V
There had never been such a June in Eagle County. Usually it was a monthof moods, with abrupt alternations of belated frost and mid-summer heat;this year, day followed day in a sequence of temperate beauty. Everymorning a breeze blew steadily from the hills. Toward noon it built upgreat canopies of white cloud that threw a cool shadow over fields andwoods; then before sunset the clouds dissolved again, and the westernlight rained its unobstructed brightness on the valley.
On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge above a sunlithollow, her face pressed to the earth and the warm currents of the grassrunning through her. Directly in her line of vision a blackberry branchlaid its frail white flowers and blue-green leaves against the sky. Justbeyond, a tuft of sweet-fern uncurled between the beaded shoots of thegrass, and a small yellow butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck ofsunshine. This was all she saw; but she felt, above her and about her,the strong growth of the beeches clothing the ridge, the rounding ofpale green cones on countless spruce-branches, the push of myriads ofsweet-fern fronds in the cracks of the stony slope below the wood,and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags in the pasturebeyond. All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting ofcalyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of fragrance. Every leafand bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalation to the pervadingsweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spiceof thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moistearth-smell that was like the breath of some huge sun-warmed animal.
Charity had lain there a long time, passive and sun-warmed as the slopeon which she lay, when there came between her eyes and the dancingbutterfly the sight of a man's foot in a large worn boot covered withred mud.
"Oh, don't!" she exclaimed, raising herself on her elbow and stretchingout a warning hand.
"Don't what?" a hoarse voice asked above her head.
"Don't stamp on those bramble flowers, you dolt!" she retorted,springing to her knees. The foot paused and then descended clumsily onthe frail branch, and raising her eyes she saw above her the bewilderedface of a slouching man with a thin sunburnt beard, and white armsshowing through his ragged shirt.
"Don't you ever SEE anything, Liff Hyatt?" she assailed him, as he stoodbefore her with the look of a man who has stirred up a wasp's nest.
He grinned. "I seen you! That's what I come down for."
"Down from where?" she questioned, stooping to gather up the petals hisfoot had scattered.
He jerked his thumb toward the heights. "Been cutting down trees for DanTargatt."
Charity sank back on her heels and looked at him musingly. She wasnot in the least afraid of poor Liff Hyatt, though he "came from theMountain," and some of the girls ran when they saw him. Among the morereasonable he passed for a harmless creature, a sort of link between themountain and civilized folk, who occasionally came down and did a littlewood cutting for a farmer when hands were short. Besides, she knew theMountain people would never hurt her: Liff himself had told her soonce when she was a little girl, and had met him one day at the edgeof lawyer Royall's pasture. "They won't any of 'em touch you up there,f'ever you was to come up.... But I don't s'pose you will," he had addedphilosophically, looking at her new shoes, and at the red ribbon thatMrs. Royall had tied in her hair.
Charity had, in truth, never felt any desire to visit her birthplace.She did not care to have it known that she was of the Mountain, and wasshy of being seen in talk with Liff Hyatt. But today she was not sorryto have him appear. A great many things had happened to her since theday when young Lucius Harney had entered the doors of the HatchardMemorial, but none, perhaps, so unforeseen as the fact of her suddenlyfinding it a convenience to be on good terms with Liff Hyatt. Shecontinued to look up curiously at his freckled weather-beaten face,with feverish hollows below the cheekbones and the pale yellow eyes ofa harmless animal. "I wonder if he's related to me?" she thought, with ashiver of disdain.
"Is there any folks living in the brown house by the swamp, up underPorcupine?" she presently asked in an indifferent tone.
Liff Hyatt, for a while, considered her with surprise; then he scratchedhis head and shifted his weight from one tattered sole to the other.
"There's always the same folks in the brown house," he said with hisvague grin.
"They're from up your way, ain't they?"
"Their name's the same as mine," he rejoined uncertainly.
Charity still held him with resolute eyes. "See here, I want to go theresome day and take a gentleman with me that's boarding with us. He's upin these parts drawing pictures."
She did not offer to explain this statement. It was too far beyond LiffHyatt's limitations for the attempt to be worth making. "He wants to seethe brown house, and go all over it," she pursued.
Liff was still running his fingers perplexedly through his shock ofstraw-colored hair. "Is it a fellow from the city?" he asked.
"Yes. He draws pictures of things. He's down there now drawing theBonner house." She pointed to a chimney just visible over the dip of thepasture below the wood.
