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THE GOLDEN BIRD
BY
MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS
Author of "The Melting of Molly," "Phyllis," "Sue Jane," "The Tinder Box,"
etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY EDWARD L. CHASE
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1918
Copyright, 1918, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright, 1918, by
BUTTERICK PUBLISHING COMPANY
_Published, September, 1918_
[Transcriber's note: Minor typos corrected.]
[Illustration: "Oh, how beautiful!" exclaimed Polly, all restraint leaving
her young face and body as she fell on her knees before the sultan]
TO
IDA CLYDE CLARKE
WHOSE COURAGE INSPIRES ME
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"Oh, how beautiful!" exclaimed Polly, all restraint leaving her young face
and body as she fell on her knees before the sultan
A poor old sheep was lying flat with pathetic inertia while Adam stood over
her with something in his arms
I put his babykins in a big feed-basket and the lamb twins came and
welcomed him
And Bud was beautiful in the "custom-made" fifteen-dollar gray cheviot with
his violet eyes and yellow shock, in spite of his red ears
THE GOLDEN BIRD
CHAPTER I
The primary need of a woman's nature is always supposed to be love, but
very suddenly I discovered that in my case it was money, a lot of it and
quick. That is, I thought I needed a lot and in a very great hurry; but if
I had known what I know now, I might have been contented feeding upon the
bread of some kind of charity, for instance, like being married to Matthew
Berry the very next day after I discovered my poverty. But at that period
of my life I was a very ignorant girl, and in the most noble spirit of a
desperate adventure I embarked upon the quest of the Golden Bird, which in
one short year has landed me--I am now the richest woman in the world.
"But, Ann Craddock, you know nothing at all about a chicken in any more
natural state than in a croquette," stormed Matthew at me as he savagely
speared one of those inoffensive articles of banquet diet with a sharp
silver fork while he squared himself with equal determination between me
and any possible partner for the delicious one-step that the band in the
ball-room was beginning to send out in inviting waves of sound to round the
dancers in from loitering over their midnight food.
"The little I do _not_ know about the chicken business, after one week
spent in pursuit of that knowledge through every weird magazine and state
agricultural bulletin in the public library, even you could learn, Matthew
Berry, with your lack of sympathy with the great American wealth producer,
the humble female chicken known in farmer patois as a hen. Did you know
that it only costs about two dollars and thirteen cents to feed a hen a
whole year and that she will produce twenty-seven dollars and a half for
her owner, the darling thing? I know I'll just love her when I get to know
her--them better, as I will in only about eighteen hours now."
"Ann, you are mad--mad!" foamed Matthew, as he set down his plate of
perfectly good and untasted food, and buried his head in his hands until
his mop of black hair looked like a big blot of midnight.
"I'm not mad, Matthew, just dead poor, an heiress out of a job and with the
necessity of earning her bread by the sweat of her brow instead of
consuming cake by the labor of other people. Uncle Cradd is coming in again
with a two-horse wagon, and the carriage to move us out to Elmnest
to-morrow morning. Judge Rutherford will attend to selling all the property
and settle with father's creditors. Another wagon is coming for father's
library, and in two days he won't know that Uncle Cradd and I have moved
him, if I can just get him started on a bat with Epictetus or old Horace.
Then me for the tall timbers and my friend the hen.
"Oh, Ann, for the love of high heaven, marry me to-morrow, and let me move
you and Father Craddock over into that infernal, empty old barn I keep open
as a hotel for nigger servants. Marry me instead--"
"Instead of the hen?" I interrupted him with a laugh. "I can't, Matt, you
dear thing. I honestly can't. I've got to go back to the land from which my
race sprang and make it blossom into a beautiful existence for those two
dear old boys. When Uncle Cradd heard of the smash from that horrible
phosphate deal he was at the door the next morning at sun-up, driving the
two gray mules to one wagon himself, with old Rufus driving the gray horses
hitched to that queer tumble-down, old family coach, though he hadn't
spoken to father since he married mother twenty-eight years ago.
