The shelf that she undertook next had another air. To Hagar each case had its own air, and each shelf its own air, and each book its own air. "Blair's Rhetoric"—she had read some of that, but she didn't want it to-day. "Pilgrim's Progress"—she knew that by heart. "Burke's Speeches"—"Junius"—she had read "Junius," as she had read many another thing simply because it was there, and a book was a book. She had read it without much understanding, but she liked the language. Milton—she knew a great part of Milton, but to-day she didn't want poetry. Poetry was for when you were happy. Scott—on another day Scott might have sufficed, but to-day she wanted something new—so new and so interesting that it would make the hard, unhappy feeling go away. She stepped from the hassock upon the chair and began to study the titles of the books on almost the top shelf.... There was one in the corner, quite out of sight unless you were on a chair, right up here, face to face with the shelf. The book was even pushed back as though it had retired—or had been retired—behind its fellows so as to be out of danger, or, perhaps, out of the way of being dangerous. Hagar put in her slender, sun-browned hand and drew it forward until she could read the legend on the back—"The Descent of Man." She drew it quite forth, and bringing both hands into play opened it. "By Charles Darwin." She turned the leaves. There were woodcuts—cuts that exercised a fascination. She glanced at the first page: "He who wishes to decide whether man is the modified descendant of some preëxisting form—"
Hagar turned upon the chair and looked about her. The room was a desert for solitude and balmy quiet. Distantly, through the closed parlour doors, came Miss Serena's rendering of "Monastery Bells." She knew that her grandfather was down the river, and that her grandmother was making raspberry jam. She knew that the Bishop was in his room, and that Mrs. LeGrand was out under the cedars. Uncle Bob did not count anyway—he rarely asked embarrassing questions. She may have hesitated one moment, but no more. She got down from the chair, put it back against the wall, closed the bookcase door, and taking the "Descent of Man" with her went over to the old, worn horsehair sofa and curled herself up at the end in a cool and slippery hollow. A gold-dust shaft, slipping through the window, lit her hair, the printed page, and the slim, long-fingered hand that clasped it.
Hagar knew quite well what she was doing. She was going to read a book which, if her course were known, she would be forbidden to read. It had happened before now that she had read books under the ban of Gilead Balm. But heretofore she had always been able to say that she had not known that they were so, had not known she was doing wrong. That could not be said in this case. Aunt Serena had distinctly told her that Charles Darwin was a wicked and irreligious man, and that no lady would read his books.... But then Aunt Serena had unsparingly condemned other books which Hagar's mind yet refused to condemn. She had condemned "The Scarlet Letter." When Gilead Balm discovered Hagar at the last page of that book, there had ensued a family discussion. Miss Serena said that she blushed when she thought of the things that Hagar was learning. The Colonel had not blushed, but he said that such books unsettled all received notions, and while he supported her he wasn't going to have Medway's child imbibing damned anarchical sentiments of any type. Old Miss said a number of things, most of which tended toward Maria. The latter had defended her daughter, but afterwards she told Hagar that in this world, even if you didn't think you were doing wrong, it made for all the happiness there seemed to be not to do what other people thought you ought not to do.... But Hagar didn't believe yet that there was anything wrong in reading "The Scarlet Letter." She had been passionately sorry for Hester, and she had felt—she did not know why—a kind of terrified pity for Mr. Dimmesdale, and she had loved little Pearl. She had intended asking her mother what the red-cloth letter that Hester Prynne wore meant, but it had gone out of her mind. The chapter she liked best was the one with little Pearl playing in the wood.... Perhaps Aunt Serena, having been mistaken about that book, was mistaken, too, about Charles Darwin.
Neither now nor later did she in any wise love the feel of wrong-doing. Forbidden fruit did not appeal to her merely because it was forbidden. But if there was no inner forbidding, if she truly doubted the justice or authority or abstract rightness of the restraining hand, she was capable of attaining the fruit whether forbidden or no. There was always the check of great native kindliness. If what she wanted to do was going—no matter how senselessly—to trouble or hurt other people's feelings, on the whole she wouldn't do it. In the case of this June day and the "Descent of Man" the library was empty. She only wanted to look at the pictures and to run over the reading enough to see what it was about—then she would put it back on the top shelf. She was not by nature indirect or secretive. She preferred to go straightforwardly, to act in the open. But if the wall of not-agreed-in objection stood too high and thick before her, she was capable of stealing forth in the dusk and seeking a way around it. Coiled now in the cool hollow of the sofa, half in and half out of the shaft of sunshine, she began to read.
