“Blue’s my best feller’s favourite colour,” contributed Huldah, picking up the bucket which she had set down, and starting on. “He ’lows it goes fine with aurbu’n hair.”
“Wade never said that,” muttered Judith to herself as she took her way to the Bonbright place.
But after all one could not be long out of tune with such a summer day. The spicy odour of pennyroyal bruised underfoot, came to her nostrils like incense. Even the sickly sweet of jimson blossoms by the draw-bars of the milking lot was dear and familiar, while their white trumpets whispered of childish play-days and flower-ladies she had set walking in procession under the shadow of some big green leaf. Blue—the soft stars of spider-wort opening among the rocks reminded her of the hue; blue curls and dittany tangled at the path edge; but the very air itself was beginning to wear Creed’s colour and put on that wonderful, luminous blue in which the Cumberlands of midsummer melt cerulean into a sky of lapis lazuli. Creed’s colour—Creed’s colour—her dark eyes misted as they searched the far reaches of the hills and found it everywhere.
Jephthah Turrentine used to say that if a man owned enough mountain land to set his foot on, he owned the whole of the sky above him; it was a truer word than this old mountain dweller could have known, since the mere possessor of a city lot, where other tall roofs cut the horizon high, must content himself with less of the welkin.
Judith opened the door, went in, closed it behind her, and gazed about. There lay over everything a fine dust; there was the look of decay which comes with disuse; and the air bore the musty odour of a shut and long uninhabited house. The Bonbright home had been a good one for the mountains, of hewn logs, and with four rooms, and two great stone chimneys. Inside was the furniture which Mary Gillenwaters brought to it as a bride when her mountain lover came down to Hepzibah and with the swift ardour of his tribe—this Bonbright’s fires of eloquence were all kindled upon the altar of his mating romance—charmed the daughter of its one merchant. These added to the already fairly complete plenishings, many of which had come over the mountains from Virginia when Sevier opened up the new State, gave an air of abundance, even of sober elegance to the room.
Reverently Judith moved among the dumb witnesses and servitors of Bonbright generations. Here was the spinning-wheel, here the cards, and out in the little room off the porch stood the loom. She had dreams of replacing these with a sewing machine. Nobody wove jeans any more—but a good carpet-loom now, that might be made useful. Unwilling to hang the bedding on bushes for fear of a chance tear from twig or thorn, she rigged a line in the back yard, and spread quilt and homespun blanket, coarse white sheets and pillowcases that were yellowing with age, out for the glad gay wind to play with, for the sunshine to sweeten.
“What a lot of feather beds!” she murmured as she tallied them over. “That there ticking is better than you can buy in the stores. My, ain’t these light and nice!”
All the warm, sunny afternoon she toiled at her self-appointed labour of love. She swept and dusted, she scrubbed and cleaned, with capable fingers, proud of the strength and skill that made her a good housewife; then bringing in the fragrant, homely fabrics, made up the beds and placed all back in due order.
“He’s boun’ to notice somebody’s been here and put things to rights,” she said over and over to herself. “If it looks sightly, and seems like home, mebbe he’ll give out the notion of stayin’ at Nancy Card’s, and come and live here.” She brooded on the bliss of the idea as she worked.
Under the great mahogany four-poster in the front room was slipped a trundle-bed that she drew out and looked at with fond eyes. No doubt Creed’s boyish head had lain there once. She wished passionately that she had known him then, all unaware that we never do know our lovers when they and we are children. Even those playfellows who are destined to be mates find, all on a day, that the familiar companion who has grown up beside each has changed into quite a different person.