Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (20 page)

She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it.

She often climbed up the hill and lay there alone for the mere pleasure of feeling the wind and of rubbing her cheeks in the grass. Generally at such times she did not think of
anything, but lay immersed in an inarticulate well-being. Today the sense of well-being was intensified by her joy at escaping from the library. She liked well enough to have a friend drop in and talk to her when she was on duty, but she hated to be bothered about books. How could she remember where they were, when they were so seldom asked for? Orma Fry occasionally took out a novel, and her brother Ben was fond of what he called ‘jography’, and of books relating to trade and book-keeping; but no one else asked for anything except, at intervals, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, or ‘Opening a Chestnut Burr’, or Longfellow. She had these under her hand, and could have found them in the dark; but unexpected demands came so rarely that they exasperated her like an injustice.…

She had liked the young man’s looks, and his short-sighted eyes, and his odd way of speaking, that was abrupt yet soft, just as his hands were sunburnt and sinewy, yet with smooth nails like a woman’s. His hair was sunburnt-looking too, or rather the colour of bracken after frost; his eyes grey, with the appealing look of the shortsighted, his smile shy yet confident, as if he knew lots of things she had never dreamed of, and yet wouldn’t for the world have had her feel his superiority. But she did feel it, and liked the feeling; for it was new to her. Poor and ignorant as she was, and knew herself to be – humblest of the humble even in North Dormer, where to come from the Mountain was the worst disgrace – yet in her narrow world she had always ruled. It was partly, of course, owing to the fact that lawyer Royall was ‘the biggest man in North Dormer’; so much too big for it, in fact, that outsiders, who didn’t know, always wondered how it held him. In spite of everything – and in spite even of Miss Hatchard – lawyer Royall ruled in North Dormer; and Charity ruled in lawyer Royall’s house. She had never put it to herself in those terms; but she knew her power, knew what it was made of, and hated it. Confusedly, the young man in the library had made her feel for the first time what might be the sweetness of dependence.

She sat up, brushed the bits of grass from her hair, and
looked down on the house where she held sway. It stood just below her, cheerless and untended, its faded red front divided from the road by a ‘yard’ with a path bordered by gooseberry bushes, a stone well overgrown with traveller’s joy, and a sickly Crimson Rambler tied to a fan-shaped support, which Mr Royall had once brought up from Hepburn to please her. Behind the house a bit of uneven ground with clothes-lines strung across it stretched up to a dry wall, and beyond the wall a patch of corn and a few rows of potatoes strayed vaguely into the adjoining wilderness of rock and fern.

Charity could not recall her first sight of the house. She had been told that she was ill of a fever when she was brought down from the Mountain; and she could only remember waking one day in a cot at the foot of Mrs Royall’s bed, and opening her eyes on the cold neatness of the room that was afterward to be hers.

Mrs Royall died seven or eight years later; and by that time Charity had taken the measure of most things about her. She knew that Mrs Royall was sad and timid and weak; she knew that lawyer Royall was harsh and violent, and still weaker. She knew that she had been christened Charity (in the white church at the other end of the village) to commemorate Mr Royall’s disinterestedness in ‘bringing her down’, and to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence; she knew that Mr Royall was her guardian, but that he had not legally adopted her, though everybody spoke of her as Charity Royall; and she knew why he had come back to live at North Dormer, instead of practising at Nettleton, where he had begun his legal career.

After Mrs Royall’s death there was some talk of sending her to a boarding-school. Miss Hatchard suggested it, and had a long conference with Mr Royall, who, in pursuance of her plan, departed one day for Starkfield to visit the institution she recommended. He came back the next night with a black face; worse, Charity observed, than she had ever seen him; and by that time she had had some experience.

When she asked him how soon she was to start he answered shortly, ‘You ain’t going,’ and shut himself up in the room he
called his office; and the next day the lady who kept the school at Starkfield wrote that ‘under the circumstances’ she was afraid she could not make room just then for another pupil.

