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CHAPTER V
There had never been such a June in Eagle County.
Usually it was a month of moods, with abrupt
alternations of belated frost and mid-summer heat; this
year, day followed day in a sequence of temperate
beauty. Every morning a breeze blew steadily from the
hills. Toward noon it built up great canopies of
white cloud that threw a cool shadow over fields and
woods; then before sunset the clouds dissolved again,
and the western light rained its unobstructed
brightness on the valley.
On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge
above a sunlit hollow, her face pressed to the earth
and the warm currents of the grass running through her.
Directly in her line of vision a blackberry branch laid
its frail white flowers and blue-green leaves against
the sky. Just beyond, a tuft of sweet-fern uncurled
between the beaded shoots of the grass, and a small
yellow butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck of
sunshine. This was all she saw; but she felt, above
her and about her, the strong growth of the beeches
clothing the ridge, the rounding of pale green cones on
countless spruce-branches, the push of myriads of
sweet-fern fronds in the cracks of the stony slope
below the wood, and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet
and yellow flags in the pasture beyond. All this
bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of
calyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of
fragrance. Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to
contribute its exhalation to the pervading sweetness in
which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spice
of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were
merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath
of some huge sun-warmed animal.
Charity had lain there a long time, passive and sun-
warmed as the slope on which she lay, when there came
between her eyes and the dancing butterfly the sight of
a man's foot in a large worn boot covered with red mud.
"Oh, don't!" she exclaimed, raising herself on her
elbow and stretching out a warning hand.
"Don't what?" a hoarse voice asked above her head.
"Don't stamp on those bramble flowers, you dolt!" she
retorted, springing to her knees. The foot paused and
then descended clumsily on the frail branch, and
raising her eyes she saw above her the bewildered face
of a slouching man with a thin sunburnt beard, and
white arms showing through his ragged shirt.
"Don't you ever SEE anything, Liff Hyatt?" she
assailed him, as he stood before her with the look of a
man who has stirred up a wasp's nest.
He grinned. "I seen you! That's what I come down for."
"Down from where?" she questioned, stooping to gather
up the petals his foot had scattered.
He jerked his thumb toward the heights. "Been cutting
down trees for Dan Targatt."
Charity sank back on her heels and looked at him
musingly. She was not in the least afraid of poor Liff
Hyatt, though he "came from the Mountain," and some of
the girls ran when they saw him. Among the more
reasonable he passed for a harmless creature, a sort of
link between the mountain and civilized folk, who
occasionally came down and did a little wood cutting
for a farmer when hands were short. Besides, she knew
the Mountain people would never hurt her: Liff himself
had told her so once when she was a little girl, and
had met him one day at the edge of lawyer Royall's
pasture. "They won't any of 'em touch you up there,
f'ever you was to come up....But I don't s'pose you
will," he had added philosophically, looking at her new
shoes, and at the red ribbon that Mrs. Royall had tied
in her hair.
Charity had, in truth, never felt any desire to visit
her birthplace. She did not care to have it known that
she was of the Mountain, and was shy of being seen in
talk with Liff Hyatt. But today she was not sorry to
have him appear. A great many things had happened to
her since the day when young Lucius Harney had entered
the doors of the Hatchard Memorial, but none, perhaps,
so unforeseen as the fact of her suddenly finding it a
convenience to be on good terms with Liff Hyatt. She
continued to look up curiously at his freckled weather-
beaten face, with feverish hollows below the cheekbones
and the pale yellow eyes of a harmless animal. "I
wonder if he's related to me?" she thought, with a
shiver of disdain.
"Is there any folks living in the brown house by the
swamp, up under Porcupine?" she presently asked in an
indifferent tone.
Liff Hyatt, for a while, considered her with surprise;
then he scratched his head and shifted his weight from
one tattered sole to the other.
"There's always the same folks in the brown house," he
said with his vague grin.
"They're from up your way, ain't they?"
"Their name's the same as mine," he rejoined
uncertainly.
Charity still held him with resolute eyes. "See here,
I want to go there some day and take a gentleman with
me that's boarding with us. He's up in these parts
drawing pictures."
She did not offer to explain this statement. It was
too far beyond Liff Hyatt's limitations for the attempt
to be worth making. "He wants to see the brown house,
and go all over it," she pursued.
Liff was still running his fingers perplexedly through
his shock of straw-colored hair. "Is it a fellow from
the city?" he asked.
"Yes. He draws pictures of things. He's down there
now drawing the Bonner house." She pointed to a chimney
just visible over the dip of the pasture below the
wood.
