Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - Pembroke

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Once or twice Mrs. Sloane volunteered a remark, but he scarcely
responded, and once he heard absently her voice and Rebecca's in the
other room. Otherwise he sat in utter silence, except for the low
chuckle of the hens and the taps of their beaks against the iron
pots, until Barney came with the minister and the minister's wife.

Barney had taken the minister aside, and asked him, stammeringly, if
he thought his wife would come. He could not bear the thought of the
Sloane woman's being a witness at his sister's wedding. The minister
and his wife were both very young, and had not lived long in
Pembroke. They looked much alike: the minister's small, pale, peaked
face peered with anxious solicitude between the folds of the great
green scarf which he tied over his cap, and his wife looked like him
out of her great wadded green silk hood, when they got into the
sleigh with Barney.

The minister had had a whispered conference with his wife, and now
she never once let her eyes rest on either of the two men as they
slid swiftly along over the new snow. Her heart beat loudly in her
ears, her little thin hands were cold in her great muff. She had
married very young, out of a godly New England minister's home. She
had never known anything like this before, and a sort of general
shame of femininity seemed to be upon her.

When she followed her husband into Mrs. Sloane's house she felt
herself as burdened with shame--as if she stood in Rebecca's place.
Her little face, all blue with the sharp cold, shrank, shocked and
sober, into the depths of her great hood. She stood behind her
husband, her narrow girlish shoulders bending under her thick
mantilla, and never looked at the face of anybody in the room.

She did not see William at all. He stood up before them as they
entered; they all nodded gravely. Nobody spoke but Mrs. Sloane,
vibrating nervously in the midst of her clamorous hens, and Barney
silenced her.

"We'll go right in," he said, in a stern, peremptory tone; then he
turned to William. "Are you ready?" he asked.

William nodded, with his eyes cast down. The party made a motion
towards the other room, but Mrs. Sloane unexpectedly stood before the
door.

"I told her there shouldn't nobody come in," said she, "an' I ain't
goin' to have you all bustin' in on her without she knows it. She's
terrible upset. You wait a minute."

Mrs. Sloane's blue eyes glared defiantly at the company. The
minister's wife bent her hooded head lower. She had heard about Mrs.
Sloane, and felt as if she were confronted by a woman from Revelation
and there was a flash of scarlet in the room.

"Go in and tell her we are coming," said Barney. And Mrs. Sloane
slipped out of the room cautiously, opening the door only a little
way. Her voice was heard, and suddenly Rebecca's rang out shrill in
response, although they could not distinguish the words. Mrs. Sloane
looked out. "She says she won't be married," she whispered.

"You let me see her," said Barney, and he took a stride forward, but
Mrs. Sloane held the door against him.

"You can't," she whispered again. "I'll talk to her some more. I can
talk her over, if anybody can."

Barney fell back, and again the door was shut and the voices were
heard. This time Rebecca's arose into a wail, and they heard her cry
out, "I won't, I won't! Go away, and stop talking to me! I won't! Go
away!"

William turned around, and hid his face against the corner of the
mantel-shelf. Barney went up and clapped him roughly on the shoulder.
"Can't you go in there and make her listen to reason?" he said.

But just then Mrs. Sloane opened the door again. "You can walk right
in now," she announced, smiling, her thin mouth sending the lines of
her whole face into smirking upward curves.

The whole company edged forward solemnly. Mrs. Sloane was following,
but Barney stood in her way. "I guess you'd better not come in," he
said, abruptly.

Mrs. Sloane's face flushed a burning red. "I guess," she began, in a
loud voice, but Barney shut the door in her face. She ran noisily,
stamping her feet like an angry child, to the fireplace, caught up a
heavy kettle, and threw it down on the hearth. The hens flew up with
a great clamor and whir of wings; Mrs. Sloane's shrill, mocking laugh
arose above it. She began talking in a high-pitched voice, flinging
out vituperations which would seem to patter against the closed door
like bullets. Suddenly she stopped, as if her ire had failed her, and
listened intently to a low murmur from the other room. She nodded her
head when it ceased.

The door opened soon, and all except Rebecca came out. They stood
consulting together in low voices, and Mrs. Sloane listened. They
were deciding where to take Rebecca.

All at once Mrs. Sloane spoke. Her voice was still high-pitched with
anger.

