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.
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