MR. WAYT’S WIFE’S SISTER

MR. WAYT’S WIFE’S SISTER

MR. WAYT’S
WIFE’S SISTER

BY
MARION HARLAND
(Mary Virginia Terhune)
AUTHOR OF “JUDITH,” “WITH THE BEST INTENTIONS,” “HANDICAPPED,”
“LOITERINGS IN PLEASANT PATHS,” “COMMON SENSE IN
THE HOUSEHOLD,” ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
THE CASSELL PUBLISHING CO.
31 East 17th St. (Union Square)

Copyright, 1894, by
THE CASSELL PUBLISHING CO.
All rights reserved.
THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS,
RAHWAY, N. J.

CONTENTS

MR. WAYT’S WIFE’S SISTER.

CHAPTER I.

One breezy May day, such a little while ago that it is hardly safe to name the year, a New Jersey ferry “car-boat” was so far behind her time that the 12.30 train for Fairhill left without waiting for her.

Ignorant, or incredulous of the untoward happening, the passengers rushed for and through the station to find egress discouraged by the impassive official whose stentorian tones were roaring through the building the name and stopping places of the next train. Among the foremost in the pell-mell run was a hazel-eyed young man with a gripsack in his hand, and the olive bronze of a sea voyage upon a very good-looking face. He was always persuaded that he could have eluded the great-voiced doorkeeper and boarded the last platform of the moving cars, had he not run afoul of a wheeled chair midway between the seats and inconveniently set radiators in the waiting room, and narrowly escaped a “header.” He did not actually fall; neither did he overset the vehicle. Avoiding both calamities by vaulting the dashboard and front wheels, he yet dropped his hat and valise in different directions, and brought up at an obtuse angle by catching at one of the marble-topped radiators. The first use he made of his hat, which was picked up by a smiling bystander, was to lift it to a woman who was propelling what he had mistaken for a baby’s perambulator.

“I beg your pardon, I am sure!” he said, in manly fashion. “I hope the”—he was about to say “baby,” but changed the phraseology just in time—“that nobody was hurt!”

A glimpse of the occupant of the chair had showed him a wan face too old for a child’s, too small for that of a grown person. Before the woman addressed could reply, elfish accents, husky and precise, said, “Not at all—thank you!” and there was a cackle of shrill, feeble laughter.

The young fellow had lost the train that should have returned him in forty minutes to the family he had not seen in six months; he was just off shipboard, and felt the need of a bath and toilet upon steady ground, with plenty of elbow room. He had come near having a bad fall, and had not missed making a ludicrous spectacle of himself for the entertainment of a gaping crowd. But he laughed in a jolly, gentlemanly way, and again raising his hat passed on without a second glance at the mute personage who had pushed the wagon directly across his track.

Like the rest of the disappointed wayfarers he walked quite up to the outlet of the station, and peered anxiously through at the empty rails, still vibrating from the wheels of the vanishing train, yet he neither frowned nor swore. He did not even ask: “When does the next train go to Fairhill?” The time-table in his pocket and that upon the wall, set at “2 P. M.,” told him all and more than he wanted to know. The excitement and suspense over, his inner man became importunate. He had had an early breakfast on the City of Rome, and was far hungrier now than then. Doubling upon his tracks, he repaired to the restaurant in the same building with the vast waiting room and offices. The place was clean, and full of odors that, for a wonder, were fresh and savory, instead of hanging on the air and clinging to the walls like a viewless “In Memoriam” of an innumerable caravan of dead-and-gone feasts. The menu was promising to an unsated appetite, and having given his order to a waiter the even-tempered customer sat back in his chair and surveyed the scene with the air of one whose mind was, as the hymnist aptly puts it, “at leisure from itself.”

This lack of self-consciousness underlay much that made March Gilchrist popular in his set. He was a clever artist, and wrought hard and well at his profession, although he had a rich father. His position in society was assured, his physique fine, and education excellent—advantages fully appreciated by most of the men, and all the women he knew. If he recognized their value he was an adroit dissembler. Simple and frank in manner, he met his world with outstretched hand. When the hand was not taken he laughed in good-humored astonishment, went about his business, and forgot the churl. His schoolmates used to say that it did not pay to quarrel with him; his parents, that he and his sister May should exchange names. That his amiability was not the result of a phlegmatic temperament was apparent in the quick brightness of the eyes that roved about the dining room, leaving out nothing—from the lunch counter in the adjoining room, set with long ranks of salvers with globular glass covers that gave the array the expression of a chemist’s laboratory, to the whirligig fans that revolved just below the ceiling with the dual mission of cooling the atmosphere and chasing away flies. Our returned traveler seemed to find these harbingers of summer weather and summer pests amusing. He was watching them when a voice behind him accosted a hurrying waiter.

“There is a young girl over there who cannot walk. Will you lift her out of her chair and bring her in? It is just at the door, and she is very light.”

“Busy now, miss! Better ask somebody else!” pushing past.

The baffled applicant stood in the middle of the floor, irresolute, seeming the more solitary and helpless because young and a woman. Thus much, and not that she was comely and a lady, March saw before he sprang to his feet and faced her respectfully.

“I beg pardon! but can I be of use? It will give me pleasure if you will allow me.” Catching sight in the doorway of the one in whose behalf she had spoken, an arch smile—respectful still—lighted up his honest countenance. “If you will let me make amends for my awkwardness of a while ago!”

He was a society man, and might have been aware how unconventional was the offer. He palliated the solecism, in describing the incident at home, by saying that he saw in every elderly woman his mother, in a young one, his only sister.

“Thank you! if you will be so kind”—accepting the proposal as simply as it had been made. “I could bring her in myself, but she does not like to have me do it here.”

“I should think not, indeed! One of the best uses to which a man’s muscles can be put is to help the weak,” rejoined March heartily.

A gleam crossed the unchildish visage of the cripple when he stooped to lift her. She recognized him, but offered no verbal remark then, or when he deposited the light burden in the chair set for her by a waiter more humane, or less driven than his testy comrade.

“You are very good, and we are much obliged to you,” the guardian said, with a little bow of acknowledgment which he took as dismissal also, withdrawing to his own place.

“Set the table for seven, please,” he heard her continue to the waiter, businesslike and quiet, “and reserve another seat at that table”—designating one remote from the larger—“for a gentleman who will come in by and by. There is a man, too, for whom I wish to order luncheon at the counter in that room. He can get a good meal and be comfortable there, I suppose?”

“A traveling party of nine!” thought March, apparently intent upon the depths of his soup tureen. “With this girl as courier. Yet she mentioned two men!”

The family filed in while he speculated. Twin boys of twelve or thirteen, dressed exactly alike in gray jackets and knickerbockers, except that the red-haired one wore a blue necktie and the brown-haired a scarlet; a pretty, blue-eyed girl of eight, and a toddler of two, led by a sweet-faced mother, with fair hair and faintly tinted complexion, of the china shepherdess school. The “courier,” assisted by the waiter, seated them all without bustle, before addressing an individual who had followed at a respectful distance and now hung aloof, chewing the brim of a brand-new straw hat.

“Homer!” said the young lady gently and distinctly, as she might direct a child, “you will get your dinner in the next room. Come!”

By shifting his position slightly, March could see her point the man to a stool and give orders for his refreshment. He was undersized, lean, and sandy haired, small of feature and loutish in carriage. His eyes had red rims, and blinked incessantly, as if excessively weak or purblind. When he began operations upon coffee and sandwiches, he gobbled voraciously, gnawing off mouthfuls like a greedy dog. His clothes were so distressingly ready-made, and accentuated his uncouthness so unmercifully, as to leave no doubt that the wearing of coat and vest was a novelty and an equivocal boon.

“An odd fish!” commented March mentally. “Why should a civilized family haul him after them like a badly made kite tail? And they are not vulgarians, either!”

His eyes strayed discreetly back to the table set for seven. The mistress of ceremonies sat at the head, and was studying the printed menu. It lay flat on the cloth that the crippled girl at her right might read it with her. Their heads were close together, and the gravity upon the countenance of the elder was reflected by the shrewd elfin face. Presently they began to whisper, the bare, thin finger of the younger of the two tracing the lines to the extreme right of the carte. It was plainly a question of comparative expense, March perceived with a pang of his kind heart. For he had been a boy himself, and the children were hungry.

