The news of Captain Tom's return spread quickly. By noon it was known throughout the Tennessee Valley.

The sensational features of it required prompt action on his and Alice's part, and their decision was quickly made: they would be married that Sunday afternoon in the little church on the mountain side and by the old man who had done so much to make their happiness possible.

For once in its history the little church could not hold the people who came to witness this romantic marriage, and far down the mountain side they stood to see the bride and groom pa.s.s by. Many remembered the groom, all had heard of him,--his devotion to his country's flag; to the memory of his father; his gallantry, his heroism, his martyrdom, dying (as they supposed) rather than turn his guns on his brave old grandsire. And now to come back to life again--to win the woman he loved and who had loved him all these years! Besides, there was no one in the Tennessee Valley considered more beautiful than the bride, and they loved her as if she had been an angel of light.

And never had she appeared more lovely.

A stillness swept over the crowd when the carriage drove up to the little church, and when the tall, handsome man in the uniform of a captain of artillery lifted Alice out with the tenderness of all lovers in his touch and the strength of a strong lover, with a lily in his hand, the crowd, knowing his history, could not refrain from cheering. He lifted his cap and threw back his iron-gray hair, showing a head proud and tender and on his face such a smile as lovers only wear. Then he led her in,--pale and tearful.

The little church had been prettily decorated that Sabbath morning, and when the old preacher came forward and called them to him, he said the simple words which made them man and wife, and as he blessed them, praying, a mocking-bird, perched on a limb near the window, sang a soft low melody as if one singer wished to compliment another.

They went out hand in hand, and when they reached the door, the sun which had been hid burst out as a benediction upon them.

Among the guests one man had stepped in unnoticed and unseen. Why he came he could not tell, for never before did he have any desire to go to the little church.

It was midnight when the news came to him that Tom Travis had returned as from the dead. It was Jud Carpenter who had awakened him that Sat.u.r.day night to whisper at the bedside the startling news.

But Travis only yawned from his sleep and said: "I've been expecting it all the time--go somewhere and go to bed."

After Carpenter had gone, he arose, stricken with a feeling he could not describe, but had often seen in race horses running desperately until within fifty yards of the wire, and then suddenly--quitting. He had almost reached his goal--but now one week had done all this.

Alice--gone, and The Gaffs--he must divide that with his cousin--for his grandfather had left no will.

Divide The Gaffs with Tom Travis?--He would as soon think of dividing Alice's love with him. In the soul of Richard Travis there was no such word as division.

In the selfishness of his life, it had ever been all or nothing.

All night he thought, he walked the halls of the old house, he ran over a hundred solutions of it in his mind. And still there was no solution that satisfied him, that seemed natural. It seemed that his mind, which had heretofore worked so unerringly, deducing things so naturally, now balked before an abyss that was bridgeless. Heretofore he had looked into the future with the bold, true sweep of an eagle peering from its mountain home above the clouds into the far distance, his eyes unclouded by the mist, which cut off the vision of mortals below. But now he was the blindest of the blind. He seemed to stop as before a wall--a chasm which ended everything--a chasm, on the opposite wall of which was printed: Thus far and no farther.

Think as he would, he could not think beyond it. His life seemed to stop there. After it, he was nothing.

Our minds, our souls--are like the sun, which shines very plainly as it moves across the sky of our life of things--showing them in all distinctness and clearness; so that we see things as they happen to us with our eyes of daylight. But as the sun throws its dim twilight shadows even beyond our earth, so do the souls of men of great mind and imagination see, faintly, beyond their own lives, and into the shadow of things.

To-night that mysterious sight came to Richard Travis, as it comes in the great crises of life and death, to every strong man, and he saw dimly, ghostily, into the shadow; and the shadow stopped at the terrible abyss which now barred his ken; and he felt, with the keen insight of the dying eagle on the peak, that the thing was death.

In the first streak of light, he was rudely awakened to it. For there on the rug, as naturally as if asleep, lay the only thing he now loved in the world, the old setter, whose life had pa.s.sed out in slumber.

All animals have the dying instinct. Man, the highest, has it the clearest. And Travis remembered that the old dog had come to his bed, in the middle of the night, and laid his large beautiful head on his master's breast, and in the dim light of the smouldering fire had said good-bye to Richard Travis as plainly as ever human being said it. And now on the rug, before the dead gray ashes of the night, he had found the old dog forever asleep, naturally and in great peace.

His heart sank as he thought of the farewell of the night before, and bitterness came, and sitting down on the rug by the side of the dead dog he stroked for the last time the grand old silken head, so calm and poised, for the little world it had been bred for, and ran his palm over the long strong nose that had never lied to the scent of the covey. His lips tightened and he said: "O G.o.d, I am dying myself, and there is not a living being whom I can crawl up to, and lay my head on its breast and know it loves and pities me, as I love you, old friend."

