guilt.” There was no sense of guilt in her now, but only a desperate desire to defend her secret from irreverent eyes, and begin life again among people to whom the harsh code of the village was unknown. The impulse did not shape itself in thought: she only knew she must save her baby, and hide herself with it somewhere where no one would ever come to trouble them.
She walked on and on, growing more heavy-footed as the day advanced. It seemed a cruel chance that compelled her to retrace every step of the way to the deserted house; and when she came in sight of the orchard, and the silver-gray roof slanting crookedly through the laden branches, her strength failed her and she sat down by the road-side. She sat there a long time, trying to gather the courage to start again, and walk past the broken gate and the untrimmed rose-bushes strung with scarlet hips. A few drops of rain were falling, and she thought of the warm evenings when she and Harney had sat embraced in the shadowy room, and the noise of summer showers on the roof had rustled through their kisses. At length she understood that if she stayed any longer the rain might compel her to take shelter in the house overnight, and she got up and walked on, averting her eyes as she came abreast of the white gate and the tangled garden.
The hours wore on, and she walked more and more slowly, pausing now and then to rest, and to eat a little bread and an apple picked up from the roadside. Her body seemed to grow heavier with every yard of the way, and she wondered how she would be able to carry her child later, if already he laid such a burden on her….A fresh wind had sprung up, scattering the rain and blowing down keenly from the mountain. Presently the clouds lowered again, and a few white darts struck her in the face: it was the first snow falling over Hamblin. The roofs of the lonely village were only half a mile ahead, and she was resolved to push beyond it, and try to reach the Mountain that night. She had no clear plan of action, except that, once in the settlement, she meant to look for Liff Hyatt, and get him to take her to her mother. She herself had been born as her own baby was going to be born; and whatever her mother’s subsequent life had been, she could hardly help remembering the past, and receiving a daughter who was facing the trouble she had known.
Suddenly the deadly faintness came over her once more and she sat down on the bank and leaned her head against a tree-trunk. The long road and the cloudy landscape vanished from her eyes, and for a time she seemed to be circling about in some terrible wheeling darkness. Then that too faded.
She opened her eyes, and saw a buggy drawn up beside her, and a man who had jumped down from it and was gazing at her with a puzzled face. Slowly consciousness came back, and she saw that the man was Liff Hyatt.
She was dimly aware that he was asking her something, and she looked at him in silence, trying to find strength to speak. At length her voice stirred in her throat, and she said in a whisper: “I’m going up the Mountain.”
“Up the Mountain?” he repeated, drawing aside a little; and as he moved she saw behind him, in the buggy, a heavily coated figure with a familiar pink face and gold spectacles on the bridge of a Grecian nose.
“Charity! What on earth are you doing here?” Mr. Miles exclaimed, throwing the reins on the horse’s back and scrambling down from the buggy.
She lifted her heavy eyes to his. “I’m going to see my mother.”
The two men glanced at each other, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
Then Mr. Miles said: “You look ill, my dear, and it’s a long way. Do you think it’s wise?”
Charity stood up. “I’ve got to go to her.”
A vague mirthless grin contracted Liff Hyatt’s face, and Mr. Miles again spoke uncertainly. “You know, then–you’d been told?”
She stared at him. “I don’t know what you mean. I want to go to her.”
Mr. Miles was examining her thoughtfully. She fancied she saw a change in his expression, and the blood rushed to her forehead. “I just want to go to her,” she repeated.
He laid his hand on her arm. “My child, your mother is dying. Liff Hyatt came down to fetch me….Get in and come with us.”
He helped her up to the seat at his side, Liff Hyatt clambered in at the back, and they drove off toward Hamblin. At first Charity had hardly grasped what Mr. Miles was saying; the physical relief of finding herself seated in the buggy, and securely on her road to the Mountain, effaced the impression of his words. But as her head cleared she began to understand. She knew the Mountain had but the most infrequent intercourse with the valleys; she had often enough heard it said that no one ever went up there except the minister, when someone was dying. And now it was her mother who was dying…and she would find herself as much alone on the Mountain as anywhere else in the world. The sense of unescapable isolation was all she could feel for the moment; then she began to wonder at the strangeness of its being Mr. Miles who had undertaken to perform this grim errand. He did not seem in the least like the kind of man who would care to go up the Mountain. But here he was at her side, guiding the horse with a firm hand, and bending on her the kindly gleam of his spectacles, as if there were nothing unusual in their being together in such circumstances.
For a while she found it impossible to speak, and he seemed to understand this, and made no attempt to question her. But presently she felt her tears rise and flow down over her drawn cheeks; and he must have seen them too, for he laid his hand on hers, and said in a low voice: “Won’t you tell me what is troubling you?”
She shook her head, and he did not insist: but after a while he said, in the same low tone, so that they should not be overheard: “Charity, what do you know of your childhood, before you came down to North Dormer?”
She controlled herself, and answered: “Nothing only what I heard Mr. Royall say one day. He said he brought me down because my father went to prison.”
“And you’ve never been up there since?”
“Never.”
Mr. Miles was silent again, then he said: “I’m glad you’re coming with me now. Perhaps we may find your mother alive, and she may know that you have come.”
They had reached Hamblin, where the snow-flurry had left white patches in the rough grass on the roadside, and in the angles of the roofs facing north. It was a poor bleak village under the granite flank of the Mountain, and as soon as they left it they began to climb. The road was steep and full of ruts, and the horse settled down to a walk while they mounted and mounted, the world dropping away below them in great mottled stretches of forest and field, and stormy dark blue distances.
Charity had often had visions of this ascent of the Mountain but she had not known it would reveal so wide a country, and the sight of those strange lands reaching away on every side gave her a new sense of Harney’s remoteness. She knew he must be miles and miles beyond the last range of hills that seemed to be the outmost verge of things, and she wondered how she had ever dreamed of going to New York to find him….
