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The Heart's Kingdom

by Maria Thompson Daviess · English · Gutenberg #18756 · 407,748 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Heart's Kingdom

Author: Maria Thompson Daviess

Illustrator: W. B. King


        
Release date: July 4, 2006 [eBook #18756]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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THE HEART'S KINGDOM

by

MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS

Author of The Melting of Molly, etc.

Illustrated by W. B. King







[Illustration: "_It's a mighty big turkle," he faltered, and snuggled
closer._]




New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers
Copyright, 1917
by
The Reilly & Britton Co.
Made in U.S.A.
Published September 12, 1917
Second Printing October 1, 1917




CONTENTS


       I The World and the Flesh           9

      II The Harpeth Jaguar               27

     III The Gauntlet                     41

      IV To Turkey Gulch                  61

       V Having It Out                    92

      VI Deep Digging                    109

     VII The Tristan Love Song           132

    VIII Breasting the Gale              146

      IX Into Brambles                   161

       X Water and Oil                   181

      XI A Bit of Raw Life               195

     XII The Tenacious Turtle            211

    XIII The Short-Circuit               227

     XIV Abide With Me                   241

      XV A Clandestine Adventure         258

     XVI The Jewel in the Matrix         283

    XVII The Pageant                     297

   XVIII Light--Into Darkness            312

     XIX The Spark and the Blaze         327

      XX The Covert of Wings             344




The Heart's Kingdom




CHAPTER I

THE WORLD AND THE FLESH


"A beautiful woman is intended to create a heaven on earth and she has
no business wasting herself making imaginary excursions into any future
paradise. The present is her time for action; and again, Charlotte, I
ask you to name the day upon which you intend to marry me," said Nickols
Powers, as he stood lounging in the broad window of Aunt Clara's music
room and gazing down into the subdued traffic of upper Madison Avenue.

"I wish you had never taken me across that ferry and into that room
crowded with redolent humanity to hear an absurd little man string
together vivid, gross words about religion, words that made me tingle
all over," I answered as I threw my coat on a chair, lifted my hat from
my head and sat down on the seat before the dark old piano. "I think
religion is the most awful thing in the world and I am as afraid of it
as I am of--of death. I'm going home to my father."

"Oh, don't be afraid of it. Religion is the most potent form of
intoxication known to the human race. That's why I took you over to hear
the little baseball player. I wanted you to get a sip. But don't let it
go to your head." And Nickols mocked me with soft tenderness in his
smile.

"Well, it frightened me, and I don't like it. I'm going home to my
father and forget it," I reiterated with a kind of numbness upon me, the
like of which I had never before experienced.

"I'll protect you from any religious danger just as effectively as Judge
Powers. I'm younger--slightly--than he, but I know just as many of the
wiles of the world and the flesh as he does and maybe a few more,"
Nickols assured me, with a flash in his dark eyes that was both wicked
and humorous, as well as very delightful.

"And the devil, too! But you don't understand. I must go home to my
father," I answered still again.

"You don't understand yourself," returned Nickols. "There are strange
hieroglyphics imprinted on every woman's heart and a man can read only
an unconnected word here and there when he can get his flashlight thrown
into the depths--if he dares adventure into her life at all. I feel that
I take my own life in my hands when I allow you to talk to me as I am
allowing you to-night."

"How do you know that those hieroglyphics might not mean the salvation
of the world if she could spell them out herself, or some great and good
person took a steady lamp and went down into her heart and--"

"It takes a very wicked man to read a woman; good men are blinded by
them and stumble," Nickols assured me as he came over, stood beside me
and ran his long, slender, artist's fingers up and down the keys of the
piano, which evoked a strange, diabolical sort of harmony from them. "I
understand about it all, so please come tell me you'll marry me." This
time his arms almost encircled me, but I slipped between them as he
laughed at me with his adorable pagan charm.

"No, Nickols, that would be an easy--and--and delightful way out, but I
am really frightened down in some queer part of my anatomy that lies
between my breast bone and my spinal column. Something is stirring in my
heart and I'm afraid of it. I've got to get out in a wilderness and
fight with it."

"Take it out on me," offered Nickols, with a laugh that was both wistful
and provoking.

"No, I've got a home panic and I must go."

"Then when do I get my answer from what is left of you after the
battle?"

"I'll let you know when to come and get it--under the roof of the
Poplars," I answered him from the doorway.

And the very next morning I went down into the Harpeth Valley, driven I
knew not by what, nor to what. I only knew that I felt full of a living,
smothered flame and I was sure that it was best to let it burst forth in
my ancestral abiding place.

I was born of a man who has the most evolved brain in the Harpeth
Valley, who has been a drunkard for twenty years, and of a very
beautiful and haughty woman whose own mother, to the day of her death,
shouted at Methodist love feasts. Is it any wonder that when I was tried
by fire I burned "as the cracklings of thorns under a pot?"

"How _could_ you set that ridiculous little Methodist meeting house on
the very doorstep of my garden, father?" I demanded, as I stood tall and
furious before him in the breakfast room on the morning after my return
home from my winter in the East with Aunt Clara. "Cousin Nickols has
spent many months out of three years on the plans of restoration for
that garden, and he is coming down soon to sketch and photograph it to
use in some of his commissions. What shall I--what will _you_--say to
him when he finds that the vista he kept open for the line of Paradise
Ridge has been cut off by that pile of stones to house the singing of
psalms?" And as I raged I had a feeling of being relentlessly
pursued--by something I didn't understand.

"Madam," returned father, with a dignity he always used with me when he
encountered one of my rages, "you will find that the chapel does not in
any way interfere with Nickols' carefully planned view. Gregory Goodloe
spent many days of thought in seeking to place it so that it would not
intrude itself upon your garden, and he built his parsonage completely
out of view, though it gives him only one large southern window to his
study and only northern ones to his bedroom."

"Does the creature also sleep and eat and have his being right there
behind my hollyhocks?" I demanded, and my rage began to merge into
actual grief, which in turn threatened to come to the surface in hot
tears.

"Now, Charlotte, my daughter," father was beginning to say with soothing
in his voice instead of the belligerence that from my youth up had
always just preceded my floods of tears. Dabney, the shriveled black
butler, who had always devotedly sympathized with my exhibitions of
temperament, to which he had, from my infancy, given the name of
"tantrums," set the platter of fried chicken before father's place at
the damask and silver-spread old table by the window, through which the
morning sun was shining genially. Then, with a smile as broad and genial
as that of the sun, he drew out my chair from behind the ancestral
silver coffee urn, which was puffing out clouds of fragrant steam.

"Breakfast am sarved, honey chile," he crooned soothingly, "an' yo'
Mammy done put the liver wing right ag'in yo' fork."

Dabney had many times stemmed my floods with choice food and was trying
his favorite method of pacification.

I faltered and wavered at the temptation. I was hungry.

"Just wait until you see Goodloe and talk it over with him," father
said, as he seized the advantage of my wavering and seated himself
opposite me as Dabney pushed in my chair and whisked the cover off the
silver sugar bowl and presented one of his old willow-ware cups for
father's two lumps and a dash of cream. "I asked him to--"

"See him? You don't expect me to discuss Nickols' and my garden with an
ignorant bucolic Methodist minister, who probably doesn't know a
honeysuckle from a jimson weed, do you?" I asked with actual rage rising
again above the tears as I literally dashed the cream into his cup and
deluged the boiling coffee down upon it so that a scalding splatter
peppered my hand. "I never want to see or hear or speak to or about
him. I'll build a trellis as high as his church, run evergreen
honeysuckle on it and go my way in an opposite direction from his.
I'll--" Just here I observed consternation spread over Dabney's black
face, then communicate itself to father's distressed countenance as he
glanced out the window. Quickly he pushed his morning julep behind the
jar of roses in the center of the table, while Dabney flung a napkin
over the silver pitcher with frost on its sides and mint nodding over
its brim.

And then, as I was about to pour my own coffee and launch forth on
another tirade on the subject of my neighbor, I heard a rich tenor voice
singing just outside the window in the garden beside the steps that led
down from the long windows in the dining room to the old flagstone walk.
Nickols and I had searched through volumes of dusty antique prints to
see just how we wanted that walk to lead out to the sunken garden beyond
the tall old poplars. I also saw the handle of a rake or hoe in action
across the window landscape and heard unmistakable sounds of vigorous
gardening.

I rose to my feet with battle in my eyes and then stopped perfectly
still and listened--unwillingly but compelled.

    "Drink to me only with thine eyes
    And I will pledge with mine,"

were the words that floated in at the window on the fragrant morning
sunbeams, in a voice of the most penetrating tenderness I had ever felt
break against my heartstrings.

"I--I--he sometimes demolishes a--a few weeds," father faltered, while
Dabney ducked his cotton-wool old head and slipped out of the door.

"You allow him to work in my--garden--and--" I faltered, just recovering
from the impact of the words of my favorite song of songs hurled at me
by the unseen enemy, when I was interrupted by his appearance in the
open door and we stood facing each other.

I am a woman who has very decided tastes about the biological man. I
know just how I want the creatures to look, and I haven't much interest
in one that isn't at least of the type of my preferred kind. Because I
am very tall and broad and deep-bosomed and vivid and high colored, and
have strong white teeth that crunch up about as much food in the
twenty-four hours as most field hands consume, and altogether I am very
much like one of the most vigorous of Sorolla's paintings, that is the
probable pathological reason I have always preferred an evolved Whistler
masculine nocturne that retreats to the limits of my comprehension and
then beckons me to follow. All other men I have grouped beyond the
border of my feminine nature and sought to waste no thought upon them.
It was a shock to come, suddenly, in my own breakfast room, face to face
with a type of man I had never before met. The enemy was astonishingly
large and lithe and distinctly resembled one of the big gold-colored
lions that live in the wilds of the Harpeth Mountains out beyond
Paradise Ridge. His head, with its tawny thatch that ought to have waved
majestically but which was sleek and decorous to the point of
worldliness, was poised on his neck and shoulders with a singularly
strong line that showed through a silk soft collar, held together by an
exquisitely worldly amethyst silk scarf which, it was a shock to see,
matched glints from eyes back under his heavy gold brows with what
appeared to be extreme sophistication. After the shock of the tie the
loose gray London worsted coat and trousers made only a passing
impression; and from my involuntary summary of the whole surprising man,
which had taken less than an instant, my dazed brain came back and was
held and concentrated by the beauty of the smile that flooded out over
me in welcome after my father's hurried introduction.

"The Reverend Mr. Gregory Goodloe--my daughter Charlotte," father
announced, as he rose and waved in my direction a hand that was cordial
to the point of bravado.

"I'm so glad you came in time to see your crocuses and anemones, Miss
Powers," the Jaguar said as he took my hand in his. "Dabney has let me
help him hand-weed them and they are a glory, aren't they?" While he
spoke he still held my hand and I was still too dazed to regain
possession of it. Father saved the situation.

"Sit down, sit down, Parson, and let Charlotte give you a cup of coffee
while it is on the simmer," he urged with hasty hospitality as if intent
upon effectively bottling me up, at least for the immediate present.
"She was just pouring my cup. Will you say grace before I take my first
sip?" was the high explosive he further proceeded to hurl in my face.

And as he spoke I sank dumbly into my chair and helplessly bowed my head
to a ceremony so obsolete in the world from which I had come that I felt
as if I was slipping back into the days of the pioneer, when the customs
of life were still primitive and dictated by emotion rather than mental
science.

And there, with father's concealed mint julep right against his
interlaced fingers, the mountain lion bowed his crested head and
involved me in prayer for the first time since chapel-service in my
college days.

"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof ... for which we give
thanks, thy children, with Lord Jesus, Amen!"

"Amen," mumbled father as if from the depths of embarrassment, and
against my will, as it were, a queer sort of a croon of an echo came
from my own throat.

Also that was the first time I had ever heard words of prayer under the
roof of the Poplars. It embarrassed me and I hated it and the cause of
it. The spell which had possessed me since the entrance of the Reverend
Goodloe, vanished, and the rage that had been in me at the discovery of
the intrusion of his chapel and himself upon my life when I had come
home to be free to be wicked, boiled up within me and then sugared down
to a rich--and dangerous--syrup. While I poured his coffee I again took
stock of him, this time coldly and with deadly intent. The reasons for
his entry into my hitherto satisfactory family life, even at breakfast
time, I did not know, any more than I knew the reason for the chapel on
the other side of the hollyhocks, but I felt that I feared both and
intended to get rid of them. If the enemy had been what one could
reasonably expect a young Methodist preacher to be, I would have routed
him and his meekness within the hour and had the chapel moved to a lot
on a side street in town within the week. However, when a hunter comes
suddenly upon a Harpeth jaguar he is glad to use his best repeater and
he is careful how he shoots, though if he is very skillful he may tease
the lion aloft with a few nipping shots. I felt suddenly very strong for
the fight that I knew was on, though the lion didn't possess that
knowledge as yet. Deliberately I fired a preliminary bullet that seemed
to graze father, though it left the Parson unharmed.

"Will you have your mint julep before I pour your coffee, Mr. Goodloe?"
I asked, with seemingly careless friendliness. "Dabney, put fresh ice in
father's glass and fill mine and Mr. Goodloe's."

"I was feeling a little under the weather this morning," said father
hastily, as he set his glass from behind the rose jar upon Dabney's
waiter and motioned it all away from him, thus denying the morning
friend of his lifetime. I had never drunk a julep before breakfast in my
life, only tasted around the frosty edges of father's, but I held my
ground, and held out my glass to Dabney, who falteringly, almost in
terror, took the frosted silver pitcher from the sideboard and poured me
an unusually large draft of the family beverage.

"Will you have yours now, Mr. Goodloe?" I asked again with still more of
the sugared solicitation.

"No, I believe I prefer the coffee, but don't pour it until you have
drunk your julep; you know frost is a thing that soon passes," was the
cheerful answer, though a suspicion of an amethyst glint made me know
that the Jaguar had at least heard the zip of the bullet.

I loathed that mixture of ice and sugar and mint and whiskey but I had
to drink it, and it heated me up inside both physically and mentally,
and took away all the queer dogging fear. And because of it I don't
remember what else happened at that breakfast except that I wanted to
clutch and cling to the warm, strong hand that I again found mine in at
the time of parting. But I didn't; at least, I don't think I did. After
it was taken away from me I went very slowly up to my room and again
went to bed, Mammy caressingly officiating and rejoicing that I was
going to "nap the steam cars outen my bones."

I fell asleep with the continued strains of "Drink to me only" in my
ears, and wondering if I ought to put it down as insult added to injury,
and I awoke several hours later to find Letitia Cockrell, one of the
dear friends whom many generations had bestowed upon me, sitting on the
foot of my bed consuming the last of the box of marrons with which
Nickols had provisioned my journey down from New York. I was glad I had
tucked the note that came in the box under my pillow the night before. I
trust Letitia and she is entirely sophisticated, but she has never had a
lover who lives in Greenwich Village, New York, America.

"Is this the open season for two-day hangovers, in New York?" she
demanded as she sniffed me suspiciously at the same time she dimpled and
smiled at me.

"No, this is not a metropolitan hangover. It was acquired at breakfast,
Letitia," I answered her as I sat up and stretched out my bare arms to
give her a good shake and a hug. "'You may break, you may shatter the
glass if you will, but the scent of the julep will hang 'round you
still,'" I misquoted as I drew my knees up into my embrace and took the
last remaining marron.

"Why, Mammy said Mr. Goodloe had breakfast with you. Did you sneak it
from the judge's pitcher?" demanded Letitia, as she likewise drew her
knees up into her arms and settled herself against one of the posts of
my bed for the many hours' résumé of our individual existences in which
we always indulged upon being reunited after separation.

"I did not," I answered. "I drank it before his eyes, and then I don't
remember what happened and I don't care."

"What?"

"Just that. I never have been drunk because I never could drink enough.
I've always felt that there isn't enough liquid in the world to faze me,
and I don't like it anyway, but Dabney was so impressed by His Worship
that he poured it double for me before I had had breakfast. I hope I
staggered or swore but I don't think I did. The Reverend Goodloe can
tell you better than I. Ask him."

"Gregory Goodloe? Oh, Charlotte!"

"That's the point I was coming to, Letitia: Just who is this Reverend
Goodloe that I shouldn't drink a quart of mint julep before him if I
want to? I had well over a pint of champagne with a Mr. Justice two
nights before I left New York and I stopped then out of courtesy to one
of the generals whom we expect to defend us from the Kaiser. Who is your
Gregory Goodloe? Tell we all about him, unexpurgated and unafraid."

"Didn't you know about him--and the chapel before you came?" Letitia
queried cautiously, as if fearing the explosion she felt was sure to
result.

"I did not," I answered. "I met him and his chapel and the mint julep
all in the same five minutes, and is it any wonder I went down? Go on.
Tell me the worst or the best. I'm ready." And as I spoke I settled my
pillows comfortably, getting a little thrill from the crumpled letter
underneath the bottom one.




CHAPTER II

THE HARPETH JAGUAR


"It is beautifully romantic, but I don't know what we are going to do
about it," answered Letitia with genuine trouble, puckering her brow
under one of her smooth waves of seal-brown hair. Letitia is one of the
wonderful variety of women who patch out life, piece by piece, in a
beautiful symmetrical pattern and who do not have imagination enough to
admire anything about a riotous crazy quilt. She is in love with Clifton
Gray, has been since she wound her brown braids about her head, and is
piecing strips of him into her life-fabric by the very sanest
love--courtship--marriage design.

"We just can't go on as we have been doing lately," she continued. "We
all decided that you would know what to do about him, and would do it
when you came home. We suspected Judge Powers hadn't written you all the
facts when you didn't come and the building went on up. You will be
able to do something about him, won't you?"

"I think it is likely," I answered, with the brittle sugar in my voice
that Letitia only half knows the flavor of. "But don't try to sketch
things, Letitia. Begin at the beginning and go straight to the end; I'll
pick up the pieces."

"Well, of course you remember the Bishop Goodloe romance, don't you?"
asked Letitia, hopeful that she could get a small start ahead on her
chronicle.

"I don't remember anything about any bishop, ever. I forget things about
that kind of people. What did, or didn't he do?"

"Charlotte!" remonstrated Letitia. "He was the last of the Goodloes who
built that old Goodloe home on exactly the place where the first Goodloe
set the stakes of the first stockade put up in the Harpeth Valley, right
here in Goodloets. It burned down the night he married that Miss Gregory
in New York, before we were born. Don't you remember we used to play in
the ruins, just over here beyond the garden where the chapel stands now?
Your father bought the property. Part of your garden is old Madam
Goodloe's garden and that's why it was so wonderful for Judge Powers to
give the lot and let Mr. Goodloe build the chapel there. We all felt
that, though some of us were scared when we thought about what you might
do when you came home. Still, after we saw that wonderful little stone
chapel that Mr. Goodloe had one of the greatest architects in New York
design, after he had sent him packages of sketches of your garden and
the Poplars, so it would only make it all the more beautiful, we felt
better. You don't really mind about it, do you, dear?" Letitia's voice
was beseechingly enthusiastic, though keyed down with a note of anxiety.

"Go on!" I commanded, packing down the rage in the dark corners of my
inmost heart.

"Nobody ever knew why Bishop Goodloe never came back after he married
while on a mission from the Southern Methodist Conference to the
Northern Methodist Conference. He severed his relations with his own
Conference, and he never preached again though he was one of the most
wonderful and eloquent preachers the South has ever known. He was the
youngest bishop the church had ever ordained. Nobody ever knew what
happened, and all we know now is that this perfectly beautiful man, who
is the bishop's son, came down to the General Conference in Nashville,
was examined and ordained, and the presiding bishop sent him out here to
Goodloets last November. We don't know anything about him except that he
has been fighting in the trenches in France for a year and has had a
bullet cut out of his left lung. Everybody adores him, and we all sit
spellbound listening to him preach, I think mostly on account of his
voice, because none of us ever seems to remember what he is preaching
about. He's been having services in the ballroom at the Country Club but
he is going to dedicate the chapel soon and we are all relieved. It has
been fun to go out to church at the Club twice every Sunday and to
prayer meeting on Wednesday night all winter, and we've danced in the
long parlor at home and in the double parlors at Jessie Litton's so as
not to disarrange the pews, I mean the chairs, in the ballroom, but now
that the spring has come we--we need the Club. I'm glad you will be here
for the dedication, and you will help us kind of--kind of--"

"Taper off from your religious spree?" I asked with a laugh that Letitia
echoed shamefacedly.

"That's an awful way to put it--but--"

"True?"

