第72章

As the first act, she sold one of the major's military grants, reserving the ample, noble, parklike one on which she had passed existence up to this; and near the cabin she laid the foundations of her house.Not the great ancestral manor-house on the James and yet a seaboard aristocratic Virginia country-place: two story brick with two-story front veranda of Corinthian columns; wide hall, wide stairway; oak wood interior, hand-carved, massive;sliding doors between the large library and large dining-room; great bedrooms, great fireplaces, great brass fenders and fire-dogs, brass locks and keys: full of elegance, spaciousness, comfort, rest.

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 Iwill 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.

She sat down in her shadowy room before the deep fireplace; where there was such comfort now, such loneliness.In early years at such hours she had like to play.She resolved to get her a spinet.Yes; and she would have myrtle-berry candles instead of tallow, and a slender-legged mahogany table beside which to read again in the Spectator and "Tom Jones." As nearly as she could she would bring back everything that she had been used to in her childhood--was not all life still before her? If he were coming, it must be soon, and she would know what had been keeping him--what it was that had happened.She had walked to meet him so many times already.And the heartless little gusts of wind, starting up among the leaves in the woods, how often they had fooled her ear and left her white and trembling!

The negro boy who had been sent to town on other business and to fetch the mail, soon afterwards knocked and entered.There was a letter from him--a short one and a paper.She read the letter and could not believe her own eyes, could not believe her own mind.Then she opened the paper and read the announcement of it printed there": he was married.

That night in her bedroom--with the great clock measuring out life in the corner--the red logs turning slowly to ashes--the crickets under the bricks of the hearth singing of summer gone--that night, sitting by the candle-stand, where his letter lay opened, in a nightgown white as white samite, she loosened the folds of her heavy lustrous hair--wave upon wave--until the edges that rippled over her forehead rippled down over her knees.With the loosening of her hair somehow had come the loosening of her tears.And with the loosening of her tears came the loosening of her hold upon what she, until this night, had never acknowledged to herself--her love for him, the belief that he had loved her.

The next morning the parson, standing a white, cold shepherd before his chilly wilderness flock, preached a sermon from the text: "I shall go softly all my years." While the heads of the rest were bowed during the last moments of prayer, she rose and slipped out.

"Yes," she said to herself, gathering her veil closely about her face as she alighted at the door of her house and the withered leaves of November were whirled fiercely about her feet, "I shall go softly all my years."