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