Ally did not answer.She bent above the blouse, and began picking out a basting thread with the point of the scissors.
"Why should I know?" Charity repeated harshly.
"I didn't know but what...folks here say she's engaged to Mr.Harney."Charity stood up with a laugh, and stretched her arms lazily above her head.
"If all the people got married that folks say are going to you'd have your time full ****** wedding-dresses," she said ironically.
"Why--don't you believe it?" Ally ventured.
"It would not make it true if I did--nor prevent it if I didn't.""That's so....I only know I seen her crying the night of the party because her dress didn't set right.That was why she wouldn't dance any...."Charity stood absently gazing down at the lacy garment on Ally's knee.Abruptly she stooped and snatched it up.
"Well, I guess she won't dance in this either," she said with sudden violence; and grasping the blouse in her strong young hands she tore it in two and flung the tattered bits to the floor.
"Oh, Charity----" Ally cried, springing up.For a long interval the two girls faced each other across the ruined garment.Ally burst into tears.
"Oh, what'll I say to her? What'll I do? It was real lace!" she wailed between her piping sobs.
Charity glared at her unrelentingly."You'd oughtn't to have brought it here," she said, breathing quickly.
"I hate other people's clothes--it's just as if they was there themselves." The two stared at each other again over this avowal, till Charity brought out, in a gasp of anguish: "Oh, go--go--go--or I'll hate you too...."When Ally left her, she fell sobbing across her bed.
The long storm was followed by a north-west gale, and when it was over, the hills took on their first umber tints, the sky grew more densely blue, and the big white clouds lay against the hills like snow-banks.The first crisp maple-leaves began to spin across Miss Hatchard's lawn, and the Virginia creeper on the Memorial splashed the white porch with scarlet.It was a golden triumphant September.Day by day the flame of the Virginia creeper spread to the hillsides in wider waves of carmine and crimson, the larches glowed like the thin yellow halo about a fire, the maples blazed and smouldered, and the black hemlocks turned to indigo against the incandescence of the forest.
The nights were cold, with a dry glitter of stars so high up that they seemed smaller and more vivid.
Sometimes, as Charity lay sleepless on her bed through the long hours, she felt as though she were bound to those wheeling fires and swinging with them around the great black vault.At night she planned many things...it was then she wrote to Harney.But the letters were never put on paper, for she did not know how to express what she wanted to tell him.So she waited.Since her talk with Ally she had felt sure that Harney was engaged to Annabel Balch, and that the process of "settling things" would involve the breaking of this tie.Her first rage of jealousy over, she felt no fear on this score.She was still sure that Harney would come back, and she was equally sure that, for the moment at least, it was she whom he loved and not Miss Balch.Yet the girl, no less, remained a rival, since she represented all the things that Charity felt herself most incapable of understanding or achieving.
Annabel Balch was, if not the girl Harney ought to marry, at least the kind of girl it would be natural for him to marry.Charity had never been able to picture herself as his wife; had never been able to arrest the vision and follow it out in its daily consequences; but she could perfectly imagine Annabel Balch in that relation to him.
The more she thought of these things the more the sense of fatality weighed on her: she felt the uselessness of struggling against the circumstances.She had never known how to adapt herself; she could only break and tear and destroy.The scene with Ally had left her stricken with shame at her own childish savagery.What would Harney have thought if he had witnessed it? But when she turned the incident over in her puzzled mind she could not imagine what a civilized person would have done in her place.She felt herself too unequally pitted against unknown forces....
At length this feeling moved her to sudden action.She took a sheet of letter paper from Mr.Royall's office, and sitting by the kitchen lamp, one night after Verena had gone to bed, began her first letter to Harney.It was very short:
I want you should marry Annabel Balch if you promised to.I think maybe you were afraid I'd feel too bad about it.I feel I'd rather you acted right.
Your loving CHARITY.
She posted the letter early the next morning, and for a few days her heart felt strangely light.Then she began to wonder why she received no answer.
One day as she sat alone in the library pondering these things the walls of books began to spin around her, and the rosewood desk to rock under her elbows.The dizziness was followed by a wave of nausea like that she had felt on the day of the exercises in the Town Hall.But the Town Hall had been crowded and stiflingly hot, and the library was empty, and so chilly that she had kept on her jacket.Five minutes before she had felt perfectly well; and now it seemed as if she were going to die.The bit of lace at which she still languidly worked dropped from her fingers, and the steel crochet hook clattered to the floor.She pressed her temples hard between her damp hands, steadying herself against the desk while the wave of sickness swept over her.Little by little it subsided, and after a few minutes she stood up, shaken and terrified, groped for her hat, and stumbled out into the air.But the whole sunlit autumn whirled, reeled and roared around her as she dragged herself along the interminable length of the road home.
As she approached the red house she saw a buggy standing at the door, and her heart gave a leap.But it was only Mr.Royall who got out, his travelling-bag in hand.He saw her coming, and waited in the porch.