Chapter VIII: New Light

THE little, old-fashioned square "stand" was drawn up in front of the stove, which last was opened to let a glow of brightness reach across the room, and beside it were Lewis and Louise Morgan, seated for an evening of good cheer. She had a bit of needle-work, in which she was taking careful stitches; and her husband held in his hand, open to a previously set mark, a handsomely bound copy of Shakespeare. He was one of those rare persons—a good reader of Shakespeare; and, in the old days at home, Louise had delighted to sit, work in hand, and listen to the music of his voice in the rendering.

He had not commenced the regular reading, but was dipping into bits here and there, while he waited for her to "settle," as he called the bringing of her small work-basket, and the searching out her work. Now, although she was "settled," and looking apparently thoughtful enough for the saddest scenes from the great writer, he still continued his glancings from page to page, breaking out presently with—

"Louise, do you remember this?"

"'I never did repent for doing good,
Nor shall not now; for in companions
That do converse and waste the time together,
Whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love,
There must be needs a like proportion
Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit.'"

"Do you remember what a suggestive shrug of her shoulders Estelle gave over the line—"

"'That do converse and waste the time together'?"

"I suspect she thought it fitted us precisely."

"Yes," Louise said, smiling in a most preoccupied way. That her thoughts were not all on Shakespeare, nor even on that fairer object, Estelle, she presently evinced by a question.

"Lewis, how far did Dorothy get in her studies?"

"Dorothy?" repeated her husband, looking up in surprise, and with difficulty coming back from Shakespeare; "I don't know, I am sure. As far, I remember hearing, as the teachers in our district school could take her. That is not saying much, to be sure; though, by the way, I hear they have an exceptionally good one this winter. Poor Dorothy didn't have half a chance; I tried to manage it, but I couldn't. Hear this, Louise,—"

"'How he glistens through my rust!
And how his piety does my deeds make the blacker!'"

"Isn't that a simile for you?"

"Very," said Louise; and her husband glanced at her curiously. What was she thinking of, and how did that brief "very" fit in with Leontes' wonderful simile?

"Well," he said, "are your thimbles and pins and things all ready, wife? Shall I commence?"

"Not just yet, dear; I want to talk. What do you think about it; was she disappointed at not having better opportunities?"

"Who? Oh, Dorothy! I thought you were talking about Hermione; she fainted, you know. Yes, Dorothy was disappointed. She wanted to go to the academy in town, and she ought to have had the opportunity, but we couldn't bring it to pass. I was at home but a few weeks, or I might have accomplished more. What is the trouble, Louise dear? How does it happen that you find poor Dorothy more interesting than Shakespeare to-night?"

"Well," said Louise, laughing, "it is true; I cannot get away from her; her life seems so forlorn, somehow. I can't help being sorry for her. She is losing her girlhood almost before it is time for it to bloom. I have been wondering and wondering all day what there was that we could do for her; and I find the real life being worked out before our eyes so engrossing, that it is hard to come back to the dead lives of Shakespeare."

Her husband closed the book, putting his finger between the leaves to mark the place.

"I have studied that problem somewhat, Louise," he said earnestly, "in the days gone by. I didn't succeed in making much of it. It is true, as you say, that she is slipping away from girlhood, almost without knowing that she has been a girl. Sometimes I think that she will have only two experiences of life—childhood and old womanhood. Mother cannot realize that she is yet any more than a child, to be governed, and to obey; and one of these mornings it will be discovered that she is no longer a child, but has passed middle life. Her future looks somewhat dreary to me, I confess."

"We must not let it grow dreary," Louise said, with a determined tone, and a positive setting of her small foot—a curious habit that she had when very much in earnest. "What sense is there in it? She is young, and in good health, and has a sound brain; why should she not make her life what it ought to be? Why shouldn't we help her in a hundred ways?"

