And at last we arrived at the old snowball guarding the open gate of the Little House and we went under its low boughs and up the walk. But we did not march to an undisputed and stealthy raid on the tea cake box above the kitchen table. The Little House was no longer the deserted scene I had left it, but was teeming with human and juvenile activities which streamed out to meet us at the door.
"You can't come in here, Auntie Charlotte," was the command that greeted me at the very doorstep as young Charlotte faced me with short skirts outspread determinedly, while behind her Mikey of the red head, Jimmy, Sue, Maudie, the sister of Mikey, and other known and unknown juveniles, presented a solid support of defiance. "We are doing some Lord's work and we don't need you, but we'll let the nice little boy and thelovely dog come in. We do need them. Come in, little boy!" and as she spoke Charlotte held out a welcoming hand to the Stray, who faltered and looked up into my face to see if he might accept the invitation which evidently swayed him by its commanding tone.
"Couldn't I come in for just a second?" I asked with all due meekness.
"Not for even a second," answered Charlotte sternly. "You'd interrupt Minister. You go away and leave the boy."
"Then how'll I get him back to his mother?" I pleaded, but as I spoke I allowed the little fingers to slip from mine and I pushed the waif towards Charlotte with the greatest confidence, which evidently communicated itself to both him and the dog, for they left me simultaneously and went towards the enemy's camp.
"Shoo, it's only little Stray Ensley. I'll take him home when I go," the redoubtable Mikey assured me with a wide smile at the kiddie, which was answered with a rapture of hero worship.
"What's his name?" demanded Charlotte as if seeking a passport.
"Just Stray," answered Mikey in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. "He ain't got no father, dead or alive."
"Then Stray is just short for stranger, because everybody else has fathers, dead, alive or drunk," said Charlotte, in the same matter-of-fact tone that Mikey had used, and he in no way seemed to feel her remark personally derogatory to his paternal parent.
"Well, let's take him to Minister to be learned his verses of the song and dance. Come on, for we are keeping him and the Lord waiting," said Charlotte as she marshaled them all into the Little House and calmly shut the door in my face and left me standing alone in the middle of the walk. Even the yellow pup had squeezed into the door before it was shut and only I was left in the outer darkness away from the grand opera voice that I could hear booming with a juvenile chorus out at the back of the cottage where I knew the rehearsal was being held under the twin of the old apple tree from which the front roof tree over my head was eternally separated by the Little House. With actual sadness and a queer feeling of shut-outness I did the only thing left to me and saunteredslowly on up the hill under the tall old elm trees that the Town had planted a century ago to keep the heat from the heads of the like of me while the toilers down in the Settlement had no such proof of ancestral care.
"They are producing in the sweat of their brows while I—saunter," I said to myself, as I stretched out my bare arm from which the white silk sleeve had been rolled away after the prevailing mode of the sport for which it was designed, and flexed and regarded the bunch of muscles that knotted themselves on my smooth, tanned forearm.
"Itcouldswing a wash tub as well as the best racquet this side of the Meadowbrook Club," I added aloud with a queer kind of primitive shame mixed with my physical pride in myself.
"Or juggle a heavy baby and a kitchen stove into a square meal?" added a laughing voice as the Jaguar padded up beside my shoulder on his tennis shoes before I had heard him at all, so deep was my absorption in my own judgment and absolution of myself.
"Still I was put out just a few minutes ago by a woman half my size," I laughed in return asthe long strides shortened into harmony with mine.
"I heard about it and ran after you to ask you to come back or, if you refused, to let me go with you wherever you are going. I left Mother Spurlock in charge of the newly installed Epworth Leaguers. Charlotte disapproved of my coming and said so," and we both laughed in delight over my strenuous name-daughter.
"Are you asking mequo vadis?" I demanded, with a look at him out of a corner of my eye that got in return a glint of the jewels under dull gold that always infuriated as well as interested me.
"'Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge—'" the parson suddenly chanted under his breath, using the old Gregorian measure for the few words of the oldest song of impersonal love extant. "Thank you for bringing Martha's boy up to the Little House. Jacob has refused both Mother Spurlock and me to let him come."
"I didn't bring him. He and the pup brought me and then he was stolen from me into the fold, as it were," I answered as I paused at the front gate of the Poplars, which had a white clematisdrifting over its tall stone pillars and clutching at the straight iron bars as if trying to keep me out of even my own fold. "Will you come in with me?" I asked with a laugh, as I flung the old gate wide in spite of the tendril fingers.
The parson laughed, whistled a strain of his "whither thou goest" chant to me and followed me across the lawn to the foot of the poplars. On the bench surrounding their trunks I found my basket with the fine seam I was sewing for the Suckling in it and I dropped upon the thick mat of grass on the very edge of the shadow from the silver branches above and began to hunt for my thimble, leaving the Jaguar standing over me.
"Stop looking down on me and come tell me what particular religious incantations were going on from which Charlotte so violently barred me," I laughed up at him, as I threw a flat grass cushion a little way from my skirts, upon which he immediately sank and seemed to curl up at my feet.
"I had the whole bunch rehearsing the children's part in the dedication services of our chapel. Do you know that small Sue can reallysing? The rest stagger well but Susan sings. It is delicious. It is going to be hard on you women folks to hear her chant her responses to me on that great day." And as he spoke he looked beyond me over to his beautiful shimmering gray chapel and there was not a glint in his eyes that showed me he was trying to sound out my intentions about attendance on that ceremony.
"Please, Mr. Goodloe, don't be serious in saying as you did last night that you are not going to dedicate your chapel until I—I help you," in all gentleness I said.
"I can't do it until you come," he answered me with just as great gentleness and he turned his head away from me, but not before I saw a glow in his eyes that made me suddenly strong and calm and curiously humble.
"I—I could go as your guest," I faltered, offering a compromise which I felt sure would not be accepted.
"I can't, I just can't dedicate the chapel until you echo my ceremony in your heart," he answered me with his eyes still turned away from me and looking with the greatest sadness out on Paradise Ridge.
"Why?" I asked with a simple directness that the situation demanded and with no trace of the coquetry the question might have held.
