THE almost unearthly stillness of the fragrant May night was, as often
happens at that lovely, uncertain season, the precursor of a rainy day.
Hetty Alling, awakening at four o’clock to plan for the work that lay
before the transplanted household, heard the first drops fall upon
the tin roof of the piazza under her window like the patter of tiny,
stealthy feet scaling the eaves and combing, then advancing boldly in
rank and rush until the beat was the reverberant roar of a spring flood.
It awoke nobody else under the parsonage roof-tree. Hester slept
soundly beside her. She never slept quietly. In addition to the spinal
disease which warped the poor girl’s figure she suffered from an
affection of the throat that made her respiration in slumber a rattling
snore, interrupted at regular intervals by a gurgle that sounded like
strangulation. So audibly distressing was it that her father could
not sleep within two rooms of her, and the healthy occupants of the
intervening nursery complained that “nothing was done to break Hester
of making such a racket. If she wanted to stop it she could.”
Her young aunt and roommate knew better. Hester had shared her bed for
almost nine years. Mrs. Wayt’s orphaned sister was but fourteen when
she came to live in the parsonage, then situated in Cincinnati. It
had been a hard winter with the pastor’s wife. While her mother lay
dying in Ithaca, N. Y., her then only daughter, the first born of her
flock, a beautiful, vivacious child of eight, met with the accident
which crippled and dwarfed her for life. The telegram announcing Mrs.
Alling’s illness was answered by one saying that Hester was at the
point of death. She had just passed the first doubtful stage upon the
return journey lifeward, when Hetty, in her new black frock, insisted
upon relieving the grief-worn watcher over the wreck that could never
be put together again.
Lying in strange quarters in a strange town at the dreariest hour of
the twenty-four, Hetty recalled that as the date when the load of
care, now an integral part of herself, was first fastened upon her.
She had before this likened it to a needle she had once, in childish
wantonness, run under the bark of a young willow, and seen disappear
gradually from view as the riven bark grew over it, until, at the end
of a year, no vestige of the steel remained, except a ridge which was
never smoothed away. She was not exactly penniless. The portion left
her by her mother was judiciously invested by her guardian, and yielded
her exactly four hundred dollars a year. It was transmitted promptly,
quarterly, until she was of age, by which time she was so rooted and
grounded in prudence that she continued to draw the like amount at
equal periods.
“It is enough to dress her,” Mrs. Wayt had said to her husband, in
seeking his sanction to her offer of a home to one who stood alone in
the world save for her sister, and an uncle who had lived in Japan for
twenty years. “And she is welcome to her board—is she not, Percy, dear?”
“Welcome, dear love? Can you ask the question with regard to your only
sister—poor motherless lamb! While we have a roof between us and the
sky and a crust of bread between us and starvation, she shall share
both. Let _me_ write the letter!”
The epistle was almost tattered with many readings when Hetty became
an inmate of her brother-in-law’s home. She had not kept it until
now. That was not strange, Fairhill being the latest in a succession
of “settlements” to which the brilliant gospeler had accepted calls,
generally unanimous and almost invariably enthusiastic. There were
three children at Hetty’s coming—her own and her mother’s namesake,
Hester, and Percy and Perry, the twin boys. Four had been born since,
but two had not outlived early infancy. Mr. Wayt would not have been a
preacher of the period had he not enriched some of his most effective
discourses with illustrations drawn from these personal bereavements.
His celebrated apostrophe to a six-months old daughter, beginning—“Dear
little Susie! She had numbered but a brief half year of mortal life,
but she was loving and beloved! I seem to feel the soft strain of her
arms about my neck this moment”—is too familiar to my readers, through
newspaper reports, to need repetition here. The sermon embodying this
gem of poetic and rhetorical emotion is known to have won him calls to
three churches.
It was still dark when Hetty’s ear caught the muffled thud of feet upon
the garret stairs. Wherever providence and parish preferences cast the
lot of the Wayts, Homer’s bedroom was nearest the heavens that were hot
by summer and cold by winter.
