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CHAPTER XII
ONE afternoon toward the end of August a group of girls
sat in a room at Miss Hatchard's in a gay confusion of
flags, turkey-red, blue and white paper muslin, harvest
sheaves and illuminated scrolls.
North Dormer was preparing for its Old Home Week. That
form of sentimental decentralization was still in its
early stages, and, precedents being few, and the desire
to set an example contagious, the matter had become a
subject of prolonged and passionate discussion under
Miss Hatchard's roof. The incentive to the celebration
had come rather from those who had left North Dormer
than from those who had been obliged to stay there, and
there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the
proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale
prim drawing-room was the centre of constant comings
and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton, Springfield and
even more distant cities; and whenever a visitor
arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to
a glimpse of the group of girls deep in their pretty
preparations.
"All the old names...all the old names...." Miss
Hatchard would be heard, tapping across the hall on her
crutches. "Targatt...Sollas...Fry: this is Miss Orma
Fry sewing the stars on the drapery for the organ-loft.
Don't move, girls....and this is Miss Ally Hawes, our
cleverest needle-woman...and Miss Charity Royall making
our garlands of evergreen....I like the idea of its all
being homemade, don't you? We haven't had to call in
any foreign talent: my young cousin Lucius Harney, the
architect--you know he's up here preparing a book on
Colonial houses--he's taken the whole thing in hand so
cleverly; but you must come and see his sketch for the
stage we're going to put up in the Town Hall."
One of the first results of the Old Home Week agitation
had, in fact, been the reappearance of Lucius Harney in
the village street. He had been vaguely spoken of as
being not far off, but for some weeks past no one had
seen him at North Dormer, and there was a recent report
of his having left Creston River, where he was said to
have been staying, and gone away from the neighbourhood
for good. Soon after Miss Hatchard's return,
however, he came back to his old quarters in her house,
and began to take a leading part in the planning of the
festivities. He threw himself into the idea with
extraordinary good-humour, and was so prodigal of
sketches, and so inexhaustible in devices, that he gave
an immediate impetus to the rather languid movement,
and infected the whole village with his enthusiasm.
"Lucius has such a feeling for the past that he has
roused us all to a sense of our privileges," Miss
Hatchard would say, lingering on the last word, which
was a favourite one. And before leading her visitor
back to the drawing-room she would repeat, for the
hundredth time, that she supposed he thought it very
bold of little North Dormer to start up and have a Home
Week of its own, when so many bigger places hadn't
thought of it yet; but that, after all, Associations
counted more than the size of the population, didn't
they? And of course North Dormer was so full of
Associations...historic, literary (here a filial sigh
for Honorius) and ecclesiastical...he knew about the
old pewter communion service imported from England in
1769, she supposed? And it was so important, in a
wealthy materialistic age, to set the example of
reverting to the old ideals, the family and the
homestead, and so on. This peroration usually carried
her half-way back across the hall, leaving the girls to
return to their interrupted activities.
The day on which Charity Royall was weaving hemlock
garlands for the procession was the last before the
celebration. When Miss Hatchard called upon the North
Dormer maidenhood to collaborate in the festal
preparations Charity had at first held aloof; but it
had been made clear to her that her non-appearance
might excite conjecture, and, reluctantly, she had
joined the other workers. The girls, at first shy and
embarrassed, and puzzled as to the exact nature of the
projected commemoration, had soon become interested in
the amusing details of their task, and excited by the
notice they received. They would not for the world
have missed their afternoons at Miss Hatchard's, and,
while they cut out and sewed and draped and pasted,
their tongues kept up such an accompaniment to the
sewing-machine that Charity's silence sheltered itself
unperceived under their chatter.
In spirit she was still almost unconscious of the
pleasant stir about her. Since her return to the
red house, on the evening of the day when Harney had
overtaken her on her way to the Mountain, she had lived
at North Dormer as if she were suspended in the void.
She had come back there because Harney, after appearing
to agree to the impossibility of her doing so, had
ended by persuading her that any other course would be
madness. She had nothing further to fear from Mr.
Royall. Of this she had declared herself sure, though
she had failed to add, in his exoneration, that he had
twice offered to make her his wife. Her hatred of him
made it impossible, at the moment, for her to say
anything that might partly excuse him in Harney's eyes.