Charity was disappointed; but she understood. It wasn’t the temptations of Starkfield that had been Mr Royall’s undoing; it was the thought of losing her. He was a dreadfully ‘lonesome’ man; she had made that out because she was so ‘lonesome’ herself. He and she, face to face in that sad house, had sounded the depths of isolation; and though she felt no particular affection for him, and not the slightest gratitude, she pitied him because she was conscious that he was superior to the people about him, and that she was the only being between him and solitude. Therefore, when Miss Hatchard sent for her a day or two later, to talk of a school at Nettleton, and to say that this time a friend of hers would ‘make the necessary arrangements’, Charity cut her short with the announcement that she had decided not to leave North Dormer.

Miss Hatchard reasoned with her kindly, but to no purpose; she simply repeated: ‘I guess Mr Royall’s too lonesome.’

Miss Hatchard blinked perplexedly behind her eye-glasses. Her long frail face was full of puzzled wrinkles, and she leant forward, resting her hands on the arms of her mahogany armchair, with the evident desire to say something that ought to be said.

‘The feeling does you credit, my dear.’

She looked about the pale walls of her sitting-room, seeking counsel of ancestral daguerreotypes and didactic samplers; but they seemed to make utterance more difficult.

‘The fact is, it’s not only – not only because of the advantages. There are other reasons. You’re too young to understand—’

‘Oh, no, I ain’t,’ said Charity harshly; and Miss Hatchard blushed to the roots of her blonde cap. But she must have felt a vague relief at having her explanation cut short, for she concluded, again invoking the daguerreotypes: ‘Of course I shall always do what I can for you; and in case … in case … you know you can always come to me.…’

Lawyer Royall was waiting for Charity in the porch when she returned from this visit. He had shaved, and brushed his black coat, and looked a magnificent monument of a man; at such moments she really admired him.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘is it settled?’

‘Yes, it’s settled. I ain’t going.’

‘Not to the Nettleton school?’

‘Not anywhere.’

He cleared his throat and asked sternly: ‘Why?’

‘I’d rather not,’ she said, swinging past him on her way to her room. It was the following week that he brought her up the Crimson Rambler and its fan from Hepburn. He had never given her anything before.

The next outstanding incident of her life had happened two years later, when she was seventeen. Lawyer Royall, who hated to go to Nettleton, had been called there in connection with a case. He still exercised his profession, though litigation languished in North Dormer and its outlying hamlets; and for once he had had an opportunity that he could not afford to refuse. He spent three days in Nettleton, won his case, and came back in high good-humour. It was a rare mood with him, and manifested itself on this occasion by his talking impressively at the supper-table of the ‘rousing welcome’ his old friends had given him. He wound up confidentially: ‘I was a damn fool ever to leave Nettleton. It was Mrs Royall that made me do it.’

Charity immediately perceived that something bitter had happened to him, and that he was trying to talk down the recollection. She went up to bed early, leaving him seated in moody thought, his elbows propped on the worn oilcloth of the supper table. On the way up she had extracted from his overcoat pocket the key of the cupboard where the bottle of whiskey was kept.

She was awakened by a rattling at her door and jumped out of bed. She heard Mr Royall’s voice, low and peremptory, and opened the door, fearing an accident. No other thought had occurred to her; but when she saw him in the doorway, a ray
from the autumn moon falling on his discomposed face, she understood.

For a moment they looked at each other in silence; then, as he put his foot across the threshold, she stretched out her arm and stopped him.

‘You go right back from here,’ she said, in a shrill voice that startled her; ‘you ain’t going to have that key tonight.’

‘Charity, let me in. I don’t want the key. I’m a lonesome man,’ he began, in the deep voice that sometimes moved her.

Her heart gave a startled plunge, but she continued to hold him back contemptuously. ‘Well, I guess you made a mistake, then. This ain’t your wife’s room any longer.’

She was not frightened, she simply felt a deep disgust; and perhaps he divined it or read it in her face, for after staring at her a moment he drew back and turned slowly away from the door. With her ear to her keyhole she heard him feel his way down the dark stairs, and toward the kitchen; and she listened for the crash of the cupboard panel. But instead she heard him, after an interval, unlock the door of the house, and his heavy steps came to her through the silence as he walked down the path. She crept to the window and saw his bent figure striding up the road in the moonlight. Then a belated sense of fear came to her with the consciousness of victory, and she slipped into bed, cold to the bone.

