The Bishop of Cottontown Part 76

"No--no--Miss Alice," and then she smiled so brightly and cheerfully that the little one in Alice Westmore's arms clapped her hands and laughed: "Little mother--be up, well, to-morrow."

Little Mother turned her eyes on the child quickly, smiled and nodded approval. But there were tears--tears which the little one did not understand.

An hour went by--the wind had ceased, and with it the rain. The children were asleep in bed; the father in his chair.

A cold sweat had broken out on the dying girl's forehead and she breathed with a terrible effort. And in it all the two watchers beside the bed saw that there was an agony there but not the fear of death. She kept trying to bite her nails nervously and saying:

"There is only-- ... one thing-- ... one ... thing...."

"Tell me, Maggie," said the old man, bending low and soothing her forehead with his hands, "tell us what's pesterin' you--maybe it hadn't oughter be. You mustn't worry now--G.o.d'll make everything right--to them that loves him even to the happy death. You'll die happy an' be happy with him forever. The little 'uns an' the father, you know they're fixed here--in this nice home an' the farm--so don't worry."

"That's it!.... Oh, that's it!.... I got it that way-- ... all for them ... but it's that that hurts now...."

He bent down over her: "Tell us, child--me an' Miss Alice--tell us what's pesterin' you. You mustn't die this way--you who've got such a right to be happy."

The hectic spark burned to white heat in her cheek. She bit her nails, she picked at the cover, she looked toward the bed and asked feebly: "Are they asleep? Can I talk to you two?"

The old man nodded. Alice soothed her brow.

Then she beckoned to the old preacher, who knelt by her side, and he put his arms around her neck and raised her on the pillow. And his ear was close to her lips, for she could scarcely talk, and Alice Westmore knelt and listened, too. She listened, but with a griping, strained heartache,--listened to a dying confession from the pale lips, and the truth for the first time came to Alice Westmore, and kneeling, she could not rise, but bent again her head and heard the pitiful, dying confession. As she listened to the broken, gasping words, heard the heart-breaking secret come out of the ruins of its wrecked home, her love, her temptation, her ignorance in wondering if she were really married by the laws of love, and then the great martyrdom of it all--giving her life, her all, that the others might live--a terrible tightening gathered around Alice Westmore's heart, her head fell with the flooding tears and she knelt sobbing, her bloodless fingers clutching the bed of the dying girl.

"Don't cry," said Maggie. "I should be the one to weep, ... only I am so happy ... to think ... I am loved by the n.o.blest, best, of men, ... an'

I love him so, ... only he ain't here; ... but I wouldn't have him see me die. Now--now ... what I want to know, Bishop, ..." she tried to rise. She seemed to be pa.s.sing away. The old man caught her and held her in his arms.

Her eyes opened: "I--is--" she went on, in the agony of it all with the same breath, "am ... am I married ... in G.o.d's sight ... as well as his--"

The old man held her tenderly as if she were a child. He smiled calmly, sweetly, into her eyes as he said:

"You believed it an' you loved only him, Maggie--poor chile!"

"Oh, yes--yes--" she smiled, "an' now--even now I love him up--right up--as you see ... to the door, ... to the shadow, ... to the valley of the shadow...."

"And it went for these, for these"--he said looking around at the room.

"For them--my little ones--they had no mother, you kno'--an' Daddy's back. Oh, I didn't mind the work, ... the mill that has killed ...

killed me, ... but, ... but was I"--her voice rose to a shrill cry of agony--"am I married in G.o.d's sight?"

Alice quivered in the beauty of the answer which came back from the old man's lips:

"As sure as G.o.d lives, you were--there now--sleep and rest; it is all right, child."

Then a sweet calmness settled over her face, and with it a smile of exquisite happiness.

She fell back on her pillow: "In G.o.d's sight ... married ... married ...

my--Oh, I have never said it before ... but now, ... can't I?"

The Bishop nodded, smiling.

"My husband, ... my husband, ... dear heart, ... Good-bye...."

She tried to reach under her pillow to draw out something, and then she smiled and died.

When Alice Westmore dressed her for burial an hour afterwards, her heart was shaken with a bitterness it had never known before--a bitterness which in a man would have been a vengeance. For there was the smile still on the dead face, carried into the presence of G.o.d.

Under the dead girl's pillow lay the picture of Richard Travis.

The next day Alice sent the picture to Richard Travis, and with it a note.

"_It is your's_," she wrote calmly, terribly calm--"_from the girl who died believing she was your wife. I am helping bury her to-day.

And you need not come to Westmoreland to-morrow night, nor next week, nor ever again._"

And Richard Travis, when he read it, turned white to his hard, bitter, cruel lips, the first time in all his life.

For he knew that now he had no more chance to recall the living than he had to recall the dead.

CHAPTER XI

THE QUEEN IS DEAD--LONG LIVE THE QUEEN

All that week at the mill, Richard Travis had been making preparations for his trip to Boston. Regularly twice, and often three times a year, he had made the same journey, where his report to the directors was received and discussed. After that, there were always two weeks of theatres, operas, wine-suppers and dissipations of other kinds--though never of the grossest sort--for even in sin there is refinement, and Richard Travis was by instinct and inheritance refined.

He was not conscious--and who of his cla.s.s ever are?--of the effects of the life he was leading--the tightening of this chain of immoral habits, the searing of what conscience he had, the freezing of all that was generous and good within him.

Once his nature had been as a lake in midsummer, its surface s.h.i.+mmering in the sunlight, reflecting something of the beauty that came to it. Now, cold, sordid, callous, it lay incased in winter ice and neither could the sunlight go in nor its reflection go out. It slept on in coa.r.s.e opaqueness, covered with an impenetrable crust which he himself did not understand.

"But," said the old Bishop more than once, "G.o.d can touch him and he will thaw like a spring day. There is somethin' great in Richard Travis if he can only be touched."

But vice cannot reason. Immorality cannot deduce. Only the moral ponders deeply and knows both the premises and the conclusions, because only the moral thinks.

Vice, like the poisonous talons of a bird of prey, while it buries its nails in the flesh of its victim, carries also the narcotic which soothes as it kills.

And Richard Travis had arrived at this stage. At first it had been with him any woman, so there was a romance--and hence Maggie. But he had tired of these, and now it was the woman beautiful as Helen, or the woman pure and lovely as Alice Westmore.

What a tribute to purity, that impurity wors.h.i.+ps it the more as itself sinks lower in the slime of things. It is the poignancy of the meteorite, which, falling from a star, hisses out its life in the mud.

The woman pure--Alice--the very thought of her sent him farther into the mud, knowing she could not be his. She alone whom he had wanted to wed all his life, the goal of his love's ambition, the one woman in the world he had never doubted would one day be his wife.

Her note to him--"_Never ... never ... again_"--he kept reading it over, stunned, and pale, with the truth of it. In his blindness it had never occurred to him that Alice Westmore and Maggie would ever meet. In his blindness--for Wrong, daring as a snake, which, however alert and far-seeing it may be in the hey-day of its spring, sees less clearly as the Summer advances, until, in the August of its infamy, it ceases to see altogether and becomes an easy victim for all things with hoofs.

Then, the poignant reawakening. Now he lay in the mud and above him still shone the star.

The star--his star! And how it hurt him! It was the breaking of a link in the chain of his life.

Twice had he written to her. But each time his notes came back unopened. Twice had he gone to Westmoreland to see her. Mrs. Westmore met him at the door, cordial, sympathetic, but with a nervous jerk in the little metallic laugh. His first glance at her told him she knew everything--and yet, knew nothing. Alice was locked in her room and would not see him.