Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - Jerome, A Poor Man

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Chapter VIII

That day had been one of those surprises of life which ever dwell
with one. Jerome in it had discovered not only a new self, but new
ways. He had struck paths at right angles to all he had followed
before. They might finally verge into the old again, but for that day
he saw strange prospects. Not the least strange of them was this
tea-drinking with the Squire and the Squire's sister and the Squire's
daughter in the arbor. He found it harder to reconcile that with his
past and himself than anything else. So bewildered was he, drinking
tea and eating cake, with the spread of Miss Camilla's lilac flounces
brushing his knee, and her soft voice now and then in his ear, that
he strove to remember how he happened to be there at all, and that
shock of strangeness which obliterates the past wellnigh paralyzed
his memory.

Yet it had been simple enough, as paths to strange conclusions always
are. He had returned home from Squire Eben's that morning, changed
his clothes, and resumed his work in the garden.

Elmira had questioned him, but he gave her no information. He had an
instinct, which had been born in him, of secrecy towards womankind.
Nobody had ever told him that women were not trustworthy with respect
to confidences; he had never found it so from observation; he simply
agreed within himself that he had better not confide any but fully
matured plans, and no plans which should be kept secret, to a woman.
He had, however, besides this caution, a generous resolution not to
worry Elmira or his mother about it until he knew. "Wait till I find
out; I don't know myself," he told Elmira.

"Don't you know where you've been? You can tell us that," she
persisted, in her sweet, querulous treble. She pulled at his jacket
sleeve with her little thin, coaxing hand, but Jerome was obdurate.
He twitched his jacket sleeve away.

"I sha'n't tell you one thing, and there is no use in your teasin',"
he said, peremptorily, and she yielded.

Elmira reported that their mother was sitting still in her
rocking-chair, with her head leaning back and her eyes shut. "She
seems all beat out," she said, pitifully; "she don't tell me to do a
thing."

The two tiptoed across the entry and stood in the kitchen door,
looking at poor Ann. She sat quite still, as Elmira had said, her
head tipped back, her eyes closed, and her mouth slightly parted. Her
little bony hands lay in her lap, with the fingers limp in utter
nerveless relaxation, but she was not asleep. She opened her eyes
when her children came to the door, but she did not speak nor turn
her head. Presently her eyes closed again.

Jerome pulled Elmira back into the parlor. "You must go ahead and get
the dinner, and make her some gruel, and not ask her a question, and
not bother her about anything," he whispered, sternly. "She's
resting; she'll die if she don't. It's awful for her. It's bad 'nough
for us, but we don't know what 'tis for her."

Elmira assented, with wide, scared, piteous eyes on her brother.

"Go now and get the dinner," said Jerome.

"There's lots left over from yesterday," said Elmira, forlornly.
"Shall we have anything after that's gone?"

"Have enough while I've got two hands," returned Jerome, gruffly.
"Get some potatoes and boil 'em, and have some of that cold meat, and
make mother the gruel."

Elmira obeyed, finding a certain comfort in that. Indeed, she
belonged assuredly to that purely feminine order of things which
gains perhaps its best strength through obedience. Give Elmira a
power over her, and she would never quite fall.

Elmira went about getting dinner, tiptoeing around her mother, who
still sat sunken in her strange apathy of melancholy or exhaustion,
it was difficult to tell which, while Jerome spaded and dug in the
garden, in the fury of zeal which he had inherited from her.

Elmira had dinner ready early, and called Jerome. When he went in he
found her trying to induce her mother to swallow a bowl of gruel.
"Won't you take it, mother?" she was pleading, with tears in her
eyes; but her mother only lifted one hand feebly and motioned it
away; she would not raise her head or open her eyes.

"Give me that bowl," said Jerome. He held it before his mother, and
slipped one hand behind her neck, constraining her gently to raise
her head. "Here, mother," said he, "here's your gruel."

She resisted faintly, and shook her weak, repelling hand again. "Sit
up, mother, and drink your gruel," said Jerome, and his mother's eyes
flew wide open at that, and stared up in his face with eager inquiry;
for again she had that wild surmise that her lost husband spoke to
her.

