MR. WAYT availed himself of an early opportunity to make known his
intention to take no vacation that year. He “doubted the expediency
of midsummer absences on the part of suburban pastors.” While many
residents of Fairhill went abroad and to fashionable resorts in America
in July and August, a respectable minority was content to remain at
home, and some of the vacated cottages and villas were taken by city
people, to whom the breezy heights and shaded lawns were a blessed
relief from miles of scorching stone and brick. He “foresaw both
foreign and domestic missionary work in his own parish,” he said to his
session in explaining his plans for the summer campaign.
The resolution was politic and strengthened his hold upon his new
charge. Not to be outdone in generosity, the people redoubled their
affectionate attentions to their spiritual leader. Fruits, flowers, and
all manner of table dainties poured into the parsonage; carriages came
daily to offer airings to Mrs. Wayt and the children, and on the Fourth
of July a pretty phaëton and gentle horse were sent as “a gift to the
mistress of the manse,” from a dozen prominent parishioners.
“Verily, my cup runneth over.”
A real tear dropped upon Mr. Wayt’s shirt front as he uttered it
falteringly on the afternoon of the holiday. Yet he had been repeating
the words at seasonable intervals, and more or less moistly, since the
hour of the presentation.
The Gilchrists were upon the eastern veranda, the embowering vines of
which were beginning to rustle in the sea breeze. All had arisen at the
pastor’s appearance, and March set a chair for him.
“I have thought, sometimes, that I had some command of language,” he
continued unctuously. “To-day I have no words save those laid to my
use by the Book of books—‘My cup runneth over.’ It is not one of my
foibles to expatiate upon the better ‘days that are no more.’ The trick
is common and cheap. But to you, my best friends, I may venture to
confide that my dear wife and I were brought up in what I have since
been disposed to characterize as ‘mistaken luxury.’ Since the unselfish
saint joined her blameless lot with mine she has never had a carriage
of her own until to-day. I can receive favors done to myself with a
manly show of gratitude. Appreciation of my wife makes a baby of me.”
“By this time he should be in his second childhood, then, for
everybody likes mamma,” piped a familiar voice from within the French
window of the library. Glancing around with a start that was _not_
theatrical, he espied his eldest born established at her ease in a
low chair. Her feet were on a stool; she wore a white gown, and May’s
white Chudda shawl covered her from the waist downward; her hair was
a mesh of gold thread that drew to it all the light of the dying day.
May sat on a cushion in the window and linked Hester in her comparative
retirement with the veranda group.
“Ah, little one, are you there?” said the fond parent playfully. “I
missed you from the dinner table and might have guessed that you could
be nowhere but here.”
Profound silence ensued, and lasted for a minute. Hester shrank into
herself with a blush visible even in the shadowy interior.
March and May had gone through orchard and gardens to fetch her an hour
ago. Her father had eaten his evening meal at the same table with her.
In the circumstances there was nothing to say, a fact comprehended by
all except the unconscious offender.
“I think Mrs. Wayt will find her horse gentle,” said Judge Gilchrist,
in formal civility too palpable to his wife.
With intelligent apprehension of the truth, too often overlooked, that
confidence in the truth bearer must precede obedience to his message,
she desired that her husband and son should like Mr. Wayt. To March she
had confessed her fear that some of the family were “peculiar,” and he
might infer the inclusion of the nominal head in the category. Further
than this she would not go. With pious haste she picked the fly out of
the ointment, and with holy duplicity beguiled others into approval of
the article that bore the trade mark of “The Church.”
Ah, the Church!—in every age and, despite lapses and shortcomings and
stains, the custodian of the Ark of God—her debt to such devout and
loyal souls as this woman’s will never be estimated until the Master
shall make acknowledgment of it in the great day of reckoning.
When the judge’s turn of the subject and the “horsey” talk that
followed granted his wife leisure to reconsider the matter, she
discovered that there was no cause for discomfiture. Mr. Wayt was
absent-minded, as were all students of deep things. Only, her husband
was quick of sight and wit, and neither March nor May had much to say,
of late, of the new preacher who was doing such excellent work in
the congregation. March went regularly to church and sat beside his
mother through prayer and hymn and sermon, and afterward refrained
from adverse criticism. This may have been out of respect to the girl
he hoped to make his wife. Yet she had dared fancy that the graver
tenderness of his behavior to herself and the unusual periods of
thoughtfulness that occurred in their conversations had to do with the
dawning of spiritual life in his soul. However much certain of Mr.
