The Golden Bird Part 12

"In Baldwin emerges the new American," said Matthew, with a light in his face I had never seen before, as we all rose to go.

"Do you blame every woman in the world for being mad about him when you saw that look in his eyes when he held out his hands and chanted that food plea to us? I'm glad he doesn't beckon to me, or I am afraid Owen Murray and Madam Felicia would be disappointed about that June decision of mine,"

said Bess as she and Owen helped Bud pack the Tilletts and me into the ark for our return trip.

"Will there be word for me in the morning?" the old wheels rattled all the way out the Riverfield ribbon, and I thought an old owl hooted the question at me from a dead tree beside the road, while I felt also that a mocking-bird sang it from a thicket of dogwood in ghostly bloom opposite.

"Will there be word in the morning?"

The next morning I awoke with the same question making a new motive in the chant on my heartstrings.

"Uncle Cradd will bring his letter when he comes back from the post-office, and I know he'll send a message to you, Mr. G. Bird," I said happily, as I watered and fed and caressed and joyed in the entire barn family. "I hate him for being what he is and treating me this way, but I love him still more," I confided to Mrs. Ewe as I gave her an extra handful of wheat out of the blouse-pocket which I kept filled for Mr. G. Bird from pure partiality.

Uncle Cradd did not bring a letter from the post-office for me. The blow in the apple orchard and the purple plumes on the lilac bushes looked less brilliant in hue, but the tune on my heartstrings kept up a note of pure bravado. I weeded the garden all afternoon, but stopped early, fed early, and went up-stairs to my room before the last sunset glow had faded off the dormer windows. Opening my old mahogany chest, I took out a bundle I had made up the day after the advent of Mother Cow and the calf, spread it out on the bed, and looked it over.

In it was an incredible amount of lingerie, made of crepe de chine and lace, folded tightly and tied with a ribbon into a package not over a foot square. A comb and a brush of old ivory, which had set in its back a small mirror held in by a silver band, which father had purchased in Florence for me under a museum guaranty as a genuine Cellini work of art, were wrapped in a silk case, and a toothbrush and soap had occupied their respective oil-silk cases along with a tube of tooth paste and one of cold cream. Two pairs of soft, but strong, tan cotton stockings were tucked underneath the ribbon confining the lingerie, and a small prayer-book with both mine and my mother's name in it completed the--I hadn't exactly liked to call it a trousseau. It was all tied up in one of Adam's Romney handkerchiefs, which he had washed out one day in the spring branch and left hanging on a hickory sapling to dry, and which I had appropriated because I loved its riot of faded colors.

"It is just about the size of his," I had said to myself as I had tied up its corners that day after my love adventure in the orchard under the chaperonage of Mother Cow, and I had laughed as I imagined Pan's face when he discovered that I had been so entirely unfemininely subservient to his command about light traveling. Suddenly I swept the bundle together and back in the chest, while a note of genuine fear swept into the song in my heart.

"He'll write from New Orleans--he doesn't sail until to-morrow," I whispered as I quieted the discord and went down to prayers.

"I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul:"

intoned Uncle Cradd, and somehow the tumult in my heart was stilled for the night, and I could as usual take Pan into my prayer arms and ask G.o.d to keep him safe. I wonder how many women would really pray if there weren't men in the world to furnish them the theme!

Also I wonder how it is possible for me to write about that following first week of May when I had to feel the chant die out of my heart and still live and help a lot of other live creatures, both people and animals, to go on breathing also.

Each day Uncle Cradd failed to bring me a letter from the post-office, and after a week I ceased to look for one. I knew that Evan Adam Baldwin was on the high seas and that if he had not written before he sailed he never intended to write. My common sense kindly and plainly spoke this truth to my aching heart: Pan had been simply having a word adventure with me in character.

CHAPTER XI

The beginning of the twentieth century has witnessed many startling inventions, reforms, evolutions, and revolutions, but mankind generally is not aware that the most remarkable result of many combined new forces is a woman whose intellect can go on functioning at the same time that her heart is aching with either requited or unrequited love. Just ten days after I had been jilted, instead of lying in a darkened room in hysterics, I went into a light corner of the barn, sat down on an upturned seed-bucket, took my farm-book on my knee, wet my pencil between my lips, and began to figure up the account between Evan Adam Baldwin and myself. First, I sat still for a long second and tried to set a price on myself the hour before I had first encountered him out on the Riverfield ribbon on the day I had made my entry into rural life. And think as hard as I could I couldn't think up a single thing I had done worth while to my race; so I had to write a great cipher against myself. Then in another column I set down the word "a.s.sets,"

and after it I wrote, "The Golden Bird and family, eight hundred dollars."

