A new name

by Grace Livingston Hill

Murray’s heart gave a strange lurch. Nobody had ever spoken to him like that. Love, except in a tawdry form, had never come his way, unless his father’s gruffness and continual fault-finding might be called love. It certainly had been well disguised so that he had never thought of it in that light. It had rather seemed to him, when he thought about it at all, that he stood to his father more in the light of an obligation than anything else. His mother’s love had been too self-centred and too peevish to interest him. There had been teachers occasionally who had been fond of him, but their interest had passed when he used them to slide out of school work. There had been a nurse in his babyhood that he barely remembered, who used to comfort him when he was hurt or sleepy, and sometimes when he was sick cuddle him in her arms as if she cared for him, but that was so very far away. He had sometimes watched the look between Bessie Chapparelle and her mother when he would be there playing games of an evening with the little girl, a look that had made him think of the word love; but that also was far away and very painful now to think about. Strange how one’s thoughts will snatch a bit from every part of one’s life and blend them together in an idea which takes but an instant to grasp, just as a painter will take a snatch of this and a dab of that color and blend them all into a tint, with no hint of the pink or the blue, or the black, or the yellow, or the white, that may have gone to form it, making just a plain gray cloud. Murray was doing more thinking these last few days than he had ever done in the whole of his life before. Life, as it were, was painting pictures on his mind, wonderful living truths that he had never seen before were flashing on the canvas of his brain, made up of the facts of his past life which at the time had passed over him unnoticed. He had gone from his cradle like one sliding down-hill and taking no note of the landscape. But he found now that he had suddenly reached the bottom of the hill, and had to climb up (if indeed he might ever attain to any heights again), that he knew every turning of the way he had come, and wondered how he could have been unheeding before. It occurred to him that this phenomenon might be called “growing up.” Trouble had come and he had grown up. Life had turned back on him and slapped him in the face, and he began to see things in life, now he had lost them, that he had not even recognized before.

As he slipped his arm through the big basket and stood waiting for Mrs. Summers to decide whose cake-pan the big square aluminum one was, he looked wistfully about him on the disarray of tables, a kind of hungering in his heart to come here again and feast and bask in the cheery comforting atmosphere. Good and sweet and wholesome it all was, a sort of haven for his weary soul that was condemned to plod on throughout his days without a place for his foot to remain, forevermore. He had a strange, tired feeling in his throat as if he would like to cry, like a child who has come to the end of the good time, and whose bubbles are broken and vanished. There would be no more bubbles for him any more. The bowl of soap-suds was broken.

And so as they walked toward the little cottage with its gleaming light awaiting them from the dining-room window he felt strangely sad and lonely, and he wished with all his heart that he might walk in and be this woman’s boy. If only he could be born again into her home and claim her as his mother, and take the place as her son and be a new man, with all his past forgotten! He thought—poor soul, he had not yet learned the subtlety of sin, the frailty of human nature—he thought if he could be in this environment, with such people about him, such a home to come to, and such a mother to love him, he could learn to fit it. If it hadn’t been for the possibility of the other man coming he would have dared to try it and keep up his masquerade.

XI

He helped her unpack the basket and put her things away, and he gave a wistful look about the pretty cosey room. He had never supposed there were homes like this anywhere. There was nothing formal about the place, and yet there were bits of fine old furniture, pictures, and bric-à-brac that spoke of travel and taste. It just seemed a place where one would like to linger, and where home had been impressed upon everything about like a lovely monogram worked into the very fabric of it.

“Now,” said Mrs. Summers as she whirled about from the cake-box, where she had been bestowing a dozen lovely frosted sponge cakes that had been left over and she had bought, “you must get to bed! I know you are all worn out, and you’ve got to be on hand early tomorrow morning. What time did Mr. Harper say he wanted you at the bank? Was it nine o’clock? I thought so. So I won’t keep you up but a minute more, I thought it would be nice if we just had a bit of a prayer together this first night, and a verse. I always like a verse for a pillow to sleep on, don’t you? Even if it is late. Will you read or shall I?” and she held out a little limp-covered book that looked, like everything else in the house, as if it had been used lovingly and often.

“Oh, you!” gasped Murray embarrassedly, looking at the book as if it had been a toad suddenly lifting its head in the way, and wondering what strange new ceremony now was being thrust at him. There seemed no end to the queer things they did in this pleasant, unusual place. Take that thing they called “blessing,” and was a prayer! It was like that book his nurse used to read him in his childhood, called “Alice in Wonderland.” You never knew what you would be called upon to do next before you could eat or sleep. Did they do these things all the time, every day, or just once in a while, when they were initiating some new member? It must be a great deal of trouble to them to keep it up every day, and must take up a good deal of time.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Summers. “You sit in that big chair, and I’ll just read a little bit where I left off last night.”

They did it every night, then! Like massaging one’s face and putting on night garments, as his mother always did, lovely gauzy things with floating scarfs like wings. This must be a sort of massaging for the soul.

He settled down in the comfortable chair and watched the white fingers of the lady flutter open the leaves of the book, familiarly and lovingly.