Pembroke | Page 9

chairs stood by
twos, finely canted towards each other, against the wall; the one great
hair-cloth rocker stood ostentatiously in advance of them, facing the
hearth fire; the long level of the hair-cloth sofa gleamed out under stiff
sweeps of the white fringed curtains at the window behind it. The
books on the glossy card-table were set canting towards each other like
the chairs, and with their gilt edges towards the light. And Sylvia had
set also on the table a burnished pitcher of a rosy copper-color full of
apple blossoms.
She looked at it when she had set the candle on the shelf. It seemed to
her that all the light in the room centred on it, and it shone in her eyes
like a copper lamp.
Charlotte also glanced at it. "Why, Richard must have come while you
were over to our house," she said.
"It don't make any odds if he did," returned Sylvia, with a faint blush
and a bridle. Sylvia was much younger than her sister. Standing there in

the dim light she did not look so much older than her niece. Her figure
had the slim angularity and primness which are sometimes seen in
elderly women who are not matrons, and she had donned a little white
lace cap at thirty, but her face had still a delicate bloom, and the wistful
wonder of expression which belongs to youth.
However, she never thought of Charlotte as anything but a child as
compared with herself. Sylvia felt very old, and the more so that she
grudged her years painfully. She stirred up the fire a little, holding back
her shiny black silk skirt carefully. Charlotte stood leaning against the
shelf, looking moodily down at the fire.
"I wouldn't feel bad if I was you, Charlotte," Sylvia ventured, timidly.
"I guess we'd better go to bed pretty soon," returned Charlotte. "It must
be late."
"Had you rather sleep with me, Charlotte, or sleep in the spare
chamber?"
"I guess I'll go in the spare chamber."
"Well, I'll get you a night-gown."
Both of their faces were sober, but perfectly staid. They bade each
other good-night without a quiver; but Charlotte, after she had said her
dutiful and unquestioning prayer, and lay folded in Sylvia's ruffled
night-gown in the best bed, shook with great sobs. "Poor Barney!" she
kept muttering. "Poor Barney! poor Barney!"
The doors were all open, and once she thought she heard a sob from
below, then concluded she must be mistaken. But she was not, for
Sylvia Crane was lamenting as sorely as the younger maiden up-stairs.
"Poor Richard!" she repeated, piteously. "Poor Richard! There he came,
and the stone was up, and he had to go away."
The faces which were so clear to the hearts of both women, as if they
were before their eyes, had a certain similarity. Indeed, Richard Alger

and Barnabas Thayer were distantly related on the mother's side, and
people said they looked enough alike to be brothers. Sylvia saw the
same type of face as Charlotte, only Richard's face was older, for he
was six years older than she.
"If I hadn't put the stone up," she moaned, "maybe he would have
thought I didn't hear him knock, an' he'd come in an' waited. Poor
Richard, I dunno what he thought! It's the first time it's happened for
eighteen years."
Sylvia, as she lay there, looked backward, and it seemed to her that the
eighteen years were all made up of the Sunday nights on which Richard
Alger had come to see her, as if they were all that made them immortal
and redeemed them from the dead past. She had endured grief, but love
alone made the past years stand out for her. Sylvia, in looking back
over eighteen years, forgot the father, mother, and sister who had died
in that time; their funeral trains passed before her eyes like so many
shadows. She forgot all their cares and her own; she forgot how she had
nursed her bedridden mother for ten years; she forgot everything but
those blessed Sunday nights on which Richard Alger had come. She
called to mind every little circumstance connected with them--how she
had adorned the best room by slow degrees, saving a few cents at a
time from her sparse income, because he sat in it every Sunday night;
how she had had the bed which her mother and grandmother kept there
removed because the fashion had changed, and the guilty audacity with
which she had purchased a hair-cloth sofa to take its place.
That adorning of the best room had come to be a religion with Sylvia
Crane. As faithfully as any worshipper of the Greek deity she laid her
offerings, her hair-cloth sofa and rocker, her copper-gilt pitcher of