Chapter V: Beds and Button-Holes

How to fit in with the family life lived at the Morgan farmhouse was one of the puzzles of the new-comer. For the first time, Louise was in doubt how to pass her time, what to do with herself. Not that she had not enough to do. She was a young woman having infinite resources; she could have locked the door on the world downstairs, and, during her husband's absence in field or barn, have lived a happy life in her own world of reading, writing, sewing, planning. But the question was, would that be fulfilling the duties which the marriage covenant laid upon her? How, in that way, could she contribute to the general good of the family into which she had been incorporated, and which she had pledged herself before God to help to sustain? But, on the other hand, how should she set about contributing to the general good? Every avenue seemed closed.

After spending one day in comparative solitude, save the visits that her husband managed to pay, from time to time, to the front room upstairs, she, revolving the problem, lingered in the large kitchen the next morning, and, with pleasant face and kindly voice, said to Dorothy, "Let me help!" and essayed to assist in the work of clearing the family table—with what dire results!

Dorothy, thus addressed, seemed as affrighted as though an angel from heaven had suddenly descended before her and offered to wash the dishes; and she let slip, in her amazement, one end of the large platter, containing the remains of the ham, and a plentiful supply of ham gravy—which perverse stuff trickled and dripped, in zigzag lines, over the clean, coarse linen which covered the table. Dorothy's exclamation of dismay brought her mother quickly from the bedroom; and, then and there, she gave a short, sharp lecture on carelessness.

"What need had you to jump because you were spoken to?" she said, in severe sarcasm, to the blazing-cheeked Dorothy. "I saw you. One would think you had never seen anybody before, nor had a remark made to you. I would try to act a little more as though I had common sense if I were you. This makes the second clean table-cloth in a week! Now, go right away and wash the grease out, and scald yourself with boiling water to finish up the morning."

Then, to Louise: "She doesn't need your help; a girl who couldn't clear off a breakfast table alone, and wash up the dishes, would be a very shiftless sort of creature, in my opinion. Dorothy has done it alone ever since she was twelve years old. She isn't shiftless, if she does act like a dunce before strangers. I'm sure I don't know what has happened to her, to jump and blush in that way when she is spoken to; she never used to do it."

It was discouraging, but Louise, bent on "belonging" to this household, tried again.

"Well, mother, what can I do to help? Since I am one of the family I want to take my share of the duties. What shall be my work after breakfast? Come, now, give me a place in the home army, and let me look after my corner. If you don't, I shall go out to the barn and help father and Lewis!"

But Mrs. Morgan's strong, stern face did not relax; no smile softened the wrinkles or brightened the eyes.

"We have always got along without any help," she said—and her voice reminded Louise of the icicles hanging at that moment from the sloping roof above her window. "Dorothy and I managed to do pretty near all the work, even in summer time, and it would be queer if we couldn't now, when there is next to nothing to do. Your hands don't look as though you were used to work."

"Well, that depends," said Louise, looking down on the hands that were offending at this moment by their shapely whiteness and delicacy; "there are different kinds of work, you know. I have managed to live a pretty busy life. I don't doubt your and Dorothy's ability to do it all, but that isn't the point; I want to help; then we shall all get through the sooner, and have a chance for other kinds of work." She had nearly said "for enjoyment," but a glance at the face looking down on her changed the words.

Then they waited; the younger woman looking up at her mother-in-law with confident, resolute eyes, full of brightness, but also full of meaning; and the older face taking on a shade of perplexity, as if this were a phase of life which she had not expected, and was hardly prepared to meet.

"There's nothing in life, that I know of, that you could do," she said at last, in a slow, perplexed tone. "There's always enough things to be done; but Dorothy knows how, and I know how, and—"

"And I don't," interrupted Louise lightly. "Well, then, isn't it your bounden duty to teach me? You had to teach Dorothy, and I daresay she made many a blunder before she learned. I'll promise to be as apt as I can. Where shall we commence? Can't I go and dry those dishes for Dorothy?"

Mrs. Morgan shook her head promptly.

"She would break every one of 'em before you were through," she said grimly; "such a notion as she has taken of jumping, and choking, and spilling things! I don't know what she'll do next."

"Well, then, I'll tell you what I can do. Let me take care of John's room. Isn't that it just at the back of ours? I saw him coming from that door this morning. While you are at work down here, I can attend to that. May I?"

