It was twilight when Mrs. Westmore heard the clatter of horses' hoofs up the gravelled roadway, and two riders cantered up.
Richard Travis sat his saddle horse in the slightly stooping way of the old fox-hunter—not the most graceful seat, but the most natural and comfortable for hard riding. Alice galloped ahead—her fine square shoulders and delicate but graceful bust silhouetted against the western sky in the fading light.
Mrs. Westmore sat on the veranda and watched them canter up. She thought how handsome they were, and how well they would look always together.
Alice sprang lightly from her mare at the front steps.
“Did you think we were never coming back? Richard's new mare rides so delightfully that we rode farther than we intended. Oh, but she canters beautifully!”
She sat on the arm of her mother's chair, and bent over and kissed her cheek. The mother looked up to see her finely turned profile outlined in a pale pink flush of western sky which glowed behind her. Her cheeks were of the same tinge as the sky. They glowed with the flush of the gallop, and her eyes were bright with the happiness of it. She sat telling of the new mare's wonderfully correct saddle gaits, flipping her ungloved hand with the gauntlet she had just pulled off.
Travis turned the horses over to Jim and came up.
“Glad to see you, Cousin Alethea,” he said, as she arose and advanced gracefully to meet him—“no, no—don't rise,” he added in his half jolly, half commanding way. “You've met me before and I'm not such a big man as I seem.” He laughed: “Do you remember Giant Jim, the big negro Grandfather used to have to oversee his hands on the lower place? Jim, you know, in consideration of his elevation, was granted several privileges not allowed the others. Among them was the privilege of getting drunk every Saturday night. Then it was he would stalk and brag among those he ruled while they looked at him in awe and reverence. But he had the touch of the philosopher in him and would finally say: 'Come, touch me, boys; come, look at me; come, feel me—I'm nothin' but a common man, although I appear so big.'”
Mrs. Westmore laughed in her mechanical way, but all the while she was looking at Alice, who was watching the mare as she was led off.
Travis caught her eye and winked mischievously as he added: “Now, Cousin Alethea, you must promise me to make Alice ride her whenever she needs a tonic—every day, if necessary. I have bought her for Alice, and she must get the benefit of her before it grows too cold.”
He turned to Alice Westmore: “You have only to tell me which days—if I am too busy to go with you—Jim will bring her over.”
She smiled: “You are too kind, Richard, always thinking of my pleasure. A ride like this once a week is tonic enough.”
She went into the house to change her habit. Her brother Clay, who had been sitting on the far end of the porch unobserved, arose and, without noticing Travis as he passed, walked into the house.
“I cannot imagine,” said Mrs. Westmore apologetically, “what is the matter with Clay to-day.”
“Why?” asked Travis indifferently enough.
“He has neglected his geological specimens all day, nor has he ever been near his laboratory—he has one room he calls his laboratory, you know. To-night he is moody and troubled.”
Travis said nothing. At tea Clay was not there.
When Travis left it was still early and Alice walked with him to the big gate. The moon shone dimly and the cool, pure light lay over everything like the first mist of frost in November. Beyond, in the field, where it struck into the open cotton bolls, it turned them into December snow-banks.
Travis led his saddle horse, and as they walked to the gate, the sweet and scarcely perceptible odor of the crepe-myrtle floated out on the open air.
The crepe-myrtle has a way of surprising us now and then, and often after a wet fall, it gives us the swan-song of a bloom, ere its delicate blossoms, touched to death by frost, close forever their scalloped pink eyes, on the rare summer of a life as spiritual as the sweet soft gulf winds which brought it to life.
Was it symbolic to-night,—the swan-song of the romance of Alice Westmore's life, begun under those very trees so many summers ago?
They stopped at the gate. Richard Travis lit a cigar before mounting his horse. He seemed at times to-night restless, yet always determined.
She had never seen him so nearly preoccupied as he had been once or twice to-night.
“Do you not think?” he asked, after a while as they stood by the gate, “that I should have a sweet answer soon?”
Her eyes fell. The death song of the crepe-myrtle, aroused by a south wind suddenly awakened, smote her painfully.
“You know—you know how it is, Richard”—
“How it was—Alice. But think—life is a practical—a serious thing. We all have had our romances. They are the heritage of dreaming youth. We outlive them—it is best that we should. Our spiritual life follows the law of all other life, and spiritually we are not the same this year that we were last. Nor will we be the next. It is always change—change—even as the body changes. Environment has more to do with what we are, what we think and feel—than anything else. If you will marry me you will soon love me—it is the law of love to beget love. You will forget all the lesser loves in the great love of your life. Do you not know it, feel it, Sweet?”
She looked at him surprised. Never before had he used any term of endearment to her. There was a hard, still and subtle yet determined light in his eyes.
“See,” he said, taking from his vest pocket a magnificent ring set in an exquisite old setting—inherited from his grandmother, and it had been her engagement ring. “See, Alice, let me put this on to-night.”
