It was “a bad day” with her. Her mother attributed it partly to her disappointment at not seeing her crony teacher.
Hetty, who had put the excited child to bed as soon as she got into the house the night before, held her peace. Mrs. Wayt, hovering from the nursery and her husband’s chamber to the sewing room, saw that in her taciturn daughter’s countenance that warned and kept her aloof. Another of Hester’s biting sayings was that her mother, on the day succeeding one of her spouse’s “seizures” was “betwixt the devil and the deep sea.” She never admitted, even to her sister, that “dear Percy” was more than “unfortunate,” yet read Hetty’s disapprobation in averted looks and studiously commonplace talk.
Wan and limp the cripple reclined among the cushions Hetty packed about her in her wheeled chair. Blue shadows ringed mouth and eyes, and stretched themselves in the hollowed temples; the deft fingers were nerveless. Most of the time she seemed to watch the rain under drooping eyelids, so transparent as to show the dark irides beneath.
At half past eleven her mother stole in like a bit of drifted down.
“Dear, I have promised papa to go up to your room and lie down for half an hour. Annie is with him. She amuses him, and will be very good, she says. I told her to let you know if she wanted anything. May I leave the door open? She cannot turn this stiff bolt.”
Annie was one of Hester’s weak points. “Baby” never made her nervous or impatient, and much of the little one’s precocity was due to intimate companionship with the disabled sister, whose plaything she was.
“Yes. All right!” murmured Hester, closing her eyes entirely.
She was deathly pallid in the uncolored gloom of a rainy noon.
“Or—if you feel like taking a nap, yourself?” hesitated Mrs. Wayt.
Tactful with her husband, and tender with all her household, she yet had the misfortune often to rub Hester’s fur the wrong way. The delicately pencilled brows met over frowning eyes.