“I don’t set no store by ceilin’s,” he told Hetty when she “wished they
could lodge him better.” “Seems if ’twas naturaler fur to see the beams
purty nigh onto my nose when I fus’ wake in the mornin’. I’m kind o’
lonesome fur ’em when I caan’t butt me head agin the top o’ me room
when I’m a mind ter.”
At another time he confided to her that it was “reel sociabul-like to
hear the rain onto the ruff, clus’ to a feller’s ears o’ nights.”
He was on his way down to the kitchen now to light the fire. Unless
she should interfere, he would cook breakfast, and serve it upon
the table she had set overnight, and sweep down the stairs and scrub
the front doorsteps while the family ate the morning meal. He called
himself “Tony,” as did all the family except Hetty and Mrs. Wayt. The
former had found “Homer Smith, Jr.,” written in a sprawling hand upon
the flyleaf of a songbook which formed the waif’s entire library.
Hetty had notions native to her own small head. One was that the—but
for her—friendless lad would respect himself the more if he were not
addressed by what she called “a circus monkey’s name.” For this reason
he was “Homer” to her, and her sister followed her example because she
considered the factotum and whatever related to him Hetty’s affair, and
that she had a right to designate her chattel by whatever title she
pleased.
Tony had come to the basement door one snowy, blowy day of a
particularly cruel winter, when Hetty was maid of all work. He stood
knee-deep in a drift when she opened the grated door and asked,
hoarsely but without a touch of the beggar’s whine, for “a job to keep
him from starvin’.” He was, as he “guessed,” twenty years of age,
emaciated from a spell of “new-money,” and so nearly blind that the
suggestion of a “job” was pitiably preposterous. Hetty took him into
her neat kitchen, made him a cup of tea, and cut and plied him with
bread and butter until he asserted that he was “right-up-an’-down
chirpy, jes’ as strong’s enny man. Couldn’t he rake out the furnace, or
saw wood, or clear off the snow, or clean shoes, or scrub the stairs,
or mend broken things, or wash windows, or peel pertaters, or black
stoves, or sif’ ashes, or red-up the cellar—or—or—somethin’, to pay for
his dinner? I aint no beggar, ma’am—nor never will be!”
Hetty hired him as a “general utility man,” at ten cents a forenoon
and his breakfast, for a week—then, for a month. He lodged wherever he
could—in stable lofts, at the police station, under porches on mild
nights, and when other resorts were closed, in a midnight refuge, and
never touched liquor or tobacco in any form. At the month’s end, his
girlish patroness cleared a corner of the attic between the sharp angle
and the chimney, set up a cot, and allowed him to sleep there. Mr.
Wayt had no suspicion of the disreputable incumbent of the habitation
honored by his name and residence, until one memorable and terrible
March midnight when a doctor must be had without the delay of an
instant revealed the secret, but under circumstances that strengthened
the retainer’s hold upon his employers. Since then, he had been part
and parcel of the establishment, proving himself as proficient in
removals and settlings-down as in other branches of his business.
Mr. Wayt liked to allude to him as “Hetty’s Freak.” At other times he
nicknamed him “Kasper Hauser.” Once, and once only, in reference to
Hetty’s influence over the being he chose to regard as half-witted,
he spoke of him as “a masculine Undine,” whereupon his sister-in-law
turned upon him a look that surprised him and horrified his wife, and
marched out of the room.
Mrs. Wayt followed her presently and found her gazing out of the window
of the closet to which she had fled, with livid face and dry eyes that
were dangerously bright.
“Percy hopes you were not hurt by his harmless little jest,” said the
gentle wife. “You know, Hetty, it would kill me if you and he were to
quarrel. He has the kindest heart in the world, and respects you too
sincerely to offend you knowingly. You must not mind what sounds like
extravagant speech. We cannot judge men of genius as we would ordinary
people. And, dear, for my sake be patient!”
The girl yielded to the weeping embrace of the woman whose face was
hidden upon her shoulder.
“Mr. Wayt”—she never gave him a more familiar title—“cannot hurt me
except through you, Fanny. You and he must know that by now. I will try
to keep my temper better in hand in future.”
