Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - Jerome, A Poor Man

M >> Mary E. Wilkins Freeman >> Jerome, A Poor Man

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31

All poor Lucina's ebullition of spirits from her pleasant visit, her
pretty gowns, and her fond belief that Jerome could not have meant
what he said, and would come to see her after her return, was fast
settling into the dregs of disappointment.

Night after night she put on one of her prettiest gowns, and waited
with that wild torture of waiting which involves uncertainty and
concealment, and Jerome did not come. Lucina began to believe that
Jerome did not love her; she tried to call her maidenly pride to her
aid, and succeeded in a measure. She stopped putting on a special
gown to please Jerome should he come; she stopped watching out for
him; she stopped healing her mind with hope in order that it might be
torn open afresh with disappointment, but the wound remained and
gaped to her consciousness, and Lucina was a tender thing. She held
her beautiful head high and forced her face to gentle smiles, but she
went thin and pale, and could not sleep of a night, and her mother
began to fret about her, and her father to lay down his knife and
fork and stare at her across the table when she could not eat.

Squire Eben at that time ransacked the woods for choice game, and
himself stood over old Hannah or his wife, broiling the delicate
birds that they be done to a turn, and was fit to weep when his
pretty Lucina could scarcely taste them. Often, too, he sent
surreptitously to Boston for dainties not obtainable at home--East
India fruits and jellies and such--to tempt his daughter's appetite,
and watched her with great frowns of anxious love when they were set
before her.

One afternoon, when Lucina had gone up to her chamber to lie down,
having left her dinner almost untasted, though there was a little fat
wild bird and guava jelly served on a china plate, and an orange and
figs to come after, the Squire beckoned his wife into the
sitting-room and shut the door.

"D'ye think she's going into a decline?" he whispered. His great
frame trembled all over when he asked the question, and his face was
yellow-white. Years ago a pretty young sister of his, whose namesake
Lucina was, had died of a decline, as they had termed it, and, ever
since, death of the young and fair had worn that guise to the fancy
of the Squire. He remembered just how his young sister had looked
when she was fading to her early tomb, and to-day he had seemed to
see her expression in his daughter's face.

Abigail laid her little hand on his arm. "Don't look so, Eben," she
said. "I don't think she is in a decline; she doesn't cough."

"What ails her, Abigail?"

Mrs. Merritt hesitated. "I don't know that much ails her, Eben," she
said, evasively. "Girls often get run down, then spring up again."

"Abigail, you don't think the child is fretting about--that boy
again?"

"She hasn't mentioned his name to me for weeks, Eben," replied
Abigail, and her statement carried reassurance, since the Squire
argued, with innocent masculine prejudice, that what came not to a
woman's tongue had no abiding in her mind.

His wife, if she were more subtle, gave no evidence of it. "I think
the best plan would be for her to go away again," she added.

The Squire looked at her wistfully. "Do you think it would, Abigail?"

"I think she would brighten right up, the way she did before."

"She did brighten up, didn't she?" said the Squire, with a sigh.
"Well, maybe you're right, Abigail, but you've got to go with her
this time. The child isn't going away, looking as she does now,
without her mother."

So it happened that, a week or two later, Jerome, going to his work,
met the coach again, and this time had a glimpse of Abigail Merritt's
little, sharply alert face beside her daughter's pale, flower-like
droop of profile. He had not been in the shop long before his uncle's
wife came with the news. She stood in the doorway, quite filling it
with her voluminosity of skirts and softly palpitating bulk, holding
a little fluttering shawl together under her chin.

"They've gone out West, to Ohio, to Mis' Merritt's cousin, Mary Jane
Anstey, that was; she married rich, years ago, and went out there to
live, and Abigail 'ain't seen her since. She's been teasin' her to
come for years; her own folks are all dead an' gone, an' her husband
is poorly, an' she can't leave him to come here. Camilla, she paid
the expenses of one of 'em out there. Lucina's been real miserable
lately, an' they're worried about her. The Squire's sister, that she
was named for, went down in a decline in six months; so her mother
has taken her out there for a change, an' they're goin' to make a
long visit. Lucina is real poorly. I had it from 'Lizy Wells. Camilla
told her."

Jerome shifted his back towards his aunt as he sat on his bench. His
face, bent over his work, was white and rigid.

"You're coldin' of the shop off, Belindy," said Ozias.

"Well, I s'pose I be," said she, with a pleasant titter of apology,
and backed off the threshold and shut the door.

