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CHAPTER 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.
Content of CHAPTER II [Edith Wharton's novel: Summer]
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