The first of May, mother came home from a visit to Aunt Grace in Louisville with the most peculiar little man led by a halter for me. He has a title, genuine brand. Elizabeth Gentry is going to marry him now, and she’ll write you all about it. Aunt Grace had selected him in Rome at Easter, and told him the round numbers of the fortune Grandmother Wickliffe left me. She had instructed mother minutely as to my joyous and appreciative course of action toward him, and you know how my maternal parent is about Aunt Grace. I want to record it of father that he received the duke with a recoil, and went to New Orleans the next morning for an indefinite stay.
Of course the little man is a human being, but I consider the United States as fortunate that it is not now in complications with Italy over the murder of one of her scions by an enraged Tennessee woman. Two days after his arrival, and only several hours after the first time he tried to possess his funny little paws of my very garden-burned hand, I packed a few of my belongings in three trunks and a steamer-bag and departed to find Dudley. He is such a perfectly satisfactory brother that, since my earliest youth, I have always felt it best to flee to him when I feel a tantrum coming on. They don’t disturb the even tenor of his life in the least.
“Oh, Nell!” was all mother had the courage to say, when so far away from Aunt Grace, at the announcement of my intention.
“My brother is ill up in the Harpeth Hills, and I must go to him,” was all I said to the duke.
That was the feminine version of a line in Dudley’s last letter, saying he had caught a heavy cold sleeping out without his blanket while with one of his gangs marking lumber on Old Harpeth. But I did take his grace to call on Elizabeth before I departed. I will say that much for myself.
With it all I had left home in such a whirl of hurry and rage that I hadn’t had time really to realize myself until I sat in my seat and watched the train begin to wind around and around the foot-hills that lead up from the valley. And I must say that realization of myself was not much in the way of amusement. Why should I have left mother in a huff just because she is Aunt Grace’s obedient sister? Isn’t she also my browbeaten parent? And why rudely abandon the little nobleman, who was my guest, for trying to kiss my hand, which has been used for any old purpose, from digging worms for Dudley to fish with to supplying a surface to be pressed by Bobby Gentry’s adolescent bristles, even unto the mustache he at present flourishes? And others, too! No, I couldn’t honestly approve of myself, as hard as I tried.
And, to make it worse, the very day itself was a balmy, pliant, feminine thing, with not a bluster in its disposition to harmonize with mine. There was a soft bridal veil of spring mist all over the Harpeth Valley, behind which the orchards were blushing pink and white, while by noon, as we began to go up the hills, I caught a whiff of that indescribable, lilting honeysuckle note that comes in the June rhapsody in the Alleghanies. You remember it, don’t you, deary, even if you do live in an enchanted Breton garden with a husband who sings? I’m going to remember it in heaven.
No, I wasn’t very well pleased with myself, and I got more and more serious on the subject the higher the train crawled up toward the crown of Old Harpeth. If a naturally conscientious person has such a bad disposition that she finds it impossible to accept any form of criticism from other people, then she is ethically obliged to chastise her own self, which is the refinement of psychical cruelty.
By three o’clock the only way I could drag myself out of the depths was by remembering how Aunt Grace’s nostrils distend while she insinuates to mother in my presence what an unsatisfactory daughter I am. I can always get up a rage with that mental picture. That is, I could; now it is different, because—but that is what I am going to tell you about.
Of course I knew that Dudley’s letters all went to Crow Point, and the ticket-man had told me that we got there at five-fifty. That hour was not dark—quite, I knew, and I decided that I would have plenty of time to drive across the ridge to his camp at Pigeon Creek.