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CHAPTER VI
That evening after supper Charity sat alone in the
kitchen and listened to Mr. Royall and young Harney
talking in the porch.
She had remained indoors after the table had been
cleared and old Verena had hobbled up to bed. The
kitchen window was open, and Charity seated herself
near it, her idle hands on her knee. The evening was
cool and still. Beyond the black hills an amber west
passed into pale green, and then to a deep blue in
which a great star hung. The soft hoot of a little owl
came through the dusk, and between its calls the men's
voices rose and fell.
Mr. Royall's was full of a sonorous satisfaction. It
was a long time since he had had anyone of Lucius
Harney's quality to talk to: Charity divined that the
young man symbolized all his ruined and unforgotten
past. When Miss Hatchard had been called to
Springfield by the illness of a widowed sister, and
young Harney, by that time seriously embarked on his
task of drawing and measuring all the old houses
between Nettleton and the New Hampshire border, had
suggested the possibility of boarding at the red house
in his cousin's absence, Charity had trembled lest Mr.
Royall should refuse. There had been no question of
lodging the young man: there was no room for him. But
it appeared that he could still live at Miss Hatchard's
if Mr. Royall would let him take his meals at the red
house; and after a day's deliberation Mr. Royall
consented.
Charity suspected him of being glad of the chance to
make a little money. He had the reputation of being an
avaricious man; but she was beginning to think he was
probably poorer than people knew. His practice had
become little more than a vague legend, revived only at
lengthening intervals by a summons to Hepburn or
Nettleton; and he appeared to depend for his living
mainly on the scant produce of his farm, and on the
commissions received from the few insurance agencies
that he represented in the neighbourhood. At any rate,
he had been prompt in accepting Harney's offer to hire
the buggy at a dollar and a half a day; and his
satisfaction with the bargain had manifested itself,
unexpectedly enough, at the end of the first week, by
his tossing a ten-dollar bill into Charity's lap as she
sat one day retrimming her old hat.
"Here--go get yourself a Sunday bonnet that'll make all
the other girls mad," he said, looking at her with a
sheepish twinkle in his deep-set eyes; and she
immediately guessed that the unwonted present--the only
gift of money she had ever received from him--
represented Harney's first payment.
But the young man's coming had brought Mr. Royall other
than pecuniary benefit. It gave him, for the first
time in years, a man's companionship. Charity had only
a dim understanding of her guardian's needs; but she
knew he felt himself above the people among whom he
lived, and she saw that Lucius Harney thought him so.
She was surprised to find how well he seemed to talk
now that he had a listener who understood him; and she
was equally struck by young Harney's friendly
deference.
Their conversation was mostly about politics, and
beyond her range; but tonight it had a peculiar
interest for her, for they had begun to speak of the
Mountain. She drew back a little, lest they should see
she was in hearing.
"The Mountain? The Mountain?" she heard Mr. Royall say.
"Why, the Mountain's a blot--that's what it is, sir, a
blot. That scum up there ought to have been run in
long ago--and would have, if the people down here
hadn't been clean scared of them. The Mountain belongs
to this township, and it's North Dormer's fault if
there's a gang of thieves and outlaws living over
there, in sight of us, defying the laws of their
country. Why, there ain't a sheriff or a tax-collector
or a coroner'd durst go up there. When they hear of
trouble on the Mountain the selectmen look the other
way, and pass an appropriation to beautify the town
pump. The only man that ever goes up is the minister,
and he goes because they send down and get him whenever
there's any of them dies. They think a lot of
Christian burial on the Mountain--but I never heard of
their having the minister up to marry them. And they
never trouble the Justice of the Peace either. They
just herd together like the heathen."
He went on, explaining in somewhat technical language
how the little colony of squatters had contrived to
keep the law at bay, and Charity, with burning
eagerness, awaited young Harney's comment; but the
young man seemed more concerned to hear Mr. Royall's
views than to express his own.
"I suppose you've never been up there yourself?" he
presently asked.
"Yes, I have," said Mr. Royall with a contemptuous
laugh. "The wiseacres down here told me I'd be done
for before I got back; but nobody lifted a finger to
hurt me. And I'd just had one of their gang sent up
for seven years too."