As the road mounted the country grew bleaker, and they drove across fields of faded mountain grass bleached by long months beneath the snow. In the hollows a few white birches trembled, or a mountain ash lit its scarlet clusters; but only a scant growth of pines darkened the granite ledges. The wind was blowing fiercely across the open slopes; the horse faced it with bent head and straining flanks, and now and then the buggy swayed so that Charity had to clutch its side.
Mr. Miles had not spoken again; he seemed to understand that she wanted to be left alone. After a while the track they were following forked, and he pulled up the horse, as if uncertain of the way. Liff Hyatt craned his head around from the back, and shouted against the wind: “Left—-” and they turned into a stunted pine-wood and began to drive down the other side of the Mountain.
A mile or two farther on they came out on a clearing where two or three low houses lay in stony fields, crouching among the rocks as if to brace themselves against the wind. They were hardly more than sheds, built of logs and rough boards, with tin stove-pipes sticking out of their roofs. The sun was setting, and dusk had already fallen on the lower world, but a yellow glare still lay on the lonely hillside and the crouching houses. The next moment it faded and left the landscape in dark autumn twilight.
“Over there,” Liff called out, stretching his long arm over Mr. Miles’s shoulder. The clergyman turned to the left, across a bit of bare ground overgrown with docks and nettles, and stopped before the most ruinous of the sheds. A stove-pipe reached its crooked arm out of one window, and the broken panes of the other were stuffed with rags and paper.
In contrast to such a dwelling the brown house in the swamp might have stood for the home of plenty.
As the buggy drew up two or three mongrel dogs jumped out of the twilight with a great barking, and a young man slouched to the door and stood there staring. In the twilight Charity saw that his face had the same sodden look as Bash Hyatt’s, the day she had seen him sleeping by the stove. He made no effort to silence the dogs, but leaned in the door, as if roused from a drunken lethargy, while Mr. Miles got out of the buggy.
“Is it here?” the clergyman asked Liff in a low voice; and Liff nodded.
Mr. Miles turned to Charity. “Just hold the horse a minute, my dear: I’ll go in first,” he said, putting the reins in her hands. She took them passively, and sat staring straight ahead of her at the darkening scene while Mr. Miles and Liff Hyatt went up to the house. They stood a few minutes talking with the man in the door, and then Mr. Miles came back. As he came close, Charity saw that his smooth pink face wore a frightened solemn look.
“Your mother is dead, Charity; you’d better come with me,” he said.
She got down and followed him while Liff led the horse away. As she approached the door she said to herself: “This is where I was born…this is where I belong….” She had said it to herself often enough as she looked across the sunlit valleys at the Mountain; but it had meant nothing then, and now it had become a reality. Mr. Miles took her gently by the arm, and they entered what appeared to be the only room in the house. It was so dark that she could just discern a group of a dozen people sitting or sprawling about a table made of boards laid across two barrels. They looked up listlessly as Mr. Miles and Charity came in, and a woman’s thick voice said: “Here’s the preacher.” But no one moved.
Mr. Miles paused and looked about him; then he turned to the young man who had met them at the door.
“Is the body here?” he asked.
The young man, instead of answering, turned his head toward the group. “Where’s the candle? I tole yer to bring a candle,” he said with sudden harshness to a girl who was lolling against the table. She did not answer, but another man got up and took from some corner a candle stuck into a bottle.
“How’ll I light it? The stove’s out,” the girl grumbled.
Mr. Miles fumbled under his heavy wrappings and drew out a match-box. He held a match to the candle, and in a moment or two a faint circle of light fell on the pale aguish heads that started out of the shadow like the heads of nocturnal animals.
“Mary’s over there,” someone said; and Mr. Miles, taking the bottle in his hand, passed behind the table. Charity followed him, and they stood before a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A woman lay on it, but she did not look like a dead woman; she seemed to have fallen across her squalid bed in a drunken sleep, and to have been left lying where she fell, in her ragged disordered clothes. One arm was flung above her head, one leg drawn up under a torn skirt that left the other bare to the knee: a swollen glistening leg with a ragged stocking rolled down about the ankle. The woman lay on her back, her eyes staring up unblinkingly at the candle that trembled in Mr. Miles’s hand.
“She jus’ dropped off,” a woman said, over the shoulder of the others; and the young man added: “I jus’ come in and found her.”
An elderly man with lank hair and a feeble grin pushed between them. “It was like this: I says to her on’y the night before: if you don’t take and quit, I says to her…”
Someone pulled him back and sent him reeling against a bench along the wall, where he dropped down muttering his unheeded narrative.
There was a silence; then the young woman who had been lolling against the table suddenly parted the group, and stood in front of Charity. She was healthier and robuster looking than the others, and her weather- beaten face had a certain sullen beauty.
“Who’s the girl? Who brought her here?” she said, fixing her eyes mistrustfully on the young man who had rebuked her for not having a candle ready.
Mr. Miles spoke. “I brought her; she is Mary Hyatt’s daughter.”
“What? Her too?” the girl sneered; and the young man turned on her with an oath. “Shut your mouth, damn you, or get out of here,” he said; then he relapsed into his former apathy, and dropped down on the bench, leaning his head against the wall.
Mr. Miles had set the candle on the floor and taken off his heavy coat. He turned to Charity. “Come and help me,” he said.
He knelt down by the mattress, and pressed the lids over the dead woman’s eyes. Charity, trembling and sick, knelt beside him, and tried to compose her mother’s body. She drew the stocking over the dreadful glistening leg, and pulled the skirt down to the battered upturned boots. As she did so, she looked at her mother’s face, thin yet swollen, with lips parted in a frozen gasp above the broken teeth. There was no sign in it of anything human: she lay there like a dead dog in a ditch Charity’s hands grew cold as they touched her.
Mr. Miles drew the woman’s arms across her breast and laid his coat over her. Then he covered her face with his handkerchief, and placed the bottle with the candle in it at her head. Having done this he stood up.
“Is there no coffin?” he asked, turning to the group behind him.