"Drink it, mother," said Jerome, again meeting her half-delirious
gaze fully; and Ann seemed to see his father looking at her from his
son's eyes, through his immortality after the flesh. She raised
herself at once, held out her trembling hands for the bowl, and drank
the gruel to the last drop. Then she gave the empty bowl to Jerome,
leaned her head back, and closed her eyes again.

After dinner Jerome changed his clothes for his poor best for the
second time, and set forth to Doctor Prescott's. Elmira's wistful
eyes followed him as he went out, but he said not a word. He threw
back his shoulders and stepped out with as much boldness of carriage
as ever.

"How smart he is!" Elmira thought, watching him from the window.

However, it was true that his heart quaked within him, supported as
he was by the advice and encouragement of Squire Merritt. Doctor
Prescott had been the awe and the terror of all his childhood. Nobody
knew how in his childish illnesses--luckily not many--he had dreaded
and resented the advent of this great man, who represented to him
absolute monarchy, if not despotism. He never demurred at his noxious
doses, but swallowed them at a gulp, with no sweet after-morsel as an
inducement, yet, strangely enough, never from actual submissiveness,
but rather from that fierce scorn and pride of utter helplessness
which can maintain a certain defiance to authority by depriving it of
that victory which comes only from opposition.

Jerome swallowed castor-oil, rhubarb, and the rest with a glare of
fierce eyes over spoon and a triumphant understanding with himself
that he took it because he chose, and not because the doctor made
him. It was odd, but Doctor Prescott seemed to have some intuition of
the boy's mental attitude, for, in spite of his ready obedience, he
had always a singular aversion to him. He was much more amenable to
pretty little Elmira, who cried pitifully whenever he entered the
house, and had always to be coaxed and threatened to make her take
medicine at all. No one would have said, and Doctor Prescott himself
would not have believed, that he, in his superior estate of age and
life, would have stooped to dislike a child like that, thus putting
him upon a certain equality of antagonism; but in truth he did.
Doctor Prescott scarcely ever knew one boy from another when he met
him upon the street, but Jerome Edwards he never mistook, though he
never stirred his stately head in response to the boy's humble bob of
courtesy. Once, after so meeting and passing the boy, he heard an
audacious note of defiance at his back, with a preliminary sniff of
scorn: "Hm! wonder if he thinks he was born grown up, with money in
his pockets; wonder if he thinks he owns this whole town?" The
doctor never turned to resent this sarcastic soliloquy whereby the
boy's suppressed democracy asserted itself, but the next time he saw
Jerome's father he told him he had better look to his son's manners,
and Jerome had been called to account.

However, when he had repeated his speech which had given offence, he
had only been charged to keep his thoughts to himself in future.
"I'll think 'em, anyhow," said Jerome, with unabated defiance.

"You'll pay proper respect to your elders," said his father.

"You'll think what we tell you to," said his mother, but the eyes of
the two met. Doctor Prescott might hold the mortgage and exact his
pound of flesh, these poor backs might bend to the yoke, but there
was no cringing in the hearts of Abel Edwards and his wife. It was
easy to see where Jerome got his spirit.

However, spirit needs long experience and great strength to assert
itself fully at all times before long-recognized power. Jerome, going
up the road to Doctor Prescott's, felt rather a fierce submission and
obligatory humility than defiance. He felt as if this great man held
not only himself, but his mother and sister, their lives and
fortunes, at his disposal. Awe of the reigning sovereign was upon
him, but it was the surly awe of the peasant whose mouth is stopped
by force from questions.

It was not long before Jerome, going along the country road, came to
the beginning of Doctor Prescott's estate. He owned long stretches of
fields along the main street of the village, comprising many fine
house-lots, which, however, people were too poor to buy. Doctor
Prescott fixed such high prices to his house-lots that no one could
pay them. However, people thought he did not care to sell. He liked
being a large land-owner, like an English lord, and feeling that he
owned half the village, they said.

Moreover, his acres brought him a fair income. They were sowed to
clover and timothy, and barley and corn, and gave such hay and such
crops as no others in town.