He took her hand—it thrilled him as he had never been thrilled before. This impure man, who had made the winning of women a plaything, trembled with the fear of it as he took in his own the hand so pure that not even his touch could awaken sensuality in it. The odor of her beautiful hair floated up to him as he bent over. A wave of hot passion swept over him—for with him love was passion—and his reason, for a moment, was swept from its seat. Then almost beside himself for love of this woman, so different from any he had ever known, he opened his arms to fold her in one overpowering, conquering embrace.
It was but a second and more a habit than thought—he who had never before hesitated to do it.
She stepped back and the hot blood mounted to her cheek. Her eyes shone like outraged stars, dreaming earthward on a sleeping past, unwarningly obscured by a passing cloud, and then flashing out into the night, more brightly from the contrast.
She did not speak and he crunched under his feet, purposely, the turf he was standing on, and so carrying out, naturally, the gesture of clasping the air, in establishing his balance—as if it was an accident.
She let him believe she thought it was, and secured relief from the incident.
“Alice—Alice!” he exclaimed. “I love you—love you—I must have you in my life! Can you not wear this now? See!”
He tried to place it on her finger. He held the small beautiful hand in his own. Then it suddenly withdrew itself and left him holding his ring and looking wonderingly at her.
She had thrown back her head, and, half turned, was looking toward the crepe-myrtle tree from which the faint odor came.
“You had better go, Richard,” was all she said.
“I'll come for my answer—soon?” he asked.
She was silent.
“Soon?” he repeated as he rose in the stirrup—“soon—and to claim you always, Alice.”
He rode off and left her standing with her head still thrown back, her thoughtful face drinking in the odor of the crepe-myrtle.
Travis did not understand, for no crepe-myrtle had ever come into his life. It could not come. With him all life had been a passion flower, with the rank, strong odor of the sensuous, wild honeysuckle, which must climb ever upon something else, in order to open and throw off the rank, brazen perfume from its yellow and streaked and variegated blossoms.
And how common and vulgar and all-surfeiting it is, loading the air around it with its sickening imitation of sweetness, so that even the bees stagger as they pass through it and disdain to stop and shovel, for the mere asking, its musky and illicit honey.
But, O mystic odor of the crepe-myrtle—O love which never dies—how differently it grows and lives and blooms!
In color, constant—a deep pink. Not enough of red to suggest the sensual, nor yet lacking in it when the full moment of ripeness comes. How delicately pink it is, and yet how unfadingly it stands the summer's sun, the hot air, the drought! How quickly it responds to the Autumn showers, and long after the honeysuckle has died, and the bees have forgotten its rank memory, this beautiful creature of love blooms in the very lap of Winter.
O love that defies even the breath of death!
The yellow lips of the honeysuckle are thick and sensual; but the beautiful petals of this cluster of love-cells, all so daintily transparent, hanging in pink clusters of loveliness with scalloped lips of purity, that even the sunbeam sends a photograph of his heart through them and every moonbeam writes in it the romance of its life. And the skies all day long, reflecting in its heart, tells to the cool green leaves that shadow it the story of its life, and it catches and holds the sympathy of the tiniest zephyr, from the way it flutters to the patter of their little feet.
All things of Nature love it—the clouds, the winds, the very stars, and sun, because love—undying love—is the soul of God, its Maker.
The rose is red in the rich passion of love, the lily is pale in the poverty of it; but the crepe-myrtle is pink in the constancy of it.
O bloom of the crepe-myrtle! And none but a lover ever smelled it—none but a lover ever knew!
She ran up the gentle slope to the old-fashioned garden and threw herself under the tree from whence the dying odor came. She fell on her knees—the moonlight over her in fleckings of purification. She clung to the scaly weather-beaten stem of the tree as she would have pressed a sister to her breast. Her arms were around it—she knew it—it's very bark.
She seized a bloom that had fallen and crushed it to her bosom and her cheek.
“O Tom—Tom—why—why did you make me love you here and then leave me forever with only the memory of it?”
“Twice does it bloom, dear Heart,—can not my love bloom like it—twice?”
“A-l-i-c-e!”
The voice came from out the distant woods nearby.
The blood leaped and then pricked her like sharp-pointed icicles, and they all seemed to freeze around and prick around her heart. She could not breathe.... Her head reeled.... The crepe-myrtle fell on her and smothered her....
When she awoke Mrs. Westmore sat by her side and was holding her head while her brother was rubbing her arms.
“You must be ill, darling,” said her mother gently. “I heard you scream. What—”
They helped her to rise. Her heart still fluttered violently—her head swam.
“Did you call me before—before”—she was excited and eager.
“Why, yes”—smiled her mother. “I said, 'Alice—Alice!'”
“It was not that—no, that was not the way it sounded,” she said as they led her into the house.
Richard Travis could not sleep that night—why, he could not tell.
After he returned from Westmoreland, Mammy Charity brought him his cocktail, and tidied up his room, and beat up the feathers in his pillows and bed—for she believed in the old-fashioned feather-bed and would have no other kind in the house.
The old clock in the hall—that had sat there since long before he, himself, could remember—struck ten, and then eleven, and then, to his disgust, even twelve.
At ten he had taken another toddy to put himself to sleep.