Wayt’s mannerisms might offend her taste, there was no question of his
ability and eloquence. That these might be the divinely appointed nets
for the ingathering into the Church of her best beloved was a burden
that weighted every petition.
March had not spoken openly of his love for Hetty Alling since the
evening on which he first avowed it to his mother, but, in her opinion,
there was nothing significant in this reserve. The Gilchrists were
delicate in their dealings with one another, never asking inconvenient
questions, or pushing communication beyond the voluntary stage. If May
divined the drift of her brother’s affections, she did not intimate
it by word or look. When the fruit of confidence was ripe it would be
dropped into her lap. She _did_ note what Mrs. Gilchrist had not the
opportunity of seeing—how seldom Hetty had leisure to receive March or
his sister. She was getting ready the wardrobe of the twin boys, who
were to go to boarding school the 1st of October. Through Hester’s talk
May had learned incidentally that the Wayts employed neither dressmaker
nor seamstress.
“Hetty is miraculously skillful with her needle,” was Hester’s way of
putting it, “and so swift that it would drive her wild to see her work
done by the ‘young lady who goes out by the day.’ I work buttonholes
and hem ruffles and such like, and mamma gives her all the time she can
spare from baby—and other things. But our Hetty is the motor of the
household machine. I don’t believe there is another like her in the
world. The mold in which she was cast was broken.”
She had said this in a chat held with her favorite this evening while
the others were engaged with other themes outside of the window. May
encouraged her to go on by remarking:
“You love her as dearly as if she were really your sister, don’t you?”
“‘As well!’ The love I have for mother, sisters, and brothers is a
drop in the ocean compared with what I feel for Hetty! See here, Miss
May!” showing her perfectly formed hands. “These were as helpless as
my feet. Hetty rubbed me, bathed me, flexed the muscles for an hour
every morning and an hour every night. She tempted me to eat; obliged
me to take exercise; carried me up and down stairs, and sat with me
in her arms out of doors until she had saved fifty dollars out of her
allowance to have my chair built. Hetty educated me—made me over! She
is my brain, the blood of my heart—I don’t believe I should have a soul
but for Hetty!”
The warm water stood in May’s eyes. But the weak voice, thrilling with
excitement, reminded her of the danger of an excess of feeling upon the
disjointed system. She spoke lightly:
“Oh, your father would have looked out for your soul!”
“_Would_ he?”
The accent of intensest acrimony shocked the listener, corroborated as
it was by the bitterness of scorn that wrung the small face.
In a second Hester caught herself up.
“They say that cobblers’ wives go barefoot. Ministers have so little
time to spare for the souls of their families that their children are
paganed. If it wasn’t for their wives and their wives’ sisters, the
forlorn creatures would not know who made them.”
It was a plausible evasion, but it did not efface from May’s mind the
disdainful outburst and the black look that went with it. Both seemed
so unnatural, even revolting, to a girl whose father stood with her
as the synonym for nobility of manhood, that she could not get away
from the recollection for the rest of the evening. This was before Mr.
Wayt’s arrival, and sharpened May’s appreciation of the little by-play
between Hester and her parent.
His departure at nine o’clock was succeeded by Hester’s at ten, and, as
was their habit, March and his sister took her home by the path across
the orchard. The night was sultry; the moon lay languid under swathes
of gray mist. She looked warm, and the stars near her faint and tired.
Low down upon the horizon were flashes of purple sheet lightning. The
town had kept the Fourth patriotically, and the odor of burned paper
and gunpowder tainted the stirless air.
“The grass is perfectly dry,” said May, stopping to lay her hand upon
the mown sward. “That should be a sign of a shower.”
“There is always rain on the night of the Fourth of July,” returned
March abstractedly.
Hester said not a word. As she looked up at the sick moon her eyes
showed large and dark; her face was corpselike in the wan radiance. She
was weary, and she had been indiscreet. She could not sleep without
confessing to Hetty her lapse of temper and tongue, and Hetty had
enough to bear already. She had not been so strong and bright as was
her wont for a month past. It might be only excessive drudgery over
sewing machine and household duties, but she looked fagged and sad at
times. The phaëton and horse would benefit mamma and the children—when
the vacant place beside the mistress of the Manse was not occupied by
their lord and master. _He_ got the lion’s share of every luxury. Poor
Hester’s conscience and heart were raw, and the heat of the wounds
inflamed her imagination. The evening at the judge’s had not rested
her. That was strange, or would have been had not the long, black
shadow of her father lain across the memory of it.
