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Title: The Heart's Kingdom


Author: Maria Thompson Daviess



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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' resume 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 s