"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.