________________________________________________
_
CHAPTER VII
SINCE her reinstatement in Miss Hatchard's favour
Charity had not dared to curtail by a moment her hours
of attendance at the library. She even made a point of
arriving before the time, and showed a laudable
indignation when the youngest Targatt girl, who had
been engaged to help in the cleaning and rearranging of
the books, came trailing in late and neglected her task
to peer through the window at the Sollas boy.
Nevertheless, "library days" seemed more than ever
irksome to Charity after her vivid hours of liberty;
and she would have found it hard to set a good example
to her subordinate if Lucius Harney had not been
commissioned, before Miss Hatchard's departure, to
examine with the local carpenter the best means of
ventilating the "Memorial."
He was careful to prosecute this inquiry on the days
when the library was open to the public; and Charity
was therefore sure of spending part of the afternoon in
his company. The Targatt girl's presence, and the
risk of being interrupted by some passer-by suddenly
smitten with a thirst for letters, restricted their
intercourse to the exchange of commonplaces; but there
was a fascination to Charity in the contrast between
these public civilities and their secret intimacy.
The day after their drive to the brown house was
"library day," and she sat at her desk working at the
revised catalogue, while the Targatt girl, one eye on
the window, chanted out the titles of a pile of books.
Charity's thoughts were far away, in the dismal house
by the swamp, and under the twilight sky during the
long drive home, when Lucius Harney had consoled her
with endearing words. That day, for the first time
since he had been boarding with them, he had failed to
appear as usual at the midday meal. No message had
come to explain his absence, and Mr. Royall, who was
more than usually taciturn, had betrayed no surprise,
and made no comment. In itself this indifference was
not particularly significant, for Mr. Royall, in common
with most of his fellow-citizens, had a way of
accepting events passively, as if he had long since
come to the conclusion that no one who lived in North
Dormer could hope to modify them. But to Charity,
in the reaction from her mood of passionate exaltation,
there was something disquieting in his silence. It was
almost as if Lucius Harney had never had a part in
their lives: Mr. Royall's imperturbable indifference
seemed to relegate him to the domain of unreality.
As she sat at work, she tried to shake off her
disappointment at Harney's non-appearing. Some
trifling incident had probably kept him from joining
them at midday; but she was sure he must be eager to
see her again, and that he would not want to wait till
they met at supper, between Mr. Royall and Verena. She
was wondering what his first words would be, and trying
to devise a way of getting rid of the Targatt girl
before he came, when she heard steps outside, and he
walked up the path with Mr. Miles.
The clergyman from Hepburn seldom came to North Dormer
except when he drove over to officiate at the old white
church which, by an unusual chance, happened to belong
to the Episcopal communion. He was a brisk affable
man, eager to make the most of the fact that a little
nucleus of "church-people" had survived in the
sectarian wilderness, and resolved to undermine the
influence of the ginger-bread-coloured Baptist
chapel at the other end of the village; but he was kept
busy by parochial work at Hepburn, where there were
paper-mills and saloons, and it was not often that he
could spare time for North Dormer.
Charity, who went to the white church (like all the
best people in North Dormer), admired Mr. Miles, and
had even, during the memorable trip to Nettleton,
imagined herself married to a man who had such a
straight nose and such a beautiful way of speaking, and
who lived in a brown-stone rectory covered with
Virginia creeper. It had been a shock to discover that
the privilege was already enjoyed by a lady with
crimped hair and a large baby; but the arrival of
Lucius Harney had long since banished Mr. Miles from
Charity's dreams, and as he walked up the path at
Harney's side she saw him as he really was: a fat
middle-aged man with a baldness showing under his
clerical hat, and spectacles on his Grecian nose. She
wondered what had called him to North Dormer on a
weekday, and felt a little hurt that Harney should have
brought him to the library.
It presently appeared that his presence there was due
to Miss Hatchard. He had been spending a few days
at Springfield, to fill a friend's pulpit, and had been
consulted by Miss Hatchard as to young Harney's plan
for ventilating the "Memorial." To lay hands on the
Hatchard ark was a grave matter, and Miss Hatchard,
always full of scruples about her scruples (it was
Harney's phrase), wished to have Mr. Miles's opinion
before deciding.
"I couldn't," Mr. Miles explained, "quite make out from
your cousin what changes you wanted to make, and as the
other trustees did not understand either I thought I
had better drive over and take a look--though I'm
sure," he added, turning his friendly spectacles on the
young man, "that no one could be more competent--but of
course this spot has its peculiar sanctity!"
"I hope a little fresh air won't desecrate it," Harney
laughingly rejoined; and they walked to the other end
of the library while he set forth his idea to the
Rector.
