The Golden Bird Part 7

After luncheon they all departed and left me to my afternoon's work.

Matthew lingered behind the others and helped me feed the old red ally and Mrs. Ewe and p.e.c.k.e.rwood Pup.

"I was talking to Evan Baldwin at the club after his first lecture the other night and, Ann, I believe I'll be recruited for the plow as well as for the machine-gun. I'm going to buy some land out there back of the Beesleys' and raise sheep on it. He says Harpeth is losing millions a year by not raising sheep. I'm going to live at Riverfield a lot of the time and motor back and forth to business. Truly, Ann, the land bug has bit me and--and it isn't just--just to come up on your blind side. But, dear, now don't you think that it would be nice for me to live over here with you as a perfectly sympathetic agricultural husband?"

"I needed a husband so much more yesterday to help with the pruning of the rose-vines than I do to-day, Matthew," I answered with a laugh. Matthew's proposals of marriage are so regular and so alike that I have to avoid monotony in the wit of my answers.

"I'm never in time to do a single thing on this place, and I don't see how everything gets done for you without my help. Who helps you?"

"Everybody," I answered. I had never had the courage to break Adam to Matthew in the long weeks I had been seeing them both every day, and of course Pan had never come out of the woods when Matthew or any of the rest were there. "I'll tell you what you can do for me," I said, with a sudden inspiration about getting rid of him, for the red-headed p.e.c.k.e.rwood had promised to come and put some kind of hoodoo earth around the peonies and irises and pinks in my garden, also to bud some kind of a new rose on one of the old blush ones, and I wanted the place quiet so he would venture out of his lair. "You can go on to town and look after Polly carefully. She is going in with Bess for the first time since their infatuation, and I want her eyes to open gradually on the world out over Paradise Ridge."

"Ann, ought they ever to open?" asked Matthew, suddenly, with the color coming up to the roots of his hair and burning in his ears like it still does in Bud Corn-ta.s.sel's when he comes over to see or help me or to bring me something from Aunt Mary, his mother. "Bess is one of the best of friends I've got in the world, but I just--just couldn't see Corn-ta.s.sel dancing in some man's arms in the mere hint of an evening gown that Bess occupied while fox-trotting with Evan Baldwin at the club the other night."

"Who was the belle of the ball, Matt?" I asked him, with a flame in my cheeks, for the pink and lavender chiffon gown Bess had worn was one of the Voudaine creations that I had brought from Paris and sold her after the crash.

"Oh, Bess always is when you are not there and, Ann, don't for a moment think that I--I--" Poor Matthew was stuttering while I rubbed the tip of my nose against his sleeve in the way of a caress, as I had a feed-bucket in one hand and a water-pan in the other.

"Do go and shop with Polly and Bess as a force for protection. I must have a quiet afternoon to commune with my garden," I commanded.

"Sometimes you make me so mad, Ann Craddock, that--that--" Matthew was stuttering when Uncle Cradd appeared at the back door to chat with him, and I made my escape through the barn and out into the woods. I had thought that I saw a glint of p.e.c.k.e.rwood red pa.s.s through the pasture that way, and I was determined that Pan shouldn't give me and the garden the slip as he always did when he saw anybody around.

As I ran rapidly through the old pasture, which was overgrown with buckbushes and sa.s.safras sprouts, which were turning into great pink and green fern clumps in the warm April suns.h.i.+ne, I gave the two or three Saint-Saens Delilah notes which had been robbed of any of their wicked Delilah flavor for me by having heard Mr. G. Bird sing them so beautifully on the stage of the Metropolitan in that first dream night in Elmnest. But I called and then called in vain until at last I came out to the huge old rock that juts out from the edge of the rugged little knoll at the far end of the pasture. Here I paused and looked down on Elmnest in the afternoon suns.h.i.+ne with what seemed to be suddenly newly opened eyes. I had been in and out of Elmnest to such an extent for the last six weeks that I hadn't had a chance to get off and look at it from an outsider's standpoint, and now suddenly I was taking that view of it. The old rose and green brick house, covered in by its wide, gray s.h.i.+ngle roof, the gables and windows of which were beginning to be wreathed in feathery and pink young vines, which were given darker notes here and there in their ma.s.ses by the st.u.r.dy green of the honey-suckles, hovered down on a small plateau rear-guarded by the barn and sheds, flanked by the garden and the gnarled old orchard, and from its front door the long avenue of elms led far down to the group of Riverfield houses that huddled at the other end. All villages in the State of Harpeth have been so built around the old "great houses" of the colonial landowners, and between their generations has been developed a communistic life that I somehow feel is to bridge from the pioneer life of this country to the great new life of the greater commune that is coming to us. Down there in Riverfield I knew that there was sin and sorrow and birth and death, but there was no starvation, and for every tragedy there was a neighbor to reach out a helping hand, and for every joy there were hearty and friendly rejoicings.