"Shall I tell you all of the reason with no reservations?" the parson asked, as he swung around on his mat and faced me, with his eyes looking straight into mine.
"All," I answered.
"In every community there is one soul which holds the real leadership of the souls of those surrounding them. God seems to appoint captains of the regiments of His people to lead them along the way, Christ the captain of all the hosts. Spiritually you are more evolved than any other person in this town and with you doubting I cannot get the others to see. You are so gorgeous and so brilliant that you blind them all. They have always followed your lead—up or down. There are a few like Mother Spurlock who have gained their Christ knowledge through suffering, but they are not of the calibre to help others to gain theirs. With your hand in mine I can make this whole community see and know; separated from you, you going one way and I another, I can do nothing. You simply short-circuit my force andI am helpless without you." He spoke very simply and directly down into my heart.
"That is not true; no one person is responsible for any spiritual decision that another makes," I answered hotly with an awful sense of having had a burden placed on my shoulders that they could not carry.
"The old 'brother's keeper' question will never be settled in any but the right way," he answered me straight from the shoulder. "You are responsible for the attitude of this whole town towards the cause I represent and they'll have to wait for your eyes to be opened and for you to make them see."
"You minimize yourself," I answered quickly, for in some curious way it hurt me to see that great strong man sit at my feet baffled by a force that he declared to be in me but which I did not acknowledge or understand.
"They were listening to me—from a distance, as it were—and I might have made them hear if you had not come home and thrown them back into the old pleasant groove of non-action and non-belief. In a week you had swept away all I had builded in six months." He spoke with simpleconviction and not a trace of the bitterness that might have been in the arraignment.
"Everybody in this town adores you," were the words that gushed out of my heart for his comforting before I could stop them. "That is one reason I have acted as I have. I do not, I cannot believe that the religion which is great enough to bring the redemption of the whole race into a desirable immortality can be composed of nine-tenths emotion, with which all of them were following your beautiful voice and beautiful eyes and beautiful church and beautiful words. If I am to be saved it will be by something sterner than that; it will be something that makes me sweat drops of blood from my mind, take up a hard cross of duty and work, work to make the fibre of my soul strong enough to enjoy the robust kind of immortality that alone seems worth while to me. Your Son of Man walked from town to town in the hot sun and taught the people, healed the multitude and yet had not where to lay his head to rest. His church has lost His vigor. Your whole scheme hasn't enough action in it. Your organization is too easy and too full of surface observances. It is conducted with slipshodbusiness methods and there is no force in it to help me. If I join any church ever it will have to be a new one that can compare with modern business in its efficiency. Your scheme of redemption to immortality through an efficient mediation is perfectly sound, but you don't back it up."
"The Church of Christ has stood, endured and done business for almost two thousand years," he answered quietly. "It is in some ways all you say of it, but it has at least proved its vitality. Why seek to found a new organization with a new head and a new scheme of immortality if you recognize this scheme as good? The place to reorganize a business is from the inside, not the outside. These peoplemustget their visionnow. Will you come and help me?" As he spoke he looked again down into the depths from which I had been trying to translate some of the hieroglyphics to him and he held out his long powerful hand to me in an entreaty that shook my very foundations.
"You make me want to do as you ask me, but I do not see what it is we should strive for, what it is from which we should be saved. There are tears in my eyes but do you want my emotionswithout my reason?" And I asked my question with a quiver almost of timidity.
"No, both!" he answered me, as he dropped his hand and arm from their attitude of entreaty, shook his head sadly and again turned from me and looked out on the dim distance of Old Harpeth. Suddenly I had the feeling of having a great door shut in my face, and a terror of being left all alone in the world came over me. Without knowing what I did I stretched out my hand and caught at his arm and moved closer to him, suddenly cold in the sunshine.
"I'm frightened," I whispered, as I bowed my head on my hand, clutching his arm.
"Poor little wandering, hunting lamb," he crooned to me as he laid a tender hand on my bowed head. "Keep watch over her, Lord Jesus," he prayed under his breath and then as suddenly as I had felt the fear I found again my courage.
"That cry was woman to man, not child to priest. It is only honest to tell you so," I said, as I suddenly raised my head and threw another gauntlet that I knew would bring on another battle. "I hate myself for it."
"I wanted to win you for God and have youcome to me then as a gift from Him, but it may have to be the other way round," was the answer he struck out at me with, and as he spoke he clasped my hand in his with a force that seemed to create the great silent, untenanted space around us as it had that night he had sung the Tristan music to me in the moonlight. "I'm going to save you and—andhaveyou."
"No, no!" I cried, as I tried to draw my hand away, found it held beyond my effort and then suddenly released.
"I knew the first minute I looked into your eyes, but I'll wait," he said softly into the silence around us.
"No, no, don't even think such a thing," I exclaimed, and I wanted to rise to my feet and break the spell of that space around us, but I could only cower closer to him on the grass beneath the rustling silver leaves. "I'm going to marry Nickols in a few months and then I'm going out of this world of yours and you can lead them all to—to safety."
"No, it's in God's hands. He'll keep you and give you to me when the time comes. It all may mean suffering to us both, probably does, but Iaccept the cup—in His good time," and as he spoke he looked again into my eyes with a lonely sadness that I could not endure.
"I want to get away from you," I gasped and I felt that I must get out of the aloneness with him.
"We are in God's hands," he said again, as his warm hands found and held mine. "We must wait on Him with—" Then suddenly the world closed in on us again and we were on our feet—apart.
"Auntie Charlotte, you stole Minister away from us in a no-fair way," stormed Charlotte as she came around the young larches and wild swamp root that had formed the world apart for the dangerous Jaguar and me. "Mother Spurlock can't sing to any good and Sue is so little we gets the key away from her. Let him come right back!" As she made this peremptory demand for the release of my prisoner, my name-daughter stood her ground with her cohorts, who had been scrambling around and over and through the shrubbery, massed behind her. There were Mikey of the red head, small James, the musical wee Susan, Maudie Burns and Jennie Todd, besides several more of the Burns family, a few Sprouls and Paynes and a very ragged young Jones, and they all looked at me with hostile and accusing eyes as Charlotte hurled a final invective at me."You are wicked and the devil will burn you up," she threatened.
