MRS. WESTMORE TAKES A HAND
“What are you playing, Alice?”
The daughter arose from the piano and kissed her mother, holding for a moment the pretty face, crowned with white hair, between her two palms.
“It—it is an old song which Tom and I used to love to sing.”
The last of the sentence came so slowly that it sank almost into silence, as of one beginning a sentence and becoming so absorbed in the subject as to forget the speech. Then she turned again to the piano, as if to hide from her mother the sorrow which had crept into her face.
“You should cease to think of that. Such things are dreams—at present we are confronted by very disagreeable realities.”
“Dreams—ah, mother mine”—she answered with forced cheeriness—“but what would life be without them?”
“For one thing, Alice”—and she took the daughter's place at the piano and began to play snatches of an old waltz tune—“it would be free from all the morbid unnaturalness, the silliness, the froth of things. There is too much hardness in every life—in the world—in the very laws of life, for such things ever to have been part of the original plan. For my part, I think they are the product of man and wine or women or morphine or some other narcotic.”
“We make the dreams of life, but the realities of it make us,” she added.
“Oh, no, mother. 'Tis the dreams that make the realities. Not a great established fact exists but it was once the vision of a dreamer. Our dreams to-day become the realities of to-morrow.”
“Do you believe Tom is not dead—that he will one day come back?” asked her mother abruptly.
It was twilight and the fire flickered, lighting up the library. But in the flash of it Mrs. Westmore saw Alice's cheek whiten in a hopeless, helpless, stricken way.
Then she walked to the window and looked out on the darkness fast closing in on the lawn, clustering denser around the evergreens and creeping ghostlike toward the dim sky line which shone clear in the open.
The very helplessness of her step, her silence, her numbed, yearning look across the lawn told Mrs. Westmore of the death of all hope there.
She followed her daughter and put her arms impulsively around her.
“I should not have hurt you so, Alice. I only wanted to show you how worse than useless it is ... but to change the subject, I do wish to speak to you of—our condition.”
Alice was used to her mother's ways—her brilliancy—her pointed manner of going at things—her quick change of thought—of mood, and even of temperament. An outsider would have judged Mrs. Westmore to be fickle with a strong vein of selfishness and even of egotism. Alice only knew that she was her mother; who had suffered much; who had been reduced by poverty to a condition straitened even to hardships. To help her the daughter knew that she was willing to make any sacrifice. Unselfish, devoted, clear as noonday in her own ideas of right and wrong, Alice's one weakness was her blind devotion to those she loved. A weakness beautiful and even magnificent, since it might mean a sacrifice of her heart for another. The woman who gives her time, her money, her life, even, to another gives but a small part of her real self. But there is something truly heroic when she throws in her heart also. For when a woman has given that she has given all; and because she has thrown it in cold and dead—a lifeless thing—matters not; in the poignancy of the giving it is gone from her forever and she may not recall it even with the opportunity of bringing it back to life.
She who gives her all, but keeps her heart, is as a priest reading mechanically the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible. But she who gives her heart never to take it back again gives as the Christ dying on the Cross.
“Now, here is the legal paper about”—
Her voice failed and she did not finish the sentence.
Alice took the paper and glanced at it. She flushed and thrust it into her pocket. They were silent a while and Mrs. Westmore sat thinking of the past. Alice knew it by the great reminiscent light which gleamed in her eyes. She thought of the time when she had servants, money, friends unlimited—of the wealth and influence of her husband—of the glory of Westmoreland.
Every one has some secret ambition kept from the eyes of every living soul—often even to die in its keeper's breast. It is oftenest a mean ambition of which one is ashamed and so hides it from the world. It is often the one weakness. Alice never knew what was her mother's. She did not indeed know that she had one, for this one thing Mrs. Westmore had kept inviolately secret. But in her heart there had always rankled a secret jealousy when she thought of The Gaffs. It had been there since she could remember—a feeling cherished secretly, too, by her husband: for in everything their one idea had been that Westmoreland should surpass The Gaffs,—that it should be handsomer, better kept, more prosperous, more famous.
Now, Westmoreland was gone—this meant the last of it. It would be sold, even the last hundred acres of it, with the old home on it. Gone—gone—all her former glory—all her family tradition, her memories, her very name.
Gone, and The Gaffs remained!
Remained in all its intactness—its beauty—its well equipped barns with all the splendor of its former days. For so great was the respect of Schofield's army for the character of Colonel Jeremiah Travis that his home escaped the torch when it was applied to many others in the Tennessee Valley. And Richard Travis had been shrewd enough after the war to hold his own. Joining the party of the negro after the war, he had been its political ruler in the county. And the Honorable Richard Travis had been offered anything he wanted. At present he was State Senator. He with others called himself a Republican—one of the great party of Lincoln to which the negroes after their enfranchisement united themselves. It was a fearful misnomer. The Republican party in the South, composed of ninety-nine ignorant negroes to one renegade white, about as truly represented the progressive party of Lincoln as a black vampire the ornithology of all lands. Indeed, since the war, there has never been in the South either a Republican or a Democratic party. The party line is not drawn on belief but on race and color. The white men, believing everything they please from free trade to protection, vote a ticket which they call Democratic. The negroes, and a few whites who allied themselves with them for the spoils of office, vote the other ticket. Neither of them represent anything but a race issue.