"You went up after that?"
"Yes, sir: right after it. The fellow came down to
Nettleton and ran amuck, the way they sometimes do.
After they've done a wood-cutting job they come down
and blow the money in; and this man ended up with
manslaughter. I got him convicted, though they were
scared of the Mountain even at Nettleton; and then a
queer thing happened. The fellow sent for me to go and
see him in gaol. I went, and this is what he says:
'The fool that defended me is a chicken-livered son of
a--and all the rest of it,' he says. 'I've got a job
to be done for me up on the Mountain, and you're the
only man I seen in court that looks as if he'd do it.'
He told me he had a child up there--or thought he had--
a little girl; and he wanted her brought down and
reared like a Christian. I was sorry for the fellow,
so I went up and got the child." He paused, and Charity
listened with a throbbing heart. "That's the only time
I ever went up the Mountain," he concluded.
There was a moment's silence; then Harney spoke. "And
the child--had she no mother?"
"Oh, yes: there was a mother. But she was glad enough
to have her go. She'd have given her to anybody. They
ain't half human up there. I guess the mother's dead
by now, with the life she was leading. Anyhow, I've
never heard of her from that day to this."
"My God, how ghastly," Harney murmured; and Charity,
choking with humiliation, sprang to her feet and ran
upstairs. She knew at last: knew that she was the
child of a drunken convict and of a mother who wasn't
"half human," and was glad to have her go; and she had
heard this history of her origin related to the one
being in whose eyes she longed to appear superior to
the people about her! She had noticed that Mr. Royall
had not named her, had even avoided any allusion that
might identify her with the child he had brought down
from the Mountain; and she knew it was out of regard
for her that he had kept silent. But of what use was
his discretion, since only that afternoon, misled by
Harney's interest in the out-law colony, she had
boasted to him of coming from the Mountain? Now every
word that had been spoken showed her how such an origin
must widen the distance between them.
During his ten days' sojourn at North Dormer Lucius
Harney had not spoken a word of love to her. He had
intervened in her behalf with his cousin, and had
convinced Miss Hatchard of her merits as a librarian;
but that was a simple act of justice, since it was by
his own fault that those merits had been questioned. He
had asked her to drive him about the country when he
hired lawyer Royall's buggy to go on his sketching
expeditions; but that too was natural enough, since he
was unfamiliar with the region. Lastly, when his
cousin was called to Springfield, he had begged Mr.
Royall to receive him as a boarder; but where else in
North Dormer could he have boarded? Not with Carrick
Fry, whose wife was paralysed, and whose large family
crowded his table to over-flowing; not with the
Targatts, who lived a mile up the road, nor with poor
old Mrs. Hawes, who, since her eldest daughter had
deserted her, barely had the strength to cook her own
meals while Ally picked up her living as a seamstress.
Mr. Royall's was the only house where the young man
could have been offered a decent hospitality. There
had been nothing, therefore, in the outward course of
events to raise in Charity's breast the hopes with
which it trembled. But beneath the visible incidents
resulting from Lucius Harney's arrival there ran an
undercurrent as mysterious and potent as the influence
that makes the forest break into leaf before the ice is
off the pools.
The business on which Harney had come was authentic;
Charity had seen the letter from a New York publisher
commissioning him to make a study of the eighteenth
century houses in the less familiar districts of New
England. But incomprehensible as the whole affair was
to her, and hard as she found it to understand why he
paused enchanted before certain neglected and paintless
houses, while others, refurbished and "improved" by the
local builder, did not arrest a glance, she could not
but suspect that Eagle County was less rich in
architecture than he averred, and that the duration of
his stay (which he had fixed at a month) was not
unconnected with the look in his eyes when he had first
paused before her in the library. Everything that had
followed seemed to have grown out of that look: his way
of speaking to her, his quickness in catching her
meaning, his evident eagerness to prolong their
excursions and to seize on every chance of being with
her.
