“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.”