XII
ONE afternoon toward the end of August a group of girls sat in a room atMiss Hatchard's in a gay confusion of flags, turkey-red, blue and whitepaper muslin, harvest sheaves and illuminated scrolls.
North Dormer was preparing for its Old Home Week. That form ofsentimental decentralization was still in its early stages, and,precedents being few, and the desire to set an example contagious, thematter had become a subject of prolonged and passionate discussion underMiss Hatchard's roof. The incentive to the celebration had come ratherfrom those who had left North Dormer than from those who had beenobliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing thevillage to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale primdrawing-room was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn,Nettleton, Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever avisitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse ofthe group of girls deep in their pretty preparations.
"All the old names... all the old names...." Miss Hatchard would beheard, tapping across the hall on her crutches. "Targatt... Sollas...Fry: this is Miss Orma Fry sewing the stars on the drapery for theorgan-loft. Don't move, girls... and this is Miss Ally Hawes, ourcleverest needle-woman... and Miss Charity Royall making our garlands ofevergreen.... I like the idea of its all being homemade, don't you? Wehaven't had to call in any foreign talent: my young cousin LuciusHarney, the architect--you know he's up here preparing a book onColonial houses--he's taken the whole thing in hand so cleverly; but youmust come and see his sketch for the stage we're going to put up in theTown Hall."
One of the first results of the Old Home Week agitation had, in fact,been the reappearance of Lucius Harney in the village street. He hadbeen vaguely spoken of as being not far off, but for some weeks past noone had seen him at North Dormer, and there was a recent report of hishaving left Creston River, where he was said to have been staying, andgone away from the neighbourhood for good. Soon after Miss Hatchard'sreturn, however, he came back to his old quarters in her house, andbegan to take a leading part in the planning of the festivities. Hethrew himself into the idea with extraordinary good-humour, and was soprodigal of sketches, and so inexhaustible in devices, that he gave animmediate impetus to the rather languid movement, and infected the wholevillage with his enthusiasm.
"Lucius has such a feeling for the past that he has roused us all to asense of our privileges," Miss Hatchard would say, lingering on the lastword, which was a favourite one. And before leading her visitor backto the drawing-room she would repeat, for the hundredth time, that shesupposed he thought it very bold of little North Dormer to start up andhave a Home Week of its own, when so many bigger places hadn't thoughtof it yet; but that, after all, Associations counted more than the sizeof the population, didn't they? And of course North Dormer was so fullof Associations... historic, literary (here a filial sigh for Honorius)and ecclesiastical... he knew about the old pewter communion serviceimported from England in 1769, she supposed? And it was so important, ina wealthy materialistic age, to set the example of reverting to the oldideals, the family and the homestead, and so on. This peroration usuallycarried her half-way back across the hall, leaving the girls to returnto their interrupted activities.
The day on which Charity Royall was weaving hemlock garlands for theprocession was the last before the celebration. When Miss Hatchardcalled upon the North Dormer maidenhood to collaborate in the festalpreparations Charity had at first held aloof; but it had been madeclear to her that her non-appearance might excite conjecture, and,reluctantly, she had joined the other workers. The girls, at first shyand embarrassed, and puzzled as to the exact nature of the projectedcommemoration, had soon become interested in the amusing details oftheir task, and excited by the notice they received. They would not forthe world have missed their afternoons at Miss Hatchard's, and, whilethey cut out and sewed and draped and pasted, their tongues kept up suchan accompaniment to the sewing-machine that Charity's silence sheltereditself unperceived under their chatter.
In spirit she was still almost unconscious of the pleasant stir abouther. Since her return to the red house, on the evening of the day whenHarney had overtaken her on her way to the Mountain, she had lived atNorth Dormer as if she were suspended in the void. She had come backthere because Harney, after appearing to agree to the impossibility ofher doing so, had ended by persuading her that any other course wouldbe madness. She had nothing further to fear from Mr. Royall. Of thisshe had declared herself sure, though she had failed to add, in hisexoneration, that he had twice offered to make her his wife. Her hatredof him made it impossible, at the moment, for her to say anything thatmight partly excuse him in Harney's eyes.
Harney, however, once satisfied of her security, had found plenty ofreasons for urging her to return. The first, and the most unanswerable,was that she had nowhere else to go. But the one on which he laid thegreatest stress was that flight would be equivalent to avowal. If--aswas almost inevitable--rumours of the scandalous scene at Nettletonshould reach North Dormer, how else would her disappearance beinterpreted? Her guardian had publicly taken away her character, and sheimmediately vanished from his house. Seekers after motives could hardlyfail to draw an unkind conclusion. But if she came back at once, andwas seen leading her usual life, the incident was reduced to its trueproportions, as the outbreak of a drunken old man furious at beingsurprised in disreputable company. People would say that Mr. Royall hadinsulted his ward to justify himself, and the sordid tale would fallinto its place in the chronicle of his obscure debaucheries.
