Pembroke | Page 7

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