“Hurry up—won’t you, Hetty,” called the redheaded twin impatiently. “Give us the first thing you come to so long as it isn’t corned beef, pork and beans, or rice pudding. I’m starved!”

“Me, too!” echoed his fellow.

“You needn’t make mincemeat of your English on that account!” piped the crippled sister tartly. “It is no little matter to order just the right things for such a host. Mamma, you must have a cup of tea, I suppose?”

The young lady interposed, writing while she talked:

“Of course! And all of us will be the better for some good, hot soup. This is luncheon, not dinner, recollect. We only need something to stay our appetites until six o’clock,” she added, putting the paper in the waiter’s hand.

She did not look like one who did things for effect, yet there was meaning in her manner of saying it. If she was obliged to cut her coat according to her cloth, she would just now make the scantiness of the pattern seem a matter of choice and carry out the seaming gallantly.

“How much further have we to go?” queried eight-year-old, somewhat ruefully.

Six o’clock was to her apprehension a long time ahead.

“We are within half an hour of home. We might have been there by now, but we thought it better to wait over a train to rest and get rid of the dust we brought off the cars.”

“And to let him get shaved and barbered and prinked up generally!” shrilled the cripple malevolently.

“Hester!” The mother’s voice was heard for the first time.

“Well, mamma?”

“That is not respectful, my love. You are tired, I am afraid.”

The shrewd face jerked fretfully, and the lips were opened for a retort, checked by a gloved hand laid upon the forward child’s. There was only a murmur, accompanied by a pettish shrug.

March was ashamed of the impulse that made him steal a look at the tray bearing the result of the whispered consultation. Three tureens, each containing two generous portions of excellent English gravy soup with barley in it, a pot of tea, bread and milk for the baby and plenty of bread and butter were duly deposited upon the board.

“I’ll take the rest of your order now,” said the waiter, civilly suggestive.

“This is all. Thank you!” in a matter-of-course tone that was not resentfully positive.

The “courier” understood herself, and having taken ground, how to hold it. This was luncheon. March caught himself speculating as to the dinner bill of fare.

The spokeswoman may have been two-and-twenty. She was slightly above the middle height of healthy womanhood, had gray, serious eyes, with brown shadows in them when the lids drooped; well-formed lips that curled roguishly at the corners in smiling; a straight nose with mobile nostrils, and a firm chin. There was character in plenty in the face. Such free air and sunshine as falls into most girls’ lives might have made it beautiful. The pose of her head, the habitual gravity of eyes and mouth, the very carriage of the shoulders and her gait testified to the untimely sense of responsibility borne by this one. She was slight and straight; her gown of fawn-colored cloth fitted well, and a toque of the same material with no trimming, except a knot of velvet ribbon, was becoming; yet March, who designed his sister’s costumes, was quite certain that gown and hat were homemade and the product of the wearer’s skill. Both women were unmistakably gentle in breeding, and the children’s chatter, although sometimes pert, was not rude or boisterous.

A man entered by the side door while the chatter was stilling under the supreme attraction of the savory luncheon, and, after a word to a waiter, took the chair which had been tilted, face downward, against the far table at the “courier’s” order. He was tall, and had an aquiline, intellectual cast of countenance. His hands—the artist had an appreciative eye for hands and fingers—were a student’s; his linen was irreproachable; his chin and cheeks were blue-shaven, and his black hair was cut straight across at the back, just clearing the collar of his coat, instead of being shingled.

“A clergyman!” deduced Gilchrist, from the latter peculiarity. “That—not the white choker—is the trade-mark of the profession. Did barber or preacher establish the fashion?”

After inspection of the menu, the newcomer ordered a repast which was sumptuous when compared with the frugal one course of the seven seated at the table in the middle of the room. He took no notice of them nor they of him. His mien was studiously abstracted. While waiting for his food he drew a small blotting pad from his pocket and wrote upon it with a stylographic pen, his profile keener as his work went on. In pausing to collect thoughts or choose words the inclination of his eyes was upward. After his entrance profound silence settled upon the central table. Not even the baby prattled. This singular taciturnity took on significance to the alert wits of the unsuspected observer when he saw a swift interchange of looks between the cripple and her left-hand neighbor, attended by a grimace of such bitter disdain directed by the junior of the pair at the student as fairly startled the artist.

The unconscious object of the shaft put up paper and pen, and addressed himself with deliberate dignity, upon the arrival of his raw oysters, to the lower task of filling the material part of him. He was discussing a juicy square of porterhouse steak, as March bowed respectfully on his way out to the girl at the head of the board, a smile in his pleasant eyes being especially intended for the dwarfed cripple beside her.

Homer had bolted the last fragment of a huge segment of custard pie, washed down the crust with a second jorum of coffee, and sat, satiate and sheepish, upon the tall stool, awaiting orders.

“The most extraordinary combinery, taken in all its parts, it was ever my luck to behold,” declared March Gilchrist at his father’s dinner table that evening. “Intensely American throughout, though. I wish I knew whether or not the man who appropriated the reserved seat was a usurper. If he were, that spirited little economist of a courier was quite capable of dispossessing him, or, at least, of calling the waiter to account for neglect of duty. And what relation did blind Homer bear to the party?”

“Dear old March!” said his sister affectionately. “Story weaving in the old fashion! How natural it sounds! What jolly times you and I have had over our amateur romances and make believes! Which reminds me of a remarkable sermon preached Sunday before last by our new pastor. (I told you we had one, didn’t I?) The text was: ‘Six waterpots of stone, containing two or three firkins apiece!’”

“Absurd!”

“True; but listen! The text was only a hook from which he hung an eloquent discourse upon the power of faith to make wine—‘old and mellow and flavorous,’ he called it—out of what to grosser souls seems insipid water. It was a plea for the pleasures of imagination—alias faith—and elevated our favorite amusement into a fine art, and the fine art into religion. I came home feeling like a spiritual chameleon, fully convinced that rarefied air is the rightful sustenance of an immortal being. According to our Mr. Wayt, what you haven’t got is the only thing you ought to be sure of. Life is a sort of ‘Now you see it and now you don’t see it’ business throughout. Only, when you don’t see it you are richer and happier than when you do. Did you ever think to hear me babble metaphysics? Now, where are those portfolios?”

“Make believe that you have overhauled them, and be blest,” retorted her brother. “There’s a chance to practice your metaphysical cant—with a new, deep meaning in it, too, which you will detect when you inspect my daubs. I did some fairish things in Norway, however, which may prove that your rule has an exception.”

The Gilchrists freely acknowledged themselves to be what the son and daughter styled “a mutual admiration square.” March’s portfolios were not the only engrossing subject that drew them together in the library, where coffee and cigars were served.

May and her father turned over sketches and examined finished pictures at the table, passing them afterward to the mother, who was a fixture in her easy-chair by reason of a head, covered with crisp chestnut curls, lying upon her lap. May was her companion and co-laborer, dutiful and beloved, despite the impetuosity of mood and temper which seemed inharmonious with the calmer nature of the matron. The mother’s idol was the long-limbed fellow who, stretched upon the tiger-skin rug, one arm cast about her waist, submitted to her mute fondling with grace as cheerful as that with which she endured the scent of the cigar she would not let him resign when he threw himself into his accustomed place. She was a good wife, but she never pretended to like the odor of the judge’s best weed. March’s cigars, she confessed, were “really delightful.” Perhaps she recognized in his affluent, joyous nature something hers lacked and had craved all her life; the golden side of the iron shield. Assuredly, her children drew the ideality in which they reveled from the father.

