Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (38 page)

Thus far she had been impelled by the blind instinct of flight; but each step seemed to bring her nearer to the realities of which her feverish vigil had given only a shadowy image. Now that she walked again in a daylight world, on the way back to familiar things, her imagination moved more soberly. On one point she was still decided: she could not remain at North Dormer, and the sooner she got away from it the better. But everything beyond was darkness.

As she continued to climb the air grew keener, and when she passed from the shelter of the pines to the open grassy roof of the Mountain the cold wind of the night before sprang out on her. She bent her shoulders and struggled on against it for a while; but presently her breath failed, and she sat down under a ledge of rock overhung by shivering birches. From where she sat she saw the trail wandering across the bleached grass in the direction of Hamblin, and the granite wall of the Mountain falling away to infinite distances. On that side of the ridge the valleys still lay in wintry shadow; but in the plain beyond the sun was touching village roofs and steeples, and gilding the haze of smoke over far-off invisible towns.

Charity felt herself a mere speck in the lonely circle of the sky. The events of the last two days seemed to have divided her forever from her short dream of bliss. Even Harney’s image had been blurred by that crushing experience: she thought of him as so remote from her that he seemed hardly more than a memory. In her fagged and floating mind only one sensation had the weight of reality; it was the bodily burden of her child. But for it she would have felt as rootless as the whiffs of thistledown the wind blew past her. Her child was like a load that held her down, and yet like a hand that
pulled her to her feet. She said to herself that she must get up and struggle on.…

Her eyes turned back to the trail across the top of the Mountain, and in the distance she saw a buggy against the sky. She knew its antique outline, and the gaunt build of the old horse pressing forward with lowered head; and after a moment she recognized the heavy bulk of the man who held the reins. The buggy was following the trail and making straight for the pine-wood through which she had climbed; and she knew at once that the driver was in search of her. Her first impulse was to crouch down under the ledge till he had passed; but the instinct of concealment was overruled by the relief of feeling that someone was near her in the awful emptiness. She stood up and walked toward the buggy.

Mr Royall saw her, and touched the horse with the whip. A minute or two later he was abreast of Charity; their eyes met, and without speaking he leaned over and helped her up into the buggy. She tried to speak, to stammer out some explanation, but no words came to her; and as he drew the cover over her knees he simply said: ‘The minister told me he’d left you up here, so I come up for you.’

He turned the horse’s head, and they began to jog back toward Hamblin. Charity sat speechless, staring straight ahead of her, and Mr Royall occasionally uttered a word of encouragement to the horse: ‘Get along there, Dan.… I gave him a rest at Hamblin; but I brought him along pretty quick, and it’s a stiff pull up here against the wind.’

As he spoke it occurred to her for the first time that to reach the top of the Mountain so early he must have left North Dormer at the coldest hour of the night, and have travelled steadily but for the halt at Hamblin; and she felt a softness at her heart which no act of his had ever produced since he had brought her the Crimson Rambler because she had given up boarding-school to stay with him.

After an interval he began again: ‘It was a day just like this, only spitting snow, when I come up here for you the first time.’ Then, as if fearing that she might take his remark as a reminder
of past benefits, he added quickly: ‘I dunno’s you think it was such a good job, either.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she murmured, looking straight ahead of her.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I tried—’

He did not finish the sentence, and she could think of nothing more to say.

‘Ho, there, Dan, step out,’ he muttered, jerking the bridle. ‘We ain’t home yet. – You cold?’ he asked abruptly.

She shook her head, but he drew the cover higher up, and stooped to tuck it in about the ankles. She continued to look straight ahead. Tears of weariness and weakness were dimming her eyes and beginning to run over, but she dared not wipe them away lest he should observe the gesture.

They drove in silence, following the long loops of the descent upon Hamblin, and Mr Royall did not speak again till they reached the outskirts of the village. Then he let the reins droop on the dashboard and drew out his watch.

‘Charity,’ he said, ‘you look fair done up, and North Dormer’s a goodish way off. I’ve figured out that we’d do better to stop here long enough for you to get a mouthful of breakfast and then drive down to Creston and take the train.’

