SUNDAY, July 5, dawned gloriously, clear and fresh after the
thunder-storm, to which Fairhill people still refer pridefully, as the
most violent known in thirty years. The gunpowder and Chinese paper
taint was swept and washed out of the world.
Mrs. Wayt, holding Fanny by the hand, and followed decorously by the
twin boys in their Sunday clothes and churchward-bound behavior,
emerged from her gate as the Gilchrists gained it. In the white light
of the forenoon, the eyes of the pastor’s wife showed faded; groups of
fine wrinkles were at the corners, and bistre shadows under them. Yet
she announced vivaciously that all were in their usual health at home,
except for Mr. Wayt’s headache, and nobody had been hurt yesterday.
“For which we should return special thanks, public and private,” she
went on to say, walking, with her little girl, abreast with Judge and
Mrs. Gilchrist, the boys falling back with the young people. “At least,
those of us who are the mothers of American boys. I can breathe with
tolerable freedom now until the next Fourth of July. What a fearful
storm we had last night! My baby was awakened by it and wanted to know
if it was ‘torpetoes or firetrackers?’ Yet, since we owe our beautiful
Sabbath to the thunder and rain, we may be thankful for it; as for many
other things that seem grievous in the endurance.”
“I hope Mr. Wayt’s headache is not in consequence of having sat up
until daybreak, as he threatened to do,” the judge said, in a genial
voice that reached his son’s ears.
March listened breathlessly for the reply.
“I think not. I did not ask him this morning at what time he left his
study. He is not inclined to be communicative with regard to his sins
of commission in that respect, but I suspect he is an incorrigible
offender. He attributes his headache—verbally—to the extraordinary heat
of yesterday. We all suffered from it, more or less, and it increased
rather than diminished, after sunset.”
“Is Mr. Wayt well enough to take the service this morning?”
“Oh, yes!” quickly emphatical. “It would be a severe indisposition
indeed that would keep him out of the pulpit. Both his parents suffered
intensely from nervous and sick headaches, so he could hardly hope to
escape. I have observed that people who are subject to constitutional
attacks of this kind, are seldom ill in any other way, particularly
if the headaches are hereditary. How do you account for this, Judge
Gilchrist? Or, perhaps, you doubt the statement itself.”
March did not trouble his brains with his father’s reply. The
volubility of one whose discourse was generally distinctively refined
and moderate in tone and terms would of itself have challenged
attention. But what was her object in saying that she had not inquired
at what hour her husband left his study last night? Since she and her
sister were in occupation of the room from midnight—probably before
that hour—until two in the morning, she certainly knew that he was
not there and almost as surely where he was and how engaged during
those hours. Where was the need of duplicity in the circumstances? Was
she committed to uphold the professional fiction, which her husband
circulated vauntingly, that his best pulpit preparation must be done
when honest people are asleep in their beds—that the beaten oil of the
sanctuary must flow through lamp-wick or gas-burners? What end was
subserved by supererogatory diplomacy and subterfuge?
“How are the two Hesters to-day, Mrs. Wayt?” asked May, from the side
of her puzzled brother.
“Hester is rather languid. The heat again!”
She looked over her shoulder to say it, and they could see how entirely
the freshness had gone from eyes and complexion. Her very hair looked
bleached and dry. “The weather will excuse every mishap and misdemeanor
until the dog days are over. Hetty stayed at home to watch over her. It
is a source of regret to Mr. Wayt and myself”—comprehensively to the
four Gilchrists—“that my sister is so often debarred the privileges of
the sanctuary in consequence of Hester’s dependence upon her.”
“I have remarked that she is frequently absent from church,” Mrs.
Gilchrist answered.
Her dry tone annoyed her son. Yet how could she, bred in luxury and
living in affluence, enter into the exigencies of a position which
combined the offices of nurse, companion, housewife, seamstress,
mother, and bread-winner?
Mrs. Wayt took alarm.