The tall, dignified woman who queened it in the best circles of Fairhill society, and was the chiefest pillar in the parish which had just called Mr. Wayt to become its spiritual head, was the embodiment of what is known as hard sense. Mind and character were laid out and down in straight lines. Right was right; duty was duty, and not to be shirked. Wrong was wrong, and the shading off of sin into foible was of the devil. She believed in a personal devil, comprehended the doctrines of the Trinity, of election and reprobation, and the resurrection of the physical body. Twice each Sabbath, once during the week, she repaired to the courts of the Lord with joys unknown to worldly souls. The ministry she held in the old-fashioned veneration we have cast behind us with many worse and a few better things. Others might and did criticise the men who wore white neckties upon weekdays and had their hair cut straight behind. The hands of the presbytery had been laid in ordination upon them. That was a sacred shield to her. In spirit she approached the awful circle of the church with bared feet and bent brow. Within it was her home. To her church her toils were literally given. For it her prayers continually ascended.

She had looked grave during May’s flippant abstract of the new preacher’s discourse anent the six stone waterpots. Her family might suspect that she could not easily assimilate spiritual bread so unlike that broken to his flock by a good man who had been gathered to his fathers six months before, after a pastorate of thirty years in Fairhill. Nobody could elicit a hint to this effect from her lips. Mr. Wayt was the choice of a respectable majority of church and parish. The presbytery had accepted his credentials and solemnly installed him in his new place. Henceforward he was her pastor, and as such above the touch of censure. He had been the guest of the Gilchrists for a week prior to the removal of his family to the flourishing suburban town, and received such entertainment for body and spirit as strengthened his belief in the Divine authority of the call he had answered.

He left Fairhill four days before March landed in New York, to meet his wife and children in Syracuse and escort them to their new abiding place. During these days the mothers and daughters of the household of faith had worked diligently to prepare the parsonage for the reception of the travelers, Mrs. Gilchrist being the guiding spirit. And while she drew the shining silk of her boy’s curls through fingers that looked strong, yet touched tenderly, the Rev. Percy Wayt, A. M. and M. A., with feet directed by gratitude and heart swollen with pastoral affection, was nearing the domicile of his best “member.”

A long French window upon the piazza framed the tableau he halted to survey, his foot upon the upper step of the broad flight leading from the lawn. It was a noble room, planned by March and built with his proud father’s money. Breast-high shelves filled with choice books lined the wall; above them were a few fine pictures. Oriental rugs were strewed upon the polished floor; lounging and upright chairs stood about in social attitudes. The light of the shaded reading lamp shone silvery upon Judge Gilchrist’s head and heightened the brightness of May’s face. March’s happy gaze, upturned to meet his mother’s look of full content, might have meant as much in a cottage as here, but they seemed to the spectator accessories of the luxurious well-being which stamped the environment.

He sighed deeply—perhaps at the contrast the scene offered to the half furnished abode he had just left—perhaps under the weight of memories aroused by the family group. He was as capable of appreciating beauty and enjoying ease as were those who took these as an installment of the debt the world owed them. The will of the holy man who preaches the great gain of godliness when wedded to contentment, ought to be one with that of the Judge of all the earth. Sometimes it is. Sometimes——

“Ah, Mr. Wayt!” Judge Gilchrist’s proverbially gracious manner was never more urbane than as he offered a welcoming hand to his wife’s spiritual director. “You find us in the full flood of rejoicing over our returned prodigal,” he continued, when the visitor had saluted the ladies. “Let me introduce my son.”

Mr. Wayt was “honored and happy at being allowed to participate in the reunion,” yet apologetic for his “intrusion upon that with which strangers should not intermeddle.”

While saying it he squeezed March’s hand in a grasp more nervous than firm, and looked admiringly into the sunny eyes.

“Your mother’s son will forgive the interruption when he learns why I am here,” he went on, tightening and relaxing his hold at alternate periods. “I brought my wife and babies home to-day. I use the word advisedly. I left a desolate, empty house. Merely walls, ceilings, doors, windows, and floors. A shell without sentiment. A chrysalis without the germ of life. This was on last Monday morning.”

By now the brief sentences had come to imply depth of emotion with which March was unable to sympathize, and he felt convicted of inhumanity that this was so.

“I advised Mrs. Wayt of what she would find. Hers is a brave spirit encased in a fragile frame, and she was not daunted. You, madam,” letting go the son’s hand and facing the mother, “know, and we can never forget what we found when, weary and faint and travel-stained, we alighted this afternoon at the parsonage gate.”

With all her native aplomb and half-century of world knowledge Mrs. Gilchrist blushed, much to the covert amusement of husband and son. If the judge had manner Mr. Wayt had deportment, and with it fluency. His weighty words pressed her hard for breath.

“Please don’t speak of it!” she hastened to implore. “We did very little—and I no more than others.”

“Allow me!” Gesture and tone were rhetorical. “You—or others under your command—laid carpets and set our humble plenishing in order. There is not much of it, but such as it is, it has followed our varied fortunes so long that it is endeared by association. You arranged it to the best advantage. You stocked larders and made up beds, and kindled the fire upon the household altar, typified by the kitchen range, and spread a toothsome feast for our refreshment. You and your sister angels. If this be not true, then benevolent pixies have been at work, for, although we found the premises swept and garnished, not a creature was to be seen. Generosity and tact had met together; beneficence and modesty had kissed each other. I assure you, Mr. Gilchrist”—wheeling back in good order upon March—“that in seventeen years of the vicissitudes of a pastoral life that has had its high lights and depressing shades, such delicacy of kindness is without a parallel.”

“Let me express my sympathy in the shape of a cigar,” said March, taking one from the table. “I brought over a lot, which my father, who is a connoisseur in tobacco, pronounces fit to smoke. Should you agree with him, I shall esteem it a compliment if you will let me send a box to the parsonage to-morrow.”

Mr. Wayt’s was an opaque and not a healthy complexion. It was mottled now with a curious, dull glow; the muscles of his mouth twitched. He waved aside the offering with more energy than courtesy.

“You are good, sir—very good! But I never smoke! My nervous system is idiosyncratic. Common prudence inhibits the use on my part of all narcotics and stimulants, if principle did not. To be frank”—inclusively to all present—“I am what is known as ‘a temperance crank.’ You may think the less of me for the confession; in point of fact, I lost one charge in direct consequence of my peculiar views upon this subject; but if I speak at all, I must be candid. Believe me nevertheless, Mr. Gilchrist, your grateful debtor for the proffered gift. If you will now and then let a kindly thought of me mingle with the smoke of your burnt offering, the favor will be still greater.”

“May I trouble you to say to Mrs. Wayt that the cook you asked me to engage for her cannot come until next Monday morning?” said the practical hostess. Mr. Wayt’s sonorous periods always impelled her to monosyllabic commonplaces. “Perhaps she cannot wait so long?”

“I take the responsibility of promising for her, madam, that she will. Apart from the fact that her desire to secure a servant recommended by yourself would reconcile her to a still longer delay, her household, as at present composed, has in itself the elements of independence. We have a faithful, if eccentric, servitor, who has an abnormal passion for work in all its varieties. He is gardener, house servant, cook, groom, mason and builder, as need requires. He mends his own clothes, cobbles his shoes—and I am not without a suspicion of his proficiency as a laundryman.”

He rendered the catalogue with relish for the humor of the situation. The exigencies of parsonage life which had developed the talents of his trusty retainer seemed to have no pathos for the master.

“Where did you find this treasure? And is he a Unique?” asked May laughingly.

“I believe the credit of raking the protoplasmic germ out of the slums of Chicago, where we were then sojourning, belongs to my wife’s sister, Miss Alling. The atmosphere of our home has warmed into growth latent possibilities, I fancy. It was a white day for poor Tony when the gutter-wash landed him at our door. Even now he has physical weaknesses and mental deficiencies that make him a striking object-lesson as to the terrible truths of heredity.”

“How many children have you, Mr. Wayt?” questioned March, with irrelevance verging upon abruptness.

“George W. Cable’s number—five. You may recall the witty puzzle he set for a Massachusetts Sunday School. ‘I have five children,’ he said, ‘and half of them are girls. What is the half of five?’ ‘Two and a half,’ came from the perplexed listeners. It transpired, eventually, that the other half were girls also.”