She roused herself from her apathetic musing. ‘The train – what train?’

Mr Royall, without answering, let the horse jog on till they reached the door of the first house in the village. ‘This is old Mrs Hobart’s place,’ he said. ‘She’ll give us something hot to drink.’

Charity, half unconsciously, found herself getting out of the buggy and following him in at the open door. They entered a decent kitchen with a fire crackling in the stove. An old woman with a kindly face was setting out cups and saucers on the table. She looked up and nodded as they came in, and Mr Royall advanced to the stove, clapping his numb hands together.

‘Well, Mrs Hobart, you got any breakfast for this young lady? You can see she’s cold and hungry.’

Mrs Hobart smiled on Charity and took a tin coffee-pot
from the fire. ‘My, you do look pretty mean,’ she said compassionately.

Charity reddened, and sat down at the table. A feeling of complete passiveness had once more come over her, and she was conscious only of the pleasant animal sensations of warmth and rest.

Mrs Hobart put bread and milk on the table, and then went out of the house: Charity saw her leading the horse away to the barn across the yard. She did not come back, and Mr Royall and Charity sat alone at the table with the smoking coffee between them. He poured out a cup for her, and put a piece of bread in the saucer, and she began to eat.

As the warmth of the coffee flowed through her veins her thoughts cleared and she began to feel like a living being again; but the return to life was so painful that the food choked in her throat and she sat staring down at the table in silent anguish.

After a while Mr Royall pushed back his chair. ‘Now, then,’ he said, ‘if you’re a mind to go along—’ She did not move, and he continued: ‘We can pick up the noon train for Nettleton if you say so.’

The words sent the blood rushing to her face, and she raised her startled eyes to his. He was standing on the other side of the table looking at her kindly and gravely; and suddenly she understood what he was going to say. She continued to sit motionless, a leaden weight upon her lips.

‘You and me have spoke some hard things to each other in our time, Charity; and there’s no good that I can see in any more talking now. But I’ll never feel any way but one about you; and if you say so we’ll drive down in time to catch that train, and go straight to the minister’s house; and when you come back home you’ll come as Mrs Royall.’

His voice had the grave persuasive accent that had moved his hearers at the Home Week festival; she had a sense of depths of mournful tolerance under that easy tone. Her whole body began to tremble with the dread of her own weakness.

‘Oh, I can’t—’ she burst out desperately.

‘Can’t what?’

She herself did not know: she was not sure if she was rejecting what he offered, or already struggling against the temptation of taking what she no longer had a right to. She stood up, shaking and bewildered, and began to speak: ‘I know I ain’t been fair to you always; but I want to be now.… I want you to know … I want …’ Her voice failed her and she stopped.

Mr Royall leaned against the wall. He was paler than usual, but his face was composed and kindly and her agitation did not appear to perturb him.

‘What’s all this about wanting?’ he said as she paused. ‘Do you know what you really want? I’ll tell you. You want to be took home and took care of. And I guess that’s all there is to say.’

‘No … it’s not all.…’

‘Ain’t it?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Well, I’ll tell you another thing. All
I
want is to know if you’ll marry me. If there was anything else, I’d tell you so; but there ain’t. Come to my age, a man knows the things that matter and the things that don’t; that’s about the only good turn life does us.’

His tone was so strong and resolute that it was like a supporting arm about her. She felt her resistance melting, her strength slipping away from her as he spoke.

‘Don’t cry, Charity,’ he exclaimed in a shaken voice. She looked up, startled at his emotion, and their eyes met.

‘See here,’ he said gently, ‘old Dan’s come a long distance, and we’ve got to let him take it easy the rest of the way.

He picked up the cloak that had slipped to her chair and laid it about her shoulders. She followed him out of the house, and they walked across the yard to the shed, where the horse was tied. Mr Royall unblanketed him and led him out into the road. Charity got into the buggy and he drew the cover about her and shook out the reins with a cluck. When they reached the end of the village he turned the horse’s head toward Creston.

