The long storm in August set in next day. A fine, close drizzle veiled the world by 7 o’clock. At 8.30, the twins and Fanny needed their waterproof cloaks for the walk to school. By noon the patter on the piazza roof and falling floods upon lawn and garden and streets were slow, but abundant. It was scrubbing day and closet day, and, as Hester fretted sometimes to methodical Mary Ann on Friday, “all the rest of the week,” below stairs. Hetty had to prepare a dessert and to set the lunch table. Before going down she made up a little fire in the sewing room, and put out Hester’s color-box, glass of water, stretching board, paper, and easel within easy reach, should she decide to use them. Silently, and not too suggestively, she set upon the table near by a vase containing some fine specimens of the moccasin flower sent in by May Gilchrist, with a note addressed to “Queen Mab.” Hester hated hints, but if she lacked a study she would not have to look far for it.

It was “a bad day” with her. Her mother attributed it partly to her disappointment at not seeing her crony teacher.

Hetty, who had put the excited child to bed as soon as she got into the house the night before, held her peace. Mrs. Wayt, hovering from the nursery and her husband’s chamber to the sewing room, saw that in her taciturn daughter’s countenance that warned and kept her aloof. Another of Hester’s biting sayings was that her mother, on the day succeeding one of her spouse’s “seizures” was “betwixt the devil and the deep sea.” She never admitted, even to her sister, that “dear Percy” was more than “unfortunate,” yet read Hetty’s disapprobation in averted looks and studiously commonplace talk.

Wan and limp the cripple reclined among the cushions Hetty packed about her in her wheeled chair. Blue shadows ringed mouth and eyes, and stretched themselves in the hollowed temples; the deft fingers were nerveless. Most of the time she seemed to watch the rain under drooping eyelids, so transparent as to show the dark irides beneath.

At half past eleven her mother stole in like a bit of drifted down.

“Dear, I have promised papa to go up to your room and lie down for half an hour. Annie is with him. She amuses him, and will be very good, she says. I told her to let you know if she wanted anything. May I leave the door open? She cannot turn this stiff bolt.”

Annie was one of Hester’s weak points. “Baby” never made her nervous or impatient, and much of the little one’s precocity was due to intimate companionship with the disabled sister, whose plaything she was.

“Yes. All right!” murmured Hester, closing her eyes entirely.

She was deathly pallid in the uncolored gloom of a rainy noon.

“Or—if you feel like taking a nap, yourself?” hesitated Mrs. Wayt.

Tactful with her husband, and tender with all her household, she yet had the misfortune often to rub Hester’s fur the wrong way. The delicately pencilled brows met over frowning eyes.

“No! no! you know I never sleep in the day! If you would never bother yourself with my peace and comfort, mamma, we should be on better terms. I am not a baby, or a—husband!”

She was not sorry for her ill humor or for the long gap between the last article and noun, when left to herself.

She lay upon a bed of thorns, each of which was endued with intelligent vitality. Earth was a waste. Heaven had never been. Hate herself for it as she might she had never, in all her rueful existence, known suffering comparable to that condensed into the three little minutes she had lived twelve hours ago.

When Hetty had come up to bed her face was beautiful with a strange white peace, at sight of which Hester held her breath. Coming swiftly, but without bustle, across the room, she kneeled by the bed and gathered the frail form in the dear, strong arms that had cradled it a thousand times. Her eyes sparkled, her lips were parted by quick breaths, but she tried to speak quietly.

“Precious child! you should be asleep. But I am glad you are not, for I have a message for you. We—you and I—are to take no anxious thought for to-morrow, or for any more of the to-morrows we are to spend together. March told me to say that and to give you this!” laying a kiss upon her lips. “For he loves me, Hester, darling, and you are to live with us! Just as we planned, ever and ever so long ago! But what day dream was ever so beautiful as this?”

For one of the three awful minutes Hester thought and hoped she was dying. The frightened blood ebbed back with turbulence that threw her into a spasm of trembling and weeping. She recollected pushing Hetty away, then clutching her frantically to pull her down for a storm of passionate kisses given between tearless sobs. Then she gave way to wheezing shrieks of laughter, which Hetty tried to check. She would not let her move or speak after that.

“How thoughtless in me not to know that you were too much unnerved to bear another shock—even of happiness!” said the loving nurse. “No! don’t try to offer so much as a word of congratulation. It will keep! All we have to do to-night is to obey the order of our superior officer, and not think—only trust!”

In the morning there was no opportunity for speech-making. A night of suffering had beaten Hester dumb.

“Nobody could be surprised at that!” cooed Hetty, as she rubbed and bathed the throbbing spine. “If I could but pour down this aching column some of my redundant vitality!”

