II

The hours of the Hatchard Memorial librarian were from three to five;

and Charity Royall's sense of duty usually kept her at her desk until

nearly half-past four.

But she had never perceived that any practical advantage thereby

accrued either to North Dormer or to herself; and she had no scruple

in decreeing, when it suited her, that the library should close an hour

earlier. A few minutes after Mr. Harney's departure she formed this

decision, put away her lace, fastened the shutters, and turned the key

in the door of the temple of knowledge.

The street upon which she emerged was still empty: and after glancing up

and down it she began to walk toward her house. But instead of entering

she passed on, turned into a field-path and mounted to a pasture on the

hillside. She let down the bars of the gate, followed a trail along the

crumbling wall of the pasture, and walked on till she reached a knoll

where a clump of larches shook out their fresh tassels to the wind.

There she lay down on the slope, tossed off her hat and hid her face in

the grass.

She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to

all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in

her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under

her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the

fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the

creak of the larches as they swayed to it.

She often climbed up the hill and lay there alone for the mere pleasure

of feeling the wind and of rubbing her cheeks in the grass. Generally

at such times she did not think of anything, but lay immersed in an

inarticulate well-being. Today the sense of well-being was intensified

by her joy at escaping from the library. She liked well enough to have a

friend drop in and talk to her when she was on duty, but she hated to be

bothered about books. How could she remember where they were, when they

were so seldom asked for? Orma Fry occasionally took out a novel, and

her brother Ben was fond of what he called “jography,” and of books

relating to trade and bookkeeping; but no one else asked for anything

except, at intervals, “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” or “Opening of a Chestnut

Burr,” or Longfellow. She had these under her hand, and could have

found them in the dark; but unexpected demands came so rarely that they

exasperated her like an injustice....

She had liked the young man's looks, and his short-sighted eyes, and his

odd way of speaking, that was abrupt yet soft, just as his hands were

sun-burnt and sinewy, yet with smooth nails like a woman's. His hair was

sunburnt-looking too, or rather the colour of bracken after frost; his

eyes grey, with the appealing look of the shortsighted, his smile shy

yet confident, as if he knew lots of things she had never dreamed of,

and yet wouldn't for the world have had her feel his superiority. But

she did feel it, and liked the feeling; for it was new to her. Poor and

ignorant as she was, and knew herself to be--humblest of the humble

even in North Dormer, where to come from the Mountain was the worst

disgrace--yet in her narrow world she had always ruled. It was partly,

of course, owing to the fact that lawyer Royall was “the biggest man

in North Dormer”; so much too big for it, in fact, that outsiders,

who didn't know, always wondered how it held him. In spite of

everything--and in spite even of Miss Hatchard--lawyer Royall ruled in

North Dormer; and Charity ruled in lawyer Royall's house. She had never

put it to herself in those terms; but she knew her power, knew what it

was made of, and hated it. Confusedly, the young man in the library

had made her feel for the first time what might be the sweetness of

dependence.

She sat up, brushed the bits of grass from her hair, and looked down on

the house where she held sway. It stood just below her, cheerless and

untended, its faded red front divided from the road by a “yard” with

a path bordered by gooseberry bushes, a stone well overgrown with

traveller's joy, and a sickly Crimson Rambler tied to a fan-shaped

support, which Mr. Royall had once brought up from Hepburn to please

her. Behind the house a bit of uneven ground with clothes-lines strung

across it stretched up to a dry wall, and beyond the wall a patch of

corn and a few rows of potatoes strayed vaguely into the adjoining

wilderness of rock and fern.

Charity could not recall her first sight of the house. She had been told

that she was ill of a fever when she was brought down from the Mountain;

and she could only remember waking one day in a cot at the foot of Mrs.

Royall's bed, and opening her eyes on the cold neatness of the room that

was afterward to be hers.

Mrs. Royall died seven or eight years later; and by that time Charity

had taken the measure of most things about her. She knew that Mrs.

Royall was sad and timid and weak; she knew that lawyer Royall was harsh

and violent, and still weaker. She knew that she had been christened

Charity (in the white church at the other end of the village) to

commemorate Mr. Royall's disinterestedness in “bringing her down,” and

to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence; she knew that

Mr. Royall was her guardian, but that he had not legally adopted her,

though everybody spoke of her as Charity Royall; and she knew why he had

come back to live at North Dormer, instead of practising at Nettleton,

where he had begun his legal career.

After Mrs. Royall's death there was some talk of sending her to a

boarding-school. Miss Hatchard suggested it, and had a long conference

with Mr. Royall, who, in pursuance of her plan, departed one day for

Starkfield to visit the institution she recommended. He came back the

next night with a black face; worse, Charity observed, than she had ever

seen him; and by that time she had had some experience.

When she asked him how soon she was to start he answered shortly, “You

ain't going,” and shut himself up in the room he called his office;

and the next day the lady who kept the school at Starkfield wrote that

“under the circumstances” she was afraid she could not make room just

then for another pupil.