There was a moment of bewildered silence; then the fierce girl spoke up. “You’d oughter brought it with you. Where’d we get one here, I’d like ter know?”
Mr. Miles, looking at the others, repeated: “Is it possible you have no coffin ready?”
“That’s what I say: them that has it sleeps better,” an old woman murmured. “But then she never had no bed….”
“And the stove warn’t hers,” said the lank-haired man, on the defensive.
Mr. Miles turned away from them and moved a few steps apart. He had drawn a book from his pocket, and after a pause he opened it and began to read, holding the book at arm’s length and low down, so that the pages caught the feeble light. Charity had remained on her knees by the mattress: now that her mother’s face was covered it was easier to stay near her, and avoid the sight of the living faces which too horribly showed by what stages hers had lapsed into death.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life,” Mr. Miles began; “he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live….Though after my skin worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh shall I see God….”
IN MY FLESH SHALL I SEE GOD! Charity thought of the gaping mouth and stony eyes under the handkerchief, and of the glistening leg over which she had drawn the stocking….
“We brought nothing into this world and we shall take nothing out of it—-“
There was a sudden muttering and a scuffle at the back of the group. “I brought the stove,” said the elderly man with lank hair, pushing his way between the others. “I wen’ down to Creston’n bought it…n’ I got a right to take it outer here…n’ I’ll lick any feller says I ain’t….”
“Sit down, damn you!” shouted the tall youth who had been drowsing on the bench against the wall.
“For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them….”
“Well, it ARE his,” a woman in the background interjected in a frightened whine.
The tall youth staggered to his feet. “If you don’t hold your mouths I’ll turn you all out o’ here, the whole lot of you,” he cried with many oaths. “G’wan, minister…don’t let ’em faze you….”
“Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first-fruits of them that slept….Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump….For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruption shall have put on incorruption, and when this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in Victory….”
One by one the mighty words fell on Charity’s bowed head, soothing the horror, subduing the tumult, mastering her as they mastered the drink-dazed creatures at her back. Mr. Miles read to the last word, and then closed the book.
“Is the grave ready?” he asked.
Liff Hyatt, who had come in while he was reading, nodded a “Yes,” and pushed forward to the side of the mattress. The young man on the bench who seemed to assert some sort of right of kinship with the dead woman, got to his feet again, and the proprietor of the stove joined him. Between them they raised up the mattress; but their movements were unsteady, and the coat slipped to the floor, revealing the poor body in its helpless misery. Charity, picking up the coat, covered her mother once more. Liff had brought a lantern, and the old woman who had already spoken took it up, and opened the door to let the little procession pass out. The wind had dropped, and the night was very dark and bitterly cold. The old woman walked ahead, the lantern shaking in her hand and spreading out before her a pale patch of dead grass and coarse-leaved weeds enclosed in an immensity of blackness.
Mr. Miles took Charity by the arm, and side by side they walked behind the mattress. At length the old woman with the lantern stopped, and Charity saw the light fall on the stooping shoulders of the bearers and on a ridge of upheaved earth over which they were bending. Mr. Miles released her arm and approached the hollow on the other side of the ridge; and while the men stooped down, lowering the mattress into the grave, he began to speak again.
“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery….He cometh up and is cut down…he fleeth as it were a shadow….Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death….”
“Easy there…is she down?” piped the claimant to the stove; and the young man called over his shoulder: “Lift the light there, can’t you?”
There was a pause, during which the light floated uncertainly over the open grave. Someone bent over and pulled out Mr. Miles’s coat—-(“No, no– leave the handkerchief,” he interposed)–and then Liff Hyatt, coming forward with a spade, began to shovel in the earth.
“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” Liff’s gaunt shoulders rose and bent in the lantern light as he dashed the clods of earth into the grave. “God–it’s froze a’ready,” he muttered, spitting into his palm and passing his ragged shirt- sleeve across his perspiring face.
“Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it may be like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself…” The last spadeful of earth fell on the vile body of Mary Hyatt, and Liff rested on his spade, his shoulder blades still heaving with the effort.
“Lord, have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us…”
Mr. Miles took the lantern from the old woman’s hand and swept its light across the circle of bleared faces. “Now kneel down, all of you,” he commanded, in a voice of authority that Charity had never heard. She knelt down at the edge of the grave, and the others, stiffly and hesitatingly, got to their knees beside her. Mr. Miles knelt, too. “And now pray with me–you know this prayer,” he said, and he began: “Our Father which art in Heaven…” One or two of the women falteringly took the words up, and when he ended, the lank-haired man flung himself on the neck of the tall youth. “It was this way,” he said. “I tole her the night before, I says to her…” The reminiscence ended in a sob.
Mr. Miles had been getting into his coat again. He came up to Charity, who had remained passively kneeling by the rough mound of earth.
“My child, you must come. It’s very late.”
She lifted her eyes to his face: he seemed to speak out of another world.
“I ain’t coming: I’m going to stay here.”
“Here? Where? What do you mean?”
“These are my folks. I’m going to stay with them.”
Mr. Miles lowered his voice. “But it’s not possible–you don’t know what you are doing. You can’t stay among these people: you must come with me.”
She shook her head and rose from her knees. The group about the grave had scattered in the darkness, but the old woman with the lantern stood waiting. Her mournful withered face was not unkind, and Charity went up to her.
“Have you got a place where I can lie down for the night?” she asked. Liff came up, leading the buggy out of the night. He looked from one to the other with his feeble smile. “She’s my mother. She’ll take you home,” he said; and he added, raising his voice to speak to the old woman: “It’s the girl from lawyer Royall’s–Mary’s girl…you remember….”
The woman nodded and raised her sad old eyes to Charity’s. When Mr. Miles and Liff clambered into the buggy she went ahead with the lantern to show them the track they were to follow; then she turned back, and in silence she and Charity walked away together through the night.
