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.