"Why, there's nothing to do to it," was Mrs. Morgan's prompt answer, "except to spread up the bed, and that takes Dorothy about three minutes. Besides, it is cold in there; you folks who are used to coddling over a fire would freeze to death. I never brought up my children to humour themselves in that way."

Louise, not wishing to enter into an argument concerning the advantages and disadvantages of warm dressing-rooms, resolved upon cutting this interview short.

"Very well, I shall spread up the bed then, if there is nothing else that I can do. Dorothy, remember that is my work after this. Don't you dare to take it away from me."

Lightly spoken, indeed, and yet with an undertone of decision in it that made Mrs. Morgan, senior, exclaim wrathfully, as the door closed after her daughter-in-law,—

"I do wish she would mind her own business! I don't want her poking around the house, peeking into places, under the name of 'helping!' As if we needed her help! We have got along without her for thirty years, and I guess we can do it now."

But Dorothy was still smarting under the sharpness of the rebuke administered to her in the presence of this elegant stranger, and did not in any way indicate that she heard her mother's comments, unless an extra bang of the large plate she was drying expressed her disapproval.

As for Louise, who will blame her that she drew a little troubled sigh as she ascended the steep staircase? And who will fail to see the connection between her thoughts and the action which followed? She went directly to an ebony box resting on her old-fashioned bureau, and drew from it a small velvet case, which, when opened, revealed the face of a middle-aged woman, with soft, silky hair, combed smooth, and wound in a knot underneath the becoming little breakfast cap, with soft lace lying in rich folds about a shapely throat, with soft eyes that looked out lovingly upon the gazer, with lips so tender and suggestive, that even from the picture they seemed ready to speak comforting words.

"Dear mother!" said Louise, and she pressed the tender lips again and again to hers. "'As one whom his mother comforteth.' Oh, I wonder if John could understand anything of the tenderness in that verse?" Then she held back the pictured face and gazed at it, and something in the earnest eyes and quiet expression recalled to her words of help and strength, and suggestions of opportunity; so that she closed the case, humming gently the old, strong-souled hymn, "A charge to keep I have," and went in search of broom, and duster, and sweeping-cap, and then penetrated to the depths of John's room; the development of Christian character in this young wife actually leading her to see a connection between that low-roofed back corner known as "John's room," and the call to duty which she had just sung—

"A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify."

What, through the medium of John's room! Yes, indeed. That seemed entirely possible to her. More than that, a glad smile and a look of eager desire shone in her face as she added the lines—

"A never-dying soul to save
And fit it for the sky."

What if—oh, what if the Lord of the vineyard had sent her to that isolated farmhouse to be the link in the chain of events which he designed to have end in the saving and fitting for glory of John Morgan's never-dying soul!

Possibly you would have thought it was a sudden descent into the prosaic, if you could have stepped with her into the low-roofed room. Can I describe to you its desolation, as it appeared to the eyes of the cultured lady? She stopped on the threshold, stopped her song, and gazed with a face of dismay! Bare-floored; the roof on the eastern side sloping down to within three feet of the floor; one western window, small-paned, curtainless; one wooden-seated chair, on which stood the inevitable candlestick, and the way in which the wick of the candle had been permitted to grow long and gutter down into the grease told a tale of dissipation of some sort indulged in the night before that would not fail to call out the stern disapproval of the watchful mother. There was not the slightest attempt at anything like appointments, unless an old-fashioned, twisted-legged stand that, despite its name, would not "stand" without being propped, having a ten-inch square glass hung over it, might be called an attempt. The bundle of very much twisted and tumbled bed-clothes in the corner, resting on the four-post bedstead, completed every suggestion of furniture which that long, low, dark room contained!

"Poor fellow!" said Louise, speaking her thoughts aloud, as the scene grew upon her. "Why shouldn't he 'give his father some troubled hours'? What else could they expect? How absolutely pitiful it is that this room and that downstairs kitchen are really the only places where the young man can spend a leisure hour! How has Lewis submitted to it?"

Yet, even as she spoke that last sentence, she felt the cold eyes, and remembered the stern mouth, of his mother, and realized that Lewis was powerless.