"We've all tried hard, but--but it is such a--a bore. It doesn't seem
fair to enjoy Gregory Goodloe so much at dinners and parties and not
show our respect and--and admiration by being good church members.
Jessie joined his study workers and she took a class of the awful little
children from down in the Settlement beyond the Phosphate Mills, who all
smelled terribly. She worked hard with them twice a week for a month,
and then Mother Spurlock, who is the front pillar of his congregation,
found that she had taught all the dirty little things to sew with their
left hands. She came in one morning and found them all stitching away
industriously backwards, just because Jessie is left-handed herself.
Mother Elsie laughed until she lost her breath and Mr. Goodloe had to
help unloosen her belt for her. The meeting broke up with ice cream on
Jessie for everybody. We all belong to home mission societies and sewing
circles and--"

"You want me to get you out of your purgatory and let you backslide
to--"

"Don't say it!" exclaimed Letitia with a laugh. "But we just want not to
hurt his feelings and--"

"We won't," I said grimly. "Now let's talk about the ball out at the
Club we are going to give Nickols when he comes down the first of May."

"That's just what I mean. I knew you'd understand and I am so relieved
that you are not angry about the chapel and things. We can leave it all
to you and we'll have the times of our lives. Billy Harvey says his
ankles are getting stiff, it's been so long since he has fox-trotted. Do
call Mammy or Sallie and let's look at your clothes." With which Letitia
descended from her spiritual heights into the realm of the material and
plunged with both Mammy and Sallie into a riot of clothes.

For an hour or two I lay back in my pillows and watched the two black
women and the white one indulge in primitive decorative orgies, and from
their delight my eyes would glance out and fix themselves wistfully on
the dim line of Paradise Ridge which was cut by the square steeple of
weathered stone just where Old Harpeth humps itself up above the rest of
the Ridge; and something sore and angry and trapped hurt under my
breast.

"The earth is the Lord's--" chanted itself in my mind to the tune of
"Drink to me only," and my hand curled around the letter under my pillow
as if for comfort and--defense.

"It is just as you told me that night at the piano, Nickols dear:
'Religion is the most potent form of intoxication known to the human
race,' and apparently all my friends have been getting the drink habit
badly. I'll rescue the poor dears and have an interesting time doing
it," I said to myself after Letitia had departed with my most choice
millinery creation fastened down upon her sleek braids because she found
she could not live without it.

And then a strange thing happened, as I lay prone between the
lavender-scented sheets spread on the four-poster bed of my foremothers,
ready to drift off into another "bone resting" nap. The flood of tears
that had risen from my heart when I had sat that night a week ago and
listened to that remarkable little baseball evangelist, the tide of
which had been rolled back when Nickols had bent his beautiful dark head
against mine in Aunt Clara's music room and whispered above the roar of
New York, "religion is the most potent form of intoxication" to me,
again welled from my heart and this time flooded my lashes and my cheek
and my pillow. What was strangest of all, they seemed to wash away all
the tears of anger and fear that I had been pressing back into my depths
from breakfast time, and left me weak and again ready for sleep. And
like a comforted little child, I slept.

It was sunset when I awoke, and I felt as strong as two women and ready
for action, the call for which was upon me by the time Sallie had put me
into her favorite creation, selected from the ones she had hung in
closets and wardrobe.

"Mister Billy Harvey and Mister Hampton Dibrell is down on the front
porch ready to gallivant you, honey-bunch, and I seen Miss Letitia and
her Mister Cliff Gray coming in one direction and Miss Jessie in
another, so I reckon Sallie had better hurry with that New York twilight
she's fixing on you," Mammy announced as she stood in my doorway and
beamed upon me. "An' I expects the parson will be stepping over
likewise fer a few words, seeing you was so sweet and showed sich pretty
manners to him this morning," she added with reverent delight.

"Sweet? Showed such pretty manners?" I gasped, as Sallie fastened the
last hook and eye and stood beside Mammy to admire me.

"'Twas no more than you oughter done to the preacher, and I was proud of
my raising of you when you helt on to him and begged him to stay to
dinner. I was sho' disappointed that he had to leave us. I'm a Colored
Methodist, I am, and if I do say it, I knows how to shake a young pullet
in the skillet fer a preacher's taste, black or white. Now go on down
and stop that buzzing fer you on the front porch. Sallie, come and carry
out the tea and cakes to the guests," with which command to both of us
Mammy rolled her two hundred and fifty pounds down the hall with great
majesty, while Sallie meekly followed in her wake.

"Sweet! Showed such pretty manners!" I quoted to myself as I slowly
descended the steps and went out on the wide porch to find my friends
assembled under the budding rose vine that wreathed the tall white
pillars of the Poplars.

The parson was not there.

"Rescued!" exclaimed Billy as he grasped one of my hands and hung on
with a very good imitation of a drowning man seizing a lifeline. They
all laughed and Hampton Dibrell held my other hand as ardently, though
not in quite such light vein. I had to rescue it to accept Clifton
Gray's nosegay of huge violets from his greenhouse, and I embraced
Jessie with the nosegay pressed to her pink cheeks.

"Oh, Charlotte, I could fox-trot with you a week and not hesitate,"
exclaimed Billy, still clinging to me.

"Let's begin to-night," I assented warmly. Billy is contagious and to
dance with him is a high art.

"Let's motor out to the Club in Hamp's car and mine, have a chicken
supper and dance until sun-up," suggested Billy.

"We can stop by and get Mark Morgan and Nell, and I believe Harriet
Henderson will come along, if everybody asks her--all the men, I mean,"
Letitia added with enthusiasm to match Billy's. Harriet Henderson is the
latest emerged widow in Goodloets and consequently is most interesting
to the masculine world at present.

"Let's start now, so as to give the chicken plenty of time to get into
the frying pan and over the fire," said Hampton, who is always the
practical member to bring up the details of any situation.

"I'm just from the tennis courts and I'll have to stop to dress, I'm
afraid," said Letitia meekly, as if she felt sure of a storm of
remonstrance.

"People don't dress to dance these days, Letitia," said Billy, with the
greatest innocence of mien and expression, a manner he always uses in
speaking to Letitia's rather literal directness and in which he delights
greatly. "They undress. You are unclothed enough as to ankles and if you
roll the sleeves of your tennis shirt to your shoulders, take off your
collar and tuck in the flaps, it will be enough to satisfy our cravings
for fashionable and suitable attire. We really want fried chicken rather
than chicken--"

"That will do, Billy," Letitia answered him with gentle firmness.

"That was just what I remarked, Letitia dear. That will do, for we want
chicken dressed with cream gravy and don't care about any swathed in
chiffon. And furthermore--"

"Do hush, Billy; look who's coming," Jessie interrupted him, and there
before my eyes I saw my entire group of friends begin to preen
themselves into new beings. Letitia smoothed down her skirts a fraction
of an inch, rolled down her sleeves another fraction and pushed back
into her braids a brown lock that was rioting across her brow. Jessie
shook out her muslin ruffles, reefed a fold of net higher across her
neck, and pinned it in place with a jeweled pin, while Hampton's and
Billy's and Cliff's expressions and poses of countenance and bodies
suddenly fell into lines of decorum.

"Great Smokes! We all forgot it was prayer meeting to-night, and it'll
be no trotting the fox for ours," Billy groaned, while he rose to his
feet with a smile of angelic sweetness. "Hello, Parson! We were just
beginning to think about you," was his greeting to the Sacred Jaguar who
had come through the garden and around the house. I felt sure that he
had heard Billy's plaint of disappointment about the dance, for there
was a quick glint of the amethysts as he halted and stood on the walk
below us and smiled up at us.

"I welcomed Miss Powers for breakfast, and now I find I want to come
over and do it again for tea," he said, and as I was perfectly cool,
sober and in my right mind at the moment he spoke, I had to concede that
his voice was the most wonderful I had ever heard, and something in me
made me resent it as well as the curious veneer that had spread over my
friends at his entry upon the scene. There they stood and sat, six
perfectly rational, fairly moral, representative free and equal
citizens, cowed by the representative of something that they neither
understood nor cared about, and it made me furious. They all wanted to
go to the Club to dance, to do the natural, usual, perfectly harmless
thing, and they were being constrained. If they had wanted to go to the
prayer meeting as they wanted to dance, they would have been natural and
joyful and eager about it.

"I resent, even _I_ resent people's being bored with the God they think
exists, and I think it is disrespectful to go into His presence like
that," I said to myself, and then I suddenly determined to begin my
rescue work for the religiously involved, and now I felt was the
appointed time. Also I felt the excitement that comes from turning and
facing the foe which has pursued.

"I'm glad you came over, Mr. Goodloe," I said with nice, cool
friendliness in my voice. "Billy was just planning a glorious fox-trot
for this evening and then suddenly remembered with dismay that you were
to have your--entertainment at the Club to-night. Couldn't we--we make
some sort of compromise? Or at least couldn't you cut your--prayers
short so he can get in an hour or two of his favorite pleasure
after--after duty well done?" As I spoke I had come to the edge of the
steps and thus stood alone above him, looking down on him with a kind of
cool aloofness as if he belonged to another world, while I heard all of
his recent converts grouped back of me give little gasps of dismay.




CHAPTER III

THE GAUNTLET


Was that young Methodist minister crushed by my plainly intended
gauntlet flung down to him? He was not.

"I'm glad I came over in time to put Billy out of his misery," he
answered, smiling up at me with a quick comprehension that was enraging.
"I'm going to have informal services in the chapel to-night to try out
the acoustics before the contractor turns over the building. I am not
satisfied about the sounding board he has put in, and the only way is to
try it with at least part of the seats occupied. We'll sing a bit and
plan the dedication; not have a formal service. So then, Billy, you can
have your fox-trotting and a good time to all of you, bless you, my
children." As he spoke he smiled at the entire group with the most
delightful interest and pleasure. He was dressed in a straight black
coat with a plain silk vest cut around a white collar that buttoned in
the back, and his dull gold mane was brushed down sleek and close to his
beautiful head. Not a flash of expression in his strong face showed that
he felt any resentment or dismay at thus having some of his most
prominent church members backslide from his prayer meeting into a
fox-trot, and yet I knew--knew that he fully appreciated the situation
and laid the blame of it where the blame was due.

"Of course we will come to the services first--that is, if you--if you
don't object," Letitia said with her usual directness and lack of any
kind of finesse, thus bringing the situation to a decided head.

"Why not come over for the songs and then not stay for the conference?"
was the genial answer that positively astonished me, and as he spoke he
came up the steps and stood beside me. "Dabney and I found the first
Star of Bethlehem when we were weeding this afternoon. I brought it to
you carefully, and can I have a cup of that tea he has been trying to
make you serve for the last five minutes?" With these words the Reverend
Mr. Goodloe turned me around and sent me to the tea tray that Dabney
and Sallie had put on a table under the rose vine; but not before he had
taken up my hand, put the star flower in it and curled my fingers over
it. "I'll pass the muffins, Billy, and you take the cakes for Miss
Powers, and be more careful than you were last Sunday with my collection
plate for the poor." Billy feigned confusion, accepted the plate and was
just about to begin a defense, when a diversion occurred to stop him.

"There comes Mark and Mrs. Mark," he exclaimed, "but they have got an
offspring apiece in their embrace and several trailers. Somebody ought
to remonstrate with Nell Morgan or have the firmness to apply the
superfluous blind kitten treatment every spring. Three children are
patriotic, but five are populistic and ought to be frowned upon," and
Billy grumbled all the while the Morgans were flocking up the front
walk. When they came to the steps the Jaguar descended and held out his
clerically befrocked arms so that the gurgler from Mark's shoulder and
the giggler from Nell's arms both fell into his embrace at one time.
"You young marplots, you!" he said as the gurgler printed a wet kiss on
his left ear and regarded him with rapture while the small cooer,
proclaimed as feminine by neck and sleeve ribbons, cuddled against his
shoulder with soft confidence. "They're going to take you both down to
the river and drown you," he confided with a soft note in his voice that
was an answer to the coo.

"I wish you would," said Mark, as, with a laugh, he shook my hand
extended from the group around me, composed of Nell and the other three
kiddies, all crowded together in one passionate greeting. "Nurse and
Julia and the house and garden man have all gone to a wedding, so we
have fed 'em and are now starting out for a razoo, and we don't care
whether it lasts until midnight or not. Young Charlotte, you hug one
side of your Aunt Charlotte and let Jimmy get his innings on the other
side. Here, break away, all of you!" and while everybody laughed, Mark
disentangled the greetings, and seated the separated juvenile members in
a row on the steps beside the parson and the two babes. Nell he left in
the hollow of my arm.

"Oh, it is so good to have you at home, Charlotte," she said, with
another hug. "We miss you terribly. We depend on you for everything.
Things don't go right without you. I had a terrible time with--that is,
you haven't seen baby yet. Give her to me, Mr. Goodloe," and as she
spoke Nell leaned over to get the cooer out of the Jaguar's arms for my
inspection.

"You'll get neither Babe nor Suckling," was his answer as he cuddled the
two closer and hunched his shoulders in Nell's direction. "Don't you
know enough to let well enough alone? If they have got to go out to the
Club and fox-trot until midnight they ought to have repose now."

"We promised to be good at church, but we didn't promise anything about
the Country Club, and if we go there we are going to be as bad as
anybody out there is," announced small Charlotte with determined
composure. "Dabney says that fox-trotting is a devil's dance and we want
to see you all do it with him."

"Help!" exclaimed Billy, while Mr. Goodloe put his arm around Charlotte
and drew her to him with a kind of fierce tenderness.

"Isn't she awful?" exclaimed Nell. "We meant to ask you if we could take
them with us out to the Club to prayer meeting. Some of the Settlement
women bring their babies and I know mine will be as good. Charlotte and
Sue and Jimmy promised, and the sound of your voice bewitches the babies
as it does all of us."

As Nell finished speaking and bent to pat the head of the Suckling on
his shoulder, the Reverend Mr. Goodloe looked straight into my eyes and
laughed, perfect comprehension of me and my revolt in his direct
amethyst glances which shot into my depths.

"They are all going over to listen to Mr. Goodloe sing hymns at his
chapel, Nell, and then all of you are coming by here for me to go out to
the Club to dance a few hours," was my answer to the shot as I calmly
refused the invitation into the fold that had been given me with the
rest of the backsliding flock.

"We can't go--the babies would never in the world--" Nell was beginning
to exclaim.

"Drat 'em!" exclaimed Billy, looking down aggrievedly at the small crew
of marplots. "A pair of perfectly good chaperons are hard to get, and to
think of that bunch of little miseries getting in the way of a good old
fox--"

"They'll all go to sleep during the services and I'll keep them on my
bed in the parsonage until the fun is over, and agree to deliver them on
claim," Mr. Goodloe interrupted Billy to say with quiet decision.

"Now that is what I call some church relation, nursery and parsonage
combined," said Billy with the deepest gratitude. "The rest of you hurry
over those muffins, even if you haven't had any of Mammy's for six
months, and, since the chicken fry is off, go home to get suppers and
ready for psalm-singing and foxing. Parson, you are some sport, and I'll
hold both of those puppies while you drink your tea from the hands of
fair Charlotte."

"Thank you, I don't believe I want any tea after all, and I think I'll
take these 'puppies' on home with me through the garden, for they are
both dying to the world." As he spoke the parson rose to his feet and
stood with the two drowsing babies in his arms, looking down at me as I
stood with his cup of tea in my hand. And as he looked I felt my whole
rebellious heart and mind laid bare and I knew that he knew that I was
ready to fight him to the last ditch in the battle for possession of the
souls of my friends. I would fight for their independence of thought
and sincerity of life, and he would fight to lead them off into a far
country in quest of what I considered a tradition, a shibboleth, "a
potent agent for intoxication" of the reason by which man must progress.
I also knew that I faced a foe versed in the warfare between religion
and modern scientific decisions about it and that he would be one worthy
of my metal. His refusal of my cup of tea, for which he had announced
that he came, was his gauntlet and I accepted it as I turned with the
queer sugared rage in my heart and set the cup on the table.

And as I had planned, and the Jaguar directed, the evening came to pass.
While I slipped into some dancing fluff, the strains of the most
wonderful hymn that the Christian religion possesses floated across my
garden and into my window and again beat against my heart. The parson
was singing with the rest of them, but his voice seemed to lift theirs
and bear them aloft on the strong, wide wings that went soaring away
into the night, even up to the bright stars that gleamed beyond the tips
of the old graybeard poplars. A queer tight breath gripped my heart for
a second as his plea, "Abide with me, fast falls the eventide," beat
against it, then I laughed it away.

"It _is_ 'a potent agent for intoxication' when brewed by the Reverend
Mr. Goodloe, and here's where I run, both physically and mentally," I
said to myself as I ran down the steps and out to the two cars that
stood honking impatiently by the gate.

I don't think I ever enjoyed a dance more, and I am sure that my
pleasure was partly due to the wild spirits of the religiously released
who were having the first joy fling for six months.

"I'll not get enough until I wilt upon the floor and have to be carried
out," said Billy, as he held me closer and slid two steps to the right
and then back to get me out of the way of Hampton and Harriet Henderson,
who were dancing with regardless joy.

"Will you feel that way about church next Sunday?" I asked him, but my
demand made no apparent dent, for he danced on without answering.

At an hour after that of midnight the revelers came home and left me at
my gate, by request, to walk alone in the brilliant spring moonlight
through my garden to the wide door back of the white pillars. After they
had seen me safely started, they glided away and I stood on the steps
and watched Nell and Mark reclaim their family from a tall dark figure
that carried out two loads to the parental arms. Then the hush that
comes upon the world in the midnight hours fell over the Poplars and I
stood leaning against one of the tall pillars and reveled in it.

Goodloets is one of the tradition-grayed old towns that are rooted deep
in the Harpeth Valley since the days of the Colonies, and in it can be
found perhaps the purest Americanism on the American continent. The
Poplars, under whose broad roof I made the seventh generation nested and
fledged, spreads out its wings and gables upon a low hill which is the
first swell of the Harpeth hills, and the rest of the old town stretches
out on the hillside before it down to the valley, in which runs the
Harpeth River, curving around the town and flowing out of the valley to
the Mississippi. Behind the Poplars roll the fields and meadows of the
Home Farm, which has given food and sustenance to the Poplars' brood
since the days of the redskins, when it was cleared by the first Powers
and his servants, with muskets ready to fire into the surrounding
forests. To the left of the Poplars and beyond the chapel lies the
Settlement, in which those lacking in worldly goods have lived for
generations in a kind of semi-poverty, which is about the only poverty
known in the Harpeth Valley. Lately, the Settlement has taken unto
itself a measure of prosperity, because of the great tannery and harness
works in its midst on the banks of the river, which is bringing in gold
from Russia and France. Everybody has made money in the last few years,
and the fashionable wing of Goodloets to the left of the Poplars shows
improvements and restorations that are both costly and sometimes
amazing. However, fortunately the inhabitants of the old village are
conservative, and very little of the delicious moss of tradition has
been scratched off; it has only been clipped into prosperous decorum,
and antiquity still flings its glamour over the town.

"I feel as much rooted as one of the old poplars," I said to myself as
some whim made me go down the steps and out into the garden, along the
walks with their budding borders of narcissus and peonies, down through
Nickols' sunken garden to the two oldest of all the poplars that now
seemed to be standing sentinel to prevent any raid from me on the little
stone meeting house over the lilac hedge. "You dear old graybeard," I
said to the one on my left, as I looked up and saw a faint feathering of
silver on its branches. And as I spoke I took the old trunk into my
embrace and laid my cheek against the rough bark.

And then something happened. Afterwards I was glad that I was leaning
against the strength of the old graybeard poplar and hidden behind it.

Suddenly from out the shadows beyond the lilac hedge, through whose bare
branches any movement in the yard of the chapel showed plainly, a woman
came stumbling along towards the gate and beside her walked the parson
with his arm supporting hers. She was sobbing the hard, dry sobs that
any woman knows are those of despair, and which call any other woman who
hears them. My first impulse was to run to the hedge and speak to her;
then I stopped, for I was arrested by what the parson was saying to her.

"What does it matter, Martha? You have your Master's forgiveness and His
permission to go and sin no more, even though those sins be as
scarlet." And as he spoke his voice was that of quiet authority as if he
felt fully his apostolic right to unloose sins upon this earth.

"He'll come back now that _she_ has, and he'll come to me again. I can't
fight him. I'll slip back into hell. Just give me the money to go out
into the city and I'll not bother anybody any more. I'll take the child
and I'll die for all anybody in Goodloets ever knows. Lend me the money;
I'll send it back!" The girl's voice was hard and defiant and she turned
and faced the minister as if at bay. "Give me that money, if all that
praying and singing and preaching that you've done is true. I want to go
in the morning before he follows her here and puts me in hell again. God
won't clean me twice."

"You shall go," came the calm answer in the apostle's beautiful voice,
"but I will have to have a few days to provide a place of safety for you
in the city, where the child can be cared for while you get suitable
work."