The broad band of gold-dust shifted place. Miss Serena, arrived at the last ten minutes of her hour and a half at the piano, began to play "Pearls and Roses." Out in the brick kitchen Old Miss dropped a tablespoonful of raspberry jam into a saucer, let it cool, tasted, and pronounced it done. The negro boy and Mimy between them lifted the copper kettle from the stove. Upstairs in Gilead Balm's best room the Bishop folded and slipped into an addressed envelope the last letter he was going to write that morning. Out under the cedars Mrs. LeGrand came to a dull stretch in her novel. She yawned, closed the book, and leaned back against the pillows in the hammock.
Mrs. LeGrand was fair and forty, but only pleasantly plump. She had a creamy skin, moderately large, hazel eyes, moderately far apart, a small, straight nose, a yielding mouth, and a chin that indubitably would presently be double. She was a widow and an orphan. Married at nineteen, her husband, the stars of a brigadier-general upon his grey collar, had within the year fallen upon some one of the blood-soaked battle-grounds of the state. Her father, the important bearer of an old, important name, had served the Confederacy well in a high civil capacity. When the long horror of the war was over, and the longer, miserable torture of the Reconstruction was passing, and a comparative ease and pale dawn of prosperity rose over the state, Mrs. LeGrand looked about her from the remnant of an old plantation on the edge of a tidewater town. The house was dilapidated, but large. The grounds had Old Neglect for gardener, but they, too, were large, and only needed Good-Care-at-Last for complete rehabilitation. Mrs. LeGrand had a kind of smooth, continuous, low-pressure energy, but no money. "A girls' school," she murmured to herself.
When she wrote, here and there over the state, it was at once seen by her correspondents that this was just the thing for the daughter of a public man and the widow of a gallant officer. It was both ladylike and possible.... That was some years ago. Mrs. LeGrand's School for Young Ladies was now an established fact. The house was repaired, the grounds were trim, there was a corps of six teachers, with prospects of expansion, there were day pupils and boarding pupils. Mrs LeGrand saw in her mind's eye long wing-like extensions to the main house where more boarding pupils might be accommodated.... She was successful, and success agreed with her. The coat grew sleek, the cream rose to the top, every angle disappeared; she was warmly optimistic, and smooth, indolent good company. In the summer-time she left Eglantine and from late June to September shared her time between the Springs and the country homes of kindred, family connections, or girlhood friends. She nearly always came for a fortnight or more to Gilead Balm.
Now, leaning back in the hammock, the novel shut, her eyes closed, she was going pleasantly over to herself the additions and improvements to be carried out at Eglantine. From this her mind slipped to her correspondence with a French teacher who promised well, and thence to certain letters received that week from patrons with daughters. One of these, from a state farther south, spoke in highest praise of Mrs. LeGrand's guardianship of the young female mind, of the safe and elegant paths into which she guided it, and of her gift generally for preserving dew and bloom and ignorance of evil in her interesting charges. Every one likes praise and no one is so churlish as to refuse a proffered bouquet or to doubt the judgment of the donor. Mrs. LeGrand experienced from head to foot a soft and amiable glow.
For ten minutes longer she lay in an atmosphere of balm, then she opened her eyes, drew her watch from her white-ribbon belt, and glancing at it surmised that by now the Bishop might have finished his letters. Upon this thought she rose, and paced across the bright June grass to the house. "Pearls and Roses" floated from the parlour. Her hand on the doorknob, Mrs. LeGrand paused irresolutely for a moment, then lightly took it away and crossed the hall to the library. A minute later the Bishop, portly and fine, letters in his hand, came down the stairs, and turned toward this room. The mail-bag always hung, he remembered, by the library escritoire. Though he was a large man, he moved with great lightness; he was at once ponderous and easy. Miss Serena at the piano could hardly have heard him pass the door, so something occult, perhaps, made her ignore the da capo over the bar of "Pearls and Roses" which she had now reached. She struck a final chord, rose, closed the piano, and left the parlour.