XVII
CHARITY lay on the floor on a mattress, as her dead mother’s body had lain. The room in which she lay was cold and dark and low-ceilinged, and even poorer and barer than the scene of Mary Hyatt’s earthly pilgrimage. On the other side of the fireless stove Liff Hyatt’s mother slept on a blanket, with two children–her grandchildren, she said–rolled up against her like sleeping puppies. They had their thin clothes spread over them, having given the only other blanket to their guest.
Through the small square of glass in the opposite wall Charity saw a deep funnel of sky, so black, so remote, so palpitating with frosty stars that her very soul seemed to be sucked into it. Up there somewhere, she supposed, the God whom Mr. Miles had invoked was waiting for Mary Hyatt to appear. What a long flight it was! And what would she have to say when she reached Him?
Charity’s bewildered brain laboured with the attempt to picture her mother’s past, and to relate it in any way to the designs of a just but merciful God; but it was impossible to imagine any link between them. She herself felt as remote from the poor creature she had seen lowered into her hastily dug grave as if the height of the heavens divided them. She had seen poverty and misfortune in her life; but in a community where poor thrifty Mrs. Hawes and the industrious Ally represented the nearest approach to destitution there was nothing to suggest the savage misery of the Mountain farmers.
As she lay there, half-stunned by her tragic initiation, Charity vainly tried to think herself into the life about her. But she could not even make out what relationship these people bore to each other, or to her dead mother; they seemed to be herded together in a sort of passive promiscuity in which their common misery was the strongest link. She tried to picture to herself what her life would have been if she had grown up on the Mountain, running wild in rags, sleeping on the floor curled up against her mother, like the pale- faced children huddled against old Mrs. Hyatt, and turning into a fierce bewildered creature like the girl who had apostrophized her in such strange words. She was frightened by the secret affinity she had felt with this girl, and by the light it threw on her own beginnings. Then she remembered what Mr. Royall had said in telling her story to Lucius Harney: “Yes, there was a mother; but she was glad to have the child go. She’d have given her to anybody….”
Well! after all, was her mother so much to blame? Charity, since that day, had always thought of her as destitute of all human feeling; now she seemed merely pitiful. What mother would not want to save her child from such a life? Charity thought of the future of her own child, and tears welled into her aching eyes, and ran down over her face. If she had been less exhausted, less burdened with his weight, she would have sprung up then and there and fled away….
The grim hours of the night dragged themselves slowly by, and at last the sky paled and dawn threw a cold blue beam into the room. She lay in her corner staring at the dirty floor, the clothes-line hung with decaying rags, the old woman huddled against the cold stove, and the light gradually spreading across the wintry world, and bringing with it a new day in which she would have to live, to choose, to act, to make herself a place among these people–or to go back to the life she had left. A mortal lassitude weighed on her. There were moments when she felt that all she asked was to go on lying there unnoticed; then her mind revolted at the thought of becoming one of the miserable herd from which she sprang, and it seemed as though, to save her child from such a fate, she would find strength to travel any distance, and bear any burden life might put on her.
Vague thoughts of Nettleton flitted through her mind. She said to herself that she would find some quiet place where she could bear her child, and give it to decent people to keep; and then she would go out like Julia Hawes and earn its living and hers. She knew that girls of that kind sometimes made enough to have their children nicely cared for; and every other consideration disappeared in the vision of her baby, cleaned and combed and rosy, and hidden away somewhere where she could run in and kiss it, and bring it pretty things to wear. Anything, anything was better than to add another life to the nest of misery on the Mountain….
The old woman and the children were still sleeping when Charity rose from her mattress. Her body was stiff with cold and fatigue, and she moved slowly lest her heavy steps should rouse them. She was faint with hunger, and had nothing left in her satchel; but on the table she saw the half of a stale loaf. No doubt it was to serve as the breakfast of old Mrs. Hyatt and the children; but Charity did not care; she had her own baby to think of. She broke off a piece of the bread and ate it greedily; then her glance fell on the thin faces of the sleeping children, and filled with compunction she rummaged in her satchel for something with which to pay for what she had taken. She found one of the pretty chemises that Ally had made for her, with a blue ribbon run through its edging. It was one of the dainty things on which she had squandered her savings, and as she looked at it the blood rushed to her forehead. She laid the chemise on the table, and stealing across the floor lifted the latch and went out….
The morning was icy cold and a pale sun was just rising above the eastern shoulder of the Mountain. The houses scattered on the hillside lay cold and smokeless under the sun-flecked clouds, and not a human being was in sight. Charity paused on the threshold and tried to discover the road by which she had come the night before. Across the field surrounding Mrs. Hyatt’s shanty she saw the tumble-down house in which she supposed the funeral service had taken place. The trail ran across the ground between the two houses and disappeared in the pine-wood on the flank of the Mountain; and a little way to the right, under a wind- beaten thorn, a mound of fresh earth made a dark spot on the fawn-coloured stubble. Charity walked across the field to the ground. As she approached it she heard a bird’s note in the still air, and looking up she saw a brown song-sparrow perched in an upper branch of the thorn above the grave. She stood a minute listening to his small solitary song; then she rejoined the trail and began to mount the hill to the pine-wood.
Thus far she had been impelled by the blind instinct of flight; but each step seemed to bring her nearer to the realities of which her feverish vigil had given only a shadowy image. Now that she walked again in a daylight world, on the way back to familiar things, her imagination moved more soberly. On one point she was still decided: she could not remain at North Dormer, and the sooner she got away from it the better. But everything beyond was darkness.
As she continued to climb the air grew keener, and when she passed from the shelter of the pines to the open grassy roof of the Mountain the cold wind of the night before sprang out on her. She bent her shoulders and struggled on against it for a while; but presently her breath failed, and she sat down under a ledge of rock overhung by shivering birches. From where she sat she saw the trail wandering across the bleached grass in the direction of Hamblin, and the granite wall of the Mountain falling away to infinite distances. On that side of the ridge the valleys still lay in wintry shadow; but in the plain beyond the sun was touching village roofs and steeples, and gilding the haze of smoke over far-off invisible towns.