"I won't wait. He'll follow her and he'll look down on me and the child
and damn me again. I won't wait. I'm weak and I dasn't. Give me that
money to-night!" And the demand was passionate and savage.

"Then I'll meet you at the morning train with it and rush you to a place
of safety if there is no other way. You must go back home now, and it
will be best not to tell anyone where you are going until you no longer
fear your weakness, for they might betray your hiding place. Strength
will be given you, Martha, if you only ask."

"I'll pray, Parson, I'll pray, now that you are going to give me my
chance to get strong enough to be good. I'll work and I'll pray, but
hide me until I do get strong." And the hard, dry sobs melted as the
girl put her head down upon the gate a moment and then went out through
it.

"God bless you, child, and keep you ever in thought of Him," were the
words that she carried away with her as she hurried down the street
toward the Settlement.

Then for a second some awful fear came across my heart that I did not
understand. I now know that it was a premonition of what was to wring my
own heart and I cowered against the old tree in agony. Gregory Goodloe
was not more than six feet away from me on the other side of the
budding, fragrant hedge, and in the moonlight I could see the beautiful
strength of his golden head and strong placid face, on which lines of
pain were drawn, and I had to restrain myself from crying out to him in
my own pain. I wanted to go quickly and cling to his strength. Then I
stopped and listened.

He had raised his face to the stars and was praying.

"O Father," he asked, as if speaking to someone with whom he walked in
the cool of the midnight, "help the weak on whom the strong prey."

Then he went into the dark door of the little chapel and left me out in
the cold midnight alone. The fear was gone, and comforted I went back
through my budding garden and arrived at the front door just as old Mr.
Pate, the telegraph operator at the little station down the street,
turned in at the gate.

"Miss Charlotte," he puffed, as he fairly flung the telegram at me,
"this come fer you at ten o'clock and I risked it and run up here with
it after I heard them ottermobiles go by. I'm courting Mrs. Jennie Hicks
myself and I understands about courtings." And before I could speak he
had run on back down the street.

As I stood and looked at the yellow envelope fear again gripped my
heart, and without opening it I walked into the house, locking the great
door behind me with trembling fingers, and went toward a light I saw
shining from the trellised back porch and which I did not understand. I
have never in my life been the least bit afraid of anything, except
something within my own body, from the hideous pain of my green-apple
days to the pain I had felt as I talked beside the piano with Nickols in
New York, a thousand miles away; but something made me pause just for a
second in the pantry doorway before I stepped into the light upon the
porch. I shall never forget the scene that was enacted before my
wondering eyes in the dim light of a candle burning upon a table near
the refrigerator.

Father stood with a bowl of ice in his hand and his fingers were just
closing around a squat, black bottle that I knew contained the rarest
and choicest whiskey ever run from a distillery. His iron-gray hair was
rampant, his dressing gown fell away from his throat and showed the
knotting of the great cords that ran down into his shoulders, and his
dark eyes glittered under their heavy, black brows, while his mouth was
twisted and white. Then, as I looked, something happened. A stealthy
padding of feet came around the house from the garden and up the back
steps, under the budding rose vine that was climbing through the trellis
as if to clutch at the light, and a huge figure loomed up from out the
shadow.

It was the powerful Harpeth Jaguar out hunting, and his weapon was a
hoe, while under his arm he carried a roll that looked like a
contribution to a rag man of bedding and old clothes.

"I tell you, Mr. Powers, there is frost in the air and I have collected
everything in the parsonage that would cover those late anemones. I saw
your light and I thought you might add to the collection. Now what would
we do if they should be wilted by the frost just as they are ready to
burst bud? Our honor is involved with Graveson, who brought the seeds
all the way from Guernsey through the trenches of France and trusted
them to me for propagation. Why, they represent a man's life work, and
that life may be put out by a bullet any moment! We'll have to rescue
them." As he spoke, the great jeweled eyes shone with excitement under
the dull gold brows and he seemed not to see at all the incriminating
ice and bottle.

"Could you get into Mrs. Dabney's linen closet? We've got to have
something." He shivered in a little wind that blew under the rose vine
with a frosty gust. I was just observing that he was attired in his
pajama jacket and gray flannel trousers, and that his bare heels and
ankles declared themselves above and at the back of his slippers, when
my eyes were drawn to my father's face and rested there. My heart stood
still while I watched it change. All the pain and appetite, straining as
a beast strains at a leash, faded from his face. The deathly pallor
vanished and the color of human blood returned. The glitter in his deep
old eyes changed in a second from that of ferocity to that of anxious
excitement.

"I do not know where the household linen is kept and I hesitate to
disturb Dabney, as he retired with an aching tooth; but I observed a box
of my daughter's apparel beside a trunk in the back hall which Dabney
had not carried up on account of its weight and which he was requiring
his wife to unpack piece by piece. I'll raid it for enough to save our
treasures and accept whatever is my just chastisement in the morning,"
he said in a voice of guilty stealth.

And there I stood in the shadow of the pantry and saw my father take two
armfuls of my costly linen and lace out into the garden. Nothing was
spared me, for from the window I could see him and the marauding Jaguar
weight their perfumed whiteness down with sticks and stones and clods of
earth. I suffered, but silently.

"Good night, sir. God's blessing," I heard the rich voice calling as the
half-bare feet padded away as swiftly as they had come through the
garden, leaving father standing under the rose vine watching him go. And
I watched father--and for some reason my breath seemed suspended in my
lungs.

For a very long minute he stood looking at the ice bowl and the bottle;
then with a queer wry smile he walked over and put them both in the
refrigerator, though the bottle's place was in the sideboard, and closed
the door carefully. Then he paused again and said under his breath,
"_You_, Judge Nickols Morris Powers!" He smiled at himself with
humorous pity and tiptoed past me into the front hall and up the
stairway to his rooms above.

I seemed to feel strange padding footsteps down in my depths and I also
tiptoed up to my room after I had heard his door shut.

After I had switched on my light (for under the roof of the Poplars
electricity had come to aid the candles of hallowed tradition, and was
called by Mammy, in deep suspicion, "ha'nt light") I discovered clutched
in my cold fingers the yellow envelope the romantic Mr. Pate had brought
to me in the midnight. It read:

     "Am coming down on Friday. Am afraid to trust the world and the
     flesh and think the third member of the carnal firm ought to be
     on the job.      N."

"Now I am frightened really," I confided to myself as I slipped between
the scented sheets and drew a corner of the rose-colored blanket over my
head. "I don't know what to do."




CHAPTER IV

TO TURKEY GULCH


The next morning I was very late in descending to my breakfast, but
arrived in time to witness Mammy's arraignment of my father, which was
conducted in perfect respect, but with great severity.

"I know, Jedge, that menfolks don't know lace that costs a million
dollars a yard from a blind woman's tatting, and that's what makes me
say what I does, that it sure am dangersome fer 'em to go on a rampage
in womenfolks' trunks. I ain't never goin' to git the stains from them
clods of earth outen my lambs' clothes, even if the minister did help
you put 'em on 'em."

"But, Melissa, those anemones were more valuable than any lace ever
manufactured, and I am sure that Charlotte will absolve me when she
hears of the exigencies of the case," father pleaded over the top of
his morning paper. Mammy was pretending to dust his study, as a blind to
the lecture she was administering.

"Yes, sir, I knows all that; but that lace was a heap more valuable than
that toothache in that wuthless Dabney's jaw, which he could er wropped
up, and hunted out all the old sheets for you instid of that petticoat
with them real lace ruffles," was Mammy's firm rejoinder, while she
passed a feather duster over the table and rolled her eyes at Dabney.

"Let's let them both off this time, Mammy. Dabney can take the trunks
where they belong and lock them up," I said, as I went toward the dining
room, while she followed to minister upon my tardiness.

"Them was all your finest lingerings," she said as she plied me with
breakfast. "And they was all lost on menfolks. They hasn't even one lady
rode by while I had 'em on the line in the sunshine," she grumbled as
she finally retired to the kitchen.

After finishing my coffee I sauntered to the front of the house, led by
a chorus of hearty laughter in a fluty tenor voice, accompanied by a
bass growl, in which I was sure that father was recounting the scrape in
which his and the Reverend Mr. Goodloe's anemone adventure had got them.
I assured myself that I was annoyed by this repeated early morning
invasion of ministerial calls and intended to retire to my room until it
was over, but without knowing why, I found myself in the library and
greeting the enemy.

"Please forgive us. The case was one of dire necessity," the Reverend
Mr. Goodloe pleaded, as he rose and took my hand in his, and held it in
such a way that I was forced to look in his face and smile, whether I
wished it or not.

"From ambush I saw you take them, and I was powerless to prevent," I
answered with a smile at father.

"I came over to ask you if you wouldn't like to go away out into the
Harpeth Hills on a mission with me this wonderful morning. I don't know
exactly whether I am called to officiate at a birth or a death or that
intermediate festivity, a wedding. This is the summons from an old
friend of mine:" As he spoke he held out to me a greasy paper on which
were a few words scrawled with a pencil.

     "Parson we need you in the morning bad. Please come with Bill
     as brings this. Bring a bible and liniment and oblige your true
     friend Jed Bangs and wife."

"Isn't your friend Bill able to elucidate?" I asked, as I passed the
paper on to father.

"Bill seems to be dumb without being deaf and has no histrionic talent
to act out the necessity, so I'm going with him. The Bangs family live
up on old Harpeth at Turkey Gulch, and Jed has shot partridges with me
all winter. Please, you and the Judge, come with me. I can get the car
over Paradise Ridge if I turn it into a wildcat. The morning is
delicious, and I feel that I'll need you both." Never in the world have
I heard a man's voice with such compelling notes in it that range from a
soft coax to a quiet command.

I had not the slightest idea of going with him and I was about to refuse
with as much sugary hauteur as I dared use to him, when I looked into
father's face and accepted. I had never been on a picnic with my father
in my life and I could not understand the pleading in his eyes for my
acceptance of this invitation to an adventure in his company, but then,
several times since I had come home, I had seen a father I had never
known before, and he fascinated me.

"The mountain laurel is in bloom and the rhododendron, and you are a
very gracious lady," the Reverend Mr. Goodloe assured me with a deep bow
over my hand, which he kissed in a very delightful foreign fashion which
made Mammy, who had come to the door to hear my decision, roll her eyes
in astonishment which, however, held no hint of criticism, for with her
the spiritual king could do no wrong.

"I got a snack fixed up jest's soon as that Dabney tol' me about the
junket," she announced. "And I'll put a little wine jelly and flannels
in if it am a baby and a bunch of white jessimings in case it am a
death."

"Suppose it is a wedding?" I asked her.

"I don't take no notice of weddings. It was a wedding that got me into
all the trouble of that Dabney and his wuthless son, Jefferson, what
ain't like me in no way." With which fling at Dabney--who was hovering
at the door--she rolled herself back to her kitchen.

"What have you been doing to her now, you rascal?" father demanded of
Dabney, who was handing him his hat and holding out his light overcoat
to put him into it.

"I jist stepped into the kitchen while her light rolls fer supper was
raisin' and got a ruckus fer it," was his mild answer. Dabney lived his
connubial life mildly in the midst of the storms of his better half.

"Well, don't do it again. And put that spade in Mr. Goodloe's car, for
I'm going to bring in some honeysuckle roots and a laurel sprout or two
to try out in the garden," father commanded, as I took my coat and hat
from the chair where I had thrown them the afternoon before, and went
out to the very unministerial-looking car which stood before the
parsonage.

Of course, I had accepted the Reverend Mr. Goodloe's invitation for the
journey out into the hills in order to sit beside this very new kind of
father I was dimly discovering myself to possess, but I do not to this
day know how it happened that I was crushed against the arm steering the
gray racer as we sped through Goodloets toward Old Harpeth, while the
judge sat beaming, though silent, beside the more silent Bill--who did
not beam, but looked out at the road ahead with the shadow in his face
of the fatalism that so many of the mountain folk possess.

We were just turning out from the edge of the town, past the last house
with its stately white pillars, when a bunch of pink-and-white
precipitated itself directly in front of the car--which made the first
of the wildcat springs that its master had prophesied for it and then
stood with its engine palpitating with what seemed like mechanical fear,
while I buried my head on the strong arm next to me, which I could feel
tremble for an instant as the Reverend Mr. Goodloe breathed a fervent,
"Thank God." Father rose from his seat with a good round oath and silent
Bill snorted like a wild animal.

"Why didn't you stop when you saw me coming?" an imperious young voice
demanded in tones of distinct anger, and Charlotte, my name daughter of
the house of Morgan, calmly climbed up on the running board, over the
door next to father, and settled herself in between him and the silent
Bill. "Now you can go on," she calmly announced, in a very much
mollified tone of voice as she shook out her ruffles into a less
compressed state and wiped her face with her dirty hand, much to the
detriment of the roses in her cheeks.

"Where are you going, Charlotte, may I inquire?" asked the Reverend Mr.
Goodloe in a cheerful and calm voice, though I saw that his fingers
still trembled on the steering wheel as he held back the enraged gray
engine. I was still speechless and I saw that father was in the same
condition.

"You said I might go 'next time' when my Auntie Harriet didn't want me
to go with you last Tuesday on account of my stomach from the raw potato
Jimmy dared me to eat. This is that time," she calmly answered, as she
gave an interested look at the silent Bill and again settled the short,
pink skirts.

"Yes, I did say that," admitted Mr. Goodloe, as he turned in his seat as
far as he could and began to argue the question. "But we shall be gone
almost all day and I am afraid your mother wouldn't want you to be gone
that long."

"Is it true for you to say that when you know that she will be mighty
glad for you to keep me safe with you all day?" Charlotte demanded of
him, looking directly into his smiling, friendly face.

"No, that wasn't quite honest, I'll admit," he answered her gravely with
the guilt of conviction showing in his face just as plainly as it would
have shown if one of his deacons had caught him evading a question of
grave moment. "And as it is the fulfillment of a promise which you
claim, I am going to ask Miss Powers and the judge if they will permit
me to add you to the party, and then go and get permission from your
mother to take you with us."

"My mother told me to go and bother Auntie Charlotte an hour or two and
that was when I met you. I ran into the car just minding my mother,"
Charlotte answered him with calm pride at her near achievement of death
through literal obedience.

"Just drive by and we'll call to Nell. I am afraid the case must have
been desperate, for I am seldom the victim," I said in an undertone to
our host, who acquiesced with a laugh. "Harriet Henderson must be dead,
for Nell usually sends the worse one to her," I added under my breath.

"My Auntie Harriet is having a man cut the ache out of one of her
teeth," Charlotte remarked, apropos of nothing, as the huge car swung
around into the street in which the Morgans reside. "And, besides, I
don't like her any more, because, when she said Sue had to have part of
the doll house she bought for us to play in down at her home, and I said
then Sue would have to take the outside because I wanted the inside, she
locked it up for all this week."

"The modern business acumen of the feministic persuasion," father
remarked, as we all laughed at this candid revelation of an egocentric
attitude of mind in small Charlotte.

After a few whirls of the gray wheels we paused a moment at the Morgan
gate.

"Heavens, yes, and thank you," called Nell in response to our demand for
her small daughter's company. "If I had another one clean, I'd give it
to you."

"Better go on quick, for Jimmy can wash in a piece of a minute if he
wants to," warned Charlotte, and in a second the parson had sent the
gray car flying out toward Old Harpeth, though I saw him glance back
with a trace of distress in his eyes at the fading vision of a small boy
running, howling, to the front gate of the Morgan residence.

"Now mother'll whip him for crying if she does as she says she would,
but she won't," observed the tender big sister, as she rose to her feet
and waved a maddening farewell to the distressed urchin being left
behind.

"Is she totally depraved?" I asked of the young Charlotte's spiritual
adviser at my side.

"No; perfectly honest," he answered me with a glint in his eyes that was
a laughing challenge.

"There is something awful about honesty," I answered, without appearing
to notice the glint.

"There wouldn't be if it were a universal custom," was the answer I got
as we whirled by a farmer's wood lot and began to climb the first
foothill of Old Harpeth.

All my life I have been going out to Old Harpeth on excursions, but
never had I spent a day like the one I had begun with the Jaguar in his
native fastnesses. The whole old mountain was beginning to bud and I
could almost see it draping on a regal Persian garment of rose and green
threaded with purple and blue woven against the old brown and gray of
the earth color. The wine-colored trillium with its huge spotted leaves,
the slender white dog-tooth violets, the rose-pink arbutus, the blue
star myrtle and the crimson oak buds, were matted into a vast robe that
was gorgeously oriental, while a perfume that was surely more delicious
than any ever wafted from the gardens of Arabia floated past us in gusts
through which the gray car sped without the slightest shortness of
breath. I seemed a million miles away from the great fetid city in which
I had been living--and fast going farther. As we wound up and up into
the great forest which is the crown of Old Harpeth, we could look down
through occasional vistas and see the Harpeth River curling and bending
through pastures in which the chocolate plowed fields were laid off in
huge checks with the green meadows, while the farmhouses and barns
dotted the valley like the crude figures on a hand-woven chintz.

There are very few men who know enough not to talk to a woman when she
has no desire for their conversation, but the Reverend Jaguar seemed to
be one of the variety who comprehend the value of silences, and neither
of us spoke for at least ten miles, though, of course, it was his duty
to make hay while the sun of my nature shone upon him and delicately to
inquire into my spiritual condition. He didn't. He just let the wind
blow into my empty spaces and kept his eyes and thoughts on the road
ahead of him. Charlotte's chatter with father was blown back from me and
I was happy in a kind of aloneness I had never felt before.

"We are in Hastings County now and in a few minutes we shall be in Hicks
Center, the county seat," were the first words that broke in on my
self-communion as we began to speed past rough board and log cabins,
each surrounded by a picket fence which in no way seemed to fend the
doorsteps from razor-back pigs, chickens and a few young mules and
calves. "It must be court day, for I don't see a single inhabitant
sitting chewing under his own vine and fig tree."

"Yes; it's the first Monday," answered father, as the gray machine
pulled gallantly through a few hundred feet of thick, black mud and
turned from the wilderness into the public square of the metropolis of
Hicks Center.

"Yes, court is in session and there the whole population is in the
courthouse," said father, as we glided slowly down the village street.
"They must be trying a murder or a horse-stealing case," and I saw his
eyes gleam for a second under their heavy brows as the eyes of an old
war horse must gleam when he scents powder.

"Ugh," assented silent Bill, making the first remark of the journey, and
as he spoke the syllable he rose and pointed to the courthouse, which
stood in the midst of a mud-covered public square, completely surrounded
by hitching-posts to which were hitched all the vehicles of locomotion
of the last century down to the present in Hicks Center--which had not
as yet arrived as far as the day of the motor car.

"Is Jed in there, Bill?" demanded the Reverend Mr. Goodloe; and as Bill
assented with muscular vigor, if not vocal, he drew the gray car up
beside, an old-fashioned carryall, whose wheels were at least five feet
high and which had hitched to its pole an old horse and a young mule.

"That team makes a nice balance of--temperament," Mr. Goodloe remarked,
as he lifted out Charlotte and then turned to swing me, in his strong
arms, free of a mud puddle and onto the old brick pavement which was
green with the moss of generations.

Then, piloted by the silent Bill, we made our way through a quiet throng
of men and women and children, from the awkward age of shoe-top trousers
and skirts to that which, in many cases, was partaking from the maternal
fount, as the women stood in groups and whispered as they looked at us
shyly. Somehow their decorous calico skirts, which just cleared the
ground, made me feel naked in my own of white corduroy, which was all of
eight inches from the mud in which theirs had draggled.

And as silent as they, even Charlotte's chatter subdued, we entered the
court room and were led through a crowd up to the front seat. At least
the rest of us were seated, but the judge, jury and prisoner and
prosecuting attorney rose in a body and shook hands with the Reverend
Mr. Goodloe as if he were their common and best beloved son.

"He's been in the Harpeth Valley less than a year, and look at that.
We've been here all our lives and they don't know who we are,"
whispered father, with the same pride shining in his eyes that shone
upon the parson from the eyes of the gaunt prisoner, who rose and shook
hands with Mr. Goodloe with the sheriff beside him, while the rough old
judge from the bench waited his turn.

"We accommodated Jed by waiting until you come before we begun his
trial, Parson," the judge said, as he turned back to his bench, which
was a splint-bottom chair behind a rude table, dignity being lent to the
chair by its being the only one in the room. The rest of the population
of the court room of Hicks Center were seated upon benches made of split
and hewn logs.

"Thank you, Mr. Hilldrop," said the Reverend Mr. Goodloe, as he sat down
beside the prisoner and began a whispered conversation with him.

