“We shall have to camp again tonight. Mrs. Jones has made up the one bed left in the house, and you and Mousie shall have that. We’ll fix Winnie and Bobsey on the lounge; and, youngsters, you can sleep in your clothes, just as soldiers do on the ground. Merton and I will doze in these chairs before the fire. Tomorrow night we can all be very comfortable.”
I took the lamp and led the way—my wife, Mousie, and Merton following—first across a little hall, from which one stairway led to the upper chambers and another to the cellar. Opening a door opposite the living room, I showed Winifred her parlor. Cozy and comfortable it looked, even now, through Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s kind offices. A Morning Glory stove gave out abundant warmth and a rich light which blended genially with the red colors of the carpet.
“Oh, how pretty I can make this room look!” exclaimed my wife.
“Of course you can: you’ve only to enter it.”
“You hurt your head when you fell out of the wagon, Robert, and are a little daft. There’s no place to sleep here.”
“Come to the room over this, warmed by a pipe from this stove.”
“Ah, this is capital,” she cried, looking around an apartment which Mrs. Jones had made comfortable. “Wasn’t I wise when I decided to come home? It’s just as warm as toast. Now let the wind blow—Why, I don’t hear it any more.”
“No, the gale has blown itself out. Finding that we had escaped, it got discouraged and gave up. Connected with this room is another for Mousie and Winnie. By leaving the door open much of the time it will be warm enough for them. So you see this end of the house can be heated with but little trouble and expense. The open fire in the living room is a luxury that we can afford, since there is plenty of wood on the place. On the other side of the hall there is a room for Merton. Now do me a favor: don’t look, or talk, or think, any more tonight. It has been a long, hard day. Indeed”—looking at my watch—“it is already tomorrow morning, and you know how much we shall have to do. Let us go back and get a little supper, and then take all the rest we can.”
Winifred yielded, and Bobsey and Winnie waked up for a time at the word “supper.” Then we knelt around our hearth, and made it an altar to God, for I wished the children never to forget our need of His fatherly care and help.
“I will now take the children upstairs and put them to bed, and then come back, for I can not leave this wood fire just yet,” remarked my wife.
I burst out laughing and said, “You have never been at home until this night, when you are camping in an old house you never saw before, and I can prove it by one question—When have you taken the children upstairs to bed before?”
“Why—why—never.”
“Of course you haven’t—city flats all your life. But your nature is not perverted. In natural homes for generations mothers have taken their children upstairs to bed, and, forgetting the habit of your life, you speak according to the inherited instinct of the mother heart.”
“O Robert, you have so many finespun theories! Yet it is a little queer. It seemed just as natural for me to say upstairs as—”
“As it was for your mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.”
“Very well. We are in such an old house that I suppose I shall begin to look and act like my great-grandmother. But no more theories tonight—nothing but rest and the wood fire.”
She soon joined me at the hearth again. Merton meanwhile had stretched himself on the rag carpet, with his overcoat for a pillow, and was in dreamless sleep. My wife’s eyes were full of languor. She did not sit down, but stood beside me for a moment. Then, laying her head on my shoulder, she said, softly, “I haven’t brains enough for theories and such things, but I will try to make you all happy here.”
“Dear little wife!” I laughed; “when has woman hit upon a higher or better wisdom than that of making all happy in her own home? and you half asleep, too.”
“Then I’ll bid you good night at once, before I say something awfully stupid.”
Soon the old house was quiet. The wind had utterly ceased. I opened the door a moment, and looked on the white, still world without. The stars glittered frostily through the rifts in the clouds. Schunemunk Mountain was a shadow along the western horizon, and the eastern highlands banked up and blended with the clouds. Nature has its restless moods, its storms and passions, like human life; but there are times of tranquillity and peace, even in March. How different was this scene from the aspect of our city street when I had taken my farewell look at a late hour the previous night! No grand sweeping outlines there, no deep quiet and peace, soothing and at the same time uplifting the mind. Even at midnight there is an uneasy fretting in city life—someone not at rest, and disturbing the repose of others.
I stole silently through the house. Here, too, all seemed in accord with nature. The life of a good old man had quietly ceased in this home; new, hopeful life was beginning. Evil is everywhere in the world, but it seemed to me that we had as safe a nook as could be found.
XIV
Self-Denial