Hester detested herself in acknowledging the fervent sincerity of the wish. Hetty would willingly divide her life with her, as she had said yesterday that she meant to divide her fortune.

“Half for you while I live! All for you when I am gone!”

The sad sweetness of the smile accompanying the words was as little like the wonderful white shining of last night as the lot cast for Hetty was like that of the deformed dwarf whose height of grotesque folly was attained when she loved—first, in dreams and in “drifting”—then, all unconsciously, in actual scenes and waking moments—one whose whole heart belonged to the woman who had “made her over,” to whom she owed life, brain, and soul!

She was to live with them! Hetty must make her partaker of her every good. By force of long habit, Hester fell to planning the house the three would inhabit. She was herself—always helpless, never less a burden than now—a piece of rubbish in the pretty rooms, a clog upon domestic machinery—a barrier to social pleasure—the inadmissible third in the married tÊte-À-tÊte.

She writhed impotently. More useless than a toy; more troublesome than a baby—uglier than the meanest insect that crawls—she must yet submit to the fate that fastened her upon the young lives of her custodians.

“I doubt if I could even take my own life!” she meditated darkly. “In my fits of rage and despair, I used to threaten to roll my chair down the stairs and break my neck to ‘finish the job.’ I said it once to mamma. I wonder sometimes if that is the reason Tony puts up gates across the top of the stairs wherever we go? He says it is to keep baby Annie from tumbling down. I haven’t cared to die lately, but to-day I wish my soul had floated clean out of my body in that five minute make-believe under the pink tent of the apple tree, three months ago.

“I suppose he will be coming here constantly, now. Hetty won’t belong to me anymore. I am very wicked! I am jealous of her with him, and of him with her! I am a spiteful, malicious, broken-backed toad! Oh, how I despise Hester Wayt! And I owe it all to him!”

She glowered revengefully at the door her mother had left unclosed.

Baby Annie was having a lovely hour with “dee papa.” He had not left his bed, but the nausea and sense of goneness with which he had awakened, were yielding to the administration of minute potions of opium by his wife, at stated intervals. A fit of delirium tremens, induced by the failure to “cool him off” secundum artem, had brought about Homer’s introduction to his nominal employer. Routed from his secret lodgings under the roof-tree at one o’clock of a winter morning, Hetty’s waif had first run for a doctor, and, pending his arrival, pinioned the raving patient with his sinewy arms until the man of intelligent measures took charge of the case. Mrs. Wayt had run no such risks since.

Her lord never confessed that he took opium or ardent spirits. Indeed, he made capital of his total abstinence even from tobacco. There was always a cause, natural or violent, for his attacks. The Chicago seizure followed upon his rashness in swallowing, “mistaking it for mineral water,” a pint of spirits of wine, bought for cleaning his Sunday suit. Other turns he attributed, severally, to dyspepsia, to vertigo, to over-study, and to extreme heat. A sunstroke, suffered when he was in college, rendered him peculiarly sensitive to hot weather. His wife never gainsaid his elaborate explanations. He was her Percy, her conscience, her king. She not only went backward with the cloak of love to conceal his shame, but she affected to forget the degradation when he became sober.

Many women in a thousand, and about one man in twenty millions, are “built so.” The policy—or principle—may be humane. It is not Godlike. The All-Merciful calls sinners to repentance before offering pardon. The Church insists upon conviction as a preliminary to conversion. Mrs. Wayt was a Christian and a churchwoman, but she clung pathetically to belief in the efficacy of her plan for the reclamation of her husband. In life, or in death, she would not have upon her soul the weight of a reproach addressed to him whom she had sworn to “honor.” Love was omnipotent. In time he would learn the depth of hers and be lured back to the right way.

He was plaintive this forenoon, but not peevish. His eyes were bloodshot; his tongue was furry; there was a gnawing in the pit of his stomach and an unaccountable ache at the base of the brain.

“I have missed another sunstroke by a hair’s breadth,” he informed his wife. “I almost regret that we did not go to the seashore. My summer labors are exhausting the reserves of vital energy.”

“Why not run down to the beach for a day or two next week?” suggested Mrs. Wayt. “Now that your wife is an heiress, you can afford a change of air, now and then.”

A dull red arose in the sallow cheek. He pulled her down to kiss her.

“The best, sweetest wife ever given to man!” he said.

After that he bade her get a little rest. She must have slept little the night before. Annie would keep him company. While his head was so light and his tongue so thick Annie’s was the best society for him. She made no demand upon intellectual forces. He sent the best wife ever given to man off lightened in spirit, and grateful for the effort he made to appease her anxiety and to affect the gayety he could not be supposed to feel. She looked back at the door to exchange affectionate smiles with the dear, unselfish fellow.