As Jerome passed these fair fields, either golden-green with the
young grass, or ploughed in even ridges for the new seeds, set with
dandelions like stars, or pierced as to the brown mould with emerald
spears of grain, he scowled at them, and his mouth puckered grimly
and piteously. He thought of all this land which Doctor Prescott
owned; he thought of the one poor little bit of soil which he was
going to offer him, to keep a roof over his head. Why should this man
have all this, and he and his so little? Was it because he was
better? Jerome shook his head vehemently. Was it because the Lord
loved him better? Jerome looked up in the blue spring sky. The
problem of the rights of the soil of the old earth was upon the boy,
but he could not solve it--only scowl and grieve over it.

Past the length of the shining fields, well back from the road, with
a fine curve of avenue between lofty pine-trees leading up to it,
stood Doctor Prescott's house. It was much the finest one in the
village, massively built of gray stone in large irregular blocks,
veined at the junctions with white stucco; a great white pillared
piazza stretched across the front, and three flights of stone steps
led over smooth terraces to it; for it was raised on an artificial
elevation above the road-level. Jerome, having passed the last field,
reached the avenue leading to the doctor's house, and stopped a
moment. His hands and feet were cold; there was a nervous trembling
all over his little body. He remembered how once, when he was much
younger, his mother had sent him to the doctor's to have a tooth
pulled, how he stood there trembling and hesitating as now, and how
he finally took matters into his own hands. A thrill of triumph shot
over him even then, as he recalled that mad race of his away up the
road, on and on until he came to the woods, and the tying of the
offending tooth to an oak-tree by a stout cord, and the agonized but
undaunted pulling thereat until his object was gained.

"I'd 'nough sight rather go to an oak-tree to have my tooth out than
to Doctor Prescott," he had said, stoutly, being questioned on his
return; and his father and mother, being rather taken at a loss by
such defiance and disobedience, scarcely knew whether to praise or
blame.

But there was no oak-tree for this strait. Jerome, after a minute of
that blind groping and feeling, as of the whole body and soul, with
which one strives to find some other way to an end than a hard and
repugnant one, gave it up. He went up the avenue, holding his head
up, digging his toes into the pine-needles, with an air of stubborn
boyish bravado, yet all the time the nervous trembling never ceased.
However, half-way up the avenue he came into one of those warmer
currents which sometimes linger so mysteriously among trees, seeming
like a pool of air submerging one as visibly as water. This warm-air
bath was, moreover, sweetened with the utmost breath of the pine
woods. Jerome, plunging into it, felt all at once a certain sense of
courage and relief, as if he had a bidding and a welcome from old
friends.

There are times when a quick conviction, from something like a
special favor or caress of the great motherhood of nature, which
makes us all as child to child, comes over one. "His pine-trees ain't
any different from other folks' pine-trees," flashed through Jerome's
mind.

Chapter IX

He went on straight round the house to the south-side door, whither
everybody went to consult the doctor. He knocked, and in a moment the
door opened, and a young girl with weak blue eyes, with a helpless
droop of the chin, and mouth half opened in a silly smile, looked out
at him. She was a girl whom Doctor Prescott had taken from the
almshouse to assist in the lighter household duties. She was
considered rather weak in her intellect, though she did her work well
enough when she had once learned how.

Jerome bent his head with a sudden stiff duck to this girl. "Is
Doctor Prescott at home?" he inquired.

"Yes, sir," replied the girl, with the same respectful courtesy and
ceremony with which she might have greeted the Squire or any town
magnate, instead of this poor little boy. Her mind was utterly
incapable of the faculties of selection and discrimination. She
applied one formula, unmodified, to all mankind.

"Can I see him a minute?" asked Jerome, gruffly.

"Yes, sir. Will you walk in?"

The girl, moving with a weak, shuffling toddle, like a child, led
Jerome through the length of the entry to a great room on the north
side of the house, which was the doctor's study and office. Two large
cupboards, whose doors were set with glass in diamond panes in the
upper panels, held his drugs and nostrums. Books, mostly ponderous
volumes in rusty leather, lined the rest of the wall space. When
Jerome entered the room the combined odor of those leather-bound
folios and the doctor's drugs smote his nostrils, as from a curious
brewing of theoretical and applied wisdom in one pot.

"Take a seat," said the girl, "and I will speak to the doctor." Then
she went out, with the vain, pleased simper of a child who has said
her lesson well.

