Chapter 8 BREASTING THE GALE

In the radiant moonlight I saw the lithe muscles of the Jaguar grow taut and stiff, and I felt rather than saw his long, strong hands clench themselves. I was about to stretch out my arms and ward off something that seemed like danger to Nickols, standing down at the bottom of the steps, smiling up at us in the moonlight with his mocking, fascinating smile, when suddenly the anger seemed to flow away from the body of the parson and he smiled down into the upturned eyes with great gentleness as we started down the steps together.

"I didn't interrupt the salvation of Charlotte's soul, did I?" Nickols asked, as he took my outstretched hand in his left hand and raised it to his lips as he held out his right to the Reverend Mr. Goodloe. So real had been that fraction of an instant when I had stood between the two men that I almost felt the sensation of alarm a second time as I saw Nickols' slender, magical, artist's fingers laid in the slim, powerful hand of the Reverend Mr. Goodloe, but the gentle voice reassured me as the Harpeth Jaguar answered the intruder, or what he must have felt to be the intruder, for I had something of that feeling myself at the advent of my lover at the moment he had chosen for his arrival.

"The trouble began about apple dumplings and hard sauce," I said, as quickly as my wits would act.

"How are you, Nickols Powers, since we separated 'somewhere in France,' you with your sketch books and I with my hospital stretchers? I got a dandy lung clip; did you bring away any lead?" And the parson's voice was gentle and cordial and full of a laughing reminiscence.

"Didn't smell powder after I left you," answered Nickols, as we all ascended the steps and stood in a group before the door. "I got my books full of sketches of bits of treasures that the war might destroy, and beat it back to civilization. Did the Madonna of the Red Cross you had in tow come across as sentimentally as was threatened?" Nickols' voice was as cordial as the Reverend Goodloe's, but something in me made me resent the question and the manner it was asked.

"She was killed in a field hospital just a few weeks after we left her-'somewhere in France.' She got God's welcome!" was the answer that came to the laughing question in a quiet, reverent voice. And as he spoke the parson started down the steps, then turned for his farewell.

"That-or sweet oblivion," said Nickols, as he came to the edge of the steps and looked down at the Harpeth Jaguar coolly. I again got the sense of danger from the tall, lithe figure that stood in the moonlight, radiant before us in the shadow. "We'll contest that point warmly while we contest the meeting house Charlotte writes me that you planted in our garden-of Eden."

"I can contest-if I must," was the serene answer that came back at us from over the white silk-clad shoulder. "Good night, both of you, and I hope to see you both again soon. Smell the lilacs bursting bud in your garden-of Eden!" With which farewell he left us to our greetings.

"That's some man to be lost in the ranks of the shibboleths," said Nickols with generous ease, as we watched the last glint of the moon on the yellow head disappearing around the corner. "Degrees from three old colleges, millions, women lovers in millions, all thrown away to sing psalms for a few rustics in little old Goodloets. Can you beat it? But, blast him, he can't take away my loving welcome with his fatal beauty," and as he spoke, with a tender laugh Nickols held out his arms to me. I went into them and he held me close.

"I couldn't stay away-with Goodloe and the meeting house in the ring against me," he whispered, and he tried to raise my head for the kiss I had been holding from him all the long winter of our engagement, claiming to want it only under the roof of the Poplars. I burrowed my face in his shoulder and held to him with such fervor that it was impossible for him to raise my head.

"Not yet," was my muffled pleading.

"Again, damn that huge blond giant for being in the way of my getting my own on the first-sight wave," said Nickols with a good-humored laugh, as he pushed me from him. "Take your time. I like ripe fruit-and kisses. Did you say Goodloe had come over to steal apple dumplings and you had caught him in the act? I never was so hungry before and one of Mrs. Dabney's apple dumplings with that hard sugar stuff smothered with cream-well, of course I could wait until breakfast, but I'd be mighty weak. Your night train carries no dining car."

"I feel sure that there is at least a half panful in the pantry; let's go see," I answered with delight at the practical turn the scene had taken, and I led him into the dark house, turned on one or two lights and went with him back into the culinary department of the Poplars.

And as I had predicted so we found the larder supplied. With a huge plate of the pastry encrusted apples, smothered with all the cream from one of Mammy's pans of milk, and a tall bottle from the sideboard, Nickols led the way out of the long windows onto the south balcony over which the moon, now high in the heavens, poured the radiance of a new-toned daylight. I followed him with some glasses and sugar and a bowl of cracked ice that I had found in its usual place in the corner of the refrigerator.

