For about ten minutes Adam stood there before those farmer folk and, with his fluty voice and the fire glow in his eyes, led them up upon a high mountain of imagination and showed them the distant land into which he could lead them, which, when they arrived, they would find to be their own.
The baby on my lap stirred, and I lifted him against my throbbing breast as I listened to this gospel of a new earth, which might be made into the outposts of a new Heaven, in which man would nourish his weaker brother into a strength equal to his own, so that no man or nation would have to fight for existence or a place in the sun. Then while we all sat breathless from his magic, Pan vanished and left us to be sent home rejoicing by the governor.
Sent home rejoicing? Suddenly I realized that when Evan Adam Baldwin had gone, my Pan had also vanished without a word to me. What did it mean? His eyes hadn't found me sitting apart from my delegation with another woman's baby in my arms. Would there be a word for me in the morning?
"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 crêpe 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.