Pembroke | Page 5

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