“Poor child! she hardly calls herself a church-goer at all. But it is
not her fault. She thinks, and with reason, that it is more important
for me to attend service regularly—for the sake of the example, you
understand—and we cannot leave our dear, helpless child with the
children or servants. She gets no Sabbath except as my sister gives
it to her. I am anxious that the true state of the case should be
understood by the church people. Hetty would grieve to think that her
enforced absences are a stumbling block.”
Her solicitude was genuine and obvious. Judge Gilchrist offered an
assuasive:
“We must have a telephone wire run from the pulpit to Miss Hester’s
room. I have known of such things.”
“I don’t believe that Hester would care to keep her room Sunday
mornings then!” whispered Perry, _l’enfant terrible_ of the Wayt
family. “She says family prayers are all she can stand.”
March, the recipient of the saucy “aside,” cast a warning look at the
telltale. Inwardly he was amused by the unlucky revelation. Spoiled
child as Hester was, she had marvelously keen perceptions and shrewd
judgment. She saw through the jugglery that deceived the mass of Mr.
Wayt’s followers, and rated correctly the worth of his capital.
He juggled rarely to-day. Even his voice partook of the spread-eagle
element which interfused Divine services as conducted by the popular
preacher. The church was full to the doors, many of the audience being
strangers and sightseers. The number of “transients” increased weekly.
“He is like fly-paper,” Hester had said, this very Sunday, as the
skirts of his well-fitting coat, clerically cut and closely buttoned,
cleared the front door. “Out of the many that swarm and buzz about
him, some are sure to stick—that is, take pews! That is the test of
spiritual husbandry, Hetty! I believe I’ll be an infidel!”
“Don’t be utterly absurd!” answered her aunt in a spiritless way. “I
haven’t the energy to argue, or even scold. ‘Let God be true, and
every man a liar.’ God forgive me, but I am ready, sometimes, to say
that all men _are_! But I can’t let Him go, dear!”
Mr. Wayt gave out the opening hymn in tones that would have been
clarion, but for an occasional break into falsetto that brought to
March’s irreverent mind the wheezing drone of a bagpipe.
We are living, we are dwelling,
In a grand and awful time;
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime.
Hark! the waking up of nations,
Gog and Magog to the fray!
Hark! what soundeth? ’Tis creation
Groaning for its latter day!
His text was, as was his custom, startlingly peculiar:
“_Only the stump of Dagon was left to him._”
It was a political discourse, after the manner of a majority of
discourses which are miscalled “National.” Government jobbery,
nepotism, and chicanery; close corporations, railway monopolies,
municipal contracts—each had its castigation; at each was hurled the
prophecy of the day of doom when head and palms would be sundered from
the fishy trunk, and evil in every form be dominated by God’s truth
marching on.
March listened for a while, then reverted to matters of more nearly
personal interest. Last night’s incident had left a most disagreeable
impression on his mind, which was confirmed by Mrs. Wayt’s demeanor.
May’s assertion of the Bohemian flavor recurred to him more than once.
No! the specious advocate of public reforms and private probity did not
“ring true.” And protest as Hester might, with all the passion of a
forceful nature, against her father’s double ways, he _was_ her father,
and the ruler of his household. His wife, it was plain, believed in and
imitated him.
Gazing at the pale, large-featured face of the orator, now alive with
his theme, and glancing from this to the refined, faded lineaments
of her whose meek eyes were raised to it from the pastor’s pew,
he was distrustful of both. He wished Hetty were not Mr. Wayt’s
wife’s sister, or that he could marry her out of hand, and get his
brother-in-law, once removed, a call to—Alaska! Her, he never doubted.
Their acquaintance had been brief, and scanty opportunities of
improving it had been vouchsafed to him of late; yet she had fastened
herself too firmly upon affection and esteem to admit of the approach
of disparaging suspicion. She might be a slave to her sister and her
sister’s children. She could never be made a tool for the furtherance
of unworthy ends. _She_ would not have said: “I did not inquire at what
hour Mr. Wayt left his study last night!” If she spoke, it would be to
tell the truth.
At this point an idea entered his brain, carrying a flood of light
with it. Mrs. Wayt was an author—one of the many ministers’ wives who
eke out insufficient salaries by writing for Sunday-school and church
papers! It was a matter of moment—perhaps of ten dollars—to get off a
MS. by a given time, and Hetty had taken it down in typewriting from
her dictation and the rough draught. Of a certainty, here was the
solution of the mysterious vigil, and of Mrs. Wayt’s equivocation!