Charity saw the force of the argument; but if she acquiesced it wasnot so much because of that as because it was Harney's wish. Since thatevening in the deserted house she could imagine no reason for doing ornot doing anything except the fact that Harney wished or did not wishit. All her tossing contradictory impulses were merged in a fatalisticacceptance of his will. It was not that she felt in him any ascendancyof character--there were moments already when she knew she was thestronger--but that all the rest of life had become a mere cloudy rimabout the central glory of their passion. Whenever she stopped thinkingabout that for a moment she felt as she sometimes did after lying on thegrass and staring up too long at the sky; her eyes were so full of lightthat everything about her was a blur.
Each time that Miss Hatchard, in the course of her periodical incursionsinto the work-room, dropped an allusion to her young cousin, thearchitect, the effect was the same on Charity. The hemlock garland shewas wearing fell to her knees and she sat in a kind of trance. It wasso manifestly absurd that Miss Hatchard should talk of Harney inthat familiar possessive way, as if she had any claim on him, or knewanything about him. She, Charity Royall, was the only being on earthwho really knew him, knew him from the soles of his feet to the rumpledcrest of his hair, knew the shifting lights in his eyes, and theinflexions of his voice, and the things he liked and disliked,and everything there was to know about him, as minutely and yetunconsciously as a child knows the walls of the room it wakes up inevery morning. It was this fact, which nobody about her guessed,or would have understood, that made her life something apart andinviolable, as if nothing had any power to hurt or disturb her as longas her secret was safe.
The room in which the girls sat was the one which had been Harney'sbedroom. He had been sent upstairs, to make room for the Home Weekworkers; but the furniture had not been moved, and as Charity sat thereshe had perpetually before her the vision she had looked in on from themidnight garden. The table at which Harney had sat was the one aboutwhich the girls were gathered; and her own seat was near the bed onwhich she had seen him lying. Sometimes, when the others were notlooking, she bent over as if to pick up something, and laid her cheekfor a moment against the pillow.
Toward sunset the girls disbanded. Their work was done, and the nextmorning at daylight the draperies and garlands were to be nailed up, andthe illuminated scrolls put in place in the Town Hall. The first guestswere to drive over from Hepburn in time for the midday banquet undera tent i
n Miss Hatchard's field; and after that the ceremonies wereto begin. Miss Hatchard, pale with fatigue and excitement, thanked heryoung assistants, and stood in the porch, leaning on her crutches andwaving a farewell as she watched them troop away down the street.
Charity had slipped off among the first; but at the gate she heard AllyHawes calling after her, and reluctantly turned.
"Will you come over now and try on your dress?" Ally asked, looking ather with wistful admiration. "I want to be sure the sleeves don't ruckup the same as they did yesterday."
Charity gazed at her with dazzled eyes. "Oh, it's lovely," she said, andhastened away without listening to Ally's protest. She wanted her dressto be as pretty as the other girls'--wanted it, in fact, to outshine therest, since she was to take part in the "exercises"--but she had no timejust then to fix her mind on such matters....
She sped up the street to the library, of which she had the key abouther neck. From the passage at the back she dragged forth a bicycle, andguided it to the edge of the street. She looked about to see if any ofthe girls were approaching; but they had drifted away together towardthe Town Hall, and she sprang into the saddle and turned toward theCreston road. There was an almost continual descent to Creston, and withher feet against the pedals she floated through the still eveningair like one of the hawks she had often watched slanting downward onmotionless wings. Twenty minutes from the time when she had left MissHatchard's door she was turning up the wood-road on which Harney hadovertaken her on the day of her flight; and a few minutes afterward shehad jumped from her bicycle at the gate of the deserted house.
In the gold-powdered sunset it looked more than ever like some frailshell dried and washed by many seasons; but at the back, whither Charityadvanced, drawing her bicycle after her, there were signs of recenthabitation. A rough door made of boards hung in the kitchen doorway,and pushing it open she entered a room furnished in primitive campingfashion. In the window was a table, also made of boards, with anearthenware jar holding a big bunch of wild asters, two canvas chairsstood near by, and in one corner was a mattress with a Mexican blanketover it.