"If you want to know where to take her to, I can tell you," said she.
"I'd keep her here an' welcome, but I s'pose you think I ain't good
enough, you're all such mighty particular folks, an' ain't never had
no disgrace in your own families. William Berry can't take her to his
home to-night, for his mother wouldn't leave a whole skin on either
of 'em. Her own mother has turned her out, an' Barney can't take her
in. She's got to go somewhere where there's a woman; she's terrible
upset. There ain't no other way but for you an' Mis' Barnes to take
her home to-night, an' keep her till William gets a place fixed to
put her in." Mrs. Sloane turned to the minister and his wife,
regarding them with a mixture of defiance, sarcasm, and appeal.

They looked at each other hesitatingly. The minister's wife paled
within her hood, and her eyes reddened with tears.

"I shouldn't s'pose you'd need any time to think on it, such good
folks as you be," said Mrs. Sloane. "There ain't no other way. She's
got to be where there's a woman."

Mrs. Barnes turned her head towards her husband. "She can come, if
you think she ought to," she said, in a trembling voice.

The sun was setting when the party started. William led Rebecca out
through the kitchen--a muffled, hesitating figure, whose very
identity seemed to be lost, for she wore Mrs. Sloane's blue plaid
shawl pinned closely over her head and face--and lifted her into his
cutter with the minister and his wife. Then he and Barney walked
along, plodding through the deep snow behind the cutter. The sun was
setting, and it was bitterly cold; the snow creaked and the trees
swung with a stiff rattle of bare limbs in the wind.

The two men never spoke to each other. The minister drove slowly, and
they could always see Mrs. Jim Sloane's blue plaid shawl ahead.

When they reached the Caleb Thayer house, Barney stopped and William
followed on alone after the sleigh.

Barney turned into the yard, and his father was standing in the barn
door, looking out.

"Tell mother she's married," Barney sang out, hoarsely. Then he went
back to the road, and home to his own house.

Chapter XI

Barney went to see Rebecca the next day, but the minister's wife came
to the door and would not admit him. She puckered her lips painfully,
and a blush shot over her face and little thin throat as she stood
there before him. "I guess you had better not come in," said she,
nervously. "I guess you had better wait until Mrs. Berry gets settled
in her house. Mr. Berry is going to hire the old Bennett place. I
guess it would be pleasanter."

Barney turned away, blushing also as he stammered an assent. Always
keenly alive to the shame of the matter, it seemed as if his sense of
it were for the moment intensified. The minister's wife's whole
nature seemed turned into a broadside of mirrors towards Rebecca's
shame and misery, and it was as if the reflection was multiplied in
Barney as he looked at her.

Still, he could not take the shame to his own nature as she could,
being a woman. He looked back furtively at the house as he went down
the road, thinking he might catch a glimpse of poor Rebecca at the
window.

But Rebecca kept herself well hid. After William had hired the old
Bennet house and established her there, she lived with curtains down
and doors bolted. Never a neighbor saw her face at door or window,
although all the women who lived near did their housework with eyes
that way. She would not go to the door if anybody knocked. The caller
would hear her scurrying away. Nobody could gain admittance if
William were not at home.

Barney went to the door once, and her voice sounded unexpectedly loud
and piteously shrill in response to his knock.

"You can't come in! go away!" cried Rebecca.

"I don't want to say anything hard to you," said Barney.

"Go away, go away!" repeated Rebecca, and then he heard her sob.

"Don't cry," pleaded Barney, futilely, through the door. But he heard
his sister's retreating steps and her sobs dying away in the
distance.

He went away, and did not try to see her again.

Rose went to see Rebecca, stealing out of a back door and scudding
across snowy fields lest her mother should espy her and stop her. But
Rebecca had not come to the door, although Rose had stood there a
long time in a bitter wind.

"She wouldn't let me in," she whispered to her brother in the store,
when she returned. She was friendly to him in a shamefaced, evasive
sort of way, and she alone of his family. His father and mother
scarcely noticed him.

"Much as ever as she'll let me in, poor girl," responded William,
looking miserably aside from his sister's eyes and weighing out some
meal.

"She wouldn't let mother in if she went there," said Rose. She felt a
little piqued at Rebecca's refusing her admittance. It was as if all
her pity and generous sympathy had been thrust back upon her, and her
pride in it swamped.

"There's no danger of her going there," William returned, bitterly.

And there was not. Hannah Berry would have set herself up in a
pillory as soon as she would have visited her son's wife. She
scarcely went into a neighbor's lest she should hear some allusion to
it.