She looked like a woman who would write over the signature of “Aunt
Huldah” in the Children’s Column, or “Theresa Trefoil” in the Woman’s
Work-table, and dread lest her identity with these worthies should be
suspected by her husband’s people, or by even “dear Percy” himself.
March experienced a blessed letting-down of the whole system—a surcease
from worrying thought, so sudden that a deep sigh escaped him that
made his mother glance askance at him. Instead of admiring the brave
industry of the true wife he had suffered a whimsical prejudice to
poison his mind against her. He despised himself as a midnight spy and
gossip hunter, in the recollection of the orchard vigil. The patient,
unseasonable toil of the sisters became sublime.
“_Who has not heard the story of the drummer boy of Gettysburg?_”
thundered the preacher, raising eagle eyes from the manuscript laid
between the Bible leaves.
March jumped as if the fulmination were chain-shot. Mrs. Gilchrist,
looking full at him, saw his color flicker violently, his fingers
clinch hard upon the palms. Then he became so ghastly that she
whispered:
“Are you ill?”
“A sharp pain in my side! It will be gone in a moment,” he whispered
back, his lips contracting into a smile. Rather a sword in his heart.
The light within him was darkness. How foolish not to have solved the
mean riddle at a glance! Mr. Wayt’s sensational sermons were composed
by his clever wife, and transcribed by her as clever sister! Here was
the secret of the sense of unreality and distrust that had haunted him
in this man’s presence from the beginning of their acquaintanceship.
The specious divine was a fraud out and out, and through and through a
cheap cheat. No wonder now, at the swift itinerancy of his ministry!
His talk of midnight study was a lie, his pretense of scholarship a
trick so flimsy that a child should have seen through it. He had gone
to bed the evening before, and taken his rest in sleep, while his
accomplices got up to order the patriotic pyrotechnics for the next day.
No wonder that Mrs. Wayt’s eyes were furtive and anxious, that there
were crow’s feet in the corners, and bistre rings about them after that
July night’s work!
No wonder that the less hardened and less culpable sister-in-law
shunned church services!
The sword was double-edged, and dug and turned in his heart. For the
girl who lent aid, willing or reluctant, to the deliberate deception
practiced in the Name which is above all other names, had a face as
clear as the sun, and eyes honest as Heaven, and he loved her!
The main body of the audience could not withdraw their eyes from the
narrator of the telling anecdote of the drummer-boy of Gettysburg. The
story was new to all there, although he had assumed their familiarity
with it. It was graphic; it was pathetic to heart-break; it thrilled
and glowed and coruscated with self-devotion and patriotism; it was
an inimitable illustration of the point just made by the orator, who
was carried clear out of himself by the theme. And not one person
there—not even March Gilchrist, fiercely distrustful of the man and
all his works—suspected that it was an original incident, home-grown,
homespun, and home-woven. Write it not down as a sin against the
popular pastor of the Fairhill First Church that the Gettysburg hero
was a twenty-four-year-old child of the speaker’s brain. If the Mill of
the Press, and the Foundry of Tradition cannot turn out illustrations
numerous and pat enough to suit every subject and time, private
enterprise must supply personal demand.
“I think young Gilchrist was ill in church to-day,” observed Mr. Wayt
to his wife that afternoon, as she fed him with the dainty repast he
could not go to the table to eat.
He lay on the settee in the wide, cool hall, supported by linen-covered
cushions. She had brought him, as a persuasive first course, a cup of
delicious bouillon, ice-cold, and administered it to him, spoonful by
spoonful.
“He changed color, and seemed to be in great pain for an instant,”
he continued, after another sip. “His mother looked very uneasy, and
apparently advised him to go out. I judged from his fluctuations of
color that it was vertigo—or a severe pain in the head. He would not
leave until the services were over. I have few more attentive hearers
than March.” Another sip. “If I should be the means of bringing him
into the Church, it would be a happy day for his pious mother. Should
my headache abate in the course of an hour or so, I will look in and
inquire how he is. It would only be courteous and neighborly.”
