After each such disparaging comment, Magdalena would murmur something to her father that Klaus did not trouble to translate. Klaus' glum expression would have dampened the spirits of a manic on the upswing, but Tom was armored in his secret, and kept smiling, something that clearly puzzled Herr Edelmann.
Edelmann's expression of disapproval changed only once in the walk from the yard to the barn, and that was when he dismounted from the carriage and was confronted with the dome. It clearly took him aback—but he recovered quickly. "A man vould go mad, liffing in such a place," he muttered, according to Klaus's dutiful translation.
Finally, they reached the barn, where all three boys waited, wearing their best—or at least, their brightest—outfits. Here Tom paused to make his own little speech.
"Guildmaster," he said, speaking slowly, giving Klaus plenty of time to make a thorough translation, "I can understand completely why you felt that I was not worthy of your beautiful and gracious daughter, whom God has endowed with so many gifts."
Behind Edelmann's back, Gerry made a gagging face. Tom ignored him.
"But there is one thing that you may not understand yet about Americans," he continued. "And that is that we all live by the proverb, 'Where there is a will, there is a way.' I vowed that I would find a way to prove to you that I am worthy of her. I swore that I would make myself worthy of her. I pledged that before I asked you a second time for her hand, I would have the means, not only to support her, but to impress you with my ability to rise to exceed anything you could demand of me in order to win her. And here, Guildmaster, are the first fruits of my labors—"
Frank and Ronald flung open the barn doors. He'd run an extension cord out there, and set up a couple of flood-lights, which now played on the display that he and the boys had set up for maximum effect.
The drying cords had been restrung, so that instead of lacing back and forth the length of the barn, they went back and forth between the walls from floor to ceiling. And draped over the cords, skein after skein after skein of the dyed cotton thread, forming an entirely new wall of color. He'd used up all of the cotton, though he'd only made a dent in the amount of dye he had stockpiled.
Edelmann stared. Klaus stared. Magdalena looked up at last, and smiled into Tom's eyes, and his heart turned over in his chest. There was a long silence.
Then Edelmann stepped forward and reached for one of the skeins to examine it closely. Slowly he began to ask questions. Was the color impervious to wetting? How quickly would it fade? Was this all of the thread, or did he have more? Was this all of the dye? Tom fielded the technical questions with ease, having been coached by Magdalena in what her father would probably ask. Questions about marketing the thread, he left to her to answer, which she did. Her father didn't seem to notice.
Evidently he was so used to being managed that it didn't impinge on his conscious mind anymore.
Finally, silence again. And when Guildmaster Edelmann turned back to face them, he was wearing an entirely different expression than the one he'd arrived here with.
"Also," he said. "Ja, gut. Und wann moechten Ihr beiden heiraten?"
Tom didn't need Klaus's translation for that. Magdalena's shining blue eyes were enough.
Preliminary negotiations over, Tom handed his betrothed back into the carriage, following her father, and waved at them until the vehicle was out of sight.
Boxes of thread adorned the top of the carriage; samples to go back to Jena with her father. He pretended he knew what he was doing, all the time basically repeating what Magdalena had coached him to tell her father, while she sat modestly out of earshot in the carriage, pretending that she hadn't any idea what was going on between the men.
Magdalena was going to take care of negotiating the sale of this first batch, and Tom was perfectly content to leave that part of it up to her. He knew he didn't have a head for business, and she clearly did.
"Well, Pop, what are you going to do for an encore?" Ronald asked, when the carriage was gone.
"Another batch with wool instead of cotton—or maybe linen," he said, vaguely, still basking in the roseate glow of knowing that Magdalena was his, his!
"Yeah, but the dye we've got isn't going to last forever," Ronald persisted. "Probably not even a year, so what are you going to do for an encore?"
"What'dye think? He'll come up with something!" Frank countered, punching Ronald's arm. "After all, he made LSD by the gallon in the sixties! How hard can it be to come up with dye?"