Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (22 page)

What he saw seemed to affect him deeply, for he grew red under his sunburn, and stammered out: ‘But, Miss Royall, I assure you … I assure you …’

His distress inflamed her anger, and she regained her voice to fling back: ‘If I was you I’d have the nerve to stick to what I said!’

The taunt seemed to restore his presence of mind. ‘I hope I should if I knew; but I don’t. Apparently something disagreeable has happened, for which you think I’m to blame. But I don’t know what it is, because I’ve been up on Eagle Ridge ever since the early morning.’

‘I don’t know where you’ve been this morning, but I know you were here in this library yesterday; and it was you that went home and told your cousin the books were in bad shape, and brought her round to see how I’d neglected them.’

Young Harney looked sincerely concerned. ‘Was that what you were told? I don’t wonder you’re angry. The books
are
in bad shape, and as some are interesting it’s a pity. I told Miss Hatchard they were suffering from dampness and lack of air; and I brought her here to show her how easily the place could be ventilated. I also told her you ought to have some one to help you do the dusting and airing. If you were given a wrong version of what I said I’m sorry; but I’m so fond of old books
that I’d rather see them made into a bonfire than left to moulder away like these.’

Charity felt her sobs rising and tried to stifle them in words. ‘I don’t care what you say you told her. All I know is she thinks it’s all my fault, and I’m going to lose my job, and I wanted it more’n anyone in the village, because I haven’t got anybody belonging to me, the way other folks have. All I wanted was to put aside money enough to get away from here sometime. D’you suppose if it hadn’t been for that I’d have kept on sitting day after day in this old vault?’

Of this appeal her hearer took up only the last question. ‘It
is
an old vault; but need it be? That’s the point. And it’s my putting the question to my cousin that seems to have been the cause of the trouble.’ His glance explored the melancholy penumbra of the long narrow room, resting on the blotched walls, the discoloured rows of books, and the stern rosewood desk surmounted by the portrait of the young Honorius. ‘Of course it’s a bad job to do anything with a building jammed against a hill like this ridiculous mausoleum: you couldn’t get a good draught through it without blowing a hole in the mountain. But it can be ventilated after a fashion, and the sun can be let in: I’ll show you how if you like.’ The architect’s passion for improvement had already made him lose sight of her grievance, and he lifted his stick instructively toward the cornice. But her silence seemed to tell him that she took no interest in the ventilation of the library, and turning back to her abruptly he held out both hands. ‘Look here – you don’t mean what you said? You don’t really think I’d do anything to hurt you?’

A new note in his voice disarmed her: no one had ever spoken to her in that tone.

‘Oh, what
did
you do it for then?’ she wailed. He had her hands in his, and she was feeling the smooth touch that she had imagined the day before on the hillside.

He pressed her hands lightly and let them go. ‘Why, to make things pleasanter for you here; and better for the books. I’m sorry if my cousin twisted around what I said. She’s excitable,
and she lives on trifles: I ought to have remembered that. Don’t punish me by letting her think you take her seriously.’

It was wonderful to hear him speak of Miss Hatchard as if she were a querulous baby: in spite of his shyness he had the air of power that the experience of cities probably gave. It was the fact of having lived in Nettleton that made lawyer Royall, in spite of his infirmities, the strongest man in North Dormer; and Charity was sure that this young man had lived in bigger places than Nettleton.

She felt that if she kept up her denunciatory tone he would secretly class her with Miss Hatchard; and the thought made her suddenly simple.

‘It don’t matter to Miss Hatchard how I take her. Mr Royall says she’s going to get a trained librarian; and I’d sooner resign than have the village say she sent me away.’

‘Naturally you would. But I’m sure she doesn’t mean to send you away. At any rate, won’t you give me the chance to find out first and let you know? It will be time enough to resign if I’m mistaken.’

Her pride flamed into her cheeks at the suggestion of his intervening. ‘I don’t want anybody should coax her to keep me if I don’t suit.’

He coloured too. ‘I give you my word I won’t do that. Only wait till tomorrow, will you?’ He looked straight into her eyes with his shy grey glance. ‘You can trust me, you know – you really can.’

