Chapter XX: Clouds

I HAVE been tempted to linger over these first weeks connected with Louise Morgan's home-coming in order that you might get a clear view of the surroundings and a true idea of the family life. Now, however, I shall have to take you away into the spring. The long, cold, busy winter, with its cares and opportunities, had passed away, and the buds and blossoms, foretelling of the coming summer, had begun to appear on every hand.

Many changes, subtle and sweet and strong, had been going on in the Morgan household. Dorothy had held steadily on her course; the first lesson in her Christian experience being ever present with her, that in the very smallest matters of life her light might shine for Christ. She was learning the important lesson to be "faithful over a few things." Little realized she the importance of this faithfulness. Not an idea had she of the number of times in which the mother had regarded her curiously, as she looked in vain for careless ways or forgotten duties, and admitted to herself that "something had come over Dorothy, and she only hoped it would last." Oh yes, it would last. Dorothy believed that. She had anchored her soul after the first hours of unrest on the sure promise of His "sufficient grace," and had no idea of doubting him. Not much outside work had she been able to take up. Yet, little by little, came changes. Carey Martyn was full of schemes.

"See here, let us do thus and so," was a favourite phrase of his, and he was growing more and more fond of saying it to Dorothy.

The bright curtains in the parlour had not been taken down again; the old-fashioned sofa still held its place in the coziest corner; and now that the sun was getting around the corner, peeping in at the pleasantest window, the room took a still more cheery look, and Dorothy had fallen into the habit of touching a match to the carefully laid fire almost every evening just after tea, and one by one the different members of the family dropped in.

The long-neglected old-fashioned brass knocker often sounded during these days. People who had never called on the Morgans, chiefly because of the fear that they would be coldly received, began to discover that Mrs. Lewis Morgan was a very pleasant woman, very glad to see her friends; and the mother was not so disagreeable as they had supposed; and, "really, that shy, silent Dorothy had improved wonderfully."

Thus it was when the spring opened, only a few months since the new-comer's first entrance; and nothing very remarkable, so far as outward eyes could see, had transpired, and yet in a hundred little ways things were different.

But on this particular May morning when I bring you into the family circle the prevailing atmosphere was gloom.

In the first place it rained—a soft, sweet spring rain, when the buds swell, and leaves almost seem to increase in size while you watch, and the spring flowers nod at one another, and the world, though in tears, seems to the happy heart to be keeping holiday. Yet, as Louise Morgan stood at her window and watched the dripping eaves, and listened to the patter on the roof, and saw the low gray clouds sail by, a rainy day seemed to her a dreary thing.

The truth was, the Morgan family were in trouble. During these passing months Louise and her husband, reinforced by Dorothy, and afterward by Carey Martyn, had carried John Morgan about on their hearts as special subject of constant prayer. Louise had been often eager, persistent, steadfast for a soul before; yet it seemed to her that the desire had never been so intense as in this instance; and as she looked over the past, it seemed to her that she had never had so little encouragement. From the time when she took that walk home with him in the moonlight, and tried to speak earnest words, John Morgan had seemed to withdraw more utterly into himself. He carefully avoided Louise; he refused, positively, all invitations to attend church on the Sabbath. He plainly informed Lewis that he was wasting words in trying to talk religion at him, and might consider himself honourably excused from any such attempts; and to Dorothy, who, with tearful eyes and trembling lips, said simply to him one night in the darkness, "O John, won't you give yourself to Jesus?" he unceremoniously and roughly answered, "Shut up."

In every respect John had seemed, during the last few months, to travel rapidly backward. The corner grocery now saw him more frequently than ever before; indeed, almost every evening, late into the night, was passed there. The smell of tobacco and of liquor lingered more constantly now about his clothing, and pervaded the atmosphere of his room. In vain did Louise struggle to keep that room pure. Gradually it had changed its outward appearance. Christmas and Now Year, and then John's birthday, had been helpful anniversaries to her plans. The bed was spread in spotless white; the twisted-leg stand had its scratched and pointless top concealed under a white and delicately crocheted tidy; a little rocker occupied the corner by the window, with a bright-coloured tidy fastened securely to its back. The space between the hall door and the clothes-press was occupied by a neat toilet-stand, with all the convenient accessories of the toilet carefully disposed on it; the walls were hung with two or three choice engravings and an illuminated text; and on the white-covered stand there daily blossomed, in a small pure vase, a rose, or a bunch of lilies of the valley, or a spray of delicate wild flower—some sweet-breathed treasure from the woods or garden, which struggled with the tobacco-scented air—placed there by Louise's tasteful fingers.

