THE rain held off, and an hour later, when she started, wild gleams of
sunlight were blowing across the fields.
After Harney's departure she had returned her bicycle to its owner at
Creston, and she was not sure of being able to walk all the way to the
Mountain. The deserted house was on the road; but the idea of spending
the night there was unendurable, and she meant to try to push on to
Hamblin, where she could sleep under a wood-shed if her strength should
fail her. Her preparations had been made with quiet forethought. Before
starting she had forced herself to swallow a glass of milk and eat a
piece of bread; and she had put in her canvas satchel a little packet of
the chocolate that Harney always carried in his bicycle bag. She wanted
above all to keep up her strength, and reach her destination without
attracting notice....
Mile by mile she retraced the road over which she had so often flown to
her lover. When she reached the turn where the wood-road branched off
from the Creston highway she remembered the Gospel tent--long since
folded up and transplanted--and her start of involuntary terror when
the fat evangelist had said: “Your Saviour knows everything. Come and
confess your guilt.” There was no sense of guilt in her now, but only
a desperate desire to defend her secret from irreverent eyes, and
begin life again among people to whom the harsh code of the village was
unknown. The impulse did not shape itself in thought: she only knew
she must save her baby, and hide herself with it somewhere where no one
would ever come to trouble them.
She walked on and on, growing more heavy-footed as the day advanced. It
seemed a cruel chance that compelled her to retrace every step of the
way to the deserted house; and when she came in sight of the orchard,
and the silver-gray roof slanting crookedly through the laden branches,
her strength failed her and she sat down by the road-side. She sat there
a long time, trying to gather the courage to start again, and walk past
the broken gate and the untrimmed rose-bushes strung with scarlet hips.
A few drops of rain were falling, and she thought of the warm evenings
when she and Harney had sat embraced in the shadowy room, and the noise
of summer showers on the roof had rustled through their kisses. At
length she understood that if she stayed any longer the rain might
compel her to take shelter in the house overnight, and she got up and
walked on, averting her eyes as she came abreast of the white gate and
the tangled garden.
The hours wore on, and she walked more and more slowly, pausing now and
then to rest, and to eat a little bread and an apple picked up from the
roadside. Her body seemed to grow heavier with every yard of the way,
and she wondered how she would be able to carry her child later, if
already he laid such a burden on her.... A fresh wind had sprung up,
scattering the rain and blowing down keenly from the mountain. Presently
the clouds lowered again, and a few white darts struck her in the face:
it was the first snow falling over Hamblin. The roofs of the lonely
village were only half a mile ahead, and she was resolved to push beyond
it, and try to reach the Mountain that night. She had no clear plan of
action, except that, once in the settlement, she meant to look for Liff
Hyatt, and get him to take her to her mother. She herself had been
born as her own baby was going to be born; and whatever her mother's
subsequent life had been, she could hardly help remembering the past,
and receiving a daughter who was facing the trouble she had known.
Suddenly the deadly faintness came over her once more and she sat down
on the bank and leaned her head against a tree-trunk. The long road and
the cloudy landscape vanished from her eyes, and for a time she seemed
to be circling about in some terrible wheeling darkness. Then that too
faded.
She opened her eyes, and saw a buggy drawn up beside her, and a man
who had jumped down from it and was gazing at her with a puzzled face.
Slowly consciousness came back, and she saw that the man was Liff Hyatt.
She was dimly aware that he was asking her something, and she looked at
him in silence, trying to find strength to speak. At length her voice
stirred in her throat, and she said in a whisper: “I'm going up the
Mountain.”
“Up the Mountain?” he repeated, drawing aside a little; and as he
moved she saw behind him, in the buggy, a heavily coated figure with a
familiar pink face and gold spectacles on the bridge of a Grecian nose.
“Charity! What on earth are you doing here?” Mr. Miles exclaimed,
throwing the reins on the horse's back and scrambling down from the
buggy.