"That's a woman," said Ozias, "who 'ain't got any affairs of her own,
but she's perfectly contented an' happy with her neighbors', taken
weak. That's the kind of woman to marry if you ain't got anythin' to
give her--no money, no interests in life, no anythin'."

Jerome made no reply. His uncle gave a shrewd glance at him. "When ye
can't eat lollypops, it's jest as well not to have them under your
nose," he remarked, with seemingly no connection, but Jerome said
nothing to that either.

He worked silently, with fierce energy, the rest of the morning. He
had not heard before of Lucina's ill health; she had not been to
church the Sunday previous, but he had thought of nothing serious
from that. Now the dreadful possibility came to him--suppose she
should die and leave his world entirely, of what avail would all his
toil be then? When he went home that noon he ate his dinner hastily,
then, on his way back to the shop, left the road, crossed into a
field, and sat down in the wide solitude, on a rock humping out of
the dun roll of sere grass-land. Always, in his stresses of spirit,
Jerome sought instinctively some closet which he had made of the free
fastnesses of nature.

The day was very dull and cold; snow threatened, should the weather
moderate. Overhead was a suspended drift of gray clouds. The earth
was stark as a corpse in utter silence. The stillness of the frozen
air was like the stillness of death and despair. A fierce blast would
have given at least the sense of life and fighting power. "Suppose
she dies," thought Jerome--"suppose she dies."

He tried to imagine the world without Lucina, but he could not, for
with all his outgoing spirit his world was too largely within him.
For the first time in his life, the conception of the death of that
which he loved better than his life was upon him, and it was a
conception of annihilation. "If Lucina is not, then I am not, and
that upon which I look is not," was in his mind.

When he rose, he staggered, and could scarcely see his way across the
field. When he entered his uncle's shop, Ozias looked at him sharply.
"If you're sick you'd better go home and go to bed," he said, in a
voice of harsh concern.

"I am not sick," said Jerome, and fell to work with a sort of fury.

As the days went on it seemed to him that he could not bear life any
longer if he did not hear how Lucina was, and yet the most obvious
steps to hear he did not take. It never occurred to him to march
straight to the Squire's house, and inquire of him concerning his
daughter's health. Far from that, he actually dreaded to meet him,
lest he read in his face that she was worse. He did not go to
meeting, lest the minister mention her in his prayer for the sick; he
stayed as little as possible in the company of his mother and sister,
lest they repeat the sad news concerning her; if a neighbor came in,
he got up and left the room directly. He never went to the village
store of an evening; he ostracized himself from his kind, lest they
stab him with the confirmation of his agonizing fear. For the first
time in his life Jerome had turned coward.

One day, when Lucina had been gone about a month, he was coming home
from Dale when he heard steps behind him and a voice shouting for him
to stop. He turned and saw Colonel Jack Lamson coming with breathless
quickening of his stiff military gait.

When the Colonel reached him he could scarcely speak; his wheezing
chest strained his coat to exceeding tightness, his face was purple,
he swung his cane with spasmodic jerks. "Fine day," he gasped out.

"Yes, sir," said Jerome.

It was near the end of February, the snow was thawing, and for the
first time there was a suggestion of spring in the air which caused
one, with the recurrence of an old habit of mind, to listen and sniff
as for birds and flowers.

The two men stepped along, picking their way through the melting
snow. "The doctor has ordered me out for a three-mile march every
day. I'm going to stent myself," said the Colonel, still breathing
hard; then he looked keenly at Jerome. "What have you been doing to
yourself, young fellow?" he asked.

"Nothing. I don't know what you mean," answered Jerome.

"Nothing! Why, you have aged ten years since I last saw you!"

"I am well enough, Colonel Lamson."

"How about that deed I witnessed? Have you got enough money to build
the mill yet?"

"No, I haven't," replied Jerome, with a curious tone of defiance and
despair, which the Colonel interpreted wrongly.

"Oh, don't give up yet," he said, cheerfully. "Rome wasn't built in a
day, you know."

Jerome made no reply, but trudged on doggedly.

"How is she?" asked the Colonel, suddenly.

Jerome turned white and looked at him. "Who?" he said.

The Colonel laughed, with wheezy facetiousness. "Why, she--_she_.
Young men don't build nests or saw-mills unless there is a she in the
case."

"There isn't--" began Jerome. Then he shut his mouth hard and walked
on.

"It's only my joke, Jerome," laughed the Colonel, but there was no
responsive smile on Jerome's face. Colonel Lamson eyed him narrowly.
"The Squire had a letter from his wife yesterday," he said, with no
preface. Then he started, for Jerome turned upon him a face as of one
who is braced for death.

