"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.