The back door of the parsonage stood wide open, and the house was so
still that, as March stooped to lift Hester from her carriage at the
foot of the steps, he caught the sound of what was scarcely louder
than an intermittent sigh in the upper story, but continuous as a
violent fit of weeping. The arm that lay over his shoulder twitched
convulsively; Hester shuddered sharply, then laughed aloud:
“Oh, Mr. Gilchrist! I thought I was falling! It is too bad to put you
to all this trouble. I hope Tony hasn’t blown himself up. He ought to
have come for me.”
“Didn’t I promise your mother to bring you home safely?” said March
reassuringly. And, as they reached the hall—“May I carry you upstairs?”
The offer seemed to terrify her.
“Oh, no, no! Just lay me on the settee there! Somebody will be down
directly. Don’t trouble yourself to bring the chair in. Tony will
attend to that. Thank you! Good-night, Mr. Gilchrist! Good-night, Miss
May!”
While she hurried all this out, a stumble on the back stairs was the
precursor of Homer’s appearance in the dim recesses of the hall. He
alighted at the bottom of the flight on all-fours, picked himself up
and shambled forward, one hand on his head, the other on his elbow, an
imbecile grin spreading his jaws.
“_Now_, I a’most broke me _nake_ on them stairs!”
March had deposited Hester upon the hall lounge, and although
perceiving her anxiety to get rid of him, hesitated to commit her to
the keeping of a man who was, apparently, but half awake.
“Let me carry you up!” he insisted to Hester. “He may fall again.”
“Oh, Tony is all right!” in the same strained key as before. “He never
lets anything but himself drop.”
A rustle and swift step sounded above stairs. Someone ran down. It was
Hetty. Her white wrapper was begirt with a ribbon loosely knotted; her
rust-brown hair was breaking from constraint and tumbling upon her
shoulders.
March’s first pained thought was: “She knew I would be in, yet did not
mean to see me again to-night!”
A second glance at the colorless face and wild eyes awakened unselfish
concern.
“What is the matter? Who is hurt?” she queried anxiously. Hester’s
reply was a shriek of laughter.
“Nothing! Nobody! Only Tony has broken his neck again, and Mr.
Gilchrist did not know that it is an hourly occurrence in our family
life, so he insisted upon taking me upstairs himself.”
“Mr. Gilchrist is very kind!” Hetty’s tone was deadly mechanical; in
speaking she looked at nobody. “I sent Homer down when I heard you
coming. I am sorry he was not in time.”
May had joined the group.
“I hope,” she said in her cheery way, “that none of the rest of your
household have come to grief to-day?”
Hetty turned to her with eyes that questioned silently—almost defiantly.
“I mean, of course, did the boys bring home the proper quantum of eyes
and fingers?”
“Yes! oh, yes! thank you! they went to bed tired, but whole, I believe.”
“That is fortunate, but remarkable for a Fourth of July report,” said
March. “Come, May! Good-night!”
He had seen, without comprehending, the intense relief that flooded
the girl’s visage at his sister’s second sentence, also that she was
feverishly anxious to have them go. And the sound above stairs, hushed
by Hester’s shrill tones—was it low, anguished weeping? The mourner was
not Hetty, yet her dry eyes were full of misery. His big, soft heart
ached with futile sympathy. By what undiscovered track could he fare
near enough to her to make her conscious of this and of a love the
greatness of which ought to help her bear her load of trouble?
“Hetty looks _dreadfully_!” broke out May at the garden gate. “She
is worked and worried to death! I am amazed that Mrs. Wayt allows
it. To reduce a girl like that to the level of a household drudge is
barbarous. She has no time for society or recreation of any kind. It
is toil, toil, toil, from morning until night. Mary Ann—the cook mamma
got for them—says she ‘never saw such another young lady for sweetness
and kindness to servants as Miss Hetty,’ but that she ‘carries all the
house on them straight little shoulders of hern.’ Hester tells the same
story in better English.”