Charity felt herself a mere speck in the lonely circle of the sky. The events of the last two days seemed to have divided her forever from her short dream of bliss. Even Harney’s image had been blurred by that crushing experience: she thought of him as so remote from her that he seemed hardly more than a memory. In her fagged and floating mind only one sensation had the weight of reality; it was the bodily burden of her child. But for it she would have felt as rootless as the whiffs of thistledown the wind blew past her. Her child was like a load that held her down, and yet like a hand that pulled her to her feet. She said to herself that she must get up and struggle on….
Her eyes turned back to the trail across the top of the Mountain, and in the distance she saw a buggy against the sky. She knew its antique outline, and the gaunt build of the old horse pressing forward with lowered head; and after a moment she recognized the heavy bulk of the man who held the reins. The buggy was following the trail and making straight for the pine-wood through which she had climbed; and she knew at once that the driver was in search of her. Her first impulse was to crouch down under the ledge till he had passed; but the instinct of concealment was overruled by the relief of feeling that someone was near her in the awful emptiness. She stood up and walked toward the buggy.
Mr. Royall saw her, and touched the horse with the whip. A minute or two later he was abreast of Charity; their eyes met, and without speaking he leaned over and helped her up into the buggy.
She tried to speak, to stammer out some explanation, but no words came to her; and as he drew the cover over her knees he simply said: “The minister told me he’d left you up here, so I come up for you.”
He turned the horse’s head, and they began to jog back toward Hamblin. Charity sat speechless, staring straight ahead of her, and Mr. Royall occasionally uttered a word of encouragement to the horse: “Get along there, Dan….I gave him a rest at Hamblin; but I brought him along pretty quick, and it’s a stiff pull up here against the wind.”
As he spoke it occurred to her for the first time that to reach the top of the Mountain so early he must have left North Dormer at the coldest hour of the night, and have travelled steadily but for the halt at Hamblin; and she felt a softness at her heart which no act of his had ever produced since he had brought her the Crimson Rambler because she had given up boarding- school to stay with him.
After an interval he began again: “It was a day just like this, only spitting snow, when I come up here for you the first time.” Then, as if fearing that she might take his remark as a reminder of past benefits, he added quickly: “I dunno’s you think it was such a good job, either.”
“Yes, I do,” she murmured, looking straight ahead of her.
“Well,” he said, “I tried—-“
He did not finish the sentence, and she could think of nothing more to say.
“Ho, there, Dan, step out,” he muttered, jerking the bridle. “We ain’t home yet.–You cold?” he asked abruptly.
She shook her head, but he drew the cover higher up, and stooped to tuck it in about the ankles. She continued to look straight ahead. Tears of weariness and weakness were dimming her eyes and beginning to run over, but she dared not wipe them away lest he should observe the gesture.
They drove in silence, following the long loops of the descent upon Hamblin, and Mr. Royall did not speak again till they reached the outskirts of the village. Then he let the reins droop on the dashboard and drew out his watch.
“Charity,” he said, “you look fair done up, and North Dormer’s a goodish way off. I’ve figured out that we’d do better to stop here long enough for you to get a mouthful of breakfast and then drive down to Creston and take the train.”
She roused herself from her apathetic musing. “The train–what train?”
Mr. Royall, without answering, let the horse jog on till they reached the door of the first house in the village. “This is old Mrs. Hobart’s place,” he said. “She’ll give us something hot to drink.”
Charity, half unconsciously, found herself getting out of the buggy and following him in at the open door. They entered a decent kitchen with a fire crackling in the stove. An old woman with a kindly face was setting out cups and saucers on the table. She looked up and nodded as they came in, and Mr. Royall advanced to the stove, clapping his numb hands together.
“Well, Mrs. Hobart, you got any breakfast for this young lady? You can see she’s cold and hungry.”
Mrs. Hobart smiled on Charity and took a tin coffee-pot from the fire. “My, you do look pretty mean,” she said compassionately.
Charity reddened, and sat down at the table. A feeling of complete passiveness had once more come over her, and she was conscious only of the pleasant animal sensations of warmth and rest.
Mrs. Hobart put bread and milk on the table, and then went out of the house: Charity saw her leading the horse away to the barn across the yard. She did not come back, and Mr. Royall and Charity sat alone at the table with the smoking coffee between them. He poured out a cup for her, and put a piece of bread in the saucer, and she began to eat.
As the warmth of the coffee flowed through her veins her thoughts cleared and she began to feel like a living being again; but the return to life was so painful that the food choked in her throat and she sat staring down at the table in silent anguish.
After a while Mr. Royall pushed back his chair. “Now, then,” he said, “if you’re a mind to go along—-” She did not move, and he continued: “We can pick up the noon train for Nettleton if you say so.”
The words sent the blood rushing to her face, and she raised her startled eyes to his. He was standing on the other side of the table looking at her kindly and gravely; and suddenly she understood what he was going to say. She continued to sit motionless, a leaden weight upon her lips.
“You and me have spoke some hard things to each other in our time, Charity; and there’s no good that I can see in any more talking now. But I’ll never feel any way but one about you; and if you say so we’ll drive down in time to catch that train, and go straight to the minister’s house; and when you come back home you’ll come as Mrs. Royall.”
His voice had the grave persuasive accent that had moved his hearers at the Home Week festival; she had a sense of depths of mournful tolerance under that easy tone. Her whole body began to tremble with the dread of her own weakness.
“Oh, I can’t—-” she burst out desperately.
“Can’t what?”
She herself did not know: she was not sure if she was rejecting what he offered, or already struggling against the temptation of taking what she no longer had a right to. She stood up, shaking and bewildered, and began to speak:
“I know I ain’t been fair to you always; but I want to be now….I want you to know…I want…” Her voice failed her and she stopped.
Mr. Royall leaned against the wall. He was paler than usual, but his face was composed and kindly and her agitation did not appear to perturb him.
“What’s all this about wanting?” he said as she paused. “Do you know what you really want? I’ll tell you. You want to be took home and took care of. And I guess that’s all there is to say.”
