ONE afternoon toward the end of August a group of girls sat in a room at
Miss Hatchard's in a gay confusion of flags, turkey-red, blue and white
paper muslin, harvest sheaves and illuminated scrolls.
North Dormer was preparing for its Old Home Week. That form of
sentimental decentralization was still in its early stages, and,
precedents being few, and the desire to set an example contagious, the
matter had become a subject of prolonged and passionate discussion under
Miss Hatchard's roof. The incentive to the celebration had come rather
from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been
obliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the
village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale prim
drawing-room was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn,
Nettleton, Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever a
visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse of
the group of girls deep in their pretty preparations.
“All the old names... all the old names....” Miss Hatchard would be
heard, tapping across the hall on her crutches. “Targatt... Sollas...
Fry: this is Miss Orma Fry sewing the stars on the drapery for the
organ-loft. Don't move, girls... and this is Miss Ally Hawes, our
cleverest needle-woman... and Miss Charity Royall making our garlands of
evergreen.... I like the idea of its all being homemade, don't you? We
haven't had to call in any foreign talent: my young cousin Lucius
Harney, the architect--you know he's up here preparing a book on
Colonial houses--he's taken the whole thing in hand so cleverly; but you
must come and see his sketch for the stage we're going to put up in the
Town 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 had
been vaguely spoken of as being not far off, but for some weeks past no
one had seen him at North Dormer, and there was a recent report of his
having left Creston River, where he was said to have been staying, and
gone away from the neighbourhood for good. Soon after Miss Hatchard's
return, however, he came back to his old quarters in her house, and
began to take a leading part in the planning of the festivities. He
threw himself into the idea with extraordinary good-humour, and was so
prodigal of sketches, and so inexhaustible in devices, that he gave an
immediate impetus to the rather languid movement, and infected the whole
village with his enthusiasm.
“Lucius has such a feeling for the past that he has roused us all to a
sense of our privileges,” Miss Hatchard would say, lingering on the last
word, which was a favourite one. And before leading her visitor back
to the drawing-room she would repeat, for the hundredth time, that she
supposed he thought it very bold of little North Dormer to start up and
have a Home Week of its own, when so many bigger places hadn't thought
of it yet; but that, after all, Associations counted more than the size
of the population, didn't they? And of course North Dormer was so full
of Associations... historic, literary (here a filial sigh for Honorius)
and ecclesiastical... he knew about the old pewter communion service
imported from England in 1769, she supposed? And it was so important, in
a wealthy materialistic age, to set the example of reverting to the old
ideals, the family and the homestead, and so on. This peroration usually
carried her half-way back across the hall, leaving the girls to return
to their interrupted activities.
The day on which Charity Royall was weaving hemlock garlands for the
procession was the last before the celebration. When Miss Hatchard
called upon the North Dormer maidenhood to collaborate in the festal
preparations Charity had at first held aloof; but it had been made
clear to her that her non-appearance might excite conjecture, and,
reluctantly, she had joined the other workers. The girls, at first shy
and embarrassed, and puzzled as to the exact nature of the projected
commemoration, had soon become interested in the amusing details of
their task, and excited by the notice they received. They would not for
the world have missed their afternoons at Miss Hatchard's, and, while
they cut out and sewed and draped and pasted, their tongues kept up such
an accompaniment to the sewing-machine that Charity's silence sheltered
itself unperceived under their chatter.
In spirit she was still almost unconscious of the pleasant stir about
her. Since her return to the red house, on the evening of the day when
Harney had overtaken her on her way to the Mountain, she had lived at
North Dormer as if she were suspended in the void. She had come back
there because Harney, after appearing to agree to the impossibility of
her doing so, had ended by persuading her that any other course would
be madness. She had nothing further to fear from Mr. Royall. Of this
she had declared herself sure, though she had failed to add, in his
exoneration, that he had twice offered to make her his wife. Her hatred
of him made it impossible, at the moment, for her to say anything that
might partly excuse him in Harney's eyes.
