had said he was looking up the old houses in the neighbourhood; and though she was not very clear as to his purpose, or as to why anyone should look for old houses, when they lay in wait for one on every roadside, she understood that he needed the help of books, and resolved to hunt up the next day the volume she had failed to find, and any others that seemed related to the subject.
Never had her ignorance of life and literature so weighed on her as in reliving the short scene of her discomfiture. “It’s no use trying to be anything in this place,” she muttered to her pillow; and she shrivelled at the vision of vague metropolises, shining super-Nettletons, where girls in better clothes than Belle Balch’s talked fluently of architecture to young men with hands like Lucius Harney’s. Then she remembered his sudden pause when he had come close to the desk and had his first look at her. The sight had made him forget what he was going to say; she recalled the change in his face, and jumping up she ran over the bare boards to her washstand, found the matches, lit a candle, and lifted it to the square of looking-glass on the white-washed wall. Her small face, usually so darkly pale, glowed like a rose in the faint orb of light, and under her rumpled hair her eyes seemed deeper and larger than by day. Perhaps after all it was a mistake to wish they were blue. A clumsy band and button fastened her unbleached night-gown about the throat. She undid it, freed her thin shoulders, and saw herself a bride in low-necked satin, walking down an aisle with Lucius Harney. He would kiss her as they left the church….She put down the candle and covered her face with her hands as if to imprison the kiss. At that moment she heard Mr. Royall’s step as he came up the stairs to bed, and a fierce revulsion of feeling swept over her. Until then she had merely despised him; now deep hatred of him filled her heart. He became to her a horrible old man….
The next day, when Mr. Royall came back to dinner, they faced each other in silence as usual. Verena’s presence at the table was an excuse for their not talking, though her deafness would have permitted the freest interchange of confidences. But when the meal was over, and Mr. Royall rose from the table, he looked back at Charity, who had stayed to help the old woman clear away the dishes.
“I want to speak to you a minute,” he said; and she followed him across the passage, wondering.
He seated himself in his black horsehair armchair, and she leaned against the window, indifferently. She was impatient to be gone to the library, to hunt for the book on North Dormer.
“See here,” he said, “why ain’t you at the library the days you’re supposed to be there?”
The question, breaking in on her mood of blissful abstraction, deprived her of speech, and she stared at him for a moment without answering.
“Who says I ain’t?”
“There’s been some complaints made, it appears. Miss Hatchard sent for me this morning–-“
Charity’s smouldering resentment broke into a blaze. “I know! Orma Fry, and that toad of a Targatt girl and Ben Fry, like as not. He’s going round with her. The low-down sneaks—I always knew they’d try to have me out! As if anybody ever came to the library, anyhow!”
“Somebody did yesterday, and you weren’t there.”
“Yesterday?” she laughed at her happy recollection. “At what time wasn’t I there yesterday, I’d like to know?”
“Round about four o’clock.”
Charity was silent. She had been so steeped in the dreamy remembrance of young Harney’s visit that she had forgotten having deserted her post as soon as he had left the library.
“Who came at four o’clock?”
“Miss Hatchard did.”
“Miss Hatchard? Why, she ain’t ever been near the place since she’s been lame. She couldn’t get up the steps if she tried.”
“She can be helped up, I guess. She was yesterday, anyhow, by the young fellow that’s staying with her. He found you there, I understand, earlier in the afternoon; and he went back and told Miss Hatchard the books were in bad shape and needed attending to. She got excited, and had herself wheeled straight round; and when she got there the place was locked. So she sent for me, and told me about that, and about the other complaints. She claims you’ve neglected things, and that she’s going to get a trained librarian.”
Charity had not moved while he spoke. She stood with her head thrown back against the window-frame, her arms hanging against her sides, and her hands so tightly clenched that she felt, without knowing what hurt her, the sharp edge of her nails against her palms.
Of all Mr. Royall had said she had retained only the phrase: “He told Miss Hatchard the books were in bad shape.” What did she care for the other charges against her? Malice or truth, she despised them as she despised her detractors. But that the stranger to whom she had felt herself so mysteriously drawn should have betrayed her! That at the very moment when she had fled up the hillside to think of him more deliciously he should have been hastening home to denounce her short-comings! She remembered how, in the darkness of her room, she had covered her face to press his imagined kiss closer; and her heart raged against him for the liberty he had not taken.
“Well, I’ll go,” she said suddenly. “I’ll go right off.”
“Go where?” She heard the startled note in Mr. Royall’s voice.
“Why, out of their old library: straight out, and never set foot in it again. They needn’t think I’m going to wait round and let them say they’ve discharged me!”
“Charity—Charity Royall, you listen–-” he began, getting heavily out of his chair; but she waved him aside, and walked out of the room.
Upstairs she took the library key from the place where she always hid it under her pincushion—who said she wasn’t careful?—put on her hat, and swept down again and out into the street. If Mr. Royall heard her go he made no motion to detain her: his sudden rages probably made him understand the uselessness of reasoning with hers.
She reached the brick temple, unlocked the door and entered into the glacial twilight. “I’m glad I’ll never have to sit in this old vault again when other folks are out in the sun!” she said aloud as the familiar chill took her. She looked with abhorrence at the long dingy rows of books, the sheep-nosed Minerva on her black pedestal, and the mild-faced young man in a high stock whose effigy pined above her desk. She meant to take out of the drawer her roll of lace and the library register, and go straight to Miss Hatchard to announce her resignation. But suddenly a great desolation overcame her, and she sat down and laid her face against the desk. Her heart was ravaged by life’s cruelest discovery: the first creature who had come toward her out of the wilderness had brought her anguish