"The court have come to order. Shoot ahead, Jim, and tell us what Jed
have done and how he done it," commanded the judge, as he tilted back
his chair, took out his knife and began to whittle a stick of bright red
cedar. Twelve good men and true, attired in butternut trousers stuffed
into muddy boots, settled themselves in the jury box, which was a log
bench set at right angles to the other benches, a little apart from the
table and chair of the judge, and nine of them took out their knives and
bits of cedar and began to follow the lead of the judge in making fine
pink curls fall upon the floor.

"May it please your honor, the prisoner is charged with the stealing of
a young mule," said a lanky young mountain lawyer, who had put on a coat
over his flannel shirt and brushed a little patch of tow hair just above
his brows in deference to his position of prosecuting attorney.

"State yo' case," commanded the judge, as he tried the point of his
splinter against his thumb to test its whittled sharpness.

"Hiram Turner, over at Sycamore, lent Jed a team of mules to haul his
daughter, who married Jed, home in a wagon with her beds and truck, and
when he come down Paradise Ridge to git the team, Jed claimed one had
got away from him and run off in the big woods. They was a horse and
mule trader come along the same day Jed lost the mule and when Hi and
his boy, Bud, knocked Jed down in a fight they found fifty dollars on
him in a wad what he won't say where he got it."

With which concise statement the prosecuting attorney sat down and
fanned his perspiring brow with his ragged felt hat.

"Got anything to say, Jed?" inquired the judge in a friendly and
leisurely fashion, after the accused had been duly sworn in by the
sheriff. "How come a man like you to let a mule git away from him?"

With the judge's friendly question there entered another actor on the
scene, in the person of a mountain girl who had been cowering on a bench
just behind Jed, her face hidden by a black calico split bonnet.

"Please lemme tell, Jed," she pleaded in a soft whisper that only father
and I heard, as we sat just behind her.

"Naw," was the one word he gave her, but it was spoken with a soft
little purr in his husky voice. Then he answered the judge with a kind
of quiet dignity, which I saw that the twelve booted jurymen listened to
with respect.

"Jedge," he said, with a stern look into the judge's face, "I reckon
you'll have to send me down to the pen. I let that mule git away from me
and I didn't steal or sell him; that is all I got to say." And he sat
down. I felt father start at my side and then sink back onto his bench.

"Where did you git the money, Jed?" the judge demanded.

"That I ain't a-telling," answered Jed determinedly. "Jest send me down
to the pen, fer you-all know all you'll ever know."

"Well, Jed," the judge was beginning to say in an argumentative tone of
voice, when father arose and stepped in front of the bench.

"May it please your honor to appoint a counsel for the defense?" he
asked in a ringing voice that brought all the outsiders crowding into
the door. I had never heard or seen my father in a court room and I had
never suspected him of the resonant silver voice with which he made his
demand.

"We ain't got a lawyer in Hicks Center but Jim Handy here, and he can't
prosecute and defend too. I always kinder looks out fer the prisoners
myself," answered the judge.

"Then may I offer myself to the prisoner to conduct his defense?" father
demanded, and he looked over at Jed, who in turn looked at Mr. Goodloe
before he nodded.

"Then shoot ahead, stranger. Jim have told all they is about it, but
you can have Hi and Bud Turner sworn in and git any more they have got
to say. Them men speaks truth when they speaks." At which statement
every good man and true nodded his head with firm conviction. A gaunt
old mountaineer who sat over by the window cleared his throat in an
embarrassment that marked him as the Hiram Turner alluded to.

"I don't think I shall need the testimony of Mr. Turner or his son,"
father answered quietly, as he stood tall and straight before the jury.
"I want to put Mr. Bangs' wife on the witness stand and question her
before the jury. Sheriff, call Mrs. Bangs."

"Naw, stranger, naw," said Jed, and he rose as if to combat, but Mr.
Goodloe laid a restraining hand on his arm, and trembling, he took his
seat.

"Don't tell nothing, honey," he whispered, as the girl rose from her
bench, laid aside her cavernous black bonnet and advanced, took the oath
administered by the sheriff and stood facing father.

"Now, Mrs. Bangs," said father, with silvery tenderness in his voice
which I felt sure had gained him the reputation of never having lost a
case in which a woman was involved, "I want you to tell us all that
happened on the day that Jed let the mule escape him. Look at me and
tell me all about it."

"Well, stranger," began the mountain girl, with a look of confidence
coming into her face that was like a little pink wide-open arbutus, "I
reckon you won't believe me--like Jed didn't at first, though he do
now."

"Don't tell, honey," the prisoner commanded and implored in the one
plea. "I'd rather take the pen. They won't believe you."

"It war this way," she continued, without seeming to hear the command of
her young husband, upon whose arm the parson again laid a restraining
hand. "Jed he had unhitched the team and tied them with their rope
halters to the fence 'fore our cabin, when it was almost dark 'fore we
got thar. Then while I was unpacking the wagon he got on one horse and
rid down the side of the gulch to see whar water was at. I was jest
takin' the things in when a man come along leading five mules and riding
on one. He was a city stranger in fine clothes and he asked me fer a
meal because he had lost his way from a man who had a tent and grub. My
mammy allus cooked fer strangers, so--"

"She shore do that," ejaculated Mr. Turner, proud of his noted
hospitality.

"So I made up a fire hasty in the yard and put on a coffee pot," the
girl continued. "I had some corn pone and bacon my mammy had give me fer
a snack and I het that up. Whilst I got the meal the stranger he went on
unloading our wagon and then he come to a bundle of bed quilts what my
mammy have been saving fer me from her mammy and her grandmammy. He took
a notion to them and ast me how old they was and I told him about as old
as any twenty-inch cedar on Old Harpeth. He asked me to trade 'em, but I
couldn't abear to until he had riz to fifty dollars, what was the price
of a young mule, all on account of his sister wanting quilts like them
up in a big city. I was kinder crying quiet at letting 'em go, but I
thought about what that mule would be to Jed who wuz so good to me, so I
give 'em to him and he tied 'em on his saddle and went away. It war most
a hour when Jed come and when I told him and showed him the money, he
didn't believe me about them old quilts and he tooken the rope from
around the neck of the mule he'd been riding and--"

She paused here in her story and put her scarlet flower face in her
hands, while Jed groaned and dropped his own face down upon his arm. The
old judge's face took on a grim sternness, the jury stopped whittling
and the face of every woman in the court room gazed upon the girl with
stern unbelieving accusation.

"Go on, now, honey, but they won't believe you," commanded Jed with a
sob.

"Your husband took the rope from around the neck of the mule and left
him untied?" asked father gently.

"What fer, Melissa?" asked the old judge, without gentleness or any show
of confidence in what the shrinking woman was saying.

"To beat me with. He war crazed mad and called me a name, but I don't
hold it ag'in him," answered the young wife, with a glance at the
cowering prisoner.

"He done right," calmly announced one of the twelve good men and true,
in the muddy boots and flannel shirt, and every mountain woman in the
court room nodded her head in approval of the pronouncement.

"Order in the court room. You all shet up and listen," commanded the
judge, as father looked around the room and then at him with a stern
demand for control of the situation.

"Then what happened, Mrs. Bangs?" father continued to question.

"I hollered and fought and skeered the mule off into the big woods where
he can't be found to keep my husband out of the pen," she answered with
a sob. "It took me a week to make him believe about them quilts and then
pappy come along and fought him about the mule and found the money, as
he claimed he sold the mule fer what was the quilt money."

"That will do. Thank you, Mrs. Bangs," said father, with the same
deference and tenderness he had used when he began to question her.
"Does the prosecution wish to question the witness?"

"They ain't no use of questioning her when she says a man give her fifty
dollars fer five old quilts," was the answer made by the young
prosecuting attorney, who did not rise to his feet to make this remark.

"Please ask Mrs. Bangs if the quilts were woven ones of three colors,
and then call me to the stand," I said to father quickly.

He put the question to the weeping young wife and got an affirmative
answer, after which he dismissed her and had the sheriff swear me in.

"Can you throw any light upon the matter of the purchase or sale of
these quilts, Miss Powers?" father questioned me formally.

"If they were old hand-woven, herb-dyed, knitted quilts, they are worth
fifty dollars apiece in New York to-day. I paid that for one not five
months ago," I said, staring haughtily into the calmly doubting faces of
the mountaineers in the jury box and on the benches.

"Do you want to question the witness?" my father asked of the indolent
young prosecutor.

"Don't know who she is and don't believe she is telling the truth," was
the laconic refusal of the prosecutor to let me influence his case.

"Well, now, Jim, Parson Goodloe here brought the gal along with him and
I reckon he can character witness for her," interposed the judge.
"Sheriff, swear in the parson." His command was duly executed.

"Mr. Goodloe, do you consider Miss Powers a woman who can be depended
upon to speak the truth?" father asked him formally.

"I do," the Reverend Mr. Goodloe answered quietly, and just for a second
a gleam from his eyes under their dull gold brows shot across the
distance to me, and if it hadn't all been so serious I should have
laughed with glee at his thus having to declare himself about my
character in public. But the next moment the situation became much more
serious and my heart positively stopped still as I seemed to see prison
doors close upon the young husband.

"Do you want to question the witness?" father asked of the lolling young
prosecutor.

"How long have you known the lady, Parson?" he asked, with a drawl and
one eye half closed.

There was an intense silence in the court room for almost a minute. Then
the Reverend Mr. Gregory Goodloe answered calmly:

"Three days."

"That might be long enough fer a parson, but it ain't fer a jury," the
young attorney answered, and there was a quizzical kindness in the old
judge's face as he smiled at Mr. Goodloe and shook his head.

Mr. Goodloe started to speak, but father waved him back to his seat,
turned to the judge and jury and began the most wonderful speech on the
subject of circumstantial evidence and ethical law that I have ever
heard. His beautiful deep voice was as clear as a bell and twenty years
seemed to have fallen from his shoulders. I was looking at and listening
to the man he had been before I was born. And when I could tear my eyes
from his radiant face I watched these stolid mountaineers with whom he
was working his will with a power they had never experienced before and
did not understand. The men in the jury box and the men on the hewn
benches dropped their eyes before his flaming ones as he shamed their
censorious manhood and some of the sun-bonneted women bent their heads
and sobbed when he arraigned them for the lack of motherhood and
sisterhood for the poor young wife who had come over the Ridge to live
among them.

"Would you men and women rather believe a girl light of love and
faithless, and send your neighbor to prison for two years of his young
life when he could mean much to you and his state and his nation, than
to give them a little human sympathy and justice. Do you prefer to pin
your faith to the value of a worthless, vagrant mule than--"

But just here, when Judge Nickols Morris Powers was winding himself up
for one of the greatest appeals to a jury he had ever made, a mule
stepped into the case and took away the honor of its winning. He poked
his inquisitive nose into a back window of the court room which looked
out upon the edge of the big woods, and gave the whole assemblage a
hew-haw of derision.

"Lordy mighty, that are Pete come back hisself with all the curkles in
the big woods sticking to him!" exclaimed Hiram Turner, as he rose and
went to examine his property. "He wasn't sold to no mule man, fer they
crops the hair on their hoofs to see if they's healthy 'fore they buys.
This here frees Jed."

"And now that you gentlemen have the testimony of a mule, will you not
believe the word of Mrs. Bangs and Miss Powers about the valuable
quilts?" my father said, after he had commanded silence by raising his
hand.

"We shore do believe every word of it, stranger, and you won this here
case and not that mule," a stern old sister in a gingham apron and black
bonnet said, with a commanding glance at the jury.

"Yes, stranger," answered the hoary old foreman, whom to this day I
believe to be the meek husband of the commanding old woman in the black
bonnet. "I have done got the mind of the jury and they all voted fer you
and not the mule."

"I hereby gives that mule to Jed Bangs and my daughter, Melissa, and
I'll knock off a half on the price of his teammate to Jed if he gives me
his fergiveness and hern," old Hiram rose and turned with his hand on
the forelock of the mule hero to say to the assembled court room. "Go
around and halter him quick, Jed, 'fore he breaks away again, the durned
fool," he added in another voice.

"Yes, prisoner, you are declared free, and hurry to ketch him, fer he's
straining ag'inst Hiram," was the judge's sentence, delivered from the
bench as everybody rose and began to stream out to watch the tussle
between Jed and the wild mule. Father and the parson were among the
first to gain the door.

In the next few minutes I found that some of the shy mountain women were
beginning to hover about me, and in another ten minutes I had laid the
foundations of an export rug and quilt business that I have a feeling
will thrive greatly.

"Were you arrested because your mother told you not to sell the quilts?"
was Charlotte's sympathetic question to the young Mrs. Bangs; and I saw
the mite take a clean handkerchief from her small pink pocket and apply
it to the tears that were coursing down Melissa's cheeks over the
dimples which her smiling mouth was putting in their way. "Just be a
good girl and God will forgive you," she comforted further, nestling a
dirty pink cheek, which rubbed off, against Melissa's wet one.

"And I asked if she were totally depraved, less than an hour ago," I
apologized to my name daughter in my heart.

All the way home I sat beside father, and once I laid a timid hand in
his, through whose fingers the pride I had in him must have flowed into
his. He flushed for a second and then was pale again.

"You can't put new wine in old bottles, daughter," he said sadly, as he
glanced down into the valley. The car was running smoothly, slowly and
noiselessly around a sharp curve, and the Reverend Mr. Goodloe both
heard and answered the sad axiom.

"The finest wine mellows in casks and is then bottled free of dregs,
Judge. I think the wine of life is of that vintage," he said, with one
of his radiant smiles that I could see fairly warm father from his
paleness.

"I wonder just what he meant by 'the wine of life,'" I asked myself as I
went to say good night to Old Harpeth after I put out my light before
going to bed.




CHAPTER V

HAVING IT OUT


"Well, of course, we knew Nickols would follow you, Charlotte, but we
did hope to have you all to ourselves for more than just a week," moaned
Nell Morgan, as we all sat on the front porch of the Poplars in the warm
spring sunlight several mornings after I had told them of Nickols'
arrival on Friday, which announcement had come in the midnight telegram.
I winced at the words "follow you," and then smiled at the absurdity of
the little shudder.

"Yes, Nickols will be absorbing, but we can all sit hard on him and
perhaps put him in his place," responded Letitia Cockrell, as she drew a
fine thread through a ruffle she was making to adorn some part of the
person of one of Nell's progeny. "I do not believe in ever allowing a
man to take more than his share of a woman's time."

"Do you use grocery scales or a pint cup to measure out Cliff Gray's
daily portion of yourself, Letitia?" asked Harriet Henderson, with a
very sophisticated laugh in which Nell joined with a little giggle.
Harriet was appliqueing velvet violets on a gray chiffon scarf and was
doing it with the zest of the newly liberated. Roger Henderson had had a
lot of money that, in default of a will, the law gave mostly to Harriet,
but in life he had not had the joy of seeing her spend it that he might
have had if he could have gazed back from placid death. "Do you make the
same allowance of affection to him in the light of the moon that you do
in the dark?" she further demanded of the serene Letitia.

"Well, he doesn't have to see his share divided up into bits and handed
out to the other men," was the serene answer to Harriet's gibe and which
was pretty good for Letitia.

"My dear child," declaimed Harriet, as she poised a purple violet on the
end of her needle, "don't ever, ever make the mistake of letting one of
the creatures know just what is coming to him. Isn't that right, Nell?"

"Yes, and it is pretty hard to keep them in a state of uncertainty
about you when there are four certain children between you, but I go
over to visit my mother at Hillsboro as often as she'll have the caravan
and plead with Billy Harvey or Hampton Dibrell to keep me out until I'm
late for dinner every time they pick me up for a little charitable spin.
That and other deceptions have kept Mark Morgan uncertainly happy so
far, but if I am pushed to the wall I'll--I'll go to the Reverend Mr.
Goodloe's study for ministerial counsel like you did last Friday
afternoon, Harriet," was Nell's contribution to the discussion, which
she delivered over the head of the Suckling on her breast.

"Now how did you get hold of that choice bit of scandal, Nellie?" asked
Harriet, with serene interest as she bit off a tag of purple silk thread
from the stem of one of her violets.

"Billy Harvey says that scandal is a yellow pup that dogs a parson's
heels, to which everybody throws some kind of bone," remarked Jessie.
Jessie always vigorously represses Billy in his own presence and then
quotes him eternally when he is absent.

"Mother Spurlock had come over from the Settlement to see him about the
state of the treasury of the Mothers' Aid Class, and she stopped in to
get a bundle of clothes I had for her," Nell answered Harriet's
question. "She said she didn't mind the hour lost if the parson could
give a 'wee bit of comfort' to your 'wrestling' soul. I didn't like to
tell her that I thought it might be Mr. Goodloe who was wrestling--for
life and liberty--for you and I have been friends since we could toddle,
Harriet, but it was temptation to share my anxiety with her." And
serenely Nellie patted the back of the drowsing Suckling.

"Wrong this time, Nell," answered Harriet, as she placed still another
violet. "I was doing the wrestling, but I went to the mat. I gave up
twenty-five dollars and took the directorship of that Mothers' Aid.
Never having been a mother, I pointed out to him that I was not exactly
qualified, but he laid stress upon my energy and business acumen and I
gave up. I mentioned you for the honor, but those marvelous eyes of his
glowed with some sort of inner warmth and he said that you had all you
could do and would need help from me just as the women at the Settlement
do. I'm going to present your Susan with a frock out of that linen and
real Valenciennes I bought in the city last week for a blouse for my own
self, and I'm going to give the making to that little Burns woman, who
sews so beautifully and cheaply to support her seven offspring, while
Mr. Burns supports 'The Last Chance' saloon down at the end of the road.
In that way I'll be aiding two of Mr. Goodloe's flock at the same time,
and when I told him my decision he laughed and said be sure and have it
made two inches shorter than you made Sue's frocks, because her bare
knees ought not to be hid from the world. That was about all that
transpired in the whole hour of spiritual conference you are spreading
the scandal about, and you ought to be ashamed."

Suddenly something in me made me determine to have it out with those
four women and see what results I could get. I felt thirsty for
knowledge of the wellsprings of other people's lives.

"Harriet," I demanded, "just why did you join Mr. Goodloe's church?"

"Let's see," answered Harriet, as she poised a violet and gave herself
up to introspection.

"Mr. Goodloe?" I asked squarely, and my honesty drew its spark from
hers.

"Mostly," she answered briefly. "And I believe in the church as an
institution," she added, with honest justice to herself.

"I think it is absolutely horrid of you to ask a question like that,
Charlotte," said Nell, as she turned the fretting Suckling over on her
knee and began another series of pats. "We all of us went to church and
Sunday school when we were children."

"Up to the time I left, not a single one of you ever had gone to church
with any kind of regularity and not a one of you had ever supported its
institutions. I've been here less than a week and each one of you has in
some way shown me how bored you are with the relation. That's all the
case I have against your or any church--just that the members are bored.
Also, do any of you get any help in your daily lives, aside from the
emotional pleasure it is to you to hear your minister sing twice a week,
which would be as great or greater if he sang love and waltz songs from
light opera for you?"

And as I asked my question I looked quickly from one to the other of the
four women seated with me under the roof of the Poplars and tried to
search out what was in their hearts. I knew them and their lives with
the cruel completeness it is given to friends to know each other in
small towns like Goodloets and I could probe with a certain touch. And
as they all sat silent with me, each one driven to self-question by my
demand, I threw the flash of a searchlight into each of them. These are
some of the things that stood out in the illumination:

Harriet Henderson has always been in love with Mark Morgan, since her
shoe-top-dress days, and she married Roger Henderson because Mark was as
poor as she before the Phosphate Company gave him his managership. Nell
and the babies are the nails driven in her heart every day and she loves
them all passionately. She is only twenty-eight and life will be long
for her. She needs help to live it. Whence will the help come?

Nell married Mark when she was eighteen and has produced a result every
year and a half since. She loves him mildly and he loves her after a
fashion, but her endurance is wearing thin. His mother had seven
children and he thinks that an ideal number, though she was one
generation nearer the pioneer woman and also had a nurse trained in
slavery who was a wizard with children. Mark wants to have a lot of joy
of life and so far he drags poor exhausted Nell with him. It is a
question how long she can stand the social pace and the over-production.
What is going to help her when she breaks down? How will she hold him
faithful while she rears and trains all the kiddies? Where will she get
spirit to love him and work out their salvation? Also Harriet is always
there. Something will have to help Nell. What?

Billy loves Nell and doesn't know it. He loved her before she was
married. The children make him rage superficially and burn inwardly. He
gambles and drinks, but is honest and adorable. What is going to make a
real man of him?