"'Ready to move you all home, bag and baggage, William,' he said, as he
took father into his huge old arms clad in the rusty broadcloth of his best
suit, which I think is the garment he purchased for father's very worldly,
town wedding with my mother, which he came from Riverfield to attend for
purposes of disinheriting the bridegroom and me, though I was several years
in the future at that date. 'Elmnest is as much yours as mine, as I told
you when you sprigged off to marry in town. Get your dimity together,
Nancy! Your grandmother Craddock's haircloth trunk is strapped on behind
her carriage there, and Rufus will drive you home. These mules are too
skittish for him to handle. Fine pair, eh, William?' And right there in the
early dawn, almost in front of the garage that contained his touring
Chauvinnais and my gray roadster, father stood in his velvet dressing-gown
and admired the two moth-eaten old animals. Now, I honestly ask you,
Matthew, could a woman of heart refuse at least to attempt to see those two
great old boys through the rest of their lives in peace and comfort
together? Elmnest is roof and land and that is about all, for Uncle Cradd
never would let father give him a cent on account of his feud with mother,
even after she had been dead for years. Father would have gone home with
him that morning, but I made him stay to turn things over to Judge
Rutherford. Aren't they great, those two old pioneers?"
"They are the best sports ever, Ann, and I say let's fix up Elmnest for
them to live in when they won't stay with us, and for a summer home for us
to go and take--take the children for rural training. Now what do you
say--wedding to-morrow?" And the light in dear old Matthew's eyes was very
lovely indeed as the music grew less blatant and the waiter turned down the
lights near the little alcove that the wide walnut paneling made beside the
steps that go up to the balcony. I have always said that the Clovermead
Country Club has the loveliest house anywhere in the South.
"No, Matthew, I care too much about you to let you marry a woman in search
of a roof and food," I answered him, with all of the affection I seemed to
possess at that time in my eyes. "You deserve better than that from me."
"Now, see here, Ann Craddock, did I or did I not ask you to marry me at
your fourteenth birthday party, which was just ten years ago, and did you
or did you not tell me just to wait until you got grown? Have you or have
you not reached the years of discretion and decision? I am ready to marry,
I am!" And as he made this announcement of his matrimonially inclined
condition of mind, Matthew took my hand in his and laid his cheek against
it.
"My heart isn't grown up yet, Matt," I said softly, with all the tenderness
I, as I before remarked, at that time possessed. "Don't wait for me. Marry
Belle Proctor or somebody and--and bring the--babies out to Elmnest for--"
The explosion that then followed landed me in Owen Murray's arms on the
floor of the ball-room, and landed Matthew in his big racing-car, which I
could hear go roaring down the road beyond the golf-links.
There is a certain kind of woman whose brain develops with amazing
normality and strength, but whose heart remains very soft-fibered and
uncertain, with tendencies to lapse into second childhood. I am that garden
variety, and it took the exercising of many heart interests to toughen my
cardiac organ.
As I traveled out the long turnpike that wound itself through the Harpeth
Valley to the very old and tradition-mossed town of Riverfield, in the
high, huge-wheeled, swinging old coach of my Great-grandmother Craddock,
sitting pensively alone while father occupied the front seat beside Uncle
Cradd, both of them in deep converse about a line in Tom Moore, while Uncle
Cradd bumbled the air of "Drink to me only with thine eyes" in a lovely old
bass, I should have been softly and pensively weeping at the thought of the
devastation of my father's fortune, of the poverty brought down upon his
old age, and about my fate as a gay social being going thus into exile; but
I wasn't. Did I say that I was sitting alone in state upon the faded rose
leather of those ancestral cushions? That was not the case, for upon the
seat beside me rode the Golden Bird in a beautiful crate, which bore the
legend, "Cock, full brother to Ladye Rosecomb, the world's champion,
three-hundred-and-fourteen-egg hen, insured at one thousand dollars.
Express sixteen dollars." And in another larger crate, strapped on top of
the old haircloth trunk, which held several corduroy skirts, some coarse
linen smocks made hurriedly by Madam Felicia after a pattern in "The
Review," and several pairs of lovely, high-topped boots, as well as a
couple of Hagensack sweaters, rode his family, to whom he had not yet even
spoken. The family consisted of ten perfectly beautiful white Leghorn
feminine darlings whose crate was marked, "Thoroughbreds from Prairie Dog
Farm, Boulder, Colorado." I had obtained the money to purchase these very
much alive foundations for my fortune, also the smart farmer's costume, or
rather my idea of the correct thing in rustics, by selling all the lovely
lingerie I had brought from Paris with me just the week before the terrible
war had crashed down upon the world, and which I had not worn because I had
not needed them, to Bess Rutherford and Belle Proctor at very high prices,
because who could tell whether France would ever procure their like again?