The signs of his liking were manifest enough; but it
was hard to guess how much they meant, because his
manner was so different from anything North Dormer had
ever shown her. He was at once simpler and more
deferential than any one she had known; and sometimes
it was just when he was simplest that she most felt the
distance between them. Education and opportunity had
divided them by a width that no effort of hers could
bridge, and even when his youth and his admiration
brought him nearest, some chance word, some unconscious
allusion, seemed to thrust her back across the gulf.
Never had it yawned so wide as when she fled up to her
room carrying with her the echo of Mr. Royall's tale.
Her first confused thought was the prayer that she
might never see young Harney again. It was too
bitter to picture him as the detached impartial
listener to such a story. "I wish he'd go away: I
wish he'd go tomorrow, and never come back!" she moaned
to her pillow; and far into the night she lay there, in
the disordered dress she had forgotten to take off, her
whole soul a tossing misery on which her hopes and
dreams spun about like drowning straws.
Of all this tumult only a vague heart-soreness was left
when she opened her eyes the next morning. Her first
thought was of the weather, for Harney had asked her to
take him to the brown house under Porcupine, and then
around by Hamblin; and as the trip was a long one they
were to start at nine. The sun rose without a cloud,
and earlier than usual she was in the kitchen, making
cheese sandwiches, decanting buttermilk into a bottle,
wrapping up slices of apple pie, and accusing Verena of
having given away a basket she needed, which had always
hung on a hook in the passage. When she came out into
the porch, in her pink calico, which had run a little
in the washing, but was still bright enough to set off
her dark tints, she had such a triumphant sense of
being a part of the sunlight and the morning that
the last trace of her misery vanished. What did it
matter where she came from, or whose child she was,
when love was dancing in her veins, and down the road
she saw young Harney coming toward her?
Mr. Royall was in the porch too. He had said nothing
at breakfast, but when she came out in her pink dress,
the basket in her hand, he looked at her with surprise.
"Where you going to?" he asked.
"Why--Mr. Harney's starting earlier than usual today,"
she answered.
"Mr. Harney, Mr. Harney? Ain't Mr. Harney learned how
to drive a horse yet?"
She made no answer, and he sat tilted back in his
chair, drumming on the rail of the porch. It was the
first time he had ever spoken of the young man in that
tone, and Charity felt a faint chill of apprehension.
After a moment he stood up and walked away toward the
bit of ground behind the house, where the hired man was
hoeing.
The air was cool and clear, with the autumnal sparkle
that a north wind brings to the hills in early summer,
and the night had been so still that the dew hung on
everything, not as a lingering moisture, but in
separate beads that glittered like diamonds on the
ferns and grasses. It was a long drive to the foot of
Porcupine: first across the valley, with blue hills
bounding the open slopes; then down into the beech-
woods, following the course of the Creston, a brown
brook leaping over velvet ledges; then out again onto
the farm-lands about Creston Lake, and gradually up the
ridges of the Eagle Range. At last they reached the
yoke of the hills, and before them opened another
valley, green and wild, and beyond it more blue heights
eddying away to the sky like the waves of a receding
tide.
Harney tied the horse to a tree-stump, and they
unpacked their basket under an aged walnut with a riven
trunk out of which bumblebees darted. The sun had
grown hot, and behind them was the noonday murmur of
the forest. Summer insects danced on the air, and a
flock of white butterflies fanned the mobile tips of
the crimson fireweed. In the valley below not a house
was visible; it seemed as if Charity Royall and young
Harney were the only living beings in the great hollow
of earth and sky.
Charity's spirits flagged and disquieting thoughts
stole back on her. Young Harney had grown silent,
and as he lay beside her, his arms under his head, his
eyes on the network of leaves above him, she wondered
if he were musing on what Mr. Royall had told him, and
if it had really debased her in his thoughts. She
wished he had not asked her to take him that day to the
brown house; she did not want him to see the people she
came from while the story of her birth was fresh in his
mind. More than once she had been on the point of
suggesting that they should follow the ridge and drive
straight to Hamblin, where there was a little deserted
house he wanted to see; but shyness and pride held her
back. "He'd better know what kind of folks I belong
to," she said to herself, with a somewhat forced
defiance; for in reality it was shame that kept her
silent.
