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