of the eldest branch of the cotton stalk nearest the ground. It hung like the flower of the cream-white, pendulous abutilon, with pollen of yellow stars beaded in dew and throwing off a rich, delicate, aromatic odor, smelt nowhere on earth save in a cottonfield, damp with early dew and warmed by the rays of the rising sun. Cream-white it was in the morning, but when she had visited it again at nightfall, it hung purple in the twilight.
Then had she plucked it.
Through the hot month of July she had watched the boll grow and expand, until in August the lowest and oldest one next to the ground burst, and shone through the pale green leaves like the image of a star reflected in waters of green. And every morning new cream-white blooms formed to the very top, only to turn purple by twilight, while beneath, climbing higher and higher as the days went by and the cool nights came, star above star of cotton arose and stood twinkling in its sky of green and purple, above the dank manger where, in early spring, the little child-seed had lain.
To-day, touched by the great frost, the last purple bloom in the very tip-top seemed to look up yearningly and plead with the sun for one more day of life; that it, too, might add in time its snowy tribute to the bank of white which rolled entirely across the field, one big billow of cotton.
And in the midst of it the girl stood dreaming and wondering.
She plucked a purple blossom and pinned it to her breast. Then, with a deep sigh of saddened longing—that this should be the last—she walked on, daintily lifting her gown to avoid the damp stars of cotton, now fast gathering the night dew.
Across the field, a vine of wild grape ran over the top of two small hackberry trees, forming a natural umbrella-shaped arbor above two big moss-covered boulders which cropped out of the ground beneath, making two natural rustic seats. On one of these she sat down. Above her head glowed the impenetrable leaves of the grape-vine and the hackberry, and through them all hung the small purple bunches of wild grapes, waiting for the frost of affliction to convert into sugar the acid of their souls.
She was in plain view of Millwood, not a quarter of a mile away, and in the glow of the blazing red sunset, shining through its broken shutters and windows, she could see Mammy Maria busy about their dinner.
She looked up the road anxiously—then, with an impatient gesture she took the cotton bloom from her bosom and began to pluck the petals apart, one by one, saying aloud:
She stopped short and sighed—“O, pshaw! that was Harry; why did I name it for him?”
Again she looked impatiently up the road and then went on:
She turned quickly. She heard the gallop of a saddle horse coming. The rider sprang off, tied his horse and sat on the rock by her side.
She appeared not to notice him, and her piqued face was turned away petulantly.
It was a handsome boyish face that looked at her for a moment mischievously. Then he seized and kissed her despite her struggles.
For this she boxed his ears soundly and sat off on another rock.
“Harry Travis, you can't kiss me every time you want to, no matter if we are engaged.”
It was a strong and rather a masculine voice, and it grated on one slightly, being scarcely expected from so beautiful a face. In it was power, self-will, ambition—but no tenderness nor that voice, soft and low, which “is an excellent thing in woman.”
He laughed banteringly.
“Did you ever hear that love is not love if it is a minute late? Just see how long I have waited here for you?”
She sat down by his side and looked fondly up into his face, flushed with exercise and smiling half cynically. It was the same smile seen so often on the face of Richard Travis.
“Oh, say,” he said, dolefully, “but don't start the hubby-come-to-taw-business on me until we are married. I was late because I had to steal the Gov'nor's new mare—isn't she a beauty?”
“Oh, say,” he went on, “but that is a good one—he has bought her for somebody he is stuck on—can't say who—and I heard him tell Jim not to let anybody get on her back.
“Well,”—he laughed—“she certainly has a fine back. I stole her out and galloped right straight here.
“You ought to own her,”—he went on flippantly—pinching playfully at the lobe of her ear—“her name is Coquette.”
Then he tried to kiss her again.
“Harry!” she said, pulling away—“don't now—Mammy Maria said I was never to—let you kiss me.”
“Oh,” he said with some iciness—“Listen to her an' you will die an old maid. Besides, I am not engaged to Mammy Maria.”
“Do you think I am a coquette?” she asked, sitting down by him again.
“Worst I ever saw—I said to Nellie just now—I mean—” he stopped and laughed.
She looked at him, pained.
“Then you've stopped to see Nellie, and that is why you are late? I do not care what she says—I am true to you, Harry—because—because I love you.”
He was feigning anger, and tapping his boot with his riding whip:
“Well—kiss me yourself then—show me that Mammy Maria does not boss my wife.”
She laughed and kissed him. He received it with indifference and some haughtiness.
Then his good nature returned and they sat and talked, watching the sunset.