They were composed mostly of incrustations of embroidery and real Val, and
anyway the Golden Bird only cost seven hundred dollars instead of the
thousand, and the ladies Bird only ten dollars apiece, which to me did not
seem exactly fair, as they were of just as good family as he. I was very
proud of myself for having been professional enough to follow the
directions of my new big red book on "The Industrious Fowl," and to buy
Golden Bird and his family from localities which were separated as far as
is the East from the West. My company was responsible for my
light-heartedness at a time when I should have been weeping with vain
regrets at leaving life--and perhaps love, for I couldn't help hearing in
my mind's ears that great dangerous racer bearing Matthew away from me at
the rate of eighty miles an hour. I was figuring on just how long it would
take the five to eight hundred children of the Bird family, which I
expected to incarnate themselves out of egg-shells, to increase to a flock
of two thousand, from which, I was assured by the statistics in that very
reliable book, I ought to make three thousand dollars a year, maybe five,
with "good management." Also I was not at all worried about the "good
management" to be employed. I intended to begin to exert it the minute of
my arrival in the township of Riverfield. I had even already begun to use
"thoughtful care," for I had brought a box of tea biscuits along, and I
felt a positive thrill of affection for Mr. G. Bird as he gratefully
gobbled a crushed one from my hand. Also it was dear of him the way he
raised his proud head and chuckled to his brides in the crate behind him
to come and get their share. It was pathetic the way he called and called
and they answered, until I finally stopped their mouths with ten other
dainties, so that he could consume his in peace. Even at that early stage
of our friendship I liked the Golden Bird, and perhaps it was just a wave
of prophetic psychology that made me feel so warmly towards the proud,
white young animal who was to lead me to--
So instead of the despair due the occasion, I was happy as I jogged slowly
out over the twenty long miles that stretched out like a silvery ribbon
dropped down upon the meadows and fields that separate the proud city of
Hayesville and the gray and green little old hamlet of Riverfield, which
nestles in a bend of the Cumberland River and sleeps time away under its
huge old oak and elm and hackberry trees, kept perpetually green by the
gnarled old cedars that throw blue-berried green fronds around their winter
nakedness. As we rode slowly along, with a leisure I am sure all the
motor-car world has forgotten exists, the two old boys on the front seat
hummed and chuckled happily while I breathed in great gulps of a large,
meadow-sweet spring tang that seemed to fairly soak into the circulation of
my heart. The February day was cool with yet a kind of tender warmth in its
little gust of Southern wind that made me feel as does that brand of very
expensive Rhine wine which Albert at the Salemite on Forty-second Street in
New York keeps for Gale Beacon specially, and which makes Gale so furious
for you not to recognize, remember about, and comment upon at his really
wonderful dinners to bright and shining lights in art and literature.
Returning from New York to the Riverfield Road through the Harpeth Valley,
I also discovered upon the damsel Spring a hint of a soft young costume of
young green and purple and yellow that was as yet just a mist being draped
over her by the Southern wind.
"I feel like the fairy princess being driven into a land of enchantment,
Mr. Golden Bird," I remarked as I leaned back upon the soft old cushions
and took in the first leisurely breath of the air of the open road that my
lungs had ever inhaled: one simply gulps air when seated in a motor-car.
"It is all so simple and easy and--"
Just at this moment happened the first real adventure of my quest, and at
that time it seemed a serious one, though now I would regard it as of very
little moment. Suddenly there came the noise of snipping cords, the feeling
of jar and upheaval, and before I could turn more than half-way around for
purposes of observation, the entire feminine Bird family in their temporary
crate abode slid down into the dust of the road with a great crash. I held
my breath while, with a jolt and a bounce and a squeak of the heavy old
springs, Uncle Cradd brought the ancestral family coach to a halt about ten
feet away from the wreck, which was a mêlée of broken timber, squeaking
voices, and flapping wings. As soon as I recovered from the shock I sprang
from my cushions beside Mr. G. Bird, who was fairly yelling clucks of
command at this family-to-be, and ran to their assistance. Now, I am very
long and fleet of limb, but those white Leghorn ladies were too swift for
me, and before I reached the wreck, they had all ten disentangled
themselves from the crushed timbers and had literally taken to the woods,
through which the Riverfield ribbon was at that moment winding itself.
