CHAPTER THREE
Mr. Cyrus Carton Todd, born in the farming district of Pennsylvania, of English and Scotch ancestry, had, as a mere boy, gone to seek his fortune in the West. This was not, of course, an original thing to do. Young men and old, families and whole communities were, at this time, streaming, like banners, out toward the alluring, unknown lands. Cyrus chose a broad, lonely stretch of moor in the very heart of a state sparsely settled, but not too far from the fertile Mississippi basin. Agriculture, rather than stock-raising, had from the first been his design. The small, hoarded patrimony went into fences, a horse, a plough, and a great lethargic sack of seed. Quick to recognize the advantages of new methods and new machinery, he became, before the age of thirty, one of the successful "large farmers" of his adopted state.
He loved, with a passionate, personal love, his broad black fields. He knew, before they ventured one slim, verdant herald to the air, the stirring of immortal essence in his buried grain. He thrilled, sometimes with the stinging of quick tears, when first the green prophecy ran, like an answering cry, from furrow to swart furrow. He moved, at harvest-time, among the hung, encrusted stalks with the deep joy of a creator who sees his work well done. Every process was vital,—the sowing, reaping, storing, and, last of all, the hissing of the great gold torrents as they plunged headlong into caverns of waiting cars. His acreage was wide, but not too wide for his heart. His great working force of men was organized and controlled with the tact and ease of a leader. Mrs. Todd, the daughter of an Illinois farmer, (of late she was successfully forgetting the fact), came into his life when, as a girl of eighteen, she had "visited" a neighbor's home. Todd was then thirty-one. The difference in age seemed great to him, but apparently not to Susan. She arrived in mid-autumn, at the height of a golden yield. Cyrus loved the whole world then, and it was not difficult for the rosy girl to secure for herself a special niche.
They were married in the following spring, when the planting was over, and Cyrus's fields ran with an emerald fire. The farmer turned, perforce, to contemplation of his house. Bare walls and rough pine floors were well enough for him, but better should be found for Susan. She assisted him in selecting the new furnishings, and then, with the self-possession known only to a woman and a hen, entered upon her kingdom.
Her presence, for a long while after, affected Todd as something in the nature of a miracle. Women had borne little part in his life. The dainty touches of ornament which his wife's quick fingers gave the little home, the good, unheard-of things she cooked for him, the demonstrative affection she was ever ready to bestow (for indeed she loved him dearly), kept him in a sort of daze of unbelieving bliss. He felt that he and life were even. Now he began to learn what money, hitherto a neglected factor in his success, had the power to grant.
The plain cottage grew into an attractive, vine-held home. Going to his fields each morning, after a perfect breakfast, he argued aloud to himself, and frequently pinched his own arm to prove the brightness true. Everything prospered. The men liked him, the dogs fawned upon him, the horses whinnied at his voice. And then, just as he told himself he couldn't possibly make room for another joy,—came Gwendolen.
Cyrus, when his eyes had cleared of the golden blur, drew a chair to the bed, put his two elbows on the rim, set his face upon his hands, and deliberately made acquaintance with his daughter. The miracle of his wife's love, the immortality of springing seed, the awe left over from his boyish dreams of heaven, all hid themselves in that small, pink frame, and looked out upon him through its feeble gaze.
He wished to name her "Susan," after his wife, and, as it happened, after his mother also. Mrs. Todd would not consider it. She desired her child to have a "pretty" name, something high-sounding, even sentimental, that would look well in a novel. Her thought whirred like a distracted magnet between three euphonious points,—"Gwendolen," "Guinevere," and "Theodora." At Guinevere Cyrus at once took an obstinate stand. It suggested to him guinea-hens.
"Then 'Theodora,' Cy. What is the matter with 'Theodora'?"
"It sounds like the tin tail to a fancy windmill. I can just see it spin!" declared the anxious father.