"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.