Once she ventured on a gift in the shape of a nicely-bound Bible, containing John's name and her own on the fly-leaf, and she made a place for it on the white-covered stand; but found that the very next morning it had been placed on the highest shelf in the clothes-press along with a pile of old agricultural papers that reposed there from one house-cleaning to another. All of these patient little efforts had been greeted hitherto with nothing but frowns or sneers or total indifference.

John Morgan seemed to have deliberately determined to ruin his prospects for this life and the next, and to forbid any one to hold him back. Yet they did not give him up, these four. The more hopeless the case seemed to grow, the more steadily did they try to hold their grasp on the arm of power.

But on this rainy morning of which I write, not one of the four but had been plunged into more or less anxiety and gloom. Apparently, not only had all their efforts failed, but the subject of them had resolved to remove himself from all further influence or molestation from them. The threat that he had often and often made, to leave his home and go where he pleased, he had now determined to put into execution. A week before he had suddenly and fiercely announced his decision, and no amount of persuasion had effected the least change. He was indifferent alike to his father's advice or threats.

"You needn't give me a copper if you haven't a mind to," he had said sullenly during one of the stormy talks. "I'll risk but that I can take care of myself. I can beg or can drown myself, if I feel like it. Anyhow, I'm going, and there's no kind of use in talking."

"But where are you going?" pleaded the mother.

One less indifferent than John could not have failed to notice that her face was pale and her voice husky with pent-up feeling.

"Just exactly where I like, and nowhere else. If I knew where that was I might tell you, but I don't. I never did as I pleased an hour since I was born, and I mean to do it now."

What was the use of talking to one in such a mood? Yet they talked, and argued, and threatened, and used sharp words, and bitter words, and words that were calculated to leave life-long scars on hearts; and the talks were frequently renewed, and lasted away into the midnight; and at last John had declared that he would not stand this sort of thing another hour, and he would not take any money—not a copper of it, even if it was offered; and he would not take his clothes along—not a rag.

"You can sell them to the first rag-man that comes along, and build another barn with their value, for all I care," he said to his father, in a pitiful attempt at sarcasm.

And then, without another word or a glance at his mother or a pretence at good-bye, he strode out of the room, closing the door after him with a bang. That was the evening before, just at supper-time, and though his mother did that night what she had never done before in her life—put some of the supper down, carefully covered to keep warm for John—he came not. The next morning's milking was done without him, and as the long rainy day waned it became evident to each heart that John was gone.

Now I have not told you the worst of this. For the past week the mother's heart had been wrung with such anxiety that she had humbled herself in a manner that she, a few days before, would not have imagined possible. She had followed Louise one morning up to her room, coming with slow and doubtful tread, closing the door after her, and looking behind her in a half-frightened way, as if to be sure that there were no other listeners to her humiliation than this one, and had said to Louise, catching her breath while she spoke,—

"You know how I feel about John. I have heard you talk about praying over everything; if you believe that it does any good, why don't you pray to have him kept at home?"

"Mother," said Louise, coming close to her, taking the hard old hand in hers, "I do pray for him, every hour in the day, almost every minute it seems to me, and I believe it will do good; I believe He will hear our prayer. But there is no one who could pray for John as his mother could. I do so desire to have his mother's prayers infold him like a garment. Won't you pray for him?"

"I'm not a praying woman," said Mrs. Morgan, trying to keep her voice steady. "Still, if I believed in it as you do, I would pray now if I never did again."

Then she turned and went swiftly away. She had actually humbled her proud heart to ask her daughter-in-law to pray for John! She could not get away from the feeling that Louise's prayers would be likely to avail if any would. More than that—but this at the time was known only to her own heart, and to the One who reads the heart—in the silence and darkness of her own room, after Nellie was asleep, and before Farmer Morgan had drawn the last bolt preparatory to coming to his bed, she had got down on her knees and had offered what, in her ignorance, she thought was prayer. "O God," she said, "if thou hearest human beings in their need, hear me, and keep John from going away." There was no submission in her heart to the divine will, no reference to the name which is the only name by which we can approach God, no realization of anything save John's peril and a blind reaching out after some hand that had power. Yet it was a nearer approach to prayer than that mother had made for fifty years!