Charity was disappointed; but she understood. It wasn't the temptations

of Starkfield that had been Mr. Royall's undoing; it was the thought of

losing her. He was a dreadfully “lonesome” man; she had made that out

because she was so “lonesome” herself. He and she, face to face in that

sad house, had sounded the depths of isolation; and though she felt

no particular affection for him, and not the slightest gratitude, she

pitied him because she was conscious that he was superior to the people

about him, and that she was the only being between him and solitude.

Therefore, when Miss Hatchard sent for her a day or two later, to talk

of a school at Nettleton, and to say that this time a friend of hers

would “make the necessary arrangements,” Charity cut her short with the

announcement that she had decided not to leave North Dormer.

Miss Hatchard reasoned with her kindly, but to no purpose; she simply

repeated: “I guess Mr. Royall's too lonesome.”

Miss Hatchard blinked perplexedly behind her eye-glasses. Her long frail

face was full of puzzled wrinkles, and she leant forward, resting her

hands on the arms of her mahogany armchair, with the evident desire to

say something that ought to be said.

“The feeling does you credit, my dear.”

She looked about the pale walls of her sitting-room, seeking counsel of

ancestral daguerreotypes and didactic samplers; but they seemed to make

utterance more difficult.

“The fact is, it's not only--not only because of the advantages. There

are other reasons. You're too young to understand----”

“Oh, no, I ain't,” said Charity harshly; and Miss Hatchard blushed to

the roots of her blonde cap. But she must have felt a vague relief at

having her explanation cut short, for she concluded, again invoking the

daguerreotypes: “Of course I shall always do what I can for you; and in

case... in case... you know you can always come to me....”

Lawyer Royall was waiting for Charity in the porch when she returned

from this visit. He had shaved, and brushed his black coat, and looked a

magnificent monument of a man; at such moments she really admired him.

“Well,” he said, “is it settled?”

“Yes, it's settled. I ain't going.”

“Not to the Nettleton school?”

“Not anywhere.”

He cleared his throat and asked sternly: “Why?”

“I'd rather not,” she said, swinging past him on her way to her room.

It was the following week that he brought her up the Crimson Rambler and

its fan from Hepburn. He had never given her anything before.

The next outstanding incident of her life had happened two years later,

when she was seventeen. Lawyer Royall, who hated to go to Nettleton,

had been called there in connection with a case. He still exercised

his profession, though litigation languished in North Dormer and its

outlying hamlets; and for once he had had an opportunity that he could

not afford to refuse. He spent three days in Nettleton, won his case,

and came back in high good-humour. It was a rare mood with him, and

manifested itself on this occasion by his talking impressively at the

supper-table of the “rousing welcome” his old friends had given him. He

wound up confidentially: “I was a damn fool ever to leave Nettleton. It

was Mrs. Royall that made me do it.”

Charity immediately perceived that something bitter had happened to him,

and that he was trying to talk down the recollection. She went up to bed

early, leaving him seated in moody thought, his elbows propped on the

worn oilcloth of the supper table. On the way up she had extracted from

his overcoat pocket the key of the cupboard where the bottle of whiskey

was kept.

She was awakened by a rattling at her door and jumped out of bed. She

heard Mr. Royall's voice, low and peremptory, and opened the door,

fearing an accident. No other thought had occurred to her; but when

she saw him in the doorway, a ray from the autumn moon falling on his

discomposed face, she understood.

For a moment they looked at each other in silence; then, as he put his

foot across the threshold, she stretched out her arm and stopped him.

“You go right back from here,” she said, in a shrill voice that startled

her; “you ain't going to have that key tonight.”

“Charity, let me in. I don't want the key. I'm a lonesome man,” he

began, in the deep voice that sometimes moved her.

Her heart gave a startled plunge, but she continued to hold him back

contemptuously. “Well, I guess you made a mistake, then. This ain't your

wife's room any longer.”

She was not frightened, she simply felt a deep disgust; and perhaps he

divined it or read it in her face, for after staring at her a moment

he drew back and turned slowly away from the door. With her ear to her

keyhole she heard him feel his way down the dark stairs, and toward

the kitchen; and she listened for the crash of the cupboard panel, but

instead she heard him, after an interval, unlock the door of the house,

and his heavy steps came to her through the silence as he walked down

the path. She crept to the window and saw his bent figure striding up

the road in the moonlight. Then a belated sense of fear came to her

with the consciousness of victory, and she slipped into bed, cold to the

bone.

A day or two later poor Eudora Skeff, who for twenty years had been the

custodian of the Hatchard library, died suddenly of pneumonia; and the

day after the funeral Charity went to see Miss Hatchard, and asked to be

appointed librarian. The request seemed to surprise Miss Hatchard: she

evidently questioned the new candidate's qualifications.

“Why, I don't know, my dear. Aren't you rather too young?” she

hesitated.