Clucking and chuckling, they concealed themselves in an undergrowth of
coral-strung buck bushes, little scrub cedars, and dried oak leaves, and I
could hear them holding a council of war that sounded as if they were to
depart forever to parts unknown. In a twinkling of an eye I saw my future
fortune literally take wings, and in my extremity I cried aloud.
"Oh, call them all back, Mr. Golden Bird," I pleaded.
"Now, Nancy, that is always what I said about hens. They are such pesky
womanish things that it's beneath the dignity of a man to bother with 'em.
I haven't had one on the place for twenty years. We'll just turn this
rooster loose with them and we can go on home in peace," said Uncle Cradd
as he peered around the side of the coach while father's mild face appeared
on the other side. As he spoke, he reached back and released my Golden Bird
from his crate and sent him flying out into the woods in the direction of
his family.
"Oh, they are the only things in the world that stand between me and
starvation," I wailed, though not loud enough for either father or Uncle
Cradd to hear. "Please, please, Golden Bird, come back and bring the others
with you," I pleaded as I held out my hand to the proud white Sultan, who
had paused by the roadside on his way to his family and was now turning
bright eyes in the direction of my outstretched hand. In all the troubles
and trials through which that proud Mr. G. Bird and I went hand in hand, or
rather wing in hand, in which I was at times hard and cold and
disappointed in him, I have never forgotten that he turned in his tracks
and walked majestically back to my side and peered into the outstretched
hand with a trustful and inquiring peck. Some kind fortune had brought it
to pass that I held the package of tea biscuits in my other hand, and in a
few breathless seconds he was pecking at one and calling to the foolish,
faithless lot of huddled hens in the bushes to come to him immediately.
First he called invitingly while I held my breath, and then he commanded as
he scratched for lost crumbs in the white dust of the Riverfield ribbon,
but the foolish creatures only huddled and squeaked, and at a few cautious
steps I took in their direction, they showed a decided threat of vanishing
forever into the woods.
"Oh, what will I do, Mr. G. Bird?" I asked in despair, with a real sob in
my throat as I looked toward the family coach, from which I could hear a
happy and animated discussion of Plato's Republic going on between the two
old gentlemen who had thirty years' arrears in argument and conversation to
make up. I could see that no help would come from that direction. "I can't
lose them forever," I said again, and this time there was the real sob
arising unmistakably in my voice.
"Just stand still, and I'll call them to you," came a soft, deep voice out
of the forest behind me, and behold, a man stood at my side!
The man's name is Adam.
"Now give me a cracker and watch 'em come," he said, as he came close to my
side and took a biscuit from my surprised and nerveless hand. "Ah, but you
are one beauty, aren't you?" he further remarked, and I was not positively
sure whether he meant me or the Golden Bird until I saw that he had reached
down and was stroking Mr. G. Bird with a delighted hand. "Chick, chick,
chick!" he commanded, with a note that was not at all unlike the commanding
one the Sultan had used a few minutes past, only more so, and in less than
two seconds all those foolish hens were scrambling around our feet. In
fact, the command in his voice had been so forcible that I myself had moved
several feet nearer to him until I, too, was in the center of my
scrambling, clucking Bird venture.
I don't like beautiful men. I never did. I think that a woman ought to have
all the beauty there is, and I feel that a man who has any is in some way
dishonest, but I never before saw anything like that person who had come
out of the woods to the rescue of my family fortune, and I simply stared at
him as he stood with a fluff of seething white wings around his feet and
towered against the green gray of an old tree that hung over the side of
the road. He was tall and broad, but lithe and lovely like some kind of a
woods thing, and heavy hair of the same brilliant burnished red that I had
seen upon the back of a prize Rhode Island Red in the lovely water-color
plates in my chicken book,--which had tempted me to buy "red" until I had
read about the triumphs of the Leghorn "whites,"--waved close to his head,
only ruffling just over his ears enough to hide the tips of them. His eyes
were set so far back under their dark, heavy, red eyebrows that they seemed
night-blue with their long black fringe of lashes. His face was square and
strong and gentle, and the collar of his gray flannel shirt was open so
that I could see that his head was set on his wide shoulders with lines
like an old Greek masterpiece. Gray corduroy trousers were strapped around
his waist by a wide belt made of some kind of raw-looking leather that was
held together by two leather lacings, while on his feet were a kind of
sandal shoes that appeared to be made of the same leather. He must have
constructed both belt and shoes himself, and he hadn't any hat at all upon
his crimson-gold thatch of hair. I looked at him so long that I had to look
away, and then when I did I looked right back at him because I couldn't
believe that he was true.