“Don't you think my dress is pretty?” she asked after a while, with a becoming toss of her head.
“Why, I hadn't noticed it—stunning—stunning. If there is a queen on earth it is you,”—he added.
She flushed under the praise and was silent.
“Harry,”—she said after a while, “I hate to trouble you now, but I am so worried about things at home.”
He looked up half frowning.
“You know I have always told you I could not marry you now. I would not burden you with Papa.”
“Why, yes,” he answered mechanically, “we're both young and can wait. You see, really, Pet—you know I am dependent at present on the Gov'nor an'—”
“I understand all that,” she said quickly—“but”—
“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:
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 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.
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 God 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 classified—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.”
General Travis laughed, and that season one of his horses won the Tennessee Valley Futurity, worth thirty-thousand dollars—and the splendid estate was again free from debt.
There was not a negro on the place who did not love the overseer, not one who did not carry that love to the extent of doing his best to please him. He had never been known to punish one, and yet the work done by the Travis hands was proverbial.
Among his duties as overseer, the entire charge of the Westmore stable of thoroughbreds fell to his care. This was as much from love as choice, for never was a man born with more innate love of all dumb creatures than the preacher-overseer.
“I've allers contended that a man could love God an' raise horses, too,” he would say; and it was ludicrous to see him when he went off to the races, filling the tent trunk with religious tracts, which, after the races, he would distribute to all who would read them. And when night came he would regularly hold prayers in his tent—prayer-meetings in which his auditors were touts, stable-boys and gamblers. And woe to the stable-boy who uttered an oath in his presence or dared to strike or maltreat any of his horses!
He preached constantly against gambling on the races. “That's the Devil's end of it,” he would say—“The Almighty lets us raise good horses as a benefit to mankind, an' the best one wins the purse. It was the Devil's idea that turned 'em into gambling machines.”
No one ever doubted the honesty of his races. When the Travis horses ran, the racing world knew they ran for blood.
Physically, he had been an athlete—a giant, and unconscious of his strength. Incidentally, he had taken to wrestling when a boy, and as a man his fame as a wrestler was coincident with the Tennessee Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian wrestling match.
There was in Hillard Watts a trait which is one of the most pronounced of his type of folks,—a sturdy, honest humor. Humor, but of the Cromwell type—and withal, a kind that went with praying and fighting. Possessed, naturally, of a strong mind of great good sense, he had learned to read and write by studying the Bible—the only book he had ever read through and through and which he seemed to know by heart. He was earnest and honest in all things, but in his earnestness and strong fight for right living there was the twinkle of humor. Life, with him, was a serious fight, but ever through the smoke of its battle there gleamed the bright sun of a kindly humor.
The overseer's home was a double log hut on the side of the mountain. His plantation, he called it,—for having been General Travis's overseer, he could not imagine any farm being less than a plantation.
It consisted of forty acres of flinty land on the mountain side—“too po' to sprout cow-peas,” as his old wife would always add—“but hits pow'ful for blackberries, an' if we can just live till blackberry time comes we can take keer ourselves.”
Mrs. Watts had not a lazy bone in her body. Her religion was work: “Hit's nature's remedy,” she would add—“wuck and five draps o' turpentine if you're feelin' po'ly.”
She despised her husband's ways and thought little of his religion. Her tongue was frightful—her temper worse. Her mission on earth—aside from work—work—work—was to see that too much peace and good will did not abide long in the same place.
Elder Butts, the Hard-Shell preacher, used to say: “She can go to the full of the moon mighty nigh every month 'thout raisin' a row, if hard pressed for time an' she thinks everybody else around her is miser'ble. But if things look too peaceful and happy, she'll raise sand in the last quarter or bust. The Bishop's a good man, but if he ever gits to heaven, the bigges' diamon' in his crown'll be because he's lived with that old 'oman an' ain't committed murder. I don't believe in law suits, but if he ain't got a damage case agin the preacher that married him, then I'm wrong.”
But no one ever heard the old man use harsher language in speaking of her than to remark that she was “a female Jineral—that's what Tabitha is.”
Perhaps she was, and but for her the Bishop and his household had starved long ago.
“Furagin' is her strong point”—he would always add—“she'd made Albert Sydney Johnston a great chief of commissary.”
And there was not an herb of any value that Mrs. Watts did not know all about. Any fair day she might be seen on the mountain side plucking edibles. Ginseng was her money crop, and every spring she would daily go into the mountain forests and come back with enough of its roots to help them out in the winter's pinch.
