Summer | Page 5

injustice....
She had liked the young man's looks, and his short-sighted eyes, and
his odd way of speaking, that was abrupt yet soft, just as his hands were
sun-burnt and sinewy, yet with smooth nails like a woman's. His hair
was sunburnt-looking too, or rather the colour of bracken after frost; his
eyes grey, with the appealing look of the shortsighted, his smile shy yet
confident, as if he knew lots of things she had never dreamed of, and
yet wouldn't for the world have had her feel his superiority. But she did
feel it, and liked the feeling; for it was new to her. Poor and ignorant as
she was, and knew herself to be--humblest of the humble even in North

Dormer, where to come from the Mountain was the worst disgrace--yet
in her narrow world she had always ruled. It was partly, of course,
owing to the fact that lawyer Royall was "the biggest man in North
Dormer"; so much too big for it, in fact, that outsiders, who didn't know,
always wondered how it held him. In spite of everything--and in spite
even of Miss Hatchard--lawyer Royall ruled in North Dormer; and
Charity ruled in lawyer Royall's house. She had never put it to herself
in those terms; but she knew her power, knew what it was made of, and
hated it. Confusedly, the young man in the library had made her feel for
the first time what might be the sweetness of dependence.
She sat up, brushed the bits of grass from her hair, and looked down on
the house where she held sway. It stood just below her, cheerless and
untended, its faded red front divided from the road by a "yard" with a
path bordered by gooseberry bushes, a stone well overgrown with
traveller's joy, and a sickly Crimson Rambler tied to a fan-shaped
support, which Mr. Royall had once brought up from Hepburn to please
her. Behind the house a bit of uneven ground with clothes-lines strung
across it stretched up to a dry wall, and beyond the wall a patch of corn
and a few rows of potatoes strayed vaguely into the adjoining
wilderness of rock and fern.
Charity could not recall her first sight of the house. She had been told
that she was ill of a fever when she was brought down from the
Mountain; and she could only remember waking one day in a cot at the
foot of Mrs. Royall's bed, and opening her eyes on the cold neatness of
the room that was afterward to be hers.
Mrs. Royall died seven or eight years later; and by that time Charity
had taken the measure of most things about her. She knew that Mrs.
Royall was sad and timid and weak; she knew that lawyer Royall was
harsh and violent, and still weaker. She knew that she had been
christened Charity (in the white church at the other end of the village)
to commemorate Mr. Royall's disinterestedness in "bringing her down,"
and to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence; she knew
that Mr. Royall was her guardian, but that he had not legally adopted
her, though everybody spoke of her as Charity Royall; and she knew

why he had come back to live at North Dormer, instead of practising at
Nettleton, where he had begun his legal career.
After Mrs. Royall's death there was some talk of sending her to a
boarding-school. Miss Hatchard suggested it, and had a long
conference with Mr. Royall, who, in pursuance of her plan, departed
one day for Starkfield to visit the institution she recommended. He
came back the next night with a black face; worse, Charity observed,
than she had ever seen him; and by that time she had had some
experience.
When she asked him how soon she was to start he answered shortly,
"You ain't going," and shut himself up in the room he called his office;
and the next day the lady who kept the school at Starkfield wrote that
"under the circumstances" she was afraid she could not make room just
then for another pupil.
Charity was disappointed; but she understood. It wasn't the temptations
of Starkfield that had been Mr. Royall's undoing; it was the thought of
losing her. He was a dreadfully "lonesome" man; she had made that out
because she was so "lonesome" herself. He and she, face to face in that
sad house, had sounded the depths of isolation; and though she felt no
particular affection for him, and not the slightest gratitude, she pitied
him because she was conscious that he was superior to the people about
him, and that she was the only being between him and solitude.
Therefore, when Miss Hatchard sent for her a day or two