"Oh, and I'm one of them--I belong," I said to myself as I noted each cottage into which I went and came at will, as friend and beloved neighbor.

Even at that distance I could see a small figure, which I knew to be Luella Spain, running up the long avenue, and in its hand I detected something that, I was sure, was a covered plate or dish. "And I'm making Elmnest fulfil its destiny into the future--into the future that the great Evan Baldwin is preaching about in town, instead of practicing out in the fields. I wonder if he really knows a single thing about farming."

"He does," came an answer from right at my shoulder in Pan's flutiest voice, and I turned to find him standing just behind me on the very edge of the old tilting rock.

"How do you know?" I demanded of him as I took the clean white cloth tied up at four corners, gypsy-fas.h.i.+on, which he offered me and which, I could see, was fairly bursting with green leaves of a kind I had never seen before.

"I was with him at the Metropolitan the night I saw Ann Craddock in Gale Beacon's box, you know,--the night that Mr. G. Bird sang 'Delilah,' and also I've slept on the bare ground with him in his woods in Michigan and on his red clay in Georgia."

"Well, I hate him all the same for the insult of his offer to buy Elmnest, though I doubt if he has any family pride or any family either, so, of course, he wouldn't understand that it _is_ an insult to offer to buy one's colonial home with holes in the door to shoot Indians through," I answered with the temper that always came at the mention of the name of a man I had chosen to consider a foe without any consent on his part at all.

"You'd think he was born and raised in a hollow log if you should ever interview him, and he hasn't any family, but from some of the motions he is making, I think he intends to have," answered Pan, with one of his most fluty jeers, and he shook his head until the crests ruffled still lower over the tips of his ears.

"Are you--you one of his agents--that is, _spies_, and was it you that insulted me by wanting to buy Elmnest just because it was poor and old?" I demanded, with the color in my cheeks.

"I am not his spy or his agent, and do you want to come down to the spring-house and cook these wild-mustard shoots for our dinner, or shall I go at our old garden with the prospect of an empty stomach at sunset?"

"Why won't you come in to dinner with me?" I asked, with a mollified laugh, though I knew I was bringing down upon myself about my hundredth refusal of proffered hospitality.

"Two reasons--first, because I won't eat with my neighbors at the 'great house' when I can't eat with them in the cottage, and I just can't eat the grease that a lot of the poorer villagers deluge their food with. I'm Pan, and I live in the woods on roots and herbs. Second--because about six weeks ago I found a farm woman who would come out at my wooing to cook and eat the herbs and roots with me and I could have her to myself all alone. Now, will you come on down to the spring?" And without waiting for my reply, Adam started down the hill, crosswise from the path by which I had ascended, padding ahead in his weird leather sandals and breaking a path for me through the undergrowth as I followed close at his shoulder, an order of rough travel to which I had become accustomed in the weeks that had pa.s.sed and that now seemed to me--well, I might say racial.

In the riot of an April growing day, in which we could hear life fairly teem and buzz at our feet, on right, and left, and overhead, Adam and I worked shoulder to shoulder in the old garden of Elmnest. Every now and then I ran down to the spring to put a green f.a.got under the pot of herbs, which needed to simmer for hours to be as delicious as was possible for them. From the library came a rattle and bang of literary musketry from the blessed parental twins, who were for the time being with Julius Caesar in "all Gaul," and oblivious to anything in the twentieth century, even a spring-intoxicated niece and daughter down in her grandmother's garden with a Pan from the woods; occasionally Rufus rattled a pot or a pan; but save for these few echoes of civilization, Adam and I delved and spaded and clipped and pruned and planted in the old garden just as if it had been the plot of ground without the walls of Eden in which our first parents were forced to get busy.

"Great work, Farmwoman," said Adam as we sat down on the side steps to eat, bite-about, the huge red apple he had taken from the bundle of emigrant appearance which he always carried over his shoulder on the end of a long hickory stick and which I had by investigation at different times found to contain everything from clean linen to Sanskrit poetry for father. To-day I found the ma.n.u.script score of a new opera by no less a person than Hurter himself, which he insisted on having me hum through with him while we ate the apple.

"I told Hurter I thought that fourth movement wouldn't do, and now I know it after hearing you try it through an apple," said Pan as he rose from beside me, tied the ma.n.u.script up in the bandana bundle, and picked up his long pruning-knife. "Now, Woman, we'll put a curb on the rambling of every last rambler in this garden and then we can lay out the rows for Bud to plant with the snap beans to-morrow." Adam, from the first day he had met me, had addressed me simply with my generic cla.s.s name, and I had found it a good one to which to make answer. Also Adam had shown me the profit and beauty of planting all needful vegetables mixed up with the flowers in the rich and loamy old garden, and had adjusted a cropping arrangement between the Corn-ta.s.sel Bud and me that was to be profitable to us both, Bud only doing in odd hours the work I couldn't do, and getting a share of the profits.

