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 and admonition as are contemplated in the command: ‘Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.’ There is didactic theology in David’s holy breathing: ‘A day in thy courts is better than a thousand.’”
“Better than a thousand in the same place? I should think so,” interposed Hester’s tuneless pipe. “He needn’t have been inspired to tell us that! Family worship suffices for my spiritual needs. That must be the porch to the ‘courts,’ at least.”
In speaking she, too, looked at her mother, although every word was aimed at her father.
“It is a cruel trick that we have!” Hetty had said of the habit. “Every ball strikes that much-tried and innocent woman, no matter who throws it.”
“Of course!” retorted the sarcastic daughter. “And must while the angle of incidence is equal to that of reflection.”
In the discussion upon family versus church religion she carried her point by a coup d’état.
“Pews and staring pewholders are all well enough for straight-backed Christians!” she snarled. “I won’t be made a holy show of to gratify all the preachers and presbyteries in America!”
Anything like physical deformity was especially obnoxious to Mr. Wayt. The most onerous duties pertaining to his holy office were visitation of the sick and burial of the dead. Hester’s beautiful golden hair, falling far below her waist, veiled her humped shoulders, and her refined face looking out from this aureole, as she lay in her wheeled chair, would be picturesquely interesting in the chancel, if not seen too often there. The coarse realism of her refusal routed him completely. With an artistic shudder and a look of eloquent misery, likewise directed at his wife, he withdrew his forces from the field. That night she read “Sartor Resartus” to him from three o’clock until 6 A. M., so intolerable was his agony of sleeplessness.
It happened so often that Hetty was the only responsible member of the family who could remain at home with the crippled girl, that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Wayt seemed to remark that her churchgoing was less than nominal. Hester called Sunday her “white-letter day,” and was usually then in her best and most tolerant temper, while her fellow-sinner looked forward to the comparative rest and liberty it afforded as the wader in marshlands eyes a projecting shoulder of firm ground and dry turf.
It was never more welcome than on the fair May day when the Fairhill “people” crowded the First Church to hear the new pulpit star.
“The prayer which preceded the sermon was a sacred lyric,” said the Monday issue of the Fairhill Pointer. “In this respect Rev. Mr. Wayt is as remarkably gifted as in the oratory which moved his auditors alternately to tears, and smiles, and glows of religious fervor. We regret the impossibility of reporting the burning stream of supplication and ascription that flowed from his heart through his lips, but a fragment of the introduction, uttered slowly and impressively, is herewith given verbatim, as a sample of incomparable felicity of diction:
“‘Thou art mighty, merciful, masterful, and majestic. We are feeble, fickle, finite, and fading.’”[A]
March Gilchrist had his say anent the sample sentence on the way home from church. He was not connected with the press, and his criticism went no further than the ears of his somewhat scandalized and decidedly diverted sister.
In intuitive anticipation of the reportorial eulogy, he affirmed that the diction was not incomparable.
“I heard a Georgia negro preacher beat it all hollow,” he said. “He began with: ‘Thou art all-sufficient, self-sufficient, and in-sufficient!’”
“March Gilchrist! How dreadful!”
They were passing the side windows of the parsonage, which opened upon a quiet cross street. May’s laugh rippled through the bowed shutters of the dining room behind which sat a girl in a blue flannel gown, holding upon her knee and against her shoulder a hunchbacked child with a weirdly wise face. They were watching the people coming home from church.
“A religious mountebank is the most despicable of humbugs,” said March’s breezy voice, as he whirled a pebble from the walk with his cane, and watched it leap to the middle of the street.
Hester twisted her neck to look into Hetty’s eyes.
“They