“Now, if anybody'll study Nature,” she would say, “they'll see she never cal'c'lated to fetch us here 'ithout makin' 'lowance fur to feed us. The fus' thing that comes up is dandelions—an' I don't want to stick my tooth in anything that's better than dandelion greens biled with hog-jowl. I like a biled dinner any way. Sas'fras tea comes mighty handy with dandelions in the spring, an' them two'll carry us through April. Then comes wild lettice an' tansy-tea—that's fur May. Blackberries is good fur June an' the jam'll take us through winter if Bull Run and Appomattox ain' too healthy. In the summer we can live on garden truck, an' in the fall there is wild reddishes an' water-cresses an' spatterdock, an' nuts an' pertatoes come in mighty handy fur winter wuck. Why, I was born wuckin'—when I was a gal I cooked, washed and done house-work for a family of ten, an' then had time to spin ten hanks o' yarn a day.”
“Now there's the old man—he's too lazy to wuck—he's like all parsons, he'd rather preach aroun' all his life on a promise of heaven than to wuck on earth for cash!”
“How did I ever come to marry Hillard Watts? Wal, he wa'n't that triflin' when I married him. He didn't have so much religiun then. But I've allers noticed a man's heredity for no-countness craps out after he's married. Lookin' back now I reckin' I married him jes' to res' myself. When I'm wuckin' an' git tired, I watches Hillard doin' nothin' awhile an' it hopes me pow'ful.”
“He gits so busy at it an' seems so contented an' happy.”
Besides his wife there were five grandchildren in his family—children of the old man's son by his second wife. “Their father tuck after his stepmother,” he would explain regretfully, “an' wucked hisself to death in the cotton factory. The dust an' lint give him consumption. He was the only man I ever seed that tuck after his stepmother”—he added sadly.
An old soldier never gets over the war. It has left a nervous shock in his make-up—a memory in all his after life which takes precedence over all other things. The old man had the naming of the grandchildren, and he named them after the battles of the Civil war. Bull Run and Seven Days were the boys. Atlanta, Appomattox and Shiloh were the girls. His apology for Shiloh was: “You see I thout I'd name the last one Appomattox. Then came a little one befo' her mammy died, so weak an' pitiful I named her Shiloh.”
It was the boast of their grandmother—that these children—even little Shiloh—aged seven—worked from ten to twelve hours every day in the cotton factory, rising before day and working often into the night, with forty minutes at noon for lunch.
They had not had a holiday since Christmas, and on the last anniversary of that day they had worked until ten o'clock, making up for lost time. Their pay was twenty-five cents a day—except Shiloh, who received fifteen.
“But I'll soon be worth mo', pap,” she would say as she crawled up into the old man's lap—her usual place when she had eaten her supper and wanted to rest. “An you know what I'm gwine do with my other nickel every day? I'm gwine give it to the po' people of Indy an' China you preaches about.”
And thus she would prattle—too young to know that, through the cupidity of white men, in this—the land of freedom and progress—she—this blue-eyed, white-skinned child of the Saxon race, was making the same wages as the Indian sepoy and the Chinese coolie.
It was Saturday night and after the old man had put Shiloh to bed, he mounted his horse and rode across the mountain to Westmoreland.
“Oh,” said the old lady—“he's gwine over to Miss Alice's to git his Sunday School less'n. An' I'd like to know what good Sunday school less'ns 'll do any body. If folks'd git in the habit of wuckin' mo' an' prayin' less, the worl'ud be better off, an' they'd really have somethin' to be thankful fur when Sunday comes, 'stid of livin' frum han' to mouth an' trustin' in some unknown God to cram feed in you' crops.”
Hardened by poverty, work, and misfortune, she was the soul of pessimism.
From The Gaffs to Westmoreland, the home of Alice Westmore, was barely two miles up the level white pike.
Jim sat in the buggy at The Gaffs holding the horses while Richard Travis, having eaten his supper, was lighting a cigar and drawing on his overcoat, preparatory to riding over to Westmoreland.
The trotters stood at the door tossing their heads and eager to be off. They were cherry bays and so much alike that even Jim sometimes got them mixed. They were clean-limbed and racy looking, with flanks well drawn up, but with a broad bunch of powerful muscles which rolled from hip to back, making a sturdy back for the splendid full tails which almost touched the ground. In front they stood up straight, deep-chested, with clean bony heads, large luminous eyes and long slender ears, tapering into a point as velvety and soft as the tendril-bud on the tip of a Virginia creeper.
