Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (25 page)

He was careful to prosecute this inquiry on the days when the library was open to the public; and Charity was therefore sure of spending part of the afternoon in his company. The Targatt girl’s presence, and the risk of being interrupted by some passer-by suddenly smitten with a thirst for letters, restricted their intercourse to the exchange of commonplaces; but there was a fascination to Charity in the contrast between these public civilities and their secret intimacy.

The day after their drive to the brown house was ‘library day’, and she sat at her desk working at the revised catalogue, while the Targatt girl, one eye on the window, chanted out the titles of a pile of books. Charity’s thoughts were far away, in the dismal house by the swamp, and under the twilight sky during the long drive home, when Lucius Harney had consoled her with endearing words. That day, for the first time since he had been boarding with them, he had failed to appear as usual at the midday meal. No message had come to explain
his absence, and Mr Royall, who was more than usually taciturn, had betrayed no surprise, and made no comment. In itself this indifference was not particularly significant, for Mr Royall, in common with most of his fellow-citizens, had a way of accepting events passively, as if he had long since come to the conclusion that no one who lived in North Dormer could hope to modify them. But to Charity, in the reaction from her mood of passionate exaltation, there was something disquieting in his silence. It was almost as if Lucius Harney had never had a part in their lives: Mr Royall’s imperturbable indifference seemed to relegate him to the domain of unreality.

As she sat at work, she tried to shake off her disappointment at Harney’s non-appearing. Some trifling incident had probably kept him from joining them at midday; but she was sure he must be eager to see her again, and that he would not want to wait till they met at supper, between Mr Royall and Verena. She was wondering what his first words would be, and trying to devise a way of getting rid of the Targatt girl before he came, when she heard steps outside, and he walked up the path with Mr Miles.

The clergyman from Hepburn seldom came to North Dormer except when he drove over to officiate at the old white church which, by an unusual chance, happened to belong to the Episcopal communion. He was a brisk affable man, eager to make the most of the fact that a little nucleus of ‘church-people’ had survived in the sectarian wilderness, and resolved to undermine the influence of the ginger-bread-coloured Baptist chapel at the other end of the village; but he was kept busy by parochial work at Hepburn, where there were paper-mills and saloons, and it was not often that he could spare time for North Dormer.

Charity, who went to the white church (like all the best people in North Dormer), admired Mr Miles, and had even, during the memorable trip to Nettleton, imagined herself married to a man who had such a straight nose and such a beautiful way of speaking, and who lived in a brown-stone rectory covered with Virginia creeper. It had been a shock to
discover that the privilege was already enjoyed by a lady with crimped hair and a large baby; but the arrival of Lucius Harney had long since banished Mr Miles from Charity’s dreams, and as he walked up the path at Harney’s side she saw him as he really was: a fat middle-aged man with a baldness showing under his clerical hat, and spectacles on his Grecian nose. She wondered what had called him to North Dormer on a weekday, and felt a little hurt that Harney should have brought him to the library.

It presently appeared that his presence there was due to Miss Hatchard. He had been spending a few days at Springfield, to fill a friend’s pulpit, and had been consulted by Miss Hatchard as to young Harney’s plan for ventilating the ‘Memorial’. To lay hands on the Hatchard ark was a grave matter, and Miss Hatchard, always full of scruples, and of scruples about her scruples (it was Harney’s phrase), wished to have Mr Miles’s opinion before deciding.

‘I couldn’t,’ Mr Miles explained, ‘quite make out from your cousin what changes you wanted to make, and as the other trustees did not understand either I thought I had better drive over and take a look – though I’m sure,’ he added, turning his friendly spectacles on the young man, ‘that no one could be more competent – but of course this spot has its peculiar sanctity!’

‘I hope a little fresh air won’t desecrate it,’ Harney laughingly rejoined; and they walked to the other end of the library while he set forth his idea to the Rector.

Mr Miles had greeted the two girls with his usual friendliness, but Charity saw that he was occupied with other things, and she presently became aware, by the scraps of conversation drifting over to her, that he was still under the charm of his visit to Springfield, which appeared to have been full of agreeable incidents.

