They began to jog down the winding road to the valleyat old Dan's languid pace. Charity felt herselfsinking into deeper depths of weariness, and as theydescended through the bare woods there were momentswhen she lost the exact sense of things, and seemed tobe sitting beside her lover with the leafy arch ofsummer bending over them. But this illusion was faintand transitory. For the most part she had only aconfused sensation of slipping down a smoothirresistible current; and she abandoned herself to thefeeling as a refuge from the torment of thought.
Mr. Royall seldom spoke, but his silent presence gaveher, 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 toher....
In the train, during the short run from Creston toNettleton, the warmth aroused her, and theconsciousness of being under strange eyes gave hera momentary energy. She sat upright, facing Mr.
Royall, and stared out of the window at the denudedcountry. Forty-eight hours earlier, when she had lasttraversed it, many of the trees still held theirleaves; but the high wind of the last two nights hadstripped them, and the lines of the landscape' were asfinely pencilled as in December. A few days of autumncold had wiped out all trace of the rich fields andlanguid groves through which she had passed on theFourth of July; and with the fading of the landscapethose fervid hours had faded, too. She could no longerbelieve that she was the being who had lived them; shewas someone to whom something irreparable andoverwhelming had happened, but the traces of the stepsleading up to it had almost vanished.
When the train reached Nettleton and she walked outinto the square at Mr. Royall's side the sense ofunreality grew more overpowering. The physical strainof the night and day had left no room in her mind fornew sensations and she followed Mr. Royall as passivelyas a tired child. As in a confused dream she presentlyfound herself sitting with him in a pleasant room, at atable with a red and white table-cloth on whichhot food and tea were placed. He filled her cup andplate and whenever she lifted her eyes from them shefound his resting on her with the same steady tranquilgaze that had reassured and strengthened her when theyhad faced each other in old Mrs. Hobart's kitchen. Aseverything else in her consciousness grew more and moreconfused and immaterial, became more and more like theuniversal shimmer that dissolves the world to failingeyes, Mr. Royall's presence began to detach itself withrocky firmness from this elusive background. She hadalways thought of him--when she thought of him at all--as of someone hateful and obstructive, but whom shecould outwit and dominate when she chose to make theeffort. Only once, on the day of the Old Home Weekcelebration, while the stray fragments of his addressdrifted across her troubled mind, had she caught aglimpse of another being, a being so different from thedull-witted enemy with whom she had supposed herself tobe living that even through the burning mist of her owndreams he had stood out with startling distinctness.
For a moment, then, what he said--and something in hisway of saying it--had made her see why he had alwaysstruck her as such a lonely man. But the mist ofher dreams had hidden him again, and she had forgottenthat fugitive impression.
It came back to her now, as they sat at the table, andgave her, through her own immeasurable desolation, asudden sense of their nearness to each other. But allthese feelings were only brief streaks of light in thegrey blur of her physical weakness. Through it she wasaware that Mr. Royall presently left her sitting by thetable in the warm room, and came back after an intervalwith a carriage from the station--a closed "hack" withsun-burnt blue silk blinds--in which they drovetogether to a house covered with creepers and standingnext to a church with a carpet of turf before it. Theygot out at this house, and the carriage waited whilethey walked up the path and entered a wainscoted halland then a room full of books. In this room aclergyman whom Charity had never seen received thempleasantly, and asked them to be seated for a fewminutes while witnesses were being summoned.
Charity sat down obediently, and Mr. Royall, his handsbehind his back, paced slowly up and down the room. Ashe turned and faced Charity, she noticed that hislips were twitching a little; but the look in his eyeswas grave and calm. Once he paused before her and saidtimidly: "Your hair's got kinder loose with the wind,"and she lifted her hands and tried to smooth back thelocks that had escaped from her braid. There was alooking-glass in a carved frame on the wall, but shewas ashamed to look at herself in it, and she sat withher hands folded on her knee till the clergymanreturned. Then they went out again, along a sort ofarcaded passage, and into a low vaulted room with across on an altar, and rows of benches. The clergyman,who had left them at the door, presently reappearedbefore the altar in a surplice, and a lady who wasprobably his wife, and a man in a blue shirt who hadbeen raking dead leaves on the lawn, came in and sat onone of the benches.