They stood shifting the bits nervously. The night air was cool and they wanted to go.
Travis came out and sprang from the porch to the buggy seat with the quick, sure footing of an athlete. Jim sat on the offside and passed him the lines just as he sang cheerily out:
“Heigh-ho—my honies—go!”
The two mares bounded away so quickly and keenly that the near mare struck her quarters and jumped up into the air, running. Her off mate settled to work, trotting as steadily as a bolting Caribou, but pulling viciously.
Travis twisted the near bit with a deft turn of his left wrist, and as the two mares settled to their strides there was but one stroke from their shoes, so evenly and in unison did they trot. Down the level road they flew, Travis sitting gracefully upright and holding the lines in that sure, yet careless way which comes to the expert driver with power in his arms.
“How many times must I tell you, Jim,” he said at last rather gruffly—“never to bring them out, even for the road, without their boots? Didn't you see Lizette grab her quarters and fly up just now?”
Jim was duly penitent.
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 glass 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 reassuring, 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 God, 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 shining 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.
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 passions 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 pronounce the word and hunting around in the scanty lexicon of his mind for some phase of speech, some word even that might not awaken in Alice Westmore memories of the past.
Richard Travis had an intuition of things as naturally as an eagle has the homing instinct, however high in air and beyond all earth's boundaries he flies. In this instance Mrs. Westmore also had it, for she looked up quickly at the man beside her. All the other emotions had vanished from his face save the one appealing look which said: “Come, let us go—we have heard enough.”
Then they slipped back into the house.
Alice Westmore had stopped, smiling back from the doorway.
“On what, Bishop?” she finally asked.
He shook his head. “Jus' the dream of an ole man,” he said. “Don't bother about us two ole men. I'll be 'long presently.”
“Bisco,” said the old preacher after a while, “come mighty nigh makin' a break then—but I've been thinkin' of Cap'n Tom all day. I can't throw it off.”
Bisco shook his head solemnly. “So have I—so have I. The older I gits, the mo' I miss Marse Tom.”
“I don't like the way things are goin'—in yonder”—and the preacher nodded his head toward the house.
Uncle Bisco looked cautiously around to see that no one was near: “He's doin' his bes'—the only thing is whether she can forgit Marse Tom.”
“Bisco, it ain't human nature for her to stan' up agin all that's brought to bear on her. Cap'n Tom is dead. Love is only human at las', an' like all else that's human it mus' fade away if it ain't fed. It's been ten years an' mo'—sence—Cap'n Tom's light went out.”
“The last day of November—'64—” said Uncle Bisco, “I was thar an' seed it. It was at the Franklin fight.”
“An' Dick Travis has loved her from his youth,” went on the overseer, “an' he loves her now, an' he's a masterful man.”
“So is the Devil,” whispered Uncle Bisco, “an' didn't he battle with the angels of the Lord an' mighty nigh hurled 'em from the crystal battlements.”
“Bisco, I know him—I've knowed him from youth. He's a conjurin' man—a man who does things—he'll win her—he'll marry her yet. She'll not love him as she did Cap'n Tom. No—she'll never love again. But life is one thing an' love is another, an' it ain't often they meet in the same person. Youth mus' live even if it don't love, an' the law of nature is the law of life.”
“I'm afeered so,” said the old negro, shaking his head, “I'm afeered it'll be that way—but—I'd ruther see her die to-night.”
“If God lets it be,” said the preacher, “Bisco, if God lets it be—” he said excitedly, “if he'll let Cap'n Tom die an' suffer the martyrdom he suffered for conscience sake an' be robbed, as he was robbed, of his home, an' of his love—if God'll do that, then all I can say is, that after a long life walkin' with God, it'll be the fus' time I've ever knowed Him to let the wrong win out in the end. An' that ain't the kind of God I'm lookin' fur.”
“Do you say that, Marse Hillyard?” asked the old negro quickly—his eyes taking on the light of hope as one who, weak, comes under the influence of a stronger mind. “Marse Hillyard, do you believe it? Praise God.”
“Bisco—I'm—I'm ashamed—why should I doubt Him—He's told me a thousand truths an' never a lie.”
“Praise God,” replied the old man softly.
And so the two old men talked on, and their talk was of Captain Tom. No wonder when the old preacher mounted his horse to go back to his little cabin, all of his thoughts were of Captain Tom. No wonder Uncle Bisco, who had raised him, went to bed and dreamed of Captain Tom—dreamed and saw again the bloody Franklin fight.