In the adjoining dining room, the door of which the draught had opened
a few inches, the family circle of the solicitous pastor heard every
word of the communication, although his accents were subdued by pain.
Sharp-eared-and-eyed Perry winked at Hetty.
“He won’t find Mr. March Gilchrist,” he mouthed in a fashion invented
by himself, to convey pert speeches only to the person for whom they
were invented. “He went to New York on the five o’clock train. I saw
him. He said he was going to dine with a friend. I heard him. A man
asked him. Another slice of beef, please, Hetty! Rare, and a bit of
fat! Some gravy on my potatoes, too!”
Hetty had shunned the orchard since the day of the last sitting. Seated
behind the shutters of her chamber-window, she had seen, almost every
day, Thor bound across the grass in pursuit of a figure partially
hidden by the lower branches. Since March frequented the spot, it was
no resort for her. She had no time for play, she told Hester, gently,
when she pleaded for a return to the pleasant lounging and talk
“under green-apple boughs.” Homer could draw the carriage down the
garden-walk and through the gate and leave the cripple there with books
and color box, whenever she wanted to go. Hester often brought back
stories of chats and readings and painting lessons with the brother or
sister—sometimes with both. Occasionally, March came to the parsonage
with a message from his sister to the effect that she had taken Hester
home with her for the day or evening, and would return her in good
order. He was apt to insist upon leaving the message with Hetty, if
Mary Ann or one of the children answered his ring. Mr. Wayt’s wife’s
sister would obey the summons in person, but she did not invite the
bearer in.
She ran down in her simple morning gown, or almost as plain afternoon
dress, without waiting to remove her sewing apron, heard what he had
to say gravely, and replied civilly, as might a servant or governess.
And day by day, he marked the lessening round of cheek and chin, and
the deepening of the plait between the brows. She could not know that
he went away, each time pitying and loving her the more, and furious at
the cruelty of the demands upon her time and strength. She could not
have altered her behavior, unless to grow more formal, had she divined
all.
But for the orchard outings Hester would have had but a dull summer of
it. As it was, it was the happiest of her life. She actually gained
flesh, and her cheeks had the delicate flush of a sweet-pea blossom.
She mellowed and mollified in the intercourse with the sound, bright
natures of her new friends. Prosperity was teaching her unselfishness.
Hetty had a proof of this after the Sunday dinner was eaten, and there
still remained a long hour of sunful daylight.
“I have a charming book which Miss May lent me yesterday,” she said, as
her custodian inquired what she should do for her entertainment. “And
now that mamma has set the children to studying their Sunday-school
lessons for next week, you ought to have a breathing spell, my poor
dear. You are bleaching too fast to please me. You can’t plead ‘work to
do’ for once.”
Hetty yielded—the more, it would seem, because she had not the strength
to resist love pleadings than from any desire for the “outing”
recommended by Hester. Taking shawl and cushion with her, she passed
down the garden alley to the gate. There was a broad track through the
orchard, worn by the wheeled chair and Hester’s attendants. It led
straight to the king apple tree. From this bourne another track, not so
distinctly marked, diverged to the white picket fence shutting in the
Gilchrist garden. Hetty’s feet had never trodden this, she reflected
with a pang, after she had settled herself against the brown trunk. It
was most probable that she never would.
Her one little dream was dead, and she was too practical a business
woman to resuscitate it. Her consistent plan of avoiding March
Gilchrist and abjuring the painful sweet of association with his sister
was adopted before she returned to the house from her ineffectual quest
for Homer and the parsley. She was filled with wonder, in looking back
to the time—was it three minutes, or thirty?—she had wasted, leaning
on the gate, enveloped in lilac perfume as in a viewless mantle, and
daring to feel as other and unexceptional girls feel—that she could
have forgotten herself so utterly. _She_ said—“so shamelessly.”
