Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (23 page)

Now she knew the meaning of her disdains and reluctances. She had learned what she was worth when Lucius Harney, looking at her for the first time, had lost the thread of his speech, and leaned reddening on the edge of her desk. But another kind of shyness had been born in her: a terror of exposing to vulgar perils the sacred treasure of her happiness. She was not sorry to have the neighbours suspect her of ‘going with’ a young man from the city; but she did not want it known to all the countryside how many hours of the long June days she spent with him. What she most feared was that the inevitable comments should reach Mr Royall. Charity was instinctively aware that few things concerning her escaped the eyes of the silent man under whose roof she lived; and in spite of the latitude which North Dormer accorded to courting couples she had always felt that, on the day when she showed too open a preference, Mr Royall might, as she phrased it, make her ‘pay for it’. How, she did not know; and her fear was the greater because it was undefinable. If she had been accepting the attentions of one of the village youths she would have been less apprehensive: Mr Royall could not prevent her marrying when she chose to. But everybody knew that ‘going with a city fellow’ was a different and less straightforward affair: almost every village could show a victim of the perilous venture. And her dread of Mr Royall’s intervention gave a sharpened joy to the hours she spent with young Harney, and made her, at the same time, shy of being too generally seen with him.

As he approached she rose to her knees, stretching her arms above her head with the indolent gesture that was her way of expressing a profound well-being.

‘I’m going to take you to that house up under Porcupine,’ she announced.

‘What house? Oh, yes; that ramshackle place near the swamp, with the gipsy-looking people hanging about. It’s
curious that a house with traces of real architecture should have been built in such a place. But the people were a sulky-looking lot – do you suppose they’ll let us in?’

‘They’ll do whatever I tell them,’ she said with assurance.

He threw himself down beside her. ‘Will they?’ he rejoined with a smile. ‘Well, I should like to see what’s left inside the house. And I should like to have a talk with the people. Who was it who was telling me the other day that they had come down from the Mountain?’

Charity shot a sideward look at him. It was the first time he had spoken of the Mountain except as a feature of the landscape. What else did he know about it, and about her relation to it? Her heart began to beat with the fierce impulse of resistance which she instinctively opposed to every imagined slight.

‘The Mountain? I ain’t afraid of the Mountain!’

Her tone of defiance seemed to escape him. He lay breast-down on the grass, breaking off sprigs of thyme and pressing them against his lips. Far off, above the folds of the nearer hills, the Mountain thrust itself up menacingly against a yellow sunset.

‘I must go up there some day: I want to see it,’ he continued.

Her heart-beats slackened and she turned again to examine his profile. It was innocent of all unfriendly intention.

‘What’d you want to go up the Mountain for?’

‘Why, it must be rather a curious place. There’s a queer colony up there, you know: sort of outlaws, a little independent kingdom. Of course you’ve heard them spoken of, but I’m told they have nothing to do with the people in the valleys – rather look down on them, in fact. I suppose they’re rough customers; but they must have a good deal of character.’

She did not quite know what he meant by having a good deal of character; but his tone was expressive of admiration, and deepened her dawning curiosity. It struck her now as strange that she knew so little about the Mountain. She had never asked, and no one had ever offered to enlighten her. North Dormer took the Mountain for granted, and implied its disparagement by an intonation rather than by explicit criticism.

‘It’s queer, you know,’ he continued, ‘that, just over there, on top of that hill, there should be a handful of people who don’t give a damn for anybody.’

The words thrilled her. They seemed the clue to her own revolts and defiances, and she longed to have him tell her more.

‘I don’t know much about them. Have they always been there?’

‘Nobody seems to know exactly how long. Down at Creston they told me that the first colonists are supposed to have been men who worked on the railway that was built forty or fifty years ago between Springfield and Nettleton. Some of them took to drink, or got into trouble with the police, and went off – disappeared into the woods. A year or two later there was a report that they were living up on the Mountain. Then I suppose others joined them – and children were born. Now they say there are over a hundred people up there. They seem to be quite outside the jurisdiction of the valleys. No school, no church – and no sheriff ever goes up to see what they’re about. But don’t people ever talk of them at North Dormer?’

‘I don’t know. They say they’re bad.’

He laughed. ‘Do they? We’ll go and see, shall we?’

She flushed at the suggestion, and turned her face to his. ‘You never heard, I suppose – I come from there. They brought me down when I was little.’

‘You?’ He raised himself on his elbow, looking at her with sudden interest. ‘You’re from the Mountain? How curious! I suppose that’s why you’re so different.…’

Her happy blood bathed her to the forehead. He was praising her – and praising her because she came from the Mountain!

‘Am I … different?’ she triumphed, with affected wonder.

‘Oh, awfully!’ He picked up her hand and laid a kiss on the sunburnt knuckles.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘let’s be off.’ He stood up and shook the grass from his loose grey clothes. ‘What a good day! Where are you going to take me tomorrow?’

T
hat 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 outlaw 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 overflowing; 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.