Harney, however, once satisfied of her security, had
found plenty of reasons for urging her to return. The
first, and the most unanswerable, was that she had
nowhere else to go. But the one on which he laid the
greatest stress was that flight would be equivalent to
avowal. If--as was almost inevitable--rumours of the
scandalous scene at Nettleton should reach North
Dormer, how else would her disappearance be
interpreted? Her guardian had publicly taken away her
character, and she immediately vanished from his
house. Seekers after motives could hardly fail to
draw an unkind conclusion. But if she came back at
once, and was seen leading her usual life, the incident
was reduced to its true proportions, as the outbreak of
a drunken old man furious at being surprised in
disreputable company. People would say that Mr. Royall
had insulted his ward to justify himself, and the
sordid tale would fall into its place in the chronicle
of his obscure debaucheries.
Charity saw the force of the argument; but if she
acquiesced it was not so much because of that as
because it was Harney's wish. Since that evening in
the deserted house she could imagine no reason for
doing or not doing anything except the fact that Harney
wished or did not wish it. All her tossing
contradictory impulses were merged in a fatalistic
acceptance of his will. It was not that she felt in
him any ascendancy of character--there were moments
already when she knew she was the stronger--but that
all the rest of life had become a mere cloudy rim about
the central glory of their passion. Whenever she
stopped thinking about that for a moment she felt as
she sometimes did after lying on the grass and staring
up too long at the sky; her eyes were so full of
light that everything about her was a blur.
Each time that Miss Hatchard, in the course of her
periodical incursions into the work-room, dropped an
allusion to her young cousin, the architect, the effect
was the same on Charity. The hemlock garland she was
wearing fell to her knees and she sat in a kind of
trance. It was so manifestly absurd that Miss Hatchard
should talk of Harney in that familiar possessive way,
as if she had any claim on him, or knew anything about
him. She, Charity Royall, was the only being on earth
who really knew him, knew him from the soles of his
feet to the rumpled crest of his hair, knew the
shifting lights in his eyes, and the inflexions of his
voice, and the things he liked and disliked, and
everything there was to know about him, as minutely and
yet unconsciously as a child knows the walls of the
room it wakes up in every morning. It was this fact,
which nobody about her guessed, or would have
understood, that made her life something apart and
inviolable, as if nothing had any power to hurt or
disturb her as long as her secret was safe.
The room in which the girls sat was the one which had
been Harney's bedroom. He had been sent upstairs,
to make room for the Home Week workers; but the
furniture had not been moved, and as Charity sat there
she had perpetually before her the vision she had
looked in on from the midnight garden. The table at
which Harney had sat was the one about which the girls
were gathered; and her own seat was near the bed on
which she had seen him lying. Sometimes, when the
others were not looking, she bent over as if to pick up
something, and laid her cheek for a moment against the
pillow.
Toward sunset the girls disbanded. Their work was
done, and the next morning at daylight the draperies
and garlands were to be nailed up, and the illuminated
scrolls put in place in the Town Hall. The first
guests were to drive over from Hepburn in time for the
midday banquet under a tent in Miss Hatchard's field;
and after that the ceremonies were to begin. Miss
Hatchard, pale with fatigue and excitement, thanked her
young assistants, and stood in the porch, leaning on
her crutches and waving a farewell as she watched them
troop away down the street.
Charity had slipped off among the first; but at the
gate she heard Ally Hawes calling after her, and
reluctantly turned.
"Will you come over now and try on your dress?"
Ally asked, looking at her with wistful admiration. "I
want to be sure the sleeves don't ruck up the same as
they did yesterday."
Charity gazed at her with dazzled eyes. "Oh, it's
lovely," she said, and hastened away without listening
to Ally's protest. She wanted her dress to be as
pretty as the other girls'--wanted it, in fact, to
outshine the rest, since she was to take part in the
"exercises"--but she had no time just then to fix her
mind on such matters....
She sped up the street to the library, of which she had
the key about her neck. From the passage at the back
she dragged forth a bicycle, and guided it to the edge
of the street. She looked about to see if any of the
girls were approaching; but they had drifted away
together toward the Town Hall, and she sprang into the
saddle and turned toward the Creston road. There was
an almost continual descent to Creston, and with her
feet against the pedals she floated through the still
evening air like one of the hawks she had often watched
slanting downward on motionless wings. Twenty minutes
from the time when she had left Miss Hatchard's door
she was turning up the wood-road on which Harney
had overtaken her on the day of her flight; and a few
minutes afterward she had jumped from her bicycle at
the gate of the deserted house.
In the gold-powdered sunset it looked more than ever
like some frail shell dried and washed by many seasons;
but at the back, whither Charity advanced, drawing her
bicycle after her, there were signs of recent
habitation. A rough door made of boards hung in the
kitchen doorway, and pushing it open she entered a room
furnished in primitive camping fashion. In the window
was a table, also made of boards, with an earthenware
jar holding a big bunch of wild asters, two canvas
chairs stood near by, and in one corner was a mattress
with a Mexican blanket over it.
