Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - Jerome, A Poor Man

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Jerome, A Poor Man

A Novel

By
Mary E. Wilkins

Author of
"Prembroke" "Jane Field" "Madelon"
"A Humble Romance" etc.

Illustrated
by A. I. Keller

New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1897

To My Father

Chapter I

One morning in early May, when the wind was cold and the sun hot, and
Jerome about twelve years old, he was in a favorite lurking-place of
his, which nobody but himself knew.

Three fields' width to the northward from the Edwardses' house was a
great rock ledge; on the southern side of it was a famous warm
hiding-place for a boy on a windy spring day. There was a hollow in
the rock for a space as tall as Jerome, and the ledge extended itself
beyond it like a sheltering granite wing to the westward.

The cold northwester blowing from over the lingering Canadian
snow-banks could not touch him, and he had the full benefit of the
sun as it veered imperceptibly south from east. He lay there basking
in it like some little animal which had crawled out from its winter
nest. Before him stretched the fields, all flushed with young green.
On the side of a gentle hill at the left a file of blooming
peach-trees looked as if they were moving down the slope to some
imperious march music of the spring.

In the distance a man was at work with plough and horse. His shouts
came faintly across, like the ever-present notes of labor in all the
harmonies of life. The only habitation in sight was Squire Eben
Merritt's, and of that only the broad slants of shingled roof and
gray end wall of the barn, with a pink spray of peach-trees against
it.

Jerome stared out at it all, without a thought concerning it in his
brain. He was actively conscious only of his own existence, which had
just then a wondrously pleasant savor for him. A sweet exhilarating
fire seemed leaping through every vein in his little body. He was
drowsy, and yet more fully awake than he had been all winter. All his
pulses tingled, and his thoughts were overborne by the ecstasy in
them. Jerome had scarcely felt thoroughly warm before, since last
summer. That same little, tight, and threadbare jacket had been his
thickest garment all winter. The wood had been stinted on the hearth,
the coverings on his bed; but now the full privilege of the spring
sun was his, and the blood in this little meagre human plant, chilled
and torpid with the winter's frosts, stirred and flowed like that in
any other. Who could say that the bliss of renewed vitality which the
boy felt, as he rested there in his snug rock, was not identical with
that of the springing grass and the flowering peach-trees? Who could
say that he was more to all intents and purposes, for that minute,
than the rock-honeysuckle opening its red cups on the ledge over his
head? He was conscious of no more memory or forethought.

Presently he shut his eyes, and the sunlight came in a soft rosy glow
through his closed lids. Then it was that a little girl came across
the fields, clambering cautiously over the stone walls, lest she
should tear her gown, stepping softly over the green grass in her
little morocco shoes, and finally stood still in front of the boy
sitting with his eyes closed in the hollow of the rock. Twice she
opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again. At last she gained
courage.

"Be you sick, boy?" she inquired, in a sweet, timid voice.

Jerome opened his eyes with a start, and stared at the little quaint
figure standing before him. Lucina wore a short blue woollen gown;
below it her starched white pantalets hung to the tops of her morocco
shoes. She wore also a white tier, and over that a little coat, and
over that a little green cashmere shawl sprinkled with palm leaves,
which her mother had crossed over her bosom and tied at her back for
extra warmth. Lucina's hood was of quilted blue silk, and her smooth
yellow curls flowed from under it quite down to her waist. Moreover,
her mother had carefully arranged four, two on each side, to escape
from the frill of her hood in front and fall softly over her pink
cheeks. Lucina's face was very fair and sweet--the face of a good and
gentle little girl, who always minded her mother and did her daily
tasks.

Her dark blue eyes, set deeply under seriously frowning childish
brows, surveyed Jerome with innocent wonder; her pretty mouth drooped
anxiously at the corners. Jerome knew her well enough, although he
had never before exchanged a word with her. She was little Lucina
Merritt, whose father had money and bought her everything she wanted,
and whose mother rigged her up like a puppet, as he had heard his
mother say.

"No, ain't sick," he said, in a half-intelligible grunt. A cross
little animal poked into wakefulness in the midst of its nap in the
sun might have responded in much the same way. Gallantry had not yet
developed in Jerome. He saw in this pretty little girl only another
child, and, moreover, one finely shod and clothed, while he went
shoeless and threadbare. He looked sulkily at her blue silk hood,
pulled his old cap down with a twitch to his black brows, and
shrugged himself closer to the warm rock.

The little girl eyed his bare toes. "Be you cold?" she ventured.

