Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (21 page)

‘Marry you? Me?’ she burst out with a scornful laugh. ‘Was that what you came to ask me the other night? What’s come over you, I wonder? How long is it since you’ve looked at yourself in the glass?’ She straightened herself, insolently conscious of her youth and strength. ‘I suppose you think it would be cheaper to marry me than to keep a hired girl. Everybody knows you’re the closest man in Eagle County; but I guess you’re not going to get your mending done for you that way twice.’

Mr Royall did not move while she spoke. His face was ash-coloured and his black eyebrows quivered as though the blaze of her scorn had blinded him. When she ceased he held up his hand.

‘That’ll do – that’ll about do,’ he said. He turned to the door and took his hat from the hat-peg. On the threshold he paused. ‘People ain’t been fair to me – from the first they ain’t been fair to me,’ he said. Then he went out.

A few days later North Dormer learned with surprise that Charity had been appointed librarian of the Hatchard Memorial at a salary of eight dollars a month, and that old Verena Marsh, from the Creston Almshouse, was coming to live at lawyer Royall’s and do the cooking.

I
t was not in the room known at the red house as Mr Royall’s ‘office’ that he received his infrequent clients. Professional dignity and masculine independence made it necessary that he should have a real office, under a different roof, and his standing as the only lawyer of North Dormer required that the roof should be the same as that which sheltered the Town Hall and the post-office.

It was his habit to walk to this office twice a day, morning and afternoon. It was on the ground floor of the building, with a separate entrance, and a weathered name-plate on the door. Before going in he stepped in to the post-office for his mail – usually an empty ceremony – said a word or two to the town-clerk, who sat across the passage in idle state, and then went over to the store on the opposite corner, where Carrick Fry, the storekeeper, always kept a chair for him, and where he was sure to find one or two selectmen leaning on the long counter, in an atmosphere of rope, leather, tar and coffee-beans. Mr Royall, though monosyllabic at home, was not averse, in certain moods, to imparting his views to his fellow-townsmen; perhaps, also, he was unwilling that his rare clients should surprise him sitting, clerkless and unoccupied, in his dusty office. At any rate, his hours there were not much longer or more regular than Charity’s at the library; the rest of the time he spent either at the store or in driving about the country on business connected with the insurance companies that he represented, or in sitting at home reading Bancroft’s History of the United States and the speeches of Daniel Webster.

Since the day when Charity had told him that she wished to succeed to Eudora Skeff’s post their relations had undefinably but definitely changed. Lawyer Royall had kept his word.
He had obtained the place for her at the cost of considerable manœuvering, as she guessed from the number of rival candidates, and from the acerbity with which two of them, Orma Fry and the eldest Targatt girl, treated her for nearly a year afterward. And he had engaged Verena Marsh to come up from Creston and do the cooking. Verena was a poor old widow, doddering and shiftless: Charity suspected that she came for her keep. Mr Royall was too close a man to give a dollar a day to a smart girl when he could get a deaf pauper for nothing. But at any rate, Verena was there, in the attic just over Charity, and the fact that she was deaf did not greatly trouble the young girl.

Charity knew that what had happened on that hateful night would not happen again. She understood that, profoundly as she had despised Mr Royall ever since, he despised himself still more profoundly. If she had asked for a woman in the house it was far less for her own defense than for his humiliation. She needed no one to defend her: his humbled pride was her surest protection. He had never spoken a word of excuse or extenuation; the incident was as if it had never been. Yet its consequences were latent in every word that he and she exchanged, in every glance they instinctively turned from each other. Nothing now would ever shake her rule in the red house.

On the night of her meeting with Miss Hatchard’s cousin Charity lay in bed, her bare arms clasped under her rough head, and continued to think of him. She supposed that he meant to spend some time in North Dormer. He had said he was looking up the old houses in the neighbourhood; and though she was not very clear as to his purpose, or as to why anyone should look for old houses, when they lay in wait for one on every roadside, she understood that he needed the help of books, and resolved to hunt up the next day the volume she had failed to find, and any others that seemed related to the subject.