To this negro party belonged Richard Travis—and the price of his infamy had been Honorable before his name.
But Mrs. Westmore cared nothing for this. She only knew that he was a leader of men, was handsome, well reared and educated, and that he owned The Gaffs, her old rival. And that there it stood, a fortune—a refuge—a rock—offered to her and her daughter, offered by a man who, whatever his other faults, was brave and dashing, sincere in his idolatrous love for her daughter. That he would make Alice happy she did not doubt; for Mrs. Westmore's idea of happiness was in having wealth and position and a splendid name. Having no real heart, how was it possible for her to know, as Alice could know, the happiness of love?
An eyeless fish in the river of Mammoth Cave might as well try to understand what light meant.
He would make Alice happy, of course he would; he would make her happy by devotion, which he was eager to give her with an unstinted hand. Alice needed it, she herself needed it. It was common sense to accept it,—business sense. It was opportunity—fate. It was the reward of a life—the triumph of it—to have her old rival—enemy—bound and presented to her.
And nothing stood between her and the accomplishment of it all but the foolish romance of her daughter's youth.
And so she sat building her castles and thinking:
“With The Gaffs, with Richard Travis and his money would come all I wish, both for her and for me. Once more I would hold the social position I once held: once more I would be something in the world. And Alice, of course, she would be happy; for her's is one of those trusting natures which finds first where her duty points and then makes her heart follow.”
But Mrs. Westmore wisely kept silent. She did not think aloud. She knew too well that Alice's sympathetic, unselfish, obedient spirit was thinking it over.
She sat down by her mother and took up a pet kitten which had come purring in, begging for sympathy. She stroked it thoughtfully.
Mrs. Westmore read her daughter's thoughts:
“So many people,” the mother said after a while, “have false ideas of love and marriage. Like ignorant people when they get religion, they think a great and sudden change must come over them—changing their very lives.”
She laughed her ringing little laugh: “I told you of your father's and my love affair. Why, I was engaged to three other men at the same time—positively I was. And I would have been just as happy with any of them.”
“Why did you marry father, then?”
Her mother laughed and tapped the toe of her shoe playfully against the fender: “It was a silly reason; he swam the Tennessee River on his horse to see me one day, when the ferry-boat was a wreck. I married him.”
“Would not the others have done as well?”
“Yes, but I knew your father was brave. You cannot love a coward—no woman can. But let a man be brave—no matter what his faults are—the rest is all a question of time. You would soon learn to love him as I did your father.”
Mrs. Westmore was wise. She changed the subject.
“Have you noticed Uncle Bisco lately, mother?” asked Alice after a while.
“Why, yes; I intended to ask you about him.”
“He says there are threats against his life—his and Aunt Charity's. He had a terrible dream last night, and he would have me to interpret it.”
“Quite Biblical,” laughed her mother. “What was it?”
“They have been very unhappy all day—you know the negroes have been surly and revengeful since the election of Governor Houston—they believe they will be put back into slavery and they know that Uncle Bisco voted with his white friends. It is folly, of course—but they beat Captain Roland's old body servant nearly to death because he voted with his old master. And Uncle Bisco has heard threats that he and Aunt Charity will be visited in a like manner. I think it will soon blow over, though at times I confess I am often worried about them, living alone so far off from us, in the cabin in the wood.”
“What was Uncle Bisco's dream?” asked Mrs. Westmore.
“Why, he said an angel had brought him water to drink from a Castellonian Spring. Now, I don't know what a Castellonian Spring is, but that was the word he used, and that he was turned into a live-oak tree, old and moss-grown. Then he stood in the forest surrounded by scrub-oaks and towering over them and other mean trees when suddenly they all fell upon him and cut him down. Now, he says, these scrub-oaks are the radical negroes who wish to kill him for voting with the whites. You will laugh at my interpretation,” she went on. “I told him that the small black oaks were years that still stood around him, but that finally they would overpower him and he would sink to sleep beneath them, as we must all eventually do. I think it reassured him—but, mamma, I am uneasy about the two old people.”
“If the Bishop were here—”
“He would sleep in the house with a shotgun, I fear,” laughed Alice.
They were silent at last: “When did you say Richard was coming again, Alice?”
“To-morrow night—and—and—I hear Clay in his laboratory. I will go and talk to him before bed time.”
She stooped and kissed her mother. To her surprise, she found her mother's arms around her neck and heard her whisper brokenly:
“Alice—Alice—you could solve it all if you would. Think—think—what it would mean to me—to all of us—oh, I can stand this poverty no longer—this fight against that which we cannot overcome.”
She burst into a flood of tears. Never before had Alice seen her show her emotions over their condition, and it hurt her, stabbed her to the vital spot of all obedience and love.
With moistened eyes she went into her brother's room.
And Mrs. Westmore wrote a note to Richard Travis. It did not say so in words but it meant: “Come and be bold—you have won.”