She repeated what she had heard that evening.
March stopped to listen under the king apple tree, where he had begun
to love the subject of the eulogy. While May declaimed he reached up
for a cluster of green apples and leaves and pulled it to pieces, his
face grave, his fingers lingering.
“Heaven knows, May”—she was not prepared for the emotion with which
it was uttered—“that I would risk my life to make hers happy. I
hoped once—but you see for yourself how she avoids me. I could fancy
sometimes that she is afraid of me!”
“Perhaps she is afraid of herself.”
He looked up eagerly.
“Is that a chance remark? You women understand one another. Have you
seen anything——”
“Nothing I could or would repeat, my dear boy! But there is a mystery
somewhere, and I can’t believe it is the phenomenon of such a sensible
girl’s failure to appreciate my brother. May I say something, March,
dear?”
“Whatever you like—after what has gone before!”
“Maybe it ought not to have gone before—or after, either. For, brother,
this is not just the sort of connection that you should form. To
speak plainly, you might look higher. ‘Strike—but hear!’ Hetty is
all that I have said, and more. But there is a Bohemian flavor about
the household. We will whisper it—even at half-past ten o’clock at
night, in the orchard—and never hint it to ‘the people,’ or to mamma!
They are nomads from first to last—why, I cannot say. They have lived
everywhere, and nowhere long. Mrs. Wayt is a refined gentlewoman, but
her eyes are sad and anxious. You know how fond I am of Hester, poor
child! Still a nameless something clings to them as a whole—not quite
a taint, but a tang! Especially to Mr. Wayt. There! it is out! Let us
hope the apple trees are discreet! I distrust him, March! He doesn’t
ring true. He is always on pose. He is a sanctimonious (which doesn’t
mean sanctified) self-lover. Such men ought to remain celibate.”
March tried to laugh, but not successfully.
“I dissent from and agree to nothing you say. But——” He waited so long
that May finished the sentence for him.
“But you love Hetty?”
“Yes! She _suits_ me, May! As no other woman ever did. As no other
woman ever will. I have tried to reason myself out of the persuasion,
but get deeper in. She _suits_ me—every fiber and every impulse of my
nature. I seem to have known her forever and always to have missed her.”
With all her pride in her family and ambition for her brother May had
a romantic side to her character. Had she liked Hetty less, she would
yet have pledged her support to the lover. She told him this while they
strolled homeward, and then around and around the graveled drive in
front of the Gilchrist portico, and had, in return, the full story of
his passion.
“When I marry, my wife will have all there is of me,” he had said, long
ago, to his sister.
He reminded her of it to-night.
“She is not a brilliant society woman. Not beautiful, perhaps. I am not
a competent judge of that at this date. She has not the prestige of
wealth or station. But she is my counterpart.”
He always returned to that.
When his sister had gone into the house he tarried on the lawn with
his cigar. What freshness the fierce sun had left to the air was all
to be found out of doors. As the gray swathes continued to smother
the light out of the moon the heat became more oppressive. The gravel
walks were hot to his feet; the bricks of the house radiated caloric.
With a half-laugh at the whim, he entered the now silent and darkened
dwelling, sought and procured a carriage rug, and pulling the door shut
after him, whistled for Thor, and retraced his steps to the orchard. He
spread the rug upon the grass kept cool by the down-leaning branches of
the arbor and cast himself upon it. He meant to make a night of it.
“I have camped out, many a July night, in far less luxurious quarters,”
he muttered. “And this place is sacred.”
When the mosquitoes began to hum in his ears, he lighted another cigar.
He was the more glad to do it, as he fancied, once in a while, that
the young apples or the wilting leaves had a peculiar and not pleasant
odor, as of some gum or essence, that hung long in the atmosphere.
He had noticed it when he pulled down a branch to get the spray he
had torn apart, while May talked. The air was full of foreign scents
to-night, and this might be an olfactory imagination.
As twelve o’clock struck from the nearest church spire, he was staring
into the formless shadows overhead and living over the apple-blossom
week, the symphony in pink and white. The young robins were full
fledged and had flitted from the parent nest. The young hope, born of
what stood with him for all the poetry of his six-and-twenty years of
life, spread strong wings toward a future he was not to enjoy alone.