The room was empty, and leaning her bicycle against the house Charityclambered up the slope and sat down on a rock under an old apple-tree.The air was perfectly still, and from where she sat she would be able tohear the tinkle of a bicycle-bell a long way down the road....
She was always glad when she got to the little house before Harney. Sheliked to have time to take in every detail of its secret sweetness--theshadows of the apple-trees swaying on the grass, the old walnutsrounding their domes below the road, the meadows sloping westward in theafternoon light--before his first kiss blotted it all out. Everythingunrelated to the hours spent in that tranquil place was as faint as theremembrance of a dream. The only reality was the wondrous unfoldingof her new self, the reaching out to the light of all her contractedtendrils. She had lived all her life among people whose sensibilitiesseemed to have withered for lack of use; and more wonderful, at first,than Harney's endearments were the words that were a part of them. Shehad always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and hemade it as bright and open as the summer air.
On the morrow of the day when she had shown him the way to the desertedhouse he had packed up and left Creston River for Boston but at thefirst station he had jumped on the train with a hand-bag and scrambledup into the hills. For two golden rainless August weeks he had camped inthe house, getting eggs and milk from the solitary farm in the valley,where no one knew him, and doing his cooking over a spirit-lamp. He gotup every day with the sun, took a plunge in a brown pool he knew of, andspent long hours lying in the scented hemlock-woods above the house, orwandering along the yoke of the Eagle Ridge, far above the misty bluevalleys that swept away east and west between the endless hills. And inthe afternoon Charity came to him.
With part of what was left of her savings she had hired a bicycle fora month, and every day after dinner, as soon as her guardian started tohis office, she hurried to the library, got out her bicycle, and flewdown the Creston road. She knew that Mr. Royall, like everyone else inNorth Dormer, was perfectly aware of her acquisition: possibly he, aswell as the rest of the village, knew what use she made of it. She didnot care: she felt him to be so powerless that if he had questioned hershe would probably have told him the truth. But they had never spoken toeach other since the night on the wharf at Nettleton. He had returned toNorth Dormer only on the third day after that encounter, arriving justas Charity and Verena were sitting down to supper. He had drawn up hischair, taken his napkin from the side-board drawer, pulled it out of itsring, and seated himself as unconcernedly as if he had come in fromhis usual afternoon session at Carrick Fry's; and the long habit of thehousehold made it seem almost natural that Charity should not so much asraise her eyes when he entered. She had simply let him understand thather silence was not accidental by leaving the table while he was stilleating, and going up without a word to shut herself into her room.After that he formed the habit of talking loudly and genially to Verenawhenever Charity was in the room; but otherwise there was no apparentchange in their relations.
She did not think connectedly of these things while she sat waiting forHarney, but they remained in her mind as a sullen background againstwhich her short hours with him flamed out like forest fires. Nothingelse mattered, neither the good nor the bad, or what might have seemedso before she knew him. He had caught her up and carried her away intoa new world, from which, at stated hours, the ghost of her came back toperform certain customary acts, but all so thinly and insubstantiallythat she sometimes wondered that the people she went about among couldsee her....
Behind the swarthy Mountain the sun had gone down in waveless gold. Froma pasture up the slope a tinkle of cow-bells sounded; a puff of smokehung over the farm in the valley, trailed on the pure air and was gone.For a few minutes, in the clear light that is all shadow, fields andwoods were outlined with an unreal precision then the twilight blottedthem out, and the little house turned gray and spectral under itswizened apple-branches.
Charity's heart contracted. The first fall of night after a day ofradiance often gave her a sense of hidden menace: it was like lookingout over the world as it would be when love had gone from it. Shewondered if some day she would sit in that same place and watch in vainfor her lover....
His bicycle-bell sounded down the lane, and in a minute she was at thegate and his eyes were laughing in hers. They walked back through thelong grass, and pushed open the door behind the house. The room atfirst seemed quite dark and they had to grope their way in hand in hand.Through the window-frame the sky looked light by contrast, and above theblack mass of asters in the earthen jar one white star glimmered like amoth.
"There was such a lot to do at the last minute," Harney was explaining,"and I had to drive down to Creston to meet someone who has come to staywith my cousin for the show."
He had his arms about her, and his kisses were in her hair and on herlips. Under his touch things deep down in her struggled to the light andsprang up like flowers in sunshine. She twisted her fingers into his,and they sat down side by side on the improvised couch. She hardly heardhis excuses for being late: in his absence a thousand doubts tormentedher, but as soon as he appeared she ceased to wonder where he had comefrom, what had delayed him, who had kept him from her. It seemed as ifthe places he had been in, and the people he had been with, must ceaseto exist when he left them, just as her own life was suspended in hisabsence.
