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THE HEART'S KINGDOM
by
MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS
Author of The Melting of Molly, etc.
Illustrated by W. B. King
[Illustration: "_It's a mighty big turkle," he faltered, and snuggled
closer._]
New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers
Copyright, 1917
by
The Reilly & Britton Co.
Made in U.S.A.
Published September 12, 1917
Second Printing October 1, 1917
CONTENTS
I The World and the Flesh 9
II The Harpeth Jaguar 27
III The Gauntlet 41
IV To Turkey Gulch 61
V Having It Out 92
VI Deep Digging 109
VII The Tristan Love Song 132
VIII Breasting the Gale 146
IX Into Brambles 161
X Water and Oil 181
XI A Bit of Raw Life 195
XII The Tenacious Turtle 211
XIII The Short-Circuit 227
XIV Abide With Me 241
XV A Clandestine Adventure 258
XVI The Jewel in the Matrix 283
XVII The Pageant 297
XVIII Light--Into Darkness 312
XIX The Spark and the Blaze 327
XX The Covert of Wings 344
The Heart's Kingdom
CHAPTER I
THE WORLD AND THE FLESH
"A beautiful woman is intended to create a heaven on earth and she has
no business wasting herself making imaginary excursions into any future
paradise. The present is her time for action; and again, Charlotte, I
ask you to name the day upon which you intend to marry me," said Nickols
Powers, as he stood lounging in the broad window of Aunt Clara's music
room and gazing down into the subdued traffic of upper Madison Avenue.
"I wish you had never taken me across that ferry and into that room
crowded with redolent humanity to hear an absurd little man string
together vivid, gross words about religion, words that made me tingle
all over," I answered as I threw my coat on a chair, lifted my hat from
my head and sat down on the seat before the dark old piano. "I think
religion is the most awful thing in the world and I am as afraid of it
as I am of--of death. I'm going home to my father."
"Oh, don't be afraid of it. Religion is the most potent form of
intoxication known to the human race. That's why I took you over to hear
the little baseball player. I wanted you to get a sip. But don't let it
go to your head." And Nickols mocked me with soft tenderness in his
smile.
"Well, it frightened me, and I don't like it. I'm going home to my
father and forget it," I reiterated with a kind of numbness upon me, the
like of which I had never before experienced.
"I'll protect you from any religious danger just as effectively as Judge
Powers. I'm younger--slightly--than he, but I know just as many of the
wiles of the world and the flesh as he does and maybe a few more,"
Nickols assured me, with a flash in his dark eyes that was both wicked
and humorous, as well as very delightful.
"And the devil, too! But you don't understand. I must go home to my
father," I answered still again.
"You don't understand yourself," returned Nickols. "There are strange
hieroglyphics imprinted on every woman's heart and a man can read only
an unconnected word here and there when he can get his flashlight thrown
into the depths--if he dares adventure into her life at all. I feel that
I take my own life in my hands when I allow you to talk to me as I am
allowing you to-night."
"How do you know that those hieroglyphics might not mean the salvation
of the world if she could spell them out herself, or some great and good
person took a steady lamp and went down into her heart and--"
"It takes a very wicked man to read a woman; good men are blinded by
them and stumble," Nickols assured me as he came over, stood beside me
and ran his long, slender, artist's fingers up and down the keys of the
piano, which evoked a strange, diabolical sort of harmony from them. "I
understand about it all, so please come tell me you'll marry me." This
time his arms almost encircled me, but I slipped between them as he
laughed at me with his adorable pagan charm.
"No, Nickols, that would be an easy--and--and delightful way out, but I
am really frightened down in some queer part of my anatomy that lies
between my breast bone and my spinal column. Something is stirring in my
heart and I'm afraid of it. I've got to get out in a wilderness and
fight with it."
"Take it out on me," offered Nickols, with a laugh that was both wistful
and provoking.
"No, I've got a home panic and I must go."
"Then when do I get my answer from what is left of you after the
battle?"
"I'll let you know when to come and get it--under the roof of the
Poplars," I answered him from the doorway.
And the very next morning I went down into the Harpeth Valley, driven I
knew not by what, nor to what. I only knew that I felt full of a living,
smothered flame and I was sure that it was best to let it burst forth in
my ancestral abiding place.
