Chapter I: Adam

It was the warmest day of the season, and from the moment when the first robin chirped in the maple tree growing by the door, to the time when the shadows stretching eastward indicated that the sultry afternoon was drawing to a close, Adam Floyd had been busy. Indeed, he could not remember a day when he had worked so continuously and so hard, neither could he recall a time when he had been so perfectly happy, except upon one starlight night when last winter’s snow was piled upon the ground. The events of that night had seemed to him then like a dream, and they were scarcely more real now, when pausing occasionally in his work and leaning his head upon his broad, brown hands, he tried to recall just the awkward words he had spoken and the graceful answer she had given; answer so low that he would hardly have known she was speaking, had not his face been so near to hers that he could hear the murmured response,

“I am not half good enough for you, Adam, and shall make a sorry wife; but, if you will take me with all my faults, I am yours.”

That was what she had said, the only she in all the world to Adam Floyd, now that the churchyard grass was growing over the poor old blind mother, to whom he had been the tenderest, best of sons, and who had said to him when dying,

“I’m glad I’m going home, my boy, for now you can bring Anna here. She is a bonny creature, I know by the sound of her voice and the touch of her silky hair. Tell her how with my last breath I blessed her, and how glad I was to think that when she came, the old blind woman’s chair would be empty, and that she would be spared a heavy burden which she is far too young to bear. God deal by her as she deals by you, my noble boy.”

The March winds were blowing when they made his mother’s grave, and Adam’s heart was not as sore now as on that dismal, rainy night, when he first sat alone in his little cottage and missed the groping hand feeling for his own. Anna was coming within a week, Anna who had said, “I am not half good enough for you.” How the remembrance of these words even now brought a smile to the lips where the sweat drops were standing as he toiled for her, putting the last finishing strokes to the home prepared for his future bride, Anna Burroughs, the Deacon’s only daughter, the fairest maiden in all the goodly town of Rhodes—Anna, who had been away to school for a whole year, who could speak another language than her own, whose hands were soft and white as wool, whom all the village lads coveted, and at whom it was rumored even Herbert Dunallen the heir of Castlewild, where Adam worked so much, had cast admiring glances. Not good enough for him? She was far too good for a great burly fellow like himself, a poor mechanic, who had never looked into the Algebras and Euclids piled on Anna’s table the morning after she came from school. This was what Adam thought, wondering why she had chosen him, and if she were not sorry. Sometimes of late he had fancied a coldness in her manner, a shrinking from his caresses; but the very idea had made his great, kind heart, throb with a pang so keen that he had striven to banish it, for to lose his darling now would be worse than death. He had thought it all over that August day, when he nailed down the bright new carpet in what was to be her room. “Our room,” he said softly to himself, as he watched his coadjutor, old Aunt Martha Eastman, smoothing and arranging the snowy pillows upon the nicely made up bed, and looping with bows of pure white satin the muslin curtains which shaded the pretty bay window. That window was his own handiwork. He had planned and built it himself, for Anna was partial to bay windows. He had heard her say so once when she came up to Castlewild where he was making some repairs, and so he had made her two, one in the bed-room, and one in the pleasant parlor looking out upon the little garden full of flowers. Adam’s taste was perfect, and many a passer by stopped to admire the bird’s nest cottage, peeping out from its thick covering of ivy leaves and flowering vines. Adam was pleased with it himself, and when the last tack had been driven and the last chair set in its place, he went over it alone admiring as he went, and wondering how it would strike Anna. Would her soft blue eyes light up with joy, or would they wear the troubled look he had sometimes observed in them? “If they do,” and Adam’s breath came hard as he said it, and his hands were locked tightly together, “If they do, I’ll lead her into mother’s room; she won’t deceive me there. I’ll tell her that I would not take a wife who does not love me; that though to give her up is like tearing out my heart, I’ll do it if she says so, and Anna will answer——”

Adam did not know what, and the very possibility that she might answer, as he sometimes feared, paled his bronzed cheek, and made him reel, as, walking to his blind mother’s chair, he knelt beside it, and prayed earnestly for grace to bear the happiness or sorrow there might be in store for him. In early youth, Adam had learned the source of all true peace, and now in every perplexity, however trivial, he turned to God, who was pledged to care for the child, trusting so implicitly in him.

“If it is right for Anna to be mine, give her to me, but, if she has sickened of me, oh, Father, help me to bear.”

This was Adam’s prayer, and when it was uttered, the pain and dread were gone, and the childlike man saw no cloud lowering on his horizon.

It was nearly time for him to be going now, if he would have Anna see the cottage by day-light, and hastening to the chamber he had occupied since he was a boy, he put on, not his wedding suit, for that was safely locked in his trunk, but his Sunday clothes, feeling a pardonable thrill of satisfaction when he saw how much he was improved by dress. Not that Adam Floyd was ever ill-looking. A stranger would have singled him out from a thousand. Tall, straight and firmly built, with the flush of perfect health upon his frank, open face, and the sparkle of intelligence in his dark brown eyes, he represented a rare type of manly beauty. He was looking uncommonly well, too, this afternoon, old Martha thought, as from the kitchen door she watched him passing down the walk and out into the road which lead to the red farm-house, where Deacon Burroughs lived, and where Anna was waiting for him.