"Pretty good substitute for the affectionate sweet I thought of all the way down from New York," said Nickols with an adorable laugh, as he lifted the first spoonful, dripping with cream, to his mouth. Then with the food almost bestowed he paused and looked out beyond the garden toward the chapel, which loomed up gray and shimmering in the silver light.

"Great heavens!" he ejaculated, and for a long minute the spoon was poised while his eyes fairly devoured the scene spread out before him against the background of Paradise Ridge.

"If you don't like it we can get rid of it," I said, as I poured his drink over the ice tinkling against the side of the glass.

"Not like it!" exclaimed Nickols, as he rose with the spoonful of dumplings dashed back into the plate. "That is the most wonderful and beautiful landscape effect I have ever beheld. That is just what our garden needed. I suppose I would have seen it and put some sort of a pavilion there, but that squat and perfect old church would have been beyond me."

"Oh, I'm glad!" I exclaimed, as he sank back on the step beside me, took the glass from my hand, drank deeply and this time began a determined attack upon the plate in his hand. And then as he ate I told him all about father and his plans for the garden and his own improvement and to what I hoped the work was leading him. But somehow I couldn't bring myself to describe the scene which had that night been enacted in the garden-I couldn't. "Oh, I am so glad you are not furious and will maybe be willing to encourage him, even if it does mean to encourage the Methodist Church and the minister thereof. You are wonderful, Nickols," I finished with a squeeze of his arm that very nearly jostled the cream out of the spoon upon his gray tweed trousers.

"I'd be a wonderful ass not to take advantage of Judge Nickols Powers' brain and money, plus Gregory Goodloe's brain and training and money combined, to get a result that will be worth a hundred thousand dollars to me and all the fame I can conveniently wear. Encourage 'em? Just watch me! Only what the judge thinks will take two years can be done in one season if we get experts down to do it, which we will. Trees two hundred years old can be moved for a few thousand dollars, as well as plants in bloom that would require years to transplant. I know the man to do it: Wilkerson of White Plains. I'll telegraph him in the morning."

"He won't interfere with-with father, will he?" I asked anxiously.

"Not a bit-he'll just make what the judge and Gregory plan for year after next, grow and bloom there in a couple of months. Wilkerson is not a creator, he's just nature keyed up to the nth power. And also I'll give him for a bait the Jeffries estate I was hesitating about making a bid for. All the big fellows are after it. Old man Jeffries has made two barrels of money in the last ten years in oil and he is going to build an estate up on the Hudson that will make the world gasp. I hadn't put in a bid, but this idea of the judge's and Greg's, with the whole village grouped about it, has given me the keynote to win the thing from the whole bunch of American architects. He wants the village built as well as the estate. That American garden idea will bowl him over. He's progressively and rabidly American. The bids don't close until December, so I'll have time to get real photographs and sketches. Me for the reformed judge and the parson!"

"This is the most wonderful thing I ever heard and I want father pushed to the limit with the planning. I don't care where the parson comes in, just so I don't have to join the church to get the garden," I said, as I tinkled the ice in Nickols' empty glass, while he consumed the last bit of cream from the empty plate.

"Oh, I'll join the church if it is needed to push the garden," said Nickols with a laugh, as he lit a cigarette and puffed a smoke ring out toward the gray little chapel. "Most people who join churches do it for some kind of pull, social or business, or a respectability stamp or to be white-washed. I'll put on a frock coat and pass the plate if it will help the parson evolve another phase of gardenism."

"Billy gets home from his poker game at the Last Chance, down in the Settlement, on Sunday morning, just in time to bathe and get into his frock coat to perform that office," I said with a laugh that had a hint of recklessness tinged with contempt.

"I'll see Billy through both ceremonials," said Nickols. "Has Billy come into the fold?"

"He has! So have all the rest," I answered. "I am the only black sheep and they are all backsliding down on me. I am getting, and will get, the blame of it all as a corrupter of public morals."

"Why don't you join and then do as you please with the official stamp of Christianity upon you?" Nickols asked, as he puffed comfortably away in the moonlight.

One of the things that cause me the deepest hurt is to try to get Nickols to look down into my depths and read one, just any one, of the hieroglyphics there. I know each time I open my nature to him he is going to turn aside, and yet I will try. As his arm stole around me I made another one of the attempts that I always know beforehand are doomed to failure.