Hetty was young and energetic, and used to hard work. She had put the
children to bed early on the evening of their arrival in Fairhill;
sent her sister, who had a sick headache, to her chamber before Mr.
Wayt returned from the Gilchrists’; given Hester’s aching limbs a hot
bath and a good rubbing, and only allowed Homer to help her unpack
boxes until half-past ten, not retiring herself until midnight. The
carload of furniture, which had preceded the family and been put in
place by the neighborly parishioners, looked scantily forlorn in the
roomy manse. The Ladies’ Aid Association had asked the privilege of
carpeting the parlors, dining room, stairs, and halls, and Judge
Gilchrist, instigated by his wife, headed a subscription that fitted up
the pastor’s study handsomely. The sight of this apartment had more to
do with Hetty’s short speech last night and her down-heartedness this
morning than the newness of quarters and the knowledge of the nearly
spent “housekeeping purse.”
“The people will expect us to live up to that study!” she divined
shrewdly, staring into the blackness that began to show two gray lights
where windows would shape themselves by and by. “And we cannot do
it—strain and save and turn and twist as we may. We are always cut out
on a scant pattern, and not a button meets without starting a seam. How
sick and tired I am of it all! How tired I am of _everything_! What if
I were to lie still as other girls—as _real_ young ladies do—and sleep
until I’m rested out—rested all through! I should enjoy nestling down
among the pillows and pulling the covers about my head, and listening
to the rain, as much as the laziest butterfly of them all. What’s the
use of trying to keep things on their feet any longer when they must go
down with a crash sooner or later?
“I’m _awfully_ sorry for Hetty Alling!” This was the summing up of the
gloomy reverie. In saying it inwardly, she raised herself to pinch
the pillow savagely and double it into a higher prop for her restless
head. “She is lonely and homesick and hasn’t a friend in the world. She
never can have an intimate friend for reasons she knows so well she is
sometimes ready to curse God and die.
“There! Hester, dear! I only moved you a little to make you lie easier.
No! it is not time to get up. Don’t talk, dear, or you’ll wake yourself
up.”
She was never cross with the afflicted child, but in her present
mood, the moan and gurgle of her obstructed respiration went through
her brain like the scraping of a saw. The change of position did not
make the breathing more quiet, and Hetty got up with the general
out-of-tune-ativeness best expressed by saying that “one’s teeth are
all on edge.” She dressed by candlelight, to save gas, and groped her
way down the unfamiliar backstairs to the kitchen.
It was commodious and well-appointed, with a pleasant outlook by
daylight. In the dawn that struggled in a low-spirited way through the
rifts in the rain and refused to blend with the yellow blink of her
candle and Homer’s lantern, no chamber could be less than dismal.
Homer was on his knees in front of the flickering fire, at which he
stared as if doggedly determined to put it out of countenance.
“Now”—his way of beginning nine out of every ten sentences—“this ere’s
a new pattern of a range to me, an’ it’s tuk me some time fur ter git
holt on it. Most new things comes awk’ard to most folks.”
Hetty blew out her candle, and, dropping into a chair in physical and
mental languor, sat watching the grotesque figure clearing away ashes
and cinders. His wrestle with the new pattern had begrimed his pale
face and reddened his weak eyes. His matutinal costume of a dim blue
flannel shirt, gray trousers, and a black silk skull cap cast off by
Mr. Wayt, pushed well back upon the nape of the neck and revealing
a scanty uneven fringe of whitey-brown hair, did not provoke the
spectator to a smile.
“There is no bringing _him_ up to the tone of that study!” she
meditated grimly. “He and I are hopeless drudges, but he is the happier
of the two. Homer! I believe you really _love_ to work!” she broke
forth finally.
Homer snickered—a sudden spurt that left him very sober. His laugh
always went out like a damp match.
“Yes’m, cert’nly, ma’am! Ef ’twant fur work, there wouldn’t be nuthin’
to live fur!”