"No, ain't cold," grunted Jerome. Then he caught sight of something
in her hand--a great square of sugar-gingerbread, out of which she
had taken only three dainty bites as she came along, and in spite of
himself there was a hungry flash of his black eyes.

Lucina held out the gingerbread. "I'd just as lives as not you had
it," said she, timidly. "It's most all there. I've just had three
teenty bites."

Jerome turned on her fiercely. "Don't want your old gingerbread," he
cried. "Ain't hungry--have all I want to home."

The little Lucina jumped, and her blue eyes filled with tears. She
turned away without a word, and ran falteringly, as if she could not
see for tears, across the field; and there was a white lamb trotting
after her. It had appeared from somewhere in the fields, and Jerome
had not noticed it. He remembered hearing that Lucina Merritt had a
cosset lamb that followed her everywhere. "Has everything," he
muttered--"lambs an' everything. Don't want your old gingerbread."

Suddenly he sprang up and began feeling in his pocket; then he ran
like a deer after the little girl. She rolled her frightened, tearful
blue eyes over her shoulder at him, and began to run too, and the
cosset lamb cantered faster at her heels; but Jerome soon gained on
them.

"Stop, can't ye?" he sang out. "Ain't goin' to hurt ye. What ye
'fraid of?" He laid his hand on her green-shawled shoulders, and she
stood panting, her little face looking up at him, half reassured,
half terrified, from her blue silk hood-frills and her curls.

"Like sas'fras?" inquired Jerome, with a lordly air. An emperor about
to bestow a largess upon a slave could have had no more of the very
grandeur of beneficence in his mien.

Lucina nodded meekly.

Jerome drew out a great handful of strange articles from his pocket,
and they might, from his manner of handling them, have been gold
pieces and jewels. There were old buttons, a bit of chalk, and a stub
of slate-pencil. There were a horse-chestnut and some grains of
parched sweet-corn and a dried apple-core. There were other things
which age and long bondage in the pocket had brought to such passes
that one could scarcely determine their identities. From all this
Jerome selected one undoubted treasure--a great jagged cut of
sassafras root. It had been nicely scraped, too, and looked white and
clean.

"Here," said Jerome.

"Don't you want it?" asked Lucina, shyly.

"No--had a great piece twice as big as that yesterday. Know where
there's lots more in the cedar swamp. Here, take it."

"Thank you," said Lucina, and took it, and fumbled nervously after
her little pocket.

"Why don't you eat it?" asked Jerome, and Lucina took an obedient
little nibble.

"Ain't that good and strong?"

"It's real good," replied Lucina, smiling gratefully.

"Mebbe I'll dig you some more some time," said Jerome, as if the
cedar swamp were a treasure-chest.

"Thank you," said the little girl. Then she timidly extended the
gingerbread again. "I only took three little bites, an' it's real
nice, honest," said she, appealingly.

But she jumped again at the flash in Jerome's black eyes.

"Don't want your old gingerbread!" he cried. "Ain't hungry; have
more'n I want to eat to home. Guess my folks have gingerbread. Like
to know what you're tryin' to give me victuals for! Don't want any of
your old gingerbread!"

"It ain't old, honest," pleaded Lucina, tearfully. "It ain't
old--Hannah, she just baked it this morning." But the boy was gone,
pelting hard across the field, and all there was for the little girl
to do was to go home, with her sassafras in her pocket and her
gingerbread in her hand, with an aromatic savor on her tongue and the
sting of slighted kindness in her heart, with her cosset lamb
trotting at heel, and tell her mother.

Jerome did not return to his nook in the rock. As he neared it he
heard the hollow note of a horn from the northwest.

"S'pose mother wants me," he muttered, and went on past the rock
ledge to the west, and climbed the stone wall into the first of the
three fields which separated him from his home. Across the young
springing grass went Jerome--a slender little lad moving with an
awkward rustic lope. It was the gait of the homely toiling men of the
village which his young muscles had caught, as if they had in
themselves powers of observation and assimilation. Jerome at twelve
walked as if he had held plough-shares, bent over potato hills, and
hewn wood in cedar swamps for half a century. Jerome's feet were
bare, and his red rasped ankles showed below his hitching trousers.
His poor winter shoes had quite failed him for many weeks, his blue
stockings had shown at the gaps in their sides which had torn away
from his mother's strong mending. Now the soles had gone, and his
uncle Ozias Lamb, who was a cobbler, could not put in new ones
because there was not strength enough in the uppers to hold them.
"You can't have soles in shoes any more than you can in folks,
without some body," said Ozias Lamb. It seemed as if Ozias might have
made and presented some new shoes, soles and all, to his needy
nephew, but he was very poor, and not young, and worked painfully to
make every cent count. So Jerome went barefoot after the soles parted
from his shoes; but he did not care, because it was spring and the
snow was gone. Jerome had, moreover, a curious disregard of physical
discomfort for a boy who could take such delight in sheer existence
in a sunny hollow of a rock. He had had chilblains all winter from
the snow-water which had soaked in through his broken shoes; his
heels were still red with them, but not a whimper had he made. He had
treated them doggedly himself with wood-ashes, after an old country
prescription, and said nothing, except to reply, "Doctorin'
chilblains," when his mother asked him what he was doing.