‘Ah, the Coopersons … yes, you know them, of course,’ she heard. ‘That’s a fine old house! And Ned Cooperson has collected some really remarkable impressionist pictures.…’ The names he cited were unknown to Charity. ‘Yes; yes; the
Schaefer quartette played at Lyric Hall on Saturday evening; and on Monday I had the privilege of hearing them again at the Towers. Beautifully done … Bach and Beethoven … a lawn-party first … I saw Miss Balch several times, by the way … looking extremely handsome.…’

Charity dropped her pencil and forgot to listen to the Targatt girl’s sing-song. Why had Mr Miles suddenly brought up Annabel Balch’s name?

‘Oh, really?’ she heard Harney rejoin; and, raising his stick, he pursued: ‘You see, my plan is to move these shelves away, and open a round window in this wall, on the axis of the one under the pediment.’

‘I suppose she’ll be coming up here later to stay with Miss Hatchard?’ Mr Miles went on, following on his train of thought; then, spinning about and tilting his head back: ‘Yes, yes, I see – I understand: that will give a draught without materially altering the look of things. I can see no objection.’

The discussion went on for some minutes, and gradually the two men moved back toward the desk. Mr Miles stopped again and looked thoughtfully at Charity. ‘Aren’t you a little pale, my dear? Not overworking? Mr Harney tells me you and Mamie are giving the library a thorough overhauling.’ He was always careful to remember his parishioners’ Christian names, and at the right moment he bent his benignant spectacles on the Targatt girl.

Then he turned to Charity. ‘Don’t take things hard, my dear; don’t take things hard. Come down and see Mrs Miles and me some day at Hepburn,’ he said, pressing her hand and waving a farewell to Mamie Targatt. He went out of the library, and Harney followed him.

Charity thought she detected a look of constraint in Harney’s eyes. She fancied he did not want to be alone with her; and with a sudden pang she wondered if he repented the tender things he had said to her the night before. His words had been more fraternal than lover-like; but she had lost their exact sense in the caressing warmth of his voice. He had made her feel that the fact of her being a waif from the Mountain
was only another reason for holding her close and soothing her with consolatory murmurs; and when the drive was over, and she got out of the buggy, tired, cold, and aching with emotion, she stepped as if the ground were a sunlit wave and she the spray on its crest.

Why, then, had his manner suddenly changed, and why did he leave the library with Mr Miles? Her restless imagination fastened on the name of Annabel Balch: from the moment it had been mentioned she fancied that Harney’s expression had altered. Annabel Balch at a garden-party at Springfield, looking ‘extremely handsome’ … perhaps Mr Miles had seen her there at the very moment when Charity and Harney were sitting in the Hyatts’ hovel, between a drunkard and a half-witted old woman! Charity did not know exactly what a garden-party was, but her glimpse of the flower-edged lawns of Nettleton helped her to visualize the scene, and envious recollections of the ‘old things’ which Miss Balch avowedly ‘wore out’ when she came to North Dormer made it only too easy to picture her in her splendour. Charity understood what associations the name must have called up, and felt the uselessness of struggling against the unseen influences in Harney’s life.

When she came down from her room for supper he was not there; and while she waited in the porch she recalled the tone in which Mr Royall had commented the day before on their early start. Mr Royall sat at her side, his chair tilted back, his broad black boots with side-elastics resting against the lower bar of the railings. His rumpled grey hair stood up above his forehead like the crest of an angry bird, and the leather-brown of his veined cheeks was blotched with red. Charity knew that those red spots were the signs of a coming explosion.

Suddenly he said: ‘Where’s supper? Has Verena Marsh slipped up again on her soda-biscuits?’

Charity threw a startled glance at him. ‘I presume she’s waiting for Mr Harney.’

‘Mr Harney, is she? She’d better dish up, then. He ain’t coming.’ He stood up, walked to the door, and called out, in
the pitch necessary to penetrate the old woman’s tympanum: ‘Get along with the supper, Verena.’

Charity was trembling with apprehension. Something had happened – she was sure of it now – and Mr Royall knew what it was. But not for the world would she have gratified him by showing her anxiety. She took her usual place, and he seated himself opposite, and poured out a strong cup of tea before passing her the tea-pot. Verena brought some scrambled eggs, and he piled his plate with them. ‘Ain’t you going to take any?’ he asked. Charity roused herself and began to eat.