He was an entertaining man, or would have been had he been colloquial instead of hortatory. Yet what he said was telling rather from the degree of importance he evidently attached to it than from the worth of the matter. In a smaller speaker, his style would have been airy. Standing, as he did, six feet in his slippers, he was always nearly—occasionally, quite—imposing. Men of his profession seldom converse well. The habit of hebdomadal speech-making runs over and saturates the six working days. Pastoral visitation is undoubtedly measurably responsible for the trick of talking as for duty’s sake, and to a roomful. The essential need of the public speaker is audience, and to this, actual or visionary, he is prone to address himself. Mr. Wayt could not bid an acquaintance “Good-morning,” in a chance encounter upon boat or car, without embracing every passenger within the scope of his orotund tones, in the salutation. A poseur during his waking hours, he probably continued to cater to the ubiquitous audience in his dreams.

“Come out for a turn on the piazza, May!” proposed March, after the guest had taken his leave.

The night was filled with divine calm. The Gilchrist house surmounted a knoll from which the beautiful town rolled away on all sides. In the distance a glistening line showed where the bay divided Jersey meadows from the ramparts of the Highlands. The turf of the lawn was ringed and crossed by beds of hyacinths and tulips. The buds of the great horse-chestnut trees were big with promise; the finer tracery of the elms against the moonlit sky showed tufts of tender foliage. Faint, delicious breaths of sweetness met brother and sister at the upper end of their walk, telling that the fruit trees were ablow.

“East or West, Hame is Best!”

quoted March, taking in a mighty draught of satisfaction. “Not that I brought you out here to listen to stale Scotch rhymes. Don’t annoy the precious mother by letting her into the secret, May, but Mr. Wayt is the man I saw in the restaurant to-day, and I believe that was his family!”

CHAPTER II.

The almost unearthly stillness of the fragrant May night was, as often happens at that lovely, uncertain season, the precursor of a rainy day.

Hetty Alling, awakening at four o’clock to plan for the work that lay before the transplanted household, heard the first drops fall upon the tin roof of the piazza under her window like the patter of tiny, stealthy feet scaling the eaves and combing, then advancing boldly in rank and rush until the beat was the reverberant roar of a spring flood.

It awoke nobody else under the parsonage roof-tree. Hester slept soundly beside her. She never slept quietly. In addition to the spinal disease which warped the poor girl’s figure she suffered from an affection of the throat that made her respiration in slumber a rattling snore, interrupted at regular intervals by a gurgle that sounded like strangulation. So audibly distressing was it that her father could not sleep within two rooms of her, and the healthy occupants of the intervening nursery complained that “nothing was done to break Hester of making such a racket. If she wanted to stop it she could.”

Her young aunt and roommate knew better. Hester had shared her bed for almost nine years. Mrs. Wayt’s orphaned sister was but fourteen when she came to live in the parsonage, then situated in Cincinnati. It had been a hard winter with the pastor’s wife. While her mother lay dying in Ithaca, N. Y., her then only daughter, the first born of her flock, a beautiful, vivacious child of eight, met with the accident which crippled and dwarfed her for life. The telegram announcing Mrs. Alling’s illness was answered by one saying that Hester was at the point of death. She had just passed the first doubtful stage upon the return journey lifeward, when Hetty, in her new black frock, insisted upon relieving the grief-worn watcher over the wreck that could never be put together again.

Lying in strange quarters in a strange town at the dreariest hour of the twenty-four, Hetty recalled that as the date when the load of care, now an integral part of herself, was first fastened upon her. She had before this likened it to a needle she had once, in childish wantonness, run under the bark of a young willow, and seen disappear gradually from view as the riven bark grew over it, until, at the end of a year, no vestige of the steel remained, except a ridge which was never smoothed away. She was not exactly penniless. The portion left her by her mother was judiciously invested by her guardian, and yielded her exactly four hundred dollars a year. It was transmitted promptly, quarterly, until she was of age, by which time she was so rooted and grounded in prudence that she continued to draw the like amount at equal periods.

“It is enough to dress her,” Mrs. Wayt had said to her husband, in seeking his sanction to her offer of a home to one who stood alone in the world save for her sister, and an uncle who had lived in Japan for twenty years. “And she is welcome to her board—is she not, Percy, dear?”

“Welcome, dear love? Can you ask the question with regard to your only sister—poor motherless lamb! While we have a roof between us and the sky and a crust of bread between us and starvation, she shall share both. Let me write the letter!”

The epistle was almost tattered with many readings when Hetty became an inmate of her brother-in-law’s home. She had not kept it until now. That was not strange, Fairhill being the latest in a succession of “settlements” to which the brilliant gospeler had accepted calls, generally unanimous and almost invariably enthusiastic. There were three children at Hetty’s coming—her own and her mother’s namesake, Hester, and Percy and Perry, the twin boys. Four had been born since, but two had not outlived early infancy. Mr. Wayt would not have been a preacher of the period had he not enriched some of his most effective discourses with illustrations drawn from these personal bereavements.

His celebrated apostrophe to a six-months old daughter, beginning—“Dear little Susie! She had numbered but a brief half year of mortal life, but she was loving and beloved! I seem to feel the soft strain of her arms about my neck this moment”—is too familiar to my readers, through newspaper reports, to need repetition here. The sermon embodying this gem of poetic and rhetorical emotion is known to have won him calls to three churches.

It was still dark when Hetty’s ear caught the muffled thud of feet upon the garret stairs. Wherever providence and parish preferences cast the lot of the Wayts, Homer’s bedroom was nearest the heavens that were hot by summer and cold by winter.

“I don’t set no store by ceilin’s,” he told Hetty when she “wished they could lodge him better.” “Seems if ’twas naturaler fur to see the beams purty nigh onto my nose when I fus’ wake in the mornin’. I’m kind o’ lonesome fur ’em when I caan’t butt me head agin the top o’ me room when I’m a mind ter.”

At another time he confided to her that it was “reel sociabul-like to hear the rain onto the ruff, clus’ to a feller’s ears o’ nights.”

He was on his way down to the kitchen now to light the fire. Unless she should interfere, he would cook breakfast, and serve it upon the table she had set overnight, and sweep down the stairs and scrub the front doorsteps while the family ate the morning meal. He called himself “Tony,” as did all the family except Hetty and Mrs. Wayt. The former had found “Homer Smith, Jr.,” written in a sprawling hand upon the flyleaf of a songbook which formed the waif’s entire library. Hetty had notions native to her own small head. One was that the—but for her—friendless lad would respect himself the more if he were not addressed by what she called “a circus monkey’s name.” For this reason he was “Homer” to her, and her sister followed her example because she considered the factotum and whatever related to him Hetty’s affair, and that she had a right to designate her chattel by whatever title she pleased.

Tony had come to the basement door one snowy, blowy day of a particularly cruel winter, when Hetty was maid of all work. He stood knee-deep in a drift when she opened the grated door and asked, hoarsely but without a touch of the beggar’s whine, for “a job to keep him from starvin’.” He was, as he “guessed,” twenty years of age, emaciated from a spell of “new-money,” and so nearly blind that the suggestion of a “job” was pitiably preposterous. Hetty took him into her neat kitchen, made him a cup of tea, and cut and plied him with bread and butter until he asserted that he was “right-up-an’-down chirpy, jes’ as strong’s enny man. Couldn’t he rake out the furnace, or saw wood, or clear off the snow, or clean shoes, or scrub the stairs, or mend broken things, or wash windows, or peel pertaters, or black stoves, or sif’ ashes, or red-up the cellar—or—or—somethin’, to pay for his dinner? I aint no beggar, ma’am—nor never will be!”

Hetty hired him as a “general utility man,” at ten cents a forenoon and his breakfast, for a week—then, for a month. He lodged wherever he could—in stable lofts, at the police station, under porches on mild nights, and when other resorts were closed, in a midnight refuge, and never touched liquor or tobacco in any form. At the month’s end, his girlish patroness cleared a corner of the attic between the sharp angle and the chimney, set up a cot, and allowed him to sleep there. Mr. Wayt had no suspicion of the disreputable incumbent of the habitation honored by his name and residence, until one memorable and terrible March midnight when a doctor must be had without the delay of an instant revealed the secret, but under circumstances that strengthened the retainer’s hold upon his employers. Since then, he had been part and parcel of the establishment, proving himself as proficient in removals and settlings-down as in other branches of his business.