"The Bonner house?" Liff echoed incredulously.
"Yes. You won't understand--and it don't matter. All I say is: he'sgoing to the Hyatts' in a day or two."
Liff looked more and more perplexed. "Bash is ugly sometimes in theafternoons."
She threw her head back, her eyes full on Hyatt's. "I'm coming too: youtell him."
"They won't none of them trouble you, the Hyatts won't. What d'you wanta take a stranger with you though?"
"I've told you, haven't I? You've got to tell Bash Hyatt."
He looked away at the blue mountains on the horizon then his gazedropped to the chimney-top below the pasture.
"He's down there now?"
"Yes."
He shifted his weight again, crossed his arms, and continued to surveythe distant landscape. "Well, so long," he said at last, inconclusively;and turning away he shambled up the hillside. From the ledge aboveher, he paused to call down: "I wouldn't go there a Sunday"; then heclambered on till the trees closed in on him. Presently, from highoverhead, Charity heard the ring of his axe.
She lay on the warm ridge, thinking of many things that the woodsman'sappearance had stirred up in her. She knew nothing of her early life,and had never felt any curiosity about it: only a sullen reluctance toexplore the corner of her memory where certain blurred images lingered.But all that had happened to her within the last few weeks had stirredher to the sleeping depths. She had become absorbingly interesting toherself, and everything that had to do with her past was illuminated bythis sudden curiosity.
She hated more than ever the fact of coming from the Mountain; but itwas no longer indifferent to her. Everything that in any way affectedher was alive and vivid: even the hateful things had grown interestingbecause they were a part of herself.
"I wonder if Liff Hyatt knows who my mother was?" she mused; and itfilled her with a tremor of surprise to think that some woman who wasonce young and slight, with quick motions of the blood like hers, hadcarried her in her breast, and watched her sleeping. She had alwaysthought of her mother as so long dead as to be no more than a namelesspinch of earth; but now it occurred to her that the once-young womanmight be alive, and wrinkled and elf-locked like the woman she hadsometimes seen in the door of the brown house that Lucius Harney wantedto draw.
The thought brought him back to the central point in her mind, andshe strayed away from the conjectures roused by Liff Hyatt's presence.Speculations concerning the past could not hold her long when thepresent was so rich, the future so rosy, and when Lucius Harney,a stone's throw away, was bending over his sketch-book, frowning,calculating, measuring, and then throwing his head back with the suddensmile that had shed its brightness over everything.
She scrambled to her feet, but as she did so she saw him coming up thepasture and dropped down on the grass to wait. When he was drawing andmeasuring one of "his houses," as she called them, she often strayedaway by her
self into the woods or up the hillside. It was partly fromshyness that she did so: from a sense of inadequacy that came to hermost painfully when her companion, absorbed in his job, forgot herignorance and her inability to follow his least allusion, and plungedinto a monologue on art and life. To avoid the awkwardness of listeningwith a blank face, and also to escape the surprised stare of theinhabitants of the houses before which he would abruptly pull up theirhorse and open his sketch-book, she slipped away to some spot fromwhich, without being seen, she could watch him at work, or at least lookdown on the house he was drawing. She had not been displeased, at first,to have it known to North Dormer and the neighborhood that she wasdriving Miss Hatchard's cousin about the country in the buggy he hadhired of lawyer Royall. She had always kept to herself, contemptuouslyaloof from village love-making, without exactly knowing whether herfierce pride was due to the sense of her tainted origin, or whether shewas reserving herself for a more brilliant fate. Sometimes she enviedthe other girls their sentimental preoccupations, their long hours ofinarticulate philandering with one of the few youths who still lingeredin the village; but when she pictured herself curling her hair orputting a new ribbon on her hat for Ben Fry or one of the Sollas boysthe fever dropped and she relapsed into indifference.
