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CHAPTER I
I
A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of
the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the
doorstep.
It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The
springlike transparent sky shed a rain of silver
sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the
pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind
moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of
the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and
down the grassy road that takes the name of street when
it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high
and in the open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more
protected New England villages. The clump of weeping-
willows about the duck pond, and the Norway spruces in
front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only
roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and the
point where, at the other end of the village, the road
rises above the church and skirts the black hemlock
wall enclosing the cemetery.
The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook
the doleful fringes of the Hatchard spruces, caught the
straw hat of a young man just passing under them, and
spun it clean across the road into the duck-pond.
As he ran to fish it out the girl on lawyer Royall's
doorstep noticed that he was a stranger, that he wore
city clothes, and that he was laughing with all his
teeth, as the young and careless laugh at such mishaps.
Her heart contracted a little, and the shrinking that
sometimes came over her when she saw people with
holiday faces made her draw back into the house and
pretend to look for the key that she knew she had
already put into her pocket. A narrow greenish mirror
with a gilt eagle over it hung on the passage wall, and
she looked critically at her reflection, wished for the
thousandth time that she had blue eyes like Annabel
Balch, the girl who sometimes came from Springfield to
spend a week with old Miss Hatchard, straightened the
sunburnt hat over her small swarthy face, and turned
out again into the sunshine.
"How I hate everything!" she murmured.
The young man had passed through the Hatchard gate, and
she had the street to herself. North Dormer is at all
times an empty place, and at three o'clock on a June
afternoon its few able-bodied men are off in the fields
or woods, and the women indoors, engaged in languid
household drudgery.
The girl walked along, swinging her key on a finger,
and looking about her with the heightened attention
produced by the presence of a stranger in a familiar
place. What, she wondered, did North Dormer look like
to people from other parts of the world? She herself
had lived there since the age of five, and had long
supposed it to be a place of some importance. But
about a year before, Mr. Miles, the new Episcopal
clergyman at Hepburn, who drove over every other
Sunday--when the roads were not ploughed up by hauling--
to hold a service in the North Dormer church, had
proposed, in a fit of missionary zeal, to take the
young people down to Nettleton to hear an illustrated
lecture on the Holy Land; and the dozen girls and boys
who represented the future of North Dormer had been
piled into a farm-waggon, driven over the hills to
Hepburn, put into a way-train and carried to Nettleton.
In the course of that incredible day Charity Royall
had, for the first and only time, experienced railway-
travel, looked into shops with plate-glass fronts,
tasted cocoanut pie, sat in a theatre, and listened to
a gentleman saying unintelligible things before
pictures that she would have enjoyed looking at if his
explanations had not prevented her from understanding
them. This initiation had shown her that North Dormer
was a small place, and developed in her a thirst for
information that her position as custodian of the
village library had previously failed to excite. For a
month or two she dipped feverishly and disconnectedly
into the dusty volumes of the Hatchard Memorial
Library; then the impression of Nettleton began to
fade, and she found it easier to take North Dormer as
the norm of the universe than to go on reading.
The sight of the stranger once more revived memories of
Nettleton, and North Dormer shrank to its real size. As
she looked up and down it, from lawyer Royall's faded
red house at one end to the white church at the other,
she pitilessly took its measure. There it lay, a
weather-beaten sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned
of men, left apart by railway, trolley, telegraph, and
all the forces that link life to life in modern
communities. It had no shops, no theatres, no
lectures, no "business block"; only a church that was
opened every other Sunday if the state of the roads
permitted, and a library for which no new books had
been bought for twenty years, and where the old ones
mouldered undisturbed on the damp shelves. Yet Charity
Royall had always been told that she ought to consider
it a privilege that her lot had been cast in North
Dormer. She knew that, compared to the place she had
come from, North Dormer represented all the blessings
of the most refined civilization. Everyone in the
village had told her so ever since she had been brought
there as a child. Even old Miss Hatchard had said to
her, on a terrible occasion in her life: "My child, you
must never cease to remember that it was Mr. Royall who
brought you down from the Mountain."