Mr. Wayt liked to allude to him as “Hetty’s Freak.” At other times he nicknamed him “Kasper Hauser.” Once, and once only, in reference to Hetty’s influence over the being he chose to regard as half-witted, he spoke of him as “a masculine Undine,” whereupon his sister-in-law turned upon him a look that surprised him and horrified his wife, and marched out of the room.

Mrs. Wayt followed her presently and found her gazing out of the window of the closet to which she had fled, with livid face and dry eyes that were dangerously bright.

“Percy hopes you were not hurt by his harmless little jest,” said the gentle wife. “You know, Hetty, it would kill me if you and he were to quarrel. He has the kindest heart in the world, and respects you too sincerely to offend you knowingly. You must not mind what sounds like extravagant speech. We cannot judge men of genius as we would ordinary people. And, dear, for my sake be patient!”

The girl yielded to the weeping embrace of the woman whose face was hidden upon her shoulder.

“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.

“There is no bringing him up to the tone of that study!” she meditated grimly. “He and I are hopeless drudges, but he is the happier of the two. Homer! I believe you really love to work!” she broke forth finally.

Homer snickered—a sudden spurt that left him very sober. His laugh always went out like a damp match.

“Yes’m, cert’nly, ma’am! Ef ’twant fur work, there wouldn’t be nuthin’ to live fur!”

He shambled off to the cellar with the ashpan, and in a few minutes, she could distinguish in the sounds rumbling and smothering in the depths beneath her feet the melancholy tune of his favorite ditty:

“On the banks of the Omaha—maha!

’Twas there we settled many a night.

As happy as the little bird that sparkled on our block

On the banks of the Omaha!”

Hetty raised the window and leaned out, gasping for breath. A garden lay behind the house and on one side of it. It was laid out in walks and borders, and was rather broad than deep. Beyond this were undefined clumps of trees that looked like an orchard. Roofs and chimneys and spires and lines of other trees, marking the course of streets, were emerging from the soaking mists. Five o’clock struck from a tower not far away, and then a church bell began to ring gently—a persuasive call to early prayers.

The warm, sweet, wet air that aroused her to look over the sill at a row of hyacinths in full bloom, the slow peal of the bell, the hush of the early morning, did not comfort her—but the soft moisture that filled her eyes drew heat and bitterness out of her heart. When she went up to awaken Hester she carried a spray of hyacinth bells, weighted with fragrant drops. Fine gems of rain sprinkled her hair, her cheeks were cool and damp, the scent of fresh earth and growing things clung to her skirts. She laid the flowers playfully against the heavy lids lifted peevishly at her call.

“‘There’s richness for you,’” she quoted. “A whole bed of them is awaiting your inspection in the garden. And such lovely pansies—some as big as the palm of your hand. You and I and Homer, who is wild with delight over them, will claim the flowers as our especial charge and property.”

“Thank you for the classification!” snapped Hester. “Yet we do belong to backyards as naturally as cats and tomato cans. At least Homer and I do. You’d climb the fence if you could.”

“With the other cats?” said Hetty lightly. “See! I am putting the hyacinths in your own little vase. I unpacked your china and books last night. Not a thing was even nicked. You shall arrange them in this jolly corner cupboard after breakfast. It looks as if it were made a-puppose, as Homer says. He has bumped his head against strange doors and skinned his poor nose against unexpected corners twenty times this morning. He says: ‘Now—I s’pose it’s the bran-new house what oxcites me so. I allers gits oxcited in a strange place.’”

The well-meant diversion was ineffectual.

“His oxcitement ought to be chronic, then! Ugh! that water is scalding hot!” shrinking from the sponge in Hetty’s hand. “For we’ve done nothing but ‘move on’ ever since I can recollect. I overheard mother say once, with a sort of reminiscent sigh, that our ‘longest pastorate was in Cincinnati.’ We were there just four years. We were six months in Chillicothe, and seven in Ypsilanti. Then there was a year in Memphis, and eighteen months in Natchez, and thirteen in Davenport. The Little Rock church had a strong constitution. We stayed there two years and one week. It’s my opinion that he is the Wandering Jew, and we are one of the Lost Tribes.”

She smiled sour approbation of her sarcastic sally, jerking her head backward to bring Hetty’s face within range of her vision. The deft fingers were fastening strings and straps over the misshapen shoulders. The visage was grave, but always kind to her difficult charge.

“You think that is irreverent,” Hester fretted, wrinkling her forehead and beetling her eyebrows. “It isn’t a circumstance to what I am thinking all the time. Some day I shall be left to myself and my bosom devil long enough to spit it all out. It’s just bottling up, like the venom in Macbeth’s witches’ toad that had sweltered so long under a stone. But for you, crosspatch, all would have been said and done long ago.”

“You wouldn’t make your mother unhappy if you could help it,” Hetty said cheerily. “And it isn’t flattering to her to compare her daughter to a toad.”

Hester was silent. As she sat in Hetty’s lap, it could be seen that she was not larger than a puny child of seven or eight. The curved spine bowed and heightened the thin shoulders; she had never walked a step since the casualty that nearly cost her her life. Only the face and hands were uninjured. The latter were exquisitely formed, the features were fine and clearly cut, and susceptible to every change of emotion. That the gentle reproof had not wrought peaceable fruits was apparent from her expression. The misfit in her organization was more painfully perceptible to herself early in the day than afterward. She seemed to have lost consciousness of her unlikeness to other people while asleep, and to be compelled to readjust mental and physical conditions every morning. Hetty dreaded the process, yet was hardly aware of the full effect upon her own spirits, or why she so often went down to breakfast jaded and appetiteless.

“I often ask myself,” resumed Hester, with slow malignity, repulsive in one of her age and relation to those she condemned—“if children ever really honor their parents. We won’t waste ammunition upon him—but there is my mother. She is a pattern of all angelic virtues, and a woman of remarkable mental endowments. You have told me again and again that she is the best person you ever knew—patient, heroic, loving, loyal, and so on to the end of the string! You tell over her perfections as a Papist tells her beads. The law of kindness is in her mouth; and her children shall arise and call her blessed, and she ought not to be afraid of the snow for her household while her sister and her slave Tony are to the fore. Don’t try to stop me, or the toad will spit at you! I say that this, one would think, impossible She, the modern rival of Solomon’s pious and prudish wise woman—is weak and unjust and——”

Hetty interrupted the tirade by rising and laying the warped frame, all a-quiver with excitement, upon the bed.

“You would better get your sleep out”—covering her up. “When you awake again you will behave more like a reasonable creature. I cannot stay here and listen to vulgar abuse of your mother and my best friend.”

She said it in firm composure, drew down the shades, and without another glance at the convulsed heap sobbing under the bedclothes, left the chamber. Outside the door she paused as if expecting to be recalled, but no summons came. She shook her head with a sad little smile and passed down to the breakfast room.

Father, mother, and four children were at the table. Mr. Wayt, in dressing jacket, slippers, and silk skull cap, a cup of steaming chocolate at his right hand, was engrossed in the morning paper. A pair of scissors was beside his plate, that he might clip out incident or statistics which might be useful in the preparation of his wide-awake sermons. He made no sign of recognition at the entrance of his wife’s sister; Mrs. Wayt smiled affectionately and lifted her face for a good-morning salute, indicating by an expressive gesture her surprise and pleasure at having found room and meal in such attractive order. Long practice had made her an adept in pantomime. The boys nodded over satisfactory mouthfuls; pretty Fanny pulled her aunt down for a hug as she passed; even the baby made a mute rosebud of her mouth and beckoned Hetty not to overlook her.

Mr. Wayt’s digestion was as idiosyncratic as his nervous system. While the important unseen apparatus carried on the business of assimilation, the rest of the physical man was held in quiescent subjugation. Agitation of molecular centers might entail ruinous consequences. He reasoned ably upon this point, citing learned authorities in defense of the dogma that simultaneous functionation—such as animated speech or auricular attention and digestion—is an impossibility, and referring to the examples of dumb creatures to prove that rest during and after eating is a natural law.

