The Heart's Kingdom

"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.