Then I thought intently back into the past and into the haircloth trunk and wrote, "Clothes, one hundred and fifty dollars."

Then I sat for another long time and looked out the door to the Paradise Ridge across the Harpeth Valley, after which I smoothed the page, dated it, and again began to take stock of myself and the business. I listed the original investment of Mr. G. Bird and the ladies Leghorn, one of which was at that moment picking wheat from my pocket, on through their fifty progeny, for which I had established a price of twenty dollars per head, through the two lambkins I had bought from Rufus for ten dollars, Mother Cow and the calf, the hundred and fifty pearls in the incubators, half of which I had sold to Owen and Bess and ten of which I had sold to a real chicken dealer who knew Mr. G. Bird's pedigree and had come all the way from Georgia to buy them. The whole inventory, including the wheat I had paid Matthew for and the improvements I had made on the barn, or rather Adam had made, also including the prospects in the garden, amounted to eighteen hundred dollars. Then I thought still longer and finally after my own name wrote one hundred and fifty dollars' worth of "education." The total was nineteen hundred and fifty dollars, thus making a profit on my investments of about eight hundred dollars. After this calculation I sat and chewed the pencil a long time, then turned a fresh page, wrote, "Evan Adam Baldwin," on the one side, "Profit" in the middle, and a large cipher opposite.

Then I closed the book forever with such decision that the Leghorn lady and Mrs. Ewe, who was helping her explore me, both jumped, and I rose to my feet.

"I got eight hundred and fifty dollars out of the deal, and Evan Adam Baldwin only got a few mediocre and amateur kisses, which he shared with me, for all his hard labor in plowing and tilling and restoring Elmnest and me to the point of being of value in the scheme of things. I got the best of that deal and why should I sulk?" I said to myself in a firm and even tone of voice. I didn't.

If I had worked like a couple of women when speeded up by a weird chant on my heartstrings, which I now recognized was just a part of the system used in my reorganization, I worked like five when my heart became perfectly dead and silent. I got out of my bed the very minute that the first gleam of consciousness came into my mind, before I could have a second to think about anything unprofitable, plunged into the old bra.s.s-bound cedar tub of cold water, which I had carried up from the spring in a bucket that matched it the night before, got into my corduroys and smock, and was out in the barn and at work before it would seem possible for a woman to more than open her eyes of understanding upon the world. All day long I weeded and hoed and harvested and fed and cleaned and marketed that farm until I fell dead between the posts of the old bed at night.

I didn't pray. I knew G.o.d would understand.

And through it all there was Matthew! The first week or two he remonstrated with me; then when he saw that I was possessed by the demon of work he just rolled up his sleeves, collected Polly and Bud, and helped. He promoted his best clerk in the office to a junior partners.h.i.+p, refused several important cases, bought the hundred-acre forest which joins Elmnest, which Aunt Mary had had in her family for generations, and which had been considered as waste land after the cedars had been cut off, and began to restore it. He never bothered me once in a sentimental way, and when he brought the plans of his house over on the knoll opposite Elmnest, Polly helped me enthuse and criticize them, and he went away seemingly content. His and Polly's Rhode Island Reds were rivaling my Leghorns in productiveness, and all of Riverfield seemed to have gone chicken mad. Mr. Spain traded a prize hog for a c.o.c.k, and twelve black Minorca hens, and Mr. Buford brought the bride two settings of gray "Rocks" to start a college education for the bundle.

"Do you know what the whole kit and biling is so busy about?" said Aunt Mary as she surveyed with pride a new hen-house that Bud had just finished, in which I saw the trap nests over which she had disputed with the commissioner of agriculture. "They were just woke up by that speech of Adam's, and they are getting ready to show him what Riverfield can do when he gets back. When did you say you expect him, honeybunch?"

"I don't," I answered quietly.