She lifted her heavy eyes to his. “I'm going to see my mother.”
The two men glanced at each other, and for a moment neither of them
spoke.
Then Mr. Miles said: “You look ill, my dear, and it's a long way. Do you
think it's wise?”
Charity stood up. “I've got to go to her.”
A vague mirthless grin contracted Liff Hyatt's face, and Mr. Miles again
spoke uncertainly. “You know, then--you'd been told?”
She stared at him. “I don't know what you mean. I want to go to her.”
Mr. Miles was examining her thoughtfully. She fancied she saw a change
in his expression, and the blood rushed to her forehead. “I just want to
go to her,” she repeated.
He laid his hand on her arm. “My child, your mother is dying. Liff Hyatt
came down to fetch me.... Get in and come with us.”
He helped her up to the seat at his side, Liff Hyatt clambered in at
the back, and they drove off toward Hamblin. At first Charity had
hardly grasped what Mr. Miles was saying; the physical relief of finding
herself seated in the buggy, and securely on her road to the Mountain,
effaced the impression of his words. But as her head cleared she
began to understand. She knew the Mountain had but the most infrequent
intercourse with the valleys; she had often enough heard it said that no
one ever went up there except the minister, when someone was dying. And
now it was her mother who was dying... and she would find herself as
much alone on the Mountain as anywhere else in the world. The sense of
unescapable isolation was all she could feel for the moment; then
she began to wonder at the strangeness of its being Mr. Miles who had
undertaken to perform this grim errand. He did not seem in the least
like the kind of man who would care to go up the Mountain. But here he
was at her side, guiding the horse with a firm hand, and bending on her
the kindly gleam of his spectacles, as if there were nothing unusual in
their being together in such circumstances.
For a while she found it impossible to speak, and he seemed to
understand this, and made no attempt to question her. But presently she
felt her tears rise and flow down over her drawn cheeks; and he must
have seen them too, for he laid his hand on hers, and said in a low
voice: “Won't you tell me what is troubling you?”
She shook her head, and he did not insist: but after a while he said, in
the same low tone, so that they should not be overheard: “Charity, what
do you know of your childhood, before you came down to North Dormer?”
She controlled herself, and answered: “Nothing only what I heard Mr.
Royall say one day. He said he brought me down because my father went to
prison.”
“And you've never been up there since?”
“Never.”
Mr. Miles was silent again, then he said: “I'm glad you're coming with
me now. Perhaps we may find your mother alive, and she may know that you
have come.”
They had reached Hamblin, where the snow-flurry had left white patches
in the rough grass on the roadside, and in the angles of the roofs
facing north. It was a poor bleak village under the granite flank of the
Mountain, and as soon as they left it they began to climb. The road was
steep and full of ruts, and the horse settled down to a walk while they
mounted and mounted, the world dropping away below them in great mottled
stretches of forest and field, and stormy dark blue distances.
Charity had often had visions of this ascent of the Mountain but she
had not known it would reveal so wide a country, and the sight of
those strange lands reaching away on every side gave her a new sense of
Harney's remoteness. She knew he must be miles and miles beyond the last
range of hills that seemed to be the outmost verge of things, and she
wondered how she had ever dreamed of going to New York to find him....
As the road mounted the country grew bleaker, and they drove across
fields of faded mountain grass bleached by long months beneath the snow.
In the hollows a few white birches trembled, or a mountain ash lit its
scarlet clusters; but only a scant growth of pines darkened the granite
ledges. The wind was blowing fiercely across the open slopes; the horse
faced it with bent head and straining flanks, and now and then the buggy
swayed so that Charity had to clutch its side.
Mr. Miles had not spoken again; he seemed to understand that she wanted
to be left alone. After a while the track they were following forked,
and he pulled up the horse, as if uncertain of the way. Liff Hyatt
craned his head around from the back, and shouted against the wind:
“Left----” and they turned into a stunted pine-wood and began to drive
down the other side of the Mountain.