Jerome sat down and looked about him. He had been in the room several
times before, but his awe of it preserved its first strangeness for
him. He eyed the books on the walls, then the great bottles visible
through the glass doors on the cupboard shelves. Those bottles were
mostly of a cloudy green or brown, but one among them caught the
light and shone as if filled with liquid rubies. That was valerian,
but Jerome did not know it; he only thought it must be a very strong
medicine to have such a bright color. He also thought that the doctor
must have mixed all those medicines from rules in those great books,
and a sudden feverish desire to look into them seized him. However,
neither his pride nor his timidity would have allowed him to touch
one of those books, even if he had not expected the doctor to enter
every moment.

He waited quite a little time, however. He could hear the far-off
tinkle of silver and clink of china, and knew the family were at
dinner. "Won't leave his dinner for me," thought Jerome, with an
unrighteous bitterness of humility, recognizing the fact that he
could not expect him to. "Might have planted an hour longer."

Then came a clang of the knocker, and this time the girl ushered into
the study a clamping, red-faced man in a shabby coat. Jerome
recognized him as a young farmer who lived three miles or so out of
the village. He blushed and stumbled, with a kind of grim
awkwardness, even before the simple girl delivering herself of her
formula of welcome. He would not sit down; he stood by the corner of
a medicine-cupboard, settling heavily into his boots, waiting.

When the girl had gone he looked at Jerome, and gave a vague and
furtive "Hullo!" in simple recognition of his presence, as it were.
He did not know who the boy was, never being easily certain as to
identities of any but old acquaintances--not from high indifference
and dislike, like the doctor, but from dulness of observation.

Jerome nodded in response to the man's salutation. "I can't ask the
doctor before him," he thought, anxiously.

The man rested heavily, first on one leg, then on the other. "Been
waitin' long?" he grunted, finally.

"Quite a while."

"Hope my horse 'll stan'," said the man; "headed towards home, an'
load off."

"The doctor can tend to you first," Jerome said, eagerly.

The man gave a nod of assent. Thanks, as elegancies of social
intercourse, were alarming, and savored of affectation, to him. He
had thanked the Lord, from his heart, for all his known and unknown
gifts, but his gratitude towards his fellow-men had never overcome
his bashful self-consciousness and found voice.

Often in prayer-meeting Jerome had heard this man's fervent
outpouring of the religious faith which seemed the only intelligence
of his soul, and, like all single and concentrated powers, had a
certain force of persuasion. Jerome eyed him now with a kind of pious
admiration and respect, and yet with recollections.

"If I were a man, I'd stop colorin' up and actin' scared," thought
the boy; and then they both heard a door open and shut, and knew the
doctor was coming.

Jerome's heart beat hard, yet he looked quite boldly at the door.
Somehow the young farmer's clumsy embarrassment had roused his own
pride and courage. When the doctor entered, he stood up with alacrity
and made his manners, and the young farmer settled to another foot,
with a hoarse note of greeting.

The doctor said good-day, with formal courtesy, with his fine, keen
face turned seemingly upon both of them impartially; then he
addressed the young man.

"How is your wife to-day?" he inquired.

The young man turned purple, where he had been red, at this direct
address. "She's pretty--comfortable," he stammered.

"Is she out of medicine?"

"Yes, sir. That's what I come for." With that the young man pulled,
with distressed fumblings and jerks, a bottle from his pocket, which
he handed to the doctor, who had in the meantime opened the door of
one of the cupboards.

The doctor took a large bottle from the cupboard, and filled from
that the one which the young man had brought. Jerome stood trembling,
watching the careful gurgling of a speckled green liquid from one
bottle to another. A strange new odor filled the room, overpowering
all the others.

When the doctor gave the bottle to the young man, he shoved it
carefully away in his pocket again, and then stood coloring more
deeply and hesitating.

"Can ye take your pay in wood for this and the last two lots?" he
murmured at length, so low that Jerome scarcely heard him.

But the doctor never lowered nor raised his incisive, high-bred voice
for any man. His reply left no doubt of the question. "No, Mr.
Upham," said Doctor Prescott. "You must pay me in money for medicine.
I have enough wood of my own."