At the same moment I shall have to confess to you that the little new-comer into the home set her lips in a quiet, curious fashion that she had, which read to those well acquainted with her this sentence: "I shall not be powerless; see if I will." And, somehow, you couldn't help believing that she would not. She had a very curious time restoring order to that confused bed. It must be borne in mind that she had never before made up a chaff bed. The best quality of hair mattress had to do with all her experience of bed-making. This being the case, the initiated will not be surprised to hear that she tugged off the red and brown patchwork coverlet three times before she reduced that bed to the state of levelness which comported with her ideas. Then the pillows came in for their share of anxiety. They were so distressingly small! How did John manage with such inane, characterless affairs? She puffed them, and tossed them, and patted them, with all the skilled touches which a good bed-maker knows how to bestow, but to very little purpose. They were shrinking, shame-faced pillows still. The coarse factory sheet, not yet "bleached," was first made smooth, and then artistically rolled under the red and brown coverlet; and, while it looked direfully unlike what Louise would have desired, yet, when the whole was finished, even with such materials, the bed presented a very different appearance from what it did after undergoing Dorothy's "spreading up."

Then, when the sweeping was concluded, Louise stood and thought. What was to be done with that room? How much would she dare to do? She had determined to make no sort of change in her own room at present; she would not even change the position of the great old bedstead, though this was a sacrifice on her part only to be appreciated by those who are able, on their first entrance into a room, to see, by a sort of intuition, the exact spot where every article of furniture should be in order to secure the best effects, and to whom the ill arrangement is a positive pain. Louise had seen, even on her first entrance into her room, that the most awkward possible spot for the bedstead had been chosen; nevertheless she heroically left it there. But she looked with longing eyes on that twisted table in John's room. How she would have enjoyed selecting one of those strong, white, serviceable tidies, and overspreading the marred top with it, and placing there a book or two, and a perfume bottle, or some delicate knick-knack, to give the room a habitable air. For fully five minutes she stood shivering in the cold, trying to determine the important question. Then she resolutely shook her head, and said aloud, "No, it won't do; I must wait," and went downstairs with her dust-pan.

During her short absence the dishes had been whisked into their places, the kitchen made clean, and both mother and daughter were seated at their sewing. Mrs. Morgan eyed the trim figure in sweeping-cap and gloves, a broom and dust-pan in hand, with no approval in her glance.

"I should think you were a little too much dressed up for such work," she said, producing at last the thought which had been rankling for two days. This was Louise's opportunity.

"Oh no," she said pleasantly. "I am dressed just right for ordinary work. Why, mother, my dress cost less than Dorothy's; hers is part woollen, and mine is nothing but cotton."

This remark brought Dorothy's eyes from her work; and fixed them in admiring wonder on the well-dressed lady before her. Being utterly unacquainted with materials and grades of quality, and judging of dress only by its effects, it was like a bewildering revelation that the dress which to her looked elegant, cost less than her own. There flashed just then into her heart the possibility that some day she too might have something pretty.

Louise did not wait for her revelation to be commented upon, but drew nearer to the workers. Mrs. Morgan was sewing rapidly on a dingy calico for herself.

"Oh, let me make the button-holes," said, or rather exclaimed, the new daughter, as though it were to be counted a privilege. "I can make beautiful ones, and I always made mother's and Estelle's."

Now, it so happened that Mrs. Morgan, with all her deftness with the needle, and she had considerable, was not skilled in that difficult branch of needle-work, the making of button-holes. Moreover, though she considered it an element of weakness, and would by no means have acknowledged it, she hated the work with an absolute hatred, born of a feeling, strong in such natures as hers, of aversion toward anything which they cannot do as well, if not better, than others. The thought of securing well-made button-holes, over which she had not to struggle, came with a sense of rest to her soul, and she answered, more kindly than Louise had heard her speak before,—

"Oh, I don't want you to bother with my button-holes."

"I shall not," said Louise brightly. "Button-holes never bother me; I like to work them as well as some people like to do embroidery."

Then she went to the sink in the kitchen, and washed her hands in the bright tin basin, and dried them on the coarse, clean family towel. Presently she came, thimble and needle-case in hand, and established herself on one of the yellow wooden chairs, to make button-holes in the dingy calico; and, with the delicate stitches in those button-boles, she worked an entrance-way into her mother-in-law's heart.