Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - Pembroke

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Transcriber's Note:
The images for this text were scanned from the 1894 edition.

Pembroke

Mary E. Wilkins

Harper & Brothers Publishers; New York: 1900

[Illustration: "'It's beautiful,' Rose said"]

Introductory Sketch

_Pembroke_ was originally intended as a study of the human will in
several New England characters, in different phases of disease and
abnormal development, and to prove, especially in the most marked
case, the truth of a theory that its cure depended entirely upon the
capacity of the individual for a love which could rise above all
considerations of self, as Barnabas Thayer's love for Charlotte
Barnard finally did.

While Barnabas Thayer is the most pronounced exemplification of this
theory, and while he, being drawn from life, originally suggested the
scheme of the study, a number of the other characters, notably
Deborah Thayer, Richard Alger, and Cephas Barnard, are instances of
the same spiritual disease. Barnabas to me was as much the victim of
disease as a man with curvature of the spine; he was incapable of
straightening himself to his former stature until he had laid hands
upon a more purely unselfish love than he had ever known, through his
anxiety for Charlotte, and so raised himself to his own level.

When I make use of the term abnormal, I do not mean unusual in any
sense. I am far from any intention to speak disrespectfully or
disloyally of those stanch old soldiers of the faith who landed upon
our inhospitable shores and laid the foundation, as on a very rock of
spirit, for the New England of to-day; but I am not sure, in spite of
their godliness, and their noble adherence, in the face of obstacles,
to the dictates of their consciences, that their wills were not
developed past the reasonable limit of nature. What wonder is it that
their descendants inherit this peculiarity, though they may develop
it for much less worthy and more trivial causes than the exiling
themselves for a question of faith, even the carrying-out of personal
and petty aims and quarrels?

There lived in a New England village, at no very remote time, a man
who objected to the painting of the kitchen floor, and who quarrelled
furiously with his wife concerning the same. When she persisted, in
spite of his wishes to the contrary, and the floor was painted, he
refused to cross it to his dying day, and always, to his great
inconvenience, but probably to his soul's satisfaction, walked around
it.

A character like this, holding to a veriest trifle with such a
deathless cramp of the will, might naturally be regarded as a notable
exception to a general rule; but his brethren who sit on church steps
during services, who are dumb to those whom they should love, and
will not enter familiar doors because of quarrels over matters of
apparently no moment, are legion. _Pembroke_ is intended to portray a
typical New England village of some sixty years ago, as many of the
characters flourished at that time, but villages of a similar
description have existed in New England at a much later date, and
they exist to-day in a very considerable degree. There are at the
present time many little towns in New England along whose pleasant
elm or maple shaded streets are scattered characters as pronounced as
any in Pembroke. A short time since a Boston woman recited in my
hearing a list of seventy-five people in the very small Maine village
in which she was born and brought up, and every one of the characters
which she mentioned had some almost incredibly marked physical or
mental characteristic.

However, this state of things--this survival of the more prominent
traits of the old stiff-necked ones, albeit their necks were
stiffened by their resistance of the adversary--can necessarily be
known only to the initiated. The sojourner from cities for the summer
months cannot often penetrate in the least, though he may not be
aware of it, the reserve and dignified aloofness of the dwellers in
the white cottages along the road over which he drives. He often
looks upon them from the superior height of a wise and keen student
of character; he knows what he thinks of them, but he never knows
what they think of him or themselves. Unless he is a man of the
broadest and most democratic tendencies, to whom culture and the
polish of society is as nothing beside humanity, and unless he
returns, as faithfully as the village birds to their nests, to his
summer home year after year, he cannot see very far below the
surfaces of villages of which Pembroke is typical. Quite naturally,
when the surfaces are broken by some unusual revelation of a
strongly serrate individuality, and the tale thereof is told
at his dinner-table with an accompaniment of laughter and
exclamation-points, he takes that case for an isolated and by no
means typical one, when, if the truth were told, the village windows
are full of them as he passes by.

However, this state of things must necessarily exist, and has
existed, in villages which, like Pembroke, have not been brought much
in contact with outside influences, and have not been studied or
observed at all by people not of their kind by birth or long
familiarity. In towns which have increased largely in population, and
have become more or less assimilated with a foreign element, these
characters do not exist in such a large measure, are more isolated in
reality, and have, consequently, less claim to be considered types.
But there have been, and are to-day in New England, hundreds of
villages like Pembroke, where nearly every house contains one or more
characters so marked as to be incredible, though a writer may be
prevented, for obvious reasons, from mentioning names and proving
facts.

There is often to a mind from the outside world an almost repulsive
narrowness and a pitiful sordidness which amounts to tragedy in the
lives of such people as those portrayed in _Pembroke_, but quite
generally the tragedy exists only in the comprehension of the
observer and not at all in that of the observed. The pitied would
meet pity with resentment; they would be full of wonder and wrath if
told that their lives were narrow, since they have never seen the
limit of the breadth of their current of daily life. A singing-school
is as much to them as a symphony concert and grand opera to their
city brethren, and a sewing church sociable as an afternoon tea.
Though the standard of taste of the simple villagers, and their
complete satisfaction therewith, may reasonably be lamented, as also
their restricted view of life, they are not to be pitied, generally
speaking, for their unhappiness in consequence. It may be that the
lack of unhappiness constitutes the real tragedy.