She had been "brought down from the Mountain"; from the
scarred cliff that lifted its sullen wall above the
lesser slopes of Eagle Range, making a perpetual
background of gloom to the lonely valley. The Mountain
was a good fifteen miles away, but it rose so abruptly
from the lower hills that it seemed almost to cast its
shadow over North Dormer. And it was like a great
magnet drawing the clouds and scattering them in storm
across the valley. If ever, in the purest summer sky,
there trailed a thread of vapour over North Dormer, it
drifted to the Mountain as a ship drifts to a
whirlpool, and was caught among the rocks, torn up and
multiplied, to sweep back over the village in rain and
darkness.
Charity was not very clear about the Mountain; but she
knew it was a bad place, and a shame to have come from,
and that, whatever befell her in North Dormer, she
ought, as Miss Hatchard had once reminded her, to
remember that she had been brought down from there, and
hold her tongue and be thankful. She looked up at the
Mountain, thinking of these things, and tried as usual
to be thankful. But the sight of the young man turning
in at Miss Hatchard's gate had brought back the vision
of the glittering streets of Nettleton, and she felt
ashamed of her old sun-hat, and sick of North Dormer,
and jealously aware of Annabel Balch of Springfield,
opening her blue eyes somewhere far off on glories
greater than the glories of Nettleton.
"How I hate everything!" she said again.
Half way down the street she stopped at a weak-hinged
gate. Passing through it, she walked down a brick path
to a queer little brick temple with white wooden
columns supporting a pediment on which was inscribed in
tarnished gold letters: "The Honorius Hatchard Memorial
Library, 1832."
Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-
uncle; though she would undoubtedly have reversed the
phrase, and put forward, as her only claim to
distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece.
For Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the
nineteenth century, had enjoyed a modest celebrity. As
the marble tablet in the interior of the library
informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed
marked literary gifts, written a series of papers
called "The Recluse of Eagle Range," enjoyed the
acquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene
Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever
contracted in Italy. Such had been the sole link
between North Dormer and literature, a link piously
commemorated by the erection of the monument where
Charity Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon,
sat at her desk under a freckled steel engraving of the
deceased author, and wondered if he felt any deader in
his grave than she did in his library.
Entering her prison-house with a listless step she took
off her hat, hung it on a plaster bust of Minerva,
opened the shutters, leaned out to see if there were
any eggs in the swallow's nest above one of the
windows, and finally, seating herself behind the desk,
drew out a roll of cotton lace and a steel crochet
hook. She was not an expert workwoman, and it had taken
her many weeks to make the half-yard of narrow lace
which she kept wound about the buckram back of a
disintegrated copy of "The Lamplighter." But there was
no other way of getting any lace to trim her summer
blouse, and since Ally Hawes, the poorest girl in the
village, had shown herself in church with enviable
transparencies about the shoulders, Charity's hook had
travelled faster. She unrolled the lace, dug the hook
into a loop, and bent to the task with furrowed brows.
Suddenly the door opened, and before she had raised her
eyes she knew that the young man she had seen going in
at the Hatchard gate had entered the library.
Without taking any notice of her he began to move
slowly about the long vault-like room, his hands behind
his back, his short-sighted eyes peering up and down
the rows of rusty bindings. At length he reached the
desk and stood before her.
"Have you a card-catalogue?" he asked in a pleasant
abrupt voice; and the oddness of the question caused
her to drop her work.
"A WHAT?"
"Why, you know----" He broke off, and she became
conscious that he was looking at her for the first
time, having apparently, on his entrance, included her
in his general short-sighted survey as part of the
furniture of the library.
The fact that, in discovering her, he lost the thread
of his remark, did not escape her attention, and she
looked down and smiled. He smiled also.
"No, I don't suppose you do know," he corrected
himself. "In fact, it would be almost a pity----"
She thought she detected a slight condescension in his
tone, and asked sharply: "Why?"
"Because it's so much pleasanter, in a small library
like this, to poke about by one's self--with the help
of the librarian."
He added the last phrase so respectfully that she was
mollified, and rejoined with a sigh: "I'm afraid I
can't help you much."