He raised his eyes above the margin of his newspaper at the clink of the chocolate pot against the cup in Hetty’s hand. The questioning gaze met a goodly sight. His wife’s sister wore a buff gingham, finished at throat and wrists with white cambric ruffles, hemmed and gathered by herself. Her dark brown hair was in perfect order; her sleeves were pushed back from strong, shapely wrists. She always gave one the impression of clean-limbedness, elasticity, and neatness. She was firm of flesh and of will. The prettier woman at the head of the table was flaccid beside her. The eyes of the younger were fearless in meeting the master’s scrutiny, those of his wife were wistful, and clouded anxiously in passing from one to the other.

“For Hester,” said Hetty, in a low voice, looking away from Mr. Wayt to her sister. “She is tired, and will take her breakfast in bed.”

“I remonstrate”—Mr. Wayt’s best audience tones also addressed his wife—“as I have repeatedly had occasion to do, against the practice of pampering an invalid until her whims dominate the household. Not that I have the least hope that my protest will be heeded. But as the child’s father, I cannot, in conscience, withhold it.”

Light scarlet flame, in which her features seemed to waver, was blown across Hetty’s face. She set down the pot, poured back what she had taken from it, and with a reassuring glance at her sister’s pleading eyes, went off to the kitchen. There she hastened to find milk, chocolate, and saucepan, and to prepare a foaming cup of Hester’s favorite beverage; Homer, meanwhile, toasting a slice of bread, delicately and quickly.

Hester’s great eyes were raised to her aunt from lids sodden with tears; her lips trembled unmanageably in trying to frame her plea.

“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.”

In speaking she, too, looked at her mother, although every word was aimed at her father.

“It is a cruel trick that we have!” Hetty had said of the habit. “Every ball strikes that much-tried and innocent woman, no matter who throws it.”

“Of course!” retorted the sarcastic daughter. “And must while the angle of incidence is equal to that of reflection.”

In the discussion upon family versus church religion she carried her point by a coup d’état.

“Pews and staring pewholders are all well enough for straight-backed Christians!” she snarled. “I won’t be made a holy show of to gratify all the preachers and presbyteries in America!”

Anything like physical deformity was especially obnoxious to Mr. Wayt. The most onerous duties pertaining to his holy office were visitation of the sick and burial of the dead. Hester’s beautiful golden hair, falling far below her waist, veiled her humped shoulders, and her refined face looking out from this aureole, as she lay in her wheeled chair, would be picturesquely interesting in the chancel, if not seen too often there. The coarse realism of her refusal routed him completely. With an artistic shudder and a look of eloquent misery, likewise directed at his wife, he withdrew his forces from the field. That night she read “Sartor Resartus” to him from three o’clock until 6 A. M., so intolerable was his agony of sleeplessness.

It happened so often that Hetty was the only responsible member of the family who could remain at home with the crippled girl, that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Wayt seemed to remark that her churchgoing was less than nominal. Hester called Sunday her “white-letter day,” and was usually then in her best and most tolerant temper, while her fellow-sinner looked forward to the comparative rest and liberty it afforded as the wader in marshlands eyes a projecting shoulder of firm ground and dry turf.

It was never more welcome than on the fair May day when the Fairhill “people” crowded the First Church to hear the new pulpit star.

“The prayer which preceded the sermon was a sacred lyric,” said the Monday issue of the Fairhill Pointer. “In this respect Rev. Mr. Wayt is as remarkably gifted as in the oratory which moved his auditors alternately to tears, and smiles, and glows of religious fervor. We regret the impossibility of reporting the burning stream of supplication and ascription that flowed from his heart through his lips, but a fragment of the introduction, uttered slowly and impressively, is herewith given verbatim, as a sample of incomparable felicity of diction:

“‘Thou art mighty, merciful, masterful, and majestic. We are feeble, fickle, finite, and fading.’”[A]

March Gilchrist had his say anent the sample sentence on the way home from church. He was not connected with the press, and his criticism went no further than the ears of his somewhat scandalized and decidedly diverted sister.

In intuitive anticipation of the reportorial eulogy, he affirmed that the diction was not incomparable.

“I heard a Georgia negro preacher beat it all hollow,” he said. “He began with: ‘Thou art all-sufficient, self-sufficient, and in-sufficient!’”

“March Gilchrist! How dreadful!”

They were passing the side windows of the parsonage, which opened upon a quiet cross street. May’s laugh rippled through the bowed shutters of the dining room behind which sat a girl in a blue flannel gown, holding upon her knee and against her shoulder a hunchbacked child with a weirdly wise face. They were watching the people coming home from church.

“A religious mountebank is the most despicable of humbugs,” said March’s breezy voice, as he whirled a pebble from the walk with his cane, and watched it leap to the middle of the street.

Hester twisted her neck to look into Hetty’s eyes.

“They are discussing their beloved and eloquent pastor! My heart goes out to those two people!”

CHAPTER III.

“Hetty! do you ever think what it would be like to be engaged?”

“Engaged to do what?” said Hetty lazily.

She lay as in a cradle, in a grassy hollow under an apple tree—the Anak of his tribe. The branches, freighted with pink and white blooms, dipped earthward until the extreme twigs almost brushed the grass, and shut in the two girls arbor-wise. The May sun warmed the flowers into fragrance that hinted subtly of continual fruitiness. Hester said she tasted, rather than smelled it. Bees hummed in the boughs; through the still blandness of the air a light shower of petals fell silently over Hetty’s blue gown, settled upon her hair, and drifted in the folds of the afghan covering Hester’s lower limbs.

Homer had discovered in the garden fence a gate opening into this orchard, and confidentially revealed the circumstance to Hetty who, in time, imparted it to Hester, and conspired with her to explore the paradise as soon as the boys and Fanny were safely off to Sunday School.

“Engaged to do what?” Hetty had said in such good faith that she opened dreamy eyes wide at the accent of the reply.

“To be married, of course, Miss Ingenuous! What else could I mean?”

“Oh-h-h!” still more indolently. “I don’t know that I ever thought far in that direction. Why should I?”

“Why shouldn’t you, or any other healthy and passably good-looking girl, expect to be engaged—and be married—and be happy? It is time you began to take the matter into consideration, if you never did before.”

“There is usually another party to such an arrangement.”

“And why not in your case?”

“Where should he come from? Is he to drop from the moon? Or out of the apple tree”—stirred to the simile by the flick of a tinted petal upon her nose. “Or am I to stamp him out of the earth, à la Pompey? And what could I do with him if he were to pop up like a fairy prince, at this or any other instant?”

“Fall in love with him, and marry him out-of-hand! I wish you would, Hetty, and take me to live with you! That is one of my dearest dreams. I have thought it all out when the backache keeps me awake at night, and when I get quiet dreamy hours by day, when he is off pastoraling, and the boys and Fan are at school, and baby Annie is asleep, and I can hear Tony crooning ‘Sweet Julia’ so far away I can’t distinguish the frightful words, and you are going about the house singing to yourself, and blessing every room you enter like a shifting sunbeam.”

“Why, my pet, you are talking poetry!”

Hetty raised her head from the arms crossed beneath it, and stared at the child. The light, filtered through the mass of scented color, freshened her complexion and rounded the outlines of her face; her solemn eyes looked upward; her hands lay together, like two lily petals, upon the coverlet. Unwittingly she was a living illustration of her father’s theory of the Reality of the Unseen.

“No!” she answered quietly. “Not poetry, for it may easily come to pass that you should have a husband and home of your own. I do dream poems sometimes, if poetry is clouds and sunsets and music nobody else hears, and voices—and love words—and bosh!”

Hetty could not help laughing.

“Tell me some of the glory and the bosh! This is a beautiful confessional, Hester; I wish we had nothing to do for a week but to lie on the grass, and look at the blue sky through apple blossoms.”

“Amen!” breathed her companion softly, and for a while they were so quiet that the robins, nesting upon the other side of the tree, began to whisper together.

“Bosh and my poetry dreams are synonyms,” resumed Hester, her voice curiously mellowed from its accustomed sharpness. “Other people may say as much of theirs. I know it of mine. There’s the difference. All the same they are as sweet as the poisoned honey we were reading about the other day, which the bees make from poppy fields. And while I suck it, I forget. My romance has no more foundation than the story of the Prince and the Little White Cat. Mine is a broken-backed cat, but she comes straight in my dreams after her head is cut off. You don’t suppose she minded that! She must have been so impatient when the Prince hesitated that she was tempted to grab his sword and saw through her own neck. You see she recollected what she had been. The woman’s soul was cooped up in the cat’s skin. And I was eight years old when the evil spell was laid upon me!”

