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.”