All the old frozen woes seemed to melt in her, and she murmured awkwardly, looking away from him: ‘Oh, I’ll wait.’

T
here had never been such a June in Eagle County. Usually it was a month of moods, with abrupt alternations of belated frost and midsummer heat; this year, day followed day in a sequence of temperate beauty. Every morning a breeze blew steadily from the hills. Toward noon it built up great canopies of white cloud that threw a cool shadow over fields and woods; then before sunset the clouds dissolved again, and the western light rained its unobstructed brightness on the valley.

On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge above a sunlit hollow, her face pressed to the earth and the warm currents of the grass running through her. Directly in her line of vision a blackberry branch laid its frail white flowers and blue-green leaves against the sky. Just beyond, a tuft of sweet-fern uncurled between the beaded shoots of the grass, and a small yellow butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck of sunshine. This was all she saw; but she felt, above her and about her, the strong growth of the beeches clothing the ridge, the rounding of pale green cones on countless spruce-branches, the push of myriads of sweet-fern fronds in the cracks of the stony slope below the wood, and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags in the pasture beyond. All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of calyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of fragrance. Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalation to the pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath of some huge sun-warmed animal.

Charity had lain there a long time, passive and sun-warmed
as the slope on which she lay, when there came between her eyes and the dancing butterfly the sight of a man’s foot in a large worn boot covered with red mud.

‘Oh, don’t!’ she exclaimed, raising herself on her elbow and stretching out a warning hand.

‘Don’t what?’ a hoarse voice asked above her head.

‘Don’t stamp on those bramble flowers, you dolt!’ she retorted, springing to her knees. The foot paused and then descended clumsily on the frail branch, and raising her eyes she saw above her the bewildered face of a slouching man with a thin sunburnt beard, and white arms showing through his ragged shirt.

‘Don’t you ever
see
anything, Liff Hyatt?’ she assailed him, as he stood before her with the look of a man who has stirred up a wasp’s nest.

He grinned. ‘I seen you! That’s what I come down for.’

‘Down from where?’ she questioned, stooping to gather up the petals his foot had scattered.

He jerked his thumb toward the heights. ‘Been cutting down trees for Dan Targatt.’

Charity sank back on her heels and looked at him musingly. She was not in the least afraid of poor Liff Hyatt, though he ‘came from the Mountain’, and some of the girls ran when they saw him. Among the more reasonable he passed for a harmless creature, a sort of link between the mountain and civilized folk, who occasionally came down and did a little wood-cutting for a farmer when hands were short. Besides, she knew the Mountain people would never hurt her: Liff himself had told her so once when she was a little girl, and had met him one day at the edge of lawyer Royall’s pasture. ‘They won’t any of ’em touch you up there, f’ever you was to come up.… But I don’t s’pose you will,’ he had added philosophically, looking at her new shoes, and at the red ribbon that Mrs Royall had tied in her hair.

Charity had, in truth, never felt any desire to visit her birthplace. She did not care to have it known that she was of the Mountain, and was shy of being seen in talk with Liff Hyatt.
But today she was not sorry to have him appear. A great many things had happened to her since the day when young Lucius Harney had entered the doors of the Hatchard Memorial, but none, perhaps, so unforeseen as the fact of her suddenly finding it a convenience to be on good terms with Liff Hyatt. She continued to look up curiously at his freckled weather-beaten face, with feverish hollows below the cheekbones and the pale yellow eyes of a harmless animal. ‘I wonder if he’s related to me?’ she thought, with a shiver of disdain.

‘Is there any folks living in the brown house by the swamp, up under Porcupine?’ she presently asked in an indifferent tone.

Liff Hyatt, for a while, considered her with surprise; then he scratched his head and shifted his weight from one tattered sole to the other.

‘There’s always the same folks in the brown house,’ he said with his vague grin.

‘They’re from up your way, ain’t they?’

‘Their name’s the same as mine,’ he rejoined uncertainly.

Charity still held him with resolute eyes. ‘See here, I want to go there some day and take a gentleman with me that’s boarding with us. He’s up in these parts drawing pictures.’

She did not offer to explain this statement. It was too far beyond Liff Hyatt’s limitations for the attempt to be worth making. ‘He wants to see the brown house, and go all over it,’ she pursued.

