“We will make it come right,” he said, decidedly. “And now I will leave you to rest a little, while I go down and discover whether this house is inhabited to-day.”
With the door closing after him seemed to go much of Ruth’s courage. This exquisite room was a rest to her beauty-loving eyes and heart. But it contrasted most strangely with the life below stairs; and, when she thought of that room below, it reminded her of all there was yet to meet and endure, and of the newness of the way, and the untried experiments which were to be made, and of her own weakness—and her heart trembled, and almost failed her. Yet it must not fail her; she must get strength.
Well for Ruth that she knew in what place to seek it. Instead of taking a seat in the delicately-carved and gracefully-upholstered easy-chair, which invited her into its depths, she turned and knelt before it. Perhaps, after all, there are more dangerous experiences than those which, in coming to a new home, to take up new responsibilities, lead us to feel our utter weakness, and bring us on our knees, crying to the strong for strength.
Judge Burnham’s entrance, nearly an hour afterward, found Ruth resting quietly in that easy chair, such a calm on her face, and such a light in her eyes, that he stopped on the threshold, and regarded her with a half-pleased, half-awed expression, as he said:
“You look wonderfully rested! I think my easy chair must be a success. Will you come down now, to a farm-house supper? Please don’t see any more of the strange things than you can help. I tried to get the girls to come up, and so avoid some of the horrors of a meeting below stairs; but they are too thoroughly alarmed to have any sense at all, and I had to abandon that plan.”
“Poor things!” said Ruth, compassionately. “Am I so very formidable? It must be dreadful to feel frightened at people. I can’t imagine the feeling.”
He surveyed her critically, then laughed. He had some conception of what a vision she would be to the people down-stairs. She had not changed her travelling dress, which was of rich dark silk, fitted exquisitely to her shapely form, and the soft laces at throat and wrist, brightened only by a knot of ribbon of the most delicate tint of blue, completed what, to Judge Burnham’s cultured taste, seemed the very perfection of a toilet.
“You do not frighten me,” he said. “I can manage to look at you without being overwhelmed. I shall not answer for anybody else. Ruth, I have obeyed you to the very letter. In a fit of something very like vexation, I resolved not to lift a finger to change the customs of the house, leaving you to see them, according to your desire, as they were. The result is we haven’t even a table to ourselves, to-night. The whole of that insufferable family, cat and all, are ready to gather, with us, around their hospitable board. I am sorry, now, that I was so very literal in my obedience.”
“I am not,” Ruth said, and her tone was quiet, and had a sound in it which was not there when he left her. It served to make him regard her again, curiously.
Then they went down-stairs to the kitchen! Ruth was presently seated at the long table, alarmingly near to the stove which had cooked the potatoes that graced the evening meal—boiled potatoes, served in their original coats! to be eaten with two-tined steel forks, the same forks expected to do duty in the mastication of a huge piece of peach-pie!—unless, indeed, she did as her husband’s daughters were evidently accustomed to doing, and ate it with her knife. There were, at that table, Farmer Ferris, in his shirt-sleeves, himself redolent of the barn and the cow-house; his wife, in a new, stiff, blue and red plaid calico, most manifestly donned to do honor to the occasion; two boys, belonging to the Ferris household, in different degrees of shock-headed, out-at-the-elbow disorder, and the aforesaid apparition in pink calico, the gray cat still hugged to her heart, and eating milk from the same saucer, at intervals; and, lastly, the two daughters of the House of Burnham.