And small Mikey was indeed a bonny kiddie attired in the very stylish
trousers and blouse of small James and shining with Dabney's valeting.
His nicely plastered red mop to some extent mitigated the effect of the
bare and scratched feet and his rollicking blue eyes over a nose as
tip-tilted as Charlotte's own bespoke his delight.
"Anyway, me mother made the togs fer Jim," he asserted with great
independence, as he rammed his hands into the diminutive pockets in the
trousers.
"Yes, she did, and Auntie Harriet paid her for a present to Jimmy. She
sews for us and not for Mikey and her other children, because her
husband drinks up his money and our husband don't. Come on, let's go
help Minister!" was the shot that Charlotte fired, as she departed down
the garden path with her cohorts.
"What about that for democracy?" demanded Nickols, as he and father and
I all laughed together.
That night at a dinner party Nell was giving I sat next to the Harpeth
Jaguar and talked to him for the first time in many weeks. I had been
avoiding him and I didn't mind admitting it to myself. There was
something disturbing and puzzling in his serene eyes and free, strong,
beautiful body that gave me a queer haunting pain back of my breast.
Into my scheme of doing those things in life that give pleasure and not
doing those things that give pain he somehow would not fit. He had
become as much a part of the social fabric of Goodloets as was I, and
he came to our dinner parties, motored with us in his long, gray car and
was as happy with us seemingly as he was with that same gray car full of
small fry from the Settlement or going about the business of the chapel.
The car had always reminded me of his evening clothes, which were
straight and simple in line with the black silk vest cut up around the
collar buttoned in the back, but which were so fine in texture and
perfect in cut and fit that they seemed to be some kind of super clothes
that ought to be called by a name of their own, just as the people in
the Settlement had decided to call the car the "Chariot" as soon as they
had stopped resenting a parson's having it, from finding out how easy
were its cushions and how swift its ministrations in time of need.
"Parson's Chariot, quick!" had moaned poor old Mrs. Kelly, when she had
slipped on Mrs. Burns' wet doorstep and dislocated her hip. Little Katie
Moore had been driven home as swiftly as if on wings after old Dr.
Harding had been overtaken, ten miles out on Providence Road, and had
used the back seat for an operating table while he put her small
splintered ankle in place between splints improvised by a long knife
from the car's kit.