Harney, however, once satisfied of her security, had found plenty of
reasons 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 the
greatest stress was that flight would be equivalent to avowal. If--as
was almost inevitable--rumours of the scandalous scene at Nettleton
should reach North Dormer, how else would her disappearance be
interpreted? Her guardian had publicly taken away her character, and she
immediately vanished from his house. Seekers after motives could hardly
fail to draw an unkind conclusion. But if she came back at once, and
was seen leading her usual life, the incident was reduced to its true
proportions, as the outbreak of a drunken old man furious at being
surprised in disreputable company. People would say that Mr. Royall had
insulted his ward to justify himself, and the sordid tale would fall
into its place in the chronicle of his obscure debaucheries.
Charity saw the force of the argument; but if she acquiesced it was
not so much because of that as because it was Harney's wish. Since that
evening in the deserted house she could imagine no reason for doing or
not doing anything except the fact that Harney wished or did not wish
it. All her tossing contradictory impulses were merged in a fatalistic
acceptance of his will. It was not that she felt in him any ascendancy
of character--there were moments already when she knew she was the
stronger--but that all the rest of life had become a mere cloudy rim
about the central glory of their passion. Whenever she stopped thinking
about that for a moment she felt as she sometimes did after lying on the
grass and staring up too long at the sky; her eyes were so full of light
that everything about her was a blur.
Each time that Miss Hatchard, in the course of her periodical incursions
into the work-room, dropped an allusion to her young cousin, the
architect, the effect was the same on Charity. The hemlock garland she
was wearing fell to her knees and she sat in a kind of trance. It was
so manifestly absurd that Miss Hatchard should talk of Harney in
that familiar possessive way, as if she had any claim on him, or knew
anything about him. She, Charity Royall, was the only being on earth
who really knew him, knew him from the soles of his feet to the rumpled
crest of his hair, knew the shifting lights in his eyes, and the
inflexions of his voice, and the things he liked and disliked,
and everything there was to know about him, as minutely and yet
unconsciously as a child knows the walls of the room it wakes up in
every morning. It was this fact, which nobody about her guessed,
or would have understood, that made her life something apart and
inviolable, as if nothing had any power to hurt or disturb her as long
as her secret was safe.
The room in which the girls sat was the one which had been Harney's
bedroom. He had been sent upstairs, to make room for the Home Week
workers; but the furniture had not been moved, and as Charity sat there
she had perpetually before her the vision she had looked in on from the
midnight garden. The table at which Harney had sat was the one about
which the girls were gathered; and her own seat was near the bed on
which she had seen him lying. Sometimes, when the others were not
looking, she bent over as if to pick up something, and laid her cheek
for a moment against the pillow.
Toward sunset the girls disbanded. Their work was done, and the next
morning at daylight the draperies and garlands were to be nailed up, and
the illuminated scrolls put in place in the Town Hall. The first guests
were to drive over from Hepburn in time for the midday banquet under
a tent in Miss Hatchard's field; and after that the ceremonies were
to begin. Miss Hatchard, pale with fatigue and excitement, thanked her
young assistants, and stood in the porch, leaning on her crutches and
waving a farewell as she watched them troop away down the street.
Charity had slipped off among the first; but at the gate she heard Ally
Hawes calling after her, and reluctantly turned.
“Will you come over now and try on your dress?” Ally asked, looking at
her with wistful admiration. “I want to be sure the sleeves don't ruck
up the same as they did yesterday.”
Charity gazed at her with dazzled eyes. “Oh, it's lovely,” she said, and
hastened away without listening to Ally's protest. She wanted her dress
to be as pretty as the other girls'--wanted it, in fact, to outshine the
rest, since she was to take part in the “exercises”--but she had no time
just then to fix her mind on such matters....
She sped up the street to the library, of which she had the key about
her neck. From the passage at the back she dragged forth a bicycle, and
guided it to the edge of the street. She looked about to see if any of
the girls were approaching; but they had drifted away together toward
the Town Hall, and she sprang into the saddle and turned toward the
Creston road. There was an almost continual descent to Creston, and with
her feet against the pedals she floated through the still evening
air like one of the hawks she had often watched slanting downward on
motionless wings. Twenty minutes from the time when she had left Miss
Hatchard's door she was turning up the wood-road on which Harney had
overtaken her on the day of her flight; and a few minutes afterward she
had jumped from her bicycle at the gate of the deserted house.