"The Bonner house?" Liff echoed incredulously.
"Yes. You won't understand--and it don't matter. All
I say is: he's going to the Hyatts' in a day or two."
Liff looked more and more perplexed. "Bash is ugly
sometimes in the afternoons."
She threw her head back, her eyes full on Hyatt's. "I'm
coming too: you tell him."
"They won't none of them trouble you, the Hyatts won't.
What d'you want a take a stranger with you though?"
I've told you, haven't I? You've got to tell Bash
Hyatt."
He looked away at the blue mountains on the horizon;
then his gaze dropped to the chimney-top below the
pasture.
"He's down there now?"
"Yes."
He shifted his weight again, crossed his arms, and
continued to survey the distant landscape. "Well, so
long," he said at last, inconclusively; and turning
away he shambled up the hillside. From the ledge above
her, he paused to call down: "I wouldn't go there a
Sunday"; then he clambered on till the trees closed in
on him. Presently, from high overhead, Charity heard
the ring of his axe.
She lay on the warm ridge, thinking of many things that
the woodsman's appearance had stirred up in her. She
knew nothing of her early life, and had never felt any
curiosity about it: only a sullen reluctance to explore
the corner of her memory where certain blurred images
lingered. But all that had happened to her within the
last few weeks had stirred her to the sleeping depths.
She had become absorbingly interesting to herself, and
everything that had to do with her past was illuminated
by this sudden curiosity.
She hated more than ever the fact of coming from the
Mountain; but it was no longer indifferent to her.
Everything that in any way affected her was alive and
vivid: even the hateful things had grown interesting
because they were a part of herself.
"I wonder if Liff Hyatt knows who my mother was?" she
mused; and it filled her with a tremor of surprise to
think that some woman who was once young and slight,
with quick motions of the blood like hers, had carried
her in her breast, and watched her sleeping. She had
always thought of her mother as so long dead as to be
no more than a nameless pinch of earth; but now it
occurred to her that the once-young woman might be
alive, and wrinkled and elf-locked like the woman she
had sometimes seen in the door of the brown house that
Lucius Harney wanted to draw.
The thought brought him back to the central point in
her mind, and she strayed away from the conjectures
roused by Liff Hyatt's presence. Speculations
concerning the past could not hold her long when the
present was so rich, the future so rosy, and when
Lucius Harney, a stone's throw away, was bending over
his sketch-book, frowning, calculating, measuring, and
then throwing his head back with the sudden smile that
had shed its brightness over everything.
She scrambled to her feet, but as she did so she saw
him coming up the pasture and dropped down on the grass
to wait. When he was drawing and measuring one of "his
houses," as she called them, she often strayed away by
herself into the woods or up the hillside. It was
partly from shyness that she did so: from a sense of
inadequacy that came to her most painfully when her
companion, absorbed in his job, forgot her ignorance
and her inability to follow his least allusion, and
plunged into a monologue on art and life. To avoid the
awkwardness of listening with a blank face, and also to
escape the surprised stare of the inhabitants of the
houses before which he would abruptly pull up their
horse and open his sketch-book, she slipped away to
some spot from which, without being seen, she could
watch him at work, or at least look down on the house
he was drawing. She had not been displeased, at first,
to have it known to North Dormer and the neighborhood
that she was driving Miss Hatchard's cousin about the
country in the buggy he had hired of lawyer Royall.
She had always kept to herself, contemptuously aloof
from village love-making, without exactly knowing
whether her fierce pride was due to the sense of her
tainted origin, or whether she was reserving herself
for a more brilliant fate. Sometimes she envied the
other girls their sentimental preoccupations, their
long hours of inarticulate philandering with one of the
few youths who still lingered in the village; but when
she pictured herself curling her hair or putting a new
ribbon on her hat for Ben Fry or one of the Sollas boys
the fever dropped and she relapsed into indifference.
Now she knew the meaning of her disdains and
reluctances. She had learned what she was worth when
Lucius Harney, looking at her for the first time, had
lost the thread of his speech, and leaned reddening on
the edge of her desk. But another kind of shyness had
been born in her: a terror of exposing to vulgar perils
the sacred treasure of her happiness. She was not
sorry to have the neighbors suspect her of "going with"
a young man from the city; but she did not want it
known to all the countryside how many hours of the long
June days she spent with him. What she most feared was
that the inevitable comments should reach Mr. Royall.
