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