"He won't neither, at all. Hush up!" came a defense and a command in a very imperious young voice, and the Stray followed the voice from around the large trunk of the oldest graybeard. He had arrived late on the scene of action because his impedimenta had been the wriggling puppy of brindle hue, which he immediately released as he came over and stood between the Reverend Mr. Goodloe and me, with my hand in his own small paddie and defiance and defense to the limit in his high-held young head with its black crest and snapping violet eyes. At last I felt Charlotte had met her match and I trembled for the result.
"She never stoled nothing," he further declared, looking Charlotte full in the eye.
"I meant she tooken him away, Stranger," parleyed Charlotte with extreme mildness for her and giving to the Stray the name that she had decided upon by translating the cognomen of his state into that of another almost equally forlorn. "My father told my Auntie Harriet that Aunt Charlotte would git Minister yet and I'll call the devil to stop her if she tries to get him away."
"I'll bust that devil's head with a rock and a bad smell," answered the Stray as he held tighter to my hand and hurled back his threat that held a remembrance of the conquering of the tenacious turtle.
"Auntie Harriet answered father that Auntie Charlotte and the devil could do most anything that—" small James was contributing to the general assault when with a wave of a calming hand Mr. Goodloe took the field.
"That will do, youngsters," he commanded with extreme mildness it seemed to me, considering the appalling situation. "I thought you had had about enough practice for to-day and Charlotte could have taught the little boy—er—"
"Stranger," prompted Charlotte.
"You could have taught him up to the point you knew so I could have a nice rest here under the lovely trees. Are you being kind to me in not helping me a little bit? You know what you promised me." And the beloved "Minister's" voice was just as grave and just as serious as if he had been reproving one of his deacons.
"Is talking to Auntie Charlotte and holding herhand the Lord's work?" demanded Charlotte, looking him straight in the face.
"Yes," answered Mr. Goodloe, gravely, looking her as straight in the eye as she had looked him.
"Then come on, Stranger, and learn the march without any tune but Sue," she said as she stretched out her hand to the Stray, who ignored it and clung to me with his serious eyes raised to mine.
"I'll go with you now over in the chapel and play for you on the organ and then we can all teach him," said the parson, and he picked wee Susan, the music box, up in his arms and buried his lips in the curls on the back of her fragrant little neck.
"Are you all done with Auntie Charlotte?" asked young Charlotte, with the extreme of consideration for him, not for my feelings.
"Yes, for the present," he answered, and he held out his free hand to the Stray, who was still clinging to me.
"Go with him, sonny, and Mikey will take you home," I said to my small champion, using the tender name that I had heard Martha give him. As I spoke I laid his hand in that of Mr. Goodloeand I didn't raise my eyes to his but turned from them and left him standing in the midst of his flock of lambs under the silver leaves and out in the bright light, while I went into the cool dark hall and on up to my own room which was also cool and dark.
"I am lost and blind and I don't know what to do," I murmured as I flung myself down on my window seat and looked through the narrow opening of the shutters out to the everlasting hills across the valley. "I know I am ineffective and perfectly worthless as I am but I will not, I will not be swayed by—"
"Charlotte," called father's voice with its commanding note which had apparently come into it now to stay.
"Yes," I answered, and went down immediately, glad of the interruption to my self-communion and arraignment.
I found father and Nickols and Mark Morgan and Billy Harvey and Mr. Cockrell down in father's study and I could see from their faces that something unusual had happened.
"City Council voted the appropriation to meet Cockrell's and my donation for the schoolhouse,contracts have been signed and dirt is to be broken to-morrow by Henry Todd and thirty workmen Nickols has ordered down from the city," father announced, with jubilation in his voice. "We thought Goodloe was here in the garden with you."
"He was, but he has taken the children with him over to his chapel," I answered, and for some reason I blushed, for I saw Mark Morgan's eyes laughing at me and I also saw a glint I didn't like in Nickols' eyes.
"School to be opened on September twelfth and then let the kids fight it out," said Billy. "I bet on Charlotte to beat out the whole Settlement the first day if allowed full swing."
"If Goodloe didn't stand behind this mixing of—of social oil and—water, I'd be scared to death," said Mark.
"Mike Burns and Henry Todd and Spain had better be afraid of a loss of progeny," jeered Billy. "I bet Charlotte and James and the scions of the Sprouls and Paynes can lead the Settlement scions into by-paths of iniquity of which they never dreamed."
"I wish you had ten, blast you, for being sosensible as to have none," Mark answered him, and I felt rather than saw the bolt of pain that shot through Billy's heart. It's because Nell and her children are not his that Billy is bad, and what is going to help him?
"Well, let's go over to the parsonage and tell Goodloe all about it," father suggested, and the other men followed him out into the garden path that led through the Eden of my foremothers straight into that little Methodist chapel. Only Nickols remained with me upon the wide high vine-shadowed porch.
"I'll marry you the first of October, Nickols, and then we can go to France as you want to," I said to him without any preamble, and as I spoke I drew close to him as if for protection from something I didn't understand.
"Fleeing from the wrath to come?" questioned Nickols with a tender jeer as he took me in his arms and his lips sought the kiss I had been keeping from him. Again I refused it and he laughed as he pushed me from him and there was still more of the jeer in the laugh though the passion in his eyes was devouring and glad.
"Suppose we go north, right after Mr. Jeffrieshas finished his visit. Let's have the ideal village wedding. We'll have out the school children if any are left from the mix-up, and Goodloe can make us man and wife out here under the trees in our own garden. Then we'll go away from the whole show, the Christian religion included, and live happy ever after." And as he spoke Nickols again drew me to him and sought the kiss I still could not give him.
"Nickols, Mother Spurlock and poor little Mrs. Burns and—and Mr. Goodloe have something very real that we haven't," I faltered and, utterly weary, I laid my head down against his strong shoulder.