I was born of a man who has the most evolved brain in the Harpeth
Valley, who has been a drunkard for twenty years, and of a very
beautiful and haughty woman whose own mother, to the day of her death,
shouted at Methodist love feasts. Is it any wonder that when I was tried
by fire I burned "as the cracklings of thorns under a pot?"
"How _could_ you set that ridiculous little Methodist meeting house on
the very doorstep of my garden, father?" I demanded, as I stood tall and
furious before him in the breakfast room on the morning after my return
home from my winter in the East with Aunt Clara. "Cousin Nickols has
spent many months out of three years on the plans of restoration for
that garden, and he is coming down soon to sketch and photograph it to
use in some of his commissions. What shall I--what will _you_--say to
him when he finds that the vista he kept open for the line of Paradise
Ridge has been cut off by that pile of stones to house the singing of
psalms?" And as I raged I had a feeling of being relentlessly
pursued--by something I didn't understand.
"Madam," returned father, with a dignity he always used with me when he
encountered one of my rages, "you will find that the chapel does not in
any way interfere with Nickols' carefully planned view. Gregory Goodloe
spent many days of thought in seeking to place it so that it would not
intrude itself upon your garden, and he built his parsonage completely
out of view, though it gives him only one large southern window to his
study and only northern ones to his bedroom."
"Does the creature also sleep and eat and have his being right there
behind my hollyhocks?" I demanded, and my rage began to merge into
actual grief, which in turn threatened to come to the surface in hot
tears.
"Now, Charlotte, my daughter," father was beginning to say with soothing
in his voice instead of the belligerence that from my youth up had
always just preceded my floods of tears. Dabney, the shriveled black
butler, who had always devotedly sympathized with my exhibitions of
temperament, to which he had, from my infancy, given the name of
"tantrums," set the platter of fried chicken before father's place at
the damask and silver-spread old table by the window, through which the
morning sun was shining genially. Then, with a smile as broad and genial
as that of the sun, he drew out my chair from behind the ancestral
silver coffee urn, which was puffing out clouds of fragrant steam.
"Breakfast am sarved, honey chile," he crooned soothingly, "an' yo'
Mammy done put the liver wing right ag'in yo' fork."
Dabney had many times stemmed my floods with choice food and was trying
his favorite method of pacification.
I faltered and wavered at the temptation. I was hungry.
"Just wait until you see Goodloe and talk it over with him," father
said, as he seized the advantage of my wavering and seated himself
opposite me as Dabney pushed in my chair and whisked the cover off the
silver sugar bowl and presented one of his old willow-ware cups for
father's two lumps and a dash of cream. "I asked him to--"
"See him? You don't expect me to discuss Nickols' and my garden with an
ignorant bucolic Methodist minister, who probably doesn't know a
honeysuckle from a jimson weed, do you?" I asked with actual rage rising
again above the tears as I literally dashed the cream into his cup and
deluged the boiling coffee down upon it so that a scalding splatter
peppered my hand. "I never want to see or hear or speak to or about
him. I'll build a trellis as high as his church, run evergreen
honeysuckle on it and go my way in an opposite direction from his.
I'll--" Just here I observed consternation spread over Dabney's black
face, then communicate itself to father's distressed countenance as he
glanced out the window. Quickly he pushed his morning julep behind the
jar of roses in the center of the table, while Dabney flung a napkin
over the silver pitcher with frost on its sides and mint nodding over
its brim.
And then, as I was about to pour my own coffee and launch forth on
another tirade on the subject of my neighbor, I heard a rich tenor voice
singing just outside the window in the garden beside the steps that led
down from the long windows in the dining room to the old flagstone walk.
Nickols and I had searched through volumes of dusty antique prints to
see just how we wanted that walk to lead out to the sunken garden beyond
the tall old poplars. I also saw the handle of a rake or hoe in action
across the window landscape and heard unmistakable sounds of vigorous
gardening.
I rose to my feet with battle in my eyes and then stopped perfectly
still and listened--unwillingly but compelled.
"Drink to me only with thine eyes
And I will pledge with mine,"
were the words that floated in at the window on the fragrant morning
sunbeams, in a voice of the most penetrating tenderness I had ever felt
break against my heartstrings.
"I--I--he sometimes demolishes a--a few weeds," father faltered, while
Dabney ducked his cotton-wool old head and slipped out of the door.
