Read CHAPTER NINE - Right at last of Stephen Grattan's Faith A Canadian Story , free online book, by Margaret M Robertson, on ReadCentral.com.

The twenty-fourth of May came on Saturday that year. It was to be a double holiday to the children in the little log-house on the hill; for their father had written a letter to say that, if it could possibly be managed, he should pass it with them. It need not be told what joyful news this was to them all. It was not unmingled joy to them all, however. Sophy had some anxieties, which she did her best to hide; but they showed in the wistful watching of her mother’s looks, and in her gentle efforts to chase all clouds from her face. As for Mrs Morely, she had suffered so many disappointments that she hardly dared to hope now. And yet her hopes were stronger than her fears this time, and she and her little daughter helped and encouraged one another without ever speaking a word.

The father was to come in the night-train of Friday, and go away in the night-train again, so that he might have two whole days at least at home; and early as the sun rises on the twenty-fourth of May, the little Morelys were up before him. The father came early, but not too early for the expectant children. The little lads met him far down the hill. They would have gone all the way to Littleton, only the bridge had been carried away by the sudden rise of the river when the ice broke up, and the mother would not trust so many of them to go over in the ferry-boat. Sophy waited at the garden-gate, with the baby in her arms, and her mother sat on the doorstep, pale and trembling, till the voices drew near and they all came in sight.

“`Clothed, and in his right mind,’” she murmured, as her husband came with Will on his shoulder and little Harry in his arms, oh! so different from him whose going away she had watched with such misgivings! It was the husband of her youth come back to her again; and she had much ado to keep back a great flood of joyful tears as she welcomed him home. As for Sophy, she never thought of keeping back her tears she could not if she had tried ever so much but clung sobbing to her father’s neck in a way that startled him not a little.

“What is it, Sophy? Are you not glad to see me?” he asked, after a time, when she grew quiet.

“Oh, yes; she’s glad,” said Johnny. “That is her way of showing that she’s glad. Don’t you mind, mother, how she cried that day when Mr Grattan brought the things, just after father went away?”

“She cried then because she was hungry,” said the matter-of-fact Eddy.

Sophy laughed, and kissed her father over and over again. Morely looked at his wife. There was something to be told, but not now. That must wait.

Nor can all the pleasure of that day be told. The little log-house was like a palace in the eyes of Morely. Indeed, it would have been very nice in any one’s eyes. The beds had been moved into the inner room, now that no fire was needed; and the large room, which was parlour and kitchen all in one, was as neat and clean as it could be made. It was bright, too, with flowers and evergreens and branches of cherry-blossom; and there were many comfortable and pretty things in it that Morely had never seen there before.

They did not stay much in the house, however. Mr and Mrs Grattan came up in the afternoon, and with them one whom John Morely presented to his wife as the best friend she had in the world, after Grattan and his wife his friend Samuel Muir. Knowing a little of what he had been to her husband all these months past, Mrs Morely welcomed him with smiles and tears, too and many a silent blessing: and if he had been the head of the firm Steel and Ironside in one he could not have been a more honoured guest.

They sat out on the hill during most of the afternoon. The day was perfect. It was warm in the sun, but cool in the shadow of the evergreens. The maples and elms did not throw deep shadows yet, and the air was sweet and fresh and still.

It was a very happy day to them all. To Samuel Muir it was a day never to be forgotten. Montreal is not a very great city. An hour’s walk from the heart of it, in any direction, will bring one either to the river or to fields where wild flowers grow. But his life had been town life and a very busy one; and to sit in the mild air, amid the sweet sounds and sweeter silence of the spring time, among all these happy children, was something wonderful to him. His constant anxious care for Morely all the winter had done much to make a man of him. His little weaknesses and vanities had fallen from him in the midst of his real work; and seeing the happy mother and her children, his heart filled with humble thankfulness to God, who had permitted him to help the husband and father to stand against his enemy.

As for Stephen Grattan, the sight of his face was good that day. He did not say much, but sat looking out over the river, and the village, and the hills beyond, as though he was not seeing them, but something infinitely fairer. Now and then, as he gazed, his thoughts overflowed in words not his own: “As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about His people.” “Ask and receive, that your joy may be full.” And sometimes he sang Dolly’s favourite chorus, repeating in queer, old, trembling strains,

“His loving-kindness, oh, how good!”

But he said little besides. Even Dolly spoke more than he that day, and with great pains drew out John Morely to tell how his prospects were brightening, and how since the first of May he had been foreman among his fellow-workmen, and how if things went moderately well with him he should have a better home than the little log-house for his wife and children before many months were over.

“Not just yet, however,” he said, looking with pleased eyes at the brown, healthy faces of the little lads. “No place I could put them in could make up to them for these open fields and this pure air. I think, Alice, they will be better here for a time.”

As for Alice, it did not seem to her that there was anything left for her to desire. Her heart was rejoicing over her husband with more than bridal joy, her husband who had been “lost, and was found.” On this first day of his coming home she suffered no trembling to mingle with it. She would not distrust the love which had “set her foot upon a rock, and put a new song in her mouth.” “Mighty to save” should His name be to her and hers henceforth. The clouds might return again, but there were none in her sky to-day.

Things went well with the Morelys after this. How it all came about, cannot be told here; but when the grand cut-stone piers of the new bridge were completed, it was John Morely who built the bridge itself, that is, he had the charge of building it, under the contractor to whom the work had been committed, and it was built so quickly and so well that he never needed to go away from Littleton to seek employment again.

The little Morelys have come to think of the days before that pleasant May-time as of a troubled dream. The first fall of the snow-flakes brings a shadow to Sophy’s face still; but even Sophy has come to have only a vague belief in the troubles of that time. The little ones are never weary of hearing the story of that terrible winter storm: but Sophy never tells them hardly acknowledges to herself, indeed that there was something in those days harder to bear than hunger, or cold, or even the dread of the drifting snow.

If after that first bright day of her husband’s home-coming there mingled trembling with the joy of Mrs Morely, she is at rest now. Day by day, as the years have passed on, she has come to know that with him, as well as with herself, “Old things have passed away, and all things have become new;” and, in the blessed renewal of strength assured to those who wait upon the Lord, she knows that he is safe for evermore.

As for Stephen Grattan, he has had a good many years of hard work since then, making strong, serviceable boots and shoes, and serving the Lord in other ways besides. He is ungrammatical still, and queer, and some people smile at him, and pretend to think lightly of him, even when he is most in earnest, people who, in point of moral worth or heavenly power, are not worthy to tie his shoes. But many a “tempted poor soul” in Littleton and elsewhere has his feet upon a rock and a new song in his mouth because of Stephen’s labours in his behalf; and if ever a man had the apostle’s prayer for the Ephesians answered in his experience, he has; for he is “strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might.”

He is an old man now, whose “work of faith and labour of love” is almost over; and I never see him coming up the street, with his leather apron on, a little bowed and tottering, but always cheerful and bright, but I seem to hear the welcome, which cannot be very far before him now, “Well done, good and faithful servant! Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”