The tears in Hetty’s throat hindered response. Never until this instant, with all her love for her dependent charge, her knowledge of her sufferings, and the infinite pity these engendered, had the deprivations Hester’s affliction involved seemed so horribly, so atrociously cruel. The listener’s nails dug furrows in her palms, she set her teeth, and looking up to the unfeeling smile of the deaf and dumb heavens, she said something in her heart that would have left faint hope of her eternal weal in the orthodox mind of her brother-in-law.

Hester was speaking again.

“Every painter has his models. I have had mine. I dress each one up and work the wires to make him or her go through the motions—my motions, mind you! not theirs, poor puppets! When the dress gets shabby, or the limbs rickety, I throw them upon the rubbish heap, and look out for another.

“I got a new one last Thursday. The man who jumped over me in the station, and afterward carried me into the restaurant (such strong, steady arms as he had!) is a real hero! Oh, I am building a noble castle to put him in! He lives near here, for he passes the house three times a day. His eyes have a smile in them, and his mustache droops just like Charles I.’s, and he walks with a spring as if he were so full of life he longed to leap or fly, and his voice has a ring and resonance like an organ. The pretty girl that called him ‘Mark’ to-day, is his sister.”

“Why not his wife?”

“Wife! Don’t you suppose I know the cut of a married man, even on the street? He hasn’t the first symptom of the craft. He doesn’t swagger, and he doesn’t slink. A husband does one or the other.”

Hetty laughed out merrily. There was a sense of relief in Hester’s return to the sarcastic raillery habitual to her, which made her mirth the heartier.

A man crossing the lower slope of the orchard heard the bubbling peal, and looked in the direction of the big tree. So did his attendant, a huge St. Bernard dog. He tore up the acclivity, bellowing ferociously. Before his master’s shout arose above his baying he was almost upon the girls. At the instant of alarm, Hetty had thrown herself before the wheeled chair and the helpless occupant, and faced the foe. Crouching slightly, as for a spring, her face blenched, eyes wide and steady, she stood in the rosy shadow of the branches, both hands outthrown to ward off the bounding assailant.

“What a pose!” was March’s first thought, professional instinct asserting itself, concerned though he was at the panic for which he was responsible. In the same lightning flash came—“I’ll paint that girl some day!”

“Don’t be frightened!” he was calling, as he ran. “He will not hurt you!”

Hester had shrieked feebly, and lay almost swooning among her cushions. Hetty had not uttered a sound, but, as the master laid his hand on the dog’s collar her knees gave way under her, and she sank down by the cripple’s chair, her head resting upon the edge of the wicker side. She was fighting desperately for composure, or the semblance of it, and did not look up when March began to apologize.

“I am awfully sorry,” he panted, ruefully penitent. “And so will Thor—my dog, you know—be when he understands how badly he has behaved. He is seldom so inhospitable.”

The words brought up Hetty’s head and wits.

“Are we trespassing?” she queried anxiously. “We thought that this orchard was a part of the parsonage grounds, or we would not have come. It is we who should beg your pardon.”

“By no means!” He had taken off his hat, and in his regretful sincerity looked handsomer than when his eyes had smiled, concluded Hester, whose senses were rapidly returning. “My name is Gilchrist, and my father’s grounds adjoin those of the parsonage. He had the gate cut between your garden and the orchard, that the clergyman’s family might be as much at home here as ourselves. I hope you will forgive my dog’s misdemeanor, and my heedlessness in not seeing you before he had a chance to frighten you.”

Summoning something of his father’s gracious stateliness, he continued, more formally:

“Have I the pleasure of addressing Miss Wayt?”

Bow and question were for Hetty. Hester’s voice, thin and dissonant, replied with old-fashioned decorum of manner, but in unconventional phrase:

“I have the misfortune to be Miss Wayt. This is Mr. Wayt’s wife’s sister, Miss Alling.”

It was a queer speech, made queerer by the prim articulation the author deemed proper in the situation. March tried not to see that the subject of the second clause of the introduction flushed deeply, while her mute return of his bow had a serious natural grace he thought charming. When he begged that she would resume her seat, the little roguish curl at the corner of her lips, which he recollected as archly demure, came into play.

“We have no chairs to offer, but if you do not object to the best we have to give”—finishing the half invitation by seating herself upon a grass-grown root, jutting out near the trunk of the tree.

“The nicest carpet and lounge in the world,” affirmed March, sitting down upon the sward. “Odd, isn’t it, that American men don’t know how to loll on the turf as English do? Our climate is ever so much drier and we have three times as many fair days in the year, and some of us seem to be as loosely put together. But we don’t understand how to fling ourselves down all in a heap that doesn’t look awkward either, and be altogether at ease in genuine Anglican fashion. Even if there are ladies present, an Englishman lies on the grass, and it is considered ‘quite the thing, don’t you know?’ They say the imported American never gets the hang of it, try as he will. A man must be born on the other side or he can’t learn it.”

“There may be something in your countryman’s born reverence for women that prevents him from mastering the accomplishment,” said Hetty, a little dryly.

March bowed gayly.

“Thank you for the implied compliment in the name of American men! I am glad you are getting the benefit of this perfect May day. There, at any rate, we have the advantage of the Mother Country, if she has given us the Maypole and ‘The Queen of the May.’ This is a sour and dubious month in Merry England.”

“You have been there, then?”

Hester said it abruptly, as she said most things, but the eagerness dashed with longing that gave plaintive cadence to the question, caught March’s ear.

“Several times. I sailed from Liverpool twelve days ago. I was just off the steamer, and may be a little unsteady on my feet, when I collided with your carriage last Thursday, and you generously forgave me.”

The girl was regarding him with frank admiration that would have annoyed an ultra-sensitive man, and amused, while it flattered, a vain one.

“It must be heavenly to travel in the country of Scott and Dickens!” she said, quaintly naïve. “How you must have enjoyed it!”

“I did, exceedingly, but less on account of ‘David Copperfield’ and ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ than because, as a boy, I reveled in English history, and that my mother’s father, for whom I was named, was English. You should hear my sister talk of her first journey across England. She would say every little while in an awed undertone: ‘This is just living Dickens!’ You have not met her yet, I think?” to Hetty.

“No.”

The tone was reserved, without being rude. He could have fancied that sadness underlay civil regret. Perhaps May had been mistaken in postponing her call until the parsonage was in perfect order.

“She means to call very soon. She thought it would be unneighborly to intrude before you had recovered from the fatigue of removal and travel. Mr. Wayt was my father’s guest for a day or two, you know, before your arrival, and I have since had the pleasure of meeting him several times and of hearing him preach this morning.”

In the pause that succeeded the speech the church bell began to ring for afternoon service. Under the impression that he had lost caste in not attending upon the second stated ordinance of the sanctuary he offered a lame explanation.

“I am afraid I am not an exemplary church-goer. But I find one sermon as much as I can digest and practice from Sunday to Sunday. My mother doesn’t like to hear me say it. She thinks such sentiments revolutionary and uncanonical, and no doubt she is right.”

“Anybody is excusable for preferring to worship ‘under green apple boughs’ to-day,” observed Hester, with uncharacteristic tact. “You see we have always lived in cities, great and small. We have been used to brick walls and narrow, high houses, with paved backyards, with cats on the fences”—disgustfully—“and wet clothes flapping in your eyes if you tried to pretend to ruralize. Everybody hasn’t as much imagination as Young John Chivery, who said the flapping of sheets and towels in his face ‘made him feel like he was in groves.’”

“Fairhill has preserved the rural element remarkably well, when one considers her tens of thousands of inhabitants, her water supply and electric lights,” said March; “and luckily one doesn’t need much imagination to help out his enjoyment of the world on this Sunday afternoon.”

His tone was so respectfully familiar, his bearing so easy, the girls forgot that he was a stranger.