"That's what they say, but they can't prove it. They can't pass it on, so it mustn't really be anything. They are not tightwads, so they wouldn't hold back on us with their salvation, would they? Well, then, they haven't anything. It's all just a substitute for love, dear. Mother Spurlock fell back on it when she lost her husband. The little Burns woman wouldn't have it any more than Nell has if Mike Burns was like Mark Morgan. And Goodloe would lose it in a week if—if he could get you in his arms." As Nickolsspoke, his arms about me trembled and strained me to him.
"No!" I exclaimed as if I had heard blasphemy uttered.
"Itis, dear, it is just suppressed sex. The scientists agree on that and all the religions are just that, from the most primitive to the most evolved. Some are more frank about it than others. The Igorrotes when they have their religious dancing at the mating season are more open than the Methodists about their being one and the same thing, but it all sums up alike. You can't get away from those facts."
"Then I want to be dead," I said as I drew myself from his arm and stood on the edge of the porch.
"Or you want to love," muttered Nickols under his breath as he watched me sullenly for a second. "Then it's October, is it?" he asked with one of his infectious, delicious laughs that have always broken across my serious moods and made them froth.
"Yes," I answered steadily.
"Then we'll tell Nell and Harriet and Jessie and Mrs. Sproul all about it, as I see them coming, ongossip bent I feel sure," he said as he went halfway down the walk to meet the girls before I could restrain him.
I shall always have with me the picture that Nickols made as he stood tall and handsome and smiling against the background of the wonderful garden he had helped to create, with the women smiling and clinging to him as he looked up at me with a great laughing light in his face. In some ways he was the handsomest man I had ever seen and his distinctions sat upon him as easily as the college honors of a boy. A wave of race pride and love swept up in my heart as I looked at him and I felt that in him must be the refuge that I sought. His sophistries always sank deep into me.
"Charlotte, my dear," said Mrs. Sproul, as I led her to a seat beneath the vines in a shady corner, "I wish I was sure that your mother knew of this safe happiness of yours. She adored Nickols and nothing could have given her a greater joy. And, my dear, for you to have held him against the world, as it were, is a triumph, I assure you. Always remember that men of his kind are—are desirable. I'll have a long talk with you before you go away with him." And I didn't know why,but the smile with which Mrs. Sproul whispered and patted my hand made me burn all over with protest.
"I wouldn't have you for a husband unless we were both convicted together to a chain gang for at least five years after the ceremony, Nickols Powers," said Harriet, with a laugh for which Nickols raised her hand to his lips as he responded.
"You like husbands in safety deposit vaults, don't you, Harriet?" At which sally they all laughed as they seated themselves around Mrs. Sproul and me.
"Why will women want husbands to be as stationary as—as hitching posts, Mrs. Sproul?" demanded Nickols as he leaned against one of the tall pillars and lighted a cigarette for himself after having lighted one for her and Jessie. Jessie Litton had always smoked, in secret until the last year or two, and Mrs. Sproul had frankly taken up the habit as a comfort for old age, she insisted. I suspect that she had had it for a long time in advance of the fashion. It was a really delicious sight to see the old world grace with which she accomplished it.
"Women have the nestling habit and that is whythey want to believe men to be sturdy oaks in whose branches they can safely anchor a family as well as twine around in their affectionate gourd fashion," answered Mrs. Sproul, as she daintily puffed a smoke ring at Nickols.
"A lot of times the gourd vine grows so strong that she doesn't realize she is supporting her family by her own strength long after the oak has faded away in her coils and sprouted up from an acorn in some other locality," said Jessie, as she, too, puffed a ring of smoke in Nickols' direction.
"Is this agriculture, biology or religion we are discussing?" demanded Harriet with a laugh as we all rose and went to the edge of the porch to meet Billy and Mark and father, who had with them the beloved "Minister."
"Congratulations and condolences, Mr. Powers," said Mrs. Sproul as she laid her hand in father's.
"On what score, my dear madam," he demanded.
"You know I asked for Charlotte on my fifteenth and her tenth birthday, Judge," Nickols said, with his ready grace in any situation, and he came and stood beside father and took his hand inhis with the gentle affection a girl might have shown the older man. "You said 'yes' then and it has taken all these years to make her echo the word," and as he finished speaking he held out his arm and drew me close to father and himself.
"Hurrah!" exclaimed Mark, but I saw him exchange a glance of amusement with Harriet, and Nell gave him a warning little squeeze of the arm.
"Bless you both," said father, as he gave us both a hug.
All this I saw and noted before I raised my eyes to meet the jeweled eyes under dull gold that I knew were gazing straight at me as Gregory Goodloe stood in the background against the dark vine while the rejoicings over the announcement of my betrothal were enacted. Somehow I felt I could not make myself face their gaze, which yet I knew I must. I met a flash that burned down into the very darkest spots in my nature and illuminated them all. There was not a trace of male anger or demand in the gaze but a cold valuation of me and the entire situation that burned me as ice burns raw flesh, then over all of us there suddenlypoured from the same source a tenderness that was as radiant as the summer sun.
"Yes, God bless us all!" he exclaimed, as he held out his hands to all of us, one of which Nickols took, with a swift challenging glance that in the radiance softened to confidence, and the other father took and fairly clung to in his happiness. I was glad, glad that I didn't have to endure the touch of his hand on mine after that glance, but not for one instant did my heart accuse his radiance of being dramatics. I rather felt that it came from a warmth within him by which everybody else in the world might be comforted but for which I would forever be cold.
"Iwantto be worth her, old man," Nickols said to him with a curiously pleading note in his voice, and he, too, seemed to me to be clinging to some of the strength that was not for me.
"Then God help you," was the answer given with the very essence of gentleness, but with a level glance into Nickols' eyes that was profoundly sad.
"And now let's hear the wedding plans," demanded Harriet. "This marrying and giving in marriage is the best way I know of to maketime pass, and let's make Charlotte give us full measure. I'm matron of honor, of course, and I suggest only twelve bridesmaids. I intend to be preceded to the altar by Sue in an embroidered silk muslin I will provide, with a bonnet of tulle in which nestles a pink rose to match the ones in her basket. There will also be a display of pink knees that will be ravishing and—"
"Just let me remind you, Harriet, that this is Charlotte's wedding and not that of my daughter, Susan, and her often-mentioned knees," said Mark with a laugh that they all echoed.