The tone with which Mr Royall had said ‘He’s not coming’ seemed to her full of an ominous satisfaction. She saw that he had suddenly begun to hate Lucius Harney, and guessed herself to be the cause of this change of feeling. But she had no means of finding out whether some act of hostility on his part had made the young man stay away, or whether he simply wished to avoid seeing her again after their drive back from the brown house. She ate her supper with a studied show of indifference, but she knew that Mr Royall was watching her and that her agitation did not escape him.

After supper she went up to her room. She heard Mr Royall cross the passage, and presently the sounds below her window showed that he had returned to the porch. She seated herself on her bed and began to struggle against the desire to go down and ask him what had happened. ‘I’d rather die than do it,’ she muttered to herself. With a word he could have relieved her uncertainty: but never would she gratify him by saying it.

She rose and leaned out of the window. The twilight had deepened into night, and she watched the frail curve of the young moon dropping to the edge of the hills. Through the darkness she saw one or two figures moving down the road; but the evening was too cold for loitering, and presently the strollers disappeared. Lamps were beginning to show here and there in the windows. A bar of light brought out the whiteness of a clump of lilies in the Hawes’s yard: and farther down the street Carrick Fry’s Rochester lamp cast its bold illumination on the rustic flower-tub in the middle of his grass-plot.

For a long time she continued to lean in the window. But a fever of unrest consumed her, and finally she went downstairs, took her hat from its hook, and swung out of the house. Mr Royall sat in the porch, Verena beside him, her old hands crossed on her patched skirt. As Charity went down the steps Mr Royall called after her: ‘Where you going?’ She could easily have answered: ‘To Orma’s’, or ‘Down to the Targatts’; and either answer might have been true, for she had no purpose. But she swept on in silence, determined not to recognize his right to question her.

At the gate she paused and looked up and down the road. The darkness drew her, and she thought of climbing the hill and plunging into the depths of the larch-wood above the pasture. Then she glanced irresolutely along the street, and as she did so a gleam appeared through the spruces at Miss Hatchard’s gate. Lucius Harney was there, then – he had not gone down to Hepburn with Mr Miles, as she had at first imagined. But where had he taken his evening meal, and what had caused him to stay away from Mr Royall’s? The light was positive proof of his presence, for Miss Hatchard’s servants were away on a holiday, and her farmer’s wife came only in the mornings, to make the young man’s bed and prepare his coffee. Beside that lamp he was doubtless sitting at this moment. To know the truth Charity had only to walk half the length of the village, and knock at the lighted window. She hesitated a minute or two longer, and then turned toward Miss Hatchard’s.

She walked quickly, straining her eyes to detect anyone who might be coming along the street; and before reaching the Frys’ she crossed over to avoid the light from their window. Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her. But the street was empty, and she passed unnoticed through the gate and up the path to the house. Its white front glimmered indistinctly through the trees, showing only one oblong of light on the lower floor. She had supposed that the lamp was in Miss Hatchard’s sitting-room; but she now saw that it shone
through a window at the farther corner of the house. She did not know the room to which this window belonged, and she paused under the trees, checked by a sense of strangeness. Then she moved on, treading softly on the short grass, and keeping so close to the house that whoever was in the room, even if roused by her approach, would not be able to see her.

The window opened on a narrow verandah with a trellised arch. She leaned close to the trellis, and parting the sprays of clematis that covered it looked into a corner of the room. She saw the foot of a mahogany bed, an engraving on the wall, a wash-stand on which a towel had been tossed, and one end of the green-covered table which held the lamp. Half of the lampshade projected into her field of vision, and just under it two smooth sunburnt hands, one holding a pencil and the other a ruler, were moving to and fro over a drawing-board.

Her heart jumped and then stood still. He was there, a few feet away; and while her soul was tossing on seas of woe he had been quietly sitting at his drawing-board. The sight of those two hands, moving with their usual skill and precision, woke her out of her dream. Her eyes were opened to the disproportion between what she had felt and the cause of her agitation; and she was turning away from the window when one hand abruptly pushed aside the drawing-board and the other flung down the pencil.