Thor was uneasy. He should have found his share of the rug laid upon
elastic turf as comfortable as the mat on the piazza floor, which was
his usual bed, yet he arose to his haunches, once and again, and,
although at his master’s touch or word, he lay down obediently, the
outline of his big head, as March could make it out in the gloom, was
alert.
“What is it, old boy?” said he presently. “What is going on?”
Thor whined and beat the ground with his tail, both tentatively, as
asking information in return.
In raising his own head from the yielding and soft rustling grasses,
March became aware of a sound, iterative and teasing, that vexed the
languid night. It was like the ticking of a clock, or of an uncommonly
strenuous deathwatch. While he listened it seemed to gather force and
become rhythmic.
“Click! click! clack! click! click! _clack!_ clicketty click!
clicketty, clicketty _clack!_ click! click! click! clicketty _clack!_
ting!”
Somebody was working a typewriter on this stifling night, presumably by
artificial light, in the most aristocratic quarter of Fairhill.
Thor knew the incident to be unprecedented. The rhythmic iteration made
his master nervous; the sharp warning of the bell at the end of each
line pierced his ear like the touch of a fine wire.
He sat up and looked about him.
An aperture in the foliage let through a single ray of light. It came
from the direction of the parsonage.
“Tony’s pet hallucination is of a wandering light in the garden and
orchard, a sort of ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ affair, which it is his duty to
look after,” Hester had said that evening. “He rushes downstairs at all
hours of the evening to see who is carrying it. I told him last night
that burglars were too clever to care to enter a clergyman’s house,
but he cannot be convinced that somebody, bent upon mischief, doesn’t
prowl about the premises. He is half blind, you know, and has but
three-fourths of his wits within call.”
Recollecting this, March arose cautiously, whispered to Thor to
“trail,” and stole noiselessly up the easy grade.
The light was in the wing of the parsonage and shone from the wide
window of the pastor’s study on the first floor. The shutters were
open; a wire screen excluded insects, and just within this sat a woman
at a typewriter—Hetty!
Across the shallow garden he could see that her hair was combed to the
crown of her head for coolness, and coiled loosely there. Now that
he was nearer to the house, he distinguished another voice, also a
woman’s, dictating, or reading, as the flying fingers manipulated the
keys. Drawing out his repeater, he struck it. Half-past twelve!
“I have been sorely interrupted in my pulpit preparation this week,”
Mr. Wayt had informed Mrs. Gilchrist, on taking leave that night. “I
fear the sunlight will extinguish my midnight argand burner. ‘The labor
we delight in physicks pain,’ and, with me, takes the place of slumber,
meat, and drink.”
Impressed by an undefined sense of trouble, March stood, his hand upon
the gate, almost decided to go up to the house and inquire if aught
were amiss. While he cast about in his mind for some form of words
that might account for his intrusion, Mrs. Wayt’s figure came forward,
and offered, with one hand, a glass of water to her sister. In the
other she held a paper. Without taking her fingers from the typewriter
Hetty raised her head, Mrs. Wayt put the glass to her lips, and, while
she drank, dictated a sentence from the sheet in her hand. In the
breezeless hush of the July night a clause was audible to the spectator.
“Who has not heard the story of the drummer boy of Gettysburg?”
“Click-click-clack! Click-click-clack!” recommenced the noisy rattle.
While Hetty’s fingers flew her sister fanned her gently, but the eyes
of one were riveted to the machine, those of the other never left the
paper in her hand.
March went back to his orchard camp, Thor at his heels.
It was close cloudy; the purple play of lightning was whitening and
concentrating in less frequent lines and lances. When these came, it
could be seen that thunderheads were lifting themselves in the west.
But the night remained windless, and the iterative click still teased
the ears of the watcher. It was an odd vigil, even for an anxious
lover, to lie there, gazing into the black abysses of shade, seeing
naught except by livid flashes that left deeper blackness, and knowing
whose vital forces were expended in the unseasonable toil.
What could it mean? Did the overladen girl add copying for pay to the
list of her labors? And could the sister who seemed to love her, aid
and abet the suicidal work? Where was Mr. Wayt? The play of questions
took the measure and beat of the type keys, until he was wild with
speculation and hearkening.
At half-past two the rattle ceased suddenly. Almost beside himself with
nervous restlessness, he sprang up and looked through the gap in the
boughs. The light went out, and, at the same instant, the delayed storm
burst in roar and rain.