“It wasn’t your Dickens who said it, but you can, perhaps, tell me who did write a verse that has been running in my unpoetical brain ever since I entered your fairy bower,” he said by and by.

“The orchard’s all a-flutter with pink;

Robins’ twitter, and wild bees’ humming

Break the song with a thrill to think

How sweet is life when summer is coming.

“That is the way it goes, I believe. It is a miracle for me to recollect so much rhyme. The robins and bees must have helped me out.”

“I wish I knew who did that!” sighed Hester. “Oh! what it must be to write poetry or paint pictures!”

March’s glance of mirthful suspicion changed at sight of the knotted brow and wistful eyes.

“One ought to be thankful for either gift,” he said quietly. “I was thinking just now how I should like to make a picture of what I saw as I ran up the hill. May I try some day?”

Hetty drew herself up and looked inquiry. Hester’s hands fluttered, painful scarlet throbbed into her cheeks.

“Can you draw? Do you paint? Are you an artist?” bringing out the last word in an excited whisper.

March was too much touched to trifle with her agitation. “I try to be,” he answered simply, almost reverently.

“And would you—may I—would it annoy you—Hetty! ask him. You know what I want!”

“My darling!” The cooing, comforting murmur was passing sweet. “Be quiet for one moment, and you can put what you want to say into words.” As the fragile form quivered under her hand, a light seemed to dawn upon her. “You see, Mr. Gilchrist, my niece loves pictures better than anything else and—she never has met a real, live artist before,” the corners of her mouth yielding a little. “She has had a great longing to know how the beautiful things that delight her are made—how they grow into being. Is that it, dear?”

Hester nodded, her eyes luminous with tears she strove to drive back.

March struck his hands together with boyish glee.

“I have it! I will make a study of ‘orchards all a-flutter with pink,’ and you shall see me put in every stroke. May I begin to-morrow? Blossom-time is short. How unspeakably jolly! May we, Miss Alling?”

The proposition was so ingenuous, and Hester’s imploring eyes were so eloquent, that the referee turned pale under the heart-wrench demur cost her.

“Dear!” she said soothingly, to the invalid, “it would not be right to promise until we have consulted your mother. Mr. Gilchrist is very kind. Indeed”—raising an earnest face whose pallor set him to wondering—“you must believe that we do appreciate your goodness in offering her this great happiness. But—Hester, love, we must ask mamma.”

March had seen Mrs. Wayt in church that forenoon, and been struck anew with her delicate loveliness. Could she, with that Madonna face, be a stern task-mistress? With the rise of difficulties, his desire to paint the picture increased. That this unfortunate child, with the artist soul shining piteous through her big eyes, should see the fair creation grow under his hand had become a matter of moment. As poor Hester’s effort to express acquiescence or dissent died in a hysterical gurgle, and a shamed attempt to hide her hot face with her hands, the tender-hearted fellow arose to take leave.

“I won’t urge my petition until you have had time to think it over. But I don’t withdraw it. May I bring my sister over to see you both? She is fond of pictures, too, and dabbles in watercolors on her own account. Excuse me—and Thor—for our unintentionally unceremonious introduction to your notice, and thank you for a delightful half-hour. Good-afternoon!”

Hetty looked after him, as his elastic stride measured off the orchard slope—a contradiction of strange mortification and strange delight warring within her. It was as if a young sun-god had paused in the entrance of a gruesome cave, and talked familiarly with the prisoners chained to the walls. With all her resolute purpose to oppose the intimacy which she foresaw must arise from the proposed scheme of picture-making, she could not ignore the straining of her spirit upon her bonds.

“Oh!” wailed Hester, lowering her hands, “I didn’t mean to be so foolish! I will be brave and sensible, but you know, Hetty, I have never had anything like this offered to me before. It is like dying with thirst with water before one’s eyes, to give it up. And when he said: ‘Blossom-time is short,’ it rushed over me that I never had any—I can never have any. I am just a withered, useless, ugly bud that will never be a flower.”

An agony of sobs followed.

“My precious one!” Hetty’s tears flowed with hers. “Do I ever forget your sorrows? Are you listening, dear? If possible, you shall have this one poor little pleasure. You must trust your mother’s love and mine, to deny you nothing we can safely give. If we must refuse, it is only bearing a little more!”

The going out of the May day was calm as with remembered happiness, but the chill that lurks in the imperfectly tempered air of the newborn season, awaiting the departure of the sun, was so pronounced by seven o’clock that Hetty called upon Homer to build a fire in the sitting room, where she and Hester were sitting. The children were sent to bed at eight o’clock. Mrs. Wayt was lying down in her chamber with one of her frequent headaches, rallying her forces against her husband’s return from the long walk he found necessary “to work off the cumulative electricity unexpended by the day’s services.”

“I belong to the peripatetic school of philosophy,” he said to a parishioner whom he met two miles from home.

“He was forging ahead like a trained prize-fighter,” reported the admiring pewholder to a friend. “Nothing of the sentimental weakling about him!”

March and May Gilchrist, pausing upon the parsonage porch, at sound of a voice singing softly and clearly within, saw, past a half-drawn sash curtain, Hetty rocking back and forth in the firelight, with Hester in her arms. The cripple’s head was thrown back slightly, bringing into relief the small, fine-featured face and lustrous eyes. Her wealth of hair waved and glittered with the motion of the chair like spun gold. It might have been a young mother crooning to her baby in a sort of chant, the words of which were distinctly audible to brother and sister, the nearest window being lowered a few inches from the top. Hester loved heat and light as well as a salamander, but could not breathe freely in a closed room. To-night was one of her “bad times,” and nothing but Hetty’s singing could win her a moderate degree of ease.

“Blow winds!” [sang Hetty]

“And waft through all the rooms

The snowflakes of the cherry blooms!

Blow winds! and bend within my reach

The fiery blossoms of the peach!

“O Life and Love! O happy throng

Of thoughts whose only speech is song!

O heart of man! canst thou not be

Blithe as the air is, and as free?”

March moved forward hastily to ring the bell. He felt like an eavesdropping spy upon the unconscious girls. Without any knowledge of the isolation and mutual dependence of the two, the visitors perceived pathos in the scene—in the clinging helplessness of one and the brooding tenderness expressed in the close clasp and bent head of the other.

The singing ceased instantly at the sound of the gong. “By George! what an alarm!” muttered March, discomfited by the clang succeeding his touch. “And I gave it such a genteel pull!”

His attitude was apologetic still, when Mr. Wayt’s wife’s sister opened the door.

“I seem fated to be heralded noisily!” he said regretfully. “I had as little idea of the tone of your doorbell as you had of the power of Thor’s lungs. Miss Alling, let me introduce my sister! She gave me no peace until I brought her to see you.”

May extended her hand with unmistakable intention of good fellowship.

“I scolded him for stealing a march upon me this afternoon while I, like a dutiful Christian, was in church,” she said. Her smile was her brother’s, her blithe, refined tones her own. “But I mean to improve my advantages the more diligently on that account.”

The genial persiflage had bridged over the always awkward transit from front door to drawing room when the host is the conductor. It was the more embarrassing in this case because the two meagerly furnished parlors were unlighted except as a glimmer from the hall gas added to the sense of space and emptiness.

“Allow me!” March took from Hetty’s fingers the match she had lighted, and reached up to the chandelier. The white illumination flashed upon a pleasing study of an up-looking manly face, with honest, hazel eyes, drooping mustache, and teeth that gleamed in the smile attending the question: “I hope your niece is none the worse for her fright?”

“Thank you! I think not. She is rather nervous than timid, and not usually afraid of dogs.”

“I hope we can see her to-night?” May took up the word. “My brother says she is such a dainty, bright little creature that I am impatient to meet her.”

Hetty’s eyes glowed with gratitude and surprise. No other visitor had ever named the afflicted daughter of the house in this tone. The frank, cordial praise kept back no implication of pitying patronage. Mr. Wayt’s wife’s sister had knocked about the world of churches and parishes long enough to know that the perfect breeding which ignores deformity without overlooking the deformed is the rarest of social gifts. In any other circumstances, she would have refused steadfastly to subject Hester to the scrutiny of a stranger. As it was, she hesitated visibly.