Never had her ignorance of life and literature so weighed on her as in reliving the short scene of her discomfiture. ‘It’s no use trying to be anything in this place,’ she muttered to her pillow; and she shrivelled at the vision of vague metropolises,
shining super-Nettletons, where girls in better clothes than Belle Balch’s talked fluently of architecture to young men with hands like Lucius Harney’s. Then she remembered his sudden pause when he had come close to the desk and had his first look at her. The sight had made him forget what he was going to say; she recalled the change in his face, and jumping up she ran over the bare boards to her washstand, found the matches, lit a candle, and lifted it to the square of looking-glass on the white-washed wall. Her small face, usually so darkly pale, glowed like a rose in the faint orb of light, and under her rumpled hair her eyes seemed deeper and larger than by day. Perhaps after all it was a mistake to wish they were blue. A clumsy band and button fastened her unbleached night-gown about the throat. She undid it, freed her thin shoulders, and saw herself a bride in low-necked satin, walking down an aisle with Lucius Harney. He would kiss her as they left the church.… She put down the candle and covered her face with her hands as if to imprison the kiss. At that moment she heard Mr Royall’s step as he came up the stairs to bed, and a fierce revulsion of feeling swept over her. Until then she had merely despised him; now deep hatred of him filled her heart. He became to her a horrible old man.…

The next day, when Mr Royall came back to dinner, they faced each other in silence as usual. Verena’s presence at the table was an excuse for their not talking, though her deafness would have permitted the freest interchange of confidences. But when the meal was over, and Mr Royall rose from the table, he looked back at Charity, who had stayed to help the old woman clear away the dishes.

‘I want to speak to you a minute,’ he said; and she followed him across the passage, wondering.

He seated himself in his black horse-hair armchair, and she leaned against the window, indifferently. She was impatient to be gone to the library, to hunt for the book on North Dormer.

‘See here,’ he said, ‘why ain’t you at the library the days you’re supposed to be there?’

The question, breaking in on her mood of blissful abstraction, deprived her of speech, and she stared at him for a moment without answering.

‘Who says I ain’t?’

‘There’s been some complaints made, it appears. Miss Hatchard sent for me this morning—’

Charity’s smouldering resentment broke into a blaze. ‘I know! Orma Fry, and that toad of a Targatt girl – and Ben Fry, like as not. He’s going round with her. The low-down sneaks – I always knew they’d try to have me out! As if anybody ever came to the library, anyhow!’

‘Somebody did yesterday, and you weren’t there.’

‘Yesterday?’ she laughed at her happy recollection. ‘At what time wasn’t I there yesterday, I’d like to know?’

‘Round about four o’clock.’

Charity was silent. She had been so steeped in the dreamy remembrance of young Harney’s visit that she had forgotten having deserted her post as soon as he had left the library.

‘Who came at four o’clock?’

‘Miss Hatchard did.’

‘Miss Hatchard? Why, she ain’t ever been near the place since she’s been lame. She couldn’t get up the steps if she tried.’

‘She can be helped up, I guess. She was yesterday, anyhow, by the young fellow that’s staying with her. He found you there, I understand, earlier in the afternoon; and he went back and told Miss Hatchard the books were in bad shape and needed attending to. She got excited, and had herself wheeled straight round; and when she got there the place was locked. So she sent for me, and told me about that, and about the other complaints. She claims you’ve neglected things, and that she’s going to get a trained librarian.’

Charity had not moved while he spoke. She stood with her head thrown back against the window-frame, her arms hanging against her sides, and her hands so tightly clenched that she felt, without knowing what hurt her, the sharp edge of her nails against her palms.

Of all Mr Royall had said she had retained only the phrase:
‘He told Miss Hatchard the books were in bad shape.’ What did she care for the other charges against her? Malice or truth, she despised them as she despised her detractors. But that the stranger to whom she had felt herself so mysteriously drawn should have betrayed her! That at the very moment when she had fled up the hillside to think of him more deliciously he should have been hastening home to denounce her shortcomings! She remembered how, in the darkness of her room, she had covered her face to press his imagined kiss closer; and her heart raged against him for the liberty he had not taken.

