“The people will expect us to live up to that study!” she divined shrewdly, staring into the blackness that began to show two gray lights where windows would shape themselves by and by. “And we cannot do it—strain and save and turn and twist as we may. We are always cut out on a scant pattern, and not a button meets without starting a seam. How sick and tired I am of it all! How tired I am of everything! What if I were to lie still as other girls—as real young ladies do—and sleep until I’m rested out—rested all through! I should enjoy nestling down among the pillows and pulling the covers about my head, and listening to the rain, as much as the laziest butterfly of them all. What’s the use of trying to keep things on their feet any longer when they must go down with a crash sooner or later?
“I’m awfully sorry for Hetty Alling!” This was the summing up of the gloomy reverie. In saying it inwardly, she raised herself to pinch the pillow savagely and double it into a higher prop for her restless head. “She is lonely and homesick and hasn’t a friend in the world. She never can have an intimate friend for reasons she knows so well she is sometimes ready to curse God and die.
“There! Hester, dear! I only moved you a little to make you lie easier. No! it is not time to get up. Don’t talk, dear, or you’ll wake yourself up.”
She was never cross with the afflicted child, but in her present mood, the moan and gurgle of her obstructed respiration went through her brain like the scraping of a saw. The change of position did not make the breathing more quiet, and Hetty got up with the general out-of-tune-ativeness best expressed by saying that “one’s teeth are all on edge.” She dressed by candlelight, to save gas, and groped her way down the unfamiliar backstairs to the kitchen.
It was commodious and well-appointed, with a pleasant outlook by daylight. In the dawn that struggled in a low-spirited way through the rifts in the rain and refused to blend with the yellow blink of her candle and Homer’s lantern, no chamber could be less than dismal.
Homer was on his knees in front of the flickering fire, at which he stared as if doggedly determined to put it out of countenance.
“Now”—his way of beginning nine out of every ten sentences—“this ere’s a new pattern of a range to me, an’ it’s tuk me some time fur ter git holt on it. Most new things comes awk’ard to most folks.”
Hetty blew out her candle, and, dropping into a chair in physical and mental languor, sat watching the grotesque figure clearing away ashes and cinders. His wrestle with the new pattern had begrimed his pale face and reddened his weak eyes. His matutinal costume of a dim blue flannel shirt, gray trousers, and a black silk skull cap cast off by Mr. Wayt, pushed well back upon the nape of the neck and revealing a scanty uneven fringe of whitey-brown hair, did not provoke the spectator to a smile.
“There is no bringing him up to the tone of that study!” she meditated grimly. “He and I are hopeless drudges, but he is the happier of the two. Homer! I believe you really love to work!” she broke forth finally.
Homer snickered—a sudden spurt that left him very sober. His laugh always went out like a damp match.
“Yes’m, cert’nly, ma’am! Ef ’twant fur work, there wouldn’t be nuthin’ to live fur!”
He shambled off to the cellar with the ashpan, and in a few minutes, she could distinguish in the sounds rumbling and smothering in the depths beneath her feet the melancholy tune of his favorite ditty:
“On the banks of the Omaha—maha!
’Twas there we settled many a night.
As happy as the little bird that sparkled on our block
On the banks of the Omaha!”
Hetty raised the window and leaned out, gasping for breath. A garden lay behind the house and on one side of it. It was laid out in walks and borders, and was rather broad than deep. Beyond this were undefined clumps of trees that looked like an orchard. Roofs and chimneys and spires and lines of other trees, marking the course of streets, were emerging from the soaking mists. Five o’clock struck from a tower not far away, and then a church bell began to ring gently—a persuasive call to early prayers.
The warm, sweet, wet air that aroused her to look over the sill at a row of hyacinths in full bloom, the slow peal of the bell, the hush of the early morning, did not comfort her—but the soft moisture that filled her eyes drew heat and bitterness out of her heart. When she went up to awaken Hester she carried a spray of hyacinth bells, weighted with fragrant drops. Fine gems of rain sprinkled her hair, her cheeks were cool and damp, the scent of fresh earth and growing things clung to her skirts. She laid the flowers playfully against the heavy lids lifted peevishly at her call.
“‘There’s richness for you,’” she quoted. “A whole bed of them is awaiting your inspection in the garden. And such lovely pansies—some as big as the palm of your hand. You and I and Homer, who is wild with delight over them, will claim the flowers as our especial charge and property.”
“Thank you for the classification!” snapped Hester. “Yet we do belong to backyards as naturally as cats and tomato cans. At least Homer and I do. You’d climb the fence if you could.”
“With the other cats?” said Hetty lightly. “See! I am putting the hyacinths in your own little vase. I unpacked your china and books last night. Not a thing was even nicked. You shall arrange them in this jolly corner cupboard after breakfast. It looks as if it were made a-puppose, as Homer says. He has bumped his head against strange doors and skinned his poor nose against unexpected corners twenty times this morning. He says: ‘Now—I s’pose it’s the bran-new house what oxcites me so. I allers gits oxcited in a strange place.’”
The well-meant diversion was ineffectual.
“His oxcitement ought to be chronic, then! Ugh! that water is scalding hot!” shrinking from the sponge in Hetty’s hand. “For we’ve done nothing but ‘move on’ ever since I can recollect. I overheard mother say once, with a sort of reminiscent sigh, that our ‘longest pastorate was in Cincinnati.’ We were there just four years. We were six months in Chillicothe, and seven in Ypsilanti. Then there was a year in Memphis, and eighteen months in Natchez, and thirteen in Davenport. The Little Rock church had a strong constitution. We stayed there two years and one week. It’s my opinion that he is the Wandering Jew, and we are one of the Lost Tribes.”
She smiled sour approbation of her sarcastic sally, jerking her head backward to bring Hetty’s face within range of her vision. The deft fingers were fastening strings and straps over the misshapen shoulders. The visage was grave, but always kind to her difficult charge.
“You think that is irreverent,” Hester fretted, wrinkling her forehead and beetling her eyebrows. “It isn’t a circumstance to what I am thinking all the time. Some day I shall be left to myself and my bosom devil long enough to spit it all out. It’s just bottling up, like the venom in Macbeth’s witches’ toad that had sweltered so long under a stone. But for you, crosspatch, all would have been said and done long ago.”
“You wouldn’t make your mother unhappy if you could help it,” Hetty said cheerily. “And it isn’t flattering to her to compare her daughter to a toad.”
Hester was silent. As she sat in Hetty’s lap, it could be seen that she was not larger than a puny child of seven or eight. The curved spine bowed and heightened the thin shoulders; she had never walked a step since the casualty that nearly cost her her life. Only the face and hands were uninjured. The latter were exquisitely formed, the features were fine and clearly cut, and susceptible to every change of emotion. That the gentle reproof had not wrought peaceable fruits was apparent from her expression. The misfit in her organization was more painfully perceptible to herself early in the day than afterward. She seemed to have lost consciousness of her unlikeness to other people while asleep, and to be compelled to readjust mental and physical conditions every morning. Hetty dreaded the process, yet was hardly aware of the