Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy—Psalm 126:5
“THERE’S A GENTLEMAN to see you, ma’am.”
Blythe looked up from the china plate she was painting, a small frown of annoyance creasing her smooth forehead. She disliked being interrupted, especially at such a creative moment. She was working on the very intricate shading of the petals of a pansy, brushing the color from a delicate violet to purple.
“Did he leave a calling card?” she asked Bertha, her housekeeper.
“No ma’am, he jest said you’d see him.”
Blythe rose from the high stool on which she sat when at her painting board with a sigh of resignation. Carefully she wiped her brush on the paint rag. Her hands slid tentatively to the buttons down the front of her smock, then she decided it was not necessary to remove it. It was probably only Mr. Pruitt, the carpenter she had hired for the addition she was planning to build.
She had decided to add a conservatory for the cultivation of year-round flowers as models for her china painting. The profusion of blossoms during the brief Virginia spring came and went too quickly for her slow, deliberate painting. Sketches were fine, but she needed flowers all year for inspiration, and having a hothouse seemed the ideal solution.
Tom Pruitt had remodeled an unused passageway of the original house into a studio, doing a superb job, if painstakingly slow job. Like so many real craftsmen Blythe had met in the rebuilding and restoring of Avalon, Mr. Pruitt was unpredictable, his hours unscheduled, his work erratic. He came and went at will, where whim or chance took him. She had had to search him out herself twice, ferreting his out-of-the-way carpentry shop to discuss her ideas for the addition. This was probably one of his characteristic unannounced visits. She’d better make the most of it, she decided, as she started down the hall to the parlor where Bertha escorted rare visitors to Blythe’s secluded home.
Before opening the parlor door, she paused for a moment to smooth her hair in the hall mirror although why she bothered, she didn’t know. Mr. Pruitt wouldn’t notice. The times she had been to his hideaway workshop, he had barely acknowledged her presence, but kept right on working. She had had to project her voice over the sound of his sawing and sanding even to be heard.
As Blythe stepped into the doorway, she saw the back of a tall, broad-shouldered man standing in the bow window overlooking the sixteenth century garden, recreated from drawings of the original ones at Monksmoor Priory. Almost at once, she realized this wasn’t the stoop-shouldered figure of Tom Pruitt, bent from years of working over a sawhorse. At her footstep, the man turned and Blythe froze.
Rod! Both hands went to her mouth as if to hush the sound of her gasp. It was Rod! She had fled halfway around the world to avoid him, and he had found her here in the woods of Avalon.
For Rod it was a moment he had dreamed and hoped and prayed for. The woman framed in the arched entrance reminded him of Blythe, as he had first seen her, standing in the pantry at Montclair years before—shy, unsure, eager to be accepted. He knew now that something had happened even then, something extraordinary, the beginning and end of love—lost before he could possess it.
She was still beautiful. Tall, slender, her wide eyes were the same velvety brown. Her mouth was parted slightly in surprise, soft and vulnerable, and the color rising into her cheeks was warm as peach glow.
“Blythe!” He spoke her name, and she felt that same heart-throbbing response to his voice, the conviction that her name had never sounded so beautiful.
“I’ve searched for you … everywhere … dozens of places … and here you were … all this time … all these years. I didn’t know—”
Rod’s words fell on numbed ears. Blythe struggled with the reality that he was actually here in the flesh, standing a few feet away from her in her own hidden house.
Her eyes moved over his face, noting the changes the years had wrought—the face that haunted her memory and invaded her dreams, the clear, truth-telling, truth-demanding eyes, the firm yet sensitive mouth under his mustache, the thick russet hair now liberally sprinkled with gray. It was Rod, and he was real, and he was here!
Instinctively she knew he had come to ask questions she might not want to answer. How could she convince him that what she had done at seventeen she regretted a few years later, and had wept tears of sorrow and remorse for it ever since?
But suddenly there was no need for words. In a few short strides Rod had closed the distance between them. He took both her hands in his. He was so close she could smell the clean, woodsy scent of his skin, see the depths of his eyes as they gazed into hers.
“My dearest Blythe, my love,” he said huskily, and she was shaken to her very soul.
He drew her to him, bringing her hands down to encircle his waist, then pulled her into his arms. With the relief from more than decade of yearning, Blythe leaned against him, feeling the blessed comfort of his embrace. She put her head on his shoulder, felt his hand on the back of her head, then underneath her hair, caressing the nape of her neck.
“Dearest love,” he murmured. “At last—”
Overcome with emotion, Rod’s hand stroked the silky softness of her glorious red hair. He let his fingers tangle in it until finally, worked free of its restraining pins the satin weight of it fell loosely from the coiled knot.
Instinctively, Blythe lifted her face for his kiss, a kiss deep with love and longing, tenderly sweet, yet demanding response. That response came without hesitation, with equal yearning and ardor.
In that kiss was all that each had carried in their hearts all the years apart. It was renewal and commitment, an unspoken pledge and passionate promise. With it came the undeniable knowledge that they belonged together, now and forever.
Explanations could be made later, forgiveness sought and unconditionally given, plans made, the future discussed. All that mattered now was the soaring freedom of claiming and receiving the love that had been denied so long.
For hours they sat together in front of the fireplace in the paneled parlor of Avalon, speaking quietly, sometimes sadly of the past and hopefully of the future.
The present was so thrilling, so unbelievable, that it was hard to express—but they tried, tongues stumbling over words.
“I have always wondered if there could come a time when one could truly say, ‘This is a perfect moment, I am as happy as I could ever imagine or want to be’ … Now I know it is possible. This is that moment—” Blythe whispered.
It seemed so foolish to her now, all the uncertainty she had felt, thinking that Rod might have forgotten her, ceased to care about her and love her. How close they had both come to marrying someone else, to making the greatest mistake either of them could have made.
Blythe’s heart swelled with gratitude as she remembered the biblical prayer of Mizpah: “The Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from the other.” Surely the Lord had watched over her and Rod and brought them to this moment of reunion.