was Charlotte's sympathetic question to the young Mrs. Bangs; and I saw the mite take a clean handkerchief from her small pink pocket and apply it to the tears that were coursing down Melissa's cheeks over the dimples which her smiling mouth was putting in their way. "Just be a good girl and G.o.d will forgive you," she comforted further, nestling a dirty pink cheek, which rubbed off, against Melissa's wet one.

"And I asked if she were totally depraved, less than an hour ago," I apologized to my name daughter in my heart.

All the way home I sat beside father, and once I laid a timid hand in his, through whose fingers the pride I had in him must have flowed into his. He flushed for a second and then was pale again.

"You can't put new wine in old bottles, daughter," he said sadly, as he glanced down into the valley. The car was running smoothly, slowly and noiselessly around a sharp curve, and the Reverend Mr. Goodloe both heard and answered the sad axiom.

"The finest wine mellows in casks and is then bottled free of dregs, Judge. I think the wine of life is of that vintage," he said, with one of his radiant smiles that I could see fairly warm father from his paleness.

"I wonder just what he meant by 'the wine of life,'" I asked myself as I went to say good night to Old Harpeth after I put out my light before going to bed.

CHAPTER V

HAVING IT OUT

"Well, of course, we knew Nickols would follow you, Charlotte, but we did hope to have you all to ourselves for more than just a week," moaned Nell Morgan, as we all sat on the front porch of the Poplars in the warm spring sunlight several mornings after I had told them of Nickols'

arrival on Friday, which announcement had come in the midnight telegram.

I winced at the words "follow you," and then smiled at the absurdity of the little shudder.

"Yes, Nickols will be absorbing, but we can all sit hard on him and perhaps put him in his place," responded Let.i.tia c.o.c.krell, as she drew a fine thread through a ruffle she was making to adorn some part of the person of one of Nell's progeny. "I do not believe in ever allowing a man to take more than his share of a woman's time."

"Do you use grocery scales or a pint cup to measure out Cliff Gray's daily portion of yourself, Let.i.tia?" asked Harriet Henderson, with a very sophisticated laugh in which Nell joined with a little giggle.

Harriet was appliqueing velvet violets on a gray chiffon scarf and was doing it with the zest of the newly liberated. Roger Henderson had had a lot of money that, in default of a will, the law gave mostly to Harriet, but in life he had not had the joy of seeing her spend it that he might have had if he could have gazed back from placid death. "Do you make the same allowance of affection to him in the light of the moon that you do in the dark?" she further demanded of the serene Let.i.tia.

"Well, he doesn't have to see his share divided up into bits and handed out to the other men," was the serene answer to Harriet's gibe and which was pretty good for Let.i.tia.

"My dear child," declaimed Harriet, as she poised a purple violet on the end of her needle, "don't ever, ever make the mistake of letting one of the creatures know just what is coming to him. Isn't that right, Nell?"

"Yes, and it is pretty hard to keep them in a state of uncertainty about you when there are four certain children between you, but I go over to visit my mother at Hillsboro as often as she'll have the caravan and plead with Billy Harvey or Hampton Dibrell to keep me out until I'm late for dinner every time they pick me up for a little charitable spin.

That and other deceptions have kept Mark Morgan uncertainly happy so far, but if I am pushed to the wall I'll--I'll go to the Reverend Mr.

Goodloe's study for ministerial counsel like you did last Friday afternoon, Harriet," was Nell's contribution to the discussion, which she delivered over the head of the Suckling on her breast.

"Now how did you get hold of that choice bit of scandal, Nellie?" asked Harriet, with serene interest as she bit off a tag of purple silk thread from the stem of one of her violets.

"Billy Harvey says that scandal is a yellow pup that dogs a parson's heels, to which everybody throws some kind of bone," remarked Jessie.

Jessie always vigorously represses Billy in his own presence and then quotes him eternally when he is absent.

"Mother Spurlock had come over from the Settlement to see him about the state of the treasury of the Mothers' Aid Cla.s.s, and she stopped in to get a bundle of clothes I had for her," Nell answered Harriet's question. "She said she didn't mind the hour lost if the parson could give a 'wee bit of comfort' to your 'wrestling' soul. I didn't like to tell her that I thought it might be Mr. Goodloe who was wrestling--for life and liberty--for you and I have been friends since we could toddle, Harriet, but it was temptation to share my anxiety with her." And serenely Nellie patted the back of the drowsing Suckling.