A mile or two farther on they came out on a clearing where two or three
low houses lay in stony fields, crouching among the rocks as if to brace
themselves against the wind. They were hardly more than sheds, built of
logs and rough boards, with tin stove-pipes sticking out of their roofs.
The sun was setting, and dusk had already fallen on the lower world,
but a yellow glare still lay on the lonely hillside and the crouching
houses. The next moment it faded and left the landscape in dark autumn
twilight.
“Over there,” Liff called out, stretching his long arm over Mr. Miles's
shoulder. The clergyman turned to the left, across a bit of bare ground
overgrown with docks and nettles, and stopped before the most ruinous of
the sheds. A stove-pipe reached its crooked arm out of one window, and
the broken panes of the other were stuffed with rags and paper.
In contrast to such a dwelling the brown house in the swamp might have
stood for the home of plenty.
As the buggy drew up two or three mongrel dogs jumped out of the
twilight with a great barking, and a young man slouched to the door and
stood there staring. In the twilight Charity saw that his face had the
same sodden look as Bash Hyatt's, the day she had seen him sleeping
by the stove. He made no effort to silence the dogs, but leaned in the
door, as if roused from a drunken lethargy, while Mr. Miles got out of
the buggy.
“Is it here?” the clergyman asked Liff in a low voice; and Liff nodded.
Mr. Miles turned to Charity. “Just hold the horse a minute, my dear:
I'll go in first,” he said, putting the reins in her hands. She took
them passively, and sat staring straight ahead of her at the darkening
scene while Mr. Miles and Liff Hyatt went up to the house. They stood
a few minutes talking with the man in the door, and then Mr. Miles came
back. As he came close, Charity saw that his smooth pink face wore a
frightened solemn look.
“Your mother is dead, Charity; you'd better come with me,” he said.
She got down and followed him while Liff led the horse away. As
she approached the door she said to herself: “This is where I was
born... this is where I belong....” She had said it to herself often
enough as she looked across the sunlit valleys at the Mountain; but it
had meant nothing then, and now it had become a reality. Mr. Miles took
her gently by the arm, and they entered what appeared to be the only
room in the house. It was so dark that she could just discern a group
of a dozen people sitting or sprawling about a table made of boards laid
across two barrels. They looked up listlessly as Mr. Miles and Charity
came in, and a woman's thick voice said: “Here's the preacher.” But no
one moved.
Mr. Miles paused and looked about him; then he turned to the young man
who had met them at the door.
“Is the body here?” he asked.
The young man, instead of answering, turned his head toward the group.
“Where's the candle? I tole yer to bring a candle,” he said with sudden
harshness to a girl who was lolling against the table. She did not
answer, but another man got up and took from some corner a candle stuck
into a bottle.
“How'll I light it? The stove's out,” the girl grumbled.
Mr. Miles fumbled under his heavy wrappings and drew out a match-box.
He held a match to the candle, and in a moment or two a faint circle of
light fell on the pale aguish heads that started out of the shadow like
the heads of nocturnal animals.
“Mary's over there,” someone said; and Mr. Miles, taking the bottle in
his hand, passed behind the table. Charity followed him, and they stood
before a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A woman lay on
it, but she did not look like a dead woman; she seemed to have fallen
across her squalid bed in a drunken sleep, and to have been left lying
where she fell, in her ragged disordered clothes. One arm was flung
above her head, one leg drawn up under a torn skirt that left the other
bare to the knee: a swollen glistening leg with a ragged stocking rolled
down about the ankle. The woman lay on her back, her eyes staring up
unblinkingly at the candle that trembled in Mr. Miles's hand.
“She jus' dropped off,” a woman said, over the shoulder of the others;
and the young man added: “I jus' come in and found her.”
An elderly man with lank hair and a feeble grin pushed between them. “It
was like this: I says to her on'y the night before: if you don't take
and quit, I says to her...”