He shambled off to the cellar with the ashpan, and in a few minutes,
she could distinguish in the sounds rumbling and smothering in the
depths beneath her feet the melancholy tune of his favorite ditty:
“On the banks of the Omaha—maha!
’Twas there we settled many a night.
As happy as the little bird that sparkled on our block
On the banks of the Omaha!”
Hetty raised the window and leaned out, gasping for breath. A garden
lay behind the house and on one side of it. It was laid out in walks
and borders, and was rather broad than deep. Beyond this were undefined
clumps of trees that looked like an orchard. Roofs and chimneys and
spires and lines of other trees, marking the course of streets, were
emerging from the soaking mists. Five o’clock struck from a tower not
far away, and then a church bell began to ring gently—a persuasive call
to early prayers.
The warm, sweet, wet air that aroused her to look over the sill at a
row of hyacinths in full bloom, the slow peal of the bell, the hush
of the early morning, did not comfort her—but the soft moisture that
filled her eyes drew heat and bitterness out of her heart. When
she went up to awaken Hester she carried a spray of hyacinth bells,
weighted with fragrant drops. Fine gems of rain sprinkled her hair, her
cheeks were cool and damp, the scent of fresh earth and growing things
clung to her skirts. She laid the flowers playfully against the heavy
lids lifted peevishly at her call.
“‘There’s richness for you,’” she quoted. “A whole bed of them is
awaiting your inspection in the garden. And such lovely pansies—some
as big as the palm of your hand. You and I and Homer, who is wild with
delight over them, will claim the flowers as our especial charge and
property.”
“Thank you for the classification!” snapped Hester. “Yet we do belong
to backyards as naturally as cats and tomato cans. At least Homer and I
do. You’d climb the fence if you could.”
“With the other cats?” said Hetty lightly. “See! I am putting the
hyacinths in your own little vase. I unpacked your china and books
last night. Not a thing was even nicked. You shall arrange them in
this jolly corner cupboard after breakfast. It looks as if it were
made a-puppose, as Homer says. He has bumped his head against strange
doors and skinned his poor nose against unexpected corners twenty times
this morning. He says: ‘_Now_—I s’pose it’s the bran-new house what
_ox_cites me so. I allers gits _ox_cited in a strange place.’”
The well-meant diversion was ineffectual.
“His oxcitement ought to be chronic, then! Ugh! that water is scalding
hot!” shrinking from the sponge in Hetty’s hand. “For we’ve done
nothing but ‘move on’ ever since I can recollect. I overheard mother
say once, with a sort of reminiscent sigh, that our ‘longest pastorate
was in Cincinnati.’ We were there just four years. We were six months
in Chillicothe, and seven in Ypsilanti. Then there was a year in
Memphis, and eighteen months in Natchez, and thirteen in Davenport. The
Little Rock church had a strong constitution. We stayed there two years
and one week. It’s _my_ opinion that _he_ is the Wandering Jew, and we
are one of the Lost Tribes.”
She smiled sour approbation of her sarcastic sally, jerking her head
backward to bring Hetty’s face within range of her vision. The deft
fingers were fastening strings and straps over the misshapen shoulders.
The visage was grave, but always kind to her difficult charge.
“You think that is irreverent,” Hester fretted, wrinkling her forehead
and beetling her eyebrows. “It isn’t a circumstance to what I am
thinking all the time. Some day I shall be left to myself and my bosom
devil long enough to spit it all out. It’s just bottling up, like the
venom in Macbeth’s witches’ toad that had sweltered so long under a
stone. But for you, crosspatch, all would have been said and done long
ago.”
“You wouldn’t make your mother unhappy if you could help it,” Hetty
said cheerily. “And it isn’t flattering to her to compare her daughter
to a toad.”
Hester was silent. As she sat in Hetty’s lap, it could be seen that she
was not larger than a puny child of seven or eight. The curved spine
bowed and heightened the thin shoulders; she had never walked a step
since the casualty that nearly cost her her life. Only the face and
hands were uninjured. The latter were exquisitely formed, the features
were fine and clearly cut, and susceptible to every change of emotion.