Liff was still running his fingers perplexedly through his shock of straw-coloured hair. ‘Is it a fellow from the city?’ he asked.

‘Yes. He draws pictures of things. He’s down there now drawing the Bonner house.’ She pointed to a chimney just visible over the dip of the pasture below the wood.

‘The Bonner house?’ Liff echoed incredulously.

‘Yes. You won’t understand – and it don’t matter. All I say is: he’s going to the Hyatts’ in a day or two.’

Liff looked more and more perplexed. ‘Bash is ugly sometimes in the afternoons.’

‘I know. But I guess he won’t trouble me.’ She threw her
head back, her eyes full on Hyatt’s. ‘I’m coming too: you tell him.’

‘They won’t none of them trouble you, the Hyatts won’t. What d’you want a take a stranger with you, though?’

‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? You’ve got to tell Bash Hyatt.’

He looked away at the blue mountains on the horizon; then his gaze dropped to the chimney-top below the pasture.

‘He’s down there now?’

‘Yes.’

He shifted his weight again, crossed his arms, and continued to survey the distant landscape. ‘Well, so long,’ he said at last, inconclusively; and turning away he shambled up the hillside. From the ledge above her, he paused to call down: ‘I wouldn’t go there a Sunday’; then he clambered on till the trees closed in on him. Presently, from high overhead, Charity heard the ring of his axe.

She lay on the warm ridge, thinking of many things that the woodsman’s appearance had stirred up in her. She knew nothing of her early life, and had never felt any curiosity about it: only a sullen reluctance to explore the corner of her memory where certain blurred images lingered. But all that had happened to her within the last few weeks had stirred her to the sleeping depths. She had become absorbingly interesting to herself, and everything that had to do with her past was illuminated by this sudden curiosity.

She hated more than ever the fact of coming from the Mountain; but it was no longer indifferent to her. Everything that in any way affected her was alive and vivid: even the hateful things had grown interesting because they were a part of herself.

‘I wonder if Liff Hyatt knows who my mother was?’ she mused; and it filled her with a tremor of surprise to think that some woman who was once young and slight, with quick motions of the blood like hers, had carried her in her breast, and watched her sleeping. She had always thought of her mother as so long dead as to be no more than a nameless pinch
of earth; but now it occurred to her that the once-young woman might be alive, and wrinkled and elf-locked like the woman she had sometimes seen in the door of the brown house that Lucius Harney wanted to draw.

The thought brought her back to the central point in her mind, and she strayed away from the conjectures roused by Liff Hyatt’s presence. Speculations concerning the past could not hold her long when the present was so rich, the future so rosy, and when Lucius Harney, a stone’s throw away, was bending over his sketch-book, frowning, calculating, measuring, and then throwing his head back with the sudden smile that had shed its brightness over everything.

She scrambled to her feet, but as she did so she saw him coming up the pasture and dropped down on the grass to wait. When he was drawing and measuring one of ‘his houses’, as she called them, she often strayed away by herself into the woods or up the hillside. It was partly from shyness that she did so: from a sense of inadequacy that came to her most painfully when her companion, absorbed in his job, forgot her ignorance and her inability to follow his least allusion, and plunged into a monologue on art and life. To avoid the awkwardness of listening with a blank face, and also to escape the surprised stare of the inhabitants of the houses before which he would abruptly pull up their horse and open his sketch-book, she slipped away to some spot from which, without being seen, she could watch him at work, or at least look down on the house he was drawing. She had not been displeased, at first, to have it known to North Dormer and the neighbourhood that she was driving Miss Hatchard’s cousin about the country in the buggy he had hired of lawyer Royall. She had always kept to herself, contemptuously aloof from village love-making, without exactly knowing whether her fierce pride was due to the sense of her tainted origin, or whether she was reserving herself for a more brilliant fate. Sometimes she envied the other girls their sentimental preoccupations, their long hours of inarticulate philandering with one of the few youths who still lingered in the village; but when she
pictured herself curling her hair or puffing a new ribbon on her hat for Ben Fry or one of the Sollas boys the fever dropped and she relapsed into indifference.