"I'm going to tell you some day before long," I whispered as I kissed the corner of her lips. "Now do take the twin fathers for a little spin up the road and make them walk back from the gate. They have been suffering with the Trojan warriors all day, and I know they must have exercise. Uncle Cradd walks down for the mail each day, but father remains stationary. Your method with them is perfect. Go take them while I supper and bed down the farm."
"I know now the picture is by Tintoretto, and it's some place in Rome," Bess called back over her shoulder as she drove her car slowly around to the front door to begin her conquest and deportation of my precious ancients.
"Not painted by Tintoretto, but by the pagan Pan," I said to myself as I turned into the barn door.
CHAPTER IX
When I came out with a bucket of the new wheat in my hand, I heard Bess and her car departing, with Uncle Cradd's sonorous speech mingling with the puff of the engine.
"We are all alone, Mr. G. Bird, and we love it, because then we can talk comfortably about our Mr. Adam," I said to the Golden Bird as he followed me around the side of the barn where a door had been cut by Pan himself to make an entry into my improvised chicken-house.
Suddenly I was answered by a very interesting chuckling and clucking, and I turned to see what had disengaged the attention of Mr. G. Bird from me and my feed-bucket. The sight that met my eyes lifted the shadow that had lain between the Golden Bird and me since the morning I had taken him in to see his newly arrived progeny and had not been able to make him notice their existence. Stretching out behind me was a trail of wheat that had dripped from a hole in the side of the bucket, and along the sides of it the paternal Bird was marshaling his reliable foster-mother, Mrs. Red Ally's and all his own fluffy white progeny. With exceeding generosity he was not eating a grain himself, but scratching and chortling encouragingly.
"I knew you were not like other chicken men, Mr. G. Bird, 'male indifferent to hatches,' as the book said," I exclaimed as he caught up with me and began to peck the grains I offered from my hand. "You are just like Owen and Matthew and Mr. Tillett and—and—" but I didn't continue the conversation because the chant began rending my heartstrings again. "Oh, Mr. G. Bird, it is an awful thing for a woman to have an apple orchard and lilac bushes in bloom when she is alone," I sighed instead, as I went on to my round of feeding, very hungry myself for—a pot of herbs. Later I, too, was fed.
Long after the twin fathers had had supper and were settled safely by their candles, which were beacons that led them back into past ages, I sat by myself on the front doorstep in the perfumed darkness that was only faintly lit by stars that seemed so near the earth that they were like flowers of light blossoming on the twigs of the roof elms. In a lovely dream I had just gone into the arms of Pan when I heard out beyond the orchard a soft moo of a cow, and with it came a weak little calf echo.