“The worm on the earth may look up to the star,” if it fancies that
method of spending an ignoble life, but star-gazing and presumptuous
longing for a million centuries would bring planets and worms no nearer
together. Hetty was very humble in imagining the figure. Some people
must live on the shady side of the street, where rents are low, and
green mold gathers upon stones, and snails crawl in areas. If the
wretches who pune and pale in the malaria-breeding damps would not go
mad, they must not look too often across the way where flowers and
people bloom. If they do, they must support the consequences.
This misguided girl had looked. She was now suffering. That she merited
what she had to bear did not make the pain less.
Unwittingly she had spread her shawl where March had laid his rug last
night. The rough bark of the tree-bole hurt her presently. Her gown
was thin, and her flesh less firm than it had been six weeks ago. She
slid down upon the shawl, her head on the cushion, and reached out, in
idle misery, to pick up some withered leaves and small, unripe apples
scattered on the grass. March had dropped them while hearkening to
his sister’s criticism of the Bohemian household. She was as idly—and
as miserably—tearing apart the leaves toughened by the heat of the
day, when she heard a joyous rush behind her and felt the panting of
hot breath upon her neck, and Thor was kissing her face and licking
her hands. She sprang to her feet and cast a wild glance along the
path and under the trees. There was no one in sight. The grounds were
peremptorily posted, and no vagrant foot ever crossed them. She took in
the situation at once. March had gone to New York in the five o’clock
train; the dog, wandering aimlessly about and missing his master,
had espied her, and accepted her as a substitute. She knelt down and
clasped her arms about his head, laid her cheek to his burly muzzle.
“O Thor! Thor! you would help me if you could.” Just as she had fondled
him in those far-away, blissful days. Her hand was tangled in his coat
when, looking across his huge bulk, she had met March Gilchrist’s eyes.
True eyes—and bonny and true, which must never read her soul again.
“Thor! dear Thor!” She cried it out in a passion of tears.
The faithful fellow moaned a little in sympathy. The more eloquent than
human longing to comfort the sorrowing, never seen except in a dog’s
eyes, filled and rounded his.
“I wouldn’t cry if I could help it, dear,” said Hetty, her arch smile
striking through the rain. “And nobody else should see me shed a tear.
You are my only confidant; and I do believe you understand—a little.”
He was not an indifferent consoler, it appeared, for in fifteen minutes
both of them were asleep, their heads upon the same pillow.
The sunset sea breeze rustled the stooping boughs. Arrows of greenish
gold, tipped with fire, were shot at random between the leaves at the
sleeping pair. Hetty was very pale, but the grieving droop of the
facial lines, the slight fullness of the lower lip, and the slow curve
of the arm thrown above her head made her seem like a child. She looked
what she was, fairly tired out—weariness so intense that it would
have chased slumber from the eyelids of an older sufferer. She had
cried herself to sleep, Thor’s presence giving the sense of protecting
companionship the child feels in his mother’s nearness. The cool breath
of the approaching twilight, the grateful shade, and Sabbath stillness
did the rest.
Now and then a long, broken sigh heaved her chest, and ran through her
body. There was the glisten of tiny crystals upon her eyelashes. Once
she sobbed aloud, and Thor moved uneasily and sighed sympathetically.
By and by he began to beat his tail gently against the turf, his
beautiful eyes gleamed glad and wistful, but he did not offer to lift
his head. Hetty patted it in her sleep, and left her hand there.
She and Thor were walking over a wilderness prairie. The coarse grass
flaunted up to her chin, and she would have lost the dog had she not
wound her fingers in his hair. Such a long, tiresome, toilsome way it
was, and the grass so stiff and strong! Sometimes it knotted about
her ankles; sometimes the beards struck like whips across her face. A
bitter wind was blowing, and stung her eyes to watering. In passing it
lashed the grass into surges that boomed like the sea.
Miles and miles away an orange sunset burned luridly upon the horizon,
and right between her and it was a floating figure, moving majestically
onward. A mantle blew back in the bitter wind until she could almost
touch the hem; a confusing flutter of drapery masked the head and
shoulders; the face was set steadfastly westward and kept away from
her. At long intervals a hand was tossed clear of the white foldings
and beckoned her to follow.
