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