"How--is she?" he gasped out.

"Who? Mrs. Merritt? No, confound it all, my boy, she's better! Hold
on to yourself, my boy; I tell you she's better."

Jerome gave a deep sigh, and walked ahead so fast that the Colonel
had to quicken his pace. "Wait a minute," he panted; "I want a word
with you."

Jerome stopped, and the Colonel came up and faced him. "Look here,
young man," he said, with sudden wrath, "if I thought for a minute
you had jilted that girl, I wouldn't stop for words; I would take you
by the neck like a puppy, and I'd break every bone in your body."

Jerome squared his shoulders involuntarily; his face, confronting the
Colonel's, twitched. "I'll kill you or any other man who dares to say
I did," he cried out, fiercely.

"If I hadn't known you didn't I would have seen you damned before I'd
spoken to you," returned the Colonel; "but what I want to ask now is,
what in--are you doing?"

"I'd like to know what business 'tis of yours!"

"What in--are you doing, my boy?" repeated the Colonel.

There was something ludicrous in the contrast between his strong
language and his voice, into which had come suddenly a tone of
kindness which was almost caressing. Jerome, since his father's day,
had heard few such tones addressed to him, and his proudly
independent heart was softened and weakened by his anxiety and relief
over Lucina.

"I am--working my fingers to the bone--to win her, sir," he blurted
out, brokenly.

"Does she know it?"

"Do you think I would say anything to her to bind her when I might
never be able to marry her?" said Jerome, with almost an accent of
wonder.

The Colonel whistled and said no more, for just then Belinda Lamb and
Paulina Maria came up, holding their petticoats high out of the
slush.

The two men walked on to Upham village, the Colonel straight, as if
at the head of a battalion, though his lungs pumped hard at every
step, holding back his square shoulders, protruding his tight
broadcloth, swinging his stick airily, Jerome at his side, burdened
like a peasant, with his sheaf of cut leather, but holding up his
head like a prince.

Chapter XXXII

Lucina and her mother were away some three months; it was late spring
when they returned. It had been told in Upham that Lucina was quite
well, but when people saw her they differed as to her appearance.
"She looks dreadful delicate now, accordin' to my way of thinkin',"
some of the women, spying sharply upon her from their sitting-room
windows and their meeting-house pews, reported.

Jerome saw her for the first time after her return when she followed
her father and mother up the aisle one Sunday in May when all the
orchards were white. He thought, with a great throb of joy, that she
looked quite well, that she must be well. If the red and white of her
cheeks was a little too clear, he did not appreciate it. She was all
in white, like the trees, with some white blossoms and plumes on her
hat.

After meeting, he lingered a little on the porch, though Elmira was
walking on, with frequent pauses turning her head and looking for
him. However, when Lucina appeared, he did not get the kindly glance
for which he had hoped. She was talking so busily with Mrs. Doctor
Prescott that she did not seem to see him, but the color on her
cheeks was deeper. Jerome joined his sister hastily and went home
quite contented, thinking Lucina was very well.

However, in a few weeks' time he began to hear whispers to the
contrary. Sometimes Lucina did not go to meeting; still, she was seen
out frequently riding and walking. When Jerome caught a glimpse of
her he strove to shut away the knowledge that she did not look well
from his own consciousness. But when Lucina had been at home six
weeks she took a sudden turn for the better, which could have been
dated accurately from a certain morning when she met Colonel Jack
Lamson, she being out riding and he walking. He kept pace with the
slow amble of her little white horse for some distance, sometimes
grasping the bridle and stopping in a shady place to talk more at
ease.

When Lucina got home that noon her mother noticed a change in her.
"You look better than you have done for weeks," said she.

"I enjoyed my ride," Lucina said, with a smile and a blush which her
mother could not fathom. The girl ate a dinner which gladdened her
father's heart; afterwards she went up to her chamber, and presently
came down with her hat on and her silk work-bag on her arm.

"I am going to take one of my chair-covers over to Aunt Camilla's,"
said she.

"Well, walk slowly," said her mother, trying to conceal her delight
lest it betray her past anxiety. Lucina had not touched her
embroidery for weeks, nor stepped out-of-doors of her own accord.

When she was gone her father and mother looked at each other. "She's
better," Eben said, with a catch in his voice.