“No…it’s not all….”
“Ain’t it?” He looked at his watch. “Well, I’ll tell you another thing. All I want is to know if you’ll marry me. If there was anything else, I’d tell you so; but there ain’t. Come to my age, a man knows the things that matter and the things that don’t; that’s about the only good turn life does us.”
His tone was so strong and resolute that it was like a supporting arm about her. She felt her resistance melting, her strength slipping away from her as he spoke.
“Don’t cry, Charity,” he exclaimed in a shaken voice. She looked up, startled at his emotion, and their eyes met.
“See here,” he said gently, “old Dan’s come a long distance, and we’ve got to let him take it easy the rest of the way….”
He picked up the cloak that had slipped to her chair and laid it about her shoulders. She followed him out of the house, and then walked across the yard to the shed, where the horse was tied. Mr. Royall unblanketed him and led him out into the road. Charity got into the buggy and he drew the cover about her and shook out the reins with a cluck. When they reached the end of the village he turned the horse’s head toward Creston.
XVIII
They began to jog down the winding road to the valley at old Dan’s languid pace. Charity felt herself sinking into deeper depths of weariness, and as they descended through the bare woods there were moments when she lost the exact sense of things, and seemed to be sitting beside her lover with the leafy arch of summer bending over them. But this illusion was faint and transitory. For the most part she had only a confused sensation of slipping down a smooth irresistible current; and she abandoned herself to the feeling as a refuge from the torment of thought.
Mr. Royall seldom spoke, but his silent presence gave her, for the first time, a sense of peace and security. She knew that where he was there would be warmth, rest, silence; and for the moment they were all she wanted. She shut her eyes, and even these things grew dim to her….
In the train, during the short run from Creston to Nettleton, the warmth aroused her, and the consciousness of being under strange eyes gave her a momentary energy. She sat upright, facing Mr. Royall, and stared out of the window at the denuded country. Forty-eight hours earlier, when she had last traversed it, many of the trees still held their leaves; but the high wind of the last two nights had stripped them, and the lines of the landscape’ were as finely pencilled as in December. A few days of autumn cold had wiped out all trace of the rich fields and languid groves through which she had passed on the Fourth of July; and with the fading of the landscape those fervid hours had faded, too. She could no longer believe that she was the being who had lived them; she was someone to whom something irreparable and overwhelming had happened, but the traces of the steps leading up to it had almost vanished.
When the train reached Nettleton and she walked out into the square at Mr. Royall’s side the sense of unreality grew more overpowering. The physical strain of the night and day had left no room in her mind for new sensations and she followed Mr. Royall as passively as a tired child. As in a confused dream she presently found herself sitting with him in a pleasant room, at a table with a red and white table-cloth on which hot food and tea were placed. He filled her cup and plate and whenever she lifted her eyes from them she found his resting on her with the same steady tranquil gaze that had reassured and strengthened her when they had faced each other in old Mrs. Hobart’s kitchen. As everything else in her consciousness grew more and more confused and immaterial, became more and more like the universal shimmer that dissolves the world to failing eyes, Mr. Royall’s presence began to detach itself with rocky firmness from this elusive background. She had always thought of him–when she thought of him at all– as of someone hateful and obstructive, but whom she could outwit and dominate when she chose to make the effort. Only once, on the day of the Old Home Week celebration, while the stray fragments of his address drifted across her troubled mind, had she caught a glimpse of another being, a being so different from the dull-witted enemy with whom she had supposed herself to be living that even through the burning mist of her own dreams he had stood out with startling distinctness. For a moment, then, what he said–and something in his way of saying it–had made her see why he had always struck her as such a lonely man. But the mist of her dreams had hidden him again, and she had forgotten that fugitive impression.
It came back to her now, as they sat at the table, and gave her, through her own immeasurable desolation, a sudden sense of their nearness to each other. But all these feelings were only brief streaks of light in the grey blur of her physical weakness. Through it she was aware that Mr. Royall presently left her sitting by the table in the warm room, and came back after an interval with a carriage from the station–a closed “hack” with sun-burnt blue silk blinds–in which they drove together to a house covered with creepers and standing next to a church with a carpet of turf before it. They got out at this house, and the carriage waited while they walked up the path and entered a wainscoted hall and then a room full of books. In this room a clergyman whom Charity had never seen received them pleasantly, and asked them to be seated for a few minutes while witnesses were being summoned.
Charity sat down obediently, and Mr. Royall, his hands behind his back, paced slowly up and down the room. As he turned and faced Charity, she noticed that his lips were twitching a little; but the look in his eyes was grave and calm. Once he paused before her and said timidly: “Your hair’s got kinder loose with the wind,” and she lifted her hands and tried to smooth back the locks that had escaped from her braid. There was a looking-glass in a carved frame on the wall, but she was ashamed to look at herself in it, and she sat with her hands folded on her knee till the clergyman returned. Then they went out again, along a sort of arcaded passage, and into a low vaulted room with a cross on an altar, and rows of benches. The clergyman, who had left them at the door, presently reappeared before the altar in a surplice, and a lady who was probably his wife, and a man in a blue shirt who had been raking dead leaves on the lawn, came in and sat on one of the benches.
The clergyman opened a book and signed to Charity and Mr. Royall to approach. Mr. Royall advanced a few steps, and Charity followed him as she had followed him to the buggy when they went out of Mrs. Hobart’s kitchen; she had the feeling that if she ceased to keep close to him, and do what he told her to do, the world would slip away from beneath her feet.
The clergyman began to read, and on her dazed mind there rose the memory of Mr. Miles, standing the night before in the desolate house of the Mountain, and reading out of the same book words that had the same dread sound of finality:
“I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment whereby ye may not be lawfully joined together…”
Charity raised her eyes and met Mr. Royall’s. They were still looking at her kindly and steadily. “I will!” she heard him say a moment later, after another interval of words that she had failed to catch. She was so busy trying to understand the gestures that the clergyman was signalling to her to make that she no longer heard what was being said. After another interval the lady on the bench stood up, and taking her hand put it in Mr. Royall’s. It lay enclosed in his strong palm and she felt a ring that was too big for her being slipped on her thin finger. She understood then that she was married….