"Now I'm going to pick them up gently, two at a time, tie their feet
together with a piece of this string, and hand them to you to put inside
the carriage. I'll catch the cock first, the handsome old sport," and as
Pan spoke, he began to suit his actions to his words with amazing tact and
skill. I shall always be glad that the first chicken I ever held in my arms
was put into them gently by that woods man, and that it was the Golden Bird
himself. "Put him in and shut the door, and he'll calm the ladies as you
bring them to him," he commanded as he bent down and lifted two of the Bird
brides and began to tie their feet together with a piece of cord he had
taken from a deep pocket in the gray trousers.
"Oh, thank you," I said with a depth of gratitude in my voice that I did
not know I possessed. "You are the most wonderful man I ever saw--I mean
that I ever saw with chickens," I said, ending the remark in an agony of
embarrassment. "I don't know much about them. I mean chickens," I hastened
to add, and made matters worse.
"Oh, they are easy, when you get to know 'em, chickens--or men," he said
kindly, without a spark in his eyes back of their black bushes. "Are they
yours?"
"They are all the property I have got in the world," I answered as I
clasped the last pair of biddies to my breast, for while we had been
holding our primitive conversation, I had been obeying his directions and
loading the Birds into Grandmother Craddock's stately equipage. Anxiety
shone from my eyes into his sympathetic ones.
"Well, you'll be an heiress in no time with them to start you, with 'good
management.' I never saw a finer lot," he said, as he walked to the door of
the carriage with me, with the last pair of white Leghorn ladies in his
arms.
"But maybe I haven't got that management," I faltered, with my anxiety
getting tearful in my words.
"Oh, you'll learn," he said, with such heavenly soothing in his voice that
I almost reached out my hands and clung to him as he settled the fussing
poultry in the bottom of the carriage in such a way as to leave room for my
feet among them. Mr. G. Bird was perched on the seat at my side and was
craning his neck down and soothingly scolding his family. "How are you, Mr.
Craddock?" Pan asked of Uncle Cradd's back, and by his question interrupted
an argument that sounded, from the Greek phrases flying, like a battle on
the walls of Troy.
"Well, well, how are you, Adam?" exclaimed Uncle Cradd, as he turned around
and greeted the woodsman with a smile of positive delight.
I had known that man's name was Adam, but I don't know how I knew.
"This is my brother, Mr. William Craddock, who's come home to me to live
and die where he belongs, and that young lady is Nancy. Those chickens are
just a whim of hers, and we have to humor her. Can we lift you as far as
Riverfield?" Uncle Cradd made his introduction and delivered his invitation
all in one breath.
"I'm glad to meet you, sir, and I am grateful for your assistance in
capturing my daughter's whims," said father, as he came partly out of his
B.C. daze.
As he took my hand into his slender, but very powerful grasp, that man had
the impertinence to laugh into my eyes at my parent's double-entendre,
which he had intended as a simple single remark.
"No, thank you, sir; I've got to get across Paradise Ridge before sundown.
The lambs are dropping fast over at Plunkett's, and I want to make sure
those Southdown ewes are all right," he answered as he put my hand out of
his, though I almost let it rebel and cling, and took for a second the
Golden Bird's proud head into his palm.
"I'll be over at Elmnest before your--your 'good judgment' needs mine," he
said to me as softly as I think a mother must speak to a child as she
unloosens clinging dependent fingers. As he spoke he shut the door of the
old ark, and Uncle Cradd drove on, leaving him standing on the edge of the
great woods looking after us.
"Oh, I wish that man were going home with us, Mr. G. Bird, or we were going
home with him," I said with a kind of terror of the unknown creeping over
me. As I spoke I reached out and cuddled the Golden darling into the hollow
of my arm. Some day I am going to travel to the East shore of Baltimore to
the Rosecomb Poultry Farm to see the woman who raised the Golden Bird and
cultivated such a beautiful confiding, and affectionate nature in him. He
soothed me with a chuckle as he pecked playfully at my fingers and then
called cheerfully down to the tethered white Ladies of Leghorn.