In a twinkling, he had gone up the tree like a cat.
By the time March recognized the latest comer, the rustling boughs were still. Thor growled fiercely. His master advanced a step into the moonlight.
“Be quiet!” to the dog. “Good-evening, Mr. Wayt! The beauty of the night has tempted you out, as well as myself.”
“Ah, Mr. Gilchrist!”—suave and stately as usual. “As you say, it is a glorious night. I have been sitting for half an hour with your respected parents. Seeing you change color suddenly during the morning service, and missing you from church this afternoon, I feared lest you had been taken ill, and so went over to inquire.
“Mrs. Gilchrist appeased my anxiety by saying that yours was a passing indisposition. I was the more solicitous because I have suffered all day from the onslaught of my constitutional enemy, ‘the rash’ and crucial headache which my mother gave me. It is more than malady. It is affliction! requiring pagan fortitude and Christian resignation. There is some occult connection between it and the course of the natural sun in the heavens. It seized me this morning with the rising of the god of day and left me at the going down of the same. Mrs. Wayt will have it that it is the penalty for much study which, if not weariness to the flesh, occasionally revenges itself in neuralgic pangs. I know no fatigue while the oracular rage of composition is upon me. Last night it possessed me! I wrote the entire sermon to which you listened this morning between the hours of half-past nine Saturday night and four o’clock this morning. In all that time I did not leave my desk. The thunder-storm wrought strange, glorious excitement in my brain. It was as if seven thunders uttered their voices to the ears of my spirit.”
The Rev. Mr. Wayt prodded holes in the turf with his cane while speaking, holding it in his right hand almost at arm’s length, in a straight line from his body. His face showed chalky-white in the moon rays, his brows and hair very black; his eyes glittered, the smile upon his thin, wide-lipped mouth was apparent in the clearing radiance. He was disposed to be affably loquacious to the heir of a rich parishioner, and the pastor’s “influence with young men” was one of his specialties. This important member of an important class did not interrupt him, and the intent expression of his figure—his back was to the moon—was pleasantly provocative to continued eloquence.
“The Sabbath has been superb—truly superb!” resumed the orator, pulling out the cane after an unusual artesian feat in jabbing it into the earth. “I could think of nothing as I looked out at daybreak upon the brightening face of nature but Mrs. Barbauld’s ‘rose that’s newly washed by the shower.’ My spirit put on wings to meet the new morning. I said, aloud, in a sort of divine transport: ‘This is the day the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it!’”
“Do you ever preach extemporaneously, Mr. Wayt?” asked March.
The sentence passed his lips almost unawares. In his perplexity and disdain, he spoke at random. He could not stand here all night, the victim of the modern Coleridge. He recollected, while the flowing periods went over him, that the Rev. Percy’s admirers likened him to the long-winded poet. The girl of his heart in esse and of his home in posse might be Mr. Wayt’s wife’s sister, but Mr. Wayt himself was an imposing liar and hypocrite, who disgraced the coat on his back. The sooner she was removed from his house the better. He credited poor Tony with more sense than he was reputed to possess, in that he doubted, inferentially, his employer’s powers as an exorcist.
“Now and then, my dear sir, now and then! But I long ago arrived at the conclusion that natural fluency is a lure to indolence. Whatever is worth the hearing should be worth careful preparation. The vice versa occurs to you, of course. I would give my audience ripe matter, the slow accretion of amber-clear thought, not the fervid exudation of momentary excitement. Every line of this morning’s sermon was written out in full. The reporter of a New York paper took it from my hand as I descended from the pulpit. ‘Mr. Wayt!’ he said, ‘that discourse can be printed without the alteration of a word. It is perfect!’”