There is only one excuse for drunkenness, and that is sleeplessness. If there is a hell for the intellectual it is not of fire, as for commoner mortals, but of sleeplessness—the wild staring eyes of an eternity of sleeplessness following an eon of that midnight mental anguish which comes with the birth of thoughts.
But still he slept not, and so at ten he had taken another toddy—and still another, and as he felt its life and vigor to the ends of his fingers, he quaffed his fourth one; then he smiled and said: “And now I don't care if I never go to sleep!”
He arose and dressed. He tried to recite one of his favorite poems, and it angered him that his tongue seemed thick.
His head slightly reeled, but in it there galloped a thousand beautiful dreams and there were visions of Alice, and love, and the satisfaction of conquering and the glory of winning.
He could feel his heart-throbs at the ends of his fingers. He could see thoughts—beautiful, grand thoughts—long before they reached him,—stalking like armed men, helmeted and vizored, stalking forward into his mind.
He walked out and down the long hall.
The ticking of the clock sounded to him so loud that he stopped and cursed it.
Because, somehow, it ticked every time his heart beat; and he could count his heart-beats in his fingers' ends, and he didn't want to know every time his heart beat. It made him nervous.
It might stop; but it would not stop. And then, somehow, he imagined that his heart was really out in the yard, down under the hill, and was pumping the water—as the ram had done for years—through the house. It was a queer fancy, and it made him angry because he could not throw it off.
He walked down the hall, rudely snatched the clock door open, and stopped the big pendulum. Then he laughed sillily.
The moonbeams came in at the stained glass windows, and cast red and yellow and pale green fleckings of light on the smooth polished floor.
He began to feel uncanny. He was no coward and he cursed himself for it.
Things began to come to him in a moral way and mixed in with the uncanniness of it all. He imagined he saw, off in the big square library across the way, in the very spot he had seen them lay out his grandfather—Maggie, and she arose suddenly from out of his grandfather's casket and beckoned to him with—
“I love you so—I love you so!”
It was so real, he walked to the spot and put his hands on the black mohair Davenport. And the form on it, sitting bolt upright, was but the pillow he had napped on that afternoon.
He laughed and it sounded hollow to him and echoed down the hall:
“How like her it looked!”
He walked into Harry's room and lit the lamp there. He smiled when he glanced around the walls. There were hunting scenes and actresses in scant clothing. Tobacco pipes of all kinds on the tables, and stumps of ill-smelling cigarettes, and over the mantel was a crayon picture of Death shaking the dice of life. Two old cutlasses crossed underneath it.
On his writing desk Travis picked up and read the copy of the note written to Helen the day before.
He smiled with elevated eyebrows. Then he laughed ironically:
“The little yellow cur—to lie down and quit—to throw her over like that! Damn him—he has a yellow streak in him and I'll take pleasure in pulling down the purse for him. Why, she was born for me anyway! That kid, and in love with Helen! Not for The Gaffs would I have him mix up with that drunken set—nor—nor, well, not for The Gaffs to have him quit like that.”
And yet it was news to him. Wrapped in his own selfish plans, he had never bothered himself about Harry's affairs.
But he kept on saying, as if it hurt him: “The little yellow cur—and he a Travis!” He laughed: “He's got another one, I'll bet—got her to-night and by now is securely engaged. So much the better—for my plans.”
Again he went into the hall and walked to and fro in the dim light. But the Davenport and the pillow instantly formed themselves again into Maggie and the casket, and he turned in disgust to walk into his own room.
Above his head over the doorway in the hall, on a pair of splendid antlers—his first trophy of the chase,—rested his deer gun, a clean piece of Damascus steel and old English walnut, imported years before. The barrels were forty inches and choked. The small bright hammers rested on the yellow brass caps deep sunk on steel nippers. They shone through the hammer slit fresh and ready for use.
He felt a cold draught of air blow on him and turned in surprise to find the hall window, which reached to the veranda floor, open; and he could see the stars shining above the dark green foliage of the trees on the lawn without.
At the same instant there swept over him a nervous fear, and he reached for his deer gun instinctively. Then there arose from the Davenport coffin a slouching unkempt form, the fine bright eyes of which, as the last rays of the moonlight fell on them, were the eyes of his dead cousin, Captain Tom, and it held out its hands pleadingly to him and tenderly and with much effort said:
“Grandfather, forgive. I've come back again.”
Travis's heart seemed to freeze tightly. He tried to breathe—he only gasped—and the corners of his mouth tightened and refused to open. He felt the blood rush up from around his loins, and leave him paralyzed and weak. In sheer desperation he threw the gun to his shoulder, and the next instant he would have fired the load into the face of the thing with its voice of the dead, had not something burst on his head with a staggering, overpowering blow, and despite his efforts to stand, his knees gave way beneath him and it seemed pleasant for him to lie prone upon the floor....
When he awakened an hour afterwards, he sat up, bewildered. His gun lay beside him, but the window was closed securely and bolted. No night air came in. The Davenport and pillow were there as before. His head ached and there was a bruised place over his ear. He walked into his own room and lit the lamp.