The room was empty, and leaning her bicycle against the
house Charity clambered up the slope and sat down on a
rock under an old apple-tree. The air was perfectly
still, and from where she sat she would be able to hear
the tinkle of a bicycle-bell a long way down the
road....
She was always glad when she got to the little house
before Harney. She liked to have time to take in every
detail of its secret sweetness--the shadows of the
apple-trees swaying on the grass, the old walnuts
rounding their domes below the road, the meadows
sloping westward in the afternoon light--before his
first kiss blotted it all out. Everything unrelated to
the hours spent in that tranquil place was as faint as
the remembrance of a dream. The only reality was the
wondrous unfolding of her new self, the reaching out to
the light of all her contracted tendrils. She had
lived all her life among people whose sensibilities
seemed to have withered for lack of use; and more
wonderful, at first, than Harney's endearments were the
words that were a part of them. She had always thought
of love as something confused and furtive, and he made
it as bright and open as the summer air.
On the morrow of the day when she had shown him the way
to the deserted house he had packed up and left Creston
River for Boston; but at the first station he had
jumped on the train with a hand-bag and scrambled up
into the hills. For two golden rainless August weeks
he had camped in the house, getting eggs and milk from
the solitary farm in the valley, where no one knew him,
and doing his cooking over a spirit-lamp. He got up
every day with the sun, took a plunge in a brown pool
he knew of, and spent long hours lying in the
scented hemlock-woods above the house, or wandering
along the yoke of the Eagle Ridge, far above the misty
blue valleys that swept away east and west between the
endless hills. And in the afternoon Charity came to
him.
With part of what was left of her savings she had hired
a bicycle for a month, and every day after dinner, as
soon as her guardian started to his office, she hurried
to the library, got out her bicycle, and flew down the
Creston road. She knew that Mr. Royall, like everyone
else in North Dormer, was perfectly aware of her
acquisition: possibly he, as well as the rest of the
village, knew what use she made of it. She did not
care: she felt him to be so powerless that if he had
questioned her she would probably have told him the
truth. But they had never spoken to each other since
the night on the wharf at Nettleton. He had returned
to North Dormer only on the third day after that
encounter, arriving just as Charity and Verena were
sitting down to supper. He had drawn up his chair,
taken his napkin from the side-board drawer, pulled it
out of its ring, and seated himself as unconcernedly as
if he had come in from his usual afternoon session
at Carrick Fry's; and the long habit of the household
made it seem almost natural that Charity should not so
much as raise her eyes when he entered. She had simply
let him understand that her silence was not accidental
by leaving the table while he was still eating, and
going up without a word to shut herself into her room.
After that he formed the habit of talking loudly and
genially to Verena whenever Charity was in the room;
but otherwise there was no apparent change in their
relations.
She did not think connectedly of these things while she
sat waiting for Harney, but they remained in her mind
as a sullen background against which her short hours
with him flamed out like forest fires. Nothing else
mattered, neither the good nor the bad, or what might
have seemed so before she knew him. He had caught her
up and carried her away into a new world, from which,
at stated hours, the ghost of her came back to perform
certain customary acts, but all so thinly and
insubstantially that she sometimes wondered that the
people she went about among could see her....
Behind the swarthy Mountain the sun had gone down in
waveless gold. From a pasture up the slope a
tinkle of cow-bells sounded; a puff of smoke hung over
the farm in the valley, trailed on the pure air and was
gone. For a few minutes, in the clear light that is
all shadow, fields and woods were outlined with an
unreal precision; then the twilight blotted them out,
and the little house turned gray and spectral under its
wizened apple-branches.
Charity's heart contracted. The first fall of night
after a day of radiance often gave her a sense of
hidden menace: it was like looking out over the world
as it would be when love had gone from it. She
wondered if some day she would sit in that same place
and watch in vain for her lover....
His bicycle-bell sounded down the lane, and in a minute
she was at the gate and his eyes were laughing in hers.
They walked back through the long grass, and pushed
open the door behind the house. The room at first
seemed quite dark and they had to grope their way in
hand in hand. Through the window-frame the sky looked
light by contrast, and above the black mass of asters
in the earthen jar one white star glimmered like a
moth.
"There was such a lot to do at the last minute," Harney
was explaining, "and I had to drive down to
Creston to meet someone who has come to stay with my
cousin for the show."
He had his arms about her, and his kisses were in her
hair and on her lips. Under his touch things deep down
in her struggled to the light and sprang up like
flowers in sunshine. She twisted her fingers into his,
and they sat down side by side on the improvised couch.
She hardly heard his excuses for being late: in his
absence a thousand doubts tormented her, but as soon as
he appeared she ceased to wonder where he had come
from, what had delayed him, who had kept him from her.
