Chapter III: Introduced

Now Louise, despite all her previous knowledge of the Morgan family, had done just as people are always doing—planned their reception at the old homestead quite after the manner of life to which she had been accustomed, instead of arranging things from the Morgan standpoint. In imagination, she had seen her husband folded in his mother's arms, his bearded face covered with motherly kisses. "It is not reasonable to suppose that she will care to kiss me," she had said to herself, "but I will give her one little, quiet kiss, to show her how dear Lewis's mother is to me, and then I will keep myself in the background for the first evening. They will be so glad to get Lewis back that they will not have room for much notice of me."

Kisses! Hardly anything could be more foreign to Mother Morgan's life than those. It was actually years since she had kissed her grown-up son. She held out her hard old hand to him, and her heart beat quickly, and she felt a curious tremble all over her that she would have been ashamed to own, but with a mighty effort she controlled her voice, and said—

"Well, so you have got back safe, with all your rampaging around the world; I should think you had had enough of it. And this is your wife?"

And then Louise had felt the quick grasp and release of her hand, and had not realized the heart-beats; and Lewis had shaken hands with his father and his sister Dorothy, and had said—

"Father, this is my wife."

And the premature old man, with the premature gray hairs standing up over his head, had nodded to her, without even a hand-clasp, and said—

"I'm glad you are safe at home. You must be tired out; travelling is worse than ploughing all day. I never could see why folks who hadn't got to do it should take journeys."

And this was the home-coming! Two nights before, they had been in the old home, stopping there over night, after a two weeks' absence in another direction. How the mother had clasped her to her heart and cried over her! How the father had called her his "precious daughter," and wondered, with a quiver in his lips and a tremble in his voice, how they could let her go again! How Estelle—bright, beautiful, foolish Estelle—had hugged and caressed and rejoiced over her darling sister! What a contrast it was! It all came over her just then, standing alone in the centre of that yellow painted floor—the tremendous, the far-reaching, the ever-developing contrast between the home that had vanished from her sight and the new home to which she had come. She felt a strange, choking sensation, as if a hand were grasping at her throat; the dim light in the tallow candle gleamed and divided itself into many sparks, and seemed swinging in space; and but for a strong and resolute determination to do no such thing, the bride would have made her advent into the Morgan household a thing of vivid memory, by fainting away!

"Lewis!" called a soft, timid voice from somewhere in the darkness. Looking out at them from that bedroom door, poor little Nellie, with her shining eyes and her beating heart, could endure it no longer; and although frightened at her boldness, and dipping her yellow head under the sheet the minute the word was out, she had yet spoken that one low, eager word.

"O Nellie!" Lewis had exclaimed. "Are you awake? Louise, come and see Nellie."

Indeed she would; nothing in life looked so inviting to his young wife at that moment as the darkness and comparative solitude of that inner room. But Lewis had seized the tallow candle as he went—Dorothy, meantime, having roused sufficiently to produce another one; and as Louise followed him she caught a glimpse of the shining eyes and the yellow curls. A whole torrent of pent-up longing for home and love and tenderness flowed out in the kisses which were suddenly lavished on astonished little Nellie, as Louise nestled her head in the bed-clothes and gathered the child to her arms.

"She looks like you, Lewis," was the only comment she made; and Lewis laughed and flushed like a girl, and told his wife she was growing alarmingly complimentary; and Nellie looked from one to the other of them with great, earnest, soulful eyes, and whispered to Lewis that she "loved her almost as much as she did him!" with a long-drawn breath on the word "almost" that showed the magnitude of the offering at the shrine of his new wife. On the whole, it was Nellie that sweetened the memory of the home-coming, and stayed the tears that might have wet Louise Morgan's pillow that night.

As for John, he stayed in the barn, as he had planned, until the new-comers were fairly out of sight above stairs.

"He is a queer fellow," explained Lewis to his wife, as they went about their own room. "I hardly know how to take him. I don't think I have ever understood his character; I doubt if anybody does. He is pent-up; there is no getting at his likes or dislikes, and yet he has strong feelings. He has given my father a good many anxious hours already; and sometimes I fear there are many more in store for him from the same source."

And Lewis sighed. Already the burden of home life was dropping on him.

Louise was by this time so divided between the sense of loneliness that possessed her and the sense of curiosity over every article in and about her room, that she could not give to John the interest which the subject demanded. It was utterly unlike any room that she had ever seen before. A brilliant carpet, aglow with alternate stripes of red and green, covered the floor. Louise looked at it with mingled feelings of curiosity and wonder. How had it been made, and where? How did it happen that she had never seen a like pattern before? It did not occur to her that it was home-made; and if it had, she would not have understood the term. The two windows to the room were shaded with blue paper, partly rolled, and tied with red cord. There was a wood fire burning in a stove, which snapped, and glowed, and lighted up the strange colours and fantastic figures of the wall-paper; there were two or three old-fashioned chairs, comfortable, as all old-fashioned chairs are; and there was a high-post bedstead, curtained at its base by what Louise learned to know was a "valance," though what its name or use she could not on this evening have told. The bed itself was a marvel of height; it looked to the bewildered eyes of the bride as though they might need the services of a step-ladder to mount it; and it was covered with a tulip bed-quilt! This also was knowledge acquired at a later date. What the strangely-shaped masses of colour were intended to represent she had not the slightest idea. There was a very simple toilet-table, neatly covered with a towel, and its appointments were the simplest and commonest. A high, wide, deep-drawered bureau, and a pine-framed mirror, perhaps a foot wide and less than two feet long, completed the furnishings, save a couple of patchwork footstools under the windows.