Chapter I

At half-past six o'clock on Sunday night Barnabas came out of his
bedroom. The Thayer house was only one story high, and there were no
chambers. A number of little bedrooms were clustered around the three
square rooms--the north and south parlors, and the great kitchen.

Barnabas walked out of his bedroom straight into the kitchen where
the other members of the family were. They sat before the hearth fire
in a semi-circle--Caleb Thayer, his wife Deborah, his son Ephraim,
and his daughter Rebecca. It was May, but it was quite cold; there
had been talk of danger to the apple blossoms; there was a crisp
coolness in the back of the great room in spite of the hearth fire.

Caleb Thayer held a great leather-bound Bible on his knees, and was
reading aloud in a solemn voice. His wife sat straight in her chair,
her large face tilted with a judicial and argumentative air, and
Rebecca's red cheeks bloomed out more brilliantly in the heat of the
fire. She sat next her mother, and her smooth dark head with its
carven comb arose from her Sunday kerchief with a like carriage. She
and her mother did not look alike, but their motions were curiously
similar, and perhaps gave evidence to a subtler resemblance in
character and motive power.

Ephraim, undersized for his age, in his hitching, home-made clothes,
twisted himself about when Barnabas entered, and stared at him with
slow regard. He eyed the smooth, scented hair, the black satin vest
with a pattern of blue flowers on it, the blue coat with brass
buttons, and the shining boots, then he whistled softly under his
breath.

"Ephraim!" said his mother, sharply. She had a heavy voice and a
slight lisp, which seemed to make it more impressive and more
distinctively her own. Caleb read on ponderously.

"Where ye goin', Barney?" Ephraim inquired, with a chuckle and a
grin, over the back of his chair.

"Ephraim!" repeated his mother. Her blue eyes frowned around his
sister at him under their heavy sandy brows.

Ephraim twisted himself back into position. "Jest wanted to know
where he was goin'," he muttered.

Barnabas stood by the window brushing his fine bell hat with a white
duck's wing. He was a handsome youth; his profile showed clear and
fine in the light, between the sharp points of his dicky bound about
by his high stock. His cheeks were as red as his sister's.

When he put on his hat and opened the door, his mother herself
interrupted Caleb's reading.

"Don't you stay later than nine o'clock, Barnabas," said she.

The young man murmured something unintelligibly, but his tone was
resentful.

"I ain't going to have you out as long as you were last Sabbath
night," said his mother, in quick return. She jerked her chin down
heavily as if it were made of iron.

Barnabas went out quickly, and shut the door with a thud.

[Illustration: "Barnabas went out quickly"]

"If he was a few years younger, I'd make him come back an' shut that
door over again," said his mother.

Caleb read on; he was reading now one of the imprecatory psalms.
Deborah's blue eyes gleamed with warlike energy as she listened: she
confused King David's enemies with those people who crossed her own
will.

Barnabas went out of the yard, which was wide and deep on the south
side of the house. The bright young grass was all snowed over with
cherry blossoms. Three great cherry-trees stood in a row through the
centre of the yard; they had been white with blossoms, but now they
were turning green; and the apple-trees were in flower.

There were many apple-trees behind the stone-walls that bordered the
wood. The soft blooming branches looked strangely incongruous in the
keen air. The western sky was clear and yellow, and there were a few
reefs of violet cloud along it. Barnabas looked up at the apple
blossoms over his head, and wondered if there would be a frost. From
their apple orchard came a large share of the Thayer income, and
Barnabas was vitally interested in such matters now, for he was to be
married the last of June to Charlotte Barnard. He often sat down with
a pencil and slate, and calculated, with intricate sums, the amounts
of his income and their probable expenses. He had made up his mind
that Charlotte should have one new silk gown every year, and two new
bonnets--one for summer and one for winter. His mother had often
noted, with scorn, that Charlotte Barnard wore her summer bonnet with
another ribbon on it winters, and, moreover, had not had a new bonnet
for three years.

"She looks handsomer in it than any girl in town, if she hasn't,"
Barnabas had retorted with quick resentment, but he nevertheless felt
sensitive on the subject of Charlotte's bonnet, and resolved that she
should have a white one trimmed with gauze ribbons for summer, and
one of drawn silk, like Rebecca's, for winter, only the silk should
be blue instead of pink, because Charlotte was fair.

Barnabas had even pondered with tender concern, before he bought his
fine flowered satin waistcoat, if he might not put the money it would
cost into a bonnet for Charlotte, but he had not dared to propose it.
Once he had bought a little blue-figured shawl for her, and her
father had bade her return it.

"I ain't goin' to have any young sparks buyin' your clothes while you
are under my roof," he had said.