A day or two later poor Eudora Skeff, who for twenty years had been the custodian of the Hatchard library, died suddenly of pneumonia; and the day after the funeral Charity went to see Miss Hatchard, and asked to be appointed librarian. The request seemed to surprise Miss Hatchard: she evidently questioned the new candidate’s qualifications.

‘Why, I don’t know, my dear. Aren’t you rather too young?’ she hesitated.

‘I want to earn some money,’ Charity merely answered.

‘Doesn’t Mr Royall give you all you require? No one is rich in North Dormer.’

‘I want to earn money enough to get away.’

‘To get away?’ Miss Hatchard’s puzzled wrinkles deepened, and there was a distressful pause. ‘You want to leave Mr Royall?’

‘Yes: or I want another woman in the house with me,’ said Charity resolutely.

Miss Hatchard clasped her nervous hands about the arms of her chair. Her eyes invoked the faded countenances on the wall, and after a faint cough of indecision she brought out: ‘The … the housework’s too hard for you, I suppose?’

Charity’s heart grew cold. She understood that Miss Hatchard had no help to give her and that she would have to fight her way out of her difficulty alone. A deeper sense of isolation overcame her; she felt incalculably old. ‘She’s got to be talked to like a baby,’ she thought, with a feeling of compassion for Miss Hatchard’s long immaturity. ‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said aloud. ‘The housework’s too hard for me: I’ve been coughing a good deal this fall.’

She noted the immediate effect of this suggestion. Miss Hatchard paled at the memory of poor Eudora’s taking-off, and promised to do what she could. But of course there were people she must consult: the clergyman, the selectmen of North Dormer, and a distant Hatchard relative at Springfield. ‘If you’d only gone to school!’ she sighed. She followed Charity to the door, and there, in the security of the threshold, said with a glance of evasive appeal: ‘I know Mr Royall is … trying at times; but his wife bore with him; and you must always remember, Charity, that it was Mr Royall who brought you down from the Mountain.’

Charity went home and opened the door of Mr Royall’s ‘office’. He was sitting there by the stove reading Daniel Webster’s speeches. They had met at meals during the five days that had elapsed since he had come to her door, and she had walked at his side at Eudora’s funeral; but they had not spoken a word to each other.

He glanced up in surprise as she entered, and she noticed that he was unshaved, and that he looked unusually old; but as she had always thought of him as an old man the change in his
appearance did not move her. She told him she had been to see Miss Hatchard, and with what object. She saw that he was astonished; but he made no comment.

‘I told her the housework was too hard for me, and I wanted to earn the money to pay for a hired girl. But I ain’t going to pay for her: you’ve got to. I want to have some money of my own.’

Mr Royall’s bushy black eyebrows were drawn together in a frown, and he sat drumming with ink-stained nails on the edge of his desk.

‘What do you want to earn money for?’ he asked.

‘So’s to get away when I want to.’

‘Why do you want to get away?’

Her contempt flashed out. ‘Do you suppose anybody’d stay at North Dormer if they could help it? You wouldn’t, folks say!’

With lowered head he asked: ‘Where’d you go to?’

‘Anywhere where I can earn my living. I’ll try here first, and if I can’t do it here I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll go up the Mountain if I have to.’ She paused on this threat, and saw that it had taken effect. ‘I want you should get Miss Hatchard and the selectmen to take me at the library: and I want a woman here in the house with me,’ she repeated.

Mr Royall had grown exceedingly pale. When she ended he stood up ponderously, leaning against the desk; and for a second or two they looked at each other.

‘See here,’ he said at length, as though utterance were difficult, ‘there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you; I’d ought to have said it before. I want you to marry me.’

The girl still stared at him without moving. ‘I want you to marry me,’ he repeated, clearing his throat. ‘The minister’ll be up here next Sunday and we can fix it up then. Or I’ll drive you down to Hepburn to the Justice, and get it done there. I’ll do whatever you say.’ His eyes fell under the merciless stare she continued to fix on him, and he shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. As he stood there before her, unwieldy, shabby, disordered, the purple veins distorting the
hands he pressed against the desk, and his long orator’s jaw trembling with the effort of his avowal, he seemed like a hideous parody of the fatherly old man she had always known.