第57章

"I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment whereby ye may not be lawfully joined together..."Charity raised her eyes and met Mr.Royall's.They were still looking at her kindly and steadily."Iwill!" she heard him say a moment later, after another interval of words that she had failed to catch.She was so busy trying to understand the gestures that the clergyman was signalling to her to make that she no longer heard what was being said.After another interval the lady on the bench stood up, and taking her hand put it in Mr.Royall's.It lay enclosed in his strong palm and she felt a ring that was too big for her being slipped on her thin finger.She understood then that she was married....

Late that afternoon Charity sat alone in a bedroom of the fashionable hotel where she and Harney had vainly sought a table on the Fourth of July.She had never before been in so handsomely furnished a room.

The mirror above the dressing-table reflected the high head-board and fluted pillow-slips of the double bed, and a bedspread so spotlessly white that she had hesitated to lay her hat and jacket on it.The humming radiator diffused an atmosphere of drowsy warmth, and through a half-open door she saw the glitter of the nickel taps above twin marble basins.

For a while the long turmoil of the night and day had slipped away from her and she sat with closed eyes, surrendering herself to the spell of warmth and silence.But presently this merciful apathy was succeeded by the sudden acuteness of vision with which sick people sometimes wake out of a heavy sleep.As she opened her eyes they rested on the picture that hung above the bed.It was a large engraving with a dazzling white margin enclosed in a wide frame of bird's-eye maple with an inner scroll of gold.The engraving represented a young man in a boat on a lake over-hung with trees.He was leaning over to gather water-lilies for the girl in a light dress who lay among the cushions in the stern.The scene was full of a drowsy midsummer radiance, and Charity averted her eyes from it and, rising from her chair, began to wander restlessly about the room.

It was on the fifth floor, and its broad window of plate glass looked over the roofs of the town.Beyond them stretched a wooded landscape in which the last fires of sunset were picking out a steely gleam.

Charity gazed at the gleam with startled eyes.Even through the gathering twilight she recognized the contour of the soft hills encircling it, and the way the meadows sloped to its edge.It was Nettleton Lake that she was looking at.

She stood a long time in the window staring out at the fading water.The sight of it had roused her for the first time to a realization of what she had done.Even the feeling of the ring on her hand had not brought her this sharp sense of the irretrievable.For an instant the old impulse of flight swept through her; but it was only the lift of a broken wing.She heard the door open behind her, and Mr.Royall came in.

He had gone to the barber's to be shaved, and his shaggy grey hair had been trimmed and smoothed.He moved strongly and quickly, squaring his shoulders and carrying his head high, as if he did not want to pass unnoticed.

"What are you doing in the dark?" he called out in a cheerful voice.Charity made no answer.He went up to the window to draw the blind, and putting his finger on the wall flooded the room with a blaze of light from the central chandelier.In this unfamiliar illumination husband and wife faced each other awkwardly for a moment; then Mr.Royall said: "We'll step down and have some supper, if you say so."The thought of food filled her with repugnance; but not daring to confess it she smoothed her hair and followed him to the lift.

An hour later, coming out of the glare of the dining-room, she waited in the marble-panelled hall while Mr.

Royall, before the brass lattice of one of the corner counters, selected a cigar and bought an evening paper.

Men were lounging in rocking chairs under the blazing chandeliers, travellers coming and going, bells ringing, porters shuffling by with luggage.Over Mr.

Royall's shoulder, as he leaned against the counter, a girl with her hair puffed high smirked and nodded at a dapper drummer who was getting his key at the desk across the hall.

Charity stood among these cross-currents of life as motionless and inert as if she had been one of the tables screwed to the marble floor.All her soul was gathered up into one sick sense of coming doom, and she watched Mr.Royall in fascinated terror while he pinched the cigars in successive boxes and unfolded his evening paper with a steady hand.

Presently he turned and joined her."You go right along up to bed--I'm going to sit down here and have my smoke," he said.He spoke as easily and naturally as if they had been an old couple, long used to each other's ways, and her contracted heart gave a flutter of relief.She followed him to the lift, and he put her in and enjoined the buttoned and braided boy to show her to her room.

She groped her way in through the darkness, forgetting where the electric button was, and not knowing how to manipulate it.But a white autumn moon had risen, and the illuminated sky put a pale light in the room.By it she undressed, and after folding up the ruffled pillow-slips crept timidly under the spotless counterpane.She had never felt such smooth sheets or such light warm blankets; but the softness of the bed did not soothe her.She lay there trembling with a fear that ran through her veins like ice."What have Idone? Oh, what have I done?" she whispered, shuddering to her pillow; and pressing her face against it to shut out the pale landscape beyond the window she lay in the darkness straining her ears, and shaking at every footstep that approached....