Chapter VI: A New Service for the Sabbath

"AT what hour do you have to start for church?"

This was the question which Louise asked of her husband on Saturday evening, as she moved about their room making preparations for the next morning's toilet.

"Well," he said, "it is three miles, you know. We make an effort to get started by about half-past nine, though sometimes we are late. It makes hurrying work on Sunday morning, Louise. I don't know how you will like that."

"I shouldn't think there would be room in one carriage for all the family. Is there?"

"Room for all who go," Lewis said gravely.

"All who go! why, they all go to church, don't they?"

"Why, no; in fact, they never all go at one time; they cannot leave the house, you know."

Louise's bewildered look proved that she did not know.

"Why not?" she asked, with wonderment in tone and eyes. "What will happen to the house?"

Despite a desire not to do so, her husband was obliged to laugh.

"Well," he said hesitatingly, "you know they never leave a farmhouse alone and go to church."

"I didn't know it, I am sure. Why don't they?"

"I declare I don't know," and he laughed again. "Possibly it is a notion; there are ugly-looking fellows prowling around sometimes, and—well, it's the custom, anyhow."

"Don't they ever close the house and all go away?"

Then was Lewis Morgan nonplussed. Distinct memories rose before his eyes of Good Fridays and Christmas days, and gala days of several sorts, when the house had been closed and darkened, and left to itself from early morning late into the afternoon. How was he to explain why a thing that was feasible for holidays became impracticable on the Sabbath?

"I'm not sure but that is one of the things that 'no f-f-fellow can f-f-find out,'" he said, with a burst of laughter. "Do you know 'Lord Dundreary'?" Then: "Seriously, Louise, our family has fallen into the custom that obtains of not closing a farmhouse save on special occasions. I suspect the custom sometimes grows out of indifference for church. You remember that none of the family have a real love for the service. It is a source of sorrow to me, as you may suppose. I hope for better things."

Then the talk drifted away into other channels; but in Louise's heart there lingered a minor tone of music over the thought that the next day would be the Sabbath. Shut away, for the first time in her life, from the prayer-meeting, from the hour of family worship, from constant and pleasant interchange of thought on religious themes, she felt a hunger for it all such as she had never realized before, and closed her eyes that night with this refrain in her heart, "To-morrow I shall go to church."

The first conscious sound the next morning was the dripping of the rain-drops from the eaves.

"Oh dear!" Lewis said, dismay in his voice. "We are going to have a rainy day!"

A careful, critical look at the prospect from the eastern window confirmed this opinion, and he repeated it with a gloomy face, adding,—

"I don't know when the weather has succeeded in disappointing me so much before."

"Never mind," Louise said cheerily. "It will not make much difference. I don't mind the rain. I have a rainy day suit, that mamma used to call my coat of mail. It is impervious to all sorts of weather; and, with your rubber coat, and a good-sized umbrella, we shall do almost as well as though the sun shone."

But her husband's face did not brighten.

"It is not personal inconvenience that I fear for you," he said gravely, "but disappointment. The truth is, Louise, I am afraid we can't go to church. This looks like a persistent storm, and my father has such a love for his horses, and such a dread of their exposure to these winter storms, that he never thinks of getting them out in the rain unless it is absolutely necessary; and you know he doesn't consider church-going an absolutely necessary thing. Could you bear to be disappointed, and stay at home with me all day?"

"Why, yes," said Louise slowly, trying to smile over those two words, "with me." "That is, if it is right. But, Lewis, it seems so strange a thing to do, to stay at home from church all day on account of a little rain that would hardly keep us from a shopping excursion."

"I know, looking at it from your standpoint it must seem very strange; but all the education of my home has been so different that I do not suppose it even seems as strange to me as to you. Still I by no means approve; and, as soon as I can make arrangements for a horse of my own, we will not be tried in this way. Indeed, Louise, I can manage it now. Of course, if I insist on it, my father will yield the point, but he will offer very serious objection. What do you think? Would it be right to press the question against his will?"

"Certainly not," his wife said hastily. "At least," she added, with a bright smile, "I don't suppose the command to obey one's parents is exactly annulled by the marriage service. Anyhow, the 'honour thy father and thy mother' never is."

And she put aside her church toilet, and made her preparations to do that which was to her an unprecedented thing—stay at home from church in full health and strength.

