Pembroke | Page 8

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