Chapter XXI: Going to Housekeeping

All the forenoon of the next day, Mr. Garner, the landlord, was absent with his team; so that our young people were obliged to defer their removal until the afternoon; and they spent the intervening hours in reviewing their possessions and supplying those few last articles that always are forgotten in a first preparation.

At two o’clock, the capacious wagon of the hotel stood before the door, laden with furniture, trunks, provisions, and so forth. A tolerable seat was arranged for Rosalie among the baggage; but Mark, on foot, accompanied the landlord, who walked at the head of his horses. It was a slow progress; the horses, already fatigued with their morning’s work, never got out of a walk; so that it was nearly four o’clock when they entered Wolf’s Grove and drew up before the log cabin. While his horses were resting, Mr. Garner assisted Mark to unlade the wagon, and take in the furniture and arrange the heaviest part of it. Then, having watered his horses, he shook hands with his late guests, wished them good luck, jumped upon his seat in front of the wagon, and drove off.

And Mark and Rosalie found themselves standing, looking at each other, alone, in the forest cabin. It was a moment in which flashed back upon each the memory of their whole past lives, and the intense realization of their present position. A doubt, whether to weep or smile, quivered over Rosalie’s features for an instant. Mark saw the tremor of her lips and eyelids, and drew her to his heart; and she dropped her head upon his shoulder and smiled through her tears. He whispered, cheerily—

“Never mind, dear; you will be one of the honoured pioneer women of the West. And when this wilderness is a great Commonwealth, and Shelton is a great city, and I am an old patriarch, we will have much joy in telling of the log cabin in the wilderness, where we first went to housekeeping. And now, let us see if we cannot get this place into a little order.”

The room, as I said, was large and square, with a window east and west, facing each other, and a stone fire-place north, facing a broad door south. The walls were unplastered, but well planed and cemented, and grey with time and use. The floor was of rough but sound pine plank. A broad shelf over the fire-place served for a mantel-piece. In the corner between the east window and the fire-place stood the step-ladder leading to the loft. In the opposite corner, between the west window and the fire-place, were three triangular shelves, that did duty as cupboard or beaufet. Finally, the sashes of the windows were good, but the glass was all broken out of them. This was the state of the room when Mark and Rosalie looked around it. Mark went up the step-ladder to examine the loft, but found it so low that even a woman could not stand upright in it. It was therefore given up, except as a place to stow trunks, boxes, &c.

Then they began to arrange their furniture. It was very easily done, they had so little—a bedstead with its appointments, a table, a half-dozen chairs, and almost everything else in half-dozens. The form of the room favoured the convenient arrangement of these things. The bedstead had already been put up in the corner between the west window and the door, and the table placed in the corresponding corner between the door and the east window. They set the chairs in their places, and then Mark began to unpack the china, while Rosalie arranged it on the shelves of the corner cupboard. There were several things—remnants of past refinement—out of keeping with their present condition; among them, the French china—that looked upon their rough pine shelves as the elegant Mark Sutherland and the fair and delicate Rosalie looked in their rude log cabin—and the superb white Marseilles counterpanes, whose deep fringes touched the rough plank floor; and the tester and valance of fine and beautiful net-work; and lastly, the tamboured curtains that lay upon the chairs, ready to be put up when Mark should have mended the windows. These were certainly out of place here, but it could not be helped; they were Rosalie’s little personal effects, endeared to her by long possession, and by their having been the property, and some of them—the tamboured curtains and the net valance, for instance—the _handiwork_ of her mother. By sunset, all was arranged, except two matters—the broken windows, with which now the young master of the house began to employ himself, taking out the sashes and laying them upon the table, and laying pane after pane in their places; and the barrel of flour which stood in the middle of the floor, with a quarter of beef laid across the top of it—both waiting to be put away out of sight, in a proper place; that is, supposing a proper place could be found on premises where there was neither storehouse, pantry, nor shed, nor even a second room.

Mark busied himself with the window sashes, trying pane after pane in the empty forms. But at length, turning around, he smiled and said—

“It’s no use, Rose; I’m not a glazier, and so carefully as I thought I measured the sashes and the glass, they will not exactly fit; and I have no diamond here to trim them, and so I suppose they must be left until to-morrow.”

And he replaced the empty sashes in the window frames. Then, seeing the neglected barrel of flour, he wheeled it up against the wall, near the door, and said it must remain there for the present; and Rosalie took a coarse, clean table-cloth and spread it over the beef, that still lay upon the top.

“And now, dear,” he said, looking around, “I believe we are as well fixed as we can be for the present. Nothing remains but to get supper; and, as I was out here in the West two years before you ever saw it, I shouldn’t wonder if I hadn’t to give you some instruction.”

“_You_ teach me to cook! _I_, my uncle’s housekeeper for two years, while you were wandering about from town to town!” exclaimed Rosalie.