"Why?" he questioned in his turn; and she replied that
there weren't many books anyhow, and that she'd hardly
read any of them. "The worms are getting at them," she
added gloomily.
"Are they? That's a pity, for I see there are some good
ones." He seemed to have lost interest in their
conversation, and strolled away again, apparently
forgetting her. His indifference nettled her, and she
picked up her work, resolved not to offer him the least
assistance. Apparently he did not need it, for he
spent a long time with his back to her, lifting down,
one after another, the tall cob-webby volumes from a
distant shelf.
"Oh, I say!" he exclaimed; and looking up she saw that
he had drawn out his handkerchief and was carefully
wiping the edges of the book in his hand. The action
struck her as an unwarranted criticism on her care of
the books, and she said irritably: "It's not my fault
if they're dirty."
He turned around and looked at her with reviving
interest. "Ah--then you're not the librarian?"
"Of course I am; but I can't dust all these books.
Besides, nobody ever looks at them, now Miss Hatchard's
too lame to come round."
"No, I suppose not." He laid down the book he had been
wiping, and stood considering her in silence. She
wondered if Miss Hatchard had sent him round to pry
into the way the library was looked after, and the
suspicion increased her resentment. "I saw you going
into her house just now, didn't I?" she asked, with the
New England avoidance of the proper name. She was
determined to find out why he was poking about among
her books.
"Miss Hatchard's house? Yes--she's my cousin and I'm
staying there," the young man answered; adding, as if
to disarm a visible distrust: "My name is Harney--
Lucius Harney. She may have spoken of me."
"No, she hasn't," said Charity, wishing she could have
said: "Yes, she has."
"Oh, well----" said Miss Hatchard's cousin with a
laugh; and after another pause, during which it
occurred to Charity that her answer had not been
encouraging, he remarked: "You don't seem strong on
architecture."
Her bewilderment was complete: the more she wished to
appear to understand him the more unintelligible his
remarks became. He reminded her of the gentleman who
had "explained" the pictures at Nettleton, and the
weight of her ignorance settled down on her again like
a pall.
"I mean, I can't see that you have any books on the old
houses about here. I suppose, for that matter, this
part of the country hasn't been much explored. They
all go on doing Plymouth and Salem. So stupid. My
cousin's house, now, is remarkable. This place must
have had a past--it must have been more of a place
once." He stopped short, with the blush of a shy man
who overhears himself, and fears he has been voluble.
"I'm an architect, you see, and I'm hunting up old
houses in these parts."
She stared. "Old houses? Everything's old in North
Dormer, isn't it? The folks are, anyhow."
He laughed, and wandered away again.
"Haven't you any kind of a history of the place?
I think there was one written about 1840: a book or
pamphlet about its first settlement," he presently said
from the farther end of the room.
She pressed her crochet hook against her lip and
pondered. There was such a work, she knew: "North
Dormer and the Early Townships of Eagle County." She
had a special grudge against it because it was a limp
weakly book that was always either falling off the
shelf or slipping back and disappearing if one squeezed
it in between sustaining volumes. She remembered, the
last time she had picked it up, wondering how anyone
could have taken the trouble to write a book about
North Dormer and its neighbours: Dormer, Hamblin,
Creston and Creston River. She knew them all, mere lost
clusters of houses in the folds of the desolate ridges:
Dormer, where North Dormer went for its apples; Creston
River, where there used to be a paper-mill, and its
grey walls stood decaying by the stream; and Hamblin,
where the first snow always fell. Such were their
titles to fame.
She got up and began to move about vaguely before the
shelves. But she had no idea where she had last put
the book, and something told her that it was going to
play her its usual trick and remain invisible. It was
not one of her lucky days.
"I guess it's somewhere," she said, to prove her zeal;
but she spoke without conviction, and felt that her
words conveyed none.
"Oh, well----" he said again. She knew he was going,
and wished more than ever to find the book.
"It will be for next time," he added; and picking up
the volume he had laid on the desk he handed it to her.
"By the way, a little air and sun would do this good;
it's rather valuable."
He gave her a nod and smile, and passed out.
Content of CHAPTER I [Edith Wharton's novel: Summer]
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