Jerome also often went hungry. He was hungry now as he loped across
the field. A young wolf that had roamed barren snow-fields all winter
might not have felt more eager for a good meal than Jerome, and he
was worse off, because he had no natural prey. But he never made a
complaint.

Had any one inquired if he were hungry, he would have flown at him as
he had done at little Lucina Merritt when she offered him her
gingerbread. He knew, and all his family knew, that the neighbors
thought they had not enough to eat, and the knowledge so stung their
pride that it made them defy the fact itself. They would not own to
each other that they were hungry; they denied it fiercely to their
own craving stomachs.

Jerome had had nothing that morning but a scanty spoonful of
corn-meal porridge, but he would have maintained stoutly that he had
eaten a good breakfast. He took another piece of sassafras from his
pocket and chewed it as he went along. After all, now the larder of
Nature was open and the lock of the frost on her cupboards was
broken, a boy would not fare so badly; he could not starve. There was
sassafras root in the swamps--plenty of it for the digging; there
were young winter-green leaves, stinging pleasantly his palate with
green aromatic juice; later there would be raspberries and
blackberries and huckleberries. There were also the mysterious cedar
apples, and the sour-sweet excrescences sometimes found on swamp
bushes. These last were the little rarities of Nature's table which a
boy would come upon by chance when berrying and snatch with delighted
surprise. They appealed to his imagination as well as to his tongue,
since they belonged not to the known fruits in his spelling-book and
dictionary, and possessed a strange sweetness of fancy and mystery
beyond their woodland savor. In a few months, too, the garden would
be grown and there would be corn and beans and potatoes. Then
Jerome's lank outlines would begin to take on curves and the hungry
look would disappear from his face. He was a handsome boy, with a
fearless outlook of black eyes from his lean, delicate face, and a
thick curling crop of fair hair which the sun had bleached like
straw. Always protected from the weather, Jerome's hair would have
been brown; but his hats failed him like his shoes, and often in the
summer season were crownless. However, his mother mended them as long
as she was able. She was a thrifty woman, although she was a
semi-invalid, and sat all day long in a high-backed rocking-chair.
She was not young either; she had been old when she married and her
children were born, but there was a strange element of toughness in
her--a fibre either of body or spirit that kept her in being, like
the fibre of an old tree.

Before Jerome entered the house his mother's voice saluted him.
"Where have you been, Jerome Edwards?" she demanded. Her voice was
querulous, but strongly shrill. It could penetrate every wall and
door. Ann Edwards, as she sat in her rocking-chair, lifted up her
voice, and it sounded all over her house like a trumpet, and all her
household marched to it.

"Been over in the pasture," answered Jerome, with quick and yet
rather defiant obedience, as he opened the door.

His mother's face, curiously triangular in outline, like a cat's,
with great hollow black eyes between thin parted curtains of black
false hair, confronted him when he entered the room. She always sat
face to the door and window, and not a soul who passed or entered
escaped her for a minute. "What have you been doing in the pasture?"
said she.

"Sittin'."

"Sittin'?"

"I've been sitting on the warm side of the big rock a little while,"
said Jerome. He looked subdued before his mother's gaze, and yet not
abashed. She always felt sure that there was some hidden reserve of
rebellion in Jerome, coerce him into obedience as she might. She
never really governed him, as she did her daughter Elmira, who stood
washing dishes at the sink. But she loved Jerome better, although she
tried not to, and would not own it to herself.

"Do you know what time it is?" said she, severely.

