The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pembroke, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

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Title: Pembroke
       A Novel

Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Release Date: December 31, 2005 [EBook #17428]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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Produced by Jeff Kaylin





Transcriber's Note:
The images for this text were scanned from the 1894 edition.




Pembroke

Mary E. Wilkins

Harper & Brothers Publishers; New York: 1900


[Illustration: "'It's beautiful,' Rose said"]


Introductory Sketch


_Pembroke_ was originally intended as a study of the human will in
several New England characters, in different phases of disease and
abnormal development, and to prove, especially in the most marked
case, the truth of a theory that its cure depended entirely upon the
capacity of the individual for a love which could rise above all
considerations of self, as Barnabas Thayer's love for Charlotte
Barnard finally did.

While Barnabas Thayer is the most pronounced exemplification of this
theory, and while he, being drawn from life, originally suggested the
scheme of the study, a number of the other characters, notably
Deborah Thayer, Richard Alger, and Cephas Barnard, are instances of
the same spiritual disease. Barnabas to me was as much the victim of
disease as a man with curvature of the spine; he was incapable of
straightening himself to his former stature until he had laid hands
upon a more purely unselfish love than he had ever known, through his
anxiety for Charlotte, and so raised himself to his own level.

When I make use of the term abnormal, I do not mean unusual in any
sense. I am far from any intention to speak disrespectfully or
disloyally of those stanch old soldiers of the faith who landed upon
our inhospitable shores and laid the foundation, as on a very rock of
spirit, for the New England of to-day; but I am not sure, in spite of
their godliness, and their noble adherence, in the face of obstacles,
to the dictates of their consciences, that their wills were not
developed past the reasonable limit of nature. What wonder is it that
their descendants inherit this peculiarity, though they may develop
it for much less worthy and more trivial causes than the exiling
themselves for a question of faith, even the carrying-out of personal
and petty aims and quarrels?

There lived in a New England village, at no very remote time, a man
who objected to the painting of the kitchen floor, and who quarrelled
furiously with his wife concerning the same. When she persisted, in
spite of his wishes to the contrary, and the floor was painted, he
refused to cross it to his dying day, and always, to his great
inconvenience, but probably to his soul's satisfaction, walked around
it.

A character like this, holding to a veriest trifle with such a
deathless cramp of the will, might naturally be regarded as a notable
exception to a general rule; but his brethren who sit on church steps
during services, who are dumb to those whom they should love, and
will not enter familiar doors because of quarrels over matters of
apparently no moment, are legion. _Pembroke_ is intended to portray a
typical New England village of some sixty years ago, as many of the
characters flourished at that time, but villages of a similar
description have existed in New England at a much later date, and
they exist to-day in a very considerable degree. There are at the
present time many little towns in New England along whose pleasant
elm or maple shaded streets are scattered characters as pronounced as
any in Pembroke. A short time since a Boston woman recited in my
hearing a list of seventy-five people in the very small Maine village
in which she was born and brought up, and every one of the characters
which she mentioned had some almost incredibly marked physical or
mental characteristic.

However, this state of things--this survival of the more prominent
traits of the old stiff-necked ones, albeit their necks were
stiffened by their resistance of the adversary--can necessarily be
known only to the initiated. The sojourner from cities for the summer
months cannot often penetrate in the least, though he may not be
aware of it, the reserve and dignified aloofness of the dwellers in
the white cottages along the road over which he drives. He often
looks upon them from the superior height of a wise and keen student
of character; he knows what he thinks of them, but he never knows
what they think of him or themselves. Unless he is a man of the
broadest and most democratic tendencies, to whom culture and the
polish of society is as nothing beside humanity, and unless he
returns, as faithfully as the village birds to their nests, to his
summer home year after year, he cannot see very far below the
surfaces of villages of which Pembroke is typical. Quite naturally,
when the surfaces are broken by some unusual revelation of a
strongly serrate individuality, and the tale thereof is told
at his dinner-table with an accompaniment of laughter and
exclamation-points, he takes that case for an isolated and by no
means typical one, when, if the truth were told, the village windows
are full of them as he passes by.

However, this state of things must necessarily exist, and has
existed, in villages which, like Pembroke, have not been brought much
in contact with outside influences, and have not been studied or
observed at all by people not of their kind by birth or long
familiarity. In towns which have increased largely in population, and
have become more or less assimilated with a foreign element, these
characters do not exist in such a large measure, are more isolated in
reality, and have, consequently, less claim to be considered types.
But there have been, and are to-day in New England, hundreds of
villages like Pembroke, where nearly every house contains one or more
characters so marked as to be incredible, though a writer may be
prevented, for obvious reasons, from mentioning names and proving
facts.

There is often to a mind from the outside world an almost repulsive
narrowness and a pitiful sordidness which amounts to tragedy in the
lives of such people as those portrayed in _Pembroke_, but quite
generally the tragedy exists only in the comprehension of the
observer and not at all in that of the observed. The pitied would
meet pity with resentment; they would be full of wonder and wrath if
told that their lives were narrow, since they have never seen the
limit of the breadth of their current of daily life. A singing-school
is as much to them as a symphony concert and grand opera to their
city brethren, and a sewing church sociable as an afternoon tea.
Though the standard of taste of the simple villagers, and their
complete satisfaction therewith, may reasonably be lamented, as also
their restricted view of life, they are not to be pitied, generally
speaking, for their unhappiness in consequence. It may be that the
lack of unhappiness constitutes the real tragedy.



Chapter I


At half-past six o'clock on Sunday night Barnabas came out of his
bedroom. The Thayer house was only one story high, and there were no
chambers. A number of little bedrooms were clustered around the three
square rooms--the north and south parlors, and the great kitchen.

Barnabas walked out of his bedroom straight into the kitchen where
the other members of the family were. They sat before the hearth fire
in a semi-circle--Caleb Thayer, his wife Deborah, his son Ephraim,
and his daughter Rebecca. It was May, but it was quite cold; there
had been talk of danger to the apple blossoms; there was a crisp
coolness in the back of the great room in spite of the hearth fire.

Caleb Thayer held a great leather-bound Bible on his knees, and was
reading aloud in a solemn voice. His wife sat straight in her chair,
her large face tilted with a judicial and argumentative air, and
Rebecca's red cheeks bloomed out more brilliantly in the heat of the
fire. She sat next her mother, and her smooth dark head with its
carven comb arose from her Sunday kerchief with a like carriage. She
and her mother did not look alike, but their motions were curiously
similar, and perhaps gave evidence to a subtler resemblance in
character and motive power.

Ephraim, undersized for his age, in his hitching, home-made clothes,
twisted himself about when Barnabas entered, and stared at him with
slow regard. He eyed the smooth, scented hair, the black satin vest
with a pattern of blue flowers on it, the blue coat with brass
buttons, and the shining boots, then he whistled softly under his
breath.

"Ephraim!" said his mother, sharply. She had a heavy voice and a
slight lisp, which seemed to make it more impressive and more
distinctively her own. Caleb read on ponderously.

"Where ye goin', Barney?" Ephraim inquired, with a chuckle and a
grin, over the back of his chair.

"Ephraim!" repeated his mother. Her blue eyes frowned around his
sister at him under their heavy sandy brows.

Ephraim twisted himself back into position. "Jest wanted to know
where he was goin'," he muttered.

Barnabas stood by the window brushing his fine bell hat with a white
duck's wing. He was a handsome youth; his profile showed clear and
fine in the light, between the sharp points of his dicky bound about
by his high stock. His cheeks were as red as his sister's.

When he put on his hat and opened the door, his mother herself
interrupted Caleb's reading.

"Don't you stay later than nine o'clock, Barnabas," said she.

The young man murmured something unintelligibly, but his tone was
resentful.

"I ain't going to have you out as long as you were last Sabbath
night," said his mother, in quick return. She jerked her chin down
heavily as if it were made of iron.

Barnabas went out quickly, and shut the door with a thud.

[Illustration: "Barnabas went out quickly"]

"If he was a few years younger, I'd make him come back an' shut that
door over again," said his mother.

Caleb read on; he was reading now one of the imprecatory psalms.
Deborah's blue eyes gleamed with warlike energy as she listened: she
confused King David's enemies with those people who crossed her own
will.

Barnabas went out of the yard, which was wide and deep on the south
side of the house. The bright young grass was all snowed over with
cherry blossoms. Three great cherry-trees stood in a row through the
centre of the yard; they had been white with blossoms, but now they
were turning green; and the apple-trees were in flower.

There were many apple-trees behind the stone-walls that bordered the
wood. The soft blooming branches looked strangely incongruous in the
keen air. The western sky was clear and yellow, and there were a few
reefs of violet cloud along it. Barnabas looked up at the apple
blossoms over his head, and wondered if there would be a frost. From
their apple orchard came a large share of the Thayer income, and
Barnabas was vitally interested in such matters now, for he was to be
married the last of June to Charlotte Barnard. He often sat down with
a pencil and slate, and calculated, with intricate sums, the amounts
of his income and their probable expenses. He had made up his mind
that Charlotte should have one new silk gown every year, and two new
bonnets--one for summer and one for winter. His mother had often
noted, with scorn, that Charlotte Barnard wore her summer bonnet with
another ribbon on it winters, and, moreover, had not had a new bonnet
for three years.

"She looks handsomer in it than any girl in town, if she hasn't,"
Barnabas had retorted with quick resentment, but he nevertheless felt
sensitive on the subject of Charlotte's bonnet, and resolved that she
should have a white one trimmed with gauze ribbons for summer, and
one of drawn silk, like Rebecca's, for winter, only the silk should
be blue instead of pink, because Charlotte was fair.

Barnabas had even pondered with tender concern, before he bought his
fine flowered satin waistcoat, if he might not put the money it would
cost into a bonnet for Charlotte, but he had not dared to propose it.
Once he had bought a little blue-figured shawl for her, and her
father had bade her return it.

"I ain't goin' to have any young sparks buyin' your clothes while you
are under my roof," he had said.

Charlotte had given the shawl back to her lover. "Father don't feel
as if I ought to take it, and I guess you'd better keep it now,
Barney," she said, with regretful tears in her eyes.

Barnabas had the blue shawl nicely folded in the bottom of his little
hair-cloth trunk, which he always kept locked.

After a quarter of a mile the stone-walls and the spray of apple
blossoms ended; there was a short stretch of new fence, and a new
cottage-house only partly done. The yard was full of lumber, and a
ladder slanted to the roof, which gleamed out with the fresh pinky
yellow of unpainted pine.

Barnabas stood before the house a few minutes, staring at it. Then he
walked around it slowly, his face upturned. Then he went in the front
door, swinging himself up over the sill, for there were no steps, and
brushing the sawdust carefully from his clothes when he was inside.
He went all over the house, climbing a ladder to the second story,
and viewing with pride the two chambers under the slant of the new
roof. He had repelled with scorn his father's suggestion that he have
a one-story instead of a story-and-a-half house. Caleb had an
inordinate horror and fear of wind, and his father, who had built the
house in which he lived, had it before him. Deborah often descanted
indignantly upon the folly of sleeping in little tucked-up bedrooms
instead of good chambers, because folks' fathers had been scared to
death of wind, and Barnabas agreed with her. If he had inherited any
of his father's and grandfather's terror of wind, he made no
manifestation of it.

In the lower story of the new cottage were two square front rooms
like those in his father's house, and behind them the great kitchen
with a bedroom out of it, and a roof of its own.

Barnabas paused at last in the kitchen, and stood quite still,
leaning against a window casement. The windows were not in, and the
spaces let in the cool air and low light. Outside was a long reach of
field sloping gently upward. In the distance, at the top of the hill,
sharply outlined against the sky, was a black angle of roof and a
great chimney. A thin column of smoke rose out of it, straight and
dark. That was where Charlotte Barnard lived.

Barnabas looked out and saw the smoke rising from the chimney of the
Barnard house. There was a little hollow in the field that was quite
blue with violets, and he noted that absently. A team passed on the
road outside; it was as if he saw and heard everything from the
innermost recesses of his own life, and everything seemed strange and
far off.

He turned to go, but suddenly stood still in the middle of the
kitchen, as if some one had stopped him. He looked at the new
fireless hearth, through the open door into the bedroom which he
would occupy after he was married to Charlotte, and through others
into the front rooms, which would be apartments of simple state, not
so closely connected with every-day life. The kitchen windows would
be sunny. Charlotte would think it a pleasant room.

"Her rocking-chair can set there," said Barnabas aloud. The tears
came into his eyes; he stepped forward, laid his smooth boyish cheek
against a partition wall of this new house, and kissed it. It was a
fervent demonstration, not towards Charlotte alone, nor the joy to
come to him within those walls, but to all life and love and nature,
although he did not comprehend it. He half sobbed as he turned away;
his thoughts seemed to dazzle his brain, and he could not feel his
feet. He passed through the north front room, which would be the
little-used parlor, to the door, and suddenly started at a long black
shadow on the floor. It vanished as he went on, and might have been
due to his excited fancy, which seemed substantial enough to cast
shadows.

"I shall marry Charlotte, we shall live here together all our lives,
and die here," thought Barnabas, as he went up the hill. "I shall lie
in my coffin in the north room, and it will all be over," but his
heart leaped with joy. He stepped out proudly like a soldier in a
battalion, he threw back his shoulders in his Sunday coat.

The yellow glow was paling in the west, the evening air was like a
cold breath in his face. He could see the firelight flickering upon
the kitchen wall of the Barnard house as he drew near. He came up
into the yard and caught a glimpse of a fair head in the ruddy glow.
There was a knocker on the door; he raised it gingerly and let it
fall. It made but a slight clatter, but a woman's shadow moved
immediately across the yard outside, and Barnabas heard the inner
door open. He threw open the outer one himself, and Charlotte stood
there smiling, and softly decorous. Neither of them spoke. Barnabas
glanced at the inner door to see if it were closed, then he caught
Charlotte's hands and kissed her.

"You shouldn't do so, Barnabas," whispered Charlotte, turning her
face away. She was as tall as Barnabas, and as handsome.

