The Bishop of Cottontown Part 72

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 rea.s.sured 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._"

CHAPTER VIII

A QUESTION BROUGHT HOME

"I shall go to Boston next week to meet the directors of the mill and give in my annual report."

The three had been sitting in Westmoreland library this Sunday night--for Richard Travis came regularly every Sunday night, and he had been talking about the progress of the mill and the great work it was doing for the poor whites of the valley. "I imagine," he added, "that they will be pleased with the report this year."

"But are you altogether pleased with it in all its features?" asked Alice thoughtfully.

"Why, what do you mean, Alice?" asked her mother, surprised.

"Just this, mother, and I have been thinking of talking to Richard about it for some time."

Travis took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at her quizzically.

She flushed under his gaze and added: "If I wasn't saying what I am for humanity's sake I would be willing to admit that it was impertinent on my part. But are you satisfied with the way you work little children in that mill, Richard, and are you willing to let it go on without a protest before your directors? You have such a fine opportunity for good there," she added in all her old beautiful earnestness.

"Oh, Alice, my dear, that is none of our affair. Now I should not answer her, Richard," and Mrs. Westmore tapped him playfully on the arm.

"Frankly, I am not," he said to Alice. "I think it is a horrible thing. But how are we to remedy it? There is no law on the subject at all in Alabama--"

"Except the broader, unwritten law," she added.

Travis laughed: "You will find that it cuts a small figure with directors when it comes in conflict with the dividends of a corporation."

"But how is it there?" she asked,--"in New England?"

"They have seen the evils of it and they have a law against child labor. The age is restricted to twelve years, and every other year they must go to a public school before they may be taken back into the mill. But even with all that, the law is openly violated, as it is in England, where they have been making efforts to throttle the child-labor problem for nearly a century, and after whose law the New England law was patterned."

"Why, by the parents of the children falsely swearing to their age."

Alice looked at him in astonishment.

"Do you really mean it?" she asked.

"Why, certainly--and it would be the same here. If we had a law the lazy parents of many of them would swear falsely to their children's ages."

"There could be some way found to stop that," she said.

"It has not been found yet," he added. "What is to prevent two designing parents swearing that an eight year old child is twelve--and these little poor whites," he added with a laugh, "all look alike from eight to sixteen--scrawny--hard and half-starved. In many cases no living man could swear whether they are six or twelve."