Rebecca's father often walked past her house with furtive, wistful
eyes towards the windows. Once or twice when nobody was looking he
knocked timidly, but he never got any response. He always took a
circuitous route home, that his wife might not know where he had
been. Deborah never spoke of Rebecca; neither Caleb nor Ephraim dared
mention her name in her hearing.

Although Deborah never asked a question, and although people were shy
of alluding to Rebecca, she yet seemed to know, in some occult and
instinctive fashion, all about her.

When a funeral procession passed the Thayer house one afternoon
Deborah knew quite well whose little coffin was in the hearse,
although she could scarcely have said that anybody had told her.

Caleb came to her after dinner, with a strange, defiant air. "I want
a clean dicky, mother; I'm agoin'," said he. And Deborah got out the
old man's Sunday clothes for him without a word. She even brushed his
hair with hard, careful strokes, and helped him on with his
great-coat; but she never said a word about Rebecca and her baby's
funeral.

"They had some white posies on it," Caleb volunteered, tremblingly,
when he got home.

Deborah made no reply.

"There was quite a lot there," added Caleb.

"Go an' bring me in some kindlin' wood," said Deborah.

Ephraim stood by, staring alternately at his father and mother. He
had watched the funeral procession pass with furtive interest.

"It won't hurt you none to make a few lamp-lighters," said his
mother. "You set right down here, an' I'll get you some paper."

Ephraim clapped his hand to his side, and rolled his eyes agonizingly
towards his mother, but she took no notice. She got some paper out of
the cupboard, and Ephraim sat down and began quirling it into long
spirals with a wretched sulky air.

Since his sister's marriage Ephraim had had a sterner experience than
had ever fallen to his lot before. His mother redoubled her
discipline over him. It was as if she had resolved, since all her
vigorous training had failed in the case of his sister, that she
would intensify it to such purpose that it should not fail with him.

So strait and narrow was the path in which Ephraim was forced to
tread those wintry days, so bound and fettered was he by precept and
admonition, that it seemed as if his very soul could do no more than
shuffle along where his mother pointed.

A scanty and simple diet had Ephraim, and it seemed to him not so
much from a solicitude for his health as from a desire to mortify his
flesh for the good of his spirit. Ephraim obeyed perforce; he was
sincerely afraid of his mother, but he had within him a dogged and
growing resentment against those attempts to improve his spirit.

Not a bit of cake was he allowed to taste. When the door of a certain
closet in which pound-cake for possible guests was always kept in a
jar, and had been ever since Ephraim could remember, was opened, the
boy's eyes would fairly glare with desire. "Jest gimme a little
scrap, mother," he would whine. He had formerly, on rare occasions,
been allowed a small modicum of cake, but now his mother was
unyielding. He got not a crumb; he could only sniff hungrily at the
rich, spicy, and fruity aroma which came forth from the closet, and
swallow at it vainly and unsatisfactorily with straining palate.

Ephraim was not allowed a soft-stoned plum from a piece of mince-pie;
the pie had always been tabooed. He was not even allowed to pick over
the plums for the pies, unless under the steady watch of his mother's
eyes. Once she seemed to see him approach a plum to his mouth when
her back was towards him.

"What are you doing, Ephraim?" she said, and her voice sounded to the
boy like one from the Old Testament. He put the plum promptly into
the bowl instead of his mouth.

"I ain't doin' nothin', mother," said he; but his eyes rolled
alarmedly after his mother as she went across the kitchen. That
frightened Ephraim. He was a practical boy and not easily imposed
upon, but it really seemed to him that his mother had seen him, after
some occult and uncanny fashion, from the back of her head. A vague
and preposterous fancy actually passed through his bewildered boyish
brain that the little, tightly twisted knob of hair on the back of a
feminine head might have some strange visual power of its own.

He never dared taste another plum, even if the knob of hair directly
faced him.

Every day Ephraim had a double task to learn in his catechism, for
Deborah held that no labor, however arduous, which savored of the
Word and the Spirit could work him bodily ill. If Ephraim had been
enterprising and daring enough, he would have fairly cursed the
Westminster divines, as he sat hour after hour, crooking his boyish
back painfully over their consolidated wisdom, driving the letter of
their dogmas into his boyish brain, while the sense of them utterly
escaped him.

There was one whole day during which Ephraim toiled, laboriously
conning over the majestic sentences in loud whispers, and received
thereby only a vague impression and maudlin hope that he himself
might be one of the elect of which they treated, because he was so
strenuously deprived of plums in this life, and might therefore
reasonably expect his share of them in the life to come.