‘Well, I’ll go,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’ll go right off.’

‘Go where?’ She heard the startled note in Mr Royall’s voice.

‘Why, out of their old library: straight out, and never set foot in it again. They needn’t think I’m going to wait round and let them say they’ve discharged me!’

‘Charity – Charity Royall, you listen—’ he began, getting heavily out of his chair; but she waved him aside, and walked out of the room.

Upstairs she took the library key from the place where she always hid it under her pincushion – who said she wasn’t careful? – put on her hat, and swept down again and out into the street. If Mr Royall heard her go he made no motion to detain her: his sudden rages probably made him understand the uselessness of reasoning with hers.

She reached the brick temple, unlocked the door and entered into the glacial twilight. ‘I’m glad I’ll never have to sit in this old vault again when other folks are out in the sun!’ she said aloud as the familiar chill took her. She looked with abhorrence at the long dingy rows of books, the sheep-nosed Minerva on her black pedestal, and the mild-faced young man in a high stock whose effigy pined above her desk. She meant to take out of the drawer her roll of lace and the library register, and go straight to Miss Hatchard to announce her resignation. But suddenly a great desolation overcame her, and she sat down and laid her face against the desk. Her heart was ravaged by life’s cruellest discovery: the first creature who had come
toward her out of the wilderness had brought her anguish instead of joy. She did not cry; tears came hard to her, and the storms of her heart spent themselves inwardly. But as she sat there in her dumb woe she felt her life to be too desolate, too ugly and intolerable.

‘What have I ever done to it, that it should hurt me so?’ she groaned, and pressed her fists against her lids, which were beginning to swell with weeping.

‘I won’t – I won’t go there looking like a horror!’ she muttered, springing up and pushing back her hair as if it stifled her. She opened the drawer, dragged out the register, and turned toward the door. As she did so it opened, and the young man from Miss Hatchard’s came in whistling.

H
e stopped and lifted his hat with a shy smile. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I thought there was no one here.’

Charity stood before him, barring his way. ‘You can’t come in. The library ain’t open to the public Wednesdays.’

‘I know it’s not; but my cousin gave me her key.’

‘Miss Hatchard’s got no right to give her key to other folks, any more’n I have. I’m the librarian and I know the by-laws.

This is my library.’

The young man looked profoundly surprised.

‘Why, I know it is; I’m so sorry if you mind my coming.’

‘I suppose you came to see what more you could say to set her against me? But you needn’t trouble: it’s my library today, but it won’t be this time tomorrow. I’m on the way now to take her back the key and the register.’

Young Harney’s face grew grave, but without betraying the consciousness of guilt she had looked for.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘There must be some mistake. Why should I say things against you to Miss Hatchard – or to anyone?’

The apparent evasiveness of the reply caused Charity’s indignation to overflow. ‘I don’t know why you should. I could understand Orma Fry’s doing it, because she’s always wanted to get me out of here ever since the first day. I can’t see why, when she’s got her own home, and her father to work for her; nor Ida Targatt, neither, when she got a legacy from her stepbrother on’y last year. But anyway we all live in the same place, and when it’s a place like North Dormer it’s enough to make people hate each other just to have to walk down the same street every day. But you don’t live here, and you don’t know
anything about any of us, so what did you have to meddle for? Do you suppose the other girls’d have kept the books any better’n I did? Why, Orma Fry don’t hardly know a book from a flat-iron! And what if I don’t always sit round here doing nothing till it strikes five up at the church? Who cares if the library’s open or shut? Do you suppose anybody ever comes here for books? What they’d like to come for is to meet the fellows they’re going with – if I’d let ’em. But I wouldn’t let Bill Sollas from over the hill hang round here waiting for the youngest Targatt girl, because I know him … that’s all … even if I don’t know about books all I ought to.…’

She stopped with a choking in her throat. Tremors of rage were running through her, and she steadied herself against the edge of the desk lest he should see her weakness.