"I haven't seen her so bright for weeks," replied Abigail. She had a
puzzled look in spite of her satisfaction. That night she ascertained
through wariest soundings that Lucina had not met Jerome when riding
in the morning. She had suspected something, though she scarcely knew
what. Lucina's secrecy lately had deceived even her mother. She had
begun to think that the girl had not been as much in earnest in her
love affair as she had thought, and was drooping from some other
cause.

When Lucina revealed with innocent readiness that she had met Colonel
Lamson that morning and talked with him, and with no one else,
Abigail could make nothing of it.

However, Lucina from that day on improved. She took up her little
tasks; she seemed quite as formerly, only, possibly, somewhat older
and more staid.

The Squire thought that her recovery was due to a certain bitter
medicine which Doctor Prescott had given her, and often extolled it
to his wife. "It is singular that medicine should work like a flash
of lightning after she had been taking it for weeks with no effect,"
thought Abigail, but she said nothing.

One afternoon, not long after her talk with Colonel Lamson, Lucina
met Jerome face to face in the road, and stopped and held out her
hand to him. "How do you do?" she said, paling and blushing, and yet
with a sweet confidence which was new in her manner.

Jerome bowed low, but did not offer his hand. She held out hers
persistently.

"I can't shake hands," he said, "mine is stained with leather; it
smells of it, too."

"I am not afraid of leather," Lucina returned, gently.

"I am," Jerome said, with a defiance in which there was no
bitterness. Then, as Lucina still looked at him and held out her
hand, with an indescribable air of pretty, childish insistence and
womanly pleading, her blue eyes being sober almost to tears, he
motioned her to wait a moment, and swung over the fence and down the
road-side, which was just there precipitous, to the brook-bed. He got
down on his knees, plunged his hands into the water, like a golden
net-work in the afternoon light, washed his hands well, and returned
to Lucina. She laid her little hand in his, but she shook her head,
smiling. "I liked it better the other way," said she.

"I couldn't touch your hand with mine like that."

"You would give me more if you let me give you something sometimes,"
said Lucina, with a pretty, sphinx-like look at him as she drew her
hand away.

Jerome wondered what she had meant after they had separated. Acute as
he was, and of more masterly mind than she, he was at a loss, for she
had touched that fixed idea which sways us all to greater or less
degree and some to delusion. Jerome, with his one principle of
giving, could not even grasp a problem which involved taking.

He puzzled much over it, then decided, not with that lenient
slighting, as in other cases when womankind had vexed him with blind
words, but with a fond reverence, as for some angelic mystery, that
it was because Lucina was a girl. "Maybe girls are given to talking
in that riddlesome kind of way," thought Jerome.

He was blissfully certain upon one point, at all events. Lucina's
whole manner had given evidence to a confidence and understanding
upon her part.

"She knows what I am doing," he told himself. "She knows how I am
working, and she is contented and willing to wait. She knows, but she
isn't bound." Jerome had not dreamed that Lucina's indisposition had
had aught to do with distress of mind upon his account.

Now he fell upon work as if it had been a veritable dragon of old,
which he must slay to rescue his princess. He toiled from earliest
dawn until far dark, and not with hands only. Still he did not
neglect his gratuitous nursing and doctoring. He saved like a miser,
though not at his mother's and sister's expense. He himself would
taste, in those days, no butter, no sugar, no fresh meat, no bread of
fine flour, but he saw to it that is mother and Elmira were well
provided.

When winter came again, he used to hasten secretly along the road,
not wishing to meet Lucina for a new reason--lest she discover how
thin his coat was against the wintry blast, how thin his shoes
against the snow.

"I never thought Jerome was so close," Elmira sometimes said to her
mother.

"He ain't close, he's got an object," returned Ann, with a shrewd,
mysterious look.

"What do you mean, mother?"

"Nothin'."

Elmira's and Lawrence's courtship progressed after the same fashion.
If Doctor Prescott suspected anything he made no sign. Lawrence was
attending patients regularly with his father and reading hard.

Sometimes, during his occasional calls upon Elmira, he saw Jerome.
The two young men, when they met on the road, exchanged covertly
cordial courtesies; a sort of non-committal friendship was struck up
between them. Lawrence was the means of introducing Jerome to a new
industry, of which he might otherwise never have heard.

"Father and I were on the old Dale road this morning," he said, "and
there is a fine cranberry-meadow there on the left, if anybody wants
to improve it. There's plenty of chance for drainage from that little
stream that runs into Graystone, and it's sheltered from the frost.
Old Jonathan Hawkins owns it; we went there--his wife is sick--and he
said he used to sell berries off it, but it had run down. He said
he'd be glad to let somebody work it on shares, just allowing him for
the use of the land. He's too old to bother with it himself, and he
is pretty well straitened for money. There's money in it, I guess."