“And follow I will!” she said, between her set teeth, to herself and to
Thor, “I will follow until I overtake him or die!”
And all the while the blasting wind hissed in her hair and howled in
the pampas grasses, and her feet were sore and bleeding; her limbs
failed under her; her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth with
dryness; her heart beat faint——
Hark! At the upward fling of her leader’s arm music rained down from
heaven, and the earth made joyous response; strong, exultant strains,
like an organ peal, and such vibrant melodious chimes as Bunyan
heard when all the bells of the holy city rang together for joy. The
majestic, floating figure turned to lean toward her with outstretched
arms, and eyes that gazed into hers as she had vowed they should never
look again.
“Oh! I knew it must be you!” She said it aloud, in her rapturous dream.
“It could be nobody else! Thank God! Thank God!”
Thor bounded from under her hand....
March Gilchrist’s New York friend was a bachelor cousin, who was always
delighted to have “a good fellow” drop in upon him on Sunday evening.
March, in the uneasy wretchedness that beset him, honestly intended
to visit him when he took the five o’clock train. He wanted to get
away from the place for a few hours, he said; away from tormenting
associations and possible catechists, and think calmly of the next step
to be taken. By the time he reached Jersey City he had discovered that
he was trying to get away from himself and not from his home; moreover,
that he wanted neither dinner nor the society of the genial celibate.
He stepped from the train, turned into the station restaurant, sat down
at the table he had occupied on the day he landed from the _City of
Rome_ and missed the noon train, and ordered at random something to eat.
The long table built in the middle of the room was surrounded by a
party of men and women. The men wore full black beards and a great
deal of waistcoat, crossed by gold ropes. The women had round, black
eyes, high-bridged noses and pronounced complexions. March tried not to
see them, and tried to eat what was set before him. It made him sick to
observe that Hetty’s place was filled by an overblown young lady whose
bang made a definite downward peak between her black brows, and who had
ten rings on the left hand and five on the right.
He caught the 6.30 train back to Fairhill. He had made up his sensible
mind to talk over his family to a project marvelously well developed
when one remembers that the inception was not an hour old when he swung
himself off upon the platform of the Fairhill station. He would set
out next week for the Adirondacks, set up a forest studio, and begin
“serious work.” The phrase jumped with his mood. Nothing else would
draw the inflammation out of the wound. He meant to bear up like a man
under the blow he had received, to forget disappointment in labor for a
worthy end; love, in ambition.
He took the orchard in his walk home from the station. It was quite out
of his way, and he was not guilty of the weakness of denying this. He
went there deliberately and with purpose, vaulting the fence from the
quiet street at the foot of the hill, as he had done on that memorable
Sunday when the orchards were “all a-flutter with pink.” One more
look at the nook under green apple-boughs would be a sad satisfaction,
and the contrast between what he had hoped and what he knew to be
rock-bottomed reality, would be a salutary tonic. One look he must
have—a look that should be farewell to folly and regret.
While still twenty yards away from the arbor he espied something that
looked like a mass of white drapery lying upon the turf. He stood just
without the drooping boughs fencing the sleeper about, his face framed
in an opening of the foliage, as Hetty, aroused by Thor’s bound from
her side, raised her eyelids and closed them again with a smile of
dreamy delight upon eyes swimming in luminous tears.
“I thought it was you!” she repeated in a thrilling whisper, and again,
and more drowsily—“Thank God!”
The church bells, chiming the half-hour notice of evening service, went
on with the music of her dream.
Thor, enacting a second time the role of _Deus ex machina_, thought
this an auspicious moment for thrusting his cold nose against her cheek.
With a stifled scream she attempted to rise, and catching her foot in
the shawl, would have fallen had not March rushed forward to her help.
Having taken her hands to restore her to her balance, he continued to
hold them.
She struggled to free them—but feebly. Surprise and confusion had
robbed her of strength and self-possession.
“I thought—they said—that is, Perry saw you take the train for New
York,” she managed to articulate.
“Hetty!”—imploringly, while the eyes she had seen in her vision
overflowed hers with loving light—“why do you shun me so persistently?
Are you determined never to hear how dear you are to me?”