“I may have fallen and struck my head,” he said, bewildered with the strangeness of it all. “I may have,” he repeated—“but if I didn't see Tom Travis's ghost to-night there is no need to believe one's senses.”
He opened the door and let in two setters which fawned upon him and licked his hand. All his nervousness vanished.
“No one knows the comfort of a dog's company,” he said, “who does not love a dog?”
Then he bathed his face and head and went to sleep.
It was after midnight when Jack Bracken led Captain Tom in and put him to bed.
“A close shave for you, Cap'n Tom,” he said—“I struck just in time. I'll not leave you another night with the door unlocked.” Then: “But poor fellow—how can we blame him for wandering off, after all those years, and trying to get back again to his boyhood home.”
Jack Bracken rolled himself in his blanket on the cot, placed in the room next to Captain Tom, and prepared to sleep again.
But the excitement of the night had been great; his sudden awakening from sleep, his missing Captain Tom, and finding him in time to prevent a tragedy, had aroused him thoroughly, and now sleep was far from his eyes.
And so he lay and thought of his past life, and as it passed before him it shook him with nervous sleeplessness.
It hurt him. He lay and panted with the strong sorrow of it.
Perhaps it was that, but with it were thoughts also of little Jack, and the tears came into the eyes of the big-hearted outlaw.
He had his plans all arranged—he and the Bishop—and now as the village blacksmith he would begin the life of an honest man.
Respected—his heart beat proudly to think of it.
Respected—how little it means to the man who is, how much to the man who is not.
“Why,” he said to himself—“perhaps after a while people will stop and talk to me an' say as they pass my shop: 'Good mornin', neighbor, how are you to-day?' Little children—sweet an' innocent little children—comin' from school may stop an' watch the sparks fly from my anvil, like they did in the poem I onct read, an' linger aroun' an' talk to me, shy like; maybe, after awhile I'll get their confidence, so they will learn to love me, an' call me Uncle Jack—Uncle Jack,” he repeated softly.
“An' I won't be suspectin' people any mo' an' none of 'em will be my enemy. I'll not be carryin' pistols an' havin' buckets of gold an' not a friend in the worl'.”
His heart beat fast—he could scarcely wait for the morning to come, so anxious was he to begin the life of an honest man again. He who had been an outlaw so long, who had not known what it was to know human sympathy and human friendship—it thrilled him with a rich, sweet flood of joy.
Then suddenly a great wave swept over him—a wave of such exquisite joy that he fell on his knees and cried out: “O God, I am a changed man—how happy I am! jus' to be human agin an' not hounded! How can I thank You—You who have given me this blessed Man the Bishop tells us about—this Christ who reaches out an' takes us by the han' an' lifts us up. O God, if there is divinity given to man, it is given to that man who can lift up another, as the po' outlaw knows.”
He lay silent and thoughtful. All day and night—since he had first seen Margaret, her eyes had haunted him. He had not seen her before for many years; but in all that time there had not been a day when he had not thought of—loved—her.
Margaret—her loneliness—the sadness of her life, all haunted him. She lived, he knew, alone, in her cottage—an outcast from society. He had looked but once in her eyes and caught the lingering look of appeal which unconsciously lay there. He knew she loved him yet—it was there as plain as in his own face was written the fact that he loved her. He thought of himself—of her. Then he said:
“For fifteen years I have robbed—killed—oh, God—killed—how it hurts me now! All the category of crime in bitter wickedness I have run. And she—once—and now an angel—Bishop himself says so.”
“I am a new man—I am a respectable and honest man,”—here he arose on his cot and drew himself up—“I am Jack Smith—Mr. Jack Smith, the blacksmith, and my word is my bond.”
He slipped out quietly. Once again in the cool night, under the stars which he had learned to love as brothers and whose silent paths across the heavens were to him old familiar footpaths, he felt at ease, and his nervousness left him.
He had not intended to speak to Margaret then—for he thought she was asleep. He wished only to guard her cabin, up among the stunted old field pines—while she slept—to see the room he knew she slept in—the little window she looked out of every day.
The little cabin was a hallowed spot to him. Somehow he knew—he felt that whatever might be said—in it he knew an angel dwelt. He could not understand—he only knew.
There is a moral sense within us that is a greater teacher than either knowledge or wisdom.
For an hour he stood with his head uncovered watching the little cabin where she lived. Everything about it was sacred, because Margaret lived there. It was pretty, too, in its neatness and cleanliness, and there were old-fashioned flowers in the yard and old-fashioned roses clambered on the rock wall.
He sat down in the path—the little white sanded path down which he knew she went every day, and so made sacred by her footsteps.
“Perhaps, I am near one of them now,” he said—and he kissed the spot.
And that night and many others did the outlaw watch over the lonely cabin on the mountain side. And she, the outcast woman, slept within, unconscious that she was being protected by the man who had loved her all his life.
The Watts children were up the next morning by four o'clock.
Mrs. Watts ate, always, by candle-light. The sun, she thought, would be dishonored, were he to find her home in disorder, her breakfast uncooked, her day's work not ready for her, with his first beams.