Late that afternoon Charity sat alone in a bedroom of the fashionable hotel where she and Harney had vainly sought a table on the Fourth of July. She had never before been in so handsomely furnished a room. The mirror above the dressing-table reflected the high head-board and fluted pillow-slips of the double bed, and a bedspread so spotlessly white that she had hesitated to lay her hat and jacket on it. The humming radiator diffused an atmosphere of drowsy warmth, and through a half-open door she saw the glitter of the nickel taps above twin marble basins.
For a while the long turmoil of the night and day had slipped away from her and she sat with closed eyes, surrendering herself to the spell of warmth and silence. But presently this merciful apathy was succeeded by the sudden acuteness of vision with which sick people sometimes wake out of a heavy sleep. As she opened her eyes they rested on the picture that hung above the bed. It was a large engraving with a dazzling white margin enclosed in a wide frame of bird’s-eye maple with an inner scroll of gold. The engraving represented a young man in a boat on a lake over-hung with trees. He was leaning over to gather water-lilies for the girl in a light dress who lay among the cushions in the stern. The scene was full of a drowsy midsummer radiance, and Charity averted her eyes from it and, rising from her chair, began to wander restlessly about the room.
It was on the fifth floor, and its broad window of plate glass looked over the roofs of the town. Beyond them stretched a wooded landscape in which the last fires of sunset were picking out a steely gleam. Charity gazed at the gleam with startled eyes. Even through the gathering twilight she recognized the contour of the soft hills encircling it, and the way the meadows sloped to its edge. It was Nettleton Lake that she was looking at.
She stood a long time in the window staring out at the fading water. The sight of it had roused her for the first time to a realization of what she had done. Even the feeling of the ring on her hand had not brought her this sharp sense of the irretrievable. For an instant the old impulse of flight swept through her; but it was only the lift of a broken wing. She heard the door open behind her, and Mr. Royall came in.
He had gone to the barber’s to be shaved, and his shaggy grey hair had been trimmed and smoothed. He moved strongly and quickly, squaring his shoulders and carrying his head high, as if he did not want to pass unnoticed.
“What are you doing in the dark?” he called out in a cheerful voice. Charity made no answer. He went up to the window to draw the blind, and putting his finger on the wall flooded the room with a blaze of light from the central chandelier. In this unfamiliar illumination husband and wife faced each other awkwardly for a moment; then Mr. Royall said: “We’ll step down and have some supper, if you say so.”
The thought of food filled her with repugnance; but not daring to confess it she smoothed her hair and followed him to the lift.
An hour later, coming out of the glare of the dining- room, she waited in the marble-panelled hall while Mr. Royall, before the brass lattice of one of the corner counters, selected a cigar and bought an evening paper. Men were lounging in rocking chairs under the blazing chandeliers, travellers coming and going, bells ringing, porters shuffling by with luggage. Over Mr. Royall’s shoulder, as he leaned against the counter, a girl with her hair puffed high smirked and nodded at a dapper drummer who was getting his key at the desk across the hall.
Charity stood among these cross-currents of life as motionless and inert as if she had been one of the tables screwed to the marble floor. All her soul was gathered up into one sick sense of coming doom, and she watched Mr. Royall in fascinated terror while he pinched the cigars in successive boxes and unfolded his evening paper with a steady hand.
Presently he turned and joined her. “You go right along up to bed–I’m going to sit down here and have my smoke,” he said. He spoke as easily and naturally as if they had been an old couple, long used to each other’s ways, and her contracted heart gave a flutter of relief. She followed him to the lift, and he put her in and enjoined the buttoned and braided boy to show her to her room.
She groped her way in through the darkness, forgetting where the electric button was, and not knowing how to manipulate it. But a white autumn moon had risen, and the illuminated sky put a pale light in the room. By it she undressed, and after folding up the ruffled pillow-slips crept timidly under the spotless counterpane. She had never felt such smooth sheets or such light warm blankets; but the softness of the bed did not soothe her. She lay there trembling with a fear that ran through her veins like ice. “What have I done? Oh, what have I done?” she whispered, shuddering to her pillow; and pressing her face against it to shut out the pale landscape beyond the window she lay in the darkness straining her ears, and shaking at every footstep that approached….
Suddenly she sat up and pressed her hands against her frightened heart. A faint sound had told her that someone was in the room; but she must have slept in the interval, for she had heard no one enter. The moon was setting beyond the opposite roofs, and in the darkness outlined against the grey square of the window, she saw a figure seated in the rocking-chair. The figure did not move: it was sunk deep in the chair, with bowed head and folded arms, and she saw that it was Mr. Royall who sat there. He had not undressed, but had taken the blanket from the foot of the bed and laid it across his knees. Trembling and holding her breath she watched him, fearing that he had been roused by her movement; but he did not stir, and she concluded that he wished her to think he was asleep.
As she continued to watch him ineffable relief stole slowly over her, relaxing her strained nerves and exhausted body. He knew, then…he knew…it was because he knew that he had married her, and that he sat there in the darkness to show her she was safe with him. A stir of something deeper than she had ever felt in thinking of him flitted through her tired brain, and cautiously, noiselessly, she let her head sink on the pillow….
When she woke the room was full of morning light, and her first glance showed her that she was alone in it. She got up and dressed, and as she was fastening her dress the door opened, and Mr. Royall came in. He looked old and tired in the bright daylight, but his face wore the same expression of grave friendliness that had reassured her on the Mountain. It was as if all the dark spirits had gone out of him.