That the gentle reproof had not wrought peaceable fruits was apparent
from her expression. The misfit in her organization was more painfully
perceptible to herself early in the day than afterward. She seemed to
have lost consciousness of her unlikeness to other people while asleep,
and to be compelled to readjust mental and physical conditions every
morning. Hetty dreaded the process, yet was hardly aware of the full
effect upon her own spirits, or why she so often went down to breakfast
jaded and appetiteless.
“I often ask myself,” resumed Hester, with slow malignity, repulsive
in one of her age and relation to those she condemned—“if children
ever really honor their parents. We won’t waste ammunition upon
_him_—but there is my mother. She is a pattern of all angelic virtues,
and a woman of remarkable mental endowments. You have told me again
and again that she is the best person you ever knew—patient, heroic,
loving, loyal, and so on to the end of the string! You tell over her
perfections as a Papist tells her beads. The law of kindness is in her
mouth; and her children shall arise and call her blessed, and she ought
not to be afraid of the snow for her household while her sister and her
slave Tony are to the fore. Don’t try to stop me, or the toad will spit
at you! I say that this, one would think, impossible She, the modern
rival of Solomon’s pious and prudish wise woman—is weak and unjust
and——”
Hetty interrupted the tirade by rising and laying the warped frame, all
a-quiver with excitement, upon the bed.
“You would better get your sleep out”—covering her up. “When you awake
again you will behave more like a reasonable creature. I cannot stay
here and listen to vulgar abuse of your mother and my best friend.”
She said it in firm composure, drew down the shades, and without
another glance at the convulsed heap sobbing under the bedclothes,
left the chamber. Outside the door she paused as if expecting to be
recalled, but no summons came. She shook her head with a sad little
smile and passed down to the breakfast room.
Father, mother, and four children were at the table. Mr. Wayt, in
dressing jacket, slippers, and silk skull cap, a cup of steaming
chocolate at his right hand, was engrossed in the morning paper. A pair
of scissors was beside his plate, that he might clip out incident or
statistics which might be useful in the preparation of his wide-awake
sermons. He made no sign of recognition at the entrance of his wife’s
sister; Mrs. Wayt smiled affectionately and lifted her face for a
good-morning salute, indicating by an expressive gesture her surprise
and pleasure at having found room and meal in such attractive order.
Long practice had made her an adept in pantomime. The boys nodded over
satisfactory mouthfuls; pretty Fanny pulled her aunt down for a hug as
she passed; even the baby made a mute rosebud of her mouth and beckoned
Hetty not to overlook her.
Mr. Wayt’s digestion was as idiosyncratic as his nervous system. While
the important unseen apparatus carried on the business of assimilation,
the rest of the physical man was held in quiescent subjugation.
Agitation of molecular centers might entail ruinous consequences. He
reasoned ably upon this point, citing learned authorities in defense of
the dogma that simultaneous functionation—such as animated speech or
auricular attention and digestion—is an impossibility, and referring
to the examples of dumb creatures to prove that rest during and after
eating is a natural law.
He raised his eyes above the margin of his newspaper at the clink of
the chocolate pot against the cup in Hetty’s hand. The questioning gaze
met a goodly sight. His wife’s sister wore a buff gingham, finished
at throat and wrists with white cambric ruffles, hemmed and gathered
by herself. Her dark brown hair was in perfect order; her sleeves
were pushed back from strong, shapely wrists. She always gave one the
impression of clean-limbedness, elasticity, and neatness. She was firm
of flesh and of will. The prettier woman at the head of the table was
flaccid beside her. The eyes of the younger were fearless in meeting
the master’s scrutiny, those of his wife were wistful, and clouded
anxiously in passing from one to the other.
“For Hester,” said Hetty, in a low voice, looking away from Mr. Wayt to
her sister. “She is tired, and will take her breakfast in bed.”
“I remonstrate”—Mr. Wayt’s best audience tones also addressed his
wife—“as I have repeatedly had occasion to do, against the practice of
pampering an invalid until her whims dominate the household. Not that I
have the least hope that my protest will be heeded. But as the child’s
father, I cannot, in conscience, withhold it.”