"Yes; but come down to actual, practical truth. What is there that she can do for herself, or that we can do for her? You see, Louise, our family is peculiar; there is no use in shutting one's eyes to that fact. It is not because father is a farmer that we find ourselves situated just as we are; other farmers have very different experiences. We are surrounded on all sides with men who get their living by cultivating the fields, whose sons and daughters are in college, or seminary, and in society, and who, in every way, take as good a position, and have as many advantages, as town-bred people—at the expense, it is true, of some inconvenience and special labour. Of course, it is also true that some of the sons and daughters do not choose to accept all the advantages for cultivation; and equally, of course, there are some who are unable to furnish the means for what they would like their children to enjoy; but no greater proportion of that class in the country than in town, I think. My father does not belong to any of these classes; he is, as I said, peculiar."

At this point both husband and wife stopped to laugh over the associations connected with that word "peculiar;" it bringing to the minds of both reminders of Gough and Dickens, as well as many more common characters which those two geniuses have caricatured.

"It is true, nevertheless," Lewis said, the laugh over. "Let me see if I can explain. In the first place, both father and mother had, in their youth, lives of grinding toil and poverty. Both were shrewd, clear-headed people, with, I think, much more than the average share of brains. The result is that, despite drawbacks and privations, they made their way, acquiring, not thorough educations, it is true, but a very fair degree of knowledge on all practical subjects. The amount of information which my mother, for instance, possesses about matters concerning which she would be supposed to know nothing would surprise you. Perhaps the result of all this is natural; anyhow, it is evident. They believe that the rubbing process is decidedly the best way to secure education or anything else needed in this world. If one makes his way in spite of obstacles, they believe it is because the grit is in him, and must find its end."

"Had Dorothy, for instance, pushed her determination to attend school in town, and get a thorough education; pushed it persistently—what you would call doggedly—against argument and opposition, and everything but absolute command—she would have won the prize, and both father and mother would have, in a certain sense, respected her more than they do now. But Dorothy was not of that mould. She wanted to go on with her studies. Had everything been smooth before her, she would, doubtless, have gone on, and made a fair scholar; but to stem a current, with so much against her, required more effort of a certain kind than she knew how to make."

"I conclude," said his wife, smiling brightly on him, "that you were one of those who can push persistently."

He answered her smile, partly with a laugh, and partly with a shrug of his handsome shoulders.

"I did push—most vehemently some of the time; worked my way part of the time besides, as you know; but in the end I gained. Both father and mother have a degree of pride in my persistence; it reminds them of their own rugged natures."

"I wonder that Dorothy, crossed in her natural ambitions, did not run into the extremes, on the question of dress and society, and, well—and aimless going generally, without regard to quality or consequence. That is the rock on which so many girls shipwreck."

"I think she would have done just that thing had she been given opportunity. I think it is what both my father and mother were afraid of. It has made them draw the reins of family government very tightly. They simply commanded that singing-schools, and country school debating societies, and social gatherings, should be ignored. We were all under that command; so that the consequence is, we are almost as isolated from our neighbours as though we had none. My mother did not feel the need of society. She could not understand why any one should feel that need; consequently, she has no society. There are good and pleasant people around us, people whom it would be a pleasure to you to meet; but they never come near us, because we have, as a family, given them to understand that we have nothing to do with common humanity."

"What a strange idea! Do you know, I have wondered why it was that your neighbours didn't call on me? I thought it must be that they had a preconceived dislike for me, somehow."

"They have a preconceived belief that you will not care to see them. You would be amused to see how this withdrawal from all friendships has been translated. If father were a poor man, having a struggle to get along, it would be set down as a dislike to mingling with those who were better off in this world's goods than ourselves; but with his farm stretching before their eyes in so many smiling acres, and with his barns the finest and best stocked in the neighbourhood, we are looked upon as a family too aristocratic to mingle with country people; which is simply funny, when you take into consideration the fact that we have never been other than country people ourselves, and that we live much more plainly than any of our neighbours. But you can readily see the effect on Dorothy; she has, in a degree, dropped out of life. The occasional going to church on a pleasant Sunday, and going to market with mother when both can, on rare occasions, be spared from home, being her two excitements. She has hardly a speaking acquaintance with the neighbours about us, and no associates whatever."

"Poor girl!" said Louise, and there was more than compassion in her voice; there was a curious undertone of determination, which made her husband smile, and wonder what this little woman, in whose capabilities he thoroughly believed, would do.