That day poor Ephraim--glancing between whiles at some boys out
coasting over in a field, down a fine icy slope, hearing now and then
their shouts of glee--had a certain sense of superiority and
complacency along with the piteous and wistful longing which always
abode in his heart.

"Maybe," thought Ephraim, half unconsciously, not framing the thought
in words to his mind--"maybe if I am a good boy, and don't have any
plums, nor go out coasting like them, I shall go to heaven, and maybe
they won't." Ephraim's poor purple face at the window-pane took on a
strange, serious expression as he evolved his childish tenet of
theology. His mother came in from another room. "Have you got that
learned?" said she, and Ephraim bent over his task again.

Ephraim had not been quite as well as usual this winter, and his
mother had been more than usually anxious about him. She called the
doctor in finally, and followed him out into the cold entry when he
left. "He's worse than he has been, ain't he?" she said, abruptly.

The doctor hesitated. He was an old man with a moderate manner. He
buttoned his old great-coat, redolent of drugs, closer, his breath
steamed out in the frosty entry. "I guess you had better be a little
careful about getting him excited," he said at last, evasively. "You
had better get along as easy as you can with him." The doctor's
manner implied more than his words; he had his own opinion of Deborah
Thayer's sternness of rule, and he had sympathy with Rebecca.

Deborah seemed to have an intuition of it, for she looked at him, and
raised her voice after a manner which would have become the Deborah
of the scriptures.

"What would you have me do?" she demanded. "Would you have me let him
have his own way if it were for the injury of his soul?" It was
curious that Deborah, as she spoke, seemed to look only at the
spiritual side of the matter. The idea that her discipline was
actually necessary for her son's bodily weal did not occur to her,
and she did not urge it as an argument.

"I guess you had better be a little careful and get along as easy as
you can," repeated the doctor, opening the door.

"That ain't all that's to be thought of," said Deborah, with stern
and tragic emphasis, as the doctor went out.

"What did the doctor say, mother?" Ephraim inquired, when she went
into the room again. He looked half scared, half important, as he sat
in the great rocking-chair by the fire. He breathed short, and his
words were disconnected as he spoke.

His mother, for answer, took the catechism from the shelf, and
extended it towards him with a decisive thrust of her arm.

"It is time you studied some more," said she.

Ephraim jerked himself away from the proffered book. "I don't want to
study any more now, mother," he whined.

"Take it," said Deborah.

Caleb was paring apples for pies on the other side of the hearth.
Ephraim looked across at him desperately. "I want to play holly-gull
with father," he said.

"Ephraim!"

"Can't I play holly-gull with father jest a little while?"

"You take this book and study your lesson," said Deborah, between
nearly closed lips.

Ephraim began to weep; he took the book with a vicious snatch and an
angry sob. "Won't never let me do anythin' I want to," he cried,
convulsively.

"Not another word," said Deborah. Ephraim bent over his catechism
with half-suppressed sobs. He dared not weep aloud. Deborah went into
the pantry with the medicine-bottle which the doctor had left; she
wanted a spoon. Caleb caught hold of her dress as she was passing
him.

"What is it?" said she.

"Look here, jest a minute, mother."

"I can't stop, father; Ephraim has got to have his medicine."

"Jest look here a minute, mother."

Deborah bent her head impatiently, and Caleb whispered. "No, he
can't; I told him he couldn't," she said aloud, and passed on into
the pantry.

Caleb looked over at Ephraim with piteous and helpless sympathy.
"Never you mind, sonny," he said, cautiously.

"She--makes--" began Ephraim with a responsive plaint; but his mother
came out of the pantry, and he stopped short. Caleb dropped a pared
apple noisily into the pan.

"You'll dent that pan, father, if you fling the apples in that way,"
said Deborah. She had a thick silver spoon, and she measured out a
dose of the medicine for Ephraim. She approached him, extending the
spoon carefully. "Open your mouth," commanded she.

"Oh, mother, I don't want to take it!"

"Open your mouth!"

"Oh, mother--I don't--want to--ta-ke it!"

"Now, sonny, I wouldn't mind takin' of it. It's real good medicine
that the doctor left you, an' father's payin' consid'able for it. The
doctor thinks it's goin' to make you well," said Caleb, who was
looking on anxiously.

"Open your mouth and _take_ it!" said Deborah, sternly. She presented
the spoon at Ephraim as if it were a bayonet and there were death at
the point.