Neither could she help a feeling, which she told herself was probably superstition, that something somehow would prevent John from carrying out his designs. Yet the days went by, and no unseen arm stretched out its hand of power to arrest John. Instead, the rainy day wore on with the feeling settling down hopelessly on the mother's heart that her son had gone from her with hard words on his lips, and with the echo of hard words from her sounding in his heart. For, so strange a thing is this human heart, Mrs. Morgan had actually never seemed more hard or cold to her son than she did during the week that her heart was torn with anxiety for him.

But I have not told you the worst of this. The days moved on, and it became evident to all that John had carried out his threat and was gone. Then the mother's grief and dismay found vent in hard and cruel words. She turned in bitterness from Louise, yes, and from Dorothy, indeed from every one. To Louise she said plainly it was not strange that John had wanted to get away; she had given him no peace since she had been there; always tormenting him to go to church or to prayer-meeting, or to do something that he did not want to do. For her part, she did not see but he was quite as good as those who were always running off to meeting. He could not even have any peace in his own room; it must be cluttered up with rubbish that any man hated—vases to tip over, and tidies to torment him!

And she flung the tidies on a chair in Louise's room, and folded and packed away the cover which she said she had been "fooled into buying," and restored every corner of that little hall chamber to its original dreariness. And, worse than all, she declared that she hoped and trusted she would hear no more cant about prayers in that house. She had not been able to see for many a year that the kind of praying that was being done in these days accomplished any good.

To Dorothy she declared that if she had had the spirit of a mouse she might have exerted herself, as other girls did, to make a pleasant spot for her brother; that she had never tried to please him in anything, not even the mending of his mittens when he wanted them; she would rather dawdle over the fire roasting apples with Carey Martyn than give any thought to her own brother.

Now all this was bitterness itself to poor Dorothy, whose own heart reproached her for having been so many years indifferent to her brother's welfare, but who had honestly tried with all the force of her heart to be pleasant and helpful to John ever since she had been doing anything from a right motive.

Neither did Mrs. Morgan spare her husband. She would not have let a boy like that go off without a penny in his pocket, she said,—no, not if she had to sell all the stock to get him ready money. He had as good a right to money as Lewis ever had, and he had been tied down to the five barns all his life. No wonder he ran away. He showed some spirit, and she was glad he had.

Do you suppose Farmer Morgan endured this in silence? Not he. And sharp words grow sharper, and bitter feelings ran high, until the once quiet kitchen was transformed into a Babel of angry words, and poor Louise could only go away and weep.

But I have not told you the worst of this: actually the worst was in this Christian woman's own sore heart. The awful question, "Why?" had crept in and was tormenting her soul. She had been sincere in her prayers; she had been honest in her desires; she had been unwavering in her petitions. Why had God permitted this disastrous thing to come? Had she not tried—oh had she not tried with sincere desire ever since she came into this home to live Christ in it? Why, then, had she been allowed to so utterly fail? Would it not be to God's glory to save John Morgan's soul? Was it not evident that through him the mother might possibly be reached? Was it not perfectly evident that John, at home, under her influence and Lewis's and Dorothy's, would be in less danger than away among strangers, wandering whither he would? Was it not perfectly evident that this conclusion to their prayers had caused Mrs. Morgan to lose faith in prayer—to grow harder and harder in her feelings toward God and toward Christians? Why was all this allowed?

She had prayed in faith—or, at least, she had supposed she had; she had felt almost sure that God would answer her prayer. She had said to Dorothy, only the night before John went away—said it with steady voice and a smile in her eye—"I don't believe John will go away; I don't think God will let him go."

And Dorothy, half-startled, had answered: "O Louise, I don't mean to be irreverent, but I don't understand. How can God keep him from going, if he will go?"

And Louise, smiling outright now, so sure was she of her trust, had answered: "I don't know, dear; he has infinite resources; I only know that I believe he will do it."

Now what had become of her faith? It grieves my heart to have to confess to you that this young servant of Christ, who had felt his "sufficient grace" in her own experience again and again, allowed Satan to stand at her elbow and push before her that persistent and faithless "Why?"

It was that word in all its changes which was crowding into her heart, on that May morning, as she looked out at the dripping eaves and the leaden clouds.