In the gold-powdered sunset it looked more than ever like some frail
shell dried and washed by many seasons; but at the back, whither Charity
advanced, drawing her bicycle after her, there were signs of recent
habitation. A rough door made of boards hung in the kitchen doorway,
and pushing it open she entered a room furnished in primitive camping
fashion. In the window was a table, also made of boards, with an
earthenware jar holding a big bunch of wild asters, two canvas chairs
stood near by, and in one corner was a mattress with a Mexican blanket
over it.
The room was empty, and leaning her bicycle against the house Charity
clambered 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 to
hear 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. She
liked to have time to take in every detail of its secret sweetness--the
shadows of the apple-trees swaying on the grass, the old walnuts
rounding their domes below the road, the meadows sloping westward in the
afternoon light--before his first kiss blotted it all out. Everything
unrelated to the hours spent in that tranquil place was as faint as the
remembrance of a dream. The only reality was the wondrous unfolding
of her new self, the reaching out to the light of all her contracted
tendrils. She had lived all her life among people whose sensibilities
seemed 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. She
had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he
made it as bright and open as the summer air.
On the morrow of the day when she had shown him the way to the deserted
house he had packed up and left Creston River for Boston; but at the
first station he had jumped on the train with a hand-bag and scrambled
up into the hills. For two golden rainless August weeks he had camped in
the 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 got
up every day with the sun, took a plunge in a brown pool he knew of, and
spent long hours lying in the scented hemlock-woods above the house, or
wandering along the yoke of the Eagle Ridge, far above the misty blue
valleys that swept away east and west between the endless hills. And in
the afternoon Charity came to him.
With part of what was left of her savings she had hired a bicycle for
a month, and every day after dinner, as soon as her guardian started to
his office, she hurried to the library, got out her bicycle, and flew
down the Creston road. She knew that Mr. Royall, like everyone else in
North Dormer, was perfectly aware of her acquisition: possibly he, as
well as the rest of the village, knew what use she made of it. She did
not care: she felt him to be so powerless that if he had questioned her
she would probably have told him the truth. But they had never spoken to
each other since the night on the wharf at Nettleton. He had returned to
North Dormer only on the third day after that encounter, arriving just
as Charity and Verena were sitting down to supper. He had drawn up his
chair, taken his napkin from the side-board drawer, pulled it out of its
ring, and seated himself as unconcernedly as if he had come in from
his usual afternoon session at Carrick Fry's; and the long habit of the
household made it seem almost natural that Charity should not so much as
raise her eyes when he entered. She had simply let him understand that
her silence was not accidental by leaving the table while he was still
eating, and going up without a word to shut herself into her room.
After that he formed the habit of talking loudly and genially to Verena
whenever Charity was in the room; but otherwise there was no apparent
change in their relations.
She did not think connectedly of these things while she sat waiting for
Harney, but they remained in her mind as a sullen background against
which her short hours with him flamed out like forest fires. Nothing
else mattered, neither the good nor the bad, or what might have seemed
so before she knew him. He had caught her up and carried her away into
a new world, from which, at stated hours, the ghost of her came back to
perform certain customary acts, but all so thinly and insubstantially
that she sometimes wondered that the people she went about among could
see her....
Behind the swarthy Mountain the sun had gone down in waveless gold. From
a pasture up the slope a tinkle of cow-bells sounded; a puff of smoke
hung 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 and
woods were outlined with an unreal precision; then the twilight blotted
them out, and the little house turned gray and spectral under its
wizened apple-branches.
Charity's heart contracted. The first fall of night after a day of
radiance often gave her a sense of hidden menace: it was like looking
out over the world as it would be when love had gone from it. She
wondered if some day she would sit in that same place and watch in vain
for her lover....
His bicycle-bell sounded down the lane, and in a minute she was at the
gate and his eyes were laughing in hers. They walked back through the
long grass, and pushed open the door behind the house. The room at
first 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 the
black mass of asters in the earthen jar one white star glimmered like a
moth.
“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 stay
with my cousin for the show.”