T
hey began to jog down the winding road to the valley at old Dan’s languid pace. Charity felt herself sinking into deeper depths of weariness, and as they descended through the bare woods there were moments when she lost the exact sense of things, and seemed to be sitting beside her lover with the leafy arch of summer bending over them. But this illusion was faint and transitory. For the most part she had only a confused sensation of slipping down a smooth irresistible current; and she abandoned herself to the feeling as a refuge from the torment of thought.

Mr Royall seldom spoke, but his silent presence gave her, for the first time, a sense of peace and security. She knew that where he was there would be warmth, rest, silence; and for the moment they were all she wanted. She shut her eyes, and even these things grew dim to her.…

In the train, during the short run from Creston to Nettleton, the warmth aroused her, and the consciousness of being under strange eyes gave her a momentary energy. She sat upright, facing Mr Royall, and stared out of the window at the denuded country. Forty-eight hours earlier, when she had last traversed it, many of the trees still held their leaves; but the high wind of the last two nights had stripped them, and the lines of the landscape were as finely pencilled as in December. A few days of autumn cold had wiped out all trace of the rich fields and languid groves through which she had passed on the Fourth of July; and with the fading of the landscape those fervid hours had faded too. She could no longer believe that she was the being who had lived them; she was someone to whom something irreparable and overwhelming had happened, but the traces of the steps leading up to it had almost vanished.

When the train reached Nettleton and she walked out into the square at Mr Royall’s side the sense of unreality grew more overpowering. The physical strain of the night and day had left no room in her mind for new sensations and she followed Mr Royall as passively as a tired child. As in a confused dream she presently found herself sitting with him in a pleasant room, at a table with a red and white table-cloth on which hot food and tea were placed. He filled her cup and plate and whenever she lifted her eyes from them she found his resting on her with the same steady tranquil gaze that had reassured and strengthened her when they had faced each other in old Mrs Hobart’s kitchen. As everything else in her consciousness grew more and more confused and immaterial, became more and more like the universal shimmer that dissolves the world to failing eyes, Mr Royall’s presence began to detach itself with rocky firmness from this elusive background. She had always thought of him – when she thought of him at all – as of someone hateful and obstructive, but whom she could outwit and dominate when she chose to make the effort. Only once, on the day of the Old Home Week celebration, while the stray fragments of his address drifted across her troubled mind, had she caught a glimpse of another being, a being so different from the dull-witted enemy with whom she had supposed herself to be living that even through the burning mist of her own dreams he had stood out with startling distinctness. For a moment, then, what he said – and something in his way of saying it – had made her see why he had always struck her as such a lonely man. But the mist of her dreams had hidden him again, and she had forgotten that fugitive impression.

It came back to her now, as they sat at the table, and gave her, through her own immeasurable desolation, a sudden sense of their nearness to each other. But all these feelings were only brief streaks of light in the grey blur of her physical weakness. Through it she was aware that Mr Royall presently left her sitting by the table in the warm room, and came back after an interval with a carriage from the station – a closed ‘hack’ with sunburnt blue silk blinds – in which they drove
together to a house covered with creepers and standing next to a church with a carpet of turf before it. They got out at this house, and the carriage waited while they walked up the path and entered a wainscoted hall and then a room full of books. In this room a clergyman whom Charity had never seen received them pleasantly, and asked them to be seated for a few minutes while witnesses were being summoned.

Charity sat down obediently, and Mr Royall, his hands behind his back, paced slowly up and down the room. As he turned and faced Charity, she noticed that his lips were twitching a little; but the look in his eyes was grave and calm. Once he paused before her and said timidly: ‘Your hair’s got kinder loose with the wind,’ and she lifted her hands and tried to smooth back the locks that had escaped from her braid. There was a looking-glass in a carved frame on the wall, but she was ashamed to look at herself in it, and she sat with her hands folded on her knee till the clergyman returned. Then they went out again, along a sort of arcaded passage, and into a low vaulted room with a cross on an altar, and rows of benches. The clergyman, who had left them at the door, presently reappeared before the altar in a surplice, and a lady who was probably his wife, and a man in a blue shirt who had been raking dead leaves on the lawn, came in and sat on one of the benches.