CHAPTER VI.
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.”