Jessie Litton's mother died in a private sanitarium for the mentally
unbalanced and she knows all about it. She loves Hampton Dibrell and
never looks in his direction or is a moment alone with him. He is in the
unattached state of ease where any woman can get him if she cares to
try, and Jessie has to keep her hands behind her.

Letitia is serenely happy with not a dark corner that I know of. She
loves Cliff Gray and always will. Cliff is faithful and as good as gold,
but he will hang around Jessie, who encourages him, because she is
lonely and considers him safely tied up with Letitia. Mr. Cockrell is
the best lawyer in town and Mrs. Cockrell the most devoted wife and
mother. I can only feel that Letitia Cockrell needs a jolt and I don't
see where it is coming from.

And I? I am lonely. And I feel that the constant anxiety about father is
more than I can bear, worse now when I realize what he has been and
could be--and that I love him. He is the hardest drinker in Goodloets
and yet never is drunk. He is soaked from the beginning of one day to
another. He began to drink like that the day my mother died and I have
always known that _I_ was helpless to help him. The weakness was in him,
only supported by her strength so long as she was there. He was the most
brilliant mind in the state, and was one of the supreme judges when
mother died. Now Mr. Cockrell manages his business for him and I have
lately come to know that I must sit by and watch him disintegrate. I
cannot endure it now, as I have been doing. What is going to help me in
this--shame for him? I have gone away to my mother's people to forget
and left him to Dabney, and I've come home--to begin the suffering all
over. I'll never leave him again. What's going to help me?

And there is something deeper--a race something that fairly eats the
heart out of my pride. On almost every page of the history of the
Harpeth Valley the name of Powers occurs. One Powers man has been
governor of the state, and there have been two United States congressmen
and a senator of our house. Father is the last of the line. Because race
instinct is the strongest in women, I am the one who suffers as I see my
family die out. What is going to help me? A few gospel hymns in a tenor
voice the like of which I should have to pay at least three dollars to
hear in the Metropolitan? The scene on the porch rose in my mind, but I
felt that I both doubted and feared such succor.

And I am in still deeper depths. Nickols is the son of father's first
cousin, and has father's full name, Nickols Morris Powers, and he is the
last of his branch of the house. Father loves him and is proud of him
and nothing ever enters his mind except that I will marry Nickols and
start the family all over again. And this is the tragedy. I love Nickols
and am entirely unsatisfied with him. He is the Whistler nocturne that
my Sorolla nature demands, and he eternally makes me hold out my hand to
grasp--nothing. He stands just beyond. I am unable to decide whether he
does or does not love me. In New York he lives his life among the
artists and fashionable people with whom his highly successful
profession throws him, and I don't see why he cares to come back here
where he was born and reared, in pursuit of a woman like me. I am as
elemental as a shock of wheat back on one of father's meadows and
Nickols is completely evolved. He laughs at race pride and resents mine.
For six months I had been in New York living with Aunt Clara in Uncle
Jonathan Van Eyek's old house down on Gramercy just to go into Nickols'
life with him. I went about in the white lights of both Murray Hill and
Greenwich Village for about one hundred and eighty-five evenings, and
then I fled back to my garden and the poplars--and my anxiety. I thought
I had come home to be free and I found the same old chains. And then
had come Nickols' telegram of pursuit in the midnight after I had stood
by in the shadow and watched a strong man pray and a weak man battle
with himself. I was frightened, frightened at the future, and what was
going to help me?

"I don't actually understand a word of Gregory Goodloe's sermons, really
understand them, I mean, but it helps me to see that somebody truly
believes that there is something somewhere that will straighten out
tangles--in life as well as thread."

Harriet broke in on my still hunt into my own and other people's inner
shrines as she snapped a bit of tangled purple silk thread, knotted it
and began all over again on the violet.

"I don't care what he preaches about--he's soothing and I need a little
repose in my life after--Oh, what is the matter now?" And as she
finished speaking Nell Morgan arose and went with the Suckling asquirm
in her arms to meet the large noise that was arriving down the front
walk.

The delegation was headed by young Charlotte, whose blue eyes flamed
across a very tip-tilted nose that bespoke mischief. Jimmy stolidly
brought up the rear with small Sue clinging loyally to his dirty little
paddie, which she only let go to run and bury her cornsilk topknot in
Harriet's outspread arms, where she was engulfed into safety until only
the most delicious dimpled pink knees protruded above dusty white socks
and equally dusty white canvas sandals. Though within a few months of
four, Sue had discovered Harriet, and never failed to take advantage of
her.

"What is the matter?" again demanded Nell, as the vocal chords of
Charlotte ceased reverberating and her countenance resumed a more normal
color and expression.

"A rock flew and the minister's window got broked." Charlotte gave forth
this announcement with a diplomacy that might have been admirable
exerted in a juster cause.

"Who had the rock?" demanded the mother sternly.

"Jimmy," was the decided answer, given with a threatening glance at the
son of the house of Morgan, who quailed in his socks and sandals and
began an attempt to screw one of his toes under one of the flagstones of
the walk. I knew in an instant that that rock had never left the hand of
small James, but the clash of Nell's wits with young Charlotte is so
constant that at times the maternal ones are dulled. The accused must
have psychically scented my sympathy, for he lifted large, scared,
pleading eyes to mine for a brief second and then dropped them again. I
went to the rescue.

"Sue, who broke the window?" I asked, as I extricated the four-year-old
witness from Harriet's chiffon and violets. I doubted if young Susan had
attained the years of prevarication as yet. I was right.

"Tarlie," was the positive answer. "Boom--book--crk!" was the graphic
description of the crash she added as she squirmed back among the
violets and the needles and the thread.

"Charlotte!" exclaimed Nell, in real despair.

"Jimmy did have the rock in his pocket, and he just lent it to me to
throw at a bird right above the window. It was a nice round one, and he
brought it from home to see if he could kill anything. It most killed
the minister, and the rock is a little bluggy. Isn't it, Jimmy? He's
got it in his pocket for keeps."

"Yes," answered young James, with the brevity with which he usually made
responses to the loquacity of his sister.

"Do you mean that you hit Mr. Goodloe, as well as broke the window?"
demanded Nell in still more horror, as she came down two of the front
steps.

"He didn't mind," answered Charlotte. "He liked it, because he made us
both learn a verse of a hymn to sing for punish, and Sue can sing it,
too. Come on, Sue!" and before any of us could recover from our horror
at the violence the young parson had suffered at the hands of the
marauders, Charlotte had lined the other two up on either hand and begun
her exhibition of the benefit arising from the throwing of the rock. It
was a very good example of the good that may result from evil, which is
one of the puzzling reverses of one of the Christian tenets.

    "'Work, for the night is coming,
    Work through the morning hours,
    Work while the dew is sparkling,
    Work 'mid springing flowers,'"

trilled Charlotte in a high, buzzy young voice, while Jimmy piped in a
few notes lower. Baby Sue's little, clear jumble of words in perfect
tune was so bewitchingly sweet that Harriet again engulfed her, while
the outraged mother, not so easily beguiled, sailed down the steps and
around through the garden toward the chapel, driving the two older
offenders before her to the scene of the crime.

"Who is going to help Nell train up liars and murderers into good
citizens?" I asked myself in my depths, as I joined with the others in
the admiring laugh at young Charlotte's dramatic powers.

"Mr. Goodloe is the most wonderful thing I ever saw with kiddies," said
Jessie Litton, as she rose to her feet to begin leave-taking. "Yes, I
must go, for father expects me to luncheon," she added, at my
remonstrance.

"I'm going to kidnap Sue while I can, and I may never bring her back. I
must fly!" said Harriet, and she departed hastily to the small roadster
she had parked beside the gate. "Come on, Letitia, and let me take you
home," she called over her shoulder, and Letitia followed to secure the
short spin around the corner to the old Cockrell home, which was set
back from the street behind a tall hedge of waxy-leaved Cherokee roses.
Thus almost in the twinkling of an eye I was left alone, which state,
however, did not last more than a few seconds, for around the corner of
the house from the chapel, from which direction the whole world seemed
to be going or coming, arrived Mrs. Elsie Spurlock, beaming the welcome
to me that had always found a ready response.




CHAPTER VI

DEEP DIGGING


And in another twinkling of eyes, both of mine and hers, I had taken her
bundle from her, seated her in the largest rocking chair, and she had
untied her bonnet strings, which denoted that she had come for a genuine
visit.

"Well, dearie, dearie me, the sight of you is good for tired eyes,
Charlotte," she bumbled in her rich, deep old voice. As she spoke she
tucked a white wisp of a curl back into place beneath the second water
wave that protruded from under the little white widow's ruche in her
bonnet and continued to beam at me. "I met Nellie Morgan and her
Annarugans hurrying to pray a pardon from Mr. Goodloe for that rock
which might have killed him, if thrown an inch to the right, instead of
only nicking that yellow head of his, the Lord be praised!"

"What was that same Lord doing when he let the rock fly from
Charlotte's hand to within an inch of the Reverend Mr. Goodloe's life,
Mother Spurlock?" I asked her, with the old warfare over the same old
subject rising at the very first minute of our meeting. I have wondered
sometimes in the last few years if the wrestling with me over her faith
was not ordained for the purpose of strengthening Mother Spurlock's
powers of patient argument. She is the only person in the world to whom
I speak from the depths, and the relief of her sweetened and seasoned
wisdom is the straw at which I often clutch to save myself.

"I surmise that He guided the hand of that child so that the verse of
the hymn, and the chastisement of the rod I hope Nellie will inflict,
might work together for her good. All of us must at times let a little
blood for another's good--heart's blood, very often, not just that from
our scalps or shins." And as she answered me without a moment's
hesitation she enveloped me in loving question. "Are you always going to
occupy the anxious seat in front of the Lord, child? Still, sit as long
as you like and go on questioning Him. You'll find the answer."

"The whole town seems to have gone into your fold and left me on the
'anxious seat' alone," I answered, as I drew my chair nearer to her and
took her lined, strong old hand in mine.

"That Billy Harvey passes the collection plate up the aisle on Sunday
and plays poker all Saturday night till Sunday morning down at the Last
Chance, in a room in front of the one in which poor Pat Burns, who
carries a hod for his money, loses his all. Mary Burns sews all day and
half the night to feed him and the children, but she puts her pittance
into Billy's plate every Sunday, and I know that she gets the strength
to go on from day to day from the words that come from the same pulpit
he sets the plate behind. That is, we call the table out at your Country
Club a pulpit, until we get our own in the chapel from which to praise
the Lord. So you see that there are some sheep who have a taint of goat
hair in their wool still left--I won't say with you--out in the world.
And speaking of that world, have you come back to say good-bye to us?"

"I don't know yet, Mother Spurlock," I answered her candidly. "I ran
away from that world, but it is coming after me on Friday."

"You'll be sent into the vineyard where you are most needed, and there
you'll serve," she said, with a far-away look coming into her eyes as
she let her glances roam out to the dim hills of Paradise Ridge. A flood
of love and reverence rose in my heart for her as I sat quiet and let
her spirit roam. Mother Spurlock had been the gayest young matron in
Goodloets, living in the great old Spurlock home with handsome,
rollicking young George Spurlock for a husband, and three babies around
her knees, and in one short year she had been left with only one large
and three tiny graves out in the placid home of the dead, beyond the
river bend. The babies had been taken by that relentless child foe,
diphtheria, and young George, reckless with grief, had let a half-broken
horse break his neck. The young woman, aged by her grief, had sold the
great house to the next of kin and moved down into an old brick cottage
that sat "beside the road" in a gnarled old apple orchard, and had
become the "friend to man." Through the orchard and past the door of the
Little House ran the path that led from the Settlement to the Town, and
through her heart and hands flowed most of the love and charity that
bound the rich and poor, brother to brother. Mother Spurlock was never
without a bundle in which she carried labor of the poor sold for the
gold of the rich, or gifts from the rich back to the needy. I thought of
all the long years of service in the vineyard into which her tragedy had
thrown her, and I bent and picked up the bundle at our feet and held it
with reverent hands.

"Just a few baby things that Nellie Morgan gave me to fix up a poor
little Mother Only in the village," she came back from her reverie to
say cheerfully, as she saw me with the bundle in my hand. Mother
Spurlock always refers to the children without the sanction of the law
for their birth as the Mother Onlies, and somehow, when she speaks it,
the name carries a world of tenderness into the heart of the hearer.

"Whose now?" I asked her gently, because in a way Mother Spurlock and I
bore one another's burdens of spirit.

"Hattie Garrett's, and it's a week old now. It is one of the saddest
things that ever happened in the village, and we none of us understand.
You remember, she taught the district school down in the Settlement."

"As none of us understood about Martha Ensley. Is that all a mystery
still?" I asked, and I stroked the bundle of tiny garments.

"Yes, and now she's gone nobody knows where, day before yesterday.
Jacob, her father, was rough and violent with her, but only from grief,
and she forgave all that. I'm troubled sorely, for she is gentle, and
not one to fight the world alone. She must have gone to the city, the
good Lord help her!"

"He will--He is," I answered quickly, then stopped because I knew I must
not tell what I had overheard--should I say in the confessional?

"Praise God! to hear you speak such words. Sometimes a body's faith gets
out of her heart past her mind and proclaims itself before the higher
criticism gets a chance to throttle it," the invincible old warrior
exclaimed with a delighted twinkle in her young blue eyes at having
caught me with religious goods on me. "He will, He will take _care_ of
us all, not that He doesn't expect us to put in about sixteen hours of
the day helping Him to do it for ourselves and others. That reminds me
that I seem to be growing to this chair. Luella May Spain has got a nice
place to work in the telegraph station with Mr. Pate, and if she's to
look neat she needs a few white shirt waists. I _could_ get them in this
bundle. If I get too many things from you and Harriet this morning to
carry myself, Hampton will take me down the hill in his car when he goes
to lunch, not that I wouldn't be frightened to death to ride with him
except on the Lord's mission."

"Do you think that fact would keep Hampton from being run down by
Harriet when she cuts corners bias, as she insists on doing?" I asked,
as I started in the door to procure the toilet necessaries to Luella
May's telegraphic career, whether it devastated my supply of tennis
clothes or not. Nothing that any woman or any member of her family in
Goodloets wears or eats is secure from Mother Spurlock, and we have all
submitted to the fact with the greatest docility.

"I know it does; and three shirt waists will be enough if you add a neat
black belt," was the answer that followed me through the hall. "Bless
my life, Nickols Powers, I was glad to see you at prayer meeting last
week, even if you and William Cockrell were just caught up out at your
Club in your chess game," I heard her exclaim, to draw a laughing answer
in father's most genial rumble. Then I heard him call loudly for Dabney,
and when Sallie descended with my bundle, that contained a complete
telegraphic outfit for Luella May which showed a decided leaning to
tennis style, she met Dabney on the front threshold with a rough parcel
from which I saw a shirt sleeve and a blue serge trouser leg protrude.

"Thank you, Nickols. Since his accident, Bill Hanks has thinned out to
just about your size. Now he can go back to his job neatly and
respectably clad," Mother Spurlock was saying.

"The citizens of Goodloets had better take the habit of wearing a double
suit of clothing for fear of having Elsie Spurlock strip them in public
to beyond the law," father grumbled in great pleasure, after he had
packed her and her bundles in Hampton's car. Father always calls Mother
Spurlock "Elsie," and once or twice I have seen a faint blush creep to
her cheeks and a glint flash from her eyes, but he blandly goes on
doing it. I wonder--

"Father," I said, as we went slowly up the front walk together, "Nickols
will be here on Friday; will you have Dabney get his rooms in the north
wing ready for him? He likes that light, and he can use the long green
room for a studio when he sketches."

"That's good," answered father heartily. He likes Nickols and Nickols
manages him beautifully, by giving him all he wants to drink whenever he
suggests it, even introducing him to new Manhattan beverages. There is
perpetual war between Dabney, who knows father's nervous limit, and
Nickols, who doesn't care just as long as things and human beings that
surround him are kept pleasant. It is all right for the rest of the
world to have delirium tremens, just so they do it out of his sight and
hearing.

"I wonder just what Nickols will think of Goodloe," father added, with a
slightly strained laugh. "You thought he would be enraged at Goodloe and
me for building the chapel and weeding the garden. Perhaps he will be
unhappy."

"I don't believe your weeding would make anybody unhappy, father," I
answered with a laugh, choosing to ignore the issue of the building of
the chapel until Nickols was upon the scene and we could decide just
what to do.

"Been over the whole garden twice and eaten several meals in the sweat
of my brow--that is, I took a cold shower before coming to the table, my
daughter," father said, and he looked ashamed of himself for being proud
of his own spurt of normality. I caught my breath, but I was wise enough
not to show my astonishment. "Goodloe is the most insinuating person I
ever met, and I advise you to be careful. He makes men do just as he
wants them to, and I should say that women would eat out of his hand."

"I suppose I ought to eat a bite or two from his fingers to pay for all
the work he has got out of you and Dabney. I never saw the garden so
beautiful or so early. Look, father, the peonies are budding, two weeks
ahead of their usual time!"

"They'd be damned ungrateful not to grow industriously, after the way
Dab and I have sprained our old backs spading and feeding them according
to spiritual direction that stood over us with a rake," answered
father, with proud if profane enthusiasm. There was a faint pink glow in
his haggard, thin cheeks, and he took from his pocket a huge knife I had
never seen him use before and began carefully to cut away a few dead
twigs from a budding rose vine.

"Your mother always put a rose from this vine at my plate for breakfast,
and you got yours from that pink bush over there by the sun dial," he
said, with a softness in his voice that I had not heard since my tenth
summer, in which my mother had died. I tingled all over, but held on to
myself.

"You go tell that old black lazybones to come here with his spade this
minute. I told him about digging in this mulch yesterday before the
dahlias sprouted, and he hasn't done it. I'm not going to do it for him,
like I put the fertilizer around the lilacs, just to save him from
Goodloe. Tell him to come right here to me, and not to let grass grow in
his shoe tracks," and father picked up a hoe from the walk beside the
neglected dahlias and began doing the work he had just declared against.
I fled around to the kitchen, and something lent wings to my feet.

"Oh, Dab, what does it mean that father is really taking an interest in
the garden?" I demanded of the faithful old black friend, whom I found
enveloped in a kitchen apron helping his wife bring the dinner to a
serving head.

"Praise God, his salvation am commenced, if it don't kill me before he
gits it," answered Dab, as he put his hand to his back and groaned.

"They has been jest one-half a demijohn of devil heart whisky ordered up
outen that cellar in over a month, and I b'lieve this here no account
nigger drunk a pint of that," Mammy added to his answer. "Last month it
was two demijohns they had up, and before that it was three or four.
That parson done it with readin' and talkin' and hoein'. Glory! I wants
to hold my breath and shout at the same time, and I would if I could
trust this pullet in the skillet to either you or Dabney whilst I did
it. The Lord wouldn't listen to no shoutin' from a cook whose chicken
was frying black while she did her praisin'," and as she spoke Mammy
began a low humming, swaying from table to stove with a rhythm in the
swing of her fat body that had a certain dignified beauty to it. It was
crude emotion, and I knew it, but I felt it work in my own body as I
let the significance of what she had told me about the lessening amount
of whiskey father had been consuming add itself to the scene upon the
back porch and sink fully into my consciousness. I don't know what might
have happened to my shouting Methodist grandmother's worldly though
emotional descendant if father's voice, sharp and clear, with a note of
command I had forgotten it possessed, had not interrupted me.

"Charlotte! Dab!" it called; and we both answered with all speed.

"That Parson Goodloe have got the power to draw the teeth of seven
devils, and you both consider the words of his mouth or he'll git the
teeth outen yourn," Mammy called after us in ambiguous warning.

And upon our arrival on the scene of action being executed upon the
dahlias, we found the commander of the devils awaiting us, though in his
hands was no forked instrument of dentistry, but in one he held a large
slice of rye bread thickly spread with butter, and the other was
disarmed by a ripe red apple. As we drew near he finished a direction to
father and took a huge bite out of the slab of bread that left a gap as
wide as one would expect a Harpeth jaguar to make.

"Harrowing deep makes great growth in all plant life," he was saying
past the slice of bread with agricultural prosiness to father, who had
completely sweated down the very high and stiff collar which he always
wore swathed in a wide tie of black after a Henry Clay cut, in a savage
attack with the hoe upon the mulch that was smothering the dahlias in
richness.

"Does the same deep digging result hold true in biological and psychic
life?" puffed father, and then he leaned on his hoe and looked up at the
young man towering over him. In his eyes was the appeal of disappointed
age calling to the ideals of flaming strength and youth in the
deep-jeweled eyes that answered with a look of passionate tenderness as
the parson poised the bread for another bite.

"'Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,' Mr. Powers, is the direct data we
have on that subject," he said. Then he, for the first time, observed
the approach of Dabney and myself, of which his widening smile and the
quick lowering of the slab of rye pone gave notice to father, who
exploded accordingly.

