The Heart"s Kingdom.
by Maria Thompson Daviess.
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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sing 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 embarra.s.sed 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 gla.s.s and fill mine and Mr. Goodloe"s."
"I was feeling a little under the weather this morning," said father hastily, as he set his gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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.