The question once settled that, under the circumstances, it was the proper thing to do, it was by no means a disagreeable way of spending Sabbath morning. Her husband had been so constantly occupied since their home-coming in carrying out his father's plans for improvements on the farm, that Louise had seen but little of him; and when, after breakfast, they returned to their own room, and he, in dressing-gown and slippers, replenished the crackling wood fire, and opened the entire front of the old-fashioned stove, letting the glow from it brighten the room, Louise admitted that the prospect was most inviting.

She drew in her own little rocker, which had travelled with her from her room at home, and settled beside him, book in hand, for a delightful two hours of social communion, such as they had not enjoyed for weeks before.

The reading and the talking that went on in that room, on that rainy Sabbath morning, were looked back to afterward as pleasant hours to be remembered. Occasionally the fact that it was Sunday, and she not at church, and a picture of the dear church at home, and the dear faces in the family pew, and the seat left vacant in the Sunday school room, would shadow Louise's face for an instant; but it brightened again. She had chosen her lot, guided, as she believed, by the hand of her Lord. It was not for a face realizing this to be in shadow.

It was not until the Sunday dinner had been eaten, and they were back again, those two, in the brightness of their enjoyed solitude, that the grave, preoccupied look on Louise's face told that her thoughts were busy with something outside of their surroundings—something that troubled her.

"Lewis, what shall we do this afternoon?" she asked him, interrupting a sentence in which he was declaring that a rainy Sunday was, after all, a blessing.

"Do!" he repeated. "Why, we will have a delightful Sunday afternoon talk, and a little reading, and a good deal of—well, I don't know just what name to give it; heart-rest, perhaps, would be a good one. Aren't you enjoying the day, dear?"

She turned toward him a smiling face.

"Yes, with a thoroughly selfish enjoyment, I am afraid. I was thinking of the family downstairs; what can we do to help them, Lewis?"

"Oh!" said her husband, and his face clouded; he seemed to have no other suggestion to offer.

"They did not look as though they were enjoying the day. I think it must be dreary for Dorothy and John. I wish we could contribute something to make the time seem less lonely to them. Suppose we go down, Lewis, and try what we can do."

Her husband looked as though that was the thing, of all others, which he had the least desire to do.

"My dear Louise," he began slowly, then stopped, and, finding that she waited, began again. "The trouble is, wife, I don't know how we can help any of them. They are not good at talking, and the sort of talk in which John and Dorothy indulge wouldn't strike you as being suited to the Sabbath day; in fact, I don't believe you would join in it. They are used to being at home on the Sabbath; we are always home from church by this time, and the afternoon is the same to them it always is. I don't believe we can do anything, dear."

Mrs. Morgan did not look in the least convinced.

"The afternoon ought not to be the same to them it always has been, should it, Lewis? We have come home, a new element in the family. We ought, surely, to have some influence. Can't we find something to say that will do for the Sabbath? What have you talked about with the family before I came? How did you spend Sunday afternoons?"

"Up here, in my room, when it wasn't too cold; and sometimes, when it was, I went to bed, and did my reading and thinking there. I rarely go downstairs on Sunday until milking time. You see, Louise, I really don't know my own family very well. The early age at which I left home, being only back for a few weeks at a time during vacations; then my exile, with Uncle John, to Australia—all this has contributed to making me a sort of stranger among them. I doubt whether John and Dorothy feel much better acquainted with me than they do with you. They were both little things when I went away; and, during this last year, I hardly know what is the matter. Perhaps I haven't gone about it in the right way, but I haven't seemed to make any advances in their direction."

"To be very frank with you, Louise, John is always sullen toward me; and Dorothy acts as though she were half afraid of me, and her foolish jumpings and blushings seem so out of place, when one remembers that she is my own sister, that, I will confess to you, I sometimes feel utterly out of patience with her. As for my mother and father, while I honour them as true, unselfish, faithful parents, there are many subjects upon which we do not think alike; and I am often at a loss to know how to get along without hurting their feelings. The result is, that I shirk the social a good deal, and devote myself to myself, or did. Now that I have you to devote myself to, I am willing to be as social as you please."

The sentence, begun in seriousness, he had purposely allowed to assume a lighter tone; but Louise held with sweet gravity to her former topic.

"Even Christ pleased not himself," she quoted gently. Then added, "You may imagine how pleasant it is to me to sit here with you for a whole quiet day. Nevertheless, Lewis, let us go downstairs to the family, and see if we cannot, as a family, honour the day together."

