In every letter she sent him that spring and summer and early autumn, always
she had something to tell him about this house, about the room in it built
for him, about the negros she had bought, the land she was clearing, the
changes and improvements everywhere: as to many things she wanted his
advice. That year also she sent back to Virginia for flower-seed and shrub
and plants--the same old familiar ones that had grown on her father's lawn,
in the garden, about the walls, along the water--some of which had been
bought over from England: the flags, the lilies, honeysuckles, calacanthus,
snowdrops, roses--all of them. Speaking of this, she wrote him that of
course that most of these would have to be set out that autumn, and little
could be done for grounds till the following season; but the house!--it was
to be finished before winter set in. In the last of these letters, she ended
by saying: "I think I know now the very day you will be coming back. I can
hear your horse's feet rustling in the leaves of--I said--October; but I
will say November this time."
His replies were unsatisfying. There had been the short, hurried, earnest
letter, speaking of Major Falconer's death: that was all right. But since
then a vague blinding mist had seemed to lie between her eyes and every
page. Something was kept hidden--some new trouble. "I shall understand
everything when he comes!" she would say to herself each time. "I can wait."
Her buoyancy was irrepressible.
Late that autumn the house was finished--one of those early country-places
yet to be seen here and there on the landscape of Kentucky, marking the
building era of the aristocratic Virginians and renewing in the wilderness
the architecture of the James.
She had taken such delight in furnishing her room: in the great bedstead
with its mighty posts, its high tester, its dainty, hiding curtains; such
delight in choosing, in bleaching, in weaving the linen for it! And the
pillowcases--how expectant they were on the two pillows now set side by side
at the head of the bed, with the delicate embroidery in the centre of each!
At first she had thought of working her initials within an oval-shaped vine;
but one day, her needle suddenly arrested in the air, she had simply worked
a rose.
Late one afternoon, when the blue of Indian summer lay on the walls of the
forest like a still sweet veil, she came home from a walk in the woods. Her
feet had been rustling among the brown leaves and each time she had laughed.
At her round white throat she had pinned a scarlet leaf, from an old habit
of her girlhood. But was not Kentucky turning into Virginia? Was not
womanhood becoming girlhood again? She was still so young--only
thirty-eight. She had the right to be bringing in from the woods a bunch of
the purple violets of November.