"Yes, I should," persisted Barnabas, all radiant, and his face
pursued hers around her shoulder.

"It's pretty cold out, ain't it?" said Charlotte, in a chiding voice
which she could scarcely control.

"I've been in to see our house. Give me one more kiss. Oh,
Charlotte!"

"Charlotte!" cried a deep voice, and the lovers started apart.

"I'm coming, father," Charlotte cried out. She opened the door and
went soberly into the kitchen, with Barnabas at her heels. Her
father, mother, and Aunt Sylvia Crane sat there in the red gleam of
the firelight and gathering twilight. Sylvia sat a little behind the
others, and her face in her white cap had the shadowy delicacy of one
of the flowering apple sprays outside.

"How d'ye do?" said Barnabas in a brave tone which was slightly
aggressive. Charlotte's mother and aunt responded rather nervously.

"How's your mother, Barnabas?" inquired Mrs. Barnard.

"She's pretty well, thank you."

Charlotte pulled forward a chair for her lover; he had just seated
himself, when Cephas Barnard spoke in a voice as sudden and gruff as
a dog's bark. Barnabas started, and his chair grated on the sanded
floor.

"Light the candle, Charlotte," said Cephas, and Charlotte obeyed. She
lighted the candle on the high shelf, then she sat down next
Barnabas. Cephas glanced around at them. He was a small man, with a
thin face in a pale film of white locks and beard, but his black eyes
gleamed out of it with sharp fixedness. Barnabas looked back at him
unflinchingly, and there was a curious likeness between the two pairs
of black eyes. Indeed, there had been years ago a somewhat close
relationship between the Thayers and the Barnards, and it was not
strange if one common note was repeated generations hence.

Cephas had been afraid lest Barnabas should, all unperceived in the
dusk, hold his daughter's hand, or venture upon other loverlike
familiarity. That was the reason why he had ordered the candle
lighted when it was scarcely dark enough to warrant it.

But Barnabas seemed scarcely to glance at his sweetheart as he sat
there beside her, although in some subtle fashion, perhaps by some
finer spiritual vision, not a turn of her head, nor a fleeting
expression on her face, like a wind of the soul, escaped him. He saw
always Charlotte's beloved features high and pure, almost severe, but
softened with youthful bloom, her head with fair hair plaited in a
smooth circle, with one long curl behind each ear. Charlotte would
scarcely have said he had noticed, but he knew well she had on a new
gown of delaine in a mottled purple pattern, her worked-muslin
collar, and her mother's gold beads which she had given her.

Barnabas kept listening anxiously for the crackle of the hearth fire
in the best room; he hoped Charlotte had lighted the fire, and they
should soon go in there by themselves. They usually did of a Sunday
night, but sometimes Cephas forbade his daughter to light the fire
and prohibited any solitary communion between the lovers.

"If Barnabas Thayer can't set here with the rest of us, he can go
home," he proclaimed at times, and he had done so to-night. Charlotte
had acquiesced forlornly; there was nothing else for her to do. Early
in her childhood she had learned along with her primer her father's
character, and the obligations it imposed upon her.

"You must be a good girl, and mind; it's your father's way," her
mother used to tell her. Mrs. Barnard herself had spelt out her
husband like a hard and seemingly cruel text in the Bible. She
marvelled at its darkness in her light, but she believed in it
reverently, and even pugnaciously.

The large, loosely built woman, with her heavy, sliding step, waxed
fairly decisive, and her soft, meek-lidded eyes gleamed hard and
prominent when her elder sister, Hannah, dared inveigh against
Cephas.

"I tell you it is his way," said Sarah Barnard. And she said it as if
"his way" was the way of the King.

"His way!" Hannah would sniff back. "His way! Keepin' you all on rye
meal one spell, an' not lettin' you eat a mite of Injun, an' then
keepin' you on Injun without a mite of rye! Makin' you eat nothin'
but greens an' garden stuff, an' jest turnin' you out to graze an'
chew your cuds like horned animals one spell, an' then makin' you
live on meat! Lettin' you go abroad when he takes a notion, an' then
keepin' you an' Charlotte in the house a year!"

"It's his way, an' I ain't goin' to have anything said against it,"
Sarah Barnard would retort stanchly, and her sister would sniff back
again. Charlotte was as loyal as her mother; she did not like it if
even her lover intimated anything in disfavor of her father.

No matter how miserable she was in consequence of her acquiescence
with her father's will, she sternly persisted.

To-night she knew that Barnabas was waiting impatiently for her
signal to leave the rest of the company and go with her into the
front room; there was also a tender involuntary impatience and
longing in every nerve of her body, but nobody would have suspected
it; she sat there as calmly as if Barnabas were old Squire Payne, who
sometimes came in of a Sabbath evening, and seemed to be listening
intently to her mother and her Aunt Sylvia talking about the spring
cleaning.

Cephas and Barnabas were grimly silent. The young man suspected that
Cephas had prohibited the front room; he was indignant about that,
and the way in which Charlotte had been summoned in from the entry,
and he had no diplomacy.

Charlotte, under her calm exterior, grew uneasy; she glanced at her
mother, who glanced back. It was to both women as if they felt by
some subtle sense the brewing of a tempest. Charlotte unobtrusively
moved her chair a little nearer her lover's; her purple delaine skirt
swept his knee; both of them blushed and trembled with Cephas's black
eyes upon them.

Charlotte never knew quite how it began, but her father suddenly
flung out a dangerous topic like a long-argued bone of contention,
and he and Barnabas were upon it. Barnabas was a Democrat, and Cephas
was a Whig, and neither ever forgot it of the other. None of the
women fairly understood the point at issue; it was as if they drew
back their feminine skirts and listened amazed and trembling to this
male hubbub over something outside their province. Charlotte grew
paler and paler. She looked piteously at her mother.

"Now, father, don't," Sarah ventured once or twice, but it was like a
sparrow piping against the north wind.

Charlotte laid her hand on her lover's arm and kept it there, but he
did not seem to heed her. "Don't," she said; "don't, Barnabas. I
think there's going to be a frost to-night; don't you?" But nobody
heard her. Sylvia Crane, in the background, clutched the arms of her
rocking-chair with her thin hands.

Suddenly both men began hurling insulting epithets at each other.
Cephas sprang up, waving his right arm fiercely, and Barnabas shook
off Charlotte's hand and was on his feet.

"Get out of here!" shouted Cephas, in a hoarse voice--"get out of
here! Get out of this house, an' don't you ever darse darken these
doors again while the Lord Almighty reigns!" The old man was almost
inarticulate; he waved his arms, wagged his head, and stamped; he
looked like a white blur with rage.

"I never will, by the Lord Almighty!" returned Barnabas, in an awful
voice; then the door slammed after him. Charlotte sprang up.

"Set down!" shouted Cephas. Charlotte rushed forward. "You set down!"
her father repeated; her mother caught hold of her dress.

"Charlotte, do set down," she whispered, glancing at her husband in
terror. But Charlotte pulled her dress away.

"Don't you stop me, mother. I am not going to have him turned out
this way," she said. Her father advanced threateningly, but she set
her young, strong shoulders against him and pushed past out of the
door. The door was slammed to after her and the bolt shot, but she
did not heed that. She ran across the yard, calling: "Barney! Barney!
Barney! Come back!" Barnabas was already out in the road; he never
turned his head, and kept on. Charlotte hurried after him. "Barney,"
she cried, her voice breaking with sobs--"Barney, do come back. You
aren't mad at me, are you?" Barney never turned his head; the
distance between them widened as Charlotte followed, calling. She
stopped suddenly, and stood watching her lover's dim retreating back,
straining with his rapid strides.

"Barney Thayer," she called out, in an angry, imperious tone, "if
you're ever coming back, you come now!"

But Barney kept on as if he did not hear. Charlotte gasped for breath
as she watched him; she could scarcely help her feet running after
him, but she would not follow him any farther. She did not call him
again; in a minute she turned around and went back to the house,
holding her head high in the dim light.

She did not try to open the door; she was sure it was locked, and she
was too proud. She sat down on the flat, cool door-stone, and
remained there as dusky and motionless against the old gray panel of
the door as the shadow of some inanimate object that had never moved.

The wind began to rise, and at the same time the full moon, impelled
softly upward by force as unseen as thought. Charlotte's fair head
gleamed out abruptly in the moonlight like a pale flower, but the
folds of her mottled purple skirt were as vaguely dark as the foliage
on the lilac-bush beside her. All at once the flowering branches on a
wide-spreading apple-tree cut the gloom like great silvery wings of a
brooding bird. The grass in the yard was like a shaggy silver fleece.
Charlotte paid no more attention to it all than to her own breath, or
a clock tick which she would have to withdraw from herself to hear.

A low voice, which was scarcely more than a whisper, called her, a
slender figure twisted itself around the front corner of the house
like a vine. "Charlotte, you there?" Charlotte did not hear. Then the
whisper came again. "Charlotte!"

Charlotte looked around then.

A slender white hand reached out in the gloom around the corner and
beckoned. "Charlotte, come; come quick."

Charlotte did not stir.

"Charlotte, do come. Your mother's dreadful afraid you'll catch cold.
The front door is open."

Charlotte sat quite rigid. The slender figure began moving towards
her stealthily, keeping close to the house, advancing with frequent
pauses like a wary bird. When she got close to Charlotte she reached
down and touched her shoulder timidly. "Oh, Charlotte, don't you feel
bad? He'd ought to know your father by this time; he'll get over it
and come back," she whispered.

"I don't want him to come back," Charlotte whispered fiercely in
return.

Sylvia stared at her helplessly. Charlotte's face looked strange and
hard in the moonlight. "Your mother's dreadful worried," she
whispered again, presently. "She thinks you'll catch cold. I come out
of the front door on purpose so you can go in that way. Your father's
asleep in his chair. He told your mother not to unbolt this door
to-night, and she didn't darse to. But we went past him real still to
the front one, an' you can slip in there and get up to your chamber
without his seeing you. Oh, Charlotte, do come!"

Charlotte arose, and she and Sylvia went around to the front door.
Sylvia crept close to the house as before, but Charlotte walked
boldly along in the moonlight. "Charlotte, I'm dreadful afraid he'll
see you," Sylvia pleaded, but Charlotte would not change her course.

Just as they reached the front door it was slammed with a quick puff
of wind in their faces. They heard Mrs. Barnard's voice calling
piteously. "Oh, father, do let her in!" it implored.

"Don't you worry, mother," Charlotte called out. "I'll go home with
Aunt Sylvia."

"Oh, Charlotte!" her mother's voice broke in sobs.

"Don't you worry, mother," Charlotte repeated, with an unrelenting
tone in the comforting words. "I'll go right home with Aunt Sylvia.
Come," she said, imperatively to her aunt, "I am not going to stand
here any longer," and she went out into the road, and hastened down
it, as Barnabas had done.

"I'll take her right home with me," Sylvia called to her sister in a
trembling voice (nobody knew how afraid she was of Cephas); and she
followed Charlotte.

Sylvia lived on an old road that led from the main one a short
distance beyond the new house, so the way led past it. Charlotte went
on at such a pace that Sylvia could scarcely keep up with her. She
slid along in her wake, panting softly, and lifting her skirts out of
the evening dew. She was trembling with sympathy for Charlotte, and
she had also a worry of her own. When they reached the new house she
fairly sobbed outright, but Charlotte went past in her stately haste
without a murmur.

"Oh, Charlotte, don't feel so bad," mourned her aunt. "I know it will
all come right." But Charlotte made no reply. Her dusky skirts swept
around the bushes at the corner of the road, and Sylvia hurried
tremulously after her.

Neither of them dreamed that Barnabas watched them, standing in one
of the front rooms of his new house. He had gone in there when he
fled from Cephas Barnard's, and had not yet been home. He recognized
Charlotte's motions as quickly as her face, and knew Sylvia's voice,
although he could not distinguish what she said. He watched them turn
the corner of the other road, and thought that Charlotte was going to
spend the night with her aunt--he did not dream why. He had resolved
to stay where he was in his desolate new house, and not go home
himself.

A great grief and resentment against the whole world and life itself
swelled high within him. It was as if he lost sight of individual
antagonists, and burned to dash life itself in the face because he
existed. The state of happiness so exalted that it became almost
holiness, in which he had been that very night, flung him to lower
depths when it was retroverted. He had gone back to first causes in
the one and he did the same in the other; his joy had reached out
into eternity, and so did his misery. His natural religious bent,
inherited from generations of Puritans, and kept in its channel by
his training from infancy, made it impossible for him to conceive of
sympathy or antagonism in its fullest sense apart from God.

Sitting on a pile of shavings in a corner of the north room, he
fairly hugged himself with fierce partisanship. "What have I done to
be treated in this way?" he demanded, setting his face ahead in the
darkness; and he did not see Cephas Barnard's threatening
countenance, but another, gigantic with its vague outlines, which his
fancy could not limit, confronting him with terrible negative power
like a stone image. He struck out against it, and the blows fell back
on his own heart.

"What have I done?" he demanded over and over of this great immovable
and silent consciousness which he realized before him. "Have I not
kept all thy commandments from childhood? Have I ever failed to
praise thee as the giver of my happiness, and ask thy blessing upon
it? What have I done that it should be taken away? It was given to me
only to be taken away. Why was it given to me, then?--that I might be
mocked? Oh, I am mocked, I am mocked!" he cried out, in a great rage,
and he struck out in the darkness, and his heart leaped with futile
pain. The possibility that his misery might not be final never
occurred to him. It never occurred to him that he could enter Cephas
Barnard's house again, ask his pardon, and marry Charlotte. It seemed
to him settled and inevitable; he could not grasp any choice in the
matter.

Barnabas finally threw himself back on the pile of shavings, and lay
there sullenly. Great gusts of cold wind came in at the windows at
intervals, a loose board somewhere in the house rattled, the trees
outside murmured heavily.