Mark laughed, and bade her remember that when she was “uncle’s” housekeeper she had experienced cooks at her command, and that her housekeeping duties and responsibilities consisted in carrying the keys and ordering what she pleased to have for dinner. And he further advised her to recollect that she was not to snap up her liege lord in that way, either! Whereupon Rose bade him mind his business and his briefs; for that she should snap him, and box his ears, too, whenever the spirit moved her. She! Mark snatched her, laughing, to his bosom, and half suffocated her with kisses, and then holding her tight, bade her do her wickedest.

“And, Rose,” he exclaimed merrily, “I do not know why it is; but out here, in this cabin of the wilderness, with nobody but you for company, I feel as if the restraints of society and of maturity had fallen away, and restored me to the freedom and the wilfulness and the irresponsible wickedness of my boyhood. And _oh!_ little one, if you were only a great deal taller and stronger, what a wrestle we would have!”

And he gazed down on her there, standing within his arms—so small, so fair, so perfectly helpless, so utterly in his power—and all the wantonness of youth fled from before her helplessness and her beauty, and a flood of unutterable tenderness rushed over his heart; and, still gazing upon her with infinite love, he said—

“God forever bless you—you little, little, wee thing; you delicate, beautiful creature; and God forever forsake me, if ever, willingly, I give you a moment’s pain or sorrow!”

Blushing deeply, Rose withdrew herself from his now yielding clasp, and, to cover her girlish embarrassment, took the new bucket and put it in his hands, requesting him to go to the spring, and bring her fresh water to fill the tea-kettle, and adding—

“You shall see what nice biscuits and what nice tea I can make.”

Mark took the pail and went out, and disappeared down the path.

Rosalie, observing the floor littered, looked around for the broom to sweep it up; and then laughed to find that, with all their getting, they had got no _broom_.

Mark came in with the pail of water, set it down, and said he would go and get some brush to kindle a fire. And while he was gone, Rosalie put water in a basin to wash her hands preparatory to making the biscuits; and _then_ she discovered that they had forgotten _soap_ also. And while she stood in dismay, wondering what else might have been omitted, Mark re-entered with a pile of brush on his shoulders, “like Christian with his bundle of sin,” he said. He threw it down upon the hearth, and began to look around, and then he broke into a gay, prolonged laugh.

“What’s the matter, Mark? Are you daring to laugh at me, with my sleeves and skirt tucked up?”

“O, Rosalie, we have heads, child! we have heads—and so have cabbages, when they have come to maturity.”

“Well, don’t laugh _yours_ off your shoulders, but tell me what you’re laughing _at_!”

“We have not brought a match nor a candle.”

“Oh! no! You don’t say so?”

“It is a positive fact.”

“We have forgotten soap and brooms too; we have forgotten _every_thing.”

“No, not _every_thing; only a few things that make everything useless.”

“What’s to be done? We can’t cook supper to-night, or even breakfast to-morrow morning, without a fire.”

“No. Let’s see—I know if one rubs two pieces of wood together long enough, they will ignite; and I know of other processes by which fire may be kindled; but, after all, I think the quickest and the surest way will be for me to go back to Shelton this evening, and get the matches; and then I can also get soap, a broom, and my pistols, which were likewise forgotten.”

“Go back to Shelton this evening! Walk three miles to Shelton, and back this evening, and the sun already down! You will be tired to death.”

“No, dear; I can walk that three miles in about an hour, get the things in ten minutes; borrow Mr. Garner’s saddle-horse to ride back, and take him home again in the morning, when I go to the office. And my brave little girl will not be afraid to stay here a a few hours by herself?”

“Afraid? No; surely not.”

“You can fasten the door with this wooden pin, if you wish to do so.”

“Oh! I shall not wish to fasten the door. I shall sit on the sill and watch the stars, and see if I can read our future destiny on their orbs, and wait for the moon to rise, and for you to come.”

“No, you must not do that, Rose. The woods are damp, and the evening air chill. And, now I think of it, this cabin will be too cool for you, with this draught through the open windows. Let’s see if we cannot do something with them. If you had anything to tack up against them, Rosalie?”

She went to a box and took out two sheets, each of which, doubled, was tacked against a window, and because the breeze still lifted them, a few tacks were driven in the sides and bottoms of these temporary blinds, to keep them down. Having finished that job, Mark pulled down and buttoned his wristbands, put on his coat, kissed Rosalie, bade her keep up her heart, for that he should be back at ten, or a little after, and departed. She stood at the door, watching him, until he disappeared within the intervening trees, and then she turned and entered the darkening house.

Did Mark Sutherland—did Rosalie—dream of all that should happen before they should meet again? Did either imagine the grim horror of the next few hours? It was a night that _one_ of them never, in after life, forgot—whose fearful memory haunted thoughts by day, and visions by night, when the dreamer would start from sleep, and, with convulsive shivers and cold perspiration, gaze around in terror that could not be reassured.