For Mrs. Watts did not consider that arising at four, and cooking and sweeping and tidying up the cabin, and quarreling with the Bishop as “a petty old bundle of botheration”—and storming around at the children—all by sun-up—this was not work at all.
It was merely an appetizer.
The children were aroused by her this morning with more severity than usual. Half frightened they rolled stupidly out of their beds—Appomattox, Atlanta, and Shiloh from one, and the boys from another. Then they began to put on their clothes in the same listless, dogged, mechanical way they had learned to do everything—learned it while working all day between the whirl of the spindle and the buzz of the bobbin.
The sun had not yet risen, and a cold gray mist crept up from the valley, closing high up and around the wood-girdled brow of the mountain as billows around a rock in the sea. The faint, far-off crowing of cocks added to the weirdness; for their shrill voices alone broke through the silence which came down with the mist. Around the brow of Sand Mountain the vapor made a faint halo—touched as it was by the splendid flush of the East.
It was all grand and beautiful enough without, but within was the poverty of work, and the two—poverty and work—had already had their effect on the children, except, perhaps, Shiloh. She had not yet been in the mill long enough to be automatonized.
Looking out of the window she saw the star setting behind the mountain, and she thought it slept, by day, in a cavern she knew of there.
“Wouldn't it be fine, Mattox,” she cried, “if we didn't have to work at the mill to-day an' cu'd run up on the mountain an' pick up that star? I seed one fall onct an' I picked it up.”
For a moment the little face was thoughtful—wistful—then she added:
“I wonder how it would feel to spen' the day in the woods onct. Archie B. says it's just fine and flowers grow everywhere. Oh, jes' to be 'quainted with one Jeree—like Archie B. is—an' have him come to yo' winder every mornin' an' say, 'Wake up, Pet! Wake up, Pet! Wake up, Pet!' An' then hear a little 'un over in another tree say, 'So-s-l-ee-py—So-s-l-ee-py!'”
Her chatter ceased again. Then: “Mattox, did you ever see a rabbit? I seen one onct, a settin' up in a fence corner an' a spittin' on his han's to wash his face.”
She laughed at the thought of it. But the other children, who had dressed, sat listlessly in their seats, looking at her with irresponsive eyes, set deep back into tired, lifeless, weazened faces.
“I'd ruther a rabbit 'ud wash his face than mine,” drawled Bull Run.
Mrs. Watts came in and jerked the chair from under him and he sat down sprawling. Then he lazily arose and deliberately spat, between his teeth, into the fireplace.
There was not enough of him alive to feel that he had been imposed upon.
For breakfast they had big soda biscuits and fried bacon floating in its own grease. There was enough of it left for the midday lunch. This was put into a tin pail with a tight fitting top. The pail, when opened, smelt of the death and remains of every other soda biscuit that had ever been laid away within this tightly closed mausoleum of tin.
They had scarcely eaten before the shrill scream of the mill-whistle called them to their work.
Shiloh, at the sound, stuck her small fingers into her ears and shuddered.
Then the others struck out across the yard, and Shiloh followed.
To this child of seven, who had already worked six months in the factory, the scream of the whistle was the call of a frightful monster, whose black smoke-stack of a snout, with its blacker breath coming out, and the flaming eyes of the engine glaring through the smoke, completed the picture of a wild beast watching her. Within, the whirr and tremble of shuttle and machinery were the purr and pulsation of its heart.
She was a nervous, sensitive child, who imagined far more than she saw; and the very uncanniness of the dark misty morning, the silence, broken only by the tremble and roar of the mill, the gaunt shadows of the overtopping mountain, filled her with childish fears.
Nature can do no more than she is permitted; and the terrible strain of twelve hours' work, every day except Sunday, for the past six months, where every faculty, from hand and foot to body, eye and brain, must be alert and alive to watch and piece the never-ceasing breaking of the threads, had already begun to undermine the half-formed framework of that little life.
As she approached the mill she clung to the hand of Appomattox, and shrinking, kept her sister between herself and the Big Thing which put the sweet morning air a-flutter around its lair. As she drew near the door she almost cried out in affright—her little heart grew tight, her lips were drawn.
“Oh, it can't hurt you, Shiloh,” said her sister pulling her along. “You'll be all right when you get inside.”
There was a snarling clatter and crescendo tremble, ending in an all-drowning roar, as the big door was pushed open for a moment, and Shiloh, quaking, but brave, was pulled in, giving the tiny spark of her little life to add to the Big Thing's fire.
Within, she was reassured; for there was her familiar spinning frame, with its bobbins ready to be set to spinning and whirling; and the room was full of people, many as small as she.
The companionship, even of fear, is helpful.
Besides, the roar and clatter drowned everything else.
Shiloh was too small to see, to know; but had she looked to the right as she entered, she had seen a sight which would have caused a stone man to flush with pity. It was Byrd Boyle, one of the mill hands who ran a slubbing machine, and he held in his arms (because they were too young to walk so far) twins, a boy and a girl. And they looked like half made up dolls left out on the grass, weather-beaten by summer rains. They were too small to know where their places were in the room, and as their father sat them down, in their proper places, it took the two together to run one side of a spinner, and the tiny little workers could scarcely reach to their whirling bobbins.