Jerome listened, and the next day went over to Jonathan Hawkins's
place, on the old Dale road, and made his bargain. Some of his work
on the cranberry-meadow was done before light, his lantern moving
about the misty expanse like a marsh candle. When the berries were
ripe he employed children to pick them, John Upham's among the rest.
He cleared quite a sum by this venture, and added it to his store. In
two years' time he had saved enough money for his mill, and early in
the fall had the lumber all ready. He had engaged one carpenter from
Dale; he thought that he could build the mill himself with his help,
and that of some extra hands for raising.

On the evening before the day on which he expected to begin work he
went to see Adoniram Judd. The Judds lived off the main road, in a
field connected with it by a cart-path. Their house, after the
commonest village pattern--a long cottage with two windows on either
side of the front door--stood closely backed up against a wood of
pines and larches. The wind was cold, and the sound of it in the
evergreens was like a far-off halloo of winter. The house had a
shadowy effect in waning moonlight, the walls were mostly gray, being
only streaked high on the sheltered sides with old white paint.

Since Paulina Maria could not afford to have a coat of new paint on
her house, she had a bitter ambition, from motives of tidiness and
pride, to at least remove all traces of the old. She felt that the
chief sting of present deprivation lay in the evidence of its
contrast with former plenty. She hated the image in her memory of her
cottage glistening with the white gloss of paint, and would have
weakened it if she could. Paulina Maria accordingly, standing on a
kitchen-chair, had scrubbed with soap and sand the old paint-streaks
as high as her long arms would reach, and had, at times, when his
rheumatism would permit, set her tall husband to the task. The paint,
which was difficult to remove by any but its natural effacers--the
long courses of nature--was one of those minor material antagonisms
of life which keep the spirit whetted for harder ones.

Paulina Maria Judd had many such; when the pricks of fate were too
firm set against her struggling feet she saved herself from the
despair of utter futility by taking soap and water and sand, and
going forth to attack the paint on her house walls, and also the
front door-stone worn in frequent hollows for the collection of dirt
and dust.

This evening, when Jerome drew near, he saw a long rise of back over
the door-step, and a swiftly plying shoulder and arm. Paulina Maria
looked up without ceasing when Jerome stood beside her.

"You're working late," he said, with an attempt at pleasantry.

"I have to do my cleanin' late or not at all," replied Paulina Maria,
in her cold, calm voice. She rubbed more soap on her cloth.

"Uncle Adoniram at home?" Jerome had always called Adoniram "Uncle,"
though he was his father's cousin.

"Yes."

"I want to see him a minute about something."

"You'll have to go round to the back door. I can't have more dirt
tracked into this while it's wet."

Jerome went around the house to the back door. As he passed the
lighted sitting-room windows he saw a monstrous shadow with steadily
moving hands on the curtain. He fumbled his way through the lighted
room, in which sat Adoniram Judd closing shoes and his son Henry
knitting. When the door opened Henry, whose shadow Jerome had seen on
the window-pane, looked up with the vacant peering of the blind, but
his fingers never ceased twirling the knitting-needles.

"How are you?" said Jerome.

Adoniram returned his salutation without rising, and bade him take a
chair. Henry spoke not at all, and bent his dim eyes again over his
knitting without a smile. Henry Judd had the lank height of his
father, and his blunt elongation of face and features, informed by
his mother's spirit. The result in his expression was an absolute
ferocity instead of severity of gloom, a fury of resentment against
his fate, instead of that bitter leaning towards it which is the acme
of defiance.

Henry Judd bent his heavy, pale brows over the miserable feminine
work to which he was forced. His long hands were white as a girl's,
and revealed their articulation as they moved; his face,
transparently pale, showed a soft furze of young beard on cheek and
chin.

"How are you, Henry?" asked Jerome.

Henry made no reply, only scowled more gloomily. Paulina Maria's
ardent severity of Christianity had produced in her son, under his
first stress of life, a fierce rebound. To no word of Scripture would
Henry Judd resort for comfort; he never bent knee in prayer, and
would not be led, even by his mother's authority, to meeting on
Sunday. The voice of his former mates, who had with him no sympathy
of like affliction, filled him with a sullen rage of injury. He was
somewhat younger than Jerome, but had seemed formerly much attracted
to him. Now he had not spoken to him for a year.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31