"You allow him to work in my--garden--and--" I faltered, just recovering
from the impact of the words of my favorite song of songs hurled at me
by the unseen enemy, when I was interrupted by his appearance in the
open door and we stood facing each other.
I am a woman who has very decided tastes about the biological man. I
know just how I want the creatures to look, and I haven't much interest
in one that isn't at least of the type of my preferred kind. Because I
am very tall and broad and deep-bosomed and vivid and high colored, and
have strong white teeth that crunch up about as much food in the
twenty-four hours as most field hands consume, and altogether I am very
much like one of the most vigorous of Sorolla's paintings, that is the
probable pathological reason I have always preferred an evolved Whistler
masculine nocturne that retreats to the limits of my comprehension and
then beckons me to follow. All other men I have grouped beyond the
border of my feminine nature and sought to waste no thought upon them.
It was a shock to come, suddenly, in my own breakfast room, face to face
with a type of man I had never before met. The enemy was astonishingly
large and lithe and distinctly resembled one of the big gold-colored
lions that live in the wilds of the Harpeth Mountains out beyond
Paradise Ridge. His head, with its tawny thatch that ought to have waved
majestically but which was sleek and decorous to the point of
worldliness, was poised on his neck and shoulders with a singularly
strong line that showed through a silk soft collar, held together by an
exquisitely worldly amethyst silk scarf which, it was a shock to see,
matched glints from eyes back under his heavy gold brows with what
appeared to be extreme sophistication. After the shock of the tie the
loose gray London worsted coat and trousers made only a passing
impression; and from my involuntary summary of the whole surprising man,
which had taken less than an instant, my dazed brain came back and was
held and concentrated by the beauty of the smile that flooded out over
me in welcome after my father's hurried introduction.
"The Reverend Mr. Gregory Goodloe--my daughter Charlotte," father
announced, as he rose and waved in my direction a hand that was cordial
to the point of bravado.
"I'm so glad you came in time to see your crocuses and anemones, Miss
Powers," the Jaguar said as he took my hand in his. "Dabney has let me
help him hand-weed them and they are a glory, aren't they?" While he
spoke he still held my hand and I was still too dazed to regain
possession of it. Father saved the situation.
"Sit down, sit down, Parson, and let Charlotte give you a cup of coffee
while it is on the simmer," he urged with hasty hospitality as if intent
upon effectively bottling me up, at least for the immediate present.
"She was just pouring my cup. Will you say grace before I take my first
sip?" was the high explosive he further proceeded to hurl in my face.
And as he spoke I sank dumbly into my chair and helplessly bowed my head
to a ceremony so obsolete in the world from which I had come that I felt
as if I was slipping back into the days of the pioneer, when the customs
of life were still primitive and dictated by emotion rather than mental
science.
And there, with father's concealed mint julep right against his
interlaced fingers, the mountain lion bowed his crested head and
involved me in prayer for the first time since chapel-service in my
college days.
"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof ... for which we give
thanks, thy children, with Lord Jesus, Amen!"
"Amen," mumbled father as if from the depths of embarrassment, and
against my will, as it were, a queer sort of a croon of an echo came
from my own throat.
Also that was the first time I had ever heard words of prayer under the
roof of the Poplars. It embarrassed me and I hated it and the cause of
it. The spell which had possessed me since the entrance of the Reverend
Goodloe, vanished, and the rage that had been in me at the discovery of
the intrusion of his chapel and himself upon my life when I had come
home to be free to be wicked, boiled up within me and then sugared down
to a rich--and dangerous--syrup. While I poured his coffee I again took
stock of him, this time coldly and with deadly intent. The reasons for
his entry into my hitherto satisfactory family life, even at breakfast
time, I did not know, any more than I knew the reason for the chapel on
the other side of the hollyhocks, but I felt that I feared both and
intended to get rid of them. If the enemy had been what one could
reasonably expect a young Methodist preacher to be, I would have routed
him and his meekness within the hour and had the chapel moved to a lot
on a side street in town within the week. However, when a hunter comes
suddenly upon a Harpeth jaguar he is glad to use his best repeater and
he is careful how he shoots, though if he is very skillful he may tease
the lion aloft with a few nipping shots. I felt suddenly very strong for
the fight that I knew was on, though the lion didn't possess that
knowledge as yet. Deliberately I fired a preliminary bullet that seemed
to graze father, though it left the Parson unharmed.