Light scarlet flame, in which her features seemed to waver, was blown
across Hetty’s face. She set down the pot, poured back what she had
taken from it, and with a reassuring glance at her sister’s pleading
eyes, went off to the kitchen. There she hastened to find milk,
chocolate, and saucepan, and to prepare a foaming cup of Hester’s
favorite beverage; Homer, meanwhile, toasting a slice of bread,
delicately and quickly.
Hester’s great eyes were raised to her aunt from lids sodden with
tears; her lips trembled unmanageably in trying to frame her plea.
“Forgive me! please forgive me!” she sobbed. “You know what my morning
fiend is. And I am not brave like you, or patient like mother!”
Hetty fondled the hot little hands.
“Let it pass, love. I was not angry, but some subjects are best left
untouched between us. Here is your breakfast. Homer says that I ‘make
chawkerlette jes’ the same’s they did for him in the horspittle when he
had the new-money.’ They must have had a French _chef_ and a marvelous
_menu_ in that famous ‘horspittle.’ It reminds me of Little Dorritt’s
Maggie and her ‘’evenly chicken,’ and ‘so lovely an’ ’ospittally!’”
She had the knack of picking up and making the most of little things
for the entertainment of her hapless charge. Mrs. Wayt was much
occupied with the other children, to whom she devoted all the time she
could spare from her husband. It happened occasionally that he would
eat no bread she had not made, and oftener that his craving was for
certain _entrées_ she alone could prepare to his liking. She brushed
his coat and hat, kept the run of missing papers and handkerchiefs,
tied his cravats, sat by him in a darkened room when he took his
afternoon siesta, wrote letters from his dictation, and, when he was
weary, copied in a clear, clerkly hand or upon his typewriter, sermons
and addresses from the notes he was wont to pencil in minute characters
upon a pocket pad. At least four nights out of seven she arose in the
dead of darkness to read aloud to him for one, three, and four hours,
when the baleful curse, insomnia, claimed him as her prey. His fad,
at this date, was what Homer tickled Hester into hysterics by calling
“them horsephates.” Horsford’s acid phosphate, if the oracle were to be
believed, ought to be the _vade mecum_ of ailing humanity. He carried
a silver flask containing it in his pocket everywhere; dropped the
liquid furtively upon a lump of sugar, and ate it in the pulpit, during
anthem, or voluntary, or offertory; mixed it with water and drank it
on the cars, in drugstores, in private houses, and at his meals, and
Mrs. Wayt kept spirit lamp and kettle in her bedroom with which to
heat water for the tranquilizing and peptic draught at cock-crowing or
at midnight. If she had ever complained of his exactions, or uttered
an ungentle word to him, neither sister nor child had heard her. She
would have become his advocate against himself had need arisen—which it
never did.
“My ministering angel,” he named her to the Gilchrists, his keen eyes
softened by ready dew. “John Randolph said, in his old age, of his
mother: ‘She was the only being who ever understood me.’ I can say the
same of my other and dearer self. She interprets my spirit intuitions
when they are but partially known to myself. She meets my nature at
every turn.”
She met it to-day by mounting guard—sometimes literally—before the door
of his study—the one room which was entirely in order—while he prepared
his discourses for the ensuing Sabbath. The rest found enough and more
than enough to do without the defended portal. Fanny was shut up in the
dining room with the baby Annie, and warned not to be noisy. The twins
carried bundles and boxes up and downstairs in their stocking-feet;
Homer pried off covers with a muffled hammer, and shouldered trunks,
empty and full, leaving his shoes at the foot of the stairs. Hester
said nothing of a blinding headache and a “jumping pain” in her back
while she dusted books and china. Hetty was everywhere and ever busy,
and nobody spoke a loud word all day.
“You might think there was a corpse in the study instead of a sermon
being born!” Hester had once sneered to her confidante. “I never
hear him preach, but I know I should be reminded of the mountain that
brought forth a mouse.”
One of her father’s many protests, addressed _at_ Hetty and _to_ his
wife, was that their eldest born was “virtually a heathen.”