Jerome glanced at the tall clock in the corner. It was nearly ten. He
glanced and made no reply. He sometimes had a dignified masculine
way, beyond his years, of eschewing all unnecessary words. His mother
saw him look at the time; why should he speak? She did not wait for
him. "'Most ten o'clock," said she, "and a great boy twelve years old
lazing round on a rock in a pasture when all his folks are working.
Here's your mother, feeble as she is, workin' her fingers to the
bone, while you're doing nothing a whole forenoon. I should think
you'd be ashamed of yourself. Now you take the spade and go right out
and go to work in the garden. It's time them beans are in, if they're
going to be. Your father has had to go down to the wood-lot and get a
load of wood for Doctor Prescott, and here 'tis May and the garden
not planted. Go right along." All the time Jerome's mother talked,
her little lean strong fingers flew, twirling bright colored rags in
and out. She was braiding a rug for this same Doctor Prescott's wife.
The bright strips spread and twirled over her like snakes, and the
balls wherein the rags were wound rolled about the floor. Most women
kept their rag balls in a basket when they braided, but Ann Edwards
worked always in a sort of untidy fury.

Jerome went out, little hungry boy with the winter chill again
creeping through his veins, got the spade out of the barn, and set to
work in the garden. The garden lay on the sunny slope of a hill which
rose directly behind the house; when his spade struck a stone Jerome
would send it rolling out of his way to the foot of the hill. He got
considerable amusement from that, and presently the work warmed him.

The robins were singing all about. Every now and then one flew out of
the sweet spring distance, lit, and silently erected his red breast
among some plough ridges lower down. It was like a veritable
transition from sound to sight.

Below where Jerome spaded, and upon the left, stretched long waving
plough ridges where the corn was planted. Jerome's father had been at
work there with the old white horse that was drawing wood for him
to-day. Much of the garden had to be spaded instead of ploughed,
because this same old white horse was needed for other work.

As Jerome spaded, the smell of the fresh earth came up in his face.
Now and then a gust of cold wind, sweet with unseen blossoms, smote
him powerfully, bending his slender body before it like a sapling. A
bird flashed past him with a blue dazzle of wings, and Jerome stopped
and looked after it. It lit on the fence in front of the house, and
shone there in the sunlight like a blue precious stone. The boy gazed
at it, leaning on his spade. Jerome always looked hard out of all his
little open windows of life, and saw every precious thing outside his
daily grind of hard, toilsome childhood which came within his sight.

The bird flew away, and Jerome spaded again. He knew that he must
finish so much before dinner or his mother would scold. He was not
afraid of his mother's sharp tongue, but he avoided provoking it with
a curious politic and tolerant submission which he had learned from
his father. "Mother ain't well, you know, an' she's high-sperited,
and we've got to humor her all we can," Abel Edwards had said,
confidentially, many a time to his boy, who had listened sagely and
nodded.

Jerome obeyed his mother with the patient obedience of a superior who
yields because his opponent is weaker than he, and a struggle beneath
his dignity, not because he is actually coerced. Neither he nor his
father ever answered back or contradicted; when her shrill voice
waxed loudest and her vituperation seemed to fairly hiss in their
ears, they sometimes looked at each other and exchanged a solemn wink
of understanding and patience. Neither ever opened mouth in reply.

Jerome worked fast in his magnanimous concession to his mother's
will, and had accomplished considerable when his sister opened the
kitchen window, thrust out her dark head, and called in a voice
shrill as her mother's, but as yet wholly sweet, with no harsh notes
in it: "Jerome! Jerome! Dinner is ready."

Jerome whooped in reply, dropped his spade, and went leaping down the
hill. When he entered the kitchen his mother was sitting at the table
and Elmira was taking up the dinner. Elmira was a small, pretty girl,
with little, nervous hands and feet, and eager black eyes, like her
mother's. She stretched on tiptoe over the fire, and ladled out a
steaming mixture from the kettle with an arduous swing of her sharp
elbow. Elmira's sleeves were rolled up and her thin, sharply-jointed,
girlish arms showed.

"Don't you know enough, without being told, to lift that kettle off
the fire for Elmira?" demanded Mrs. Edwards of Jerome.

Jerome lifted the kettle off the fire without a word.

"It seems sometimes as if you might do something without being told,"
said his mother. "You could see, if you had eyes to your head, that
your sister wa'n't strong enough to lift that kettle off, and was
dippin' it up so's to make it lighter, an' the stew 'most burnin'
on."

Jerome made no response. He sniffed hungrily at the savory steam
arising from the kettle. "What is it?" he asked his sister, who
stooped over the kettle sitting on the hearth, and plunged in again
the long-handled tin dipper.

