“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 are discussing their beloved and eloquent pastor! My heart goes out to those two people!”
CHAPTER III.
“Hetty! do you ever think what it would be like to be engaged?”
“Engaged to do what?” said Hetty lazily.
She lay as in a cradle, in a grassy hollow under an apple tree—the Anak of his tribe. The branches, freighted with pink and white blooms, dipped earthward until the extreme twigs almost brushed the grass, and shut in the two girls arbor-wise. The May sun warmed the flowers into fragrance that hinted subtly of continual fruitiness. Hester said she tasted, rather than smelled it. Bees hummed in the boughs; through the still blandness of the air a light shower of petals fell silently over Hetty’s blue gown, settled upon her hair, and drifted in the folds of the afghan covering Hester’s lower limbs.
Homer had discovered in the garden fence a gate opening into this orchard, and confidentially revealed the circumstance to Hetty who, in time, imparted it to Hester, and conspired with her to explore the paradise as soon as the boys and Fanny were safely off to Sunday School.
“Engaged to do what?” Hetty had said in such good faith that she opened dreamy eyes wide at the accent of the reply.
“To be married, of course, Miss Ingenuous! What else could I mean?”
“Oh-h-h!” still more indolently. “I don’t know that I ever thought far in that direction. Why should I?”
“Why shouldn’t you, or any other healthy and passably good-looking girl, expect to be engaged—and be married—and be happy? It is time you began to take the matter into consideration, if you never did before.”
“There is usually another party to such an arrangement.”
“And why not in your case?”
“Where should he come from? Is he to drop from the moon? Or out of the apple tree”—stirred to the simile by the flick of a tinted petal upon her nose. “Or am I to stamp him out of the earth, à la Pompey? And what could I do with him if he were to pop up like a fairy prince, at this or any other instant?”
“Fall in love with him, and marry him out-of-hand! I wish you would, Hetty, and take me to live with you! That is one of my dearest dreams. I have thought it all out when the backache keeps me awake at night, and when I get quiet dreamy hours by day, when he is off pastoraling, and the boys and Fan are at school, and baby Annie is asleep, and I can hear Tony crooning ‘Sweet Julia’ so far away I can’t distinguish the frightful words, and you are going about the house singing to yourself, and blessing every room you enter like a shifting sunbeam.”
“Why, my pet, you are talking poetry!”
Hetty raised her head from the arms crossed beneath it, and stared at the child. The light, filtered through the mass of scented color, freshened her complexion and rounded the outlines of her face; her solemn eyes looked upward; her hands lay together, like two lily petals, upon the coverlet. Unwittingly she was a living illustration of her father’s theory of the Reality of the Unseen.
“No!” she answered quietly. “Not poetry, for it may easily come to pass that you should have a husband and home of your own. I do dream poems sometimes, if poetry is clouds and sunsets and music nobody else hears, and voices—and love words—and bosh!”
Hetty could not help laughing.
“Tell me some of the glory and the bosh! This is a beautiful confessional, Hester; I wish we had nothing to do for a week but to lie on the grass, and look at the blue sky through apple blossoms.”
“Amen!”