The Bishop of Cottontown Part 15

Could he buy her--bribe her, win her to work for him? He started to speak and say: "Cousin Alethea, may not all this be stopped, this debt and poverty and make-believe--this suffering of pride, transfixed by the spears of poverty? Let you and me arrange it, and all so satisfactorily. I have loved Alice all my life."

There is the fool in every one of us. And that is what the fool in Richard Travis wished him to say. What he did say was:

"Oh, it was nothing but purely business on my part--purely business.

I had the money and was looking for a good investment. I was glad to find it. There are a hundred acres and the house left. And by the way, Cousin Alethea, I just added five-hundred dollars more to the princ.i.p.al,--thought, perhaps, you'd need it, you know? You'll find it to your credit at s.h.i.+pton's bank."

He smoked on as if he thought it was nothing. As a business fact he knew the place was already mortgaged for all it was worth.

"Oh, how can we ever thank you enough?"

Travis glanced at her when she spoke. He flushed when he heard her place a slight accent on the we. She glanced at him and then looked into the fire. But in their glances which met, they both saw that the other knew and understood.

"And by the way, Cousin Alethea," said Travis after a while, "of course it is not necessary to let Alice know anything of this business. It will only worry her unnecessarily."

"Of course not," said Mrs. Westmore.

CHAPTER X

A STAR AND A SATELLITE

An hour later Mrs. Westmore had gone to her room and Alice had been singing his favorite songs. Her singing always had a peculiar influence over Richard Travis--a moral influence, which, perhaps, was the secret of its power; and all influence which is permanent is moral. There was in it for him an uplifting force that he never experienced save in her presence and under the influence of her songs.

He was a brilliant man and he knew that if he won Alice Westmore it must be done on a high plane. Women were his playthings--he had won them by the score and flung them away when won. But all his life--even when a boy--he had dreamed of finally winning Alice Westmore and settling down.

Like all men who were impure, he made the mistake of thinking that one day, when he wished, he could be pure.

Such a man may marry, but it is a thing of convenience, a matter in which he selects some woman, who he knows will not be his mistress, to become his housekeeper.

And thus she plods along in life, differing eventually only from his mistress in that she is the mother of his children.

In all Richard's longings, too, for Alice Westmore, there was an unconscious cause. He did not know it because he could not know.

Sooner or later love, which is loose, surfeits and sours. It is then that it turns instinctively to the pure, as the Jews, straying from their true G.o.d and meeting the chastis.e.m.e.nt of the sword of Babylon, turned in their anguish to the city of their King.

Nature is inexorable, and love has its laws as fixed as those which hold the stars in their course. And woe to the man or woman who transgresses! He who, ere it is ripe, deflowers the bud of blossoming love in wantonness and waste, in after years will watch and wait and water it with tears, in vain, for that bloom will never come.

She came over by the fire. Her face was flushed; her beautiful sad eyes lighted with excitement.

"Do you remember the first time I ever heard you sing, Alice?"

His voice was earnest and full of pathos, for him.

"Was it not when father dressed me as a gypsy girl and I rode my pony over to The Gaffs and sang from horse-back for your grandfather?"

He nodded: "I thought you were the prettiest thing I ever saw, and I have thought so ever since. That's when I fell in love with you."

"I remember quite distinctly what you did," she said. "You were a big boy and you came up behind my pony and jumped on, frightening us dreadfully."

"Tried to kiss you, didn't I?"

She laughed: "That was ever a chronic endeavor of your youth."

How pretty she looked. Had it been any other woman he would have reached over and taken her hand.

"Overpower her, master her, make her love you by force of arms"--his inner voice said.

He turned to the musing woman beside him and mechanically reached out his hand. Hers lay on the arm of her chair. The next instant he would have dropped his upon it and held it there. But as he made the motion her eyes looked up into his, so pa.s.sion-free and holy that his own arm fell by his side.

But the little wave of pa.s.sion in him only stirred him to his depths.

Ere she knew it or could stop him he was telling her the story of his love for her. Poetry,--romance,--and with it the strength of saying,--fell from his lips as naturally as snow from the clouds. He went into the history of old loves--how, of all loves they are the greatest--of Jacob who served his fourteen years for Rachel, of the love of Petrarch, of Dante.

"Do you know Browning's most beautiful poem?" he asked at last. His voice was tenderly mellow:

"All that I know of a certain star Is, it can throw (like the angled spar) Now a dart of red, now a dart of blue; Till my friends have said they would fain see, too, My star that dartles the red and the blue!

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled: They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.

What matter to me if their star is a world?

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it."

"Alice," he said, drawing his chair closer to her, "I know I have no such life to offer as you would bring to me. The best we men can do is to do the best we can. We are saved only because there is one woman we can look to always as our star. There is much of our past that we all might wish to change, but change, like work, is the law of life, and we must not always dream."

Quietly he had dropped his hand upon hers. Her own eyes were far off--they were dreaming. So deep was her dream that she had not noticed it. Pa.s.sion practised, as he was, the torch of her hand thrilled him as with wine; and as with wine was he daring.

"I know where your thoughts have been," he went on.

She looked up with a start and her hand slipped from under his into her lap. It was a simple movement and involuntary--like that of the little brown quail when she slips from the sedge-gra.s.s into the tangled depths of the blossoming wild blackberry bushes at the far off flash of a sharp-s.h.i.+nned hawk-wing, up in the blue. Nor could she say whether she saw it, or whether it was merely a shadow, an instinctive signal from the innocent courts of the sky to the brood-children of her innocence below.

But he saw it and said quickly, changing with it the subject: "At least were--but all that has pa.s.sed. I need you, Alice," he went on pa.s.sionately--"in my life, in my work. My home is there, waiting! It has been waiting all these years for you--its mistress--the only mistress it shall ever have. Your mother"--Alice looked at him surprised.

"Your mother--you,--perhaps, had not thought of that--your mother needs the rest and the care we could give her. Our lives are not always our own," he went on gravely--"oftentimes it belongs partly to others--for their happiness."

He felt that he was striking a winning chord.

"You can love me if you would say so," he said, bending low over her.

This time, when his hand fell on hers, she did not move. Surprised, he looked into her eyes. There were tears there.

Travis knew when he had gone far enough. Reverently he kissed her hand as he said:

"Never mind--in your own time, Alice. I can wait--I have waited long.

Twenty years," he added, patiently, even sweetly, "and if need be, I'll wait twenty more."

"I'll go now," he said, after a moment.

She looked at him gratefully, and arose. "One moment, Richard," she said--"but you were speaking of mother, and knowing your zeal for her I was afraid you might--might--the mortgage has been troubling her."