"There won't be a frost," Barnabas thought, his mind going apace on
its old routine in spite of its turmoil. Then he thought with the
force of an oath that he did not care if there was a frost. All the
trees this spring had blossomed only for him and Charlotte; now there
was no longer any use in that; let the blossoms blast and fall!



Chapter II


Sylvia Crane's house was the one in which her grandmother had been
born, and was the oldest house in the village. It was known as the
"old Crane place." It had never been painted, it was shedding its
flapping gray shingles like gray scales, the roof sagged in a mossy
hollow before the chimney, the windows and doors were awry, and the
whole house was full of undulations and wavering lines, which gave it
a curiously unreal look in broad daylight. In the moonlight it was
the shadowy edifice built of a dream.

As Sylvia and Charlotte came to the front door it seemed as if they
might fairly walk through it as through a gray shadow; but Sylvia
stooped, and her shoulders strained with seemingly incongruous force,
as if she were spending it to roll away a shadow. On the flat
doorstep lay a large round stone, pushed close against the door.
There were no locks and keys in the old Crane place; only bolts.
Sylvia could not fasten the doors on the inside when she went away,
so she adopted this expedient, which had been regarded with favor by
her mother and grandmother before her, and illustrated natures full
of gentle fallacies which went far to make existence comfortable.

Always on leaving the house alone the Crane women had bolted the side
door, which was the one in common use, gone out the front one, and
laboriously rolled this same round stone before it. Sylvia reasoned
as her mother and grandmother before her, with the same simplicity:
"When the stone's in front of the door, folks must know there ain't
anybody to home, because they couldn't put it there if they was."

And when some neighbor had argued that the evil-disposed might roll
away the stone and enter at will, Sylvia had replied, with the
innocent conservatism with which she settled an argument, "Nobody
ever did."

To-night she rolled away the stone to the corner of the door-step,
where it had lain through three generations when the Crane women were
at home, and sighed with regret that she had defended the door with
it. "I wish I hadn't put the stone up," she thought. "If I hadn't,
mebbe he'd gone in an' waited." She opened the door, and the gloom of
the house, deeper than the gloom of the night, appeared. "You wait
here a minute," she said to Charlotte, "an' I'll go in an' light a
candle."

Charlotte waited, leaning against the door-post. There was a flicker
of fire within. Then Sylvia held the flaring candle towards her.
"Come in," she said; "the candle's lit."

There was a bed of coals on the hearth in the best room; Sylvia had
made a fire there before going over to her sister's, but it had
burned low. The glow of the coals and the smoky flare of the candle
lighted the room uncertainly, scattering and not dispelling the
shadows. There was a primly festive air in the room. The
flag-bottomed chairs stood by twos, finely canted towards each other,
against the wall; the one great hair-cloth rocker stood
ostentatiously in advance of them, facing the hearth fire; the long
level of the hair-cloth sofa gleamed out under stiff sweeps of the
white fringed curtains at the window behind it. The books on the
glossy card-table were set canting towards each other like the
chairs, and with their gilt edges towards the light. And Sylvia had
set also on the table a burnished pitcher of a rosy copper-color full
of apple blossoms.

She looked at it when she had set the candle on the shelf. It seemed
to her that all the light in the room centred on it, and it shone in
her eyes like a copper lamp.

Charlotte also glanced at it. "Why, Richard must have come while you
were over to our house," she said.

"It don't make any odds if he did," returned Sylvia, with a faint
blush and a bridle. Sylvia was much younger than her sister. Standing
there in the dim light she did not look so much older than her niece.
Her figure had the slim angularity and primness which are sometimes
seen in elderly women who are not matrons, and she had donned a
little white lace cap at thirty, but her face had still a delicate
bloom, and the wistful wonder of expression which belongs to youth.

However, she never thought of Charlotte as anything but a child as
compared with herself. Sylvia felt very old, and the more so that she
grudged her years painfully. She stirred up the fire a little,
holding back her shiny black silk skirt carefully. Charlotte stood
leaning against the shelf, looking moodily down at the fire.

"I wouldn't feel bad if I was you, Charlotte," Sylvia ventured,
timidly.

"I guess we'd better go to bed pretty soon," returned Charlotte. "It
must be late."

"Had you rather sleep with me, Charlotte, or sleep in the spare
chamber?"

"I guess I'll go in the spare chamber."

"Well, I'll get you a night-gown."

Both of their faces were sober, but perfectly staid. They bade each
other good-night without a quiver; but Charlotte, after she had said
her dutiful and unquestioning prayer, and lay folded in Sylvia's
ruffled night-gown in the best bed, shook with great sobs. "Poor
Barney!" she kept muttering. "Poor Barney! poor Barney!"

The doors were all open, and once she thought she heard a sob from
below, then concluded she must be mistaken. But she was not, for
Sylvia Crane was lamenting as sorely as the younger maiden up-stairs.
"Poor Richard!" she repeated, piteously. "Poor Richard! There he
came, and the stone was up, and he had to go away."

The faces which were so clear to the hearts of both women, as if they
were before their eyes, had a certain similarity. Indeed, Richard
Alger and Barnabas Thayer were distantly related on the mother's
side, and people said they looked enough alike to be brothers. Sylvia
saw the same type of face as Charlotte, only Richard's face was
older, for he was six years older than she.

"If I hadn't put the stone up," she moaned, "maybe he would have
thought I didn't hear him knock, an' he'd come in an' waited. Poor
Richard, I dunno what he thought! It's the first time it's happened
for eighteen years."

Sylvia, as she lay there, looked backward, and it seemed to her that
the eighteen years were all made up of the Sunday nights on which
Richard Alger had come to see her, as if they were all that made them
immortal and redeemed them from the dead past. She had endured grief,
but love alone made the past years stand out for her. Sylvia, in
looking back over eighteen years, forgot the father, mother, and
sister who had died in that time; their funeral trains passed before
her eyes like so many shadows. She forgot all their cares and her
own; she forgot how she had nursed her bedridden mother for ten
years; she forgot everything but those blessed Sunday nights on which
Richard Alger had come. She called to mind every little circumstance
connected with them--how she had adorned the best room by slow
degrees, saving a few cents at a time from her sparse income, because
he sat in it every Sunday night; how she had had the bed which her
mother and grandmother kept there removed because the fashion had
changed, and the guilty audacity with which she had purchased a
hair-cloth sofa to take its place.

That adorning of the best room had come to be a religion with Sylvia
Crane. As faithfully as any worshipper of the Greek deity she laid
her offerings, her hair-cloth sofa and rocker, her copper-gilt
pitcher of apple blossoms, upon the altar of love.

Sylvia recalled, sobbing more piteously in the darkness, sundry
dreams, which had never been realized, of herself and Richard sitting
side by side and hand in hand, as confessed lovers, on that sofa.
Richard Alger, during all those eighteen years, had never made love
to Sylvia, unless his constant attendance upon Sabbath evenings could
be so construed, as it was in that rural neighborhood, and as Sylvia
was fain to construe it in her innocent heart.

It is doubtful if Sylvia, in her perfect decorum and long-fostered
maiden reserve, fairly knew that Richard Alger had never made love to
her. She scarcely expected her dreams of endearments to be realized;
she regarded them, except in desperate moods, with shame. If her old
admirer had, indeed, attempted to sit by her side upon that
hair-cloth sofa and hold her hand, she would have arisen as if
propelled by stiff springs of modest virtue. She did not fairly know
that she was not made love to after the most honorable and orthodox
fashion without a word of endearment or a caress; for she had been
trained to regard love as one of the most secret of the laws of
nature, to be concealed, with shamefaced air, even from herself; but
she did know that Richard had never asked her to marry him, and for
that she was impatient without any self-reserve; she was even
confidential with her sister, Charlotte's mother.

"I don't want to say anything outside," she once said, "but I do
think it would be a good deal better for him if we was settled down.
He ain't half taken care of since his mother died."

"He's got money enough," returned Mrs. Barnard.

"That can't buy everything."

"Well, I don't pity him; I pity you," said Mrs. Barnard.

"I guess I shall get along a while longer, as far as that goes,"
Sylvia had replied to her sister, with some pride. "I ain't worried
on my account."

"Women don't worry much on their own accounts, but they've got
accounts," returned Mrs. Barnard, with more contempt for her sister
than she had ever shown for herself. "You're gettin' older, Sylvy."

"I know it," Sylvia had replied, with a quick shrinking, as if from a
blow.

The passing years, as they passed for her, stung her like swarming
bees, with bitter humiliation; but never for herself, only for
Richard. Nobody knew how painfully she counted the years, how she
would fain have held time back with her thin hands, how futilely and
pitifully she set her loving heart against it, and not for herself
and her own vanity, but for the sake of her lover. She had come, in
the singleness of her heart, to regard herself in the light of a
species of coin to be expended wholly for the happiness and interest
of one man. Any depreciation in its value was of account only as it
affected him.

Sylvia Crane, sitting in the meeting-house of a Sunday, used to watch
the young girls coming in, as radiant and flawless as new flowers, in
their Sunday bests, with a sort of admiring envy, which could do them
no harm, but which tore her own heart.

When she should have been contrasting the wickedness of her soul with
the grace of the Divine Model, she was contrasting her fading face
with the youthful bloom of the young girls. "He'd ought to marry one
of them," she thought; "he'd ought to, by good rights." It never
occurred to Sylvia that Richard also was growing older, and that he
was, moreover, a few years older than she. She thought of him as an
immortal youth; his face was the same to her as when she had first
seen it.

When it came before a subtler vision than her bodily one, there in
the darkness and loneliness of this last Sunday night, it wore the
beauty and innocent freshness of a child. If Richard Alger could have
seen his own face as the woman who loved him saw it, he could never
have doubted his own immortality.

"There he came, an' the stone was up, an' he had to go away," moaned
Sylvia, catching her breath softly. Many a time she had pitied
Richard because he had not the little womanly care which men need;
she had worried lest his stockings were not darned, and his food not
properly cooked; but to-night she had another and strange anxiety.
She worried lest she herself had hurt him and sent him home with a
heavy heart.

Sylvia had gone about for the last few days with her delicate face as
irresponsibly calm as a sweet-pea; nobody had dreamed of the turmoil
in her heart. On the Wednesday night before she had nearly reached
the climax of her wishes. Richard had come, departing from his usual
custom--he had never called except on Sunday before--and remained
later. It was ten o'clock before he went home. He had been very
silent all the evening, and had sat soberly in the great best
rocking-chair, which was, in a way, his throne of state, with Sylvia
on the sofa on his right. Many a time she had dreamed that he came
over there and sat down beside her, and that night it had come to
pass.

Just before ten o'clock he had arisen hesitatingly; she thought it
was to take leave, but she sat waiting and trembling. They had sat in
the twilight and young moonlight all the evening. Richard had checked
her when she attempted to light a candle. That had somehow made the
evening seem strange, and freighted with consequences; and besides
the white light of the moon, full of mystic influence, there was
something subtler and more magnetic, which could sway more than the
tides, even the passions of the human heart, present, and they both
felt it.

Neither had said much, and they had been sitting there nearly two
hours, when Richard had arisen, and moved curiously, rather as if he
was drawn than walked of his own volition, over to the sofa. He sank
down upon it with a little cough. Sylvia moved away a little with an
involuntary motion, which was pure maidenliness.

"It's getting late," remarked Richard, trying to make his voice
careless, but it fell in spite of him into deep cadences.

"It ain't very late, I guess," Sylvia had returned, tremblingly.

"I ought to be going home."

Then there was silence for a while. Sylvia glanced sidewise, timidly
and adoringly, at Richard's smoothly shaven face, pale as marble in
the moonlight, and waited, her heart throbbing.

[Illustration: "Sylvia glanced timidly at Richard's smoothly-shaven
face"]

"I've been coming here a good many years," Richard observed finally,
and his own voice had a solemn tremor.

Sylvia made an almost inarticulate assent.

"I've been thinking lately," said Richard; then he paused. They could
hear the great clock out in the kitchen tick. Sylvia waited, her very
soul straining, although shrinking at the same time, to hear.

"I've been thinking lately," said Richard again, "that--maybe--it
would be wise for--us both to--make some different arrangement."

Sylvia bent her head low. Richard paused for the second time. "I have
always meant--" he began again, but just then the clock in the
kitchen struck the first stroke of ten. Richard caught his breath and
arose quickly. Never in his long courtship had he remained as late as
that at Sylvia Crane's. It was as if a life-long habit struck as well
as the clock, and decided his times for him.

"I must be going," said he, speaking against the bell notes. Sylvia
arose without a word of dissent, but Richard spoke as if she had
remonstrated.

"I'll come again next Sunday night," said he, apologetically.

Sylvia followed him to the door. They bade each other good-night
decorously, with never a parting kiss, as they had done for years.
Richard went out of sight down the white gleaming road, and she went
in and to bed, with her heart in a great tumult of expectation and
joyful fear.

She had tried to wait calmly for Sunday night. She had done her neat
household tasks as usual, her face and outward demeanor were sweetly
unruffled, but her thoughts seemed shivering with rainbows that
constantly dazzled her with sweet shocks when her eyes met them. Her
feet seemed constantly flying before her into the future, and she
could scarcely tell where she might really be, in the present or in
her dreams, which had suddenly grown so real.

On Sunday morning she had curled her soft fair hair, and arranged
with trepidation one long light curl outside her bonnet on each side
of her face. Her bonnet was tied under her chin with a green ribbon,
and she had a little feathery green wreath around her face inside the
rim. Her wide silk skirt was shot with green and blue, and rustled as
she walked up the aisle to her pew. People stared after her without
knowing why. There was no tangible change in her appearance. She had
worn that same green shot silk many Sabbaths; her bonnet was three
summers old; the curls drooping on her cheeks were an innovation, but
the people did not recognize the change as due to them. Sylvia
herself had looked with pleased wonder at her face in the glass; it
was as if all her youthful beauty had suddenly come up, like a
withered rose which is dipped in a vase.

"I sha'n't look so terrible old side of him when I go out bride," she
reflected, happily, smiling fondly at herself. All the way to meeting
that Sunday morning she saw her face as she had seen it in the glass,
and it was as if she walked with something finer than herself.