To the credit of Richard Travis, this working of children under twelve years of age in the mills was done over his protest. Not so with Kingsley and his wife, who were experienced mill people from New England and knew the harm of it—morally, physically. Travis had even made strict regulations on the subject, only to be overruled by the combined disapproval of Kingsley and the directors and, strange to say, of the parents of the children themselves. His determination that only children of twelve years and over should work in the mill came to naught, more from the opposition of the parents themselves than that of Kingsley. These, to earn a little more for the family, did not hesitate to bring a child of eight to the mill and swear it was twelve. This and the ruling of the directors,—and worse than all, the lack of any state law on the subject,—had brought about the pitiful condition which prevailed then as now in Southern cotton mills.
There was no talking inside the mill. Only the Big Thing was permitted to talk. No singing—for songs come from the happy heart of labor, unshackled. No noise of childhood, though the children were there. They were flung into an arena for a long day's fight against a thing of steel and steam, and there was no time for anything save work, work, work—walk, walk, walk—watch, forever watch,—the interminable flying whirl of spindle and spool.
Early as it was, the children were late, and were soundly rebuffed by the foreman.
The scolding hurt only Shiloh—it made her tremble and cry. The others were hardened—insensible—and took it with about the same degree of indifference with which caged and starved mice look at the man who pours over their wire traps the hot water which scalds them to death.
The fight between steel, steam and child-flesh was on.
Shiloh, Appomattox and Atlanta were spinners.
Spinners are small girls who walk up and down an aisle before a spinning-frame and piece up the threads which are forever breaking. There were over a hundred spindles on each side of the frame, each revolving with the rapidity of an incipient cyclone and snapping every now and then the delicate white thread that was spun out like spiders' web from the rollers and the cylinders, making a balloon-like gown of cotton thread, which settled continuously around the bobbin.
All day long and into the night, they must walk up and down, between these two rows of spinning-frames, amid the whirling spindles, piecing the broken threads which were forever breaking.
It did not require strength, but a certain skill, which, unfortunately, childhood possessed more than the adult. Not power, but dexterity, watchfulness, quickness and the ability to walk—as children walk—and watch—as age should watch.
No wonder that in a few months the child becomes, not the flesh and blood of its heredity, but the steel and wood of its environment.
Bull Run and Seven Days were doffers, and confined to the same set of frames. They followed their sisters, taking off the full bobbins and throwing them into a cart and thrusting an empty bobbin into its place. This requires an eye of lightning and a hand with the quickness of its stroke.
For it must be done between the pulsings of the Big Thing's heart—a flash, a snap, a snarl of broken thread—up in the left hand flies the bobbin from its disentanglement of thread and skein, and down over the buzzing point of steel spindles settles the empty bobbin, thrust over the spindle by the right.
It is all done with two quick movements—a flash and a jerk of one hand up, and the other down, the eye riveted to the nicety of a hair's breadth, the stroke downward gauged to the cup of a thimble, to settle over the point of the spindle's end; for the missing of a thread's breadth would send a spindle blade through the hand, or tangle and snap a thread which was turning with a thousand revolutions in a minute.
Snap—bang! Snap—bang! One hundred and twenty times—Snap—bang! and back again, went the deft little workers pushing their cart before them.
Full at last, their cart is whirled away with flying heels to another machine.
It was a steady, lightning, endless track. Their little trained fingers betook of their surroundings and worked like fingers of steel. Their legs seemed made of India rubber. Their eyes shot out right and left, left and right, looking for the broken threads on the whirling bobbins as hawks sweep over the marsh grass looking for mice, and the steel claws, which swooped down on the bobbins when they found it, made the simile not unsuitable.
Young as she was, Shiloh managed one of these harnessed, fiery lines of dancing witches, pirouetting on boards of hardened oak or hickory. Up and down she walked—up and down, watching these endless whirling figures, her bare fingers pitted against theirs of brass, her bare feet against theirs shod with iron, her little head against theirs insensate and unpitying, her little heart against theirs of flame which throbbed in the boiler's bosom and drove its thousand steeds with a whip of fire.
In the bloodiest and cruelest days of the Roman Empire, man was matched against wild beasts. But in the man's hand was the blade of his ancestors and over his breast the steel ribs which had helped his people to conquer the world.
And in the Beast's body was a heart!
Ay, and the man was a man—a trained gladiator—and he was nerved by the cheers of thousands of sympathizing spectators.
And now, centuries after, and in the age of so-called kindness, comes this battle to be fought over. And the fight, now as then, is for bread and life.
But how cruelly unfair is the fight of to-day, when the weak and helpless child is made the gladiator, and the fight is for bread, and the Beast is of steel and steam, and is soulless and heartless. Steel—that by which the old gladiator conquered—that is the heart of the Thing the little one must fight. And the cheers—the glamour of it is lacking, for the little one cannot hear even the sound of its own voice—in the roar of the thousand-throated Thing which drives the Steel Beast on.