He had his arms about her, and his kisses were in her hair and on her
lips. Under his touch things deep down in her struggled to the light and
sprang up like flowers in sunshine. She twisted her fingers into his,
and they sat down side by side on the improvised couch. She hardly heard
his excuses for being late: in his absence a thousand doubts tormented
her, but as soon as he appeared she ceased to wonder where he had come
from, what had delayed him, who had kept him from her. It seemed as if
the places he had been in, and the people he had been with, must cease
to exist when he left them, just as her own life was suspended in his
absence.
He continued, now, to talk to her volubly and gaily, deploring his
lateness, grumbling at the demands on his time, and good-humouredly
mimicking Miss Hatchard's benevolent agitation. “She hurried off Miles
to ask Mr. Royall to speak at the Town Hall tomorrow: I didn't know till
it was done.” Charity was silent, and he added: “After all, perhaps it's
just as well. No one else could have done it.”
Charity made no answer: She did not care what part her guardian played
in the morrow's ceremonies. Like all the other figures peopling her
meagre world he had grown non-existent to her. She had even put off
hating him.
“Tomorrow I shall only see you from far off,” Harney continued. “But in
the evening there'll be the dance in the Town Hall. Do you want me to
promise not to dance with any other girl?”
Any other girl? Were there any others? She had forgotten even that
peril, so enclosed did he and she seem in their secret world. Her heart
gave a frightened jerk.
“Yes, promise.”
He laughed and took her in his arms. “You goose--not even if they're
hideous?”
He pushed the hair from her forehead, bending her face back, as his way
was, and leaning over so that his head loomed black between her eyes and
the paleness of the sky, in which the white star floated...
Side by side they sped back along the dark wood-road to the village. A
late moon was rising, full orbed and fiery, turning the mountain ranges
from fluid gray to a massive blackness, and making the upper sky so
light 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 jumped
from his bicycle, took Charity in his arms for a last kiss, and then
waited while she went on alone.
They were later than usual, and instead of taking the bicycle to the
library she propped it against the back of the wood-shed and entered the
kitchen of the red house. Verena sat there alone; when Charity came in
she looked at her with mild impenetrable eyes and then took a plate
and a glass of milk from the shelf and set them silently on the table.
Charity nodded her thanks, and sitting down, fell hungrily upon her
piece of pie and emptied the glass. Her face burned with her quick
flight through the night, and her eyes were dazzled by the twinkle of
the 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 dark
stairs. When she opened her door a wonder arrested her. Before going
out she had closed her shutters against the afternoon heat, but they had
swung partly open, and a bar of moonlight, crossing the room, rested
on her bed and showed a dress of China silk laid out on it in virgin
whiteness. 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 let
North Dormer see that she was worthy of Harney's admiration. Above the
dress, folded on the pillow, was the white veil which the young women
who 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 had
produced from an old trunk in which she stored mysterious treasures.
Charity stood gazing at all the outspread whiteness. It recalled a
vision that had come to her in the night after her first meeting with
Harney. She no longer had such visions... warmer splendours had displaced
them... but it was stupid of Ally to have paraded all those white things
on her bed, exactly as Hattie Targatt's wedding dress from Springfield
had been spread out for the neighbours to see when she married Tom
Fry....
Charity took up the satin shoes and looked at them curiously. By day, no
doubt, they would appear a little worn, but in the moonlight they seemed
carved of ivory. She sat down on the floor to try them on, and they
fitted her perfectly, though when she stood up she lurched a little on
the high heels. She looked down at her feet, which the graceful mould
of the slippers had marvellously arched and narrowed. She had never
seen such shoes before, even in the shop-windows at Nettleton... never,
except... yes, once, she had noticed a pair of the same shape on Annabel
Balch.
A blush of mortification swept over her. Ally sometimes sewed for Miss
Balch when that brilliant being descended on North Dormer, and no
doubt she picked up presents of cast-off clothing: the treasures in the
mysterious trunk all came from the people she worked for; there could be
no doubt that the white slippers were Annabel Balch's....
As she stood there, staring down moodily at her feet, she heard the
triple click-click-click of a bicycle-bell under her window. It was
Harney's secret signal as he passed on his way home. She stumbled to
the window on her high heels, flung open the shutters and leaned out. He
waved to her and sped by, his black shadow dancing merrily ahead of him
down the empty moonlit road; and she leaned there watching him till he
vanished under the Hatchard spruces.