They went downstairs to the dining-room for breakfast, and after breakfast he told her he had some insurance business to attend to. “I guess while I’m doing it you’d better step out and buy yourself whatever you need.” He smiled, and added with an embarrassed laugh: “You know I always wanted you to beat all the other girls.” He drew something from his pocket, and pushed it across the table to her; and she saw that he had given her two twenty-dollar bills. “If it ain’t enough there’s more where that come from–I want you to beat ’em all hollow,” he repeated.
She flushed and tried to stammer out her thanks, but he had pushed back his chair and was leading the way out of the dining-room. In the hall he paused a minute to say that if it suited her they would take the three o’clock train back to North Dormer; then he took his hat and coat from the rack and went out.
A few minutes later Charity went out, too. She had watched to see in what direction he was going, and she took the opposite way and walked quickly down the main street to the brick building on the corner of Lake Avenue. There she paused to look cautiously up and down the thoroughfare, and then climbed the brass-bound stairs to Dr. Merkle’s door. The same bushy-headed mulatto girl admitted her, and after the same interval of waiting in the red plush parlor she was once more summoned to Dr. Merkle’s office. The doctor received her without surprise, and led her into the inner plush sanctuary.
“I thought you’d be back, but you’ve come a mite too soon: I told you to be patient and not fret,” she observed, after a pause of penetrating scrutiny.
Charity drew the money from her breast. “I’ve come to get my blue brooch,” she said, flushing.
“Your brooch?” Dr. Merkle appeared not to remember. “My, yes–I get so many things of that kind. Well, my dear, you’ll have to wait while I get it out of the safe. I don’t leave valuables like that laying round like the noospaper.”
She disappeared for a moment, and returned with a bit of twisted-up tissue paper from which she unwrapped the brooch.
Charity, as she looked at it, felt a stir of warmth at her heart. She held out an eager hand.
“Have you got the change?” she asked a little breathlessly, laying one of the twenty-dollar bills on the table.
“Change? What’d I want to have change for? I only see two twenties there,” Dr. Merkle answered brightly.
Charity paused, disconcerted. “I thought…you said it was five dollars a visit….”
“For YOU, as a favour–I did. But how about the responsibility and the insurance? I don’t s’pose you ever thought of that? This pin’s worth a hundred dollars easy. If it had got lost or stole, where’d I been when you come to claim it?”
Charity remained silent, puzzled and half-convinced by the argument, and Dr. Merkle promptly followed up her advantage. “I didn’t ask you for your brooch, my dear. I’d a good deal ruther folks paid me my regular charge than have ’em put me to all this trouble.”
She paused, and Charity, seized with a desperate longing to escape, rose to her feet and held out one of the bills.
“Will you take that?” she asked.
“No, I won’t take that, my dear; but I’ll take it with its mate, and hand you over a signed receipt if you don’t trust me.”
“Oh, but I can’t–it’s all I’ve got,” Charity exclaimed.
Dr. Merkle looked up at her pleasantly from the plush sofa. “It seems you got married yesterday, up to the ‘Piscopal church; I heard all about the wedding from the minister’s chore-man. It would be a pity, wouldn’t it, to let Mr. Royall know you had an account running here? I just put it to you as your own mother might.”
Anger flamed up in Charity, and for an instant she thought of abandoning the brooch and letting Dr. Merkle do her worst. But how could she leave her only treasure with that evil woman? She wanted it for her baby: she meant it, in some mysterious way, to be a link between Harney’s child and its unknown father. Trembling and hating herself while she did it, she laid Mr. Royall’s money on the table, and catching up the brooch fled out of the room and the house….
In the street she stood still, dazed by this last adventure. But the brooch lay in her bosom like a talisman, and she felt a secret lightness of heart. It gave her strength, after a moment, to walk on slowly in the direction of the post office, and go in through the swinging doors. At one of the windows she bought a sheet of letter-paper, an envelope and a stamp; then she sat down at a table and dipped the rusty post office pen in ink. She had come there possessed with a fear which had haunted her ever since she had felt Mr. Royall’s ring on her finger: the fear that Harney might, after all, free himself and come back to her. It was a possibility which had never occurred to her during the dreadful hours after she had received his letter; only when the decisive step she had taken made longing turn to apprehension did such a contingency seem conceivable. She addressed the envelope, and on the sheet of paper she wrote:
I’m married to Mr. Royall. I’ll always remember you. CHARITY.
The last words were not in the least what she had meant to write; they had flowed from her pen irresistibly. She had not had the strength to complete her sacrifice; but, after all, what did it matter? Now that there was no chance of ever seeing Harney again, why should she not tell him the truth?
When she had put the letter in the box she went out into the busy sunlit street and began to walk to the hotel. Behind the plateglass windows of the department stores she noticed the tempting display of dresses and dress-materials that had fired her imagination on the day when she and Harney had looked in at them together. They reminded her of Mr. Royall’s injunction to go out and buy all she needed. She looked down at her shabby dress, and wondered what she should say when he saw her coming back empty-handed. As she drew near the hotel she saw him waiting on the doorstep, and her heart began to beat with apprehension.
He nodded and waved his hand at her approach, and they walked through the hall and went upstairs to collect their possessions, so that Mr. Royall might give up the key of the room when they went down again for their midday dinner. In the bedroom, while she was thrusting back into the satchel the few things she had brought away with her, she suddenly felt that his eyes were on her and that he was going to speak. She stood still, her half-folded night-gown in her hand, while the blood rushed up to her drawn cheeks.
“Well, did you rig yourself out handsomely? I haven’t seen any bundles round,” he said jocosely.
“Oh, I’d rather let Ally Hawes make the few things I want,” she answered.
“That so?” He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment and his eye-brows projected in a scowl. Then his face grew friendly again. “Well, I wanted you to go back looking stylisher than any of them; but I guess you’re right. You’re a good girl, Charity.”
Their eyes met, and something rose in his that she had never seen there: a look that made her feel ashamed and yet secure.
“I guess you’re good, too,” she said, shyly and quickly. He smiled without answering, and they went out of the room together and dropped down to the hall in the glittering lift.
Late that evening, in the cold autumn moonlight, they drove up to the door of the red house.