The Bishop of Cottontown Part 65

It was nearly time to go home when Travis came to see how Helen was progressing. He came up behind the two girls and stood looking at them work. When they looked up Maggie started and reddened and Helen saw her tighten her thin lips in a peculiar way while the blood flew from them, leaving a thin white oval ring in the red that flushed her face.

"You are doing finely," he said to Helen--"you will make a swift drawer-in." He stooped over and whispered: "Such fingers and hands would draw in anything--even hearts."

Helen blushed and looked quickly at Maggie, over whose face the pinched look had come again, but Maggie was busy at her machine.

"I remember when I came here five years ago," went on Maggie after Travis had left, "I was so proud an' happy. I was healthy an' well an' so happy to think I cu'd make a livin' for the home-folks--for daddy an' the little ones. Oh, they would put them in the mill, but I said no, I'll work my fingers off first. Let 'em play an' grow. Yes, they've lived on what I have made for five years--daddy down on his back, too, an' the children jus' growin', an' now they are big enough and strong enough to he'p me run the little farm--instead"--she said after a pause--"instead of bein' dead an' buried, killed in the mill.

That was five years ago--five years"--she coughed and looked out of the window reflectively.

"Daddy--poor daddy--he couldn't help the tree fallin' on his back an'

cripplin' him; an' little Buddy, well, he was born weakly, so I done it all. Oh, I am not braggin' an' I ain't complainin', I'm so proud to do it."

Helen was silent, her own bitterness softened by the story Maggie was telling, and for a while she forgot herself and her sorrow.

It is so always. When we would weep we have only to look around and see others who would wail.

"When I come I was as rosy as you," Maggie went on; "not so pretty now, mind you--n.o.body could be as pretty as you."

She said it simply, but it touched Helen.

"But I'll get my color back on the little farm--I'll be well again."

She was silent a while. "I kno' you are wonderin' how I saved and got it." Helen saw her face sparkle and the spots deepen. "Mr. Travis has been so kind to me in--in other ways--but that's a big secret,"

she laughed, "I'm to tell you some day, or rather you'll see yo'self, an' then, oh--every thing will be all right an' I'll be ever so much happier than I am now."

She jumped up impulsively and stood before Helen.

"Mightn't I kiss you once,--you're so pretty an' fresh?" And she kissed the pretty girl half timidly on the cheek.

"It makes me so happy to think of it," she went on excitedly, "to think of owning a little farm all by ourselves, to go out into the air every day whenever you feel like it and not have to work in the mill, nor ask anybody if you may, but jus' go out an' see things grow--an' hear the birds sing and set under the pretty green trees an' gather wild flowers if you want to. To keep house an' to clean up an' cook instead of forever drawin'-in, an' to have a real flower garden of yo' own--yo' very own."

They worked for hours, Maggie talking as a child who had found at last a sympathetic listener. Twilight came and then a clang of bells and the shaft above them began to turn slower and slower. Helen looked up wondering why it had all stopped so suddenly. She met the eyes of Travis looking at her.

"I am to take you home," he said to her, "the trotters are at the door. Oh," as he looked at her work--"why, you have done first rate for the day."

"It's Maggie's," she whispered.

He had not seen Maggie and he stood looking at Helen with such pa.s.sionate, patronizing, commanding, masterful eyes, that she shrank for a moment, sideways.

Then he laughed: "How beautiful you are! There are queens born and queens made--I shall call you the queen of the mill, eh?"

He reached out and tried to take her hand, but she shrank behind the machine and then--

"Oh, Maggie!" she exclaimed--for the girl's face was now white and she stood with a strained mouth as if ready to sob.

"Oh, Maggie's a good little girl," said Travis, catching her hand.

"Oh, please don't--please"--said Maggie.

Then she walked out, drawing her thin shawl around her.

CHAPTER II

IN THE DEPTHS

All the week the two girls worked together at the mill; a week which was to Helen one long nightmare, filled, as it was, with the hum and roar of machinery, the hot breath of the mill, and worst of all, the seared and deadening thought that she was disgraced.

In the morning she entered the mill hoping it might fall on and destroy her. At night she went home to a drunken father and a little sister who needed, in her childish sorrow, all the pity and care of the elder one.

And one night her father, being more brutal than ever, had called out as Helen came in: "Come in, my mill-girl!"

Richard Travis always drove her home, and each night he became more familiar and more masterful. She felt,--she knew--that she was falling under his fascinating influence.

And worse than all, she knew she did not care.

There is a depth deeper even than the sin--the depth where the doer ceases to care.

Indeed, she was beginning to make herself believe that she loved him--as he said he wished her to do--and as he loved her, he said; and with what he said and what he hinted she dreamed beautiful, desperate dreams of the future.

She did not wonder, then, that on one drive she had permitted him to hold her hand in his. What a strong hand it was, and how could so weak a hand as her's resist it? And all the time he had talked so beautifully and had quoted Browning and Keats. And finally he had told her that she had only to say the word, and leave the mill with him forever.

But where, she did not even care--only to get away from the mill, from her disgrace, from her drunken father, from her wretched life.

And another night, when he had helped her out of the buggy, and while she was close to him and looking downward, he had bent over her and kissed her on the neck, where her hair had been gathered up and had left it white and fair and unprotected. And it sent a hot flame of shame to the depths of her brain, but she could only look up and say--"Oh, please don't--please don't, Mr. Travis," and then dart quickly into the old gate and run to her home.

But within it was only to meet the taunts and sneers of her father that brought again the hot Conway blood in defying anger to her face, and then she had turned and rushed back to the gate which Travis had just left, crying:

"Take me now--anywhere--anywhere. Carry me away from here."

But she heard only the sound of his trotters' feet up the road, and overcome with the reflective anguish of it all, she had tottered and dropped beneath the tree upon the gra.s.s--dropped to weep.

After a while she sat up, and going down the long path to the old spring, she bathed her face and hands in its cool depths. Then she sat upon a rock which jutted out into the water. It calmed her to sit there and feel the rush of the air from below, upon her hot cheeks and her swollen eyes.

The moon shone brightly, lighting up the water, the rocks which held the spring pool within their fortress of gray, and the long green path of water-cresses, stretching away and showing where the spring branch ran to the pasture.

Glancing down, she saw her own image in the water, and she smiled to see how beautiful it was. There was her hair hanging splendidly down her back, and in the mirror of water beneath she saw it was tinged with that divine color which had set the Roman world afire in Cleopatra's days. But then, there was her dress--her mill dress.

She sighed--she looked up at the stars. They always filled her with great waves of wonder and reverence.

"Is mother in one of you?" she asked. "Oh, mother, why were you taken from your two little girls? and if the dead are immortal, can they forget us of earth? Can they be indifferent to our fate? How could they be happy if they knew--" She stopped and looking up, picked out a single star that shone brighter than the others, clinging so close to the top of Sunset Rock as to appear a setting to his crown.

"I will imagine she is there"--she whispered--"in that world--O mother--mother--will you--cannot you help me?"

She was weeping and had to bathe her face again. Then another impulse seized her--an impulse of childhood. Pulling off her stockings, she dipped her feet in the cool water and splashed them around in sheer delight.

The moonbeams falling on them under the water turned the pink into white, and she smiled to see how like the pictures of Diana her ankles looked.