WORK IN A NEW LIGHT
It was an hour before Clay Westmore rode back to Millwood. He had been too busy plowing that day to get, sooner, a specimen of the rock he had seen out-cropping on Sand Mountain. At night, after supper, he had ridden over for it.
And now by moonlight he had found it!
He flushed with the strength of it all as he put it in his satchel—the strength of knowing that not even poverty, nor work, nor night could keep him from accomplishing his purpose.
Then he rode back, stopping at Millwood. For he thought, too, that he might see Helen, and while he had resolved not to force himself on her after what she had said when he last saw her, still he wished very much to see her now and then.
For somehow, it never got out of his deductive head that some day she would learn to love him. Had he known the temptation, the despair that was hers, he would not have been so quietly deliberate. But she had never told him. In fact, he had loved her from a distance all his life in his quiet way, though now, by her decree, they were scarcely more than the best of friends. Some day, after he had earned enough, he would tell her just how much he loved her. At present he could not, for was he not too poor, and were not his mother and sister dependent upon him?
He knew that Harry Travis loved her in a way—a love he was certain would not last, and in the fullness and depths of his sincere nature, he felt as sure of ultimately winning her, by sheer force of strength, of consistency and devotion, as he was that every great thing in life had been done by the same force and would be to the end of time.
As sure as that, by this same force, he, himself, would one day discover the vein of coal which lay somewhere in the beautiful valley of the Tennessee.
And so he waited his time with the easy assurance of the philosopher which he was, and with that firm faith which minds of his strength always have in themselves and their ultimate success.
It surprised him, it is true—hurt him—when he found to what extent Harry Travis had succeeded in winning the love of Helen. He was hurt because he expected—hoped—she would see further into things than she had. And counting all the poverty and hardships of his life, the Sunday afternoon when he had left her in the arbor, after she had told him she was engaged to Harry Travis, he could not remember when anything had been so hard for him to bear. Later he had heard how she had gone to work in the mill, and he knew that it meant an end of her love affair with Harry.
To-night something told him it was time to see her again, not to tell her of his own love, and how it would never change, whether she was mill girl or the mistress of Millwood, but to encourage her in the misery of it all.
Work—and did not he himself love to work? Was it not the noblest thing of life?
He would tell her it was.
He was surprised when he saw what had just happened; but all his life he had controlled himself to such a degree that in critical moments he was coolest; and so what with another might have been a serious affair, he had turned into half retributive fun, but the deadliest punishment, as it afterwards turned out, that he could have inflicted on a temperament and nature such as Harry Travis'. For that young man, unable to stand the gibes of the neighborhood and the sarcasm of his uncle when it all became known, accepted a position in another town and never came back again.
To have been shot or floored in true melodramatic style by his rival, as he stood on a rock with a helpless girl in his clutch, would have been more to his liking than to be picked up bodily, by the nape of his neck, and taken from the scene of his exploits like a pig across a saddle.
That kind of a combat did not meet his ideas of chivalry.
Helen was dressed in her prettiest gown when Clay rode back to Millwood, after securing the samples he had started for. She knew he was coming and so she tied a white scarf over her head and went again to her favorite seat beneath the trees.
“I don't know how to thank you, Clay,” she said, as he swung down from his saddle and threw his leathern bag on the grass.
“Now, you look more like yourself,” he smiled admiringly, as he looked down on her white dress and auburn hair, drooping low over her neck and shoulders.
“Tell me about yourself and how you like it at the mill,” he went on as he sat down.
“Oh, you will not be willing to speak to me now—now that I am a mill-girl,” she added. “Do you know? Clay—”
“I know that, aside from being beautiful, you have just begun to be truly womanly in my sight.”
“Oh, Clay, do you really think that? It is the first good word that has been spoken to me since—since my—disgrace.”
He turned quickly: “Your disgrace! Do you call it disgrace to work—to make an honest living—to be independent and self-reliant?”
He picked up his bag of samples and she saw that his hands had become hard and sunburnt from the plow handles.
“Helen,” he went on earnestly, “that is one of the hide-bound tyrannies that must be banished from our Southland—banished as that other tyranny, slavery, has been banished—a sin, which, with no fault of our own, we inherited from the centuries. We shall never be truly great—as God intended we should be great—until we learn to work. We have the noblest and sunniest of lands, with more resources than man now dreams of, a greater future than we know of if we will only work—work and develop them. You have set an example for every girl in the South who has been thrown upon her own resources. Never before in my life have I cared—so—much—for you.”
And he blushed as he said it, and fumbled his samples.
“Then you do care some for me?” she asked pleadingly. She was heart-sick for sympathy and did not know just what she said.
He flushed and started to speak. He looked at her, and his big glasses quivered with the suppressed emotions which lay behind them in his eyes.
But he saw that she did not love him, that she was begging for sympathy and not for love. Besides, what right had he to plan to bring another to share his poverty?
He mounted his horse as one afraid to trust himself to stay longer. But he touched her hair in his awkward, funny way, before he swung himself into the saddle, and Helen, as she went into the desolate home, felt uplifted as never before.
Never before had she seen work in that light—nor love.