Richard Alger sat with the choir in a pew beside the pulpit, at right
angles with the others. He had a fine tenor voice, and had sung in
the choir ever since he was a boy. When Sylvia sat down in her place,
which was in full range of his eyes, he glanced at her without
turning his head; he meant to look away again directly, so as not to
be observed, but her face held him. A color slowly flamed out on his
pale brown cheeks; his eyes became intense and abstracted. A soprano
singer nudged the girl at her side; they both glanced at him and
tittered, but he did not notice it.

Sylvia knew that he was looking at her, but she never looked at him.
She sat soberly waving a little brown fan before her face; the light
curls stirred softly. She wondered what he thought of them; if he
considered them too young for her, and silly; but he did not see them
at all. He had no eye for details. And neither did she even hear his
fine tenor, still sweet and powerful, leading all the other male
voices when the choir stood up to sing. She thought only of Richard
himself.

After meeting, when she went down the aisle, several women had spoken
to her, inquired concerning her health, and told her, with wondering
eyes, that she looked well. Richard was far behind her, but she did
not look around. They very seldom accosted each other, unless it was
unavoidable, in any public place. Still, Sylvia, going out with
gentle flounces of her green shot silk, knew well that Richard's eyes
followed her, and his thought was close at her side.

After she got home from meeting that Sunday, Sylvia Crane did not
know how to pass the time until the evening. She could not keep
herself calm and composed as was her wont on the Sabbath day. She
changed her silk for a common gown; she tried to sit down and read
the Bible quietly and with understanding, but she could not. She
turned to Canticles, and read a page or two. She had always believed
loyally and devoutly in the application to Christ and the Church; but
suddenly now, as she read, the restrained decorously chanting New
England love-song in her maiden heart had leaped into the fervid
measures of the oriental King. She shut the Bible with a clap. "I
ain't giving the right meaning to it," she said, sternly, aloud.

She put away the Bible, went into the pantry, and got out some bread
and cheese for her luncheon, but she could eat nothing. She picked
the apple blossoms and arranged them in the copper-gilt pitcher on
the best-room table. She even dusted off the hair-cloth sofa and
rocker, with many compunctions, because it was Sunday. "I know I
hadn't ought to do it to-day," she murmured, apologetically, "but
they do get terrible dusty, and need dusting every day, and he is
real particular, and he'll have on his best clothes."

Finally, just before twilight, Sylvia, unable to settle herself, had
gone over to her sister's for a little call. Richard never came
before eight o'clock, except in winter, when it was dark earlier.
There was a certain half-shamefaced reserve about his visits. He knew
well enough that people looked from their windows as he passed, and
said, facetiously, "There goes Richard Alger to court Sylvy Crane."
He preferred slipping past in a half-light, in which he did not seem
so plain to himself, and could think himself less plain to other
people.

Sylvia, detained at her sister's by the quarrel between Cephas and
Barnabas, had arisen many a time to take leave, all palpitating with
impatience, but her sister had begged her, in a distressed whisper,
to remain.

"I guess you can get along without Richard Alger one Sunday evening,"
she had said finally, quite aloud, and quite harshly. "I guess your
own sister has just as much claim on you as he has. I dunno what's
going to be done. I don't believe Charlotte's father will let her in
the house to-night."

Poor Sylvia had sunk back in her chair. To her sensitive conscience
the duty nearest at hand seemed always to bark the loudest, and the
precious moments had gone by until she knew that Richard had come,
found the stone before the door, and gone away, and all her sweet
turmoil of hope and anticipation had gone for naught.

Sylvia, lying there awake that night, her mind carrying her back over
all that had gone before, had no doubt that this was the end of
everything. Not originally a subtle discerner of character, she had
come insensibly to know Richard so well that certain results from
certain combinations of circumstances in his life were as plain and
inevitable to her as the outcome of a simple sum in mathematics.
"He'd got 'most out of his track for once," she groaned out softly,
"but now he's pushed back in so hard he can't get out again if he
wants to. I dunno how he's going to get along."

Sylvia, with the roof settling over her head, with not so much upon
her few sterile acres to feed her as to feed the honey-bees and
birds, with her heart in greater agony because its string of joy had
been strained so high and sweetly before it snapped, did not lament
over herself at all; neither did she over the other woman who lay
up-stairs suffering in a similar case. She lamented only over Richard
living alone and unministered to until he died.

When daylight came she got up, dressed herself, and prepared
breakfast. Charlotte came down before it was ready. "Let me help get
breakfast," she said, with an assumption of energy, standing in the
kitchen doorway in her pretty mottled purple delaine. The purple was
the shade of columbine, and very becoming to Charlotte. In spite of
her sleepless night, her fine firm tints had not faded; she was too
young and too strong and too full of involuntary resistance. She had
done up her fair hair compactly; her chin had its usual proud lift.

Sylvia, shrinking as if before some unseen enemy as she moved about,
her face all wan and weary, glanced at her half resentfully. "I guess
she 'ain't had any such night as I have," she thought. "Girls don't
know much about it."

"No, I don't need any help," she replied, aloud. "I 'ain't got
anything to do but to stir up an Injun cake. You've got your best
dress on. You'd better go and sit down."

"It won't hurt my dress any." Charlotte glanced down half scornfully
at her purple skirt. It had lost all its glory for her. She was not
even sure that Barney had seen it.

"Set down. I've got breakfast 'most ready," Sylvia said, again, more
peremptorily than she was wont, and Charlotte sat down in the
hollow-backed cherry rocking-chair beside the kitchen window, leaned
her head back, and looked out indifferently between the lilac-bushes.
The bushes were full of pinkish-purple buds. Sylvia's front yard
reached the road in a broad slope, and the ground was hard, and green
with dampness under the shade of a great elm-tree. The grass would
never grow there over the roots of the elm, which were flung out
broadly like great recumbent limbs over the whole yard, and were
barely covered by the mould.

Across the street, seen under the green sweep of the elm, was an
orchard of old apple-trees which had blossomed out bravely that
spring. Charlotte looked at the white and rosy masses of bloom.

"I guess there wasn't any frost last night, after all," she remarked.

"I dunno," responded Sylvia, in a voice which made her niece look
around at her. There was a curious impatient ring in it which was
utterly foreign to it. There was a frown between Sylvia's gentle
eyes, and she moved with nervous jerks, setting down dishes hard, as
if they were refractory children, and lashing out with spoons as if
they were whips. The long, steady strain upon her patience had not
affected her temper, but this last had seemed to bring out a certain
vicious and waspish element which nobody had suspected her to
possess, and she herself least of all. She felt this morning disposed
to go out of her way to sting, and as if some primal and evil
instinct had taken possession of her. She felt shocked at herself,
but all the more defiant and disposed to keep on.

"Breakfast is ready," she announced, finally; "if you don't set right
up an' eat it, it will be gettin' cold. I wouldn't give a cent for
cold Injun cake."

Charlotte arose promptly and brought a chair to the table, which
Sylvia always set punctiliously in the centre of the kitchen as if
for a large family.

"Don't scrape your chair on the floor that way; it wears 'em all
out," cried Sylvia, sharply.

Charlotte stared at her again, but she said nothing; she sat down and
began to eat absently. Sylvia watched her angrily between her own
mouthfuls, which she swallowed down defiantly like medicine.

"It ain't much use cookin' things if folks don't eat 'em," said she.

"I am eating," returned Charlotte.

"Eatin'? Swallowin' down Injun cake as if it was sawdust! I don't
call that eatin'. You don't act as if you tasted a mite of it!"

"Aunt Sylvy, what has got into you?" said Charlotte.

"Got into me? I should think you'd talk about anything gettin' into
me, when you set there like a stick. I guess you 'ain't got all there
is to bear."

"I never thought I had," said Charlotte.

"Well, I guess you 'ain't."

They went on swallowing their food silently; the great clock ticked
slowly, and the spring birds called outside; but they heard neither.
The shadows of the young elm leaves played over the floor and the
white table-cloth. It was much warmer that morning, and the shadows
were softer.

Before they had finished breakfast, Charlotte's mother came,
advancing ponderously, with soft thuds, across the yard to the side
door. She opened it and peered in.

"Here you be," said she, scanning both their faces with anxious and
deprecating inquiry.

"Can't you come in, an' not stand there holdin' the door open?"
inquired Sylvia. "I feel the wind on my back, and I've got a bad pain
enough in it now."

Mrs. Barnard stepped in, and shut the door quickly, in an alarmed
way.

"Ain't you feelin' well this mornin', Sylvy?" said she.

"Oh yes, I'm feelin' well enough. It ain't any matter how I feel, but
it's a good deal how some other folks do."

Sarah Barnard sank into the rocking-chair, and sat there looking at
them hesitatingly, as if she did not dare to open the conversation.

Suddenly Sylvia arose and went out of the kitchen with a rush,
carrying a plate of Indian cake to feed the hens. "I can't set here
all day; I've got to do something," she announced as she went.

When the door had closed after her, Mrs. Barnard turned to Charlotte.

"What's the matter with her?" she asked, nodding towards the door.

"I don't know."

"She ain't sick, is she? I never see her act so. Sylvy's generally
just like a lamb. You don't s'pose she's goin' to have a fever, do
you?"

"I don't know."

Suddenly Charlotte, who was still sitting at the table, put up her
two hands with a despairing gesture, and bent her head forward upon
them.

"Now don't, you poor child," said her mother, her eyes growing
suddenly red. "Didn't he even turn round when you called him back
last night?"

Charlotte shook her bowed head dumbly.

"Don't you s'pose he'll ever come again?"

Charlotte shook her head.

"Mebbe he will. I know he's terrible set."

"Who's set?" demanded Sylvia, coming in with her empty plate.

"Oh, I was jest sayin' that I thought Barney was kinder set," replied
her sister, mildly.

"He ain't no more set than Cephas," returned Sylvia.

"Cephas ain't set. It's jest his way."

Sylvia sniffed. She looked scornfully at Charlotte, who had raised
her head when she came in, but whose eyes were red. "Folks had better
been created without ways, then," she retorted. "They'd better have
been created slaves; they'd been enough sight happier an' better off,
an' so would other folks that they have to do with, than to have so
many ways, an' not sense enough to manage 'em. I don't believe in
free-will, for my part."

"Sylvy Crane, you ain't goin' to deny one of the doctrines of the
Church at your time of life?" demanded a new voice. Sylvia's other
sister, Hannah Berry, stood in the doorway.

Sylvia ordinarily was meek before her, but now she faced her. "Yes, I
be," said she; "I don't approve of free-will, and I ain't afraid to
say it."

Sylvia had always been considered very unlike Mrs. Hannah Berry in
face and character. Now, as she stood before her, a curious
similarity appeared; even her voice sounded like her sister's.

"What on earth ails you, Sylvy?" asked Mrs. Berry, ignoring suddenly
the matter in hand.

"Nothin' ails me that I know of. I don't think much of free-will, an'
I ain't goin' to say I do when I don't."

"Then all I've got to say is you'd ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Why, I should think you was crazy, Sylvy Crane, settin' up yourself
agin' the doctrines of the Word. I'd like to know what you know about
them."

"I know enough to see how they work," returned Sylvia, undauntedly,
"an' I ain't goin' to pretend I'm blind when I can see."

Sylvia's serene arc of white forehead was shortened by a distressed
frown, her mild mouth dropped sourly at the corners, and the lips
were compressed. Her white cap was awry, and one of yesterday's curls
hung lankly over her left cheek.

"You look an' act like a crazy creature," said Hannah Berry, eying
her with indignant amazement. She walked across the room to another
rocking-chair, moving with unexpected heaviness. She was in reality
as stout as her sister Sarah Barnard, but she had a long, thin, and
rasped face, which misled people.

"Now," said she, looking around conclusively, "I ain't come over here
to argue about free-will. I want to know what all this is about?"

"All what?" returned Mrs. Barnard, feebly. She was distinctly afraid
of her imperious sister, yet she was conscious of a quiver of
resentment.

"All this fuss about Barney Thayer," said Hannah Berry.

"How did you hear about it?" Mrs. Barnard asked with a glance at
Charlotte, who was sitting erect with her cheeks very red and her
mouth tightly closed.

"Never mind how I heard," replied Hannah. "I did hear, an' that's
enough. Now I want to know if you're really goin' to set down like an
old hen an' give up, an' let this match between Charlotte an' a good,
smart, likely young man like Barnabas Thayer be broken off on account
of Cephas Barnard's crazy freaks?"

Sarah stiffened her neck. "There ain't no call for you to speak that
way, Hannah. They got to talkin' over the 'lection."

"The 'lection! I'd like to know what business they had talkin' about
it Sabbath night anyway? I ain't blamin' Barnabas so much; he's
younger an' easier stirred up; but Cephas Barnard is an old man, an'
he has been a church-member for forty year, an' he ought to know
enough to set a better example. I'd like to know what difference it
makes about the 'lection anyway? What odds does it make which one is
President if he rules the country well? An' that they can't tell till
they've tried him awhile anyway. I guess they don't think much about
the country; it's jest to have their own way about it. I'd like to
know what mortal difference it's goin' to make to Barney Thayer or
Cephas Barnard which man is President? He won't never hear of them,
an' they won't neither of them make him rule any different after he's
chose. It's jest like two little boys--one wants to play marbles
'cause the other wants to play puss-in-the-corner, an' that's all the
reason either one of 'em's got for standin' out. Men ain't got any
too much sense anyhow, when you come right down to it. They don't
ever get any too much grown up, the best of 'em. I'd like to know
what Cephas Barnard has got to say because he's drove a good, likely
young man like Barnabas Thayer off an' broke off his daughter's
match? It ain't likely she'll ever get anybody now; young men like
him, with nice new houses put up to go right to housekeepin' in as
soon as they are married, don't grow on every bush. They ain't quite
so thick as wild thimbleberries. An' Charlotte ain't got any money
herself, an' her father ain't got any to build a house for her. I'd
like to know what he's got to say about it?"

