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."