The Heart's Kingdom Part 3

"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 d.a.m.n me again. I won't wait. I'm weak and I dasn't. Give me that money to-night!" And the demand was pa.s.sionate 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.

"G.o.d 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 appet.i.te, 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 chastis.e.m.e.nt 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. G.o.d'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 pa.s.sed 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 ba.s.s growl, in which I was sure that father was recounting the sc.r.a.pe in which his and the Reverend Mr. Goodloe's anemone adventure had got them.

I a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sured 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.