It seemed as if the places he had been in, and the
people he had been with, must cease to exist when he
left them, just as her own life was suspended in his
absence.
He continued, now, to talk to her volubly and gaily,
deploring his lateness, grumbling at the demands on his
time, and good-humouredly mimicking Miss Hatchard's
benevolent agitation. "She hurried off Miles to ask
Mr. Royall to speak at the Town Hall tomorrow: I didn't
know till it was done." Charity was silent, and he
added: "After all, perhaps it's just as well. No one
else could have done it."
Charity made no answer: She did not care what part
her guardian played in the morrow's ceremonies. Like
all the other figures peopling her meagre world he had
grown non-existent to her. She had even put off hating
him.
"Tomorrow I shall only see you from far off," Harney
continued. "But in the evening there'll be the dance
in the Town Hall. Do you want me to promise not to
dance with any other girl?"
Any other girl? Were there any others? She had
forgotten even that peril, so enclosed did he and she
seem in their secret world. Her heart gave a
frightened jerk.
"Yes, promise."
He laughed and took her in his arms. "You goose--not
even if they're hideous?"
He pushed the hair from her forehead, bending her face
back, as his way was, and leaning over so that his head
loomed black between her eyes and the paleness of the
sky, in which the white star floated...
Side by side they sped back along the dark wood-road to
the village. A late moon was rising, full orbed and
fiery, turning the mountain ranges from fluid gray
to a massive blackness, and making the upper sky so
light that the stars looked as faint as their own
reflections in water. At the edge of the wood, half a
mile from North Dormer, Harney jumped from his bicycle,
took Charity in his arms for a last kiss, and then
waited while she went on alone.
They were later than usual, and instead of taking the
bicycle to the library she propped it against the back
of the wood-shed and entered the kitchen of the red
house. Verena sat there alone; when Charity came in
she looked at her with mild impenetrable eyes and then
took a plate and a glass of milk from the shelf and set
them silently on the table. Charity nodded her thanks,
and sitting down, fell hungrily upon her piece of pie
and emptied the glass. Her face burned with her quick
flight through the night, and her eyes were dazzled by
the twinkle of the kitchen lamp. She felt like a
night-bird suddenly caught and caged.
"He ain't come back since supper," Verena said. "He's
down to the Hall."
Charity took no notice. Her soul was still winging
through the forest. She washed her plate and tumbler,
and then felt her way up the dark stairs. When she
opened her door a wonder arrested her. Before going
out she had closed her shutters against the afternoon
heat, but they had swung partly open, and a bar of
moonlight, crossing the room, rested on her bed and
showed a dress of China silk laid out on it in virgin
whiteness. Charity had spent more than she could
afford on the dress, which was to surpass those of all
the other girls; she had wanted to let North Dormer see
that she was worthy of Harney's admiration. Above the
dress, folded on the pillow, was the white veil which
the young women who took part in the exercises were to
wear under a wreath of asters; and beside the veil a
pair of slim white satin shoes that Ally had produced
from an old trunk in which she stored mysterious
treasures.
Charity stood gazing at all the outspread whiteness. It
recalled a vision that had come to her in the night
after her first meeting with Harney. She no longer had
such visions...warmer splendours had displaced
them...but it was stupid of Ally to have paraded all
those white things on her bed, exactly as Hattie
Targatt's wedding dress from Springfield had been
spread out for the neighbours to see when she married
Tom Fry....
Charity took up the satin shoes and looked at them
curiously. By day, no doubt, they would appear a
little worn, but in the moonlight they seemed carved of
ivory. She sat down on the floor to try them on, and
they fitted her perfectly, though when she stood up she
lurched a little on the high heels. She looked down at
her feet, which the graceful mould of the slippers had
marvellously arched and narrowed. She had never seen
such shoes before, even in the shop-windows at
Nettleton...never, except...yes, once, she had noticed
a pair of the same shape on Annabel Balch.
A blush of mortification swept over her. Ally
sometimes sewed for Miss Balch when that brilliant
being descended on North Dormer, and no doubt she
picked up presents of cast-off clothing: the treasures
in the mysterious trunk all came from the people she
worked for; there could be no doubt that the white
slippers were Annabel Balch's....
As she stood there, staring down moodily at her feet,
she heard the triple click-click-click of a bicycle-
bell under her window. It was Harney's secret signal
as he passed on his way home. She stumbled to the
window on her high heels, flung open the shutters and
leaned out. He waved to her and sped by, his
black shadow dancing merrily ahead of him down the
empty moonlit road; and she leaned there watching him
till he vanished under the Hatchard spruces.
Content of CHAPTER XII [Edith Wharton's novel: Summer]
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