Mr. Wayt's Wife's Sister. Marion Harland
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