Now she knew the meaning of her disdains and reluctances. She hadlearned what she was worth when Lucius Harney, looking at her for thefirst time, had lost the thread of his speech, and leaned reddening onthe edge of her desk. But another kind of shyness had been born inher: a terror of exposing to vulgar perils the sacred treasure of herhappiness. She was not sorry to have the neighbors suspect her of "goingwith" a young man from the city; but she did not want it known to allthe countryside how many hours of the long June days she spent with him.What she most feared was that the inevitable comments should reach Mr.Royall. Charity was instinctively aware that few things concerning herescaped the eyes of the silent man under whose roof she lived; and inspite of the latitude which North Dormer accorded to courting couplesshe had always felt that, on the day when she showed too open apreference, Mr. Royall might, as she phrased it, make her "pay forit." How, she did not know; and her fear was the greater because itwas undefinable. If she had been accepting the attentions of one of thevillage youths she would have been less apprehensive: Mr. Royall couldnot prevent her marrying when she chose to. But everybody knew that"going with a city fellow" was a different and less straightforwardaffair: almost every village could show a victim of the perilousventure. And her dread of Mr. Royall's intervention gave a sharpenedjoy to the hours she spent with young Harney, and made her, at the sametime, shy of being too generally seen with him.
As he approached she rose to her knees, stretching her arms above herhead with the indolent gesture that was her way of expressing a profoundwell-being.
"I'm going to take you to that house up under Porcupine," she announced.
"What house? Oh, yes; that ramshackle place near the swamp, with thegipsy-looking people hanging about. It's curious that a house withtraces of real architecture should have been built in such a place. Butthe people were a sulky-looking lot--do you suppose they'll let us in?"
"They'll do whatever I tell them," she said with assurance.
He threw himself down beside her. "Will they?" he rejoined with a smile."Well, I should like to see what's left inside the house. And I shouldlike to have a talk with the people. Who was it who was telling me theother day that they had come down from the Mountain?"
Charity shot a sideward look at him. It was the first time he had spokenof the Mountain except as a feature of the landscape. What else did heknow about it, and about her relation to it? Her heart began to beatwith the fierce impulse of resistance which she instinctively opposed toevery imagined slight.
"The Mountain? I ain't afraid of the Mountain!"
Her tone of defiance seemed to escape him. He lay breast-down on thegrass, breaking off sprigs of thyme and pressing them against his lips.Far off, above the folds of the nearer hills, the Mountain thrust itselfup menacingly against a yellow sunset.
"I must go up there some day: I want to see it," he continued.
Her heart-beats slackened and she turned again to examine his profile.It was innocent of all unfriendly intention.
"What'd you want to go up the Mountain for?"
"Why, it must be rather a curious place. There's a queer colony upthere, you know: sort of out-laws, a little independent kingdom. Ofcourse you've heard them spoken of; but I'm told they have nothing todo with the people in the valleys--rather look down on them, in fact.I suppose they're rough customers; but they must have a good deal ofcharacter."
She did not quite know what he meant by having a good deal of character;but his tone was expressive of admiration, and deepened her dawningcuriosity. It struck her now as strange that she knew so little aboutthe Mountain. She had never asked, and no one had ever offered toenlighten her. North Dormer took the Mountain for granted, and impliedits disparagement by an intonation rather than by explicit criticism.
"It's queer, you know," he continued, "that, just over there, on top ofthat hill, there should be a handful of people who don't give a damn foranybody."
The words thrilled her. They seemed the clue to her own revolts anddefiances, and she longed to have him tell her more.
"I don't know much about them. Have they always been there?"
"Nobody seems to know exactly how long. Down at Creston they told methat the first colonists are supposed to have been men who worked on therailway that was built forty or fifty years ago between Springfieldand Nettleton. Some of them took to drink, or got into trouble with thepolice, and went off--disappeared into the woods. A year or two laterthere was a report that they were living up on the Mountain. Then Isuppose others joined them--and children were born. Now they say thereare over a hundred people up there. They seem to be quite outside thejurisdiction of the valleys. No school, no church--and no sheriff evergoes up to see what they're about. But don't people ever talk of them atNorth Dormer?"
"I don't know. They say they're bad."
He laughed. "Do they? We'll go and see, shall we?"
She flushed at the suggestion, and turned her face to his. "You neverheard, I suppose--I come from there. They brought me down when I waslittle."
"You?" He raised himself on his elbow, looking at her with suddeninterest. "You're from the Mountain? How curious! I suppose that's whyyou're so different...."
Her happy blood bathed her to the forehead. He was praising her--andpraising her because she came from the Mountain!
"Am I... different?" she triumphed, with affected wonder.
"Oh, awfully!" He picked up her hand and laid a kiss on the sunburntknuckles.
"Come," he said, "let's be off." He stood up and shook the grass fromhis loose grey clothes. "What a good day! Where are you going to take metomorrow?"