"You black son-of-a-gun! Why didn't you rake off these dahlias as I told
you to yesterday? Now you get his hide, Parson!" was the greeting that
Dabney received, while I was ignored by all concerned.

"That hinge in your back rusty again, Dabney?" questioned the parson,
with leonine mildness.

"I been upsot by my young mistis coming home," answered Dabney, with a
quick glance at me as if to indicate me as a substantial excuse for any
crimes. I stood convicted, for I do use Dabney continually in all my
hospitalities.

"We understand, Dabney," was the answer he got from the feeding Jaguar,
who gave me that glint of a laugh that I had learned to expect and
to--dread. I knew what he meant to imply, and I also knew that he knew
that I understood that he considered me a disturbing element. Then he
again raised the half-demolished hunk of bread to his mouth, stopped and
regarded the apple in meditative indecision. From head to heels he was
clothed in the most exquisite white flannel and buckskin tennis
clothes, but for all their civilized worldliness he resembled nothing so
much as a feeding king of the forest in the poise of his wonderful head
and equally wonderful body. I glanced quickly at his face with its
gentle, deep, comprehending lines, in positive fear of him, and I found
reassurance in the smile that curled his strong red mouth and glinted at
me from his brilliant eyes under dull gold. Then, after the smile, he
decided for the apple rather than further conversation, and was just
going to set his white teeth in its rosy cheek when I stopped him with
an almost involuntary exclamation.

"Don't!" I pleaded. "Dinner is just ready, and you'll spoil it if you
eat all that bread and butter and apple." Just exactly a week before, at
almost that exact hour, the Reverend Gregory Goodloe had refused the cup
of tea I had stood holding for him in my hand for five minutes on the
front porch of the Poplars, and I had taken a resolve that never would
he again receive a food invitation from me. I didn't count Mammy's
"snack" eaten on the Harpeth adventure. I didn't understand myself and
my sudden rush of dismay at the idea of a spoiled dinner for him, but I
couldn't stop myself as I added:

"Mammy has apple dumplings and hard sauce; please don't--I mean please
_do_ come in to dinner with us."

"Thank you, but as you see I've about dined," he answered me, as with a
laugh he held out his fragments. "Jefferson was feeling badly and I sent
him to bed instead of the parsonage kitchen." Mammy had told me that the
Reverend Mr. Goodloe had taken hers and Dabney's cherished and perfectly
worthless only son as his sole domestic dependence, and Mammy had added
the fact that Jeff had "shot nary crap since the parson rescued him from
the jaw of the jail."

"Huh," ejaculated Dabney over the hoe he had taken from father and was
using at his direction while father lined the border beside the bed with
his sharp spade. I knew the contempt in his voice was for the illness of
Jefferson, and the Reverend Mr. Goodloe and I both laughed as he took
the last bite of the brown slab and then held out the unbitten side of
the apple to me.

"You eat your fruit with me, not in dumplings with hard sauce," he said,
and there was a wooing note in his voice as if he pleaded for that
friendliness from me to heal a hurt.

"No, _I_ won't eat out of your hand," I answered, with a cool emphasis
on the "I." And I looked him straight in the eyes, for I wanted him to
know that I had thoroughly understood his refusal of my invitation
couched so gently, but which I considered in reality haughty and
resentful, especially as I had been his guest in his car. "We'll wait
until you get your shower, father, and not much longer," I said to
father, as I turned and went along the flagstones to the steps that led
to the balcony upon which opened the long windows of the dining room. I
was furious and I was hurt.

At times I become acutely conscious that I am very imperious, but it is
not entirely my fault. My friends have depended upon my clear head, in
which father's brain seems to work with a kind of feminine vigor, and I
have always felt that the superior force with which I have loved and
cherished them made it all right. I've always stood by them and used
myself mercilessly for their exigencies, and I suppose I have ruled them
as mercilessly. I rarely encounter another will, and to clash into one
as strong as mine drew the sparks of my nature. The blaze was soon over,
but I--smouldered.

During dinner I was deeply interested in father's plans for my garden,
which brilliantly carried the plans Nickols and I had made to what I saw
in another year would be a marvelously artistic completeness. But under
the joy of hearing him talk as I had never really heard him since I was
old enough to appreciate his scintillating delicious choice of words and
phrases, I was hot and sore at the thought of my duty to render
gratitude where gratitude was due for having him like that.

"It will be perfectly wonderful, father, and Nickols had not worked it
out to anything like that completeness. He will be wild about it, but
won't it take a lot of money? And where did you get your inspiration?" I
asked the question, though I hated the answer I knew it must receive.

"The plans are entirely my own," answered father, with a pleased flush
making even brighter his dulled eyes and cheeks, faintly glowing from
the shower at which Dabney had officiated a few minutes before. I had
not failed to notice that we had sat down and were halfway through
dinner and father's hand had not motioned Dabney towards the decanter
and ice and siphon on the sideboard. "I must confess that the
inspiration came from a kind of rage when Goodloe said to me how much it
was to be regretted that all the great gardens in the North are being
made out of a sort of patchwork of English, French, Italian and even
Japanese influences. You couldn't expect anything more of the
inhabitants of the part of the country in the veins of whose people flow
just about that mixture of blood, but in the Harpeth Valley we have been
Americans for two and a half centuries, and I'll show 'em an American
garden if it does unhinge both mine and Dabney's backs and make Cockrell
swear I'm crazy when he audits my accounts once every month. No, Madam,
your own grandmother and great-grandmother, in conjunction with
Goodloe's maternal ancestors, conceived and laid out the beginning of
the great American garden, and we will combine to produce it."

"What about Nickols' plans?" I asked, trying hard to raise indignation
in my heart and voice at the thought of Nickols Morris Powers' work,
for which the people of wealth in the North were beginning fairly to
clamor, being criticized and laid aside at the inspiration of the
Methodist parson across the lilac hedge. And I succeeded better than I
expected, for I saw father lose color and tremble with his own rage,
which he always quells with drink.

"That sunken garden is Italian, and I'm going to tear it out and
put--Oh, my daughter; forgive me, but I forgot, in this queer nature
frenzy that has come over me of late and which I do not at all
understand, that the garden is yours, was your mother's and
grandmother's. So far the plans have just been begun, and nothing that
you and Nickols have done--Dabney, pour me three fingers of the 1875
Bourbon." And in a second I saw father grow white and shaking with
mortification at what he felt to be an unmannerly trespass upon
another's rights. My father has been a drunkard for nearly twenty years,
but he is still a great gentleman. Slowly he drank the whiskey, every
drop of which seemed to go to my heart like cold lead.

"But, father!" I exclaimed, determined to win him back. Dabney was
putting the silver stopper in the decanter over by the sideboard, and I
thought I saw a sob shake his bent old shoulders as his black hands
trembled. "I'd like to know if I'm not as purely American as you are,
and have I not the same right to want, demand and work for an American
nationalism, even in a garden, as you have? I'll have you know, sir,
that the future of the nation is in the hands of the women. We can
produce pure Americans or let the whole country go hybrid." And as I
spoke I let my temper rise to a point which I hoped would shock father
and take his mind from the decanter and the ice. "I demand that you
allow me to carry out your plans for my garden, and that you help me do
it to the limit of the hinges in your back and Dabney's. And, Dabney,
don't let me hear another word about that hinge until those dahlias are
in bloom. Also get me a half dozen bottles of dynamite to blow out that
Italian garden. I never did like it."

"Yes'm," answered Dabney, meekly but comprehendingly, for he hastily
flung a napkin over the ice and gently set the decanter back in its
rack. "But dynamite, it comes in sticks and not in bottles. And it
would shake the roots of them old poplars clean most down to hell."

"How'll we get that sunken garden out, then, father?" I asked, and I saw
the life and color come back to his face in a flood of humor.

"We might try filling it in," he answered, and then we both laughed at
ourselves, with Dabney joining in.




CHAPTER VII

THE TRISTAN LOVE SONG


After dinner father and I sat out on the porch in the soft, warm breeze
that waved a misty spring moonlight around us, and talked garden until
after ten o'clock. He was brilliant and delightful, but three times he
made trips to ice bowl and decanter on the sideboard.

"It will be a great relief and happiness to me if Nickols does sanction
and set the seal of artistic approval upon our plans," he said, with
feverish but happy eyes. "You see, Nickols will represent the
cosmopolitan in judgment upon the normally developed insular. I remember
once that Mr. Justice Harlan said that in an opinion on freight rates I
had sent up to him I had represented both the cosmopolitan and the
insular interest with astonishing equity, and I told him that I
considered that it took at least six generations of insular mind culture
to see any kind of national equity. The same thing holds good with a
garden. It takes the sixth generation on a piece of land to produce a
garden, and then it has to be laid out around a library full of the
ideals of poet and scholar. In about three years I can, with your
permission, present the American nation with a garden that will
represent the best ideals of Americans; and I must go to bed if I expect
to get up and hunt the early worm. I can never decide which is the
harder work, the capture of that creature of tradition or the arousing
of Dabney to perform that task. You, Dabney."

"Yes, sir," came a sleepy groan from just within the door, and in a
second the old black face was lit up with father's candle until the
white wool above shone like a halo as it appeared from out the gloom.
And I sat and watched the two old gentlemen, one black and one white,
toil slowly up the steps and down the wide hall of the Poplars.

"Father _must_ come back; the nation needs him," I said fiercely under
my breath as I noticed that in Dabney's hand swung the ice bucket where
I had been accustomed to see it swing for years, but which I had not
seen him carry before since I came home. "And that's how _you_ help him
fight to come back," I arraigned myself with bitter scorn. "You have no
faith nor spiritual sources yourself, and you throw him back into
degradation when something is helping him crawl out. What's helping him?
No matter what it is, you are a coward to obstruct it."

And for a long hour I sat thus raging at myself and questioning
hopelessly, while the young moon rose higher and higher over the tops of
the silvery poplars and young spring slipped about in the lights and
shadows, invisible except for perfumed wreathings of gossamer mist.
Above, I heard father pacing up and down his rooms, slowly, almost
feebly. Sometimes he would hesitate; then I would hear him stop beside
the window, where I knew the ice bowl and the decanter were placed upon
a table which had stood beside the head of his bed so burdened since my
early childhood. I had always dreaded his moroseness and instinctively
felt the cause of it. I had never really loved him until just the last
few days, and now I felt my love rise in a tide that threatened to
overwhelm me.

"Oh, I found him, and now I've thrown him away," I sobbed to myself.
Then, as I sat listening, I heard the faltering steps come out into the
hall above, descend the steps one by one, go through the dark dining
room groping pitifully, and down the side steps out into the beloved
garden. Silently I watched the tall figure with the white hair silvered
radiantly by the moonlight go slowly down the path, past the old
graybeard poplars, and even up to the lilac hedge that ran as a bulwark
in front of the dark chapel door, which I could see was ajar as it
always is.

"He's going for help," I muttered to myself, and I felt the padding of
fear pursuing me, while also something of the Methodist grandmother
within me began a queer calling and a tightening at my throat.

Then something happened that interested me so that I lost all personal
anxiety. Father stopped beside the hedge and picked up something from
the grass. I saw it was a long, heavy hoe. Walking over to a long bed of
early roses he and Dabney had been fertilizing in the late afternoon, he
bent feebly and began to dig the food into their roots. As he swung the
long handle, each blow upon the soft earth became more decided. I crept
down behind the old snowball bush to be nearer him; I didn't dare go to
him in his fight, because I had in my selfish heedlessness brought it
all on, but in a little while he was not alone, for a bent old figure
with grizzled white wool sticking out from under a red flannel nightcap
came quietly along the path with a hoe in his hand, fell in directly
behind his master, and began a rhythmic blow-answering-blow contest with
the fragrant earth and the demon within the man. For at least an hour
the two old friends worked up and down the long bed, until I could see
father begin to totter with weakness.

"Now, come on, Mas' Nick, honey, and go to bed. I'll pour a bucket of
cistern water over you and rub you down so as you'll sleep like a bug in
a rug," the staunch old comrade crooned, with a mother note in his
voice, as he took father's heavy hoe and shouldered it with his.

"I think evening exercise is good for me, Dabney," answered father with
all the dignity and command come back into his voice. "Put both those
hoes in the tool house this time, and I'll not tell Mr. Goodloe you
left one down by the lilac hedge."

"Yes, sir, thanky, sir, fer not telling him," answered Dabney, as he
followed his master to the tool house under the back steps, deposited
the garden implements where he was directed, and then again followed his
idol in through the long dining room window and was lost in the shadow.

I went back to the front steps, again sank down, put my arms on my
knees, and let my head fall upon my clasped hands. As I sat there alone,
with the dark house yawning behind me in its emptiness, someone sat down
beside me and laid a warm, strong hand on my interlaced and strained
fingers for just about half a second.

"Please forgive me about the apple dumplings and the hard sauce," a
merry, very lovely voice pleaded.

"I went out to Old Harpeth with you when you asked me; but I loathe
going to church--I haven't been in one since I was strong enough to
rebel--and I'm not going to yours," was the apology I graciously offered
in return for that about the apple dumplings. "But I'd pay fifty
dollars for a tenth row seat to hear you sing Tristan in the
Metropolitan any day if I had to go hungry for a week to pay for it," I
added, as I laughed as softly as he had pleaded. All the sorrow and
strain of the last hours had vanished at the touch of his hand, and I
felt like an impish, teasing child.

"I'll sing some of it for you now, if you'll give fifty cents to Mother
Spurlock for the Children's Day Picnic. And it'll be a bargain you are
getting," was the unexpected offer I encountered.

"And a freezer of vanilla ice cream to boot," I assented, generously.

And then something happened to me the like of which I know never
happened to anybody in all the world, and that could happen only the
once to me. Gregory Goodloe drew a little closer to me and bent his
great gold head until his face was just off my left shoulder, and in his
powerful, rich, fascinating voice, which he muted down in a way that
made it sound as if he were singing through a golden cloud, he sang
Tristan's immortal love agony in a way that shut out all the rest of the
universe and left me alone with him in a space swayed by his pleading
until my mortal body shook in actual pain.

"Don't! I can't stand it!" I gasped, as I seized his wrist in my strong
hands and wrung it. "Stop!"

The last tender note breathed itself into the air that seemed to hold it
in a long caress until it died away, and sobs shook me as I held on
desperately to his wrist. I felt that I _must_ be comforted. And I was!
Again the gentle fingers were laid over mine for a still smaller
fraction of a second, and then again the beautiful, clear voice began to
sing to me, just to me, out of the whole world.

"'Abide with me, fast falls the even tide,'" he chanted, and then waited
while my sobs died away and I let go my drowning grasp on his wrist.

"That's just what I mean. That's just why I wouldn't have any more
respect for myself if I should go to your church than if I joined in one
of Mammy's foot-washings down at the river and fell in a fit of shouting
in which it took two burly coons to 'hold my spirit down,' as she
describes those gymnastics to me. I hate you and I hate my friends for
indulging in religion, because it is just as 'potent an agent of
intoxication' as exists to-day, and it blinds us to the need of work
along scientific lines for the immediate improvement of the race. What
right have we to intoxicate reason with religion? If religion is
anything it must be reason." I fairly hurled my words of half-baked
skepticism at him, with the vision of father and Dabney digging in the
garden, still in my eyes.

"I felt just as you do about it a year ago to-day," he answered me
quietly. "As you state the case of religion as emotion versus reason, it
doesn't exist. Religion is reason plus emotion, and when you combine the
two the eyes of your soul are open, whereas they had been closed. Nobody
can tell you about it, but you begin really to live when you see and
comprehend. Yes, it is going to take all the scientific reason the world
possesses to start its salvation, but it will not get far without
'emotion,' as you call what I _know_ is love of God, and, through that
love, compassion for man."

"The assumption that every man is blind who does not believe as you do,
stops all argument," I said scornfully.

"I didn't come to talk religion with you; I came over to get that apple
dumpling off my conscience, as I couldn't digest it because it wasn't
there. I preach twice, on Sunday and on Wednesday night, and I'm in my
study behind the altar every afternoon that I'm not playing tennis. I'll
be there any time by appointment." The worldly and protective raillery
in that young Methodist minister's voice almost interrupted my religious
researches, but I was in depths that were strange to me, and I was
floundering for a line out.

"I'll never be there," I flared at him, then went on with my
floundering. "If a man is blind, how can he gain the sight that you
arrogate to yourself?"

"A great man once prayed, 'Lord, help thou my unbelief,'" was the gentle
answer in which was that queer note of apostolic surety with which I
heard him address the woman in the garden that night.

"I can't pray--there's nothing there," I said in a very small voice that
I could scarcely recognize as my own. "Oh, I mean that we are all
floundering, and where can we get the lifeline? Where did you get the
line that you think will pull you out of the vortex?"

Then for a long moment he and I sat again involved in the emptiness of
the universe that Tristan's love song had opened for us, and I knew that
with ruthless feet I had entered his Holy of Holies and was being
allowed to stand across the threshold.

"Forgive me," I gasped.

"I never felt that I could tell it before," he said, slowly, and the
bounds of the emptiness retreated still further away as he turned so
that he sat facing me and again bent his dull gold head closer to mine.
In a second I knew why in my mind I had been calling him a Harpeth
jaguar. It was just my pictorial expression for the word freedom, the
freedom that comes from power. I knew that mentally and bodily I was
looking upon the first free man I had ever encountered, and I was
abashed.

"Don't tell me," I said, with a gentleness in my voice I had never heard
before, and that came from something that I felt to be strangely like
meekness, though I had never before met that emotion in myself.

"You know the romance of my father's life," the soft voice went on,
speaking as if I had not interrupted him, "but nobody knows the tragedy.
Love for my mother came upon him like an arrow shot out of ambush, and
he married into a worldly, pleasure-loving, agnostic circle of people
who all adored and flattered him until he--he became confused and
doubting. He had transgressed the law: 'yoke not yourselves with
unbelievers,' and he suffered. She never understood. It killed him, and
when he had been dead nearly twenty years I found the diary he kept the
months before he died. It was last year, just after her death. It was a
cry to me, who at that time was a mere babe, and it--it lighted the
flame he had almost let go out. As I read, the apostolic call came to me
and I answered. I was starting to the front in France, and I went on. My
year there was a series of experiences that gave me my surety. One day
it came more clearly than ever. I had gone out into one of the trenches
of the first line, because I am so strong that I can carry any man back
to the stretchers across my back or in my arms. I have carried two at a
time. There were nineteen men in the trench, and I made the twentieth.
Suddenly a machine gun found the range and mowed them all down like
cornstalks or wheat heads. Only I was left standing, bleeding under my
left ribs. I raised my voice and praised God for my surety of
immortality, and then fell. While I was practically dying in the
hospital with a clip in my lung I got suddenly and unaccountably well
and strong, and felt I must come back to try and help others to see what
we must see to assure every man of his immortality. When the race
awakens to that fact there will be no more use for machine guns. I may
not help much, but I can only try. Perhaps I do only work through the
emotions as yet, but I believe that my ministry will have its fruits. I
can wait." And the humility and patience in his voice beat against my
heart and bruised it so that I cried out.

"Oh, why did you come here?" I positively moaned, as he and I both rose
and I put out my hand as if to force him out of that aloneness in which
we stood together.

"America must lead the world in spiritual as well as material
regeneration, and this is the only real and dispassionate America, with
no foreign pull on its vitals. You must wake up; the cry has been heard
to 'Come over and help.' Why do you fight the--"

"I can't help fighting. I must do what I conscientiously believe--" I
was saying with my hand still outstretched against him, when suddenly
the still place around us was invaded with a crash and its invisible
walls thrown down.

"Charlotte!" came in Nickols' languid, fascinating voice that always
draws me to the edge of his world. "And Greg Goodloe, by all that is
good and holy--in tennis flannels!"




CHAPTER VIII

BREASTING THE GALE


In the radiant moonlight I saw the lithe muscles of the Jaguar grow taut
and stiff, and I felt rather than saw his long, strong hands clench
themselves. I was about to stretch out my arms and ward off something
that seemed like danger to Nickols, standing down at the bottom of the
steps, smiling up at us in the moonlight with his mocking, fascinating
smile, when suddenly the anger seemed to flow away from the body of the
parson and he smiled down into the upturned eyes with great gentleness
as we started down the steps together.

"I didn't interrupt the salvation of Charlotte's soul, did I?" Nickols
asked, as he took my outstretched hand in his left hand and raised it to
his lips as he held out his right to the Reverend Mr. Goodloe. So real
had been that fraction of an instant when I had stood between the two
men that I almost felt the sensation of alarm a second time as I saw
Nickols' slender, magical, artist's fingers laid in the slim, powerful
hand of the Reverend Mr. Goodloe, but the gentle voice reassured me as
the Harpeth Jaguar answered the intruder, or what he must have felt to
be the intruder, for I had something of that feeling myself at the
advent of my lover at the moment he had chosen for his arrival.