Mr. Miles had greeted the two girls with his usual
friendliness, but Charity saw that he was occupied with
other things, and she presently became aware, by the
scraps of conversation drifting over to her, that he
was still under the charm of his visit to
Springfield, which appeared to have been full of
agreeable incidents.
"Ah, the Coopersons...yes, you know them, of course,"
she heard. "That's a fine old house! And Ned Cooperson
has collected some really remarkable impressionist
pictures...." The names he cited were unknown to
Charity. "Yes; yes; the Schaefer quartette played at
Lyric Hall on Saturday evening; and on Monday I had the
privilege of hearing them again at the Towers.
Beautifully done...Bach and Beethoven...a lawn-party
first...I saw Miss Balch several times, by the
way...looking extremely handsome...."
Charity dropped her pencil and forgot to listen to the
Targatt girl's sing-song. Why had Mr. Miles suddenly
brought up Annabel Balch's name?
"Oh, really?" she heard Harney rejoin; and, raising his
stick, he pursued: "You see, my plan is to move these
shelves away, and open a round window in this wall, on
the axis of the one under the pediment."
"I suppose she'll be coming up here later to stay with
Miss Hatchard?" Mr. Miles went on, following on his
train of thought; then, spinning about and tilting his
head back: "Yes, yes, I see--I understand: that
will give a draught without materially altering the
look of things. I can see no objection."
The discussion went on for some minutes, and gradually
the two men moved back toward the desk. Mr. Miles
stopped again and looked thoughtfully at Charity.
"Aren't you a little pale, my dear? Not overworking?
Mr. Harney tells me you and Mamie are giving the
library a thorough overhauling." He was always careful
to remember his parishioners' Christian names, and at
the right moment he bent his benignant spectacles on
the Targatt girl.
Then he turned to Charity. "Don't take things hard, my
dear; don't take things hard. Come down and see Mrs.
Miles and me some day at Hepburn," he said, pressing
her hand and waving a farewell to Mamie Targatt. He
went out of the library, and Harney followed him.
Charity thought she detected a look of constraint in
Harney's eyes. She fancied he did not want to be alone
with her; and with a sudden pang she wondered if he
repented the tender things he had said to her the night
before. His words had been more fraternal than lover-
like; but she had lost their exact sense in the
caressing warmth of his voice. He had made her feel
that the fact of her being a waif from the Mountain was
only another reason for holding her close and soothing
her with consolatory murmurs; and when the drive was
over, and she got out of the buggy, tired, cold, and
aching with emotion, she stepped as if the ground were
a sunlit wave and she the spray on its crest.
Why, then, had his manner suddenly changed, and why did
he leave the library with Mr. Miles? Her restless
imagination fastened on the name of Annabel Balch: from
the moment it had been mentioned she fancied that
Harney's expression had altered. Annabel Balch at a
garden-party at Springfield, looking "extremely
handsome"...perhaps Mr. Miles had seen her there at the
very moment when Charity and Harney were sitting in the
Hyatts' hovel, between a drunkard and a half-witted old
woman! Charity did not know exactly what a garden-party
was, but her glimpse of the flower-edged lawns of
Nettleton helped her to visualize the scene, and
envious recollections of the "old things" which Miss
Balch avowedly "wore out" when she came to North Dormer
made it only too easy to picture her in her splendour.
Charity understood what associations the name must
have called up, and felt the uselessness of struggling
against the unseen influences in Harney's life.
When she came down from her room for supper he was not
there; and while she waited in the porch she recalled
the tone in which Mr. Royall had commented the day
before on their early start. Mr. Royall sat at her
side, his chair tilted back, his broad black boots with
side-elastics resting against the lower bar of the
railings. His rumpled grey hair stood up above his
forehead like the crest of an angry bird, and the
leather-brown of his veined cheeks was blotched with
red. Charity knew that those red spots were the signs
of a coming explosion.
Suddenly he said: "Where's supper? Has Verena Marsh
slipped up again on her soda-biscuits?"
Charity threw a startled glance at him. "I presume
she's waiting for Mr. Harney."
"Mr. Harney, is she? She'd better dish up, then. He
ain't coming." He stood up, walked to the door, and
called out, in the pitch necessary to penetrate the old
woman's tympanum: "Get along with the supper, Verena."
Charity was trembling with apprehension. Something
had happened--she was sure of it now--and Mr. Royall
knew what it was. But not for the world would she have
gratified him by showing her anxiety. She took her
usual place, and he seated himself opposite, and poured
out a strong cup of tea before passing her the tea-pot.
Verena brought some scrambled eggs, and he piled his
plate with them. "Ain't you going to take any?" he
asked. Charity roused herself and began to eat.
The tone with which Mr. Royall had said "He's not
coming" seemed to her full of an ominous satisfaction.