He continued, now, to talk to her volubly and gaily, deploring hislateness, grumbling at the demands on his time, and good-humouredlymimicking Miss Hatchard's benevolent agitation. "She hurried off Milesto ask Mr. Royall to speak at the Town Hall tomorrow: I didn't know tillit was done." Charity was silent, and he added: "After all, perhaps it'sjust as well. No one else could have done it."
Charity made no answer: She did not care what part her guardian playedin the morrow's ceremonies. Like all the other figures peopling hermeagre world he had gr
own non-existent to her. She had even put offhating him.
"Tomorrow I shall only see you from far off," Harney continued. "But inthe evening there'll be the dance in the Town Hall. Do you want me topromise not to dance with any other girl?"
Any other girl? Were there any others? She had forgotten even thatperil, so enclosed did he and she seem in their secret world. Her heartgave a frightened jerk.
"Yes, promise."
He laughed and took her in his arms. "You goose--not even if they'rehideous?"
He pushed the hair from her forehead, bending her face back, as his waywas, and leaning over so that his head loomed black between her eyes andthe paleness of the sky, in which the white star floated...
Side by side they sped back along the dark wood-road to the village. Alate moon was rising, full orbed and fiery, turning the mountain rangesfrom fluid gray to a massive blackness, and making the upper sky solight that the stars looked as faint as their own reflections in water.At the edge of the wood, half a mile from North Dormer, Harney jumpedfrom his bicycle, took Charity in his arms for a last kiss, and thenwaited while she went on alone.
They were later than usual, and instead of taking the bicycle to thelibrary she propped it against the back of the wood-shed and entered thekitchen of the red house. Verena sat there alone; when Charity came inshe looked at her with mild impenetrable eyes and then took a plateand a glass of milk from the shelf and set them silently on the table.Charity nodded her thanks, and sitting down, fell hungrily upon herpiece of pie and emptied the glass. Her face burned with her quickflight through the night, and her eyes were dazzled by the twinkle ofthe kitchen lamp. She felt like a night-bird suddenly caught and caged.
"He ain't come back since supper," Verena said. "He's down to the Hall."
Charity took no notice. Her soul was still winging through the forest.She washed her plate and tumbler, and then felt her way up the darkstairs. When she opened her door a wonder arrested her. Before goingout she had closed her shutters against the afternoon heat, but they hadswung partly open, and a bar of moonlight, crossing the room, restedon her bed and showed a dress of China silk laid out on it in virginwhiteness. Charity had spent more than she could afford on the dress,which was to surpass those of all the other girls; she had wanted to letNorth Dormer see that she was worthy of Harney's admiration. Above thedress, folded on the pillow, was the white veil which the young womenwho took part in the exercises were to wear under a wreath of asters;and beside the veil a pair of slim white satin shoes that Ally hadproduced from an old trunk in which she stored mysterious treasures.
Charity stood gazing at all the outspread whiteness. It recalled avision that had come to her in the night after her first meeting withHarney. She no longer had such visions... warmer splendours had displacedthem... but it was stupid of Ally to have paraded all those white thingson her bed, exactly as Hattie Targatt's wedding dress from Springfieldhad been spread out for the neighbours to see when she married TomFry....
Charity took up the satin shoes and looked at them curiously. By day, nodoubt, they would appear a little worn, but in the moonlight they seemedcarved of ivory. She sat down on the floor to try them on, and theyfitted her perfectly, though when she stood up she lurched a little onthe high heels. She looked down at her feet, which the graceful mouldof the slippers had marvellously arched and narrowed. She had neverseen such shoes before, even in the shop-windows at Nettleton... never,except... yes, once, she had noticed a pair of the same shape on AnnabelBalch.
A blush of mortification swept over her. Ally sometimes sewed for MissBalch when that brilliant being descended on North Dormer, and nodoubt she picked up presents of cast-off clothing: the treasures in themysterious trunk all came from the people she worked for; there could beno doubt that the white slippers were Annabel Balch's....
As she stood there, staring down moodily at her feet, she heard thetriple click-click-click of a bicycle-bell under her window. It wasHarney's secret signal as he passed on his way home. She stumbled tothe window on her high heels, flung open the shutters and leaned out. Hewaved to her and sped by, his black shadow dancing merrily ahead of himdown the empty moonlit road; and she leaned there watching him till hevanished under the Hatchard spruces.
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