"The trouble began about apple dumplings and hard sauce," I said, as
quickly as my wits would act.

"How are you, Nickols Powers, since we separated 'somewhere in France,'
you with your sketch books and I with my hospital stretchers? I got a
dandy lung clip; did you bring away any lead?" And the parson's voice
was gentle and cordial and full of a laughing reminiscence.

"Didn't smell powder after I left you," answered Nickols, as we all
ascended the steps and stood in a group before the door. "I got my books
full of sketches of bits of treasures that the war might destroy, and
beat it back to civilization. Did the Madonna of the Red Cross you had
in tow come across as sentimentally as was threatened?" Nickols' voice
was as cordial as the Reverend Goodloe's, but something in me made me
resent the question and the manner it was asked.

"She was killed in a field hospital just a few weeks after we left
her--'somewhere in France.' She got God's welcome!" was the answer that
came to the laughing question in a quiet, reverent voice. And as he
spoke the parson started down the steps, then turned for his farewell.

"That--or sweet oblivion," said Nickols, as he came to the edge of the
steps and looked down at the Harpeth Jaguar coolly. I again got the
sense of danger from the tall, lithe figure that stood in the moonlight,
radiant before us in the shadow. "We'll contest that point warmly while
we contest the meeting house Charlotte writes me that you planted in our
garden--of Eden."

"I can contest--if I must," was the serene answer that came back at us
from over the white silk-clad shoulder. "Good night, both of you, and I
hope to see you both again soon. Smell the lilacs bursting bud in your
garden--of Eden!" With which farewell he left us to our greetings.

"That's some man to be lost in the ranks of the shibboleths," said
Nickols with generous ease, as we watched the last glint of the moon on
the yellow head disappearing around the corner. "Degrees from three old
colleges, millions, women lovers in millions, all thrown away to sing
psalms for a few rustics in little old Goodloets. Can you beat it? But,
blast him, he can't take away my loving welcome with his fatal beauty,"
and as he spoke, with a tender laugh Nickols held out his arms to me. I
went into them and he held me close.

"I couldn't stay away--with Goodloe and the meeting house in the ring
against me," he whispered, and he tried to raise my head for the kiss I
had been holding from him all the long winter of our engagement,
claiming to want it only under the roof of the Poplars. I burrowed my
face in his shoulder and held to him with such fervor that it was
impossible for him to raise my head.

"Not yet," was my muffled pleading.

"Again, damn that huge blond giant for being in the way of my getting my
own on the first-sight wave," said Nickols with a good-humored laugh, as
he pushed me from him. "Take your time. I like ripe fruit--and kisses.
Did you say Goodloe had come over to steal apple dumplings and you had
caught him in the act? I never was so hungry before and one of Mrs.
Dabney's apple dumplings with that hard sugar stuff smothered with
cream--well, of course I could wait until breakfast, but I'd be mighty
weak. Your night train carries no dining car."

"I feel sure that there is at least a half panful in the pantry; let's
go see," I answered with delight at the practical turn the scene had
taken, and I led him into the dark house, turned on one or two lights
and went with him back into the culinary department of the Poplars.

And as I had predicted so we found the larder supplied. With a huge
plate of the pastry encrusted apples, smothered with all the cream from
one of Mammy's pans of milk, and a tall bottle from the sideboard,
Nickols led the way out of the long windows onto the south balcony over
which the moon, now high in the heavens, poured the radiance of a
new-toned daylight. I followed him with some glasses and sugar and a
bowl of cracked ice that I had found in its usual place in the corner of
the refrigerator.

"Pretty good substitute for the affectionate sweet I thought of all the
way down from New York," said Nickols with an adorable laugh, as he
lifted the first spoonful, dripping with cream, to his mouth. Then with
the food almost bestowed he paused and looked out beyond the garden
toward the chapel, which loomed up gray and shimmering in the silver
light.

"Great heavens!" he ejaculated, and for a long minute the spoon was
poised while his eyes fairly devoured the scene spread out before him
against the background of Paradise Ridge.

"If you don't like it we can get rid of it," I said, as I poured his
drink over the ice tinkling against the side of the glass.

"Not like it!" exclaimed Nickols, as he rose with the spoonful of
dumplings dashed back into the plate. "That is the most wonderful and
beautiful landscape effect I have ever beheld. That is just what our
garden needed. I suppose I would have seen it and put some sort of a
pavilion there, but that squat and perfect old church would have been
beyond me."

"Oh, I'm glad!" I exclaimed, as he sank back on the step beside me, took
the glass from my hand, drank deeply and this time began a determined
attack upon the plate in his hand. And then as he ate I told him all
about father and his plans for the garden and his own improvement and to
what I hoped the work was leading him. But somehow I couldn't bring
myself to describe the scene which had that night been enacted in the
garden--I couldn't. "Oh, I am so glad you are not furious and will maybe
be willing to encourage him, even if it does mean to encourage the
Methodist Church and the minister thereof. You are wonderful, Nickols,"
I finished with a squeeze of his arm that very nearly jostled the cream
out of the spoon upon his gray tweed trousers.

"I'd be a wonderful ass not to take advantage of Judge Nickols Powers'
brain and money, plus Gregory Goodloe's brain and training and money
combined, to get a result that will be worth a hundred thousand dollars
to me and all the fame I can conveniently wear. Encourage 'em? Just
watch me! Only what the judge thinks will take two years can be done in
one season if we get experts down to do it, which we will. Trees two
hundred years old _can_ be moved for a few thousand dollars, as well as
plants in bloom that would require years to transplant. I know the man
to do it: Wilkerson of White Plains. I'll telegraph him in the
morning."

"He won't interfere with--with father, will he?" I asked anxiously.

"Not a bit--he'll just make what the judge and Gregory plan for year
after next, grow and bloom there in a couple of months. Wilkerson is not
a creator, he's just nature keyed up to the _n_th power. And also I'll
give him for a bait the Jeffries estate I was hesitating about making a
bid for. All the big fellows are after it. Old man Jeffries has made two
barrels of money in the last ten years in oil and he is going to build
an estate up on the Hudson that will make the world gasp. I hadn't put
in a bid, but this idea of the judge's and Greg's, with the whole
village grouped about it, has given me the keynote to win the thing from
the whole bunch of American architects. He wants the village built as
well as the estate. That American garden idea will bowl him over. He's
progressively and rabidly American. The bids don't close until December,
so I'll have time to get real photographs and sketches. Me for the
reformed judge and the parson!"

"This is the most wonderful thing I ever heard and I want father pushed
to the limit with the planning. I don't care where the parson comes in,
just so I don't have to join the church to get the garden," I said, as I
tinkled the ice in Nickols' empty glass, while he consumed the last bit
of cream from the empty plate.

"Oh, I'll join the church if it is needed to push the garden," said
Nickols with a laugh, as he lit a cigarette and puffed a smoke ring out
toward the gray little chapel. "Most people who join churches do it for
some kind of pull, social or business, or a respectability stamp or to
be white-washed. I'll put on a frock coat and pass the plate if it will
help the parson evolve another phase of gardenism."

"Billy gets home from his poker game at the Last Chance, down in the
Settlement, on Sunday morning, just in time to bathe and get into his
frock coat to perform that office," I said with a laugh that had a hint
of recklessness tinged with contempt.

"I'll see Billy through both ceremonials," said Nickols. "Has Billy come
into the fold?"

"He has! So have all the rest," I answered. "I am the only black sheep
and they are all backsliding down on me. I am getting, and will get,
the blame of it all as a corrupter of public morals."

"Why don't you join and then do as you please with the official stamp of
Christianity upon you?" Nickols asked, as he puffed comfortably away in
the moonlight.

One of the things that cause me the deepest hurt is to try to get
Nickols to look down into my depths and read one, just any one, of the
hieroglyphics there. I know each time I open my nature to him he is
going to turn aside, and yet I will try. As his arm stole around me I
made another one of the attempts that I always know beforehand are
doomed to failure.

"There is something in me, a quality of mind that seems to be judicial,
which insists that as a cold scheme for existence in this universe
nothing compares with that of life followed by eternal redemption
through personal effort interpreted by a mediator. The bare Christian
tenets have a nobility that it kills me to see belittled by the bored,
half-hearted observances of most of its protestants, who in turn are not
to be blamed for being half-hearted and bored by the dogmas and
restrictions and littleness with which the great bare scheme has been
enmeshed and clothed. The Methodist Church positively forbids Billy to
play poker or drink, but it just as positively forbids him to see
Pavlowa dance or Beerbohm Tree play Falstaff or Forbes Robertson
incarnate Hamlet. And look at its wretched machinery--they allow a young
man to give his life and expect inspiration from him at six hundred
dollars a year with a wife and two dozen children, which he has been
encouraged to bring down upon himself, dependent on that same six
hundred dollars. The great men who are expected to direct our spiritual
destinies don't get as much money as many ordinary grocers and certainly
not enough to support their obligations with dignity. What is true of
the Methodist Church is true of all the rest, in perhaps a greater
degree. So with their smallness and their pettiness and their befogging
stupidity I feel that they may be denying thinkers like you and me the
use of their scheme and we'll have to find another for ourselves if we
want immortality."

"Do we want that immortality?" asked Nickols easily. "This world is a
pretty good old place if you don't regard the 'shalt nots,' but isn't it
long enough to live the allotted time? What do we want to do it all
over again for, that is, provided we do all the pleasant things while we
have the chance? I don't want to see any play twice, even a masterpiece.
I wouldn't want to live again unless I had been a Christian in this life
and felt that I wanted to come back and do a lot of the things I had
just heard about and previously hadn't tried."

"Certainly I wouldn't want another life that is as unsatisfied as this,"
I murmured, more to myself than to Nickols.

"Do the things that satisfy," he urged again, and I could see a deviltry
dancing at me out of the corner of his eyes that I resented deeply
without exactly knowing why.

"Harriet Henderson can't get Mark Morgan's love or--his children, and
Nell Morgan is unattainable for Billy. Though they have all the world's
goods and go a pace that pleases them, they are unsatisfied. If they
don't get the new deal that immortality promises they lose the whole
thing," I answered straight out from the shoulder. "And what about those
who die in infancy and--and you and me?"

"If you'll just kiss me and hush preaching to me I'll be entirely
satisfied and ready to die as soon as I have lifted that fifty thousand
out of old Jeffries with the judge's and the Reverend Gregory's garden
and done a few more commissions. Try kissing me and see if you don't
feel more cheerful," Nickols answered with a laugh, as he drew me close
to him. I sadly shut up the doors of my depths, warded off the
kiss--why, I didn't know--and persuaded him to go up to his rooms which
I had seen Sallie and Dabney put in order that afternoon.

It was midnight when I parted with Nickols at the head of the old
winding stairs in the fragrant darkness, lit only by the silver light of
the night from a long window at the front of the hall. He held me close
for a half second as he whispered:

"Let me make you happy. I understand."

"I don't understand, and until I do I'd make you miserable, dear," I
whispered back as I drew myself out of his reluctant arms and went into
my own door.

Then for a long midnight hour I stood at my deep window and looked out
over the garden, past the squat steeple silvering beyond the lilac
hedge, to Paradise Ridge in the dim distance, and tried to read my own
hieroglyphics. I needed help. Nickols had come after me to Goodloets in
a spirit of gentle determination and I knew the fight would be to the
finish. And why should I fight? Any woman ought to be proud to marry
Nickols Morris Powers, especially a woman who had loved him since her
heart had been developed to the knowledge of love. Very unostentatiously
and with perfect good taste Nickols had let me see that Marie VanClive
with her Knickerbocker ancestry and her Manhattan land-grants fortune
was very decidedly interested in him in her cultured and perfected young
way, and young Mrs. Houston had herself shown me the same thing on one
of the week-end flights we had had on her yacht. And beyond all that my
own heart told me that Nickols was desirable. His gentleness and his
tenderness and his daring and his humor were irresistible to a woman.
And his lazy acquiescence in life was peaceful and inviting to my own
strenuosity. I felt as if I had always been an eagle breasting the gale
with no place to alight, and now Nickols was calling to me from an
eyrie on a mountain side to come and rest and be mated and comforted.

"I'm tired of loneliness and I think I'll drift and be happy," I
murmured, as I fell asleep with my back to the silver steeple against
the dim hills.




CHAPTER IX

INTO BRAMBLES


The next morning I awoke with the same resolve in my heart, to be happy
if wicked, and proceeded to execute it with a great vigor. And in the
execution of that resolve dear old Goodloets almost had some of the moss
of its century's repose scraped off of its back.

First and foremost, we all danced, day and night. We had really begun
the giddy whirl the summer before when we had built the little clubhouse
over in the oak grove by the river's edge, just between the Town and the
Settlement, so that we would no longer feel the limit and limitations to
our gliding of anybody's double parlors, and conservative Goodloets had
been duly shocked thereat.

"Ladies did not dance outside of their own and their friends' private
homes in my day," Mrs. Cockrell had sighed, as she finished the petal
of the rose she was embroidering upon some of Letitia's lingerie.

"I'd rather they danced in their den of iniquity than to execute these
modern gyrations in my home," had responded Harriet's mother, Mrs.
Sproul, as she finished the hundredth round on the shawl she was
knitting. Harriet's report of the conversation had been received with
great hilarity that evening at dinner at the Club.

But Goodloets had had a year in which to recover from the shock of the
institution of the Country Club when I started in to enjoy myself.
Having church services there on Sundays and Wednesdays during the winter
had done much to remove the prejudice in the minds of the conservative.
I suspected the Reverend Mr. Goodloe of a great deal of worldly wisdom
when I saw how he had been able to persuade the directors, Hampton
Dibrell and Mark and Cliff, to let him do such a weird thing. Mrs.
Sproul and Mrs. Cockrell and their friends had first been tolled out to
prayer meeting and then had come to witness a tennis match. Billy, in
great glee, recounted to me the first time they had stayed to dinner
with him and father and Mr. Cockrell. They had been enjoying the prayer
meetings to the utmost and had come out with Mother Spurlock by mistake
on a Tuesday night, which was the regular dinner dance night. It was
some time before they discovered their mistake, for they were immensely
enjoying their visit with Mother Spurlock, and when the dancing began
Billy had seized Mother Elsie in his arms and danced her the whole
length of the room. The music had been too much for her feet in their
sensible shoes, and very suddenly they had unfolded their wings after
thirty long years of rest and had fairly flown up and down and backwards
and forwards with Billy's in a sedate version of one of the phases of
the tango. Mrs. George Spurlock had been the best dancer in Goodloets
when time was young.

"Do you think that it was the devil that tempted you, Mother Elsie?" I
asked her about it one day when she had a leisure moment for teasing.

"Effie Burns' youngest baby was born exactly while I was dancing, and we
will have six months' trouble with her because her band was not put on
properly," was her answer, as she took up her parcel of five pairs of
only slightly worn stockings that five girls in the Settlement needed
worse than I needed darns, and departed in a great hurry. "Oh, but you
should have seen Hattie Sproul's eyes while I danced," she called back
over her shoulder as she went through the gate.

And so in the second summer of the Club's existence there had been no
bridle upon its gayeties--I had almost used the word license, and I
suppose it would have been a just one under the circumstances. Billy
called it "The Bucket of the Lost Lid," and every individual member did
exactly as he or she chose. The sideboard out on the back porch made as
good a bar as any in the state with old Uncle Wilks to officiate, and in
the wing in one of the private dining rooms a huge wheel stood with its
face to the wall during the day, but came complacently out of its corner
when night descended. On the porch could always be found either Mrs.
James Knight or Mrs. Buford Cunningham. They neither of them had
children, hated home and were serenely happy sitting on the front porch
knitting silk scarfs and gossiping with all comers, while James and
Buford hung around the sideboard at the back. They were institutions and
all of the unmarried boys and girls, men and women, widowed and
widowered, came and went at will, with the liberty that the chaperonage
of their certain presence allowed.

"Suppose one of 'em should fall dead and the other have to attend her
funeral," Nickols remarked one Saturday night at a dinner table not more
than twelve feet away from the two couples. "The scandal that would soon
disrupt this town for lack of their free chaperonage would be like an
earthquake. None of you would have a shred of respectability with which
to drape yourselves to appear in public."

"They don't wear much respectability anyway in the eyes of the
Settlement," said Billy, as he mixed the champagne cup with old Wilks
standing admiringly by. "The floor manager ordered Luella May Spain off
the floor at the dance they had in the lodge room over the Last Chance
last Saturday night for appearing in one of Harriet's last year dancing
frocks Mother Spurlock had collected for her, though they do say that
Luella May had sewed in two inches of tucker and put in sleeves. How's
that for an opinion passed upon the high and mighty from the meek and
lowly?"

"I'd been in mourning a year. That was my coming out gown and I felt--"
Harriet was saying when Billy laughed and interrupted her.

"And you came out, Harriet dear," he assured her, as he poured her
champagne cup and his and signaled Wilks to serve the rest of us.

On the surface all of the joy that most of Goodloets was having was real
and brilliant and spontaneous, all the dancing and drinking and high
playing, but under the surface there were dark currents that ran in many
directions. Young Ted Montgomery and Billy played poker one Saturday
night until daylight out at the Club, and Bessie Thornton and Grace
Payne had "staid by" and were having bacon and eggs with them when the
sun rose. Judge Payne, Grace's father, has been a widower ten years and
Grace, with the four younger "pains," as Billy calls them, has run wild
away from him and her grandmother, old Madam Payne, who lives in a world
of crochet needles and silk thread with Mrs. Cockrell and Mrs. Sproul.
One night I went with Billy in his car to take Grace home and he had to
wait until I tiptoed to her room with my arm around her and put her to
bed, while Harriet was doing the same thing with Bessie Thornton. Those
girls are not much over twenty and they are only a little more
"liberated," as they call it, than the rest of their friends. Ted
Montgomery loves Grace, when he is himself and not at the card table,
but what chance have they to form a union of any solidity and
permanence? Billy's nephew, Clive Harvey, has always loved Bessie
Thornton, but he is teller in the Goodloets bank and almost never sees
her. He is one of the stewards in the Harpeth Jaguar's church, and the
suffering on his slim young face hurts me like a blow every time I meet
him. What's going to satisfy him, no matter what pace he should choose
to go or how many things he is driven by unhappiness to indulge himself
in?

And it was true that everything done up in the town had its effect down
in the Settlement. The lodge hall over the Last Chance was the only hall
available for the young people in the Settlement to dance, and the bar
of the East Chance, at which old Jacob Ensley officiated, was no better
stocked than the lockers at the Country Club. And all of us knew that
very frequently Billy and Nickols and the rest of our friends went down
to dance and drink with the girls from the mills and the shops. Billy
had told me once that Milly Burt, who stays at the cigar stand in the
Goodloe Hotel in Goodloets, dances so much like me and is so perfumed
with my especial sachet from France, Mother Spurlock having collected
the chiffon blouse from me for her to wear at the entertainment of the
Epworth League, that he came very near addressing her by my name in
giving her the invitation to the dance.

"Settlement or Town, they all add up to the sum of girl," he laughed, as
he told me about that Saturday night frolic in the Last Chance.

It was the day after Billy's account of the ball at the Last Chance, in
which Luella May and Milly and the rest had frolicked in what ought to
have been a perfectly harmless way, that Mother Spurlock came to spend
the afternoon with me and in which we wrestled until I was almost on the
mat--not quite.

"Goodloets has always been the gayest town in the state, but it has now
reached the place of the most wicked," she said, after a few preliminary
shots had been exchanged. "Every dignity of tradition seems to have been
dropped and everybody is dance or play or drink or speed mad. You are
the most influential personality in the whole town and I want you to
call a halt."

"But aren't they all happy? Isn't everybody getting the most out of
life? The men are all working to their capacity and making more money
than they ever have before. Why shouldn't they play hard?" I answered
her, as I seated myself in the broad window seat of my room opposite the
wide maternal ancestral rocker she had chosen.

"Are they happy?" she asked, with her keen eyes on my face.

"They seem to be," I parried.

"Well, as far as personal happiness is concerned I think it is not worth
talking about. It is the good of the whole for which I am working, for
which I am contending to-day. What you women do, who are not obliged to
add to the work of the world that you may live in it, is not of any
great importance; it is for the toilers in the vineyard that I plead.
The girls and young men in this town cannot dance and drink and play all
night and do the constructive work of the community in the daytime. If
Luella May Spain falls asleep or nods at her typewriter and fails to get
out the telegram to you or Nickols which Mr. Tate has shouted to her
off the keys, do you excuse her because she has been fatiguing herself
until midnight trying to learn some new dance that Billy Harvey has
brought down to the Last Chance from your Country Club? You would not!
She would be fired on your complaint."

