第48章

At that hour she was not likely to find him there: he had probably had his supper and walked over to Carrick Fry's.She pushed open the door of the unlit room, and the light of her lifted candle fell on his figure, seated in the darkness in his high-backed chair.His arms lay along the arms of the chair, and his head was bent a little; but he lifted it quickly as Charity entered.She started back as their eyes met, remembering that her own were red with weeping, and that her face was livid with the fatigue and emotion of her journey.But it was too late to escape, and she stood and looked at him in silence.

He had risen from his chair, and came toward her with outstretched hands.The gesture was so unexpected that she let him take her hands in his and they stood thus, without speaking, till Mr.Royall said gravely:

"Charity--was you looking for me?"

She freed herself abruptly and fell back."Me? No----"She set down the candle on his desk."I wanted some letter-paper, that's all." His face contracted, and the bushy brows jutted forward over his eyes.

Without answering he opened the drawer of the desk, took out a sheet of paper and an envelope, and pushed them toward her."Do you want a stamp too?" he asked.

She nodded, and he gave her the stamp.As he did so she felt that he was looking at her intently, and she knew that the candle light flickering up on her white face must be distorting her swollen features and exaggerating the dark rings about her eyes.She snatched up the paper, her reassurance dissolving under his pitiless gaze, in which she seemed to read the grim perception of her state, and the ironic recollection of the day when, in that very room, he had offered to compel Harney to marry her.His look seemed to say that he knew she had taken the paper to write to her lover, who had left her as he had warned her she would be left.She remembered the scorn with which she had turned from him that day, and knew, if he guessed the truth, what a list of old scores it must settle.She turned and fled upstairs; but when she got back to her room all the words that had been waiting had vanished....

If she could have gone to Harney it would have been different; she would only have had to show herself to let his memories speak for her.But she had no money left, and there was no one from whom she could have borrowed enough for such a journey.There was nothing to do but to write, and await his reply.For a long time she sat bent above the blank page; but she found nothing to say that really expressed what she was feeling....

Harney had written that she had made it easier for him, and she was glad it was so; she did not want to make things hard.She knew she had it in her power to do that; she held his fate in her hands.All she had to do was to tell him the truth; but that was the very fact that held her back....Her five minutes face to face with Mr.Royall had stripped her of her last illusion, and brought her back to North Dormer's point of view.Distinctly and pitilessly there rose before her the fate of the girl who was married "to make things right." She had seen too many village love-stories end in that way.Poor Rose Coles's miserable marriage was of the number; and what good had come of it for her or for Halston Skeff? They had hated each other from the day the minister married them; and whenever old Mrs.Skeff had a fancy to humiliate her daughter-in-law she had only to say: "Who'd ever think the baby's only two? And for a seven months' child--ain't it a wonder what a size he is?" North Dormer had treasures of indulgence for brands in the burning, but only derision for those who succeeded in getting snatched from it; and Charity had always understood Julia Hawes's refusal to be snatched....

Only--was there no alternative but Julia's? Her soul recoiled from the vision of the white-faced woman among the plush sofas and gilt frames.In the established order of things as she knew them she saw no place for her individual adventure....

She sat in her chair without undressing till faint grey streaks began to divide the black slats of the shutters.Then she stood up and pushed them open, letting in the light.The coming of a new day brought a sharper consciousness of ineluctable reality, and with it a sense of the need of action.She looked at herself in the glass, and saw her face, white in the autumn dawn, with pinched cheeks and dark-ringed eyes, and all the marks of her state that she herself would never have noticed, but that Dr.Merkle's diagnosis had made plain to her.She could not hope that those signs would escape the watchful village; even before her figure lost its shape she knew her face would betray her.

Leaning from her window she looked out on the dark and empty scene; the ashen houses with shuttered windows, the grey road climbing the slope to the hemlock belt above the cemetery, and the heavy mass of the Mountain black against a rainy sky.To the east a space of light was broadening above the forest; but over that also the clouds hung.Slowly her gaze travelled across the fields to the rugged curve of the hills.She had looked out so often on that lifeless circle, and wondered if anything could ever happen to anyone who was enclosed in it....

Almost without conscious thought her decision had been reached; as her eyes had followed the circle of the hills her mind had also travelled the old round.She supposed it was something in her blood that made the Mountain the only answer to her questioning, the inevitable escape from all that hemmed her in and beset her.At any rate it began to loom against the rainy dawn; and the longer she looked at it the more clearly she understood that now at last she was really going there.