Charlotte had given the shawl back to her lover. "Father don't feel
as if I ought to take it, and I guess you'd better keep it now,
Barney," she said, with regretful tears in her eyes.

Barnabas had the blue shawl nicely folded in the bottom of his little
hair-cloth trunk, which he always kept locked.

After a quarter of a mile the stone-walls and the spray of apple
blossoms ended; there was a short stretch of new fence, and a new
cottage-house only partly done. The yard was full of lumber, and a
ladder slanted to the roof, which gleamed out with the fresh pinky
yellow of unpainted pine.

Barnabas stood before the house a few minutes, staring at it. Then he
walked around it slowly, his face upturned. Then he went in the front
door, swinging himself up over the sill, for there were no steps, and
brushing the sawdust carefully from his clothes when he was inside.
He went all over the house, climbing a ladder to the second story,
and viewing with pride the two chambers under the slant of the new
roof. He had repelled with scorn his father's suggestion that he have
a one-story instead of a story-and-a-half house. Caleb had an
inordinate horror and fear of wind, and his father, who had built the
house in which he lived, had it before him. Deborah often descanted
indignantly upon the folly of sleeping in little tucked-up bedrooms
instead of good chambers, because folks' fathers had been scared to
death of wind, and Barnabas agreed with her. If he had inherited any
of his father's and grandfather's terror of wind, he made no
manifestation of it.

In the lower story of the new cottage were two square front rooms
like those in his father's house, and behind them the great kitchen
with a bedroom out of it, and a roof of its own.

Barnabas paused at last in the kitchen, and stood quite still,
leaning against a window casement. The windows were not in, and the
spaces let in the cool air and low light. Outside was a long reach of
field sloping gently upward. In the distance, at the top of the hill,
sharply outlined against the sky, was a black angle of roof and a
great chimney. A thin column of smoke rose out of it, straight and
dark. That was where Charlotte Barnard lived.

Barnabas looked out and saw the smoke rising from the chimney of the
Barnard house. There was a little hollow in the field that was quite
blue with violets, and he noted that absently. A team passed on the
road outside; it was as if he saw and heard everything from the
innermost recesses of his own life, and everything seemed strange and
far off.

He turned to go, but suddenly stood still in the middle of the
kitchen, as if some one had stopped him. He looked at the new
fireless hearth, through the open door into the bedroom which he
would occupy after he was married to Charlotte, and through others
into the front rooms, which would be apartments of simple state, not
so closely connected with every-day life. The kitchen windows would
be sunny. Charlotte would think it a pleasant room.

"Her rocking-chair can set there," said Barnabas aloud. The tears
came into his eyes; he stepped forward, laid his smooth boyish cheek
against a partition wall of this new house, and kissed it. It was a
fervent demonstration, not towards Charlotte alone, nor the joy to
come to him within those walls, but to all life and love and nature,
although he did not comprehend it. He half sobbed as he turned away;
his thoughts seemed to dazzle his brain, and he could not feel his
feet. He passed through the north front room, which would be the
little-used parlor, to the door, and suddenly started at a long black
shadow on the floor. It vanished as he went on, and might have been
due to his excited fancy, which seemed substantial enough to cast
shadows.

"I shall marry Charlotte, we shall live here together all our lives,
and die here," thought Barnabas, as he went up the hill. "I shall lie
in my coffin in the north room, and it will all be over," but his
heart leaped with joy. He stepped out proudly like a soldier in a
battalion, he threw back his shoulders in his Sunday coat.

The yellow glow was paling in the west, the evening air was like a
cold breath in his face. He could see the firelight flickering upon
the kitchen wall of the Barnard house as he drew near. He came up
into the yard and caught a glimpse of a fair head in the ruddy glow.
There was a knocker on the door; he raised it gingerly and let it
fall. It made but a slight clatter, but a woman's shadow moved
immediately across the yard outside, and Barnabas heard the inner
door open. He threw open the outer one himself, and Charlotte stood
there smiling, and softly decorous. Neither of them spoke. Barnabas
glanced at the inner door to see if it were closed, then he caught
Charlotte's hands and kissed her.

"You shouldn't do so, Barnabas," whispered Charlotte, turning her
face away. She was as tall as Barnabas, and as handsome.

"Yes, I should," persisted Barnabas, all radiant, and his face
pursued hers around her shoulder.

"It's pretty cold out, ain't it?" said Charlotte, in a chiding voice
which she could scarcely control.

"I've been in to see our house. Give me one more kiss. Oh,
Charlotte!"

"Charlotte!" cried a deep voice, and the lovers started apart.

"I'm coming, father," Charlotte cried out. She opened the door and
went soberly into the kitchen, with Barnabas at her heels. Her
father, mother, and Aunt Sylvia Crane sat there in the red gleam of
the firelight and gathering twilight. Sylvia sat a little behind the
others, and her face in her white cap had the shadowy delicacy of one
of the flowering apple sprays outside.

"How d'ye do?" said Barnabas in a brave tone which was slightly
aggressive. Charlotte's mother and aunt responded rather nervously.

"How's your mother, Barnabas?" inquired 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 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.

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