Seven o'clock—eight o'clock—Shiloh's head swam—her shoulders ached, her ears quivered with sensitiveness, and seemed not to catch sounds any more, but sharp and shooting pains. She was dazed already and weak; but still the Steam Thing cheered its steel legions on.
Up and down, up and down she walked, her baby thoughts coming to her as through the roar of a Niagara, through pain and sensitiveness, through aches and a dull, never-ending sameness.
Nine o'clock! Oh, she was so tired of it all!
Hark, she thought she heard a bird sing in a far off, dreamy way, and for a moment she made mud pies in the back yard of the hut on the mountain, under the black-oak in the yard, with the glint of soft sunshine over everything and the murmur of green leaves in the trees above, as the wind from off the mountain went through them, and the anemone, and bellworts, and daisies grew beneath and around. Was it a bluebird? She had never seen but one and it had built its nest in a hole in a hollow tree, the summer before she went into the mill to work.
She listened again—yes, it did sound something like a bluebird, peeping in a distant far off way, such as she had heard in the cabin on the mountain before she had ever heard the voice of the Big Thing at the mill. She listened, and a wave of disappointment swept over her baby face; for, listening closely, she found it was an unoiled separator, that peeped in a bluebird way now and then, above the staccato of some rusty spindle.
But in the song of that bluebird and the glory of an imaginary mud pie, all the disappointment of what she had missed swept over her.
Ten o'clock—the little fingers throbbed and burned, the tiny legs were stiff and tired, the little head seemed as a block of wood, but still the Steam Thing took no thought of rest.
Eleven o'clock—oh, but to rest awhile! To rest under the trees in the yard, for the sunshine looked so warm and bright out under the mill-windows, and the memory of that bluebird's song, though but an imitation, still echoed in her ear. And those mud pies!—she saw them all around her and in such lovely bits of old broken crockery and—....
She felt a rude punch in the side. It was Jud Carpenter standing over her and pointing to where a frowzled broken thread was tangling itself around a separator. She had dreamed but a minute—half a dozen threads had broken.
It was a rude punch and it hurt her side and frightened her. With a snarl and a glare he passed on while Shiloh flew to her bobbin.
This fright made her work the next hour with less fatigue. But she could not forget the song of the bluebird, and once, when Appomattox looked at her, she was working her mouth in a song,—a Sunday School song she had picked up at the Bishop's church. Appomattox could not hear it—no one had a license to hear a song in the Beast Thing's Den—nothing was ever privileged to sing but it,—but she knew from the way her mouth was working that Shiloh was singing.
Oh, the instinct of happiness in the human heart! To sing through noises and aches and tired feet and stunned, blocky heads. To sing with no hope before her and the theft of her very childhood—ay, her life—going on by the Beast Thing and his men.
God intended us to be happy, else He had never put so strong an instinct there.
Twelve o'clock. The Steam Beast gave a triumphant scream heard above the roar of shuttle and steel. It was a loud, defiant, victorious roar which drowned all others.
Then it purred and paused for breath—purred softer and softer and—slept at last.
It was noon.
The silence now was almost as painful to Shiloh as the noise had been. The sudden stopping of shuttle and wheel and belt and beam did not stop the noise in her head. It throbbed and buzzed there in an echoing ache, as if all the previous sounds had been fire-waves and these the scorched furrows of its touch. Wherever she turned, the echo of the morning's misery sounded in her ears.
And now they had forty minutes for noon recess.
They sat in a circle, these five children—and ate their lunch of cold soda biscuits and fat bacon.
Not a word did they say—not a laugh nor a sound to show they were children,—not even a sigh to show they were human.
Silently, like wooden things they choked it down and then—O men and women who love your own little ones—look!
Huddled together on the great, greasy, dirty floor of this mill, in all the attitudes of tired-out, exhausted childhood, they slept. Shiloh slept bolt upright, her little head against the spinning-frame, where all the morning she had chased the bobbins up and down the long aisle. Appomattox and Atlanta were grouped against her. Bull Run slept at her feet and Seven Days lay, half way over on his bobbin cart, so tired that he went to sleep as he tried to climb into it.
In other parts of the mill, other little ones slept and even large girls and boys, after eating, dozed or chatted. Spoolers, weavers, slubbers, warpers, nearly grown but all hard-faced, listless—and many of them slept on shawls and battings of cotton.
They were awakened by the big whistle at twenty minutes to one o'clock. At the same time, Jud Carpenter, the foreman, passed down the aisles and dashed cold water in the sleeping faces. Half laughingly he did it, but the little ones arose instantly, and with stooped forms, and tired, cowed eyes, in which the Anglo-Saxon spirit of resentment had been killed by the Yankee spirit of greed, they looked at the foreman, and then began their long six hours' battle with the bobbins.
Three o'clock! The warm afternoon's sun poured on the low flat tin roof of the mill and warmed the interior to a temperature which was uncomfortable.