"I am going to marry Susan's pink knees when they are ripe," remarked Billy and his suppression lasted long enough for me to attain command enough of myself to manage the plans of my own wedding.
Later when they had all gone by way of the chapel to help Mr. Goodloe decide on some designs for a memorial window to his father he was having made by a great artist he and Nickols had selected, I went in to make my announcement to Mammy and Dabney.
"Well, ram in the cork to the demijohn, honey, and it'll be all right," was Dabney's semi-cordialconsent, but Mammy went on industriously beating her biscuits for supper the one hundred and twenty licks prescribed by her reputation as a cook and her conscientious guarding of that same reputation.
"What do you say, Mammy?" I insisted on her giving her opinion.
"Of course, if you want to eat plain biscuits instead of the showbread from before the mercy seat—one hundred and two, one hundred and three—" was the answer given between the licks upon the white dough, and I fled before I should get a clearer manifestation of the disappointment I felt raging in her faithful old heart.
That night a young crescent moon was hung over the very crown of Old Harpeth as I threw the shutters of my window wide to the night breezes after I had put out my light and was ready for bed. I stood in its soft light and looked across to the dark mass of the chapel opposite and saw that a dim light was still burning from the window by the organ loft. And as I stood and looked, the empty place that I had felt in the very center of my heart grew colder and more bleak until suddenly across the garden on perfumedwaves of sound came the Tristan love song and filled my emptiness with a pain that was both hot and cold. I stood and let the flood dash over me as long as I could and then with a sob I sank on the floor and rested my head on the window seat and began to weep as only women such as I know how to weep. Then into my sorrow very quietly there again stole another strain after the Tristan song had sobbed away into the night and suddenly my own weeping was stilled and again something within me was healed by the great tender voice singing out in the darkness beyond the hedge:
"Abide with me; fast falls the eventide—... ... ... ...Help of the helpless, O abide with me!"
"Abide with me; fast falls the eventide—... ... ... ...Help of the helpless, O abide with me!"
"I don't know what to do, I don't know," I cried, and sobbed myself to sleep on my pillow after I had watched the light across the garden go out and after all in the little parsonage beyond the hedge was dark and quiet.
It seems a strange, almost savage thing that the few months before a woman's marriage are always filled so full of the doing of thousands and tens of thousands of small things that she has no time to think of the hugeness of the responsibilities she is assuming. Perhaps if she were given time to realize them she would never assume them. Once or twice in the long two, nearly three months that I had given myself to get ready to marry Nickols, I paused and found myself thinking of the weighty things of life, but I soon was able to shake off the thought of the future. The time I felt it press most heavily was one morning that Jessie Litton and I sat quietly sewing on some sort of fluff she and Harriet had planned for my adornment, and very suddenly Jessie laid down her ruffle and looked at me as she said:
"Charlotte, I would be frightened, positively frightened, at the prospect of marrying Nickols Powers."
"I am; but why would you be?" I asked her directly.
"I read that long résumé of his work in the Review last night and for the first time I really realized what an important person he is to the development of American art. He really is a huge national machine and you'll be one of the important cogs on which the whole thing runs. You'll be ground and ground by his life and you'll have to make good or be responsible for some sort of a crash."
"No," I answered, slowly drawing my thread through the sheer cloth. "No, Nickols will live his own way regardless of the cogs on which it grinds. I shall have an enormous task in keeping up with the social side of his life, but Nickols is not the kind of a man who takes a woman into his work."
As I made my answer I was stabbed by the memory of the words that Gregory Goodloe had said to me on that day in the garden: "Separated from you, you going one way and I another, I cando nothing. You short-circuit my force—I am helpless without you." Andhehad been inviting me into the work for which he had been ordained into the holy Church of Christ. I felt myself groping blindly into the futility of my own life, and I was sick at heart.
"And if that is so, I would be still more frightened," Jessie said, gazing at me with dismayed and honest affection.
"Don't let's talk about it," I answered her and took up my sewing. At that moment and from that moment I cast myself into the whole whirl of activities in Goodloets and gave myself no more time or strength for self-communion. I was fleeing, and from what I dared not know.
And it was a busy month that stretched from August through September. Nickols said it would be his last fling at the old town and he proposed to leave his mark on its mossy sides. And he did.
In the first place money was pouring into little old Goodloets from three huge sources. The little one-horse tannery down by the river beyond the Settlement doubled, tripled and then quadrupled its capacity and next to it the little old saddleand harness factory in which Mr. Cockrell and old Mr. Sproul had been making saddles and harness since the days of the Confederacy, did the same and sent out consignment after consignment of saddles and bridles which were paid for in huge checks of Russian origin which almost paralyzed the Goodloets Bank and Trust Company and which worked pale Clive Harvey into the night until he managed to get young Henry Thornton in to assist him. His salary was raised three times until it was large enough to harbor Bessie and any number of small editions of them both, only she preferred to drink and dance and joy-ride with Hugh Payne, who could not have supported such a flowering by his own effort to have saved his own life and soul.
And then to burden poor Clive still further, Hampton Dibrell and Mr. Thornton hastily built huge pens over by the railroad and in these assembled hundreds and thousands of mules to be shipped through to France, which brought in return a steady stream of French francs to be translated into American dollars. Still further, Billy and Mark and Cliff, with Nickols' assistance, and the telegraph system, speculated in War Bridesdown on Wall Street until their individual bank accounts began to mount to giddy sums. Father and Mr. Sproul and more of the other men did likewise and Buford Cunningham got some spectacular returns from copper in Canada that Billy said would make Mrs. Buford Cunningham try to buy the Country Club outright for a summer home. And while there was prosperity in the Town the Settlement also had its share. Wages rose higher and higher and many of the women went to work at the machines in the saddle factory, leaving the care of the children to the old dames, which resulted in an added pandemonium in the Settlement streets.
