“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.