Shiloh grew sleepy—she dragged her stumbling little feet along, and had she stopped but a moment, she had paid the debt that childhood owes to fairy-land. The air was close—stifling. Her shoulders ached—her head seemed a stuffy thing of wood and wooly lint.
As it was she nodded as she walked, and again the song of the bluebird peeped dreamily from out the unoiled spindle. She tried to sing to keep awake, and then there came a strange phantasy to mix with it all, and out of the half-awake world in which she now staggered along she caught sight of something which made her open her eyes and laugh outright.
Was it—could it be? In very truth it was—
Dolls!
And oh, so many! And all in a row dressed in matchless gowns of snowy white. She would count them up to ten—as far as she had learned to count.... But there were ten,—yes, and many more than ten— ... and just to think of whole rows of them— ... all there— ... and waiting for her to reach out and fondle and caress.
And she—never in her life before had she been so fortunate as to own one....
A smile lit up her dreaming eyes. Rows upon rows of dolls.... And not even Appomattox and Atlanta had ever seen so many before; and now how funny they acted, dancing around and around and bobbing their quaint bodies and winking and nodding at her.... It was Mayday with them and down the long line of spindles these cotton dolls were dancing around their May Queen, and beckoning Shiloh to join them....
It was too cute—too cunning—! they were dancing and drawing her in—they were actually singing— ... humming and chanting a May song....
O lovely—lovely dolls!...
Jud Carpenter found her asleep in the greasy aisle, her head resting on her arm, a smile on her little face—a hand clasping a rounded well-threaded doll-like bobbin to her breast.
It is useless to try to speak in a room in which the Steam Beast's voice drowns all other voices. It is useless to try to awaken one by calling. One might as well stand under Niagara Falls and whistle to the little fishes. No other voice can be heard while the Steam Beast speaks.
Shiloh was awakened by a dash of cold water and a rough kick from the big boot of that other beast who called himself the overseer. He did not intend to jostle her hard, but Shiloh was such a little thing that the kick she got in the side accompanied by the dash of water shocked and frightened her instantly to her feet, and with scared eyes and blanched face she darted down to the long line of bobbins, mending the threads.
If, in the great Mystic Unknown,—the Eden of Balance,—there lies no retributive Cause to right the injustice of that cruel Effect, let us hope there is no Here-after; that we all die and rot like dogs, who know no justice; that what little kindness and sweetness and right, man, through his happier dreams, his hopeful, cheerful idealism, has tried to establish in the world, may no longer stand as mockery to the Sweet Philosopher who long ago said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” ...
They were more dead than alive when, at seven o'clock, the Steam Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home.
Outside the stars were shining and the cool night air struck into them with a suddenness which made them shiver. They were children, and so they were thoughtless and did not know the risk they ran by coming out of a warm mill, hot and exhausted, into the cool air of an Autumn night. Shiloh was so tired and sleepy that Bull Run and Seven Days had to carry her between them.
Everybody passed out of the mill—a speechless, haggard, over-worked procession. Byrd Boyle, with a face and form which seemed to belong to a slave age, carried his twins in his arms.
Their heads lay on his shoulders. They were asleep.
Scarcely had the children eaten their supper of biscuit and bacon, augmented with dandelion salad, ere they, too, were asleep—all but Shiloh.
She could not sleep—now that she wanted to—and she lay in her grandfather's lap with flushed face and hot, over-worked heart. The strain was beginning to tell, and the old man grew uneasy, as he watched the flush on her cheeks and the unusual brightness in her eyes.
“Better give her five draps of tub'bentine an' put her to bed,” said Mrs. Watts as she came by. “She'll be fittin' an' good by mornin'.”
The old man did not reply—he only sang a low melody and smoothed her forehead.
It was ten o'clock, and now she lay on the old man's lap asleep from exhaustion. A cricket began chirping in the fireplace, under a hearth-brick.
“What's that, Pap?” asked Shiloh half asleep.
“That's a cricket, Pet,” smiled the old man.
She listened a while with a half-amused smile on her lips:
“Well, don't you think his spindles need oilin', Pap?”
There was little but machinery in her life.
Another hour found the old man tired, but still holding the sleeping child in his arms:
“If I move her she'll wake,” he said to himself. “Po' little Shiloh.”
He was silent a while and thoughtful. Then he looked up at the shadow of Sand Mountain, falling half way down the valley in the moonlight.
“The shadow of that mountain across that valley,” he said, “is like the shadow of the greed of gain across the world. An' why should it be? What is it worth? Who is happier for any money more than he needs in life?”
He bowed his head over the sleeping Shiloh.
“Oh, God,” he prayed—“You, who made the world an' said it might have a childhood—remember what it means to have it filched away. It's like stealin' the bud from the rose-bush, the dew from the grass, hope from the heart of man. Take our manhood—O God—it is strong enough to stand it—an' it has been took from many a strong man who has died with a smile on his lips. Take our old age—O God—for it's jus' a memory of Has Beens. But let them not steal that from any life that makes all the res' of it beautiful with dreams of it. If, by some inscrutable law which we po' things can't see through, stealin' in traffic an' trade must go on in the world, O God, let them steal our purses, but not our childhood. Amen.”