Mrs. Edwards never allowed any one to answer a question when she
could do it herself. "It's a parsnip stew," said she, sharply.
"Elmira dug some up in the old garden-patch, where we thought they
were dead. I put in a piece of pork, when I'd ought to have saved it.
It's good 'nough for anybody, I don't care who 'tis, if it's Doctor
Prescott, or Squire Merritt, or the minister. You'd better be
thankful for it, both of you."

"Where's father?" said Jerome.

"He 'ain't come home yet. I dun'no' where he is. He's been gone long
enough to draw ten cords of wood. I s'pose he's potterin' round
somewheres--stopped to talk to somebody, or something. I ain't going
to wait any longer. He'll have to eat his dinner cold if he can't get
home."

Elmira put the dish of stew on the table. Jerome drew his chair up.
Mrs. Edwards grasped the long-handled dipper preparatory to
distributing the savory mess, then suddenly stopped and turned to
Elmira.

"Elmira," said she, "you go into the parlor an' git the china bowl
with pink flowers on it, an' then you go to the chest in the spare
bedroom an' get out one of them fine linen towels."

"What for?" said Elmira, wonderingly.

"No matter what for. You do what I tell you to."

Elmira went out, and after a little reappeared with the china bowl
and the linen towel. Jerome sat waiting, with a kind of fierce
resignation. He was almost starved, and the smell of the stew in his
nostrils made him fairly ravenous.

"Give it here," said Mrs. Edwards, and Elmira set the bowl before her
mother. It was large, almost large enough for a punch-bowl, and had
probably been used for one. It was a stately old dish from overseas,
a relic from Mrs. Edwards's mother, who had seen her palmy days
before her marriage. Mrs. Edwards had also in her parlor cupboard a
part of a set of blue Indian china which had belonged to her mother.
The children watched while their mother dipped the parsnip stew into
the china bowl. Elmira, while constantly more amenable to her mother,
was at the moment more outspoken against her.

"There won't be enough left for us," she burst forth, excitedly.

"I guess you'll get all you need; you needn't worry."

"There won't be enough for father when he comes home, anyhow."

"I ain't a mite worried about your father; I guess he won't starve."

Mrs. Edwards went on dipping the stew into the bowl while the
children watched. She filled it nearly two-thirds full, then stopped,
and eyed the girl and boy critically. "I guess you'd better go,
Elmira," said she. "Jerome can't unless he's all cleaned up. Get my
little red cashmere shawl, and you can wear my green silk pumpkin
hood. Yours don't look nice enough to go there with."

"Can't I eat dinner first, mother?" pleaded Elmira, pitifully.

"No, you can't. I guess you won't starve if you wait a little while.
I ain't 'goin' to send stew to folks stone-cold. Hurry right along
and get the shawl and hood. Don't stand there lookin' at me."

Elmira went out forlornly.

Mrs. Edwards began pinning the linen towel carefully over the bowl.

"Let Elmira stay an' eat her dinner. I'd just as lives go. Don't care
if I don't ever have anythin' to eat," spoke up Jerome.

His mother flashed her black eyes round at him. "Don't you be saucy,
Jerome Edwards," said she, "or you'll go back to your spadin' without
a mouthful! I told your sister she was goin', an' I don't want any
words about it from either of you."

When Elmira returned with her mother's red cashmere shawl pinned
carefully over her childish shoulders, with her sharply pretty,
hungry-eyed little face peering meekly out of the green gloom of the
great pumpkin hood, Mrs. Edwards gave her orders. "There," said she,
"you take this bowl, an' you be real careful and don't let it fall
and break it, nor slop the stew over my best shawl, an' you carry it
down the road to Doctor Prescott's; an' whoever comes to the door,
whether it's the hired girl, or Lawrence, or the hired man, you ask
to see Mis' Doctor Prescott. Don't you give this bowl to none of the
others, you mind. An' when Mis' Doctor Prescott comes, you courtesy
an' say, 'Good-mornin', Mis' Prescott. Mis' Abel Edwards sends you
her compliments, and hopes you're enjoyin' good health, an' begs
you'll accept this bowl of parsnip stew. She thought perhaps you
hadn't had any this season.'"

Mrs. Edwards repeated the speech in a little, fine, mincing voice,
presumably the one which Elmira was to use. "Can you remember that?"
she asked, sharply, in her natural tone.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Say it over."

Poor little Elmira Edwards said it over like a parrot, imitating her
mother's fine, stilted tone perfectly. In truth, it was a formula of
presentation which she had often used.

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