Mrs. Barnard put up her apron and began to weep helplessly.

"Don't, mother," said Charlotte, in an undertone. But her mother
began talking in a piteous wailing fashion.

"You hadn't ought to talk so about Cephas," she moaned. "He's my
husband. I guess you wouldn't like it if anybody talked so about your
husband. Cephas ain't any worse than anybody else. It's jest his way.
He wa'n't any more to blame than Barney; they both got to talkin'. I
know Cephas is terrible upset about it this mornin'; he 'ain't really
said so in so many words, but I know by the way he acts. He said this
mornin' that he didn't know but we were eatin' the wrong kind of
food. Lately he's had an idea that mebbe we'd ought to eat more meat;
he's thought it was more strengthenin', an' we'd ought to eat things
as near like what we wanted to strengthen as could be. I've made a
good deal of bone soup. But now he says he thinks mebbe he's been
mistaken, an' animal food kind of quickens the animal nature in us,
an' that we'd better eat green things an' garden sass."

"I guess garden sass will strengthen the other kind of sass that
Cephas Barnard has got in him full as much as bone soup has,"
interrupted Hannah Berry, with a sarcastic sniff.

"I dunno but he's right," said Mrs. Barnard. "Cephas thinks a good
deal an' looks into things. I kind of wish he'd waited till the
garden had got started, though, for there ain't much we can eat now
but potatoes an' turnips an' dandelion greens."

"If you want to live on potatoes an' turnips an' dandelion greens,
you can," cried Hannah Berry; "What I want to know is if you're goin'
to settle down an' say nothin', an' have Charlotte lose the best
chance she'll ever have in her life, if she lives to be a hundred--"

Charlotte spoke up suddenly; her blue eyes gleamed with steely light.
She held her head high as she faced her aunt.

"I don't want any more talk about it, Aunt Hannah," said she.

"Hey?"

"I don't want any more talk about it."

"Well, I guess you'll have more talk about it; girls don't get jilted
without there is talk generally. I guess you'll have to make up your
mind to it, for all you put on such airs with your own aunt, who left
her washin' an' come over here to take your part. I guess when you
stand out in the road half an hour an' call a young man to come back,
an' he don't come, that folks are goin' to talk some. Who's that
comin' now?"

"It's Cephas," whispered Mrs. Barnard, with a scared glance at
Charlotte.

Cephas Barnard entered abruptly, and stood for a second looking at
the company, while they looked back at him. His eyes were stolidly
defiant, but he stood well back, and almost shrank against the door.
There seemed to be impulses in Hannah's and Sylvia's faces
confronting his.

He turned to his wife. "When you comin' home?" said he.

"Oh, Cephas! I jest ran over here a minute. I--wanted to
see--if--Sylvy had any emptins. Do you want me an' Charlotte to come
now?"

Cephas turned on his heel. "I think it's about time for you both to
be home," he grunted.

Sarah Barnard arose and looked with piteous appeal at Charlotte.

Charlotte hesitated a second, then she arose without a word, and
followed her mother, who followed Cephas. They went in a procession
of three, with Cephas marching ahead like a general, across the yard,
and Sylvia and Hannah stood at a window watching them.

"Well," said Hannah Berry, "all I've got to say is I'm thankful I
'ain't got a man like that, an' you ought to be mighty thankful you
'ain't got any man at all, Sylvy Crane."



Chapter III


When Cephas Barnard and his wife and daughter turned into the main
road and came in sight of the new house, not one of them appeared to
even glance at it, yet they all saw at once that there were no
workmen about, and they also saw Barnabas himself ploughing with a
white horse far back in a field at the left of it.

[Illustration: "They came in sight of the house"]

They all kept on silently. Charlotte paled a little when she caught
sight of Barney, but her face was quite steady. "Hold your dress up a
little higher; the grass is terrible wet," her mother whispered once,
and that was all that any of them said until they reached home.

Charlotte went at once up-stairs to her own chamber, took off her
purple gown, and hung it up in her closet, and got out a common one.
The purple gown was part of her wedding wardrobe, and she had worn it
in advance with some misgivings. "I dunno but you might jest as well
wear it a few Sundays," her mother had said; "you're goin' to have
your silk dress to come out bride in. I dunno as there's any sense in
your goin' lookin' like a scarecrow all the spring because you're
goin' to get married."

So Charlotte had put on the new purple dress the day before; now it
looked, as it hung in the closet, like an effigy of her happier self.

When Charlotte went down-stairs she found her mother showing much
more spirit than usual in an altercation with her father. Sarah
Barnard stood before her husband, her placid face all knitted with
perplexed remonstrance. "Why, I can't, Cephas," she said. "Pies can't
be made that way."

"I know they can," said Cephas.

"They can't, Cephas. There ain't no use tryin'. It would jest be a
waste of the flour."

"Why can't they, I'd like to know?"

"Folks don't ever make pies without lard, Cephas."

"Why don't they?"

"Why, they wouldn't be nothin' more than-- You couldn't eat them
nohow if they was made so, Cephas. I dunno how the sorrel pies would
work. I never heard of anybody makin' sorrel pies. Mebbe the Injuns
did; but I dunno as they ever made pies, anyway. Mebbe the sorrel, if
it had some molasses on it for juice, wouldn't taste very bad; I
dunno; but anyway, if the sorrel did work, the other wouldn't. I
can't make pies fit to eat without any lard or any butter or anything
any way in the world, Cephas."

"I know you can make 'em without," said Cephas, and his black eyes
looked like flint. Mrs. Barnard appealed to her daughter.

"Charlotte," said she, "you tell your father that pies can't be made
fit to eat without I put somethin' in 'em for short'nin'."

"No, they can't, father," said Charlotte.

"He wants me to make sorrel pies, Charlotte," Mrs. Barnard went on,
in an injured and appealing tone which she seldom used against
Cephas. "He's been out in the field, an' picked all that sorrel," and
she pointed to a pan heaped up with little green leaves on the table,
"an' I tell him I dunno how that will work, but he wants me to make
the pie-crust without a mite of short'nin', an' I can't do that
nohow, can I?"

"I don't see how you can," assented Charlotte, coldly.

Cephas went with a sudden stride towards the pantry. "I'll make 'em
myself, then," he cried.

Mrs. Barnard gasped, and looked piteously at her daughter. "What you
goin' to do, Cephas?" she asked, feebly.

Cephas was in the pantry rattling the dishes with a fierce din. "I'm
a-goin' to make them sorrel pies myself," he shouted out, "if none of
you women folks know enough to."

"Oh, Cephas, you can't!"

Cephas came out, carrying the mixing-board and rolling-pin like a
shield and a club; he clapped them heavily on to the table.

Mrs. Barnard stood staring aghast at him; Charlotte sat down, took
some lace edging from her pocket, and began knitting on it. She
looked hard and indifferent.

"Oh, Charlotte, ain't it dreadful?" her mother whispered, when Cephas
went into the pantry again.

"I don't care if he makes pies out of burrs," returned Charlotte,
audibly, but her voice was quite even.

"I don't b'lieve but what sorrel would do some better than burrs,"
said her mother, "but he can't make pies without short'nin' nohow."

Cephas came out of the pantry with a large bowl of flour and a spoon.
"He 'ain't sifted it," Mrs. Barnard whispered to Charlotte, as though
Cephas were not there; then she turned to him. "You sifted the flour,
didn't you, Cephas?" said she.

"You jest let me alone," said Cephas, grimly. "I'm goin' to make
these pies, an' I don't need any help. I've picked the sorrel, an'
I've got the brick oven all heated, an' I know what I want to do, an'
I'm goin' to do it!"

"I've got some pumpkin that would make full as good pies as sorrel,
Cephas. Mebbe the sorrel will be real good. I ain't sayin' it won't,
though I never heard of sorrel pies; but you know pumpkin is good,
Cephas."

"I know pumpkin pies have milk in 'em," said Cephas; "an' I tell you
I ain't goin' to have anything of an animal nature in 'em. I've been
studyin' into it, an' thinkin' of it, an' I've made up my mind that
I've made a mistake along back, an' we've ate too much animal food.
We've ate a whole pig an' half a beef critter this winter, to say
nothin' of eggs an' milk, that are jest as much animal as meat,
accordin' to my way of thinkin'. I've reasoned it out all along that
as long as we were animals ourselves, an' wanted to strengthen
animal, that it was common-sense that we ought to eat animal. It
seemed to me that nature had so ordered it. I reasoned it out that
other animals besides man lived on animals, except cows, an' they,
bein' ruminatin' animals, ain't to be compared to men--"

"I should think we'd be somethin' like 'em if we eat that," said Mrs.
Barnard, pointing at the sorrel, with piteous sarcasm.

"It's the principle I'm thinkin' about," said Cephas. He stirred some
salt into the flour very carefully, so not a dust fell over the brim
of the bowl.

"Horses don't eat meat, neither, an' they don't chew their cuds,"
Mrs. Barnard argued further. She had never in her life argued with
Cephas; but sorrel pies, after the night before, made her wildly
reckless.

Cephas got a gourdful of water from the pail in the sink, and carried
it carefully over to the table. "Horses are the exception," he
returned, with dignified asperity. "There always are exceptions. What
I was comin' at was--I'd been kind of wrong in my reasonin'. That is,
I 'ain't reasoned far enough. I was right so far as I went."

Cephas poured some water from the gourd into the bowl of flour and
began stirring.

Sarah caught her breath. "He's makin'--paste!" she gasped. "He's jest
makin' flour paste!"

"Jest so far as I went I was right," Cephas resumed, pouring in a
little more water with a judicial air. "I said Man was animal, an' he
is animal; an' if you don't take anything else into account, he'd
ought to live on animal food, jest the way I reasoned it out. But
you've got to take something else into account. Man is animal, but he
ain't all animal. He's something else. He's spiritual. Man has
command over all the other animals, an' all the beasts of the field;
an' it ain't because he's any better an' stronger animal, because he
ain't. What's a man to a horse, if the horse only knew it? but the
horse don't know it, an' there's jest where Man gets the advantage.
It's knowledge an' spirit that gives Man the rule over all the other
animals. Now, what we want is to eat the kind of things that will
strengthen knowledge an' spirit an' self-control, because the first
two ain't any account without the last; but there ain't no kind of
food that's known that can do that. If there is, I 'ain't never heard
of it."

Cephas dumped the whole mass of paste with a flop upon the
mixing-board, and plunged his fists into it. Sarah made an
involuntary motion forward, then she stood back with a great sigh.

"But what we can do," Cephas proceeded, "is to eat the kind of things
that won't strengthen the animal nature at the expense of the
spiritual. We know that animal food does that; we can see how it
works in tigers an' bears. Now, it's the spiritual part of us we want
to strengthen, because that is the biggest strength we can get, an'
it's worth more. It's what gives us the rule over animals. It's
better for us to eat some other kind of food, if we get real weak and
pindlin' on it, rather than eat animal food an' make the animal in us
stronger than the spiritual, so we won't be any better than wild
tigers an' bears, an' lose our rule over the other animals."

Cephas took the rolling-pin and brought it heavily down upon the
sticky mass on the board. Sarah shuddered and started as if it had
hit her. "Now, if we can't eat animal food," said Cephas, "what other
kind of food can we eat? There ain't but one other kind that's known
to man, an' that's vegetable food, the product of the earth. An'
that's of two sorts: one gets ripe an' fit to eat in the fall of the
year, an' the other comes earlier in the spring an' summer. Now, in
order to carry out the plans of nature, we'd ought to eat these
products of the earth jest as near as we can in the season of 'em.
Some had ought to be eat in the fall an' winter, an' some in the
spring an' summer. Accordin' to my reasonin', if we all lived this
way we should be a good deal better off; our spiritual natures would
be strengthened, an' we should have more power over other animals,
an' better dispositions ourselves."

"I've seen horses terribly ugly, an' they don't eat a mite of meat,"
said Sarah, with tremulous boldness. Her right hand kept moving
forward to clutch the rolling-pin, then she would draw it back.

"'Ain't I told ye once horses were the exceptions?" said Cephas,
severely. "There has to be exceptions. If there wa'n't any exceptions
there couldn't be any rule, an' there bein' exceptions shows there is
a rule. Women can't ever get hold of things straight. Their minds
slant off sideways, the way their arms do when they fling a stone."

Cephas brought the rolling-pin down upon the paste again with fierce
impetus. "You'll break it," Sarah murmured, feebly. Cephas brought it
down again, his mouth set hard; his face showed a red flush through
his white beard, the veins on his high forehead were swollen and his
brows scowling. The paste adhered to the rolling-pin; he raised it
with an effort; his hands were helplessly sticky. Sarah could
restrain herself no longer. She went into the pantry and got a dish
of flour, and spooned out some suddenly over the board and Cephas's
hands. "You've got to have some more flour," she said, in a desperate
tone.

Cephas's black eyes flashed at her. "I wish you would attend to your
own work, an' leave me alone," said he. But at last he succeeded in
moving the rolling-pin over the dough as he had seen his wife move
it.

"He ain't greasin' the pie-plates," said Sarah, as Cephas brought a
piece of dough with a dexterous jerk over a plate; "there ain't much
animal in the little mite of lard it takes to grease a plate."

Cephas spread handfuls of sorrel leaves over the dough; then he
brought the molasses-jug from the pantry, raised it, and poured
molasses over the sorrel with an imperturbable air.

Sarah watched him; then she turned to Charlotte. "To think of eatin'
it!" she groaned, quite openly; "it looks like p'ison."

Charlotte made no response; she knitted as one of the Fates might
have spun. Sarah sank down on a chair, and looked away from Cephas
and his cookery, as if she were overcome, and quite done with all
remonstrance.

Never before had she shown so much opposition towards one of her
husband's hobbies, but this galloped so ruthlessly over her own
familiar fields that she had plucked up boldness to try to veer it
away.

Somebody passed the window swiftly, the door opened abruptly, and
Mrs. Deborah Thayer entered. "_Good_-mornin'," said she, and her
voice rang out like a herald's defiance.