Suddenly she lifted her hand and pointed to the sky.
"There's a storm coming up."
He followed her glance and smiled. "Is it that scrap
of cloud among the pines that frightens you?"
"It's over the Mountain; and a cloud over the Mountain
always means trouble."
"Oh, I don't believe half the bad things you all
say of the Mountain! But anyhow, we'll get down to
the brown house before the rain comes."
He was not far wrong, for only a few isolated drops had
fallen when they turned into the road under the shaggy
flank of Porcupine, and came upon the brown house. It
stood alone beside a swamp bordered with alder thickets
and tall bulrushes. Not another dwelling was in sight,
and it was hard to guess what motive could have
actuated the early settler who had made his home in so
unfriendly a spot.
Charity had picked up enough of her companion's
erudition to understand what had attracted him to the
house. She noticed the fan-shaped tracery of the
broken light above the door, the flutings of the
paintless pilasters at the corners, and the round
window set in the gable; and she knew that, for reasons
that still escaped her, these were things to be admired
and recorded. Still, they had seen other houses far
more "typical" (the word was Harney's); and as he threw
the reins on the horse's neck he said with a slight
shiver of repugnance: "We won't stay long."
Against the restless alders turning their white lining
to the storm the house looked singularly desolate.
The paint was almost gone from the clap-boards, the
window-panes were broken and patched with rags, and the
garden was a poisonous tangle of nettles, burdocks and
tall swamp-weeds over which big blue-bottles hummed.
At the sound of wheels a child with a tow-head and pale
eyes like Liff Hyatt's peered over the fence and then
slipped away behind an out-house. Harney jumped down
and helped Charity out; and as he did so the rain broke
on them. It came slant-wise, on a furious gale, laying
shrubs and young trees flat, tearing off their leaves
like an autumn storm, turning the road into a river,
and making hissing pools of every hollow. Thunder
rolled incessantly through the roar of the rain, and a
strange glitter of light ran along the ground under the
increasing blackness.
"Lucky we're here after all," Harney laughed. He
fastened the horse under a half-roofless shed, and
wrapping Charity in his coat ran with her to the house.
The boy had not reappeared, and as there was no
response to their knocks Harney turned the door-handle
and they went in.
There were three people in the kitchen to which the
door admitted them. An old woman with a
handkerchief over her head was sitting by the
window. She held a sickly-looking kitten on her knees,
and whenever it jumped down and tried to limp away she
stooped and lifted it back without any change of her
aged, unnoticing face. Another woman, the unkempt
creature that Charity had once noticed in driving by,
stood leaning against the window-frame and stared at
them; and near the stove an unshaved man in a tattered
shirt sat on a barrel asleep.
The place was bare and miserable and the air heavy with
the smell of dirt and stale tobacco. Charity's heart
sank. Old derided tales of the Mountain people came
back to her, and the woman's stare was so
disconcerting, and the face of the sleeping man so
sodden and bestial, that her disgust was tinged with a
vague dread. She was not afraid for herself; she knew
the Hyatts would not be likely to trouble her; but she
was not sure how they would treat a "city fellow."
Lucius Harney would certainly have laughed at her
fears. He glanced about the room, uttered a general
"How are you?" to which no one responded, and then
asked the younger woman if they might take shelter till
the storm was over.
She turned her eyes away from him and looked at
Charity.
"You're the girl from Royall's, ain't you?"
The colour rose in Charity's face. "I'm Charity
Royall," she said, as if asserting her right to the
name in the very place where it might have been most
open to question.
The woman did not seem to notice. "You kin stay," she
merely said; then she turned away and stooped over a
dish in which she was stirring something.
Harney and Charity sat down on a bench made of a board
resting on two starch boxes. They faced a door hanging
on a broken hinge, and through the crack they saw the
eyes of the tow-headed boy and of a pale little girl
with a scar across her cheek. Charity smiled, and
signed to the children to come in; but as soon as they
saw they were discovered they slipped away on bare
feet. It occurred to her that they were afraid of
rousing the sleeping man; and probably the woman shared
their fear, for she moved about as noiselessly and
avoided going near the stove.
