The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (small books to read .TXT) 📕

it. There suddenly and poignantly, for the first time in his life, he envied Allen and wanted to die. He wanted to die with so keen a despair that never afterwards could he hear the cocksure rail against suicide. He hated living vehemently, and wanted to escape from it. There was no use saying one girl couldn’t make him unhappy. He was meant for Chirstie, and without her life had no meaning. Some way, it had just that combination of demure eyes and white arms to stimulate his desire till it was without mercy. He could not go on without her. He wished there had been a battle that day, which he could have gone into. He would have shot himself dead with his first bullet. That was the climax of his despair, though he was far from knowing it.

The next Sunday he walked with his brothers to the church where the lairds of the Waupsipinnikon, ragged but clean, worshiped the God of their fathers. The little church they had built out of their wartime prosperity stands on a green knoll on Gib McWhee’s farm. Entering it, one saw then, as one sees nowadays, a large unadorned square room, with only one beauty, and that so great that any church in the world might well envy it. Eight high, narrow windows it has, pointedly arched, of clear glass, and whatever one thinks of a style of ecclesiastical architecture which draws one’s attention from the sermon to the prairies, those eight windows frame pictures of billowing, cloud-shadowed, green distances in which surely sensible eyes can never sufficiently luxuriate.

Up the scrubbed aisle, into pews varnished into yellow wave patterns, family after family filed decorously that morning, mothers and infants in arms and strong men⁠—there were as yet no old men in that world. Wully went to the family pew. Before the war he had usually sought out a place where the overflow of big boys sat as far as possible away from the source of blessings. The McLaughlin pew held only twelve, and that uncomfortably. But there had never been more than twelve children at church together, since small Sarah had been born after her brothers had gone to war.

The congregation sang their Psalms out of books now. No more lining-out of numbers in a congregation so well-established and prosperous. The man of God read the Scriptures, and then at last came that welcomed long prayer, good for fifteen minutes at least. Wully, sitting determinedly in a certain well-considered place in the pew, bowing his head devoutly and bending just a bit to one side, could watch Chirstie through his fingers, where she sat on the other side of the church in the pew just behind the McLaughlins. Her eyes were closed, but his did a week’s duty. There was no doubt about it. She was getting thinner and thinner. It wasn’t just his imagination. She was paler. She was unhappy. He had noticed that week by week. Surely she was not happy!

The minister was an indecent man, cutting that prayer short in so unceremonious a fashion. Wully wondered the elders didn’t notice his carelessness. But after the sermon there would be another prayer, just a glimpse long. He had that to look forward to. He made a mental note of the text, which the children would be expected to repeat at the dinner table, and then settled down, to be disturbed no more by sermons. He had long ago acquired a certain immunity to them. A breeze cooled the warm worshiping faces, and from outside came the soothing hum of bees, and the impatient stamping of fly-bitten horses. The minister’s voice was rich and low. The younger children slept first, unashamedly, against the older ones next them, and then, gradually, one God-fearing farmer and another, exhausted by the week’s haying, nodded, struggled, surrendered, and slept.

Wully was wide awake, waiting for the last prayer. There was no time to be lost, when the petitions were so short. He turned his head, and there⁠—oh, Chirstie was looking at him! With head bowed, but eyes wide open, she was looking at him! Hungrily, tenderly, pitifully, just as he wanted her to look! Their eyes met, and her face blossomed red. She turned her head hastily away. Let her turn away! Let her pray! He knew, now! That was enough! For some reason she didn’t mean him to understand. But he had found out! It was all right. He could wait. He could wait any length of time, if only she would look at him again in that way! The congregation had risen, and had begun the Psalm. He would tell her, then and there, how glad he was, how he understood! He lifted up his voice and sang, sang louder than anyone else. That was what Allen used to do, when the service particularly bored him. He would sing the last Psalm louder and clearer than the whole congregation, with the face of an earnest, humble angel, while his elders admired, and his contemporaries hid their amusement as best they might. Chirstie would know Wully was sending her a joyous, patient answer. What did it matter that in going out she never once would turn towards him? Perhaps that was the way of women. They don’t just tell you all that is in their hearts. It was all very well. He knew what she was thinking.

After dinner, he said he was going down to the swimming hole, where the assembly of cousins proved week by week that the heat had prevailed over the shorter catechism. But instead he rushed eagerly and cautiously over to Chirstie. He knew there might be someone with her on Sunday, and he left his horse some distance away, intending, if he saw others there, to come back and wait. There was not a sound to be heard as he crept up, though he stopped, listening. He hesitated, and drew nearer. Then he saw her. She was sitting in the