"There is something in me, a quality of mind that seems to be judicial, which insists that as a cold scheme for existence in this universe nothing compares with that of life followed by eternal redemption through personal effort interpreted by a mediator. The bare Christian tenets have a nobility that it kills me to see belittled by the bored, half-hearted observances of most of its protestants, who in turn are not to be blamed for being half-hearted and bored by the dogmas and restrictions and littleness with which the great bare scheme has been enmeshed and clothed. The Methodist Church positively forbids Billy to play poker or drink, but it just as positively forbids him to see Pavlowa dance or Beerbohm Tree play Falstaff or Forbes Robertson incarnate Hamlet. And look at its wretched machinery-they allow a young man to give his life and expect inspiration from him at six hundred dollars a year with a wife and two dozen children, which he has been encouraged to bring down upon himself, dependent on that same six hundred dollars. The great men who are expected to direct our spiritual destinies don't get as much money as many ordinary grocers and certainly not enough to support their obligations with dignity. What is true of the Methodist Church is true of all the rest, in perhaps a greater degree. So with their smallness and their pettiness and their befogging stupidity I feel that they may be denying thinkers like you and me the use of their scheme and we'll have to find another for ourselves if we want immortality."

"Do we want that immortality?" asked Nickols easily. "This world is a pretty good old place if you don't regard the 'shalt nots,' but isn't it long enough to live the allotted time? What do we want to do it all over again for, that is, provided we do all the pleasant things while we have the chance? I don't want to see any play twice, even a masterpiece. I wouldn't want to live again unless I had been a Christian in this life and felt that I wanted to come back and do a lot of the things I had just heard about and previously hadn't tried."

"Certainly I wouldn't want another life that is as unsatisfied as this," I murmured, more to myself than to Nickols.

"Do the things that satisfy," he urged again, and I could see a deviltry dancing at me out of the corner of his eyes that I resented deeply without exactly knowing why.

"Harriet Henderson can't get Mark Morgan's love or-his children, and Nell Morgan is unattainable for Billy. Though they have all the world's goods and go a pace that pleases them, they are unsatisfied. If they don't get the new deal that immortality promises they lose the whole thing," I answered straight out from the shoulder. "And what about those who die in infancy and-and you and me?"

"If you'll just kiss me and hush preaching to me I'll be entirely satisfied and ready to die as soon as I have lifted that fifty thousand out of old Jeffries with the judge's and the Reverend Gregory's garden and done a few more commissions. Try kissing me and see if you don't feel more cheerful," Nickols answered with a laugh, as he drew me close to him. I sadly shut up the doors of my depths, warded off the kiss-why, I didn't know-and persuaded him to go up to his rooms which I had seen Sallie and Dabney put in order that afternoon.

It was midnight when I parted with Nickols at the head of the old winding stairs in the fragrant darkness, lit only by the silver light of the night from a long window at the front of the hall. He held me close for a half second as he whispered:

"Let me make you happy. I understand."

"I don't understand, and until I do I'd make you miserable, dear," I whispered back as I drew myself out of his reluctant arms and went into my own door.

Then for a long midnight hour I stood at my deep window and looked out over the garden, past the squat steeple silvering beyond the lilac hedge, to Paradise Ridge in the dim distance, and tried to read my own hieroglyphics. I needed help. Nickols had come after me to Goodloets in a spirit of gentle determination and I knew the fight would be to the finish. And why should I fight? Any woman ought to be proud to marry Nickols Morris Powers, especially a woman who had loved him since her heart had been developed to the knowledge of love. Very unostentatiously and with perfect good taste Nickols had let me see that Marie VanClive with her Knickerbocker ancestry and her Manhattan land-grants fortune was very decidedly interested in him in her cultured and perfected young way, and young Mrs. Houston had herself shown me the same thing on one of the week-end flights we had had on her yacht. And beyond all that my own heart told me that Nickols was desirable. His gentleness and his tenderness and his daring and his humor were irresistible to a woman. And his lazy acquiescence in life was peaceful and inviting to my own strenuosity. I felt as if I had always been an eagle breasting the gale with no place to alight, and now Nickols was calling to me from an eyrie on a mountain side to come and rest and be mated and comforted.

"I'm tired of loneliness and I think I'll drift and be happy," I murmured, as I fell asleep with my back to the silver steeple against the dim hills.

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