Sarah Barnard arose, and went forward quickly. "Good-mornin'," she
responded, with nervous eagerness. "Good-mornin', Mis' Thayer. Come
in an' set down, won't you?"

"I 'ain't come to set down," responded Deborah's deep voice.

She moved, a stately high-hipped figure, her severe face almost
concealed in a scooping green barège hood, to the centre of the
floor, and stood there with a pose that might have answered for a
statue of Judgment. She turned her green-hooded head slowly towards
them all in turn. Sarah watched her and waited, her eyes dilated.
Cephas rolled out another pie, calmly. Charlotte knitted fast; her
face was very pale.

"I've come over here," said Deborah Thayer, "to find out what my son
has done."

There was not a sound, except the thud of Cephas's rolling-pin.

"Mr. Barnard!" said Deborah. Cephas did not seem to hear her.

"Mr. Barnard!" she said, again. There was that tone of command in her
voice which only a woman can accomplish. It was full of that maternal
supremacy which awakens the first instinct of obedience in man, and
has more weight than the voice of a general in battle. Cephas did not
turn his head, but he spoke. "What is it ye want?" he said, gruffly.

"I want to know what my son has done, an' I want you to tell me in so
many words. I ain't afraid to face it. What has my son done?"

Cephas grunted something inarticulate.

"What?" said Deborah. "I can't hear what you say. I want to know what
my son has done. I've heard how you turned him out of your house last
night, and I want to know what it was for. I want to know what he has
done. You're an old man, and a God-fearing one, if you have got your
own ideas about some things. Barnabas is young, and apt to be
headstrong. He ain't always been as mindful of obedience as he might
be. I've tried to do my best by him, but he don't always carry out my
teachin's. I ain't afraid to say this, if he is my son. I want to
know what he's done. If it's anything wrong, I shall be jest as hard
on him as the Lord for it. I'm his mother, but I can see his faults,
and be just. I want to know what he has done."

Charlotte gave one great cry. "Oh, Mrs. Thayer, he hasn't done
anything wrong; Barney hasn't done anything wrong!"

But Deborah quite ignored her. She kept her eyes fixed upon Cephas.
"What has my son done?" she demanded again. "If he's done anything
wrong I want to know it. I ain't afraid to deal with him. You ordered
him out of your house, and he didn't come home at all last night. I
don't know where he was. He won't speak a word this mornin' to tell
me. I've been out in the field where he's to work ploughin', and I
tried to make him tell me, but he wouldn't say a word. I sat up and
waited all night, but he didn't come home. Now I want to know where
he was, and what he's done, and why you ordered him out of the house.
If he's been swearin', or takin' anything that didn't belong to him,
or drinkin', I want to know it, so I can deal with him as his mother
had ought to deal."

"He hasn't been doing anything wrong!" Charlotte cried out again;
"you ought to be ashamed of yourself talking so about him, when
you're his mother!"

Deborah Thayer never glanced at Charlotte. She kept her eyes fixed
upon Cephas. "What has he done?" she repeated.

"I guess he didn't do much of anything," Mrs. Barnard murmured,
feebly; but Deborah did not seem to hear her.

Cephas opened his mouth as if perforce. "Well," he said, slowly, "we
got to talkin'--"

"Talkin' about what?"

"About the 'lection. I think, accordin' to my reasonin', that what we
eat had a good deal to do with it."

"What?"

"I think if you'd kept your family on less meat, and given 'em more
garden-stuff to eat Barney wouldn't have been so up an' comin'. It's
what he's eat that's made him what he is."

Deborah stared at Cephas in stern amazement. "You're tryin' to make
out, as near as I can tell," said she, "that whatever my son has done
wrong is due to what he's eat, and not to original sin. I knew you
had queer ideas, Cephas Barnard, but I didn't know you wa'n't sound
in your faith. What I want to know is, what has he done?"

Suddenly Charlotte sprang up, and pushed herself in between her
father and Mrs. Thayer; she confronted Deborah, and compelled her to
look at her.

"I'll tell you what he's done," she said, fiercely. "I know what he's
done; you listen to me. He has done nothing--nothing that you've got
to deal with him for. You needn't feel obliged to deal with him. He
and father got into a talk over the 'lection, and they had words
about it. He didn't talk any worse than father, not a mite. Father
started it, anyway, and he knew better; he knew just how set Barney
was on his own side, and how set he was on his; he wanted to pick a
quarrel."

"Charlotte!" shouted Cephas.

"You keep still, father," returned Charlotte, with steady fierceness.
"I've never set myself up against you in my whole life before; but
now I'm going to, because it's just and right. Father wanted to pick
a quarrel," she repeated, turning to Deborah; "he's been kind of
grouty to Barney for some time. I don't know why; he took a notion
to, I suppose. When they got to having words about the 'lection,
father begun it. I heard him. Barney answered back, and I didn't
blame him; I would, in his place. Then father ordered him out of the
house, and he went. I don't see what else he could do. And I don't
blame him because he didn't go home if he didn't feel like it."

"Didn't he go away from here before nine o'clock?" demanded Deborah,
addressing Charlotte at last.

"Yes, he did, some time before nine; he had plenty of time to go home
if he wanted to."

"Where was he, then, I'd like to know?"

"I don't know, and I wouldn't lift my finger to find out. I am not
afraid he was anywhere he hadn't ought to be, nor doin' anything he
hadn't ought to."

"Didn't you stand out in the road and call him back, and he wouldn't
come, nor even turn his head to look at you?" asked Deborah.

"Yes, I did," returned Charlotte, unflinchingly. "And I don't blame
him for not coming back and not turning his head. I wouldn't if I'd
been in his place."

"You'll have to uphold him a long time, then; I can tell you that,"
said Deborah. "He won't never come back if he's said he won't. I know
him; he's got some of me in him."

"I'll uphold him as long as I live," said Charlotte.

"I wonder you ain't ashamed to talk so."

"I am not."

Deborah looked at Charlotte as if she would crush her; then she
turned away.

"You're a hard woman, Mrs. Thayer, and I pity Barney because he's got
you for a mother," Charlotte said, in undaunted response to Deborah's
look.

"Well, you'll never have to pity yourself on that account," retorted
Deborah, without turning her head.

The door opened softly, and a girl of about Charlotte's age slipped
in. Nobody except Mrs. Barnard, who said, absently, "How do you do,
Rose?" seemed to notice her. She sat down unobtrusively in a chair
near the door and waited. Her blue eyes upon the others were so
intense with excitement that they seemed to blot out the rest of her
face. She had her blue apron tightly rolled about both hands.

Deborah Thayer, on her way to the door, looked at her as if she had
been a part of the wall, but suddenly she stopped and cast a glance
at Cephas. "What be you makin'?" she asked, with a kind of scorn at
him, and scorn at her own curiosity.

Cephas did not reply, but he looked ugly as he slapped another piece
of dough heavily upon a plate.

Deborah, as if against her will, moved closer to the table and bent
over the pan of sorrel. She smelled of it; then she took a leaf and
tasted it, cautiously. She made a wry face. "It's sorrel," said she.
"You're makin' pies out of sorrel. A man makin' pies out of sorrel!"

She looked at Cephas like a condemning judge. He shot a fiery glance
at her, but said nothing. He sprinkled the sorrel leaves in the pie.

"Well," said Deborah, "I've got a sense of justice, and if my son, or
any other man, has asked a girl to marry him, and she's got her
weddin' clothes ready, I believe in his doin' his duty, if he can be
made to; but I must say if it wa'n't for that, I'd rather he'd gone
into a family that was more like other folks. I'm goin' to do the
best I can, whether you go half way or not. I'm goin' to try to make
my son do his duty. I don't expect he will, but I shall do all I can,
tempers or no tempers, and sorrel pies or no sorrel pies."

Deborah went out, and shut the door heavily after her.



Chapter IV


After Deborah Thayer had shut the door, the young girl sitting beside
it arose. "I didn't know she was in here, or I wouldn't have come
in," she said, nervously.

"That don't make any odds," replied Mrs. Barnard, who was trembling
all over, and had sunk helplessly into a rocking-chair, which she
swayed violently and unconsciously.

Cephas opened the door of the brick oven, and put in a batch of his
pies, and the click of the iron latch made her start as if it were a
pistol-shot.

Charlotte got up and went out of the room with a backward glance and
a slight beckoning motion of her head, and the girl slunk after her
so secretly that it seemed as if she did not see herself. Cephas
looked sharply after them, but said nothing; he was like a
philosopher in such a fury of research and experiment that for the
time he heeded thoroughly nothing else.

The young girl, who was Rose Berry, Charlotte's cousin, followed her
panting up the steep stairs to her chamber. She was a slender little
creature, and was now overwrought with nervous excitement. She fairly
gasped for breath when she sat down in the little wooden chair in
Charlotte's room. Charlotte sat on the bed. The two girls looked at
each other--Rose with a certain wary alarm and questioning in her
eyes, Charlotte with a dignified confidence of misery.

"I didn't sleep here last night," Charlotte said, at length.

"You went over to Aunt Sylvy's, didn't you?" returned Rose, as if
that were all the matter in hand.

Charlotte nodded, then she looked moodily past her cousin's face out
of the window.

"You've heard about it, I suppose?" said Charlotte.

"Something," replied Rose, evasively.

"I don't see how it got out, for my part. I don't believe he told
anybody."

Rose flushed all over her little eager face and her thin neck. She
opened her mouth as if to speak, then shut it with a catch of her
breath.

"I can't imagine how it got out," repeated Charlotte.

Rose looked at Charlotte with a painful effort; she clutched her
hands tightly into fists as she spoke. "I was coming up here 'cross
lots last night, and I heard you out in the road calling Barney," she
said, as if she forced out the words.

"Rose Berry, you didn't tell!"

"I went home and told mother, that's all. I didn't think that it
would do any harm, Charlotte."

"It'll be all over town, that's all. It's bad enough, anyway."

"I don't believe it'll get out; I told mother not to tell."

"Mrs. Thayer knew."

"Maybe Barney told her."

"Rose Berry, you know better. You know Barney wouldn't do such a
thing."

"No; I don't s'pose he would."

"Don't suppose! Don't you know?"

"Yes, of course I do. I know Barney just as well as you do,
Charlotte. Oh, Charlotte, don't feel bad. I wouldn't have told mother
if I'd thought. I didn't mean to do any harm. I was all upset myself
by it. Don't cry, Charlotte."

"I ain't going to cry," said Charlotte, with spirit. "I've stopped
cryin'." She wiped her eyes forcibly with her apron, and gave her
head a proud toss. "I know you didn't mean to do any harm, Rose, and
I suppose it would have got out anyway. 'Most everything does get out
but good deeds."

"I truly didn't mean to do any harm, Charlotte," Rose repeated.

"I know you didn't. We won't say any more about it."

"I was just running over across lots last night," Rose said. "I
supposed you'd be in the front room with Barney, but I thought I'd
see Aunt Sarah. I'd got terrible lonesome; mother had gone to sleep
in her chair, and father had gone to bed. When I got out by the
stone-wall next the wood I heard you; then I ran right back. Don't
you--suppose he'll ever come again, Charlotte?"

"No," said Charlotte.

"Oh, Charlotte!" There was a curious quality in the girl's voice, as
if some great hidden emotion in her heart tried to leap to the
surface and make a sound, although it was totally at variance with
the import of her cry. Charlotte started, without knowing why. It was
as if Rose's words and her tone had different meanings, and
conflicted like the wrong lines with a tune.

"I gave it up last night," said Charlotte. "It's all over. I'm goin'
to pack my wedding things away."

"I don't see what makes you so sure."

"I know him."

"But I don't see what you've done, Charlotte; he didn't quarrel with
you."

"That don't make any odds. He can't get married to me now without he
breaks his will, and he can't. He can't get outside himself enough to
break it. I've studied it all out. It's like ciphering. It's all
over."

"Charlotte."

"What is it?"

"Why--couldn't you go somewhere else to get married? What's the need
of his comin' here, if he's been ordered out, and he's said he
wouldn't?"

"That's just the letter of it," returned Charlotte, scornfully. "Do
you suppose he could cheat himself that way, or I'd have him if he
could? When Barney Thayer went out of this house last night, and said
what he did, he meant that it was all over, that he was never going
to marry me, nor have anything more to do with us, and he's going to
stand by it. I am not finding any fault with him. I've made up my
mind that it's all over, and I'm going to pack away my weddin'
things."

"Oh, Charlotte, you take it so calm!"

"What do you want me to do?"

"If it was anybody else, I should think they didn't care."

"Maybe I don't."

"I couldn't bear it so, anyhow! I couldn't!" Rose cried out, with
sudden passion. "I wouldn't bear it. I'd go down on my knees to him
to come back!" Rose flung back her head and looked at Charlotte with
a curious defiance; her face grew suddenly intense, and seemed to
open out into bloom and color like a flower. The pupils of her blue
eyes dilated until they looked black; her thin lips looked full and
red; her cheeks were flaming; her slender chest heaved. "I would,"
said she; "I don't care, I would."

Charlotte looked at her, and a quivering flush like a reflection was
left on her fair, steady face.

"I would," said Rose again.

"It wouldn't do any good."

"It would if he cared anything about you."

"It would if he could give up to the care. Barney Thayer has got a
terrible will that won't always let him do what he wants to himself."

"I don't believe he's enough of a fool to put his own eyes out."

"You don't know him."

"I'd try, anyway."

"It wouldn't do any good."

"I don't believe you care anything about him, Charlotte Barnard!"
Rose cried out. "If you did, you couldn't give him up so easy for
such a silly thing. You sit there just as calm. I don't believe but
what you'll have another fellow on the string in a month. I know one
that's dying to get you."

"Maybe I shall," replied Charlotte.

"Won't you, now?" Rose tried to speak archly, but her eyes were
fiercely eager.

"I can't tell till I get home from the grave," said Charlotte. "You
might wait till I did, Rose." She got up and went to dusting her
bureau and the little gilt-framed mirror behind it. Her lips were
shut tightly, and she never looked at her cousin.