"Don't work me to death to-day," I pleaded, and told him about the rescue of the babies Bird with so much dramatic force that his laughter rang out with such volume that old Rufus came to the kitchen window to look out and shake his head, and I knew he was muttering about "p.e.c.k.e.rwoods," "devils,"

and the sixth day of the week. "Will the chicks live all right, do you think?" I asked anxiously.

"They're safe if they never got cold to the touch and you didn't joggle 'em too much. Do either you or Miss Rutherford happen to er--er--kick in your sleep?"

"We do not!" I answered with dignity, as I snipped away a dead branch of ivy from across the path.

"I just thought Miss Rutherford might from--"

"You don't know Bess; she's so executive that--"

"That she wouldn't kick eggs for anything," finished Pan, mockingly. "She does pretty well in the Russian ballet, doesn't she?"

"Oh, I wish you could just see her in the 'Cloud Wisp'!" I exclaimed, with the greatest pride, for Bess Rutherford has nothing to envy Pavlova about.

"I have--er--have a great desire to so behold her at some future time,"

answered Pan, with one of his eery laughs, and I could almost see hoofs through the raw hide of his shoes. I would have ruffled the red crests off of the tips of his ears to see if they really were pointed if he had not stood just out of reach of my hand, where it would have been impossible to catch him if I tried.

"You won't eat with me in civilization, you won't meet any of my friends, and I don't believe you ever want to please me," I said as I turned away from his provocation and began again with the scissors.

"I don't like world girls," he said with the fluty coo in his voice that always calms the Ladies Leghorn when they are ruffled. "I only love farm women. The moon is beginning to get a rise out of the setting sun, and let's go away from these haunts of men to our own woods home. Come along!"

As he spoke Pan pocketed his long knife, picked up his stick and bundle, and began to pad away through the trees down towards the spring, with me at his shoulder, and for the first time he held my hand in his as I followed in my usual squaw style.

In all the long dreary weeks that followed I was glad that I had had that dinner at sunset and moonrise with him down in the cove at the spring that was away from all the world. All during the days that never seemed to end, as I went upon my round of duties, I put the ache of the memories of it from me, but in the night I took the agony into my heart and cherished it.

"And it's the Romney hand ye have with the herb-pot, Woman dear," said Adam as he squatted down beside our simmering pot and stirred it with the clean hickory stick I had barked for that purpose when, very shortly after high noon, I had put the greens, with the two wild onion sprigs and the handful of inevitable black-walnut kernels, into the iron pot set on the two rocks with their smoldering green fire between. "You know you'd rather be eating this dinner of sprouts and black bread with your poor Adam than--than dancing that 'Cloud Drift' in town with Matthew Berry--or Baldwin the enemy."

"Yes," I answered, as I knelt beside him and thrust in another slim stick and tasted the juice of the pot off the end. "But it would be hard to make Matthew believe it. I forgot to tell you that Matt is really going in for farming, thanks to the evil influence of your friend Evan Baldwin, who wouldn't know a farm if he met one on the road, a real farm, I mean. Poor Matt little knows the life of toil he is plotting for himself."

"Is he coming to live at Elmnest?" asked Adam, in a voice of entire unconcern, as he took the black loaf from his gypsy pack and began to cut it up into hunks and lay it on the clean rock beside the pot.

"He is not," I answered with an indignation that I could see no reason for.

"Sooner or later, Woman, you'll have to take a mate," was the primitive statement that confronted me as I lifted the pot with the skirt of my blouse and poured the greens into two brown crockery bowls that Adam kept secreted with the pot on a ledge of the old spring-house.

"Well, a husky young farmer is the only kind of a man who need apply. I mean a born rustic. I couldn't risk an amateur with the farm after all you've taught me," I answered as we seated ourselves on the warm earth side by side and began to dip the hunks of black bread into our bowls and lift the delicious wilted leaves to our mouths with it, a mode of consumption it had taken Pan several attempts to teach me. Pan never talks when he eats, and he seems to browse food in a way that each time tempts me more and more to reach out my hand and lift one of the red crests to see about the points of his ears.

"Do you want to hear my invocation to my ultimate woman?" he asked as he set his bowl down after polis.h.i.+ng it out with his last chunk of bread some minutes after I had so finished up mine.

"Is it more imperative than the one you give me under my window before I have had less than a good half-night's sleep every morning?" I asked as I crushed a blade of meadow fern in my hands and inhaled its queer tang.

"I await my beloved in Grain fields.

Come, woman!

In thy eyes is truth.

Thy body must give food with Sweat of labor, and thy lips Hold drink for love thirst.

I am thy child.

I am thy mate.

Come!"