Pembroke | Page 3

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