Someone pulled him back and sent him reeling against a bench along the
wall, where he dropped down muttering his unheeded narrative.
There was a silence; then the young woman who had been lolling against
the table suddenly parted the group, and stood in front of Charity.
She was healthier and robuster looking than the others, and her
weather-beaten face had a certain sullen beauty.
“Who's the girl? Who brought her here?” she said, fixing her eyes
mistrustfully on the young man who had rebuked her for not having a
candle ready.
Mr. Miles spoke. “I brought her; she is Mary Hyatt's daughter.”
“What? Her too?” the girl sneered; and the young man turned on her with
an oath. “Shut your mouth, damn you, or get out of here,” he said;
then he relapsed into his former apathy, and dropped down on the bench,
leaning his head against the wall.
Mr. Miles had set the candle on the floor and taken off his heavy coat.
He turned to Charity. “Come and help me,” he said.
He knelt down by the mattress, and pressed the lids over the dead
woman's eyes. Charity, trembling and sick, knelt beside him, and tried
to compose her mother's body. She drew the stocking over the dreadful
glistening leg, and pulled the skirt down to the battered upturned
boots. As she did so, she looked at her mother's face, thin yet swollen,
with lips parted in a frozen gasp above the broken teeth. There was no
sign in it of anything human: she lay there like a dead dog in a ditch.
Charity's hands grew cold as they touched her.
Mr. Miles drew the woman's arms across her breast and laid his coat
over her. Then he covered her face with his handkerchief, and placed the
bottle with the candle in it at her head. Having done this he stood up.
“Is there no coffin?” he asked, turning to the group behind him.
There was a moment of bewildered silence; then the fierce girl spoke up.
“You'd oughter brought it with you. Where'd we get one here, I'd like
ter know?”
Mr. Miles, looking at the others, repeated: “Is it possible you have no
coffin ready?”
“That's what I say: them that has it sleeps better,” an old woman
murmured. “But then she never had no bed....”
“And the stove warn't hers,” said the lank-haired man, on the defensive.
Mr. Miles turned away from them and moved a few steps apart. He had
drawn a book from his pocket, and after a pause he opened it and began
to read, holding the book at arm's length and low down, so that the
pages caught the feeble light. Charity had remained on her knees by the
mattress: now that her mother's face was covered it was easier to stay
near her, and avoid the sight of the living faces which too horribly
showed by what stages hers had lapsed into death.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life,” Mr. Miles began; “he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.... Though after
my skin worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh shall I see God....”
IN MY FLESH SHALL I SEE GOD! Charity thought of the gaping mouth and
stony eyes under the handkerchief, and of the glistening leg over which
she had drawn the stocking....
“We brought nothing into this world and we shall take nothing out of
it----”
There was a sudden muttering and a scuffle at the back of the group. “I
brought the stove,” said the elderly man with lank hair, pushing his
way between the others. “I wen' down to Creston'n bought it... n' I got a
right to take it outer here... n' I'll lick any feller says I ain't....”
“Sit down, damn you!” shouted the tall youth who had been drowsing on
the bench against the wall.
“For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he
heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them....”
“Well, it ARE his,” a woman in the background interjected in a
frightened whine.
The tall youth staggered to his feet. “If you don't hold your mouths
I'll turn you all out o' here, the whole lot of you,” he cried with many
oaths. “G'wan, minister... don't let 'em faze you....”
“Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first-fruits of them
that slept.... Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but
we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at
the last trump.... For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this
mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruption shall have put
on incorruption, and when this mortal shall have put on immortality,
then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is
swallowed up in Victory....”
One by one the mighty words fell on Charity's bowed head, soothing
the horror, subduing the tumult, mastering her as they mastered the
drink-dazed creatures at her back. Mr. Miles read to the last word, and
then closed the book.
“Is the grave ready?” he asked.
