It was not, of course, strictly presentable yet. There were several small messy piles of broken, discarded bricks left out before it, the sod was not in place, and the window glass was smirched with streaks of paint. But something almost reverent came into the man's face as he looked at it. His lips parted slightly and his eyes softened. He hadn't known there could be such a beautiful house. It was the most beautiful house he had ever seen. It was his.
A questioning flicker from the coachman's whip stirred him from his revery.
"You'll have to wait for me. I'm going down to meet the boat from here, later on."
"Yessuh, take your time, cunnel," the coachman grinned understandingly. "A man got to look at his house."
Durand didn't go inside immediately. Instead he prolonged the rapture he was deriving from this by first walking slowly and completely around the two outermost faces of the house. He tested a bit of foundation stone with his cane. He put out his hand and tried one of the shutters, swinging it out, then flattening it back again. He fastidiously speared a small, messy puff-ball of straw with his stick and transported it offside of the walk, leaving a trail of scattered Maments that was worse than the original offender.
He returned at last to the door, his head proudly high. There was a place indicated by pencil marks on the white-painted pinewood where a wrought-iron knocker was to be affixed, but this was not yet in position. He had chosen it himself, making a special trip to the foundry to do so. No effort too great, no detail too small.
Scorning to raise hand to the portal himself, possibly under the conviction that it was not fitting for a man to have to knock at the door of his own house, he tried the knob, found it unlocked, and entered. There was on the inside the distinctive and not unpleasant--and in this case enchanting--aroma a new house has, of freshly planed wood, the astringent turpentine in paint, window putty, and several other less identifiable ingredients.
A virginal staircase, its newly applied maple varnish protected by a strip of brown wrapping paper running down its center, rose at the back of the hall to the floor above. Turning aside, he entered a skeletal parlor, its western window casting squared puddles of gold light upon the floor.
As he stood and looked at it, the room changed. A thick-napped flowered carpet spread over its ascetic floor boards. The lurid red of lazy wood-flames peered forth, from the now-blank fireplace under the mantel. A rounded mirror glistened ghostly on the wall above it. A plush sofa, a plush chair, a parlor table, came to life where there was nothing standing now. On the table a lamp with a planet-like milky-white bowl topping its base began to glow softly, then stronger, and stronger. And with its aid, a dark-haired head appeared in one of the chairs, contentedly resting back against the white antimacassar that topped it. And on the table, under the kindly lamp, some sort of a workbasket. A sewing workbasket. A little vaguer than the other details, this.
Then a pail clanked somewhere upstairs, and a tide of effacement flowed across the room, the carpet thinned, the fire dimmed, the lamp went out and with it the dark-haired faceless head, and the room was just as gaunt as it had been before. Rolls of furled wallpaper, a bucket on a trestle, bare floor.
"Who's that down there ?" a woman's voice called hollowly through the empty spaces.
He came out into the hall at the foot of the stairs.
"Oh, it you, Mr. Lou. 'Bout ready for you now, I reckon."
The gnarled face of an elderly colored woman, topped by a dustkerchief tied bandana-style, was peering down over the upstairs guardrail.
"Where'd he go, this fellow down here?" he demanded testily. "He should be finishing."
"Went to get more paste, I 'spect. He be back."
"How is it up there?"
"Coming along."
He launched into an unexpected little run, that carried him at a sprightly pace up the stairs. "I want to see the bedroom, mainly," he announced, brushing by her.
"What bridegroom don't ?" she chuckled.
He stopped in the doorway, looked back at her rebukingly. "On account of the wallpaper," he took pains to qualify.
"You don't have to 'splain to me, Mr. Lou. I was in this world 'fore you was even born."
He went over to the wall, traced his fingers along it, as though the flowers were tactile, instead of just visual.
"It looks even better up, don't you think?"
"Right pretty," she agreed.
"It was the closest I could get. They had to send all the way to New York for it. See I asked her what her favorite kind was, without telling her why I wanted to know." He fumbled in his pocket, took out a letter, and scanned it carefully. He finally located the passage he wanted, underscored it with his finger. "--and for a bedroom I like pink, but not too bright a pink, with small blue flowers like forget-me-nots." He refolded the letter triumphantly, cocked his head at the walls.
Aunt Sarah was giving only' a perfunctory ear. "I got a passel of work to do yet. If you'll 'scuse me, Mr. Lou, I wish you'd get out the way. I got make this bed up first of all." She chuckled again.
"Why do you keep laughing all the time ?" he protested. "Don't you do that once she gets here."
"Shucks, no. I got better sense than that, Mr. Lou. Don't you fret your head about it."
He left the room, only to return to the doorway again a moment later. "Think you can get the downstairs curtains up before she gets here? Windows look mighty bare the way they are."
"Just you fetch her, and I have the house ready," the bustling old woman promised, casting up a billowing white sheet like a sail in the wind.
He left again. He came back once more, this time from mid-stairs.
"Oh, and it'd be nice if you could find some flowers, arrange them here and there. Maybe in the parlor, to greet her when she comes in."
She muttered something that sounded suspiciously like: "She ain't going have much time spend smelling flowers."
"What?" he caught her up, horrified.
She prudently refrained from repetition.
He departed once more. Once more he returned. This time all the way from the foot of the stairs.
"And be sure to leave all the lamps on when you go. I want the place bright and cheery when she first sees it."
"You keep peggin' at me every secon' like that," she chided, but without undue resentment, "and I won't git nothing done. Now go on, scat," she ordered, shaking her apron at him with contemptuous familiarity as though he were seven or seventeen, not thirty-seven. "Ain't nothing git in your way more than a man when he think he helping you fix up a place for somebody."
He gave her a rather hurt look, but he went below again. This time, at last, he didn't come back.
Yet when she descended herself, some full five minutes later, he was still there.
His back was to her. He stood before a table, simply because it happened to be there in the way. His hands were planted flat upon it at each side, and he was leaning slightly forward over it. As if peering intently into vistas of the future, that no one but he could see. As if in contemplation of some small-sized figure coming toward him through its rotary swirls, coming nearer, nearer, growing larger as it neared him, growing toward life-size--
He didn't hear Aunt Sarah come down. He only tore himself away from the entranced prospect, turned, at the first sound of her voice.
"You still here, Mr. Lou? I might have knowed it." She planted her arms akimbo, and surveyed him indulgently. "Just look at that. You sure happy, ain't you? I ain't never seen such a look on nobody's face before."
He sheepishly passed his hand across the lower part of his face, as if it were something external she had reference to. "Does it show that much ?" He looked around him uncertainly, as if he still couldn't fully believe that the surroundings were actually there as he saw them. "My own house--" he murmured half-audibly. "My own wife--"