"I don't know what is the matter. Goodloets is money mad," wailed Mother Spurlock, as she sank with weariness into the rocker on my porch one hot August afternoon. "The girls and the women are all at work and two babies have died this week from pure lack of mother's care, I might say mother's milk. Ed Jones' wife weaned her six-months'-old baby so she could go in the factory, and left it on condensed milk with old Mrs. Jones, who fed it incessantly and not at all cleanly. Now it is not expected to live. And they dance atthe Last Chance until one o'clock almost every night. Is the world mad?"
"No, just prosperous, Mother Elsie," I answered her as I gave her a large fan and Dabney brought her a tall glass of very cold tea. "Little old Goodloets is having the same boom that the rest of America is getting from feeding and furnishing the rest of the warring world."
"Nickols Powers told me just last night that over two hundred thousand dollars would be spent on the improvements to this town in the next two months, counting the new schoolhouse, the restoration of the courthouse, the paving of the public square and the enlargement of the electric light plant. That doesn't count the money everybody is putting on their own private homes. That camp of workmen down by the river that Nickols has had sent down from the city has a hundred men in it now, and that is one thing that demoralizes the Settlement. Jacob Ensley has had that dance hall enlarged twice and he has employed George Spain to stand behind the bar. It is breaking Mrs. Spain's heart, but she is helpless, for George is being paid three dollars a day for being just where he wants to be. I don't knowwhat to do. I firmly believe the town is mad, with only Gregory Goodloe to stand between it and God's wrath."
"What is he doing to stem the joy tide?" I asked with a laugh, for it did seem in a way funny to see one of the leading citizens of old Goodloets so distressed over its improvement and modernization through its enormous prosperity.
"He was down in the workmen's camp last night having a song service and seventy-five of them stayed there singing until midnight. Jacob had to put out his lights at eleven o'clock because there were not enough to pay to keep open. The chapel was full Sunday night and Jacob closed the Last Chance at six o'clock for the first time in its existence. The men passed it on to him to do it and he came and sat in a back pew himself. They all call Mr. Goodloe 'Parson,' and he walks in and around and about this town night and day shedding a kind of peace and good will even into the darkest corners. He lends a hand here and there with the work, eats out of the men's dinner pails when that Jefferson is too lazy to cook for him, or takes a bite off some stove down in the Settlement out of some old woman's pork andcabbage pot with just as much grace and heartiness as he eats at Nell Morgan's or Harriet Henderson's most elaborate dinners. And outside of his pulpit he never preaches; he just lives. This is what I heard Jacob say to him just yesterday:
"'Sure, and I wint up to set in one of your pews to see if your action in your own job was as good as it is in the many you lend a hand to week about.'
"'Well?' asked Mr. Goodloe, as he picked up, one of those rosy apples from the box Jacob keeps out on the sidewalk to blind the Last Chance.
"'I knows when to run and not be caught,' Jacob answered, as he put another apple in the parson's pocket and went back into the grocery door."
"Do you ever see Martha?" I asked with a kind of impatience. I had been three times down to the Last Chance and each time Jacob's excuses for Martha had been positive though courteous, and I had come away baffled, with the green groceries I had purchased as a blind to my visit. I had written to her and had had no response. At that I had stopped, with a self-sufficient feeling ofa duty well done, but through it all I also felt that she was on the other side of a prison wall crying to me.
"Never," answered Mother Spurlock, with real pain in her voice. "She stays in that back room and cooks for Jacob, and the child stays with her and has only the small yard back of the bar in which to play. Jacob only let him come up to sing with Mr. Goodloe and the children a few times and now he is kept as near in prison as his mother. Jacob's attitude grows more morose about her and the child every day. I don't understand it. I never will. Martha was the loveliest girl that ever bloomed in the Settlement, and now she has been plucked and thrown into the dust. And the child is too young to share her prison fate. He must be got out and away."
"He will," I answered, with a calm confidence. I didn't tell Mother Spurlock, and I didn't know exactly why I didn't, but I was deeply involved in a clandestine affair with the Stray which was fast becoming one of the adventures of my life. It had begun in a positively weird manner and was continuing along the same lines. One morning several weeks after my first acquaintance andturtle adventure with him I had waked up at dawn and gone to look out of the window just as the morning star was fading over Old Harpeth. In the dim light I had spied a small figure down in the garden, hopping along by a row of early young rose bushes, with a can in one hand and a long stick in the other. Hastily getting into a few clothes I crept down through the silent house and out in the garden to find the Stray busily engaged in knocking large slugs off into a can.
"I feed 'em to mother's bird in the cage, 'cause he can't get out to get 'em," he explained. "They all sleep hard 'cause they work so late and I crawl out the window and go back while they don't wake up. I like your yard better than I do mine." The statement was made simply, without envy of apology.
And from that morning a queer kind of dawn life went on between the small boy and me. Morning after morning he threw a pebble to waken me and I hurried down to our tryst, which extended through the hour that lies between the crack of day and the first glint of the awakening sun. At first I had carried sweetmeats to ourtryst, which were accepted with moderate pleasure, but one morning I had taken a huge volume of Rackham's Mother Goose which Nickols had brought me, and from then on our hour had been one of spiritual communion. I found the young mind insatiate and I had to ransack the library for stories and poems and pictures suitable to his years, though he rapidly developed a very advanced taste. The morning I read him the Shakespearian lines woven around the little Princes in the Tower, having suitably connected up the story for him with words of my own, we forgot the time and he overstayed his limit, for Dabney was opening the house when he fled. For five mornings he did not come and I could find no way to get news of him. I asked Mikey and got a maddening response.
"They shut up Stray in the back yard because he's a shame to old Jake," was his answer to my question. "Jake would shoot anybody that climbed that fence."
"I bet I could get over and the bad man not see if I could get out in the dark," Charlotte declared as she stood listening to my questioning. "And I am going after Stranger that way, too,if ever they leave the front door to my house unlocked. It is wicked to shut up a little boy, and the devil would help me get him out." Charlotte's purpose was high if she did slightly mix her theology.
That night a wonderful thing happened in my moonlit room. I was dead asleep when I felt a soft hand stroking my face, and then my hair, and I awoke to find the Stray standing by my bed.