"Haven't I established the validity of our claim to being 'peculiar'?" he asked her.

"I should think you had! What has been the effect of the 'peculiarities' on John?"

Her husband's face instantly sobered, and there was a note of pain in his voice.

"John has broken loose from the restraints in a degree—in a painful degree. He has made his own associates; and they are of a kind that he wouldn't care to bring home, if he had an opportunity. He is away very frequently of evenings, it is difficult to tell where; but the daily decrease of anything like manliness attests the unfortunate result. I am more than suspicious that he is learning to drink something stronger than cider; and I am sure that he occasionally, at least, smokes—two vices that are my father's horror. He looks on with apparently mingled feelings of anger and dismay. His pet theories of family government have failed. He honestly desired to shield his children from evil influences; he is comparatively satisfied with the result both in Dorothy's case and mine. He doesn't know what to think of John. He has spells of great harshness and severity connected with him, thwarting everything that he undertakes in what must seem to John an utterly unreasonable way; and yet I believe it is done with a sore heart, and with an anxious desire for his good. And when my mother's face is most immovable, I have learned to know that she is trying to quiet the frightened beatings of her heart over the wrong-doings of her youngest boy."

"Lewis," his wife said, interrupting the next word, and with intense earnestness and solemnity in her voice, "we must save John for Christ, and his father and mother."

"Amen. But how, dear, how?"

"Lewis, let's go right downstairs. They are all at home; I noticed it as I came through the room; and they look so gloomy. Why shouldn't we all have a pleasant evening together? Did you ever read anything to them? I thought not. Now, don't you know they can't help enjoying your reading? I mean to try it right away."

"Read Shakespeare?" her husband asked dryly, albeit there was also dismay in his voice. To talk earnestly over a state of things, to wish that all was different, was one thing; and to plunge right into the midst of existing things, and try to make them differ, was quite another. His wife answered his question with a bright little laugh.

"No, I don't believe they would enjoy Shakespeare yet, though I am by no means sure that we can't have some good readings from him some time. But let me see; I have a book that I am certain they will all like. You never read it, and you ought to; it is worth any one's while to read it." And she let fall spool and scissors, and went in eagerness to the old-fashioned swinging-shelves, where she had arranged some of her favourite books, selecting one from among them. "Here it is," she said; "Estelle and I enjoyed this book wonderfully; so did papa. We read it while mamma was away one winter, when we were dreary without her. John will certainly be interested in the bear hunt; being a boy, he can't help it; and I know mother will like to hear about that poor mother down behind the beans."

"Behind the beans! What an extraordinary place for a mother to be! What was she doing there?"

"Wait until you read it, my dear. You will like the book; people of good sense always do."

"Thank you. But, Louise dear, do you think it a wise thing to try? Remember what a disastrous failure I made on Sabbath. I don't believe I am fitted for aggressive movements."

"I don't believe anybody but Christ knows yet whether your Sabbath effort was all a failure, Lewis; and I don't believe that you and I have any right with the results, if we did what we could. Besides, this is different. I know you can read. Come."

"I can't see to read from the light of a tallow candle; I always despised them."

"We will take the lamp," she said, with a defiant little nod of her head toward the pretty bronze figure that held a shapely kerosene lamp of newest pattern and improved burner, Lewis having searched the lamp-stores over for just the right sort of offering for his bride. "We will set it right beside mother, where it will throw just the right angle of light on her work, and yet be shaded from her eyes; and we will not hint, by word or glance, that she may possibly see better than she does by her candle. Come, Lewis, carry it; it is too heavy for me. I will bring the book and my work-basket."

"Mother despises dressing-gowns," her husband said, rising slowly, and casting regretful looks at Shakespeare, the open fire, and his lounging-chair, though it was neither the chair nor yet the book that held him, but a horrible shrinking from this attempt at innovation, and an almost certainty of disastrous failure.

"No, she doesn't; she only thinks so, because she isn't used to them, and doesn't realize how much they save coats. I'm going to make John one for Christmas, and a pair of slippers like those Estelle gave you last year, and she will like them very much; you see if she doesn't. Now we're ready."