He watched the baby’s pretty, quaint pretense of “being mamma,” and hearkened to the drip and plash of the rain until the gnawing in his stomach re-asserted itself importunately. He knew what it meant. It was the demand of the devil-appetite he had created long ago—his Frankenstein, his Old Man of the Sea, his body of death, lashed fast to him, lying down when he lay down, rising up at his awakening, keeping step with him, however he might try to flee. The lust he had courted rashly—now become flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone.

His wife had carried off the phial of opium. But he had secreted a supply of the drug for such emergencies since she had found out the phosphate device and privately confiscated the stout blue bottle. He always carried a small Greek Testament in his hip pocket. Mrs. Wayt’s furtive search of his clothes every night, after making sure that he was asleep, had not extended to the removal of the sacred volume.

He arose stealthily, steadied his reeling head by holding hard to the back of his neck with one hand, while the other caught at the chairs and bed-foot; tiptoed to the closet, found his black cloth pantaloons, drew out the Testament, and extracted from the depths beneath a wad of silken, rustleless paper. Within was a lump of dark brown paste.

“Tan’y! tan’y!” twittered Annie’s sweet, small pipe. “Give baby a piece! p’ease, dee papa!”

He hurried back into bed. If the child were overheard Hetty might look in. And Hester’s sharp ears were across the hall.

“No, baby; papa has no candy.” He was so startled and unmanned that he had to wet his lips with a tongue almost as parched before he could articulate. “Papa’s head aches badly. Will Annie sing him to sleep?”

Hester heard, through her stupor of misery, the weak little voice and the thump of the low rocking chair as baby crooned to the dolly cuddled in her arms and to “dee papa,” the song learned from Hester’s self:

The rain fell straight and strong. The heavy pour had beaten all motion out of the air, but the gurgling of water pipes and the resonance of the tinned roof gave the impression of a tumultuous storm. Through the register and chimney arose a far-off humming from the cellar, where Homer was “redding up.” Hester’s acute ears divided the sound into notes and words:

Annie stopped singing. “Dolly mus’ lie down in her twadle, an’ mamma mate her some tea!” Hester heard her say. At another time she would have speculated, perhaps anxiously, as to the processes going on when the clatter of metal and the tinkle of china arose, accompanied by the fitful bursts of song and a monologue of exclamations.

“Oh! oh! tate tare, dee papa!” came presently in a frightened tone. Then louder: “Papa! dee papa! wate up! you’ll det afire!”

Wee feet raced across the hall, a round face, red and scared, appeared in the doorway.

“Hetter! Hetter! tum, wate up dee papa! ’E bed is on fire!”

Through the doors left open behind her Hester saw a lurid glare, a column of smoke.

Shrieking for help at the top of her feeble lungs she plied the levers of her chair and rolled rapidly into the burning room. Upon the table at the foot of the bed had stood the spirit lamp and copper teakettle used by Mrs. Wayt in heating her husband’s phosphate draughts at night. Annie had lighted the lamp and contrived to knock it over upon the bed. The alcohol had ignited and poured over the counterpane.

Mr. Wayt lay, unstirring, amid the running flames. Hester made straight for him, leaned far out of her chair, to pull off the blazing covers, “Papa! papa! papa!”

He had not heard the word from her in ten years. He was not to hear it now.

Mrs. Wayt, Hetty, March Gilchrist, and the servants, rushing to the spot, found father and child enwrapped in the same scorching pall.

“Mr. Wayt died at midnight,” reported the Fairhill papers. “He never regained consciousness. The heroic daughter who lost her life in attempting to rescue a beloved parent lived until daybreak.

“‘They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided.’”

“I must be going, dear heart!” whispered Hetty’s namechild, as the August dawn, made faint by showers, glimmered through the windows. “I cannot see you. Would Mr. March mind kissing me ‘good-by’?”

“Mind?” He could not restrain the great sob. A tear fell with the kiss.

“Dear little friend! my sweet sister!”

The glorious eyes, darkened by death and almost sightless, widened in turning toward him. She smiled radiantly.

“Thank you for calling me that. Now, Miss May! And poor mamma! I wish I had been a better child to you! Hetty, dearest! hold me fast and kiss me last of all! You will be very happy, darling! But you won’t forget me—will you? I heard the doctors say”—a gleam of the old fantastic humor playing about her mouth—“that I had swallowed the flame. I think they were right—for the—bitterness is all—burned—out—of my heart!”

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