"They tied me in bed when they found out I had runned away in the mornings to see you, but I gnawed the rope that he put, because I wanted to tell you that I can go to the big school when it opens because Minister told him that he would be put in jail if I didn't. It is a law. I heard him last night, and mother cried a long time, for what, I don't know. Was she glad or sorry? Do you know?"
"No, darling, I don't know, and I wish I did," I answered him as I put my arms around him while he snuggled his black-crested head down beside mine on the pillow.
"My mother is sick, she cries so much," he said with a manly struggle that drowned the sob inhis throat. "I don't know what to do. Do you know?"
"I'll find out," I said with a sudden fierceness as I strained him against my shoulder for an instant and then sat up in bed as if I must do something at once.
"I must run right back and tie myself before he wakes up and whips me," the Stray said, and it sickened me to see him wrap the gnawed rope around his little arm.
"No!" I exclaimed, and held out my arms to him.
"I must, but I don't mind whippings if I can read books in school and you make mother not cry," and before I could stop him he ran out of the dim room and I could hear his cautious bare feet patter down the long stairway and hall.
That moonlight tryst was the last of the adventure, but I did not worry, for I knew that the school would be opened formally in ten days, and I had laid my plans for Stray in an interested friendship with the very competent young woman who had already come down from the state normal college to teach the amalgamated young ideas of Goodloets to shoot. Also, I had vague plans thathurt me, of getting Jessie or Harriet to continue the trysts for me after the wedding, whose details they were all pushing to completion by a mid-September day.
And added to the strenuosity of the laying of my plans for at least a year's absence, I had to help father make his arrangements for a six months' stay in Washington, for he had accepted the President's appointment on the Commerce Commission, and night and day he was at his library desk. The silver-topped decanter still stood on the sideboard in the dining room, and the silver ice bowl was formally filled before every meal by Dabney. The mint glass was kept fresh and fragrant but apparently father had forgotten entirely about all three. He ate twice as much as I had ever seen him consume and the worn lines in his face were slowly filling out into a delicious joviality. Mr. Hicks, the little tailor who had always clothed him, had little by little made over the outer man with new garments as the old ones grew restrictive, and Mother Spurlock had carried his entire discarded wardrobe, garment at a time, down to the Settlement for the clothing of some of her most needy friends.
But the most reborn person I had ever seen was Dabney. The little black man had lived so long under the shadow of father's moroseness that when the pressure was lifted from his bent black shoulders he rebounded to an amazing extent. His reaction took the form of gala attire in which Nickols encouraged him to the extent of silk hosiery of the most delicate shades from his own wardrobe, with ties to match, not to mention his own last year's Panama hat, pressed over into the extreme of the prevailing style for youthful masculine head adornment. Also Nickols bestowed upon him a very up-to-date Palm Beach suit, purchased at the Hicks shop, and on his first appearance in the kitchen for his wife's inspection I was present.
"Go take them clothes off, nigger, and put 'em along of my black silk shroud in the bottom drawer of the chist," she commanded, as she put her hands on her sixty-inch waist and stood before him with arms akimbo. "Folks is got no business to dress in life so fine that they shames they burying clothes."
"Shoo fly, I'm jest going to Washington, not to Heaven, in this here rig. When I git intoHeaven it'll be 'cause I'm hiding behind that black silk skirt of your shroud, honey, if I'm as naked as borned," was the admiring, wily and also wholly sincere answer to Mammy's fling at the gorgeous raiment.
And while the Poplars teemed with wedding plans Nickols kept the whole village steamed up to be in readiness for the visit of Mr. Jeffries, which was dated for just a week before the wedding, and the village festival at the opening of the new school was to be the most important ceremonial of the whole visit. Father was to give him a dinner at which all of the Solons of the Harpeth Valley were to be present, and a ball at the Country Club was being planned by Billy with all enthusiasm. But the center of the buzz was down at Mother Spurlock's Little House, where Mr. Goodloe daily, and it seemed almost hourly, drilled the children for the ceremonial of the opening of their house of learning across the way from the Little House by the Road. Only echoes of the orgies reached the outside, and gossip ran high in the Settlement as well as the Town at the fragments that the delighted scions brought home, of curiousfolk dances mixed with fragments of weird tunes.
"Sure, a minister of the gospel to teach me Mikey to stand on one leg and spin around on the other with his hands over his head is a quare thing, but the Riverend Goodloe is no ordinary man," said Mrs. Burns to Mother Spurlock, who answered:
"You can trust him, Mrs. Burns, even with Mikey's legs."
And during all the long weeks of activity not once did I have a word alone with the Harpeth Jaguar. We met constantly at dinner at the tables of our friends and he came and went at the Poplars with the same freedom that Nickols enjoyed. He was long hours in the library with father, and somehow I felt that he was strengthening the structure that he had builded on the ruined foundation and something passionate rose in my heart and filled it with pain every time I heard his ringing laugh come from the library table, accompanied by father's booming chuckle. Also, he worked early and late in the garden with Nickols and the young man from White Plains, and I saw that Nickols' artistic ideas flowed attop speed when Gregory Goodloe was standing by.
It was the same thing over at the new schoolhouse. Mr. Todd and the men worked miracles with their stone and mortar and wood and iron when he was standing by or lending a hand. The school was built partly of stone like the chapel and partly of old purple-pink brick like Mother Spurlock's Little House, and it was beamed with heavy timbers. It was roofed with heavy colonial clapboards which made it look as if it had already stood a century before the floors were laid or the very modern desks installed. It was built to house increasing generations, though only about fifty children would open its portals of education.
"It speaks of education de luxe, doesn't it?" Billy asked as Nell and Harriet and I stood with him and Nickols and the parson watching Mr. Todd directing the men in screwing down the desks just a few days before the opening.
"There is scarcely a village in England to compare with old Goodloets now, and nothing at all like it," said Nickols, as he looked first up the hill to the Town and down the hill to the Settlement. "I know that it is the first spot in America to express what the full grown nation is going to be.When we add beauty to the materially perfected mode of existence we are enjoying, life will be too short in the living. That schoolhouse ought to produce some results in art cultures in the infant mind of Goodloets."