“I want to earn some money,” Charity merely answered.

“Doesn't Mr. Royall give you all you require? No one is rich in North

Dormer.”

“I want to earn money enough to get away.”

“To get away?” Miss Hatchard's puzzled wrinkles deepened, and there was

a distressful pause. “You want to leave Mr. Royall?”

“Yes: or I want another woman in the house with me,” said Charity

resolutely.

Miss Hatchard clasped her nervous hands about the arms of her chair. Her

eyes invoked the faded countenances on the wall, and after a faint cough

of indecision she brought out: “The... the housework's too hard for you,

I suppose?”

Charity's heart grew cold. She understood that Miss Hatchard had no

help to give her and that she would have to fight her way out of her

difficulty alone. A deeper sense of isolation overcame her; she felt

incalculably old. “She's got to be talked to like a baby,” she thought,

with a feeling of compassion for Miss Hatchard's long immaturity. “Yes,

that's it,” she said aloud. “The housework's too hard for me: I've been

coughing a good deal this fall.”

She noted the immediate effect of this suggestion. Miss Hatchard paled

at the memory of poor Eudora's taking-off, and promised to do what she

could. But of course there were people she must consult: the clergyman,

the selectmen of North Dormer, and a distant Hatchard relative at

Springfield. “If you'd only gone to school!” she sighed. She followed

Charity to the door, and there, in the security of the threshold, said

with a glance of evasive appeal: “I know Mr. Royall is... trying at

times; but his wife bore with him; and you must always remember,

Charity, that it was Mr. Royall who brought you down from the Mountain.”

Charity went home and opened the door of Mr. Royall's “office.” He was

sitting there by the stove reading Daniel Webster's speeches. They had

met at meals during the five days that had elapsed since he had come to

her door, and she had walked at his side at Eudora's funeral; but they

had not spoken a word to each other.

He glanced up in surprise as she entered, and she noticed that he

was unshaved, and that he looked unusually old; but as she had always

thought of him as an old man the change in his appearance did not move

her. She told him she had been to see Miss Hatchard, and with what

object. She saw that he was astonished; but he made no comment.

“I told her the housework was too hard for me, and I wanted to earn the

money to pay for a hired girl. But I ain't going to pay for her: you've

got to. I want to have some money of my own.”

Mr. Royall's bushy black eyebrows were drawn together in a frown, and he

sat drumming with ink-stained nails on the edge of his desk.

“What do you want to earn money for?” he asked.

“So's to get away when I want to.”

“Why do you want to get away?”

Her contempt flashed out. “Do you suppose anybody'd stay at North Dormer

if they could help it? You wouldn't, folks say!”

With lowered head he asked: “Where'd you go to?”

“Anywhere where I can earn my living. I'll try here first, and if I

can't do it here I'll go somewhere else. I'll go up the Mountain if I

have to.” She paused on this threat, and saw that it had taken effect.

“I want you should get Miss Hatchard and the selectmen to take me at the

library: and I want a woman here in the house with me,” she repeated.

Mr. Royall had grown exceedingly pale. When she ended he stood up

ponderously, leaning against the desk; and for a second or two they

looked at each other.

“See here,” he said at length as though utterance were difficult,

“there's something I've been wanting to say to you; I'd ought to have

said it before. I want you to marry me.”

The girl still stared at him without moving. “I want you to marry me,”

he repeated, clearing his throat. “The minister'll be up here next

Sunday and we can fix it up then. Or I'll drive you down to Hepburn to

the Justice, and get it done there. I'll do whatever you say.” His

eyes fell under the merciless stare she continued to fix on him, and

he shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. As he

stood there before her, unwieldy, shabby, disordered, the purple veins

distorting the hands he pressed against the desk, and his long orator's

jaw trembling with the effort of his avowal, he seemed like a hideous

parody of the fatherly old man she had always known.

“Marry you? Me?” she burst out with a scornful laugh. “Was that what you

came to ask me the other night? What's come over you, I wonder? How long

is it since you've looked at yourself in the glass?” She straightened

herself, insolently conscious of her youth and strength. “I suppose

you think it would be cheaper to marry me than to keep a hired girl.

Everybody knows you're the closest man in Eagle County; but I guess

you're not going to get your mending done for you that way twice.”

Mr. Royall did not move while she spoke. His face was ash-coloured and

his black eyebrows quivered as though the blaze of her scorn had blinded

him. When she ceased he held up his hand.

“That'll do--that'll about do,” he said. He turned to the door and took

his hat from the hat-peg. On the threshold he paused. “People ain't been

fair to me--from the first they ain't been fair to me,” he said. Then he

went out.

A few days later North Dormer learned with surprise that Charity had

been appointed librarian of the Hatchard Memorial at a salary of eight

dollars a month, and that old Verena Marsh, from the Creston Almshouse,

was coming to live at lawyer Royall's and do the cooking.