Entering her prison-house with a listless step she took off her hat, hung it on a plaster bust of Minerva, opened the shutters, leaned out to see if there were any eggs in the swallow’s nest above one of the windows, and finally, seating herself behind the desk, drew out a roll of cotton lace and a steel crochet hook. She was not an expert workwoman, and it had taken her many weeks to make the half-yard of narrow lace which she kept wound about the buckram back of a disintegrated copy of “The Lamplighter.” But there was no other way of getting any lace to trim her summer blouse, and since Ally Hawes, the poorest girl in the village, had shown herself in church with enviable transparencies about the shoulders, Charity’s hook had travelled faster. She unrolled the lace, dug the hook into a loop, and bent to the task with furrowed brows.
Suddenly the door opened, and before she had raised her eyes she knew that the young man she had seen going in at the Hatchard gate had entered the library.
Without taking any notice of her he began to move slowly about the long vault-like room, his hands behind his back, his short-sighted eyes peering up and down the rows of rusty bindings. At length he reached the desk and stood before her.
“Have you a card-catalogue?” he asked in a pleasant abrupt voice; and the oddness of the question caused her to drop her work.
“A WHAT?”
“Why, you know—-” He broke off, and she became conscious that he was looking at her for the first time, having apparently, on his entrance, included her in his general short-sighted survey as part of the furniture of the library.
The fact that, in discovering her, he lost the thread of his remark, did not escape her attention, and she looked down and smiled. He smiled also.
“No, I don’t suppose you do know,” he corrected himself. “In fact, it would be almost a pity—-”
She thought she detected a slight condescension in his tone, and asked sharply: “Why?”
“Because it’s so much pleasanter, in a small library like this, to poke about by one’s self–with the help of the librarian.”
He added the last phrase so respectfully that she was mollified, and rejoined with a sigh: “I’m afraid I can’t help you much.”
“Why?” he questioned in his turn; and she replied that there weren’t many books anyhow, and that she’d hardly read any of them. “The worms are getting at them,” she added gloomily.
“Are they? That’s a pity, for I see there are some good ones.” He seemed to have lost interest in their conversation, and strolled away again, apparently forgetting her. His indifference nettled her, and she picked up her work, resolved not to offer him the least assistance. Apparently he did not need it, for he spent a long time with his back to her, lifting down, one after another, the tall cob-webby volumes from a distant shelf.
“Oh, I say!” he exclaimed; and looking up she saw that he had drawn out his handkerchief and was carefully wiping the edges of the book in his hand. The action struck her as an unwarranted criticism on her care of the books, and she said irritably: “It’s not my fault if they’re dirty.”
He turned around and looked at her with reviving interest. “Ah–then you’re not the librarian?”
“Of course I am; but I can’t dust all these books. Besides, nobody ever looks at them, now Miss Hatchard’s too lame to come round.”
“No, I suppose not.” He laid down the book he had been wiping, and stood considering her in silence. She wondered if Miss Hatchard had sent him round to pry into the way the library was looked after, and the suspicion increased her resentment. “I saw you going into her house just now, didn’t I?” she asked, with the New England avoidance of the proper name. She was determined to find out why he was poking about among her books.
“Miss Hatchard’s house? Yes–she’s my cousin and I’m staying there,” the young man answered; adding, as if to disarm a visible distrust: “My name is Harney– Lucius Harney. She may have spoken of me.”