“Home education in religion, even when administered by the wisest and
tenderest of mothers—like yourself, my love—must still fall short of
such godly nurture and admonition as are contemplated in the command:
‘Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.’ There is didactic
theology in David’s holy breathing: ‘A day in thy courts is better than
a thousand.’”
“Better than a thousand in the same place? I should think so,”
interposed Hester’s tuneless pipe. “He needn’t have been inspired to
tell us that! Family worship suffices for my spiritual needs. That must
be the porch to the ‘courts,’ at least.”
In speaking she, too, looked at her mother, although every word was
aimed at her father.
“It is a cruel trick that we have!” Hetty had said of the habit. “Every
ball strikes that much-tried and innocent woman, no matter who throws
it.”
“Of course!” retorted the sarcastic daughter. “And must while the angle
of incidence is equal to that of reflection.”
In the discussion upon family _versus_ church religion she carried her
point by a _coup d’état_.
“Pews and staring pewholders are all well enough for straight-backed
Christians!” she snarled. “I won’t be made a holy show of to gratify
all the preachers and presbyteries in America!”
Anything like physical deformity was especially obnoxious to Mr. Wayt.
The most onerous duties pertaining to his holy office were visitation
of the sick and burial of the dead. Hester’s beautiful golden hair,
falling far below her waist, veiled her humped shoulders, and her
refined face looking out from this aureole, as she lay in her wheeled
chair, would be picturesquely interesting in the chancel, if not
seen too often there. The coarse realism of her refusal routed him
completely. With an artistic shudder and a look of eloquent misery,
likewise directed at his wife, he withdrew his forces from the field.
That night she read “Sartor Resartus” to him from three o’clock until 6
A. M., so intolerable was his agony of sleeplessness.
It happened so often that Hetty was the only responsible member of the
family who could remain at home with the crippled girl, that neither
Mr. nor Mrs. Wayt seemed to remark that her churchgoing was less than
nominal. Hester called Sunday her “white-letter day,” and was usually
then in her best and most tolerant temper, while her fellow-sinner
looked forward to the comparative rest and liberty it afforded as the
wader in marshlands eyes a projecting shoulder of firm ground and dry
turf.
It was never more welcome than on the fair May day when the Fairhill
“people” crowded the First Church to hear the new pulpit star.
“The prayer which preceded the sermon was a sacred lyric,” said
the Monday issue of the _Fairhill Pointer_. “In this respect Rev.
Mr. Wayt is as remarkably gifted as in the oratory which moved his
auditors alternately to tears, and smiles, and glows of religious
fervor. We regret the impossibility of reporting the burning stream
of supplication and ascription that flowed from his heart through
his lips, but a fragment of the introduction, uttered slowly and
impressively, is herewith given verbatim, as a sample of incomparable
felicity of diction:
“‘THOU art mighty, merciful, masterful, and majestic. _We_ are feeble,
fickle, finite, and fading.’”[A]
March Gilchrist had his say anent the sample sentence on the way home
from church. He was not connected with the press, and his criticism
went no further than the ears of his somewhat scandalized and decidedly
diverted sister.
In intuitive anticipation of the reportorial eulogy, he affirmed that
the diction was _not_ incomparable.
“I heard a Georgia negro preacher beat it all hollow,” he said.
“He began with: ‘THOU art all-sufficient, self-sufficient, and
_in_-sufficient!’”
“March Gilchrist! How dreadful!”
They were passing the side windows of the parsonage, which opened upon
a quiet cross street. May’s laugh rippled through the bowed shutters
of the dining room behind which sat a girl in a blue flannel gown,
holding upon her knee and against her shoulder a hunchbacked child with
a weirdly wise face. They were watching the people coming home from
church.
“A religious mountebank is the most despicable of humbugs,” said
March’s breezy voice, as he whirled a pebble from the walk with his
cane, and watched it leap to the middle of the street.
Hester twisted her neck to look into Hetty’s eyes.
“They are discussing their beloved and eloquent pastor! My heart goes
out to those two people!”