Charity was instinctively aware that few things
concerning her escaped the eyes of the silent man under
whose roof she lived; and in spite of the latitude
which North Dormer accorded to courting couples she had
always felt that, on the day when she showed too open a
preference, Mr. Royall might, as she phrased it, make
her "pay for it." How, she did not know; and her fear
was the greater because it was undefinable. If she had
been accepting the attentions of one of the village
youths she would have been less apprehensive: Mr.
Royall could not prevent her marrying when she chose
to. But everybody knew that "going with a city fellow"
was a different and less straightforward affair: almost
every village could show a victim of the perilous
venture. And her dread of Mr. Royall's intervention
gave a sharpened joy to the hours she spent with young
Harney, and made her, at the same time, shy of being
too generally seen with him.
As he approached she rose to her knees, stretching her
arms above her head with the indolent gesture that was
her way of expressing a profound well-being.
"I'm going to take you to that house up under
Porcupine," she announced.
"What house? Oh, yes; that ramshackle place near the
swamp, with the gipsy-looking people hanging about.
It's curious that a house with traces of real
architecture should have been built in such a place.
But the people were a sulky-looking lot--do you suppose
they'll let us in?"
"They'll do whatever I tell them," she said with
assurance.
He threw himself down beside her. "Will they?" he
rejoined with a smile. "Well, I should like to see
what's left inside the house. And I should like to
have a talk with the people. Who was it who was
telling me the other day that they had come down from
the Mountain?"
Charity shot a sideward look at him. It was the first
time he had spoken of the Mountain except as a feature
of the landscape. What else did he know about it, and
about her relation to it? Her heart began to beat with
the fierce impulse of resistance which she
instinctively opposed to every imagined slight.
"The Mountain? I ain't afraid of the Mountain!"
Her tone of defiance seemed to escape him. He lay
breast-down on the grass, breaking off sprigs of thyme
and pressing them against his lips. Far off, above the
folds of the nearer hills, the Mountain thrust itself
up menacingly against a yellow sunset.
"I must go up there some day: I want to see it," he
continued.
Her heart-beats slackened and she turned again to
examine his profile. It was innocent of all unfriendly
intention.
"What'd you want to go up the Mountain for?"
"Why, it must be rather a curious place. There's a
queer colony up there, you know: sort of out-laws, a
little independent kingdom. Of course you've heard
them spoken of; but I'm told they have nothing to do
with the people in the valleys--rather look down on
them, in fact. I suppose they're rough customers; but
they must have a good deal of character."
She did not quite know what he meant by having a good
deal of character; but his tone was expressive of
admiration, and deepened her dawning curiosity. It
struck her now as strange that she knew so little about
the Mountain. She had never asked, and no one had ever
offered to enlighten her. North Dormer took the
Mountain for granted, and implied its disparagement by
an intonation rather than by explicit criticism.
"It's queer, you know," he continued, "that, just over
there, on top of that hill, there should be a handful
of people who don't give a damn for anybody."
The words thrilled her. They seemed the clue to her
own revolts and defiances, and she longed to have him
tell her more.
"I don't know much about them. Have they always been
there?"
"Nobody seems to know exactly how long. Down at
Creston they told me that the first colonists are
supposed to have been men who worked on the railway
that was built forty or fifty years ago between
Springfield and Nettleton. Some of them took to drink,
or got into trouble with the police, and went off--
disappeared into the woods. A year or two later there
was a report that they were living up on the Mountain.
Then I suppose others joined them--and children were
born. Now they say there are over a hundred people up
there. They seem to be quite outside the jurisdiction
of the valleys. No school, no church--and no sheriff
ever goes up to see what they're about. But don't
people ever talk of them at North Dormer?"
"I don't know. They say they're bad."
He laughed. "Do they? We'll go and see, shall we?"
She flushed at the suggestion, and turned her face to
his. "You never heard, I suppose--I come from there.
They brought me down when I was little."
"You?" He raised himself on his elbow, looking at her
with sudden interest. "You're from the Mountain? How
curious! I suppose that's why you're so different...."
Her happy blood bathed her to the forehead. He was
praising her--and praising her because she came from
the Mountain!
"Am I...different?" she triumphed, with affected
wonder.
"Oh, awfully!" He picked up her hand and laid a kiss on
the sunburnt knuckles.
"Come," he said, "let's be off." He stood up and shook
the grass from his loose grey clothes. "What a good
day! Where are you going to take me tomorrow?"
Content of CHAPTER V [Edith Wharton's novel: Summer]
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