"Wrong this time, Nell," answered Harriet, as she placed still another violet. "I was doing the wrestling, but I went to the mat. I gave up twenty-five dollars and took the directorship of that Mothers' Aid.

Never having been a mother, I pointed out to him that I was not exactly qualified, but he laid stress upon my energy and business ac.u.men and I gave up. I mentioned you for the honor, but those marvelous eyes of his glowed with some sort of inner warmth and he said that you had all you could do and would need help from me just as the women at the Settlement do. I'm going to present your Susan with a frock out of that linen and real Valenciennes I bought in the city last week for a blouse for my own self, and I'm going to give the making to that little Burns woman, who sews so beautifully and cheaply to support her seven offspring, while Mr. Burns supports 'The Last Chance' saloon down at the end of the road.

In that way I'll be aiding two of Mr. Goodloe's flock at the same time, and when I told him my decision he laughed and said be sure and have it made two inches shorter than you made Sue's frocks, because her bare knees ought not to be hid from the world. That was about all that transpired in the whole hour of spiritual conference you are spreading the scandal about, and you ought to be ashamed."

Suddenly something in me made me determine to have it out with those four women and see what results I could get. I felt thirsty for knowledge of the wellsprings of other people's lives.

"Harriet," I demanded, "just why did you join Mr. Goodloe's church?"

"Let's see," answered Harriet, as she poised a violet and gave herself up to introspection.

"Mr. Goodloe?" I asked squarely, and my honesty drew its spark from hers.

"Mostly," she answered briefly. "And I believe in the church as an inst.i.tution," she added, with honest justice to herself.

"I think it is absolutely horrid of you to ask a question like that, Charlotte," said Nell, as she turned the fretting Suckling over on her knee and began another series of pats. "We all of us went to church and Sunday school when we were children."

"Up to the time I left, not a single one of you ever had gone to church with any kind of regularity and not a one of you had ever supported its inst.i.tutions. I've been here less than a week and each one of you has in some way shown me how bored you are with the relation. That's all the case I have against your or any church--just that the members are bored.

Also, do any of you get any help in your daily lives, aside from the emotional pleasure it is to you to hear your minister sing twice a week, which would be as great or greater if he sang love and waltz songs from light opera for you?"

And as I asked my question I looked quickly from one to the other of the four women seated with me under the roof of the Poplars and tried to search out what was in their hearts. I knew them and their lives with the cruel completeness it is given to friends to know each other in small towns like Goodloets and I could probe with a certain touch. And as they all sat silent with me, each one driven to self-question by my demand, I threw the flash of a searchlight into each of them. These are some of the things that stood out in the illumination:

Harriet Henderson has always been in love with Mark Morgan, since her shoe-top-dress days, and she married Roger Henderson because Mark was as poor as she before the Phosphate Company gave him his managership. Nell and the babies are the nails driven in her heart every day and she loves them all pa.s.sionately. She is only twenty-eight and life will be long for her. She needs help to live it. Whence will the help come?

Nell married Mark when she was eighteen and has produced a result every year and a half since. She loves him mildly and he loves her after a fashion, but her endurance is wearing thin. His mother had seven children and he thinks that an ideal number, though she was one generation nearer the pioneer woman and also had a nurse trained in slavery who was a wizard with children. Mark wants to have a lot of joy of life and so far he drags poor exhausted Nell with him. It is a question how long she can stand the social pace and the over-production.

What is going to help her when she breaks down? How will she hold him faithful while she rears and trains all the kiddies? Where will she get spirit to love him and work out their salvation? Also Harriet is always there. Something will have to help Nell. What?

Billy loves Nell and doesn't know it. He loved her before she was married. The children make him rage superficially and burn inwardly. He gambles and drinks, but is honest and adorable. What is going to make a real man of him?

Jessie Litton's mother died in a private sanitarium for the mentally unbalanced and she knows all about it. She loves Hampton Dibrell and never looks in his direction or is a moment alone with him. He is in the unattached state of ease where any woman can get him if she cares to try, and Jessie has to keep her hands behind her.

Let.i.tia is serenely happy with not a dark corner that I know of. She loves Cliff Gray and always will. Cliff is faithful and as good as gold, but he will hang around Jessie, who encourages him, because she is lonely and considers him safely tied up with Let.i.tia. Mr. c.o.c.krell is the best lawyer in town and Mrs. c.o.c.krell the most devoted wife and mother. I can only feel that Let.i.tia c.o.c.krell needs a jolt and I don't see where it is coming from.