She saw that he had suddenly begun to hate Lucius
Harney, and guessed herself to be the cause of this
change of feeling. But she had no means of finding out
whether some act of hostility on his part had made the
young man stay away, or whether he simply wished to
avoid seeing her again after their drive back from the
brown house. She ate her supper with a studied show of
indifference, but she knew that Mr. Royall was watching
her and that her agitation did not escape him.
After supper she went up to her room. She heard Mr.
Royall cross the passage, and presently the sounds
below her window showed that he had returned to the
porch. She seated herself on her bed and began to
struggle against the desire to go down and ask him what
had happened. "I'd rather die than do it," she
muttered to herself. With a word he could have
relieved her uncertainty: but never would she gratify
him by saying it.
She rose and leaned out of the window. The twilight
had deepened into night, and she watched the frail
curve of the young moon dropping to the edge of the
hills. Through the darkness she saw one or two figures
moving down the road; but the evening was too cold for
loitering, and presently the strollers disappeared.
Lamps were beginning to show here and there in the
windows. A bar of light brought out the whiteness of a
clump of lilies in the Hawes's yard: and farther down
the street Carrick Fry's Rochester lamp cast its bold
illumination on the rustic flower-tub in the middle of
his grass-plot.
For a long time she continued to lean in the window.
But a fever of unrest consumed her, and finally she
went downstairs, took her hat from its hook, and swung
out of the house. Mr. Royall sat in the porch, Verena
beside him, her old hands crossed on her patched skirt.
As Charity went down the steps Mr. Royall called after
her: "Where you going?" She could easily have
answered: "To Orma's," or "Down to the Targatts'"; and
either answer might have been true, for she had no
purpose. But she swept on in silence, determined not
to recognize his right to question her.
At the gate she paused and looked up and down the road.
The darkness drew her, and she thought of climbing the
hill and plunging into the depths of the larch-wood
above the pasture. Then she glanced irresolutely along
the street, and as she did so a gleam appeared through
the spruces at Miss Hatchard's gate. Lucius Harney was
there, then--he had not gone down to Hepburn with Mr.
Miles, as she had at first imagined. But where had he
taken his evening meal, and what had caused him to stay
away from Mr. Royall's? The light was positive proof of
his presence, for Miss Hatchard's servants were away on
a holiday, and her farmer's wife came only in the
mornings, to make the young man's bed and prepare his
coffee. Beside that lamp he was doubtless sitting at
this moment. To know the truth Charity had only to
walk half the length of the village, and knock at the
lighted window. She hesitated a minute or two longer,
and then turned toward Miss Hatchard's.
She walked quickly, straining her eyes to detect
anyone who might be coming along the street; and before
reaching the Frys' she crossed over to avoid the light
from their window. Whenever she was unhappy she felt
herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of
animal secretiveness possessed her. But the street was
empty, and she passed unnoticed through the gate and up
the path to the house. Its white front glimmered
indistinctly through the trees, showing only one oblong
of light on the lower floor. She had supposed that the
lamp was in Miss Hatchard's sitting-room; but she now
saw that it shone through a window at the farther
corner of the house. She did not know the room to
which this window belonged, and she paused under the
trees, checked by a sense of strangeness. Then she
moved on, treading softly on the short grass, and
keeping so close to the house that whoever was in the
room, even if roused by her approach, would not be able
to see her.
The window opened on a narrow verandah with a trellised
arch. She leaned close to the trellis, and parting the
sprays of clematis that covered it looked into a corner
of the room. She saw the foot of a mahogany bed, an
engraving on the wall, a wash-stand on which a
towel had been tossed, and one end of the green-covered
table which held the lamp. Half of the lampshade
projected into her field of vision, and just under it
two smooth sunburnt hands, one holding a pencil and the
other a ruler, were moving to and fro over a drawing-
board.
Her heart jumped and then stood still. He was there, a
few feet away; and while her soul was tossing on seas
of woe he had been quietly sitting at his drawing-
board. The sight of those two hands, moving with their
usual skill and precision, woke her out of her dream.
Her eyes were opened to the disproportion between what
she had felt and the cause of her agitation; and she
was turning away from the window when one hand abruptly
pushed aside the drawing-board and the other flung down
the pencil.
Charity had often noticed Harney's loving care of his
drawings, and the neatness and method with which he
carried on and concluded each task. The impatient
sweeping aside of the drawing-board seemed to reveal a
new mood. The gesture suggested sudden discouragement,
or distaste for his work and she wondered if he too
were agitated by secret perplexities. Her impulse of
flight was checked; she stepped up on the verandah
and looked into the room.