"Yes, America is learning that the foundation of its national existence, trait upon trait, must be laid in the lives of the children," said Mr. Goodloe, slowly, and he smiled as across from the Little House came wee Susan's exquisite treble in a waltz song which was backed up by Mother Spurlock's bumble and Charlotte's none too accurate accompaniment. And we all smiled with him.
Always it seemed to me I was with him and a part of a number of people who felt the radiance of his loveliness, and not once had I for a second come into personal touch with him. I had, like the rest, got my smiles and friendliness from the dark eyes under dull gold, but the door to the land in which I had been with Tristan when he sang his death song had vanished and there were no traces of its portals. The only sign that was between him and me was his continued evasion of setting a date for the dedication of the chapel. He always answered inquiries by saying that theopening of the school must come first and when the dedication was mentioned he never looked in my direction. My soul seemed to be standing still and listening for something that never came.
And then Mr. Jeffries arrived on the scene of action.
That night of Billy's ball for the magnate, who was having the time of his gray-headed life under Billy's and Nickols' enthusiastic direction, the strange alien thing that had been developed in my depths, part unrest and part rebellion, since I had first looked into the eyes of the young Methodist parson, who had intruded himself and his chapel into my existence, got its death blow. In my presence Nickols made his formal request of the Reverend Mr. Goodloe to officiate at our marriage.
"Of course, Greg, old fellow, you are going to marry us next Tuesday, aren't you?" asked Nickols, as we stood on the steps of the Poplars after dinner, chatting with him as he was leaving to go over to the chapel while we went out to the dance. "I suppose there is some sort of formal way to make the request, but I don't know it."
"If there is I don't know it, either," was thekindly answer, which both Nickols and I took for assent.
"Thank you, sir," said Nickols, as he turned away towards father and Mr. Cockrell and Mr. Jeffries, who had come out on the porch with their cigars, and left him and me standing alone in the starlight.
"God guard you!" he said to me without taking the hand I held out to him in the darkness with a kind of desperation that seemed that of a drowning woman. "Good-bye!" and he was gone out into the night, leaving me, I knew, forever outside of his life.
"Wait, Oh wait!" I pleaded, but he was gone and I didn't even know if he heard the cry out into the velvet darkness.
That night was the most brilliant night that Goodloets had ever known. The Town was full of guests who had motored over from all the towns around in the Harpeth Valley. The Governor had come down from the capital in his huge touring car to congratulate father on his appointment and to meet Mr. Jeffries. His adjutant-general and several of his aids were with him in their showy State Guard uniforms and all of thegirls were rosy with excitement at the presence of so many rows of brass buttons. Mr. Jeffries opened the ball, and to the delight and amusement of us all, he succeeded in leading out with him Mrs. Sproul, who turned the opening dance into a stately old Virginia reel, which so delighted the tango dancers with its novelty that the dance was repeated several times during the evening by enthusiastic requests.
And while the Town reveled in celebration of the new Goodloets, down in the Settlement like rejoicings were being held at the dance hall of the Last Chance. In fact, the whole small city was in the throes of a great rejoicing. Why shouldn't all Goodloets revel when it was enjoying a prosperity beyond anybody's dreams of two years before? Everybody had been generous to the old town with the money that had come so easily from other suffering people's necessities, and security and good fellowship and prosperity reigned supreme. In each heart there was the feeling that now the old town and their personal lives were founded on solid rocks of peace and plenty and it was the time to eat, drink and be merry.
At supper the Governor's first toast, after thatto the town itself, was to father and his distinctions. Then Mr. Jeffries toasted Nickols and me. He called Nickols the "American Wizard of Habitations," and, amid cheering and clapping hands, announced his intention to have Nickols build the American town on the Hudson. He called me the "Heart of the Achievement," and father's pride as he looked down the long table at Nickols and me was very wonderful and beautiful; and as great a pride rose in my heart as I saw him lift his glass of water to pledge me, leaving the bubbles breaking in his champagne.
It was very near dawn when we all motored home and it was upon the verge of the crack of day by the time Dabney and Nickols had got the Governor and Mr. Jeffries and the other guests settled under the wide roof of the Poplars, which had never hovered a more distinguished or brilliant house party.
For a few quiet minutes after they had all gone to their rooms Nickols and I stood alone on the front porch in the cool darkness with its hint of the dawn, while old Dabney shut up the back part of the house.
"The school festival will be over to-morrow,sweetheart, and the next day they will all be gone. The photographers are all through with the photographing and to-morrow night all the extra workmen go back to the city. There'll be three whole quiet days for you to get ready to give me that kiss, which I won't take when you are as tired as you are now," said Nickols, as he put a limp arm around me and leaned against the tall door post.
"To-morrow the old makes way for the new. Goodloets is dead! Long live Goodloets!" I answered, as I in turn leaned against Nickols' jaded arm for only a second before we preceded Dabney up the stairs to our rooms.
In my room I went immediately to the window and opened wide the heavy shutters. I found myself looking down on Goodloets, which lay below the darkness of the Poplars like a long glowworm, brilliant with the lights from the homes of the revelers who were going to bed with a sense of perfect security. Still farther down the hill the lights from the Settlement glowed with scarcely less brilliancy and I felt sure that the Last Chance was still harboring a last fling of joy.
Suddenly over my spirit came a deep wave of depression that amounted to a great fear and thenas I stood trembling in the darkness, a broad ray of morning light shot up over Paradise Ridge and spread rapidly into a crimson glow that was reflected against a black cloud hanging low over the head of Old Harpeth. A flash of lightning darted from the cloud and spread its gold fire through the crimson of the coming day, and then the sullen-pointed cloud sank rapidly below Paradise Ridge, over which it had risen, as if reconnoitering. Positively shuddering, I knelt against the window seat and watched the day come with a hitherto unknown terror. Then as I watched the dawn begin to drive away the sullen clouds a rich voice began to sing out beyond the old poplars as a window of the gray chapel was thrown open: