Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - Jerome, A Poor Man

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

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Miss Camilla Merritt lived in the house which had belonged to her
grandfather, called the "old Merritt house" to distinguish it from
the one which her father had built, in which her brother Eben lived.
Both, indeed, were old, but hers was venerable, and claimed that
respect which extreme age, even in inanimate things, deserves. And in
a way, indeed, this old house might have been considered raised above
the mere properties of wood and brick and plaster by such an
accumulation of old memories and associations, which were inseparable
from its walls, to something nearly sentient and human, and to have
established in itself a link 'twixt matter and mind.

Never had any paint touched its outer walls, overlapped with
silver-gray shingles like scales of a fossil fish. The door and the
great pillared portico over it were painted white, as they had been
from the first, and that was all. A brick walk, sunken in mossy
hollows, led up to the front door, which was only a few feet from
the road, the front yard being merely a narrow strip with great
poplars set therein. Lucina had always had a suspicion, which she
confided to no one, being sensitive as to ridicule for her childish
theories, that these poplars were not real trees. Even the changing
of the leaves did not disarm her suspicion. Sometimes she dug
surreptitiously around the roots with a pointed stick to see what
she could discover for or against it, and always with a fearful
excitement of daring, lest she topple the tree over, perchance,
and destroy herself and Aunt Camilla and the house.

To-day Lucina went up the walk between the poplars, recognizing them
as one recognizes friends oftentimes, not as their true selves, but
as our conception of them, and knocked one little ladylike knock with
the brass knocker. She never entered her aunt Camilla's house without
due ceremony.

Aunt Camilla's old woman, who lived with her, and performed her
household work as well as any young one, answered the knock and bade
her enter. Lucina followed this portly old-woman figure, moving with
a stiff wabble of black bombazined hips, like some old domestic fowl,
into the east room, which was the sitting-room.

The old woman's name was lost to memory, inasmuch as she had been
known simply as 'Liza ever since her early childhood, and had then
hailed from the town farm, with her parentage a doubtful matter.

There was about this woman, who had no kith nor kin, nor equal
friends, nor money, nor treasures, nor name, and scarce her own
individuality in the minds of others, a strange atmosphere of
silence, broken seldom by uncouth, stammering speech, which always
intimidated the little Lucina. She had, however, a way of expanding,
after long stares at her, into sudden broad smiles which relieved the
little girl's apprehension; and, too, her rusty black bombazine
smelled always of rich cake--a reassuring perfume to one who knew the
taste of it.

Lucina's aunt Camilla was a nervous soul, and liked not the rattle of
starched cotton about the house. Her old serving-woman must go always
clad in woollen, which held the odors of cooking long.

Lucina sat down in a little rocking-chair, hollowed out like a nest
in back and seat, which was her especial resting-place, and 'Liza
went out, leaving the rich, fruity odor of cake behind her, saying no
word, but evidently to tell her mistress of her guest. There were no
blinds on this ancient house, but there were inside shutters in fine
panel-work at all the windows. These were all closed except at the
east windows. There between the upper panels were left small square
apertures which framed little pictures of the blue spring sky,
slanted across with blooming peach boughs; for there was a large
peach orchard on the east side of the house. Lucina watched these
little pictures, athwart which occasionally a bird flew and raised
them to life. She held her doll primly, and her little work-bag still
dangled from her arm. She would not begin her task of knitting until
her aunt appeared and her visit was fairly in progress.

Over against the south wall stood a clock as tall as a giant man, and
giving in the half-light a strong impression of the presence of one,
to an eye which did not front it. Lucina often turned her head with a
start and looked, to be sure it was only the clock which sent that
long, dark streak athwart her vision. The clock ticked with slow and
solemn majesty. She was sure that sixty of those ticks would make a
minute, and sixty times the sixty an hour, if she could count up to
that and not get lost in such a sea of numbers; but she could not
tell the time of day by the clock hands.

Lucina was a quick-witted child, but seemed in some particulars to
have a strange lack of curiosity, or else an instinct to preserve for
herself an imagination instead of acquiring knowledge. She was either
obstinately or involuntarily ignorant as yet of the method of telling
time, and the hands of the clock were held before its face of mystery
for concealment rather than revelation to her. But she loved to sit
and watch the clock, and she never told her mother what she thought
about it. Directly in front of Lucina, as she sat waiting, hanging
over the mantel-shelf between the east windows, was a great steel
engraving of the Declaration of Independence. Lucina looked at the
cluster of grave men, and was innocently proud and sure that her
father was much finer-looking than any one of them, and, moreover,
doubted irreverently if any one of them could shoot rabbits or catch
fish, or do anything but sign his name with that stiff pen. Lucina
was capable of an agony of faithfulness to her own, but of loyalty in
a broad sense she knew nothing, and never would, having in that
respect the typical capacity only of women.

The east-room door had been left ajar. Presently a soft whisper of
silk could be heard afar off; but before that even a delicate breath
of lavender came floating into the room. Many sweet and subtly
individual odors seemed to dwell in this old house, preceding the
mortal inhabitants through the doors, and lingering behind them in
rooms where they had stayed.

Lucina started when the lavender breath entered the room, and looked
up as if at a ghostly herald. She toed out her two small morocco-shod
feet more particularly upon the floor, she smoothed down her own and
her doll's little petticoats, and she also made herself all ready to
rise and courtesy.

After the lavender sweetness came the whisper of silk flounces,
growing louder and louder; but there was no sound of footsteps, for
Aunt Camilla moved only with the odor and rustle of a flower. No one
had ever heard her little slippered feet; even her high heels never
tapped the thresholds. She had a way of advancing her toes first and
making the next step with a tilt, so soft that it was scarcely a
break from a glide, and yet clearing the floor as to her slipper
heels.

Lucina knew her aunt Camilla was coming down the stairs by the
rustling of her silk flounces along the rails of the banisters, like
harp-strings; then there was a cumulative whisper and an entrance.

Lucina rose, holding her doll like a dignified little mother, and
dropped a courtesy.

"Good-afternoon," said Aunt Camilla.

"Good-afternoon," returned Lucina.

"How do you do?" asked Aunt Camilla.

"Pretty well, I thank you," replied Lucina.

"How is your mother?"

"Pretty well, I thank you."

"Is your father well?"

"Yes, ma'am; I thank you."

During this dialogue Aunt Camilla was moving gently forward upon her
niece. When she reached her she stooped, or rather drooped--for
stooping implies a bend of bone and muscle, and her graceful body
seemed to be held together by integuments like long willow
leaves--and kissed her with a light touch of cool, delicate lips.
Aunt Camilla's slender arms in their pointed lilac sleeves and lace
undersleeves waved forward as with a vague caressing intent. Soft
locks of hair and frilling laces in her cap and bosom hung forward
like leaves on a swaying bough, and tickled Lucina's face, half
smothered in the old lavender fragrance.

Lucina colored innocently and sweetly when her aunt kissed her, and
afterwards looked up at her with sincerest love and admiration and
delight.

Camilla Merritt was far from young, being much older than her
brother, Lucina's father; but she was old as a poem or an angel might
be, with the lovely meaning of her still uppermost and most evident.
Camilla in her youth had been of a rare and delicate beauty, which
had given her fame throughout the country-side, and she held the best
of it still, as one holds jewels in a worn casket, and as a poem
written in obsolete language contains still its first grace of
thought. Camilla's soft and slender body had none of those stiff,
distorted lines which come from resistance to the forced attitudes of
life. Her body and her soul had been amenable to all discipline. She
had leaned sweetly against her crosses, instead of straining away
from them with fierce cramps and agonies of resistance. In every
motion she had the freedom of utter yielding, which surpasses the
freedom of action. Camilla's graduated flounces of lilac silk,
slightly faded, having over it a little spraying mist of gray,
trimmed her full skirt to her slender waist, girdled with a narrow
ribbon fastened with a little clasp set with amethysts. A great
amethyst brooch pinned the lace at her throat. She wore a lace cap,
and over that, flung loosely, draping her shoulders and shading her
face with its soft mesh, a great shawl or veil of fine white lace
wrought with sprigs. Camilla's delicately spare cheeks were softly
pink, with that elderly bloom which lacks the warm dazzle of youth,
yet has its own late beauty. Her eyes were blue and clear as a
child's, and as full of innocent dreams--only of the past instead of
the future. Her blond hair, which in turning gray had got a creamy
instead of a silvery lustre, like her old lace, was looped softly and
disposed in half-curls over her ears. When she smiled it was with the
grace and fine dignity of ineffable ladyhood, and yet with the soft
ignorance, though none of the abandon, of childhood. Camilla was like
a child whose formal code and manners of life had been fully
prescribed and learned, but whose vital copy had not been quite set.

Lucina loved her aunt Camilla with a strange sense of comradeship,
and yet with awe. "If you can ever be as much of a lady as your aunt
Camilla, I shall be glad," her mother often told her. Camilla was to
Lucina the personification of the gentle and the genteel. She was her
ideal, the model upon which she was to form herself.

Camilla was so unceasingly punctilious in all the finer details of
living that all who infringed upon them felt her mere presence a
reproach. Children were never rough or loud-voiced or naughty when
Miss Camilla was near, though she never admonished otherwise than by
example. As for little Lucina, she would have felt shamed for life
had her aunt Camilla caught her toeing in, or stooping, or leaving
the "ma'am" off from her yes and no.

Camilla, this afternoon, did what Lucina had fondly hoped she might
do--proposed that they should sit out in the arbor in the garden. "I
think it is warm enough," she said; and Lucina assented with tempered
delight.

It was a very warm afternoon. Spring had taken, as she will sometimes
do in May, being apparently weary of slow advances, a sudden flight
into summer, with a wild bursting of buds and a great clamor of wings
and songs.

Miss Camilla got a yellow Canton crepe shawl, that was redolent of
sandalwood, out of a closet, but she did not put it over her
shoulders, the outdoor air was so soft. She needed nothing but her
lace mantle over her head, which made her look like a bride of some
old spring. Lucina followed her through the hall, out of the back
door, which had a trellis and a grape-vine over it, into the garden.
The garden was large, and laid out primly in box-bordered beds. There
were even trees of box on certain corners, and it looked as if the
box would in time quite choke out the flowers. Lucina, who was given
to sweet and secret fancies, would often sit with wide blue eyes of
contemplation upon the garden, and discover in the box a sprawling,
many-armed green monster, bent upon strangling out the lives of the
flowers in their beds.

"Why don't you have the box trimmed, Aunt Camilla?" she would venture
to inquire at such times; and her aunt Camilla, looking gently
askance at the flush of excitement, which she did not understand,
upon her niece's cheek, would reply:

"The box has always been there, my dear."

Long existence proved always the sacredness of a law to Miss Camilla.
She was a conservative to the bone.

The arbor where the two sat that afternoon was of the kind one sees
in old prints where lovers sit in chaste embrace under a green arch
of eglantine. However, in Miss Camilla's arbor were no lovers, and
instead of eglantine were a honeysuckle and a climbing rose. The rose
was not yet in bloom, and the honeysuckle's red trumpets were not
blown--their parts in the symphony of the spring were farther on;
over the arbor there was only a delicate prickling of new leaves,
which cast a lace-like shadow underneath. A bench ran around the
three closed sides of the arbor, and upon the bench sat Lucina and
her aunt Camilla, in her spread of lilac flounces. Camilla held in
her lap a little portfolio of papier-mache, and wrote with a little
gold pencil on sheets of gilt-edged paper. Camilla always wrote when
she sat in the arbor, but nobody ever knew what. She always carried
the finely written sheets into the house, and nobody knew where she
put them afterwards. Camilla's long, thin fingers, smooth and white
as ivory, sparkled dully with old rings. Some large amethysts in fine
gold settings she wore, one great yellow pearl, a mourning-ring of
hair in a circlet of pearls for tears, and some diamond bands in
silver, which gave out cold white lights only as her hands moved
across the gilt-edged paper.

As for Lucina, she had set up her doll primly in a corner of the
arbor, and was knitting her stent. It might have seemed difficult to
understand what the child found to enjoy in this quiet entertainment,
but in childhood all situations which appeal to the imagination give
enjoyment, and most situations which break the routine of daily life
do so appeal. Then, too, Camilla's quiet persistence in her own
employment gave a delightful sense of equality and dignity to the
child. She would not have liked it half as well had her aunt stooped
to entertain her and brought out toys and games for her amusement.
However, there was entertainment to come, to which she looked forward
with gratification, as that placed her firmly on the footing of an
honored guest. The minister's daughter or the doctor's wife could not
be treated better or with more courtesy.

Aunt Camilla wrote with pensive pauses of reflection, and Lucina
knitted until her stent was finished. Then she folded up the garter
neatly, quilted in the needles as she had been taught, and placed it
in her little bag. Then she took up her doll protectingly and
soothingly, and held her in her lap, with the great china head
against her small bosom. Lucina's doll was very large, and finely
attired in stiff book-muslin and pink ribbons. She wore also pink
morocco shoes on her feet, which stood out strangely at sharp right
angles. Lucina sometimes eyed her doll-baby's feet uncomfortably. "I
guess she will outgrow it," she told herself, with innocent maternal
hypocrisy early developed.

When Lucina laid aside her work and began nursing her doll her aunt
looked up from her writing. "Are you enjoying yourself, dear?" she
inquired.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Would you like to run about the garden?"

"No, thank you, ma'am; I will sit here and hold my doll. It is time
for her nap. I will hold her till she goes to sleep."

"Then you can run about a little," suggested Miss Camilla, gravely,
without a smile. She respected Lucina's doll, as she might have her
baby, and the child's heart leaped up with gratitude. An older soul
which needs not to make believe to re-enter childhood is a true
comrade for a child.

"Yes, ma'am," replied Lucina. "I will lay her down on the bench here
when she falls asleep."

"You can cover her up with my shawl," said Miss Camilla, gravely
still, and naturally. Indeed, to her a child with a doll was as much
a part and parcel of the natural order of things as a mother with an
infant. Outside all of it herself, she comprehended and admitted it
with the impartiality of an observer. "Then you can run in the
garden," she added, "and pick a bouquet if you wish. There is not
much in bloom now but the heart's-ease and the flowering almond and
the daffodils, but you can make a bouquet of them to take home to
your mother."

"Thank you, ma'am," said Lucina.

However, she was in no hurry to take advantage of her aunt's
permission. She sat quietly in the warm and pleasant arbor, holding
her doll-baby, with the afternoon sun sifting through the young
leaves, and making over them a shifting dapple like golden water, and
felt no inclination to stir. The spring languor was over even her
young limbs; the sweet twitter of birds, the gathering bird-like
flutter of leaves before a soft swell of air, the rustle of her
aunt's gilt-edged paper, an occasional hiss of her silken flounces,
grew dim and confused. Lucina, as well as her doll, fell asleep,
leaning her pretty head against the arbor trellis-work. Camilla did
not disturb her; she had never in her life disturbed the peace or the
slumber of any soul. She only gazed at her now and then, with gentle,
half-abstracted affection, then wrote again.

Presently, stepping with that subtlest silence of motion through the
quiet garden, came a great yellow cat. She rubbed against Miss
Camilla's knees with that luxurious purr of love and comfort which is
itself a completest slumber song, then made a noiseless leap to a
sunny corner of the bench, and settled herself there in a yellow coil
of sleep. Presently there came another, and another, and another
still--all great cats, and all yellow, marked in splendid tiger
stripes, with eyes like topaz--until there were four of them, all
asleep on the sunny side of the arbor. Miss Camilla's yellow cats
were of a famous breed, well represented in the village; but she had
these four, which were marvels of beauty.

Another hour wore on. Miss Camilla still wrote, and Lucina and the
yellow cats slept. Then it was four o'clock, and time for the
entertainment to which Lucina had looked forward.

There was a heavy footstep on the garden walk and a rustling among
the box borders. Then old 'Liza loomed up in the arbor door,
darkening out the light. Little Lucina stirred and woke, yet did not
know she woke, not knowing she had slept. To her thinking she had sat
all this time with her eyes wide open, and the sight of her aunt
Camilla writing and the leaf shadows on the arbor floor had never
left them. She saw the yellow cats with some surprise, but cats can
steal in quietly when one's eyes are turned. Had Lucina dreamed she
had fallen asleep when an honored guest of her lady aunt, she would
have been ready to sink with shame. Blindness to one's innocent
shortcomings seems sometimes a special mercy of Providence.

Lucina straightened herself with a flushed smile, gave just one
glance at the great tray which old 'Liza bore before her; then looked
away again, being fully alive to the sense that it is not polite nor
ladylike to act as if you thought much of your eating and drinking.

Old 'Liza set the tray on a little table in the midst of the arbor,
and immediately odors, at once dainty and delicate, spicy, fruity,
and aromatically soothing, diffused themselves about. The four yellow
cats stirred; they yawned, and stretched luxuriously; then, suddenly
fully awake to the meaning of those savory scents which had disturbed
their slumbers, sat upright with eager jewel eyes upon the tray.

"Take the cats away, 'Liza," said Miss Camilla.

Old 'Liza advanced grinning upon the cats, gathered them up, two
under each arm, and bore them away, moving out of sight between the
box borders like some queer monster, with her wide humping flanks of
black bombazine enhanced by four angrily waving yellow cat tails,
which gave an effect of grotesque wrath to the retreat.

Lucina looked, in spite of her manners, at the tray when it was on
the table before her very face and eyes. It was covered with a napkin
of finest damask, whose flower pattern glistened like frostwork, and
upon it were ranged little cups and saucers of pink china as thin and
transparent as shells, a pink sugar-bowl to match, a small silver
teapot under a satin cozy, a silver cream-jug, a plate of delicate
bread-and-butter, and one of fruit-cake.

"You will have a cup of tea, will you not, dear?" said Aunt Camilla.

"If you please; thank you, ma'am," replied Lucina, striving to look
decorously pleased and not too delighted at the prospect of the
fruit-cake. Tea and bread-and-butter presented small attractions to
her, but she did love old 'Liza's fruit-cake, made after a famous
receipt which had been in the Merritt family for generations.

Miss Camilla removed the cozy and began pouring the tea. Lucina took
a napkin, being so bidden, spread it daintily over her lap, and
tucked a corner in her neck. The feast was about to commence, when a
loud, jovial voice was heard in the direction of the house:

"Camilla! Camilla! Lucina, where are you all?"

"That's father!" cried Lucina, brightening, and immediately Squire
Eben Merritt came striding down between the box-ridges, and Jerome
Edwards was at his heels.

"Well, how are you, sister?" Squire Eben cried, merrily; and in the
same breath, "I have brought another guest to your tea-drinking,
sister."

Jerome bobbed his head, half with defiant dignity, half in utter
shyness and confusion at the sight of this fine, genteel lady and her
wonderful tea equipage. But Miss Camilla, having welcomed her brother
with gentle warmth, greeted this little poor Jerome with as sweet a
courtesy as if he had been the Governor, and bade Lucina run to the
house and ask 'Liza to fetch two more cups and saucers and two
plates, and motioned both her guests to be seated on the arbor bench.

Squire Eben laughed, and glanced at his great mud-splashed boots, his
buckskin, his fishing-tackle, and a fine string of spotted trout
which he bore. "A pretty knight for a lady's bower I am!" said he.

"A lady never judges a knight by his outward guise," returned
Camilla, with soft pleasantry. She adored her brother.

Eben laughed, deposited his fish and tackle on the bench near the
door, and flung himself down opposite them, at a respectful distance
from his sister's silken flounces, with a sigh of comfort. "I have
had a hard tramp, and would like a cup of your tea," he admitted.
"I've been lucky, though. 'Twas a fine day for trout, though I would
not have thought it. I will leave you some for your breakfast,
sister; have 'Liza fry them brown in Indian meal."

Then, following Miss Camilla's remonstrating glance, he saw little
Jerome Edwards standing in the arbor door, through which his entrance
was blocked by the Squire's great legs and his fishing-tackle, with
the air of an insulted ambassador who is half minded to return to his
own country.

The Squire made room for him to pass with a hearty laugh. "Bless you,
my boy!" said he, "I'm barring out the guest I invited myself, am I?
Walk in--walk in and sit down."

Jerome, half melted by the Squire's genial humor, half disposed still
to be stiffly resentful, hesitated a second; but Miss Camilla also,
for the second time, invited him to enter, with her gentle ceremony,
which was the subtlest flattery he had ever known, inasmuch as it
seemed to set him firmly in his own esteem above his poor estate of
boyhood; and he entered, and seated himself in the place indicated,
at his hostess's right hand, near the little tea-table.

Jerome, hungry boy as he was, having the spicy richness of that
wonderful fruit-cake in his nostrils, noted even before that the
lavender scent of Miss Camilla's garments, which seemed, like a
subtle fragrance of individuality and life itself, to enter his
thoughts rather than his senses. The boy, drawn within this
atmosphere of virgin superiority and gentleness, felt all his
defiance and antagonism towards his newly discovered pride of life
shame him.

The great and just bitterness of wrath against all selfish holders of
riches that was beginning to tincture his whole soul was sweetened
for the time by the proximity of this sweet woman in her silks and
laces and jewels. Not reasoning it out in the least, nor recognizing
his own mental attitude, it was to him as if this graceful creature
had been so endowed by God with her rich apparel and fair
surroundings that she was as much beyond question and envy as a lily
of the field. He did not even raise his eyes to her face, but sat at
her side, at once elevated and subdued by her gentle politeness and
condescension. When Lucina returned, and 'Liza followed with the
extra cups and plates, and the tea began, he accepted what was
proffered him, and ate and drank with manners as mild and grateful as
Lucina's. She could scarcely taste the full savor of her fruit-cake,
after all, so occupied she was in furtively watching this strange
boy. Her blue eyes were big with surprise. Why should he take Aunt
Camilla's cake, and even her bread-and-butter, when he would not
touch the gingerbread she had offered him, nor the money to buy
shoes? This young Lucina had yet to learn that the proud soul accepts
from courtesy what it will not take from love or pity.

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