"Why, I thought Silas said you did," she answered absent-mindedly. "Now, you can have Bud, but not for keeps, because as I borned him I think I am ent.i.tled to work him." We all laughed as Bud and I betook ourselves and a large farm-basket full of late cabbage plants across to Elmnest.

"Miss Ann, please ma'am, make mother let me go to town to-night with Mr.

Matthew and stay with Miss Bess. All her linen chest has come, and I want to see it," Polly Corn-ta.s.sel waylaid us and pleaded. I went back and laid the case before her mother.

"Well, I suppose it won't hurt her if all this marriage and giving in marriage don't get into her head. I aim to keep and work her at least two years longer to pay my trouble with her teething back," agreed Aunt Mary.

"When did you say the wedding was going to be?"

"June tenth," I answered.

"I heard that Mr. Owen Murray talking to Mr. Spain about his wooded piece of land over by the big spring the other night. Looks like you are a pot of honey, sure enough, child, that draws all your friends to settle around you."

"No, it's the back-to-the-land vogue, and this is the most beautiful part of the Harpeth Valley," I answered as I again began to depart with Bud and the cabbage plants.

"Adam told me one night that he was going to prove that the Garden of Eden was located right here. It was when your locusts were in full bloom and I asked him if he had run down Eve anywhere. Are you sure you don't know when he'll come back to see us all?" Aunt Mary's blue eyes danced with merriment.

"No," I answered, and went hastily back to Bud and left her muttering to herself, "Well, Silas _did_ say--"

All afternoon I stolidly planted the gray-green young cabbage sprouts behind Bud's hoe and refused even to think about Bess's wedding-chest. But at sunset I saw I must go into town to her dinner for the announcement of her wedding, and wear one of my dresses that I had sold and then borrowed back from her--or have a serious crisis in our friends.h.i.+p. I hadn't strength for that, and I had hoped that the fun of it all would make noise enough to wake some kind of echo in my very silent interior, but it didn't, though there was a positive uproar when Owen brought the whole Bird collateral family, who now have wings and tails and pin feathers, into the dining-room and put them in the rose bed in the middle of the table so as to hear his oratorical effort as expectant bridegroom.

"Why is it, Matt, that you have heart enough to drive me like mad out here in the dark and not make me say a word?" I asked him as he brought me home in the after-midnight hush.

"You've trained my heart into silence, Ann," he answered gently.

"No!" I exclaimed, for I couldn't bear the thought of Matthew's big heart being silent too. Just then Polly, who had gone to sleep on the back seat, fell off and had to be rescued. We put her out at home in a wilted condition from pure good times, and then Matthew took me on up to Elmnest.

An old moon was making the world look as if mostly composed of black shadows, and Matthew walked at my side out to the barn to see if all was quiet and well.

"Why, what's the matter?" I exclaimed as I ran to the side of the shed in which Mrs. Ewe and the lambs resided. "Strike your cigar-lighter quick, Matt."

As Matthew shed a tiny light from a silver tube upon the situation, I sank to my knees with a cry. There upon the gra.s.s lay one of my lambkins, and red blood was oozing from its woolly white throat. As I lifted it on my arm, its little body gave a shudder and then lay so still that I knew it was dead. Mother Ewe stood near in the shadow and gave a plaintive bleat as she came to my side.

"Oh," I sobbed as I looked up at Matthew, "it's dead. What did it?"

"A dog," answered Matthew, as he knelt beside me and laid the tiny dead lamb back on the ground.

"Not p.e.c.k.e.rwood Pup!" I exclaimed.

"No, she's too young; some stray," answered Matthew as he look savagely around into the shadows.

"It's the littlest one, and she licked my hand the last thing before I left. I can't bear it all, Matthew--this is too much for me," I said, and I sobbed into my hands as I sank down into a heap against the side of the bereaved sheep mother, who was still uttering her plaintive moans of question.

I say now and I shall always maintain that the most wonderful tenderness in the world is that with which a man who had known a woman all his life, who has grown with her growth, has shared her laughter and her tears, and knows her to her last feminine foible or strength, takes her into his arms.

Matthew crouched down upon the gra.s.s beside me and gathered me against his breast, away from the dreadful monster-inhabited shadows, and made me feel that a new day could dawn upon the world. I think from the way I huddled to his strength that he knew that I had given up the fight and that his hour was at hand.