WESTMORELAND
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.