The clergyman opened a book and signed to Charity andMr. Royall to approach. Mr. Royall advanced a fewsteps, and Charity followed him as she had followed himto the buggy when they went out of Mrs. Hobart'skitchen; she had the feeling that if she ceased to keepclose to him, and do what he told her to do, the worldwould slip away from beneath her feet.
The clergyman began to read, and on her dazed mindthere rose the memory of Mr. Miles, standing the nightbefore in the desolate house of the Mountain, andreading out of the same book words that had the samedread sound of finality:
"I require and charge you both, as ye will answer atthe dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of allhearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you knowany impediment whereby ye may not be lawfully joinedtogether..."Charity raised her eyes and met Mr. Royall's. Theywere still looking at her kindly and steadily. "Iwill!" she heard him say a moment later, after anotherinterval of words that she had failed to catch. Shewas so busy trying to understand the gestures that theclergyman was signalling to her to make that she nolonger heard what was being said. After anotherinterval the lady on the bench stood up, and taking herhand put it in Mr. Royall's. It lay enclosed in hisstrong palm and she felt a ring that was too big forher being slipped on her thin finger. She understoodthen that she was married....
Late that afternoon Charity sat alone in a bedroom ofthe fashionable hotel where she and Harney hadvainly sought a table on the Fourth of July. She hadnever before been in so handsomely furnished a room.
The mirror above the dressing-table reflected the highhead-board and fluted pillow-slips of the double bed,and a bedspread so spotlessly white that she hadhesitated to lay her hat and jacket on it. The hummingradiator diffused an atmosphere of drowsy warmth, andthrough a half-open door she saw the glitter of thenickel taps above twin marble basins.
For a while the long turmoil of the night and day hadslipped away from her and she sat with closed eyes,surrendering herself to the spell of warmth andsilence. But presently this merciful apathy wassucceeded by the sudden acuteness of vision with whichsick people sometimes wake out of a heavy sleep. Asshe opened her eyes they rested on the picture thathung above the bed. It was a large engraving with adazzling white margin enclosed in a wide frame ofbird's-eye maple with an inner scroll of gold. Theengraving represented a young man in a boat on a lakeover-hung with trees. He was leaning over to gatherwater-lilies for the girl in a light dress who layamong the cushions in the stern. The scene wasfull of a drowsy midsummer radiance, and Charityaverted 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 ofplate glass looked over the roofs of the town. Beyondthem stretched a wooded landscape in which the lastfires of sunset were picking out a steely gleam.
Charity gazed at the gleam with startled eyes. Eventhrough the gathering twilight she recognized thecontour of the soft hills encircling it, and the waythe meadows sloped to its edge. It was Nettleton Lakethat she was looking at.
She stood a long time in the window staring out at thefading water. The sight of it had roused her for thefirst time to a realization of what she had done. Eventhe feeling of the ring on her hand had not brought herthis sharp sense of the irretrievable. For an instantthe old impulse of flight swept through her; but it wasonly the lift of a broken wing. She heard the dooropen behind her, and Mr. Royall came in.
He had gone to the barber's to be shaved, and hisshaggy grey hair had been trimmed and smoothed. Hemoved strongly and quickly, squaring his shouldersand carrying his head high, as if he did not want topass unnoticed.
"What are you doing in the dark?" he called out in acheerful voice. Charity made no answer. He went up tothe window to draw the blind, and putting his finger onthe wall flooded the room with a blaze of light fromthe central chandelier. In this unfamiliarillumination husband and wife faced each otherawkwardly for a moment; then Mr. Royall said: "We'llstep down and have some supper, if you say so."The thought of food filled her with repugnance; but notdaring to confess it she smoothed her hair and followedhim 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 cornercounters, selected a cigar and bought an evening paper.
Men were lounging in rocking chairs under the blazingchandeliers, travellers coming and going, bellsringing, porters shuffling by with luggage. Over Mr.
Royall's shoulder, as he leaned against the counter, agirl with her hair puffed high smirked and nodded at adapper drummer who was getting his key at the deskacross the hall.
Charity stood among these cross-currents of life asmotionless and inert as if she had been one of thetables screwed to the marble floor. All her soul wasgathered up into one sick sense of coming doom, and shewatched Mr. Roya............