Liff Hyatt, who had come in while he was reading, nodded a “Yes,” and
pushed forward to the side of the mattress. The young man on the bench
who seemed to assert some sort of right of kinship with the dead woman,
got to his feet again, and the proprietor of the stove joined him.
Between them they raised up the mattress; but their movements were
unsteady, and the coat slipped to the floor, revealing the poor body in
its helpless misery. Charity, picking up the coat, covered her mother
once more. Liff had brought a lantern, and the old woman who had already
spoken took it up, and opened the door to let the little procession
pass out. The wind had dropped, and the night was very dark and bitterly
cold. The old woman walked ahead, the lantern shaking in her hand and
spreading out before her a pale patch of dead grass and coarse-leaved
weeds enclosed in an immensity of blackness.
Mr. Miles took Charity by the arm, and side by side they walked behind
the mattress. At length the old woman with the lantern stopped, and
Charity saw the light fall on the stooping shoulders of the bearers and
on a ridge of upheaved earth over which they were bending. Mr. Miles
released her arm and approached the hollow on the other side of the
ridge; and while the men stooped down, lowering the mattress into the
grave, he began to speak again.
“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full
of misery.... He cometh up and is cut down... he fleeth as it were a
shadow.... Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and
merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal
death....”
“Easy there... is she down?” piped the claimant to the stove; and the
young man called over his shoulder: “Lift the light there, can't you?”
There was a pause, during which the light floated uncertainly over the
open grave. Someone bent over and pulled out Mr. Miles's coat----(“No,
no--leave the handkerchief,” he interposed)--and then Liff Hyatt, coming
forward with a spade, began to shovel in the earth.
“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take
unto Himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore
commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to
dust...” Liff's gaunt shoulders rose and bent in the lantern light as he
dashed the clods of earth into the grave. “God--it's froze a'ready,”
he muttered, spitting into his palm and passing his ragged shirt-sleeve
across his perspiring face.
“Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it
may be like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working,
whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself...” The last
spadeful of earth fell on the vile body of Mary Hyatt, and Liff rested
on his spade, his shoulder blades still heaving with the effort.
“Lord, have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy
upon us...”
Mr. Miles took the lantern from the old woman's hand and swept its light
across the circle of bleared faces. “Now kneel down, all of you,” he
commanded, in a voice of authority that Charity had never heard.
She knelt down at the edge of the grave, and the others, stiffly and
hesitatingly, got to their knees beside her. Mr. Miles knelt, too. “And
now pray with me--you know this prayer,” he said, and he began: “Our
Father which art in Heaven...” One or two of the women falteringly took
the words up, and when he ended, the lank-haired man flung himself on
the neck of the tall youth. “It was this way,” he said. “I tole her the
night before, I says to her...” The reminiscence ended in a sob.
Mr. Miles had been getting into his coat again. He came up to Charity,
who had remained passively kneeling by the rough mound of earth.
“My child, you must come. It's very late.”
She lifted her eyes to his face: he seemed to speak out of another
world.
“I ain't coming: I'm going to stay here.”
“Here? Where? What do you mean?”
“These are my folks. I'm going to stay with them.”
Mr. Miles lowered his voice. “But it's not possible--you don't know what
you are doing. You can't stay among these people: you must come with
me.”
She shook her head and rose from her knees. The group about the grave
had scattered in the darkness, but the old woman with the lantern stood
waiting. Her mournful withered face was not unkind, and Charity went up
to her.
“Have you got a place where I can lie down for the night?” she asked.
Liff came up, leading the buggy out of the night. He looked from one
to the other with his feeble smile. “She's my mother. She'll take you
home,” he said; and he added, raising his voice to speak to the
old woman: “It's the girl from lawyer Royall's--Mary's girl... you
remember....”
The woman nodded and raised her sad old eyes to Charity's. When Mr.
Miles and Liff clambered into the buggy she went ahead with the lantern
to show them the track they were to follow; then she turned back, and in
silence she and Charity walked away together through the night.