"But are we responsible for how the girls and men in the Settlement
spend their evenings?" I demanded with a fine show of indignation, but
with a thrill of fear in my heart. There has always been something in
Luella May Spain's shy and admiring glances that drew me and I have
always lingered to chat with her a few minutes if business called me
into the station. The last time I had spoken to her, not a week before,
she had seemed pale and listless and had answered me with indifference.

"You and your class are the ones in power and what you do and what you
think is a moral influence that reaches and permeates every soul in this
town. You are not about your Father's business; and those less powerful
of brain and character follow you in by-paths from the straight road.
They are his Little Ones and you lead their feet into brambles. Oh,
Charlotte!" And Mother Spurlock stretched out her hands to me in
entreaty.

"I'm not a leader," I denied her. "I don't see a foot ahead of me. I'm
not worth anything. I'm just living and trying to have a good time doing
it. You have got a leader, there over the hedge; why don't they follow
him and not me?"

"Before you came Gregory Goodloe had services three times a week at your
Country Club, at which the Settlement met the Town. You were not willing
that even those few hours should be given over to the learning of the
Father's will from one whose mind and soul are ready to teach, and you
swept away his pews and his influence. And your dance tunes, to which
even I yielded, ring in the ears of his flock to drown out the echoes of
God's hymns. And now those who had begun to lean on him and to follow
him are turning to persecute him. When Jacob Ensley is drunk he openly
charges him with inveigling Martha away and hiding her. He was in a
dangerous state one night a week ago and Billy Harvey had to lock him up
in his own wine cellar to keep him and a few of his hangers-on from
'going after the parson,' who was down there praying with old Jennie
Neil as she died. He doesn't know his danger from Jacob and I think
Billy ought to tell him. All Goodloets has admired and aped you since
your birth, and now that you discountenance him they are again following
you. There were only ten people at prayer meeting last night in the
chapel, and the Wednesday before you turned him out of the Club which
had offered him its hospitality, there were one hundred and thirty,
Settlement and Town about evenly represented. You are responsible for
that prayer meeting last night. You may be responsible for the result of
one of Jacob's drunken fits. Sometime you'll have to answer for what you
do."

"No, Mother Spurlock, I'm not responsible for the failure of Gregory
Goodloe to get to the heart of your people and hold them happy to his
services and observances, and I'm certainly not responsible for his
personal safety. What he offers is not enough to satisfy. His members
prefer their Country Club and their Last Chance and their knitting and
embroidery. What we all need from the Country Club to the Last Chance is
something that makes us want to be constructive, race constructive, so
that life will be desirable on through immortality, if there is such a
thing. I can't get a glimpse of it. Can you?" and I questioned her
beseechingly.

"I can. I do! I have faith in my Father's plan to lead me through 'deep
waters' into 'pleasant pastures,'" she answered me, as her eyes looked
past me out at Paradise Ridge beyond the chapel.

"Then give it to me," I demanded.

"I can't. You must seek it yourself, and when you get it you will be
able to pour it out into the hearts of others as living water. I serve
by using my two talents of mercy and love, but God will some day give
you ten and you will have to return an hundred fold. He has given the
ten to Gregory Goodloe, and now is the night of his despair, but his
morning will dawn. You can't dance down and drink down and gamble down
and lust down a man like that. He can bide his time until his sheep come
to the fold to be fed and warmed in his bosom."

"What practical thing can I do to make you believe that I do not mean to
pull down any structure that another human is building up with the hope
it is for the good of the whole, Mother Spurlock?" I demanded of her,
goaded to the last point of endurance.

"The dedication services of the chapel will be next Sunday. Come, bring
Nickols and your father, and let the Town and Settlement see your
respect for Mr. Goodloe and for his church," she demanded, as she rose
to go, with patient defeat but a lingering hope in her voice and manner.

"Endorse something that means nothing to me?" I asked with pained
patience. "You say the people follow me; shall I lead them to drink from
a spring that I consider dry, that is dry and has no water for my
thirst? No, Mother Spurlock, if the people among whom I have been born
trust me I will only lead them by going into paths I know and in which I
walk for my own good or pleasure."

"To the Last Chance?"

"At least they get joy there that makes toil easier or offsets the
grind," I answered her.

"Is that your final--" she was asking me with her deep, wise old eyes
searching me, when she was interrupted by the banging open of my door
and the inburst of young Charlotte, young James as ever at her heels,
with Sue clinging to his hand. To-day, however, Charlotte had added one
to her cohorts, for she led by the hand a very dirty specimen of the
masculine gender, somewhat larger than herself and with a flaming red
head.

"This is Mikey Burns, Aunt Charlotte, and he's a nice little boy that's
dirty and hungry because his mother has got seven like him. Won't you
wash him and feed him so we can play with him? The preacher cleaned up
four for us to play with yesterday and they are still clean enough. If
you clean Mikey I can have a baseball nine, with Sue to get the balls
that we don't hit. She gets balls nicely and Mikey throws lots
straighter than I can. Jimmy can hit 'em, too, with a wide stick."

"I tan git 'em," declaimed small Sue with great pride.

"I can pitch 'em," also declared Mikey, with evident desire to back up
his patroness. "But not as good as her," and his admiration amounted to
adoration, as he raised his young eyes to Charlotte.

"You see, Oh, you see, even to the second generation they follow,"
laughed Mother Spurlock, as she escaped through the door and left me
with my practical demonstration of class leadership.

"Wash him, Auntie Charlotte, wash him," Charlotte continued to insist.
"I made Jimmy steal some of his things for him while nurse was
downstairs. Here they are," and young James, the thief and
aforementioned murderer, gave up his stolen goods. "And Mr. Nickols says
that all the Settlement children will go to school with us in the nice
schoolhouse he and Judge Powers and Minister are going to build in front
of Mother Spurlock's orchard. That is a law and then we'll have good
times, all of us. There is not many children in the Town and they are
all too dressed up, but it is a million down in the Settlement and we
are going to have two baseball nines and two armies to battle with. I
asked Mr. Nickols to have a place to wash the Settlements and he said he
had thought of that and is going to have five shower baths. If you'll
just wash Mikey for me I'll help you. I can attend to Jimmy's ears for
nurse real good, can't I, Jimmy?"

"Yes," responded Jimmy with brotherly pride.

"No," remonstrated Mikey with abject fear, for the sake of his ears or
propriety I was not sure.

I got past the question by motioning him into my bathroom and sending
Charlotte and Sue to bring Dabney. Dabney is Charlotte's slave and was
soon under way to execute her commands upon Mikey while I beguiled her
from the superintendence thereof down into the garden with me, where
from my window I could see Nickols and father in deep conclave over some
drawings. Father had discarded his Henry Clay costume and looked young
and alive in some of Nickols' flannels and linen. They looked up with
interest as I came down the flagstone walk with Charlotte trotting on my
one side and wee Sue clinging on the other.

"I'm glad you have come, daughter," said father, as he held up one of
the large blue prints before me. "Now you can help Nickols and me locate
the exact spot for the public school building. See, here is the public
square of Goodloets, with the courthouse in the middle."

"That courthouse is as good as any minor _hotels de ville_ in any of the
small towns in France," said Nickols, as he came and stood beside me,
looking over my shoulder at the map. "The Farmers' Bank and one or two
of the very old brick stores are good, too," he added.

"Now, this is Main Street that leads past us down into the Settlement.
Here is the Poplars, here the chapel, and this is Elsie Spurlock's
house. Nickols and the parson are inclined to place the schoolhouse
right opposite, but I am afraid it is too near the Settlement and too
far from the Town. Do you suppose the Town children will be able to walk
so far?"

"Do you really--really plan to have the Town and the Settlement go to
school together?" I gasped.

"Well, Goodloe thinks that the ideal public school system is only to be
executed in a democratic--" father was saying, when Nickols interrupted
him.

"What does it matter where the two and a half kids from the decadent old
families that are dying out go to school? Their sterile parents can
motor 'em down to education!" he exclaimed. "Right here is the logical
place for the school with the meadow behind it to give a bit of
distance, the oak grove back of that, the Country Club beyond, with the
river beginning to curve it in. It solidifies and unifies the landscape
of the whole town and puts all the community centers where they belong.
The Town and Settlement straggled a bit before, but the chapel and the
school will unite them! Braid says the schoolhouse can be built of
weathered stone and concrete and finished by September fifth, in time to
start school. Wilkerson can begin immediately putting out his hedges and
the Reverend Gregory is down there now finishing laying out the
playground with his ball park."

"That's it--that's the baseball nine Dabney is washing Mikey for!"
exclaimed Charlotte, catching up with the conversation. "And when we all
go to school with the Settlements and they are clean some, and Mildred
Payne and Grace Sproul and some of the others get dirty a little, nobody
will know the difference and we can play ball and scouts and everything
Minister teaches us. That school makes enough children to do things. We
haven't got enough for anything, but the Settlements have, and it is
mighty good of them to come up and let us play with them."

"Keep up with the times, Charlotte; don't be a back number. Miss
Olymphia Lassiter's school may have held you and Nell, but it will never
hold young Charlotte," Nickols jeered, as father began to roll up the
map and speak to a young man that the great Wilkerson of White Plains
had sent down to juggle with the flora and fauna of the Harpeth Valley.




CHAPTER X

WATER AND OIL


I turned from Nickols' raillery and surveyed the great American garden.
The weeks had flown from May to late July and father's plans were
beginning to be materialized. Where the sunken garden had been filled in
a wide stone well house, the like of which can be found at many of the
farmhouses in the Harpeth Valley, had been built and a chain wheel and
bucket drew up the water from the deep cistern, which was supplied with
underground pipes from the south wing of the Poplars.

"There is no water as soft as open-top cistern water, aerated by a chain
and bucket," father had informed me, and he and Dabney consumed buckets
of it, while Mammy refused anything else for cooking purposes and
insisted on a nightly bath of it for my face. A white clematis in full
bloom clambered over the eaves of the low stone house and a blush rose
nodded at its door, beside which was placed a rough bench made of square
stones and two large slabs, equally moss-covered and worn.

"It is growing to be perfectly wonderful, Nickols," I said, as if I had
seen it for the first time, while my eyes followed the sweep of the
flagstone walk from the well house beneath the old graybeard poplars out
past stretches of velvety lawn, with groups of shrubs and trees casting
deep shadows even to the kitchen garden, whose long rows of vegetables,
bordered with old-fashioned blooming herbs and savories, led the
observer out into the meadows to the Home Farm and beyond to the dim
line of Paradise Ridge. "It is different and distinctive and--and
American," I added.

"After this garden and the school are finished and a few of the
unfortunate restorations taken away from some of the old houses, like
the porch at Mrs. Sproul's and that bathroom addition of Morgan's, I am
going to bring Jeffries down in his private car and it will be difficult
to keep him from offering to buy Goodloets and have it all shipped up
the Hudson. Really, Charlotte, we have seen a vision of the future
materialize here and we ought to stand with hats off."

"Whose vision?" I asked, as I stood and let the truth of his statement
sink in.

"The parson's spiritual vision perhaps filtering through your father's
mentality, which has welded past, present and future. At least, that is
the way I see it with the material eye, which is all I have to view it
with--if we can call the recognition of beauty and completeness
material."

"Now Mikey is nice and clean and we can go to Minister to play, thank
you, Aunt Charlotte," at this point young Charlotte broke in to say,
thus flinging us a line to haul us out of depths that were slightly over
our heads. "Isn't he lovely?" And she gazed upon her new-found comrade
with open admiration and self-congratulation.

And small Mikey was indeed a bonny kiddie attired in the very stylish
trousers and blouse of small James and shining with Dabney's valeting.
His nicely plastered red mop to some extent mitigated the effect of the
bare and scratched feet and his rollicking blue eyes over a nose as
tip-tilted as Charlotte's own bespoke his delight.

"Anyway, me mother made the togs fer Jim," he asserted with great
independence, as he rammed his hands into the diminutive pockets in the
trousers.

"Yes, she did, and Auntie Harriet paid her for a present to Jimmy. She
sews for us and not for Mikey and her other children, because her
husband drinks up his money and our husband don't. Come on, let's go
help Minister!" was the shot that Charlotte fired, as she departed down
the garden path with her cohorts.

"What about that for democracy?" demanded Nickols, as he and father and
I all laughed together.

That night at a dinner party Nell was giving I sat next to the Harpeth
Jaguar and talked to him for the first time in many weeks. I had been
avoiding him and I didn't mind admitting it to myself. There was
something disturbing and puzzling in his serene eyes and free, strong,
beautiful body that gave me a queer haunting pain back of my breast.
Into my scheme of doing those things in life that give pleasure and not
doing those things that give pain he somehow would not fit. He had
become as much a part of the social fabric of Goodloets as was I, and
he came to our dinner parties, motored with us in his long, gray car and
was as happy with us seemingly as he was with that same gray car full of
small fry from the Settlement or going about the business of the chapel.
The car had always reminded me of his evening clothes, which were
straight and simple in line with the black silk vest cut up around the
collar buttoned in the back, but which were so fine in texture and
perfect in cut and fit that they seemed to be some kind of super clothes
that ought to be called by a name of their own, just as the people in
the Settlement had decided to call the car the "Chariot" as soon as they
had stopped resenting a parson's having it, from finding out how easy
were its cushions and how swift its ministrations in time of need.

"Parson's Chariot, quick!" had moaned poor old Mrs. Kelly, when she had
slipped on Mrs. Burns' wet doorstep and dislocated her hip. Little Katie
Moore had been driven home as swiftly as if on wings after old Dr.
Harding had been overtaken, ten miles out on Providence Road, and had
used the back seat for an operating table while he put her small
splintered ankle in place between splints improvised by a long knife
from the car's kit.

And from a distance I had wondered at the Reverend Gregory Goodloe,
wondered at his freedom from all resentment because of his ministerial
and spiritual failures and at his loving serenity and enjoyment of us
all. He partook of the joy in almost all of our adventures in pleasure,
and when we did things that in the nature of the case would seem to
merit his disapproval, he never administered it; he simply was not with
us, but was serenely about his business at the other end of the town
from the Country Club or the Last Chance, at whichever resort the
entertainment that did not interest him was in progress. He seemed
especially to enjoy coming to our dinner parties and he was such a
delight with his keen-bladed wit, his flow of joyous laughter and high
spirits and the music that bubbled up without accompaniment or denial
whenever we asked for it, that not a woman in town would invite the rest
to dine until she was sure of securing him first.

[Illustration: "_I been upsot by my young mistis comin' home._"]

"He's so economical," said Nell Morgan, as I helped her arrange her
guests for Mark's birthday dinner. While she talked I paused to consider
where to put Harriet Henderson and then dropped her card beside Mark's
with a little ache in my heart as I tucked Cliff Gray in by Jessie
Litton and left the place next Nell vacant for Billy. "People never
empty their champagne glasses when Mr. Goodloe gets to talking, and you
can put the extra bottles back in the cellar for next time. Do you
suppose he does it on purpose?"

"Nobody could be as completely happy as he was at Jessie's Friday night
_on purpose_," I answered, as I laid the last card and went with Nell to
greet her first guests.

After the soup I turned toward the Reverend Mr. Goodloe, whose card I
had placed next my own, and found him looking at me with a particular
softness in his eyes under the dull gold.

"Charlotte's and Mikey's nine won twenty-eight to eighteen against Tommy
Braidy and Maudie Burns. Thank you for getting the pitcher into his
togs," he said, as he squared his shoulders slightly against the rest of
the world, the rest of the diners in particular, and bent toward me in
just that deferential angle that a man uses when he wants to signal to
the others that for a limited time he desires sole possession of the
woman dining next to him.

"Your mixing of water and oil in the educational scheme is interesting
me greatly," I answered him with a laugh. "Do you really think it will
succeed?"

"Any kind of kingdom can be built in the heart of a child, an oligarchy,
a democracy or a republic," he answered quickly. "Your name-daughter is
a born socialist."

"She and James are murderers and liars and thieves and are wholly
engaging. Sue is fast learning from them the habits of their underworld
and is asleep upstairs now with Harriet's silver and jade chain, which
she brought home with her without the knowledge of the owner this
afternoon. What are you going to do about them? I take it you intend to
build a kingdom in and of their hearts."

"Weed 'em, like Dabney and I did your dahlia bank ten times at least
this spring. You didn't help with the dahlias, but maybe you will with
the young Tenderloiners." His eyes entreated mine with a soft radiance
that almost made me dizzy.

"I wouldn't know weeds from flowers, 'Minister,'" I answered with
prompt denial of his plea, but with a soft use of the children's name
for him.

"I don't always know. Let's study botany--together," he again hazarded
daringly, and from the tenderness that suddenly curved his strong mouth
I knew my soft answer had hit its mark. "Are you coming to the
dedication of the chapel a week from Sunday?" He asked me the question
directly and with all his softness gone and a commanding note in his
voice and direct look. His jeweled eyes were so deep back under their
dull gold brows that between the bars of black lashes they looked like
stars shining down through a radiant night. They threw their rays
directly down into my heart and I could see that their owner was reading
the hieroglyphics of my uncertainties and that I could not hide them
from him.

"I am not," I answered him with the frankness that his gaze compelled.

"I'll not dedicate it until you help me do it and--" he was saying
quietly and positively, when Billy broke in over the excluding shoulder.
Billy really adores Gregory Goodloe, but he enjoys going to the limit of
his ministerial endurance. Over that limit he has never stepped and he
never will; none of them ever will, for there is that in the Harpeth
Jaguar which commands the very essence of respect for himself as well as
his cloth.

"Say, Parson, what's that about the dedication of the chapel?" he asked,
as he twirled his champagne glass to break a few bubbles. "Charlotte and
Nickols are going to give Harriet and me that tennis dressing down
Sunday week if you don't need us to dedicate with."

"No, I won't need you," answered the Reverend Mr. Goodloe, in an easy
agreeable voice, but that had in it the note that he always uses to make
Billy halt. "I'm not going to dedicate it yet."

"Why?" came in a perfect chorus.

"I've been working night and day on that altar cloth because I depended
on you to know the date of the dedication of your own church. I have
danced only once this week," said Letitia Cockrell, with her usual bland
directness.

"The communion service from Gorham's has been packed away unopened in my
office a week," Hampton added in an aggrieved voice. "They hurried it
for us and it has to be sent back, piece at a time, to be marked."

"The baptismal font is perfectly beautiful and I want the Suckling
sprinkled from it first. If you don't hurry she will get old enough to
misbehave herself. I know I promised, but I have decided that I can
never have the others baptized now, they are too bad," said Nell, as she
paused and listened for some sort of explosion from above as she did
every minute or two.

"I'll rope Charlotte and drag her to the altar for you, and Mark can sit
on her feet while the parson sprinkles," offered Billy, and they all
laughed at the picture that he conjured, which seemed to be in keeping
with many scenes we had witnessed in the life of small Charlotte.

"That won't be necessary. She will stand before me with folded hands
when her time comes," answered Mr. Goodloe, after he had laughed as
heartily as anybody else at Billy's threat. "The greatest difficulty
will be in persuading her to allow me to conduct my own services."

"But what did you put off the dedication date for?" demanded Letitia,
with the hurry over the altar cloth still rankling.

"I put off the dedication of the chapel until all of the people for whom
I cared deeply, whose cooperation with me is positively necessary,
should be ready to come and help me in the services. When that time
comes I will have the dedication. It may be a year and it may be
a--day," the parson answered with cool directness.

"If you mean Charlotte, the offer I made for young Charlotte holds
good," said Billy with positive glee. "If you want her I'll rope her and
drag her in and the rest of you can bid for who holds her down while
being branded."

"And my answer to your generous offer, Billy Harvey, is--" Mr. Goodloe
paused and looked at me, and Jessie giggled with nervousness--"the same
that I made to your offer about the constraining of young Charlotte."

"Still it would be great sport to see both the Charlottes--" Billy was
saying, when a servant brought a note on his tray and handed it to Mr.
Goodloe, who glanced at it and then hurriedly opened and read it.

"I am sorry, Mrs. Morgan, but will you let me answer this summons?" he
asked, and there was the regret in his rich voice of a great boy at
being snatched from a feast. "I am so hungry," he added with a laugh.

"Come back later. I'll save some of everything for you," said Nell
pleadingly.

"I will if I can," he answered. There was an excited smoulder in the
stars under the dull gold that made me restless and my eyes sought and
claimed his for a second in which a quick flash of the jeweled
tenderness of comprehension was flashed into my depths.

"Good-bye, everybody," he said, and in a second was out of the dining
room and we could hear him running down the steps.

"Oh

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