"Now don't get mad, Charlotte," Rose said. "Maybe I ought not to have
spoken so, but it did seem to me you couldn't care as _much_-- It
does seem to me I couldn't settle down and be so calm if I was in
your place, and all ready to be married to anybody. I should want to
do something."

"I should, if there was anything to do," said Charlotte. She stopped
dusting and leaned against the wall, reflecting. "I wish it was a
real mountain to move," said she; "I'd do it."

"I'd go right down in the field where he is ploughing, and I'd make
him say he'd come to see me to-night."

"I called him back last night--you heard me," said Charlotte, with
slow bitterness. Her square delicate chin dipped into the muslin
folds of her neckerchief; she looked steadily at the floor and bent
her brow.

"I'd call him again."

"You would, would you?" cried Charlotte, straightening herself. "You
would stand out in the road and keep on calling a man who wouldn't
even turn his head? You'd keep on calling, and let all the town
hear?"

"Yes, I would. I would! I wouldn't be ashamed of anything if I was
going to marry him. I'd go on my knees before him in the face and
eyes of the whole town."

"Well, I wouldn't," said Charlotte.

"I would, if I was sure he thought as much of me as I did of him."

Charlotte looked at her proudly. "I'm sure enough of that," said she.

Rose winced a little. "Then I wouldn't mind what I did," she
persisted, stubbornly.

"Well, I would," said Charlotte; "but maybe I don't care. Maybe all
this isn't as hard for me as it would be for another girl."
Charlotte's voice broke, but she tossed her head back with a proud
motion; she took up the dusting-cloth and fell to work again.

"Oh, Charlotte!" said Rose; "I didn't mean that. Of course I know you
care. It's awful. It was only because I didn't see how you could seem
so calm; it ain't like me. Of course I know you feel bad enough
underneath. Your wedding-clothes all done and everything. They are
pretty near all done, ain't they, Charlotte?"

"Yes," said Charlotte. "They're--pretty near--done." She tried to
speak steadily, but her voice failed. Suddenly she threw herself on
the bed and hid her face, and her whole body heaved and twisted with
great sobs.

"Oh, poor Charlotte, don't!" Rose cried, wringing her own hands; her
face quivered, but she did not weep.

"Maybe I don't care," sobbed Charlotte; "maybe--I don't care."

"Oh, Charlotte!" Rose looked at Charlotte's piteous girlish shoulders
shaken with sobs, and the fair prostrate girlish head. Charlotte all
drawn up in this little heap upon the bed looked very young and
helpless. All her womanly stateliness, which made her seem so
superior to Rose, had vanished. Rose pulled her chair close to the
bed, sat down, and laid her little thin hand on Charlotte's arm, and
Charlotte directly felt it hot through her sleeve. "Don't,
Charlotte," Rose said; "I'm sorry I spoke so."

"Maybe I don't care," Charlotte sobbed out again. "Maybe I don't."

"Oh, Charlotte, I'm sorry," Rose said, trembling. "I do know you
care; don't you feel so bad because I said that."

Rose tightened her grasp on Charlotte's arm; her voice changed
suddenly. "Look here, Charlotte," said she, "I'll do anything in the
world I can to help you; I promise you that, and I mean it, honest."

Charlotte reached around a hand, and clasped her cousin's.

"I'm sorry I spoke so," Rose said.

"Never mind," Charlotte responded, chokingly. She sobbed a little
longer from pure inertia of grief; then she raised herself, shaking
off Rose's hand. "It's all right," said she; "I needn't have minded;
I know you didn't mean anything. It was just--the last straw,
and--when you said that about my wedding-clothes--"

"Oh, Charlotte, you did speak about them yourself first," Rose said,
deprecatingly.

"I did, so nobody else would," returned Charlotte. She wiped her
eyes, drooping her stained face away from her cousin with a kind of
helpless shame; then she smoothed her hair with the palms of her
hands. "I know you didn't mean any harm, Rose," she added, presently.
"I got my silk dress done last Wednesday; I wanted to tell you."
Charlotte tried to smile at Rose with her poor swollen lips and her
reddened eyes.

"I'm sorry I said anything," Rose repeated; "I ought to have known it
would make you feel bad, Charlotte."

"No, you hadn't. I was terrible silly. Don't you want to see my
dress, Rose?"

"Oh, Charlotte! you don't want to show it to me?"

"Yes, I do. I want you to see it--before I pack it away. It's in the
north chamber."

Rose followed Charlotte out of the room across the passageway to the
north chamber. Charlotte had had one brother, who had died some ten
years before, when he was twenty. The north chamber had been his
room, the bureau drawers were packed with his clothes, and the silk
hat which had been the pride of his early manhood hung on the nail
where he had left it, and also his Sunday coat. His mother would not
have them removed, but kept them there, with frequent brushings, to
guard against dust and moths.

Always when Charlotte entered this small long room, which was full of
wavering lines from its uneven floor and walls and ceiling and the
long arabesques on its old blue-and-white paper, whose green paper
curtains with fringed white dimity ones drooping over them were
always drawn, and in summertime when the windows were open undulated
in the wind, she had the sense of a presence, dim, but as positive as
the visions she had used to have of faces in the wandering design of
the old wall-paper when she had studied it in her childhood. Ever
since her brother's death she had had this sense of his presence in
his room; now she thought no more of it than of any familiar figure.
All the grief at his death had vanished, but she never entered his
old room that the thought of him did not rise up before her and stay
with her while she remained.

Now, when she opened the door, and the opposite green and white
curtains flew out in the draught towards her, they were no more
evident than this presence to which she now gave no thought, and
pushed by her brother's memory without a glance.

Rose followed her to the bed. A white linen sheet was laid over the
chintz counterpane. Charlotte lifted the sheet.

"I took the last stitch on it Wednesday night," she said, in a hushed
voice.

"Didn't he come that night?"

"I finished it before he came."

"Did he see it?"

Charlotte nodded. The two girls stood looking solemnly at the silk
dress.

"You can't see it here; it's too dark," said Charlotte, and she
rolled up a window curtain.

"Yes, I can see better," said Rose, in a whisper. "It's beautiful,
Charlotte."

The dress was spread widely over the bed in crisp folds. It was
purple, plaided vaguely with cloudy lines of white and delicate
rose-color. Over it lay a silvery lustre that was the very light of
the silken fabric.

Rose felt it reverently. "How thick it is!" said she.

"Yes, it's a good piece," Charlotte replied.

"You thought you'd have purple?"

"Yes, he liked it."

"Well, it's pretty, and it's becoming to you."

Charlotte took up the skirt, and slipped it, loud with silken
whispers, over her head. It swept out around her in a great circle;
she looked like a gorgeous inverted bell-flower.

"It's beautiful," Rose said.

Charlotte's face, gazing downward at the silken breadths, had quite
its natural expression. It was as if her mind in spite of herself
would stop at old doors.

"Try on the waist," pleaded Rose.

Charlotte slipped off her calico waist, and thrust her firm white
arms into the flaring silken sleeves of the wedding-gown. Her neck
arose from it with a grand curve. She stood before the glass and
strained the buttons together, frowning importantly.

"It fits you like a glove," Rose murmured, admiringly, smoothing
Charlotte's glossy back.

"I've got a spencer-cape to wear over my neck to meeting," Charlotte
said, and she opened the upper-most drawer in the chest and took out
a worked muslin cape, and adjusted it carefully over her shoulders,
pinning it across her bosom with a little brooch of her brother's
hair in a rim of gold.

"It's elegant," said Rose.

"I'll show you my bonnet," said Charlotte. She went into a closet and
emerged with a great green bandbox.

Rose bent over, watching her breathlessly as she opened it. "Oh!" she
cried. "Oh, Charlotte!"

Charlotte held up the bonnet of fine Dunstable straw, flaring in
front, and trimmed under the brim with a delicate lace ruche and a
wreath of feathery white flowers. Bows of white gauze ribbon stood up
from it stiffly. Long ribbon strings floated back over her arm as she
held it up.

"Try it on," said Rose.

Charlotte stepped before the glass and adjusted the bonnet to her
head. She tied the strings carefully under her chin in a great square
bow; then she turned towards Rose. The fine white wreath under the
brim encircled her face like a nimbus; she looked as she might have
done sitting a bride in the meeting-house.

"It's beautiful," Rose said, smiling, with grave eyes. "You look real
handsome in it, Charlotte." Charlotte stood motionless a moment, with
Rose surveying her.

"Oh, Charlotte," Rose cried out, suddenly, "I don't believe but what
you'll have him, after all!" Rose's eyes were sharp upon Charlotte's
face. It was as if the bridal robes, which were so evident, became
suddenly proofs of something tangible and real, like a garment left
by a ghost. Rose felt a sudden conviction that the quarrel was but a
temporary thing; that Charlotte would marry Barney, and that she knew
it.

A change came over Charlotte's face. She began untying the bonnet
strings.

"Sha'n't you?" repeated Rose, breathlessly.

"No, I sha'n't."

Charlotte took the bonnet off and smoothed the creases carefully out
of the strings.

"If I were you," Rose cried out, "I'd feel like tearing that bonnet
to pieces!"

Charlotte replaced it in the bandbox, and began unfastening her
dress.

"I don't see how you can bear the sight of them. I don't believe I
could bear them in the house!" Rose cried out again. "I would put
that dress in the rag-bag if it was mine!" Her cheeks burned and her
eyes were quite fierce upon the dress as Charlotte slipped it off and
it fell to the floor in a rustling heap around her.

"I don't see any sense in losing everything you have ever had because
you haven't got anything now," Charlotte returned, in a stern voice.
She laid the shining silk gown carefully on the bed, and put on her
cotton one again. Her face was quite steady.

Rose watched her with the same sharp question in her eyes. "You know
you and Barney will make it up," she said, at length.

"No, I don't," returned Charlotte. "Suppose we go down-stairs now.
I've got some work I ought to do."

Charlotte pulled down the green paper shades of the windows, and went
out of the room. Rose followed. Charlotte turned to go down-stairs,
but Rose caught her arm.

"Wait a minute," said she. "Look here, Charlotte."

"What is it?"

"Charlotte," said Rose again; then she stopped.

Charlotte turned and looked at her. Rose's eyes met hers, and her
face had a noble expression.

"You write a note to him, and I'll carry it," said Rose. "I'll go
down in the field where he is, on my way home."

Tears sprang into Charlotte's eyes. "You're real good, Rose," she
said; "but I can't."

"Hadn't you better?"

"No; I can't. Don't let's talk any more about it."

Charlotte pushed past Rose's detaining hand, and the girls went
down-stairs. Mrs. Barnard looked around dejectedly at them as they
entered the kitchen. Her eyes were red, and her mouth drooping; she
was clearing the débris of the pies from the table; there was a smell
of baking, but Cephas had gone out. She tried to smile at Rose. "Are
you goin' now?" said she.

"Yes; I've got to. I've got to sew on my muslin dress. When are you
coming over, Aunt Sarah? You haven't been over to our house for an
age."

"I don't care if I never go anywhere!" cried Sarah Barnard, with
sudden desperation. "I'm discouraged." She sank in a chair, and flung
her apron over her face.

"Don't, mother," said Charlotte.

"I can't help it," sobbed her mother. "You're young and you've got
more strength to bear it, but mine's all gone. I feel worse about you
than if it was myself, an' there's so much to put up with besides. I
don't feel as if I could put up with things much longer, nohow."

"Uncle Cephas ought to be ashamed of himself!" Rose cried out.

Sarah stood up. "Well, I don't s'pose I have so much to put up with
as some folks," she said, catching her breath as if it were her
dignity. "Your Uncle Cephas means well. It did seem as if them sorrel
pies were the last straw, but I hadn't ought to have minded it."

"You haven't got to eat sorrel pies, have you?" Rose asked, in a
bewildered way.

"I don't s'pose they'll be any worse than some other things we eat,"
Sarah answered, scraping the pie-board again.

"I don't see how you can."

"I guess they won't hurt us any," Sarah said, shortly, and Rose
looked abashed.

"Well, I must be going," said she.

As she went out, she looked hesitatingly at Charlotte. "Hadn't you
better?" she whispered. Charlotte shook her head, and Rose went out
into the spring sunlight. She bent her head as she went down the road
before the sweet gusts of south wind; the white apple-trees seemed to
sing, for she could not see the birds in them.

Rose's face between the green sides of her bonnet had in it all the
quickened bloom of youth in spring; her eyes had all the blue
surprise of violets; she panted softly between red swelling lips as
she walked; pulses beat in her crimson cheeks. Her slender figure
yielded to the wind as to a lover. She passed Barney Thayer's new
house; then she came opposite the field where he was at work
ploughing, driving a white horse, stooping to his work in his blue
frock.

Rose stood still and looked at him; then she walked on a little way;
then she paused again. Barney never looked around at her. There was
the width of a field between them.

Finally Rose went through the open bars into the first field. She
crossed it slowly, holding up her skirts where there was a wet gleam
through darker grass, and getting a little nosegay of violets with a
busy air, as if that were what she had come for. She passed through
the other bars into the second field, and Barney was only a little
way from her. He did not glance at her then. He was ploughing with
the look that Cadmus might have worn preparing the ground for the
dragon's teeth.

Rose held up her skirts, and went along the furrows behind him.
"Hullo, Barney," she said, in a trembling voice.

"Hullo," he returned, without looking around, and he kept on, with
Rose following.

"Barney," said she, timidly.

"Well?" said Barney, half turning, with a slight show of courtesy.

"Do you know if Rebecca is at home?"

"I don't know whether she is or not."

Barney held stubbornly to his rocking plough, and Rose followed.

"Barney," said she, again.

"Well?"

"Stop a minute, and look round here."

"I can't stop to talk."

"Yes, you can; just a minute. Look round here."

Barney stopped, and turned a stern, miserable face over his shoulder.

"I've been up to Charlotte's," Rose said.

"I don't know what that is to me."

"Barney Thayer, ain't you ashamed of yourself?"

"I can't stop to talk."