Harney had put his elbows on the table and was resting
his chin on his locked hands. He had taken off his
coat and waistcoat, and unbuttoned the low collar of
his flannel shirt; she saw the vigorous lines of his
young throat, and the root of the muscles where they
joined the chest. He sat staring straight ahead of
him, a look of weariness and self-disgust on his face:
it was almost as if he had been gazing at a distorted
reflection of his own features. For a moment Charity
looked at him with a kind of terror, as if he had been
a stranger under familiar lineaments; then she glanced
past him and saw on the floor an open portmanteau half
full of clothes. She understood that he was preparing
to leave, and that he had probably decided to go
without seeing her. She saw that the decision, from
whatever cause it was taken, had disturbed him deeply;
and she immediately concluded that his change of plan
was due to some surreptitious interference of Mr.
Royall's. All her old resentments and rebellions flamed
up, confusedly mingled with the yearning roused by
Harney's nearness. Only a few hours earlier she had
felt secure in his comprehending pity; now she was
flung back on herself, doubly alone after that moment
of communion.
Harney was still unaware of her presence. He sat
without moving, moodily staring before him at the same
spot in the wall-paper. He had not even had the energy
to finish his packing, and his clothes and papers lay
on the floor about the portmanteau. Presently he
unlocked his clasped hands and stood up; and Charity,
drawing back hastily, sank down on the step of the
verandah. The night was so dark that there was not
much chance of his seeing her unless he opened the
window and before that she would have time to slip away
and be lost in the shadow of the trees. He stood for a
minute or two looking around the room with the same
expression of self-disgust, as if he hated himself and
everything about him; then he sat down again at the
table, drew a few more strokes, and threw his pencil
aside. Finally he walked across the floor, kicking the
portmanteau out of his way, and lay down on the bed,
folding his arms under his head, and staring up
morosely at the ceiling. Just so, Charity had seen him
at her side on the grass or the pine-needles, his eyes
fixed on the sky, and pleasure flashing over his face
like the flickers of sun the branches shed on it.
But now the face was so changed that she hardly knew
it; and grief at his grief gathered in her throat, rose
to her eyes and ran over.
She continued to crouch on the steps, holding her
breath and stiffening herself into complete immobility.
One motion of her hand, one tap on the pane, and she
could picture the sudden change in his face. In every
pulse of her rigid body she was aware of the welcome
his eyes and lips would give her; but something kept
her from moving. It was not the fear of any sanction,
human or heavenly; she had never in her life been
afraid. It was simply that she had suddenly understood
what would happen if she went in. It was the thing
that did happen between young men and girls, and that
North Dormer ignored in public and snickered over on
the sly. It was what Miss Hatchard was still ignorant
of, but every girl of Charity's class knew about before
she left school. It was what had happened to Ally
Hawes's sister Julia, and had ended in her going to
Nettleton, and in people's never mentioning her name.
It did not, of course, always end so sensationally;
nor, perhaps, on the whole, so untragically. Charity
had always suspected that the shunned Julia's fate
might have its compensations. There were others, worse
endings that the village knew of, mean, miserable,
unconfessed; other lives that went on drearily, without
visible change, in the same cramped setting of
hypocrisy. But these were not the reasons that held
her back. Since the day before, she had known exactly
what she would feel if Harney should take her in his
arms: the melting of palm into palm and mouth on mouth,
and the long flame burning her from head to foot. But
mixed with this feeling was another: the wondering
pride in his liking for her, the startled softness that
his sympathy had put into her heart. Sometimes, when
her youth flushed up in her, she had imagined yielding
like other girls to furtive caresses in the twilight;
but she could not so cheapen herself to Harney. She
did not know why he was going; but since he was going
she felt she must do nothing to deface the image of her
that he carried away. If he wanted her he must seek
her: he must not be surprised into taking her as girls
like Julia Hawes were taken....
No sound came from the sleeping village, and in the
deep darkness of the garden she heard now and then
a secret rustle of branches, as though some night-bird
brushed them. Once a footfall passed the gate, and she
shrank back into her corner; but the steps died away
and left a profounder quiet. Her eyes were still on
Harney's tormented face: she felt she could not move
till he moved. But she was beginning to grow numb from
her constrained position, and at times her thoughts
were so indistinct that she seemed to be held there
only by a vague weight of weariness.
A long time passed in this strange vigil. Harney still
lay on the bed, motionless and with fixed eyes, as
though following his vision to its bitter end. At last
he stirred and changed his attitude slightly, and
Charity's heart began to tremble. But he only flung
out his arms and sank back into his former position.
With a deep sigh he tossed the hair from his forehead;
then his whole body relaxed, his head turned sideways
on the pillow, and she saw that he had fallen asleep.
The sweet expression came back to his lips, and the
haggardness faded from his face, leaving it as fresh as
a boy's.
She rose and crept away.
Content of CHAPTER VII [Edith Wharton's novel: Summer]
_
Read next: CHAPTER VIII
Read previous: CHAPTER VI
Table of content of Summer
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
