Summer, Edith Wharton [urban books to read .TXT] 📗

shoulders of the bearers and on a ridge of upheaved earth over which they were bending. Mr. Miles released her arm and approached the hollow on the other side of the ridge; and while the men stooped down, lowering the mattress into the grave, he began to speak again.

“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery.⁠ ⁠… He cometh up and is cut down⁠ ⁠… he fleeth as it were a shadow.⁠ ⁠… Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.⁠ ⁠…”

“Easy there⁠ ⁠… is she down?” piped the claimant to the stove; and the young man called over his shoulder: “Lift the light there, can’t you?”

There was a pause, during which the light floated uncertainly over the open grave. Someone bent over and pulled out Mr. Miles’s coat⁠—(“No, no⁠—leave the handkerchief,” he interposed)⁠—and then Liff Hyatt, coming forward with a spade, began to shovel in the earth.

“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust⁠ ⁠…” Liff’s gaunt shoulders rose and bent in the lantern light as he dashed the clods of earth into the grave. “God⁠—it’s froze a’ready,” he muttered, spitting into his palm and passing his ragged shirtsleeve across his perspiring face.

“Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it may be like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself⁠ ⁠…” The last spadeful of earth fell on the vile body of Mary Hyatt, and Liff rested on his spade, his shoulder blades still heaving with the effort.

“Lord, have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us⁠ ⁠…”

Mr. Miles took the lantern from the old woman’s hand and swept its light across the circle of bleared faces. “Now kneel down, all of you,” he commanded, in a voice of authority that Charity had never heard. She knelt down at the edge of the grave, and the others, stiffly and hesitatingly, got to their knees beside her. Mr. Miles knelt, too. “And now pray with me⁠—you know this prayer,” he said, and he began: “Our Father which art in Heaven⁠ ⁠…” One or two of the women falteringly took the words up, and when he ended, the lank-haired man flung himself on the neck of the tall youth. “It was this way,” he said. “I tole her the night before, I says to her⁠ ⁠…” The reminiscence ended in a sob.

Mr. Miles had been getting into his coat again. He came up to Charity, who had remained passively kneeling by the rough mound of earth.

“My child, you must come. It’s very late.”

She lifted her eyes to his face: he seemed to speak out of another world.

“I ain’t coming: I’m going to stay here.”

“Here? Where? What do you mean?”

“These are my folks. I’m going to stay with them.”

Mr. Miles lowered his voice. “But it’s not possible⁠—you don’t know what you are doing. You can’t stay among these people: you must come with me.”

She shook her head and rose from her knees. The group about the grave had scattered in the darkness, but the old woman with the lantern stood waiting. Her mournful withered face was not unkind, and Charity went up to her.

“Have you got a place where I can lie down for the night?” she asked. Liff came up, leading the buggy out of the night. He looked from one to the other with his feeble smile. “She’s my mother. She’ll take you home,” he said; and he added, raising his voice to speak to the old woman: “It’s the girl from lawyer Royall’s⁠—Mary’s girl⁠ ⁠… you remember.⁠ ⁠…”

The woman nodded and raised her sad old eyes to Charity’s. When Mr. Miles and Liff clambered into the buggy she went ahead with the lantern to show them the track they were to follow; then she turned back, and in silence she and Charity walked away together through the night.

XVII

Charity lay on the floor on a mattress, as her dead mother’s body had lain. The room in which she lay was cold and dark and low-ceilinged, and even poorer and barer than the scene of Mary Hyatt’s earthly pilgrimage. On the other side of the fireless stove Liff Hyatt’s mother slept on a blanket, with two children⁠—her grandchildren, she said⁠—rolled up against her like sleeping puppies. They had their thin clothes spread over them, having given the only other blanket to their guest.

Through the small square of glass in the opposite wall Charity saw a deep funnel of sky, so black, so remote, so palpitating with frosty stars that her very soul seemed to be sucked into it. Up there somewhere, she supposed, the God whom Mr. Miles had invoked was waiting for Mary Hyatt to appear. What a long flight it was! And what would she have to say when she reached Him?

Charity’s bewildered brain laboured with the attempt to picture her mother’s past, and to relate it in any way to the designs of a just but merciful God; but it was impossible to imagine any link between them. She herself felt as remote from the poor creature she had seen lowered into her hastily dug grave as if the height of the heavens divided them. She had seen poverty and misfortune in her life; but in a community where poor thrifty Mrs. Hawes and the industrious Ally represented the nearest approach to destitution there was nothing to suggest the savage misery of the Mountain farmers.

As she lay there, half-stunned by her tragic initiation, Charity vainly tried to think herself into the life about her. But she could not even make out what relationship these people bore to each other, or to her dead mother; they seemed to be herded together in a