"Yes, you can. Look here. Charlotte feels awfully."

Barney stood with his back to Rose; his very shoulders had a dogged
look.

"Barney, why don't you make up with her?"

Barney stood still.

"Barney, she feels awfully because you didn't come back when she
called you last night."

Barney made no reply. He and the white horse stood like statues.

"Barney, why don't you make up with her? I wish you would." Rose's
voice was full of tender inflections; it might have been that of an
angel peace-making.

Barney turned around between the handles of the plough, and looked at
her steadily. "You don't know anything about it, Rose," he said.

Rose looked up in his face, and her own was full of fine pleading.
"Oh, Barney," she said, "poor Charlotte does feel so bad! I know that
anyhow."

"You don't know how I am situated. I can't--"

"Do go and see her, Barney."

"Do you think I'm going into Cephas Barnard's house after he's
ordered me out?"

"Go up the road a little way, and she'll come and meet you. I'll run
ahead and tell her."

Barney shook his head. "I can't; you don't know anything about it,
Rose." He looked into Rose's eyes. "You're real good, Rose," he said,
as if with a sudden recognition of her presence.

Rose blushed softly, a new look came into her eyes, she smiled up at
him, and her face was all pink and sweet and fully set towards him,
like a rose for which he was a sun.

"No, I ain't good," she whispered.

"Yes, you are; but I can't. You don't know anything about it." He
swung about and grasped his plough-handles again.

"Barney, do stop a minute," Rose pleaded.

"I can't stop any longer; there's no use talking," Barney said; and
he went on remorselessly through the opening furrow. Just before he
turned the corner Rose made a little run forward and caught his arm.

"You don't think I've done anything out of the way speaking to you
about it, do you, Barney?" she said, and she was half crying.

"I don't know why I should think you had; I suppose you meant all
right," Barney said. He pulled his arm away softly, and jerked the
right rein to turn the horse. "G'lang!" he cried out, and strode
forward with a conclusive air.

Rose stood looking after him a minute; then she struck off across the
field. Her knees trembled as she stepped over the soft plough-ridges.

When she was out on the road again she went along quickly until she
came to the Thayer house. She was going past that when she heard some
one calling her name, and turned to see who it was.

Rebecca Thayer came hurrying out of the yard with a basket on her
arm. "Wait a minute," she called, "and I'll go along with you."



Chapter V


Rebecca, walking beside Rose, looked like a woman of another race.
She was much taller, and her full, luxuriant young figure looked
tropical beside Rose's slender one. Her body undulated as she walked,
but Rose moved only with forward flings of delicate limbs.

"I've got to carry these eggs down to the store and get some sugar,"
said Rebecca.

Rose assented, absently. She was full of the thought of her talk with
Barney.

"It's a pleasant day, ain't it?" said Rebecca.

"Yes, it's real pleasant. Say, Rebecca, I'm awful afraid I made
Barney mad just now."

"Why, what did you do?"

"I stopped in the field when I was going by. I'd been up to see
Charlotte, and I said something about it to him."

"How much do you know about it?" Rebecca asked, abruptly.

"Charlotte told me this mornin', and last night when I was going to
her house across lots I saw Barney going, and heard her calling him
back. I thought I'd see if I couldn't coax him to make up with her,
but I couldn't."

"Oh, he'll come round," said Rebecca.

"Then you think it'll be made up?" Rose asked, quickly.

"Of course it will. We're having a terrible time about poor Barney.
He didn't come home last night, and it's much as ever he's spoken
this morning. He wouldn't eat any breakfast. He just went into his
room, and put on his other clothes, and then went out in the field to
work. He wouldn't tell mother anything about it. I never saw her so
worked up. She's terribly afraid he's done something wrong."

"He hasn't done anything wrong," returned Rose. "I think your mother
is terrible hard on him. It's Uncle Cephas; he just picked the
quarrel. He hasn't never more'n half liked Barney. So you think
Barney will make up with Charlotte, and they'll get married, after
all?"

"Of course they will," Rebecca replied, promptly. "I guess they won't
be such fools as not to for such a silly reason as that, when
Barney's got his house 'most done, and Charlotte has got all her
wedding-clothes ready."

"Ain't Barney terrible set?"

"He's set enough, but I guess you'll find he won't be this time."

"Well, I'm sure I hope he won't be," Rose said, and she walked along
silently, her face sober in the depths of her bonnet.

They came to Richard Alger's house on the right-hand side of the
road, and Rebecca looked reflectively at the white cottage with its
steep peak of Gothic roof set upon a ploughed hill. "It's queer how
he's been going with your aunt Sylvy all these years," she said.

"Yes, 'tis," assented Rose, and she too glanced up at the house. As
they looked, a man came around the corner with a basket. He was about
to plant potatoes in his hilly yard.

"There he is now," said Rose.

They watched Richard Alger coming towards them, past a great tree
whose new leaves were as red as flowers.

"What do you suppose the reason is?" Rebecca said, in a low voice.

"I don't know. I suppose he's got used to living this way."

"I shouldn't think they'd be very happy," Rebecca said; and she
blushed, and her voice had a shamefaced tone.

"I don't suppose it makes so much difference when folks get older,"
Rose returned.

"Maybe it don't. Rose."

"What is it?"

"I wish you'd go into the store with me."

Rose laughed. "What for?"

"Nothing. Only I wish you would."

"You afraid of William?" Rose peered around into Rebecca's bonnet.

Rebecca blushed until tears came to her eyes. "I'd like to know what
I'd be afraid of William Berry for," she replied.

"Then what do you want me to go into the store with you for?"

"Nothing."

"You're a great ninny, Rebecca Thayer," Rose said, laughing, "but
I'll go if you want me to. I know William won't like it. You run away
from him the whole time. There isn't another girl in Pembroke treats
him as badly as you do."

"I don't treat him badly."

"Yes, you do. And I don't believe but what you like him, Rebecca
Thayer; you wouldn't act so silly if you didn't."

Rebecca was silent. Rose peered around in her face again. "I was only
joking. I think a sight more of you for not running after him, and so
does William. You haven't any idea how some of the girls act chasing
to the store. Mother and I have counted 'em some days, and then we
plague William about it, but he won't own up they come to see him. He
acts more ashamed of it than the girls do."

"That's one thing I never would do--run after any fellow," said
Rebecca.

"I wouldn't either."

Then the two girls had reached the tavern and the store. Rose's
father, Silas Berry, had kept the tavern, but now it was closed,
except to occasional special guests. He had gained a competency, and
his wife Hannah had rebelled against further toil. Then, too, the
railroad had been built through East Pembroke instead of Pembroke,
the old stage line had become a thing of the past, and the tavern was
scantily patronized. Still, Silas Berry had given it up with great
reluctance; he cherished a grudge against his wife because she had
insisted upon it, and would never admit that business policy had
aught to do with it.

The store adjoining the tavern, which he had owned for years, he
still retained, but his son William had charge of it. Silas Berry was
growing old, and the year before had had a slight shock of paralysis,
which had made him halt and feeble, although his mind was as clear as
ever. However, although he took no active part in the duties of the
store, he was still there, and sharply watchful for his interests,
the greater part of every day.

The two girls went up the steps to the store piazza. Rose stepped
forward and looked in the door. "Father's in there, and Tommy Ray,"
she whispered. "You needn't be afraid to go in." But she entered as
she spoke, and Rebecca followed her.

There was one customer in the great country store, a stout old man,
on the grocery side. His broad red face turned towards them a second,
then squinted again at some packages on the counter. He was haggling
for garden seeds. William Berry, who was waiting upon him, did not
apparently look at his sister and Rebecca Thayer, but Rebecca had
entered his heart as well as the store, and he saw her face deep in
his own consciousness.

Tommy Ray, the great white-headed boy who helped William in the
store, shuffled along behind the counter indeterminately, but the
girls did not seem to see him. Rose was talking fast to Rebecca. He
lounged back against the shelves, stared out the door, and whistled.

Out of the obscurity in the back of the store an old man's narrow
bristling face peered, watchful as a cat, his body hunched up in a
round-backed arm-chair.

"Mr. Nims will go in a minute," Rose whispered, and presently the old
farmer clamped past them out the door, counting his change from one
hand to the other, his lips moving.

William Berry replaced the seed packages which the customer had
rejected on the shelves as the girls approached him.

"Rebecca's got some eggs to sell," Rose announced.

[Illustration: "'Rebecca's got some eggs to sell'"]

William Berry's thin, wide-shouldered figure towered up behind the
counter; he smiled, and the smile was only a deepening of the
pleasant intensity of his beardless face, with its high pale forehead
and smooth crest of fair hair. The lines in his face scarcely
changed.

"How d'ye do?" said he.

"How d'ye do?" returned Rebecca, with fluttered dignity. Her face
bloomed deeply pink in the green tunnel of her sun-bonnet, her black
eyes were as soft and wary as a baby's, her full red lips had a
grave, innocent expression.

"How many dozen eggs have you got, Rebecca?" Rose inquired, peering
into the basket.

"Two; mother couldn't spare any more to-day," Rebecca replied, in a
trembling voice.

"How much sugar do you give for two dozen eggs, William?" asked Rose.

William hesitated; he gave a scarcely perceptible glance towards the
watchful old man, whose eyes seemed to gleam out of the gloom in the
back of the store. "Well, about two pounds and a half," he replied,
in a low voice.

Rebecca set her basket of eggs on the counter.

"How many pound did you tell her, William?" called the old man's
hoarse voice.

William compressed his lips. "About two and a half, father."

"How many?"

"Two and a half."

"How many dozen of eggs?"

"Two."

"You ain't offerin' of her two pound of sugar for two dozen eggs?"

"I said two pounds and a half of sugar, father," said William. He
began counting the eggs.

"Be you gone crazy?"

"Never mind," whispered Rebecca. "That's too much sugar for the eggs.
Mother didn't expect so much. Don't say any more about it, William."
Her face was quite steady and self-possessed now, as she looked at
William, frowning heavily over the eggs.

"Give Rebecca two pounds of sugar for the eggs, father, and call it
square," Rose called out.

Silas Berry pulled himself up a joint at a time; then he came forward
at a stiff halt, his face pointing out in advance of his body. He
entered at the gap in the counter, and pressed close to his son's
side. Then he looked sharply across at Rebecca. "Sugar is fourteen
cents a pound now," said he, "an' eggs ain't fetchin' more'n ten
cents a dozen. You tell your mother."

"Father, I told her I'd giver her two and a half pounds for two
dozen," said William; he was quite pale. He began counting the eggs
over again, and his hands trembled.

"I'll take just what you're willing to give," Rebecca said to Silas.

"Sugar is fourteen cents a pound, an' eggs is fetchin' ten cents a
dozen," said the old man; "you can have a pound and a half of sugar
for them eggs if you can give me a cent to boot."

Rebecca colored. "I'm afraid I haven't got a cent with me," said she;
"I didn't fetch my purse. You'll have to give me a cent's worth less
sugar, Mr. Berry."

"It's kinder hard to calkilate so close as that," returned Silas,
gravely; "you had better tell your mother about it, an' you come back
with the cent by-an'-by."

"Why, father!" cried Rose.

William shouldered his father aside with a sudden motion. "I'm
tending to this, father," he said, in a stern whisper; "you leave it
alone."

"I ain't goin' to stan' by an' see you givin' twice as much for eggs
as they're worth 'cause it's a gal you're tradin' with. That wa'n't
never my way of doin' business, an' I ain't goin' to have it done in
my store. I shouldn't have laid up a cent if I'd managed any such
ways, an' I ain't goin' to see my hard earnin's wasted by you. You
give her a pound and a half of sugar for them eggs and a cent to
boot."

"You sha'n't lose anything by it, father," said William, fiercely.
"You leave me alone."

The sugar-barrel stood quite near. William strode over to it, and
plunged in the great scoop with a grating noise. He heaped it
recklessly on some paper, and laid it on the steelyards.

"Don't give me more'n a pound and a half," Rebecca said, softly.

"Keep still," Rose whispered in her ear.

Silas pushed forward, and bent over the steelyards. "You've weighed
out nigh three," he began. Then his son's face suddenly confronted
his, and he stopped talking and stood back.

Almost involuntarily at times Silas Berry yielded to the combination
of mental and superior physical force in his son. While his own mind
had lost nothing of its vigor, his bodily weakness made him
distrustful of it sometimes, when his son towered over him in what
seemed the might of his own lost strength and youth, brandishing his
own old weapons.

William tied up the sugar neatly; then he took the eggs from
Rebecca's basket, and put the parcel in their place. Silas began
lifting the eggs from the box in which William had put them, and
counted them eagerly.

"There ain't but twenty-three eggs here," he called out, as Rebecca
and Rose turned away, and William was edging after them from behind
the counter.

"I thought there were two dozen," Rebecca responded, in a distressed
voice.

"Of course there are two dozen," said Rose, promptly. "You 'ain't
counted 'em right, father. Go along, Rebecca; it's all right."

"I tell ye it ain't," said Silas. "There ain't but twenty-three. It's
bad enough to be payin' twice what they're wuth for eggs, without
havin' of 'em come short."

"I tell you I counted 'em twice over, and they're all right. You keep
still, father," said William's voice at his ear, in a fierce whisper,
and Silas subsided into sullen mutterings.

William had meditated following Rebecca to the door; he had even
meditated going farther; but now he stood back behind the counter,
and began packing up some boxes with a busy air.

"Ain't you going a piece with Rebecca, and carry her basket,
William?" Rose called back, when the two girls reached the door.

Rebecca clutched her arm. "Oh, don't," she gasped, and Rose giggled.

"Ain't you, William?" she said again.

Rebecca hurried out the door, but she heard William reply coldly that
he couldn't, he was too busy. She was half crying when Rose caught up
with her.

"William wanted to go bad enough, but he was too upset by what father
said. You mustn't mind father," Rose said, peering around into
Rebecca's bonnet. "Why, Rebecca, what is the matter?"

"I didn't go into that store a step to see William Berry. You know I
didn't," Rebecca cried out, with