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

Pembroke

Mary E. Wilkins

Harper & Brothers Publishers; New York:1900

Introductory Sketch

Pembroke was originally intended as a study of thehuman will in several New England characters, in different phasesof disease and abnormal development, and to prove, especially inthe most marked case, the truth of a theory that its cure dependedentirely upon the capacity of the individual for a love which couldrise above all considerations of self, as Barnabas Thayer's lovefor Charlotte Barnard finally did.

While Barnabas Thayer is the most pronounced exemplification ofthis theory, and while he, being drawn from life, originallysuggested the scheme of the study, a number of the othercharacters, notably Deborah Thayer, Richard Alger, and CephasBarnard, are instances of the same spiritual disease. Barnabas tome was as much the victim of disease as a man with curvature of thespine; he was incapable of straightening himself to his formerstature until he had laid hands upon a more purely unselfish lovethan he had ever known, through his anxiety for Charlotte, and soraised himself to his own level.

When I make use of the term abnormal, I do not mean unusual inany sense. I am far from any intention to speak disrespectfully ordisloyally of those stanch old soldiers of the faith who landedupon our inhospitable shores and laid the foundation, as on a veryrock 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 faceof obstacles, to the dictates of their consciences, that theirwills were not developed past the reasonable limit of nature. Whatwonder is it that their descendants inherit this peculiarity,though they may develop it for much less worthy and more trivialcauses than the exiling themselves for a question of faith, eventhe carrying-out of personal and petty aims and quarrels?

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

A character like this, holding to a veriest trifle with such adeathless cramp of the will, might naturally be regarded as anotable exception to a general rule; but his brethren who sit onchurch steps during services, who are dumb to those whom theyshould love, and will not enter familiar doors because of quarrelsover matters of apparently no moment, are legion.Pembroke is intended to portray a typical New Englandvillage of some sixty years ago, as many of the charactersflourished at that time, but villages of a similar description haveexisted in New England at a much later date, and they exist to-dayin a very considerable degree. There are at the present time manylittle towns in New England along whose pleasant elm or mapleshaded streets are scattered characters as pronounced as any inPembroke. A short time since a Boston woman recited in my hearing alist of seventy-five people in the very small Maine village inwhich she was born and brought up, and eve

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