"Oh, mother," whimpered Ephraim.

"Mebbe mother will let you have a little taste of lasses arter it, if
you take it real good," ventured Caleb.

"No, he won't have any lasses after it," said Deborah. "I'm a-tendin'
to him, father. Now, Ephraim, you take this medicine this minute, or
I shall give you somethin' worse than medicine. Open your mouth!" And
Ephraim opened his mouth as if his mother's will were a veritable
wedge between his teeth, swallowed the medicine with a miserable
gulp, and made a grotesque face of wrath and disgust. Caleb,
watching, swallowed and grimaced at the same instant that his son
did. There were tears in his old eyes as he took up another apple to
pare.

Deborah set the bottle on the shelf and laid the spoon beside it.
"You've got to take this every hour for a spell," said she, "an' I
ain't goin' to have any such work, if you be sick; you can make up
your mind to it."

And make up his mind to this unwelcome dose Ephraim did. Once an hour
his mother stood over him with the spoon, and the fierce odor of the
medicine came to his nostrils; he screwed his eyes tight, opened his
mouth, and swallowed without a word. There were limits to his
mother's patience which Ephraim dared not pass. He had only vague
ideas of what might happen if he did, but he preferred to be on the
safe side. So he took the medicine, and did not lift his voice
against it, although he had his thoughts.

It did seem as if the medicine benefited him. He breathed more easily
after a while, and his color was more natural. Deborah felt
encouraged; she even went down upon her stiff knees after her family
were in bed, and thanked the Lord from the depths of her sorely
chastened but proud heart. She did not foresee what was to come of
it; for that very night Ephraim, induced thereto by the salutary
effect of the medicine, which removed somewhat the restriction of his
laboring heart upon his boyish spirits, perpetrated the crowning act
of revolt and rebellion of his short life.

The moon was bright that night. The snow was frozen hard. The long
hills where the boys coasted looked like slopes of silver. Ephraim
had to go to bed at eight. He lay, well propped up on pillows, in his
little bedroom, and he could hear the shouts of the coasting boys.
Now that he could breathe more easily the superiority of his enforced
deprivation of such joys no longer comforted him as much as it had
done. His curtain was up, and the moonlight lay on his bed. The
mystic influence of that strange white orb which moves the soul of
the lover to dream of love and yearnings after it, which saddens with
sweet wounds the soul who has lost it forever, which increases the
terrible freedom of the maniac, and perhaps moves the tides,
apparently increased the longing in the heart of one poor boy for all
the innocent hilarity of his youth which he had missed.

Ephraim lay there in the moonlight, and longed as he had never longed
before to go forth and run and play and halloo, to career down those
wonderful shining slants of snow, to be free and equal with those
other boys, whose hearts told off their healthy lives after the
Creator's plan.

The clock in the kitchen struck nine, then ten. Caleb and Deborah
went to bed, and Ephraim could hear his father's snores and his
mother's heavy breathing from a distant room. Ephraim could not go to
sleep. He lay there and longed for the frosty night air, the sled,
and the swift flight down the white hill as never lover longed for
his mistress.

At half-past ten o'clock Ephraim rose up. He dressed himself in the
moonlight--all except his shoes; those he carried in his hand--and
stole out in his stocking-feet to the entryway, where his warm coat
and cap, which he so seldom wore, hung. Ephraim pulled the cap over
his ears, put on the coat, cautiously unbolted the door, and stepped
forth like a captive from prison.

He sat down on the doorstep and put on his shoes, tying them with
trembling, fumbling fingers. He expected every minute to hear his
mother's voice.

Then he ran down the yard to the wood shed. It was so intensely cold
that the snow did not yield to his tread, but gave out quick sibilant
sounds. It seemed to him like a whispering multitude called up by his
footsteps, and as if his mother must hear.

He knew where Barney's old sled hung in the woodshed, and the
woodshed door was unlocked.

Presently a boyish figure fled swiftly out of the Thayer yard with a
bobbing sled in his wake. He expected every minute to hear the door
or window open; but he cleared the yard and dashed up the road, and
nobody arrested him.

[Illustration: "A boyish figure fled swiftly out of the Thayer yard"]

Ephraim knew well the way to the coasting-hill, which was considered
the best in the village, although he had never coasted there himself,
except twice or thrice, surreptitiously, on another boy's sled, and
not once this winter. He heard no more shouts; the frosty air was
very still. He thought to himself that the other boys had gone home,
but he did not care.

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