The rain continued to beat against the house, and in
one or two places it sent a stream through the
patched panes and ran into pools on the floor.
Every now and then the kitten mewed and struggled down,
and the old woman stooped and caught it, holding it
tight in her bony hands; and once or twice the man on
the barrel half woke, changed his position and dozed
again, his head falling forward on his hairy breast. As
the minutes passed, and the rain still streamed against
the windows, a loathing of the place and the people
came over Charity. The sight of the weak-minded old
woman, of the cowed children, and the ragged man
sleeping off his liquor, made the setting of her own
life seem a vision of peace and plenty. She thought of
the kitchen at Mr. Royall's, with its scrubbed floor
and dresser full of china, and the peculiar smell of
yeast and coffee and soft-soap that she had always
hated, but that now seemed the very symbol of household
order. She saw Mr. Royall's room, with the high-backed
horsehair chair, the faded rag carpet, the row of books
on a shelf, the engraving of "The Surrender of
Burgoyne" over the stove, and the mat with a brown and
white spaniel on a moss-green border. And then her
mind travelled to Miss Hatchard's house, where all was
freshness, purity and fragrance, and compared to which
the red house had always seemed so poor and plain.
"This is where I belong--this is where I belong," she
kept repeating to herself; but the words had no meaning
for her. Every instinct and habit made her a stranger
among these poor swamp-people living like vermin in
their lair. With all her soul she wished she had not
yielded to Harney's curiosity, and brought him there.
The rain had drenched her, and she began to shiver
under the thin folds of her dress. The younger woman
must have noticed it, for she went out of the room and
came back with a broken tea-cup which she offered to
Charity. It was half full of whiskey, and Charity
shook her head; but Harney took the cup and put his
lips to it. When he had set it down Charity saw him
feel in his pocket and draw out a dollar; he hesitated
a moment, and then put it back, and she guessed that he
did not wish her to see him offering money to people
she had spoken of as being her kin.
The sleeping man stirred, lifted his head and opened
his eyes. They rested vacantly for a moment on Charity
and Harney, and then closed again, and his head
drooped; but a look of anxiety came into the woman's
face. She glanced out of the window and then came
up to Harney. "I guess you better go along now," she
said. The young man understood and got to his feet.
"Thank you," he said, holding out his hand. She seemed
not to notice the gesture, and turned away as they
opened the door.
The rain was still coming down, but they hardly noticed
it: the pure air was like balm in their faces. The
clouds were rising and breaking, and between their
edges the light streamed down from remote blue hollows.
Harney untied the horse, and they drove off through the
diminishing rain, which was already beaded with
sunlight.
For a while Charity was silent, and her companion did
not speak. She looked timidly at his profile: it was
graver than usual, as though he too were oppressed by
what they had seen. Then she broke out abruptly:
"Those people back there are the kind of folks I come
from. They may be my relations, for all I know." She
did not want him to think that she regretted having
told him her story.
"Poor creatures," he rejoined. "I wonder why they came
down to that fever-hole."
She laughed ironically. "To better themselves! It's
worse up on the Mountain. Bash Hyatt married the
daughter of the farmer that used to own the brown
house. That was him by the stove, I suppose."
Harney seemed to find nothing to say and she went on:
"I saw you take out a dollar to give to that poor
woman. Why did you put it back?"
He reddened, and leaned forward to flick a swamp-fly
from the horse's neck. "I wasn't sure----"
"Was it because you knew they were my folks, and
thought I'd be ashamed to see you give them money?"
He turned to her with eyes full of reproach. "Oh,
Charity----" It was the first time he had ever called
her by her name. Her misery welled over.
"I ain't--I ain't ashamed. They're my people, and I
ain't ashamed of them," she sobbed.
"My dear..." he murmured, putting his arm about her;
and she leaned against him and wept out her pain.
It was too late to go around to Hamblin, and all the
stars were out in a clear sky when they reached the
North Dormer valley and drove up to the red house.
Content of CHAPTER VI [Edith Wharton's novel: Summer]
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