Suddenly the deadly faintness came over her once more and she sat down on the bank and leaned her head against a tree-trunk. The long road and the cloudy landscape vanished from her eyes, and for a time she seemed to be circling about in some terrible wheeling darkness. Then that too faded.
She opened her eyes, and saw a buggy drawn up beside her, and a man who had jumped down from it and was gazing at her with a puzzled face. Slowly consciousness came back, and she saw that the man was Liff Hyatt.
She was dimly aware that he was asking her something, and she looked at him in silence, trying to find strength to speak. At length her voice stirred in her throat, and she said in a whisper: “I’m going up the Mountain.”
“Up the Mountain?” he repeated, drawing aside a little; and as he moved she saw behind him, in the buggy, a heavily coated figure with a familiar pink face and gold spectacles on the bridge of a Grecian nose.
“Charity! What on earth are you doing here?” Mr. Miles exclaimed, throwing the reins on the horse’s back and scrambling down from the buggy.
She lifted her heavy eyes to his. “I’m going to see my mother.”
The two men glanced at each other, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
Then Mr. Miles said: “You look ill, my dear, and it’s a long way. Do you think it’s wise?”
Charity stood up. “I’ve got to go to her.”
A vague mirthless grin contracted Liff Hyatt’s face, and Mr. Miles again spoke uncertainly. “You know, then—you’d been told?”
She stared at him. “I don’t know what you mean. I want to go to her.”
Mr. Miles was examining her thoughtfully. She fancied she saw a change in his expression, and the blood rushed to her forehead. “I just want to go to her,” she repeated.
He laid his hand on her arm. “My child, your mother is dying. Liff Hyatt came down to fetch me. … Get in and come with us.”
He helped her up to the seat at his side, Liff Hyatt clambered in at the back, and they drove off toward Hamblin. At first Charity had hardly grasped what Mr. Miles was saying; the physical relief of finding herself seated in the buggy, and securely on her road to the Mountain, effaced the impression of his words. But as her head cleared she began to understand. She knew the Mountain had but the most infrequent intercourse with the valleys; she had often enough heard it said that no one ever went up there except the minister, when someone was dying. And now it was her mother who was dying … and she would find herself as much alone on the Mountain as anywhere else in the world. The sense of unescapable isolation was all she could feel for the moment; then she began to wonder at the strangeness of its being Mr. Miles who had undertaken to perform this grim errand. He did not seem in the least like the kind of man who would care to go up the Mountain. But here he was at her side, guiding the horse with a firm hand, and bending on her the kindly gleam of his spectacles, as if there were nothing unusual in their being together in such circumstances.
For a while she found it impossible to speak, and he seemed to understand this, and made no attempt to question her. But presently she felt her tears rise and flow down over her drawn cheeks; and he must have seen them too, for he laid his hand on hers, and said in a low voice: “Won’t you tell me what is troubling you?”
She shook her head, and he did not insist: but after a while he said, in the same low tone, so that they should not be overheard: “Charity, what do you know of your childhood, before you came down to North Dormer?”
She controlled herself, and answered: “Nothing only what I heard Mr. Royall say one day. He said he brought me down because my father went to prison.”
“And you’ve never been up there since?”
“Never.”
Mr. Miles was silent again, then he said: “I’m glad you’re coming with me now. Perhaps we may find your mother alive, and she may know that you have come.”
They had reached Hamblin, where the snow-flurry had left white patches in the rough grass on the roadside, and in the angles of the roofs facing north. It was a poor bleak village under the granite flank of the Mountain, and as soon as they left it they began to climb. The road was steep and full of ruts, and the horse settled down to a walk while they mounted and mounted, the world dropping away below them in great mottled stretches of forest and field, and stormy dark blue distances.
Charity had often had visions of this ascent of the Mountain but she had not known it would reveal so wide a country, and the sight of those strange lands reaching away on every side gave her a new sense of Harney’s remoteness. She knew he must be miles and miles beyond the last range of hills that seemed to be the outmost verge of things, and she wondered how she had ever dreamed of going to New
