The Choir Invisible

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.