"Will you have your mint julep before I pour your coffee, Mr. Goodloe?"
I asked, with seemingly careless friendliness. "Dabney, put fresh ice in
father's glass and fill mine and Mr. Goodloe's."
"I was feeling a little under the weather this morning," said father
hastily, as he set his glass from behind the rose jar upon Dabney's
waiter and motioned it all away from him, thus denying the morning
friend of his lifetime. I had never drunk a julep before breakfast in my
life, only tasted around the frosty edges of father's, but I held my
ground, and held out my glass to Dabney, who falteringly, almost in
terror, took the frosted silver pitcher from the sideboard and poured me
an unusually large draft of the family beverage.
"Will you have yours now, Mr. Goodloe?" I asked again with still more of
the sugared solicitation.
"No, I believe I prefer the coffee, but don't pour it until you have
drunk your julep; you know frost is a thing that soon passes," was the
cheerful answer, though a suspicion of an amethyst glint made me know
that the Jaguar had at least heard the zip of the bullet.
I loathed that mixture of ice and sugar and mint and whiskey but I had
to drink it, and it heated me up inside both physically and mentally,
and took away all the queer dogging fear. And because of it I don't
remember what else happened at that breakfast except that I wanted to
clutch and cling to the warm, strong hand that I again found mine in at
the time of parting. But I didn't; at least, I don't think I did. After
it was taken away from me I went very slowly up to my room and again
went to bed, Mammy caressingly officiating and rejoicing that I was
going to "nap the steam cars outen my bones."
I fell asleep with the continued strains of "Drink to me only" in my
ears, and wondering if I ought to put it down as insult added to injury,
and I awoke several hours later to find Letitia Cockrell, one of the
dear friends whom many generations had bestowed upon me, sitting on the
foot of my bed consuming the last of the box of marrons with which
Nickols had provisioned my journey down from New York. I was glad I had
tucked the note that came in the box under my pillow the night before. I
trust Letitia and she is entirely sophisticated, but she has never had a
lover who lives in Greenwich Village, New York, America.
"Is this the open season for two-day hangovers, in New York?" she
demanded as she sniffed me suspiciously at the same time she dimpled and
smiled at me.
"No, this is not a metropolitan hangover. It was acquired at breakfast,
Letitia," I answered her as I sat up and stretched out my bare arms to
give her a good shake and a hug. "'You may break, you may shatter the
glass if you will, but the scent of the julep will hang 'round you
still,'" I misquoted as I drew my knees up into my embrace and took the
last remaining marron.
"Why, Mammy said Mr. Goodloe had breakfast with you. Did you sneak it
from the judge's pitcher?" demanded Letitia, as she likewise drew her
knees up into her arms and settled herself against one of the posts of
my bed for the many hours' résumé of our individual existences in which
we always indulged upon being reunited after separation.
"I did not," I answered. "I drank it before his eyes, and then I don't
remember what happened and I don't care."
"What?"
"Just that. I never have been drunk because I never could drink enough.
I've always felt that there isn't enough liquid in the world to faze me,
and I don't like it anyway, but Dabney was so impressed by His Worship
that he poured it double for me before I had had breakfast. I hope I
staggered or swore but I don't think I did. The Reverend Goodloe can
tell you better than I. Ask him."
"Gregory Goodloe? Oh, Charlotte!"
"That's the point I was coming to, Letitia: Just who is this Reverend
Goodloe that I shouldn't drink a quart of mint julep before him if I
want to? I had well over a pint of champagne with a Mr. Justice two
nights before I left New York and I stopped then out of courtesy to one
of the generals whom we expect to defend us from the Kaiser. Who is your
Gregory Goodloe? Tell we all about him, unexpurgated and unafraid."
"Didn't you know about him--and the chapel before you came?" Letitia
queried cautiously, as if fearing the explosion she felt was sure to
result.
"I did not," I answered. "I met him and his chapel and the mint julep
all in the same five minutes, and is it any wonder I went down? Go on.
Tell me the worst or the best. I'm ready." And as I spoke I settled my
pillows comfortably, getting a little thrill from the crumpled letter
underneath the bottom one.