Lewis set down the candlestick, which he had been holding aloft, on the little toilet-table, and surveyed his wife with a curious, half-laughing air, behind which was hidden an anxious, questioning gaze.

"My mother has an intense horror of the new invention known as kerosene," was his first explanatory sentence, with a comical side glance toward the blinking candle.

"Kerosene!" said Louise absently, her thoughts in such confusion that she could not pick them out and answer clearly. "Doesn't she like gas?" And then the very absurdity of her question brought her back to the present, and she looked up quickly in her husband's face, and, struggling with the pent-up tears, burst instead into a low, sweet, ringing laugh, which laugh he joined in and swelled until the low ceilings might almost have shaken over their mirth.

"Upon my word, I don't know what we are laughing at," he said at last: "but she is a brave little woman to laugh, and I'm thankful to be able to join her;" and he pushed one of the patchwork footstools over to where she had sunk on the other and sat down beside her.

"It is all as different as candle-light from sunlight, isn't it? That blinking little wretch over there on the stand furnished me with a simile. I haven't done a thing to this room, mainly because I didn't know what to do. I realized the absurdity of trying to put city life into it, and I didn't know how to put anything into it; I thought you would. In fact, I don't know but it fits country life. It has always seemed to me to be a nice, pleasant home room, but—well—well, the simple truth is, Louise, there is something the matter with it all, now that you are in it,—it doesn't fit you; but you will know how to repair it, will you not?" An anxious look was in his eyes, there was almost a tremble in his voice, the laughter had gone out of them so soon. It nerved Louise to bravery.

"We will not rearrange anything to-night," she said brightly; "we are too tired for planning. That great bed is the most comfortable thing I can think of; if we can only manage to get into it. What makes it so high, Lewis?"

Whereupon he laughed again, and she joined, laughing in that immoderate, nervous way in which people indicate that the laughter, hilarious as it appears, is but one remove from tears. And it was thus that the first evening under the new home-roof was spent.

John, coming from his hiding-place and going in stocking feet up the stairs, heard the outburst, and, curling his sour-looking lip, muttered: "They feel very fine over it; I hope it will last."

And the poor fellow had not the remotest idea that it would. Boy that he was, John Morgan was at war with life: he believed that it had ill-treated him; that to his fortunate elder brother had fallen all the joy, and to him all the bitterness. He was jealous because of the joy. He was not sure but he almost hated his brother's wife. Her low, clear laugh, as it rang out to him, sounded like mockery: he could almost make his warped nature believe that she was laughing at him, though she had never seen, perhaps never heard of him. If she had seen his face at that moment, doubtless her thoughts would have been of him; as it was, they revolved around the Morgan family.

"What about your sister Dorothy?" she asked her husband, diving into the bewilderments of the large trunk, in search of her toilet case.

"Dorothy is a good, warm-hearted girl, who has no—well—" and then he stopped; he did not know how to finish his sentence. It would not do to say she had no education, for she had been the best scholar in their country school, and during her last winter was reported to have learned all that the master could teach her.

She had been disappointed, it is true, that he had not known more; and Lewis had been disappointed, because he wanted her to go on, or go elsewhere, and get—what? He did not know how to name it. Something that his wife had to her very finger-tips, and something that Dorothy had not a trace of. What was the name of it? Was it to be learned from books? At least he had wanted her to try, and she had been willing enough, but Farmer Morgan had not.

"She has book-learning enough for a farmer's daughter," he had said sturdily. "She knows more about books now than her mother ever did; and if she makes one-half as capable a woman, she will be ahead of all the women there are nowadays."

So Dorothy had packed away her books, and settled down at her churning and baking and dish-washing; she took it quietly, patiently. Lewis did not know whether the disappointment was very great or not; in truth he knew very little about her. Of late he had known almost nothing of home, until within the last year failing health and the necessity for outdoor life had changed all his plans and nearly all his hopes in life.

Louise waited for a completion of the unfinished sentence, but her husband seemed unable to add to it. He bent over the valise and gave himself to the business of unpacking, with a puzzled air, as though he were trying to solve a problem that eluded him. His wife tried again.

"Lewis, why is she not a Christian?"

Now, indeed, he dropped the coat that he was unrolling, and, rising up, gave the questioner the full benefit of his troubled eyes. He was under the impression that he was pretty well acquainted with his wife; yet she certainly had the fashion of asking the most strange-sounding questions, perplexing to answer, and yet simple and straightforward enough in their tone.

"Why is it?" he repeated. "I do not know; my dear Louise, how could I know?"

"Well, doesn't it seem strange that a young lady, in this age of the world, surrounded by Christian influences, should go on year after year without settling that question?"

Her husband's answer was very thoughtfully given. "It seems exceedingly strange when I hear you speak of it, but I do not know that I ever thought of it in that sense before."

Then the unpacking went on in silence for a few minutes, until Louise interrupted it with another question.

"Lewis, what does she say when you talk with her about these matters? What line of reasoning does she use?"

It was so long before she received an answer that she turned from her work in surprise to look at him; then he spoke.

"Louise, I never said a word to her on this subject in my life. And that seems stranger to you than anything else?" he added at last, his voice low and with an anxious touch in it.

She smiled on him gently. "It seems a little strange to me, Lewis, I shall have to own; but I suppose it is different with brothers and sisters from what it is when two are thrown together constantly as companions. I have no brother, you know."

Do you know what Lewis thought of then? His brother John.