慰

Heart radical at the bottom — the indexing radical and the locus of the action. Comforting is a transaction between hearts in classical Chinese psychology; 慰 places itself in the emotion-and-mind family alongside 想 (think), 感 (feel), 怒 (anger), 念 (long for).

Top 尉 supplies the sound wèi directly with no drift. 尉 originally pictured a hand pressing a hot iron to flatten cloth — to smooth out wrinkles. That hand-soothing-the-surface image is a near-perfect semantic fit: consoling someone is smoothing out their worries the same way you press out a crease. 尉 is later also a military rank.