And I? I am lonely. And I feel that the constant anxiety about father is more than I can bear, worse now when I realize what he has been and could be--and that I love him. He is the hardest drinker in Goodloets and yet never is drunk. He is soaked from the beginning of one day to another. He began to drink like that the day my mother died and I have always known that _I_ was helpless to help him. The weakness was in him, only supported by her strength so long as she was there. He was the most brilliant mind in the state, and was one of the supreme judges when mother died. Now Mr. c.o.c.krell manages his business for him and I have lately come to know that I must sit by and watch him disintegrate. I cannot endure it now, as I have been doing. What is going to help me in this--shame for him? I have gone away to my mother's people to forget and left him to Dabney, and I've come home--to begin the suffering all over. I'll never leave him again. What's going to help me?

And there is something deeper--a race something that fairly eats the heart out of my pride. On almost every page of the history of the Harpeth Valley the name of Powers occurs. One Powers man has been governor of the state, and there have been two United States congressmen and a senator of our house. Father is the last of the line. Because race instinct is the strongest in women, I am the one who suffers as I see my family die out. What is going to help me? A few gospel hymns in a tenor voice the like of which I should have to pay at least three dollars to hear in the Metropolitan? The scene on the porch rose in my mind, but I felt that I both doubted and feared such succor.

And I am in still deeper depths. Nickols is the son of father's first cousin, and has father's full name, Nickols Morris Powers, and he is the last of his branch of the house. Father loves him and is proud of him and nothing ever enters his mind except that I will marry Nickols and start the family all over again. And this is the tragedy. I love Nickols and am entirely unsatisfied with him. He is the Whistler nocturne that my Sorolla nature demands, and he eternally makes me hold out my hand to grasp--nothing. He stands just beyond. I am unable to decide whether he does or does not love me. In New York he lives his life among the artists and fashionable people with whom his highly successful profession throws him, and I don't see why he cares to come back here where he was born and reared, in pursuit of a woman like me. I am as elemental as a shock of wheat back on one of father's meadows and Nickols is completely evolved. He laughs at race pride and resents mine.

For six months I had been in New York living with Aunt Clara in Uncle Jonathan Van Eyek's old house down on Gramercy just to go into Nickols'

life with him. I went about in the white lights of both Murray Hill and Greenwich Village for about one hundred and eighty-five evenings, and then I fled back to my garden and the poplars--and my anxiety. I thought I had come home to be free and I found the same old chains. And then had come Nickols' telegram of pursuit in the midnight after I had stood by in the shadow and watched a strong man pray and a weak man battle with himself. I was frightened, frightened at the future, and what was going to help me?

"I don't actually understand a word of Gregory Goodloe's sermons, really understand them, I mean, but it helps me to see that somebody truly believes that there is something somewhere that will straighten out tangles--in life as well as thread."

Harriet broke in on my still hunt into my own and other people's inner shrines as she snapped a bit of tangled purple silk thread, knotted it and began all over again on the violet.

"I don't care what he preaches about--he's soothing and I need a little repose in my life after--Oh, what is the matter now?" And as she finished speaking Nell Morgan arose and went with the Suckling asquirm in her arms to meet the large noise that was arriving down the front walk.

The delegation was headed by young Charlotte, whose blue eyes flamed across a very tip-tilted nose that bespoke mischief. Jimmy stolidly brought up the rear with small Sue clinging loyally to his dirty little paddie, which she only let go to run and bury her cornsilk topknot in Harriet's outspread arms, where she was engulfed into safety until only the most delicious dimpled pink knees protruded above dusty white socks and equally dusty white canvas sandals. Though within a few months of four, Sue had discovered Harriet, and never failed to take advantage of her.

"What is the matter?" again demanded Nell, as the vocal chords of Charlotte ceased reverberating and her countenance resumed a more normal color and expression.

"A rock flew and the minister's window got broked." Charlotte gave forth this announcement with a diplomacy that might have been admirable exerted in a juster cause.

"Who had the rock?" demanded the mother sternly.

"Jimmy," was the decided answer, given with a threatening glance at the son of the house of Morgan, who quailed in his socks and sandals and began an attempt to screw one of his toes under one of the flagstones of the walk. I knew in an instant that that rock had never left the hand of small James, but the clash of Nell's wits with young Charlotte is so constant that at times the maternal ones are dulled. The accused must have psychically scented my sympathy, for he lifted large, scared, pleading eyes to mine for a brief second and then dropped them again. I went to the rescue.