The Hearts Kingdom | Page 2

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