The thought gripped his throat, and as he thought of the sweetness and n.o.bility of this dumb thing, his gentleness, faithfulness and devotion, the sureness of his life in filling the mission he came for, he wept tears so strange to his cheek that they scalded as they flowed, and he bowed his head and said: "Gladstone, Gladstone, good-bye--true to your breeding, you were what your master never was--a gentleman."

And the old housekeeper found this strong man, who had never wept in his life, crying over the old dead setter on the rug.

And the same feeling, the second sight--the presentiment--the terrible balking of his mind that had always seen so clearly, ever into the future, held him as in a vise all the morning and moved him in a strange mysterious way to go to the church and see the woman he had loved all his life, the being whose very look uplifted him, and whose smile could make him a hero or a martyr, married to the man who came home to take her, and half of his all.

Numbed, hardened, speechless, and yet with that terrible presentiment of the abyss before him, he had stood and seen Alice Westmore made the wife of another.

He remembered first how quickly he had caught the text of the old man; indeed, it seemed to him now that everything he heard struck into him like a brand of fire--for never had life appeared to him as it did to-day.

"_For the hand of G.o.d hath touched me--_" he kept repeating over and over--repeating and then cursing himself for repeating it--for remembering it.

And still it stayed there all day--the unbidden ghost-guest of his soul.

And everything the old preacher said went searing into his quivering soul, and all the time he kept looking--looking at the woman he loved and seeing her giving her love, her life, with a happy smile, to another. And all the time he stood wondering why he came to see it, why he felt as he did, why things hurt him that way, why he acted so weakly, why his conscience had awakened at last, why life hurt him so--life that he had played with as an edged tool--why he could not get away from himself and his memory, but ran always into it, and why at last with a shudder, why did nothing seem to be beyond the wall?

He saw her go off, the wife of another. He saw their happiness--unconscious even that he lived, and he cursed himself and kept saying: "_The hand of G.o.d hath touched me._"

Then he laughed at himself for being silly.

He rode home, but it was not home. Nothing was itself--not even he.

In the watches of one night his life had been changed and the light had gone out.

When night came it was worse. He mounted his horse and rode--where?

And he could no more help it than he could cease to breathe.

He did not guide the saddle mare, she went herself through wood sombre and dark with shadows, through cedar trees, dwarfed, and making pungent the night air with aromatic breath; through old sedge fields, garish in the faint light; up, up the mountain, over it; and at last the mare stopped and stood silently by a newly made grave, while Richard Travis, with strained hard mouth and wet eyes, knelt and, knowing that no hand in the world cared to feel his repentant face in it, he buried it in the new made sod as he cried: "Maggie--Maggie--forgive me, for the hand of G.o.d hath touched me!"

And it soothed him, for he knew that if she were alive he might have lain his head there--on her breast.

CHAPTER XVI

MAMMY MARIA

That Monday was a memorable day for Helen Conway. She went to the mill with less bitterness than ever before--the sting of it all was gone--for she felt that she was helpless to the fate that was hers--that she was powerless in the hands of Richard Travis:

"_I will come for you Monday night. I will take you away from here.

You shall belong to me forever--My Queen!_"

These words had rung in her ears all Sat.u.r.day night, when, after coming home, she had found her father fallen by the wayside.

In the night she had lain awake and wondered. She did not know where she was going--she did not care. She did not even blush at the thought of it. She was hardened, steeled. She knew not whether it meant wife or mistress. She knew only that, as she supposed, G.o.d had placed upon her more than she could bear.

"If my life is wrecked," she said as she lay awake that Sunday night--"G.o.d himself will do it. Who took my mother before I knew her influence? Who made me as I am and gave me poverty with this fatal beauty--poverty and a drunken father and this terrible temptation?"

"Oh, if I only had her, Mammy--negro that she is."

Lily was asleep with one arm around her sister's neck.

"What will become of Lily, in the mill, too?" She bent and kissed her, and she saw that the little one, though asleep, had tears in her own eyes.

Young as she was, Helen's mind was maturer than might have been supposed. And the problem which confronted her she saw very clearly, although she was unable to solve it. The problem was not new, indeed, it has been Despair's conundrum since the world began: Whose fault that my life has been as it is? In her despair, doubting, she cried:

"Is there really a G.o.d, as Mammy Maria told me? Does He interpose in our lives, or are we rushed along by the great moral and physical laws, which govern the universe; and if by chance we fail to harmonize with them, be crushed for our ignorance--our ignorance which is not of our own making?"