She had risen as she spoke, and drawn her little rocker away from the stove, preparatory to leaving the room. Very slowly her husband followed her example, reluctance on every line of his face.

"I will go down with you, if you say so; but, honestly, I never dreaded to do anything more in my life! I can imagine that it seems a very strange thing to you, but I really and truly don't in the least know what to say when we got down there—I mean, that will be in keeping with our ideas of the Sabbath, and will help anybody."

"Neither do I," said Louise quietly. "Since we both feel our unfitness, let us kneel down before we go, and ask for the Spirit's guidance. Don't you know he promises: 'Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee saying, This is the way, walk ye in it'? I cannot help thinking that he points us down to that family room; why should not we ask him to fill our mouths?"

Without another word, and with a strange sense of solemnity about him, the young husband turned and dropped upon his knees beside his wife.

A few minutes thereafter they of the kitchen were startled by the unexpected entrance of the young couple into their midst. Almost any movement would have startled the quiet that reigned therein.

The kitchen, on a dull day, with its scarcity of windows, was a dark and dingy spot, the clean and shining stove being the only speck of brightness. The family group was complete; yet Louise, as she glanced around her, taking in their occupations, or want of occupations, could not forbear feeling the sense of dulness which their positions suggested. Farmer Morgan, with his steel-bowed spectacles mounted on his forehead, winked and blinked over the columns of the weekly paper. Mrs. Morgan sat bolt upright in her favourite straight-backed chair, and held in her hands an old-fashioned family Bible, in which Nellie had dutifully been spelling out the words until her restlessness had gotten the better of her mother's patience, and she had been sent to the straight-backed chair in the corner, to sit "until she could learn to stand still, and not twist around on one foot, and hop up and down when she was reading!" How long will poor Nellie have to "sit" before she learns that lesson?

Dorothy, without the hopping, was not one whit less restless, and lounged from one chair to another in an exasperatingly aimless way, calling forth from her mother, several times, a sharp—

"Dorothy, why can't you sit still when you get a chance? If you worked as hard as I do all the week, you would be glad enough of a day of rest." But poor Dorothy was not glad; she hated the stillness and inaction of the Sabbath; she breathed a sigh of relief when the solemn-voiced clock clanged out another hour, and looked forward with a sort of satisfaction even to the bustle of the coming wash-day morning. John was there, as silent and immovable as a statue, sitting in his favourite corner, behind the stove; in his favourite attitude, boots raised high to the stove-hearth; slouched hat on, drawn partly over his eyes; hands in his pockets, and a deeper shade of sullenness on his face. So it seemed to Louise. "Poor fellow!" she said, in compassionate thought. "It is a surprise to me that he doesn't do something awfully wicked. He will do it, too; I can see it in his face; unless—"

But she didn't finish her thought, even to herself. These various persons glanced up on the entrance of the two, and looked their surprise. Then Farmer Morgan, seeing that they proposed to take seats, moved his chair a little and motioned Lewis nearer the stove, with the words—

"A nasty day; fire feels good."

"Yet it hasn't rained much," Lewis said, watching Louise, and finding that she went over to the unoccupied chair nearest Nellie, he took the proffered seat.

"Rained enough to make mean going for to-morrow; and we've got to go to town in the morning, rain or shine. I never did see the beat of this winter for rain and mud; I don't believe it will freeze up before Christmas."

"You can't get started very early for town," remarked Mrs. Morgan. "There was so much to do yesterday that I didn't get around to fixing the butter, and it will take quite a little spell in the morning; and Dorothy didn't count over the eggs, and pack 'em, either. Dorothy's fingers were all thumbs, by the way she worked yesterday; we didn't get near as much done as common."

"She and John were about a match, I guess," Farmer Morgan said, glancing at the sullen-browed young man behind the stove. "Yesterday was his unlucky day. About everything you touched broke, didn't it, John?"

"That's nothing new."

John growled out this contribution to the conversation between lips that seemed firmly closed. Lewis glanced toward his wife. How would she think they were getting on? What would she think of butter, and eggs, and accidents as topics for Sabbath conversation?

But Louise had put an arm around little Nellie, and was holding a whispered conversation with her, and at this moment broke into the talk.

"Mother, may this little maiden come and sit on my lap, if she will be very good and quiet? My arms ache for the little girlie who used to climb into them at about this hour on Sunday."