Charity shot a sideward look at him. It was the first time he had spoken of the Mountain except as a feature of the landscape. What else did he know about it, and about her relation to it? Her heart began to beat with the fierce impulse of resistance which she instinctively opposed to every imagined slight.
“The Mountain? I ain’t afraid of the Mountain!”
Her tone of defiance seemed to escape him. He lay breast-down on the grass, breaking off sprigs of thyme and pressing them against his lips. Far off, above the folds of the nearer hills, the Mountain thrust itself up 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 up there, you know: sort of outlaws, a little independent kingdom. Of course you’ve heard them spoken of; but I’m told they have nothing to do 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 of character.”
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 dawning curiosity. It struck her now as strange that she knew so little about the Mountain. She had never asked, and no one had ever offered to enlighten her. North Dormer took the Mountain for granted, and implied its disparagement by an intonation rather than by explicit criticism.
“It’s queer, you know,” he continued, “that, just over there, on top of that hill, there should be a handful of people who don’t give a damn for anybody.”
The words thrilled her. They seemed the clue to her own revolts and defiances, 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 me that the first colonists are supposed to have been men who worked on the railway that was built forty or fifty years ago between Springfield and Nettleton. Some of them took to drink, or got into trouble with the police, and went off— disappeared into the woods. A year or two later there was a report that they were living up on the Mountain. Then I suppose others joined them—and children were born. Now they say there are over a hundred people up there. They seem to be quite outside the jurisdiction of the valleys. No school, no church—and no sheriff ever goes up to see what they’re about. But don’t people ever talk of them at North 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 never heard, I suppose—I come from there. They brought me down when I was little.”
“You?” He raised himself on his elbow, looking at her with sudden interest. “You’re from the Mountain? How curious! I suppose that’s why you’re so different….”
Her happy blood bathed her to the forehead. He was praising her—and praising 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 sunburnt knuckles.
“Come,” he said, “let’s be off.” He stood up and shook the grass from his loose grey clothes. “What a good day! Where are you going to take me tomorrow?”
VI
That evening after supper Charity sat alone in the kitchen and listened to Mr. Royall and young Harney talking in the porch.
She had remained indoors after the table had been cleared and old Verena had hobbled up to bed. The kitchen window was open, and Charity seated herself near it, her idle hands on her knee. The evening was cool and still. Beyond the black hills an amber west passed into pale green, and then to a deep blue in which a great star hung. The soft hoot of a little owl came through the dusk, and between its calls the men’s voices rose and fell.
Mr. Royall’s was full of a sonorous satisfaction. It was a long time since he had had anyone of Lucius Harney’s quality to talk to: Charity divined that the young man symbolized all his ruined and unforgotten past. When Miss Hatchard had been called to Springfield by the illness of a widowed sister, and young Harney, by that time seriously embarked on his task of drawing and measuring all the old houses between Nettleton and the New Hampshire border, had suggested the possibility of boarding at the red house in his cousin’s absence, Charity had trembled lest Mr. Royall should refuse. There had been no question of lodging the young man: there was no room for him. But it appeared that he could still live at Miss Hatchard’s if Mr. Royall would let him take his meals at the red house; and after a day’s deliberation Mr. Royall consented.
Charity suspected him of being glad of the chance to make a little money. He had the reputation of being an avaricious man; but she was beginning to think he was probably poorer than people knew. His practice had become little more than a vague legend, revived only at lengthening intervals by a summons to Hepburn or Nettleton; and he appeared to depend for his living mainly on the scant produce of his farm, and on the commissions received from the few insurance agencies that he represented in the neighbourhood. At any rate, he had been prompt in accepting Harney’s offer to hire the buggy at a dollar and a half a day; and his satisfaction with the bargain had manifested itself, unexpectedly enough, at the end of the first week, by his tossing a ten-dollar bill into Charity’s lap as she sat one day retrimming her old hat.
“Here—go get yourself a Sunday bonnet that’ll make all the other girls mad,” he said, looking at her with a sheepish twinkle in his deep-set eyes; and she immediately guessed that the unwonted present—the only gift of money she had ever received from him— represented Harney’s first payment.
But the young man’s coming had brought Mr. Royall other than pecuniary benefit. It gave him, for the first time in years, a man’s companionship. Charity had only a dim understanding of her guardian’s needs; but she knew he felt himself above the people among whom he lived, and she saw that Lucius Harney thought him so. She was