"I know ye have--consider'ble," responded the young man, in an agony,
"but--"

"I would like the money as soon as convenient," said the doctor.

"I'm--havin'--dreadful--hard work to get--any money myself--lately,"
persisted the young man. "Folks--they promise, but--they don't pay,
an'--"

"Never give or take promises long enough to calculate interest,"
interposed Doctor Prescott, with stern pleasantry; "that's my rule,
young man, and it's the one I expect others to follow in their
business dealings with me. Don't give and don't take; then you'll
make your way in life."

Ozias Lamb had said once, in Jerome's hearing, that all the medicine
that Doctor Prescott ever gave to folks for nothing was good advice,
and he didn't know but then he sent the bill in to the Almighty.
Jerome, who had taken this in, with a sharp wink of appreciation, in
spite of his mother's promptly sending him out of the room, thinking
that such talk savored of irreverence, and was not fit for youthful
ears, remembered it now, as he heard Doctor Prescott admonishing poor
John Upham.

"Know ye've got consider'ble," mumbled John Upham, who had rough
lands enough for a village, but scarce two shillings in pocket, and a
delicate young wife and three babies; "but--thought ye hadn't--no old
apple-tree wood--old apple-tree wood--well seasoned--jest the thing
for the parlor hearth--didn't know but--"

"I should like the money next week," said the doctor, as if he had
not heard a word of poor John's entreaty.

The young man shook his head miserably. "Dun'no' as I can--nohow."

"Well," said the doctor, looking at him calmly, "I'm willing to take
a little land for the medicine and that last winter's bill, when
Johnny had the measles."

Then this poor John Upham, uncouth, and scarcely quicker-witted than
one of his own oxen, but as faithful, and living up wholly to his
humble lights, turned pale through his blushes, and stared at the
doctor as if he could not have heard aright. "Take--my land?" he
faltered.

Doctor Prescott never smiled with his eyes, but only with a
symmetrical curving and lengthening of his finely cut, thin lips. He
smiled so then. "Yes, I am willing to take some land for the debt,
since you have not the money," said he.

"But--that was--father's land."

"Yes, and your father was a good, thrifty man. He did not waste his
substance."

"It was grandfather's, too."

"Yes, it was, I believe."

"It has always been in our--family. It's the Upham--land. I can't
part with it nohow."

"I will take the money, then," said Doctor Prescott.

"I'll raise it just as soon as I can, doctor," cried John Upham,
eagerly. "I've got a man's note for twenty dollars comin' due in
three months; he's sure to pay. An'--there's some cedar ordered,
an'--"

"I must have it next week," said the doctor, "or--" He paused. "I
shall dislike to proceed to extreme measures," he added.

Then John Upham, aroused to boldness by desperation, as the very oxen
will sometimes run in madness if the goad be sharp enough, told
Doctor Prescott to his face, with scarce a stumble in his speech,
that he owned half the town now; that his land was much more valuable
than his, which was mostly swampy woodland and pasture-lands,
bringing in scarcely enough income to feed and clothe his family.

"Sha'n't have 'nough to live on if I let any on't go," said John
Upham, "an' you've got more land as 'tis than any other man in town."

Doctor Prescott did not raise or quicken his clear voice; his eyes
did not flash, but they gave out a hard light. John Upham was like a
giant before this little, neat, wiry figure, which had such a majesty
of port that it seemed to throw its own shadow over him.

"We are not discussing the extent of my possessions," said Doctor
Prescott, "but the extent of your debts." He moved aside, as if to
clear the passage to the door, turning slightly at the same time
towards his other caller, who was cold with indignation upon John
Upham's account and terror upon his own.

Half minded he was, when John Upham went out, with his clamping,
clumsy tread, with his honest head cast down, and no more words in
his mouth for the doctor's last smoothly scathing remark, to follow
him at a bound and ask nothing for himself; but he stood still and
watched him go.

When John Upham had opened the door and was passing through, the
doctor pursued him with yet one more bit of late advice. "It is poor
judgment," said Doctor Prescott, "for a young man to marry and bring
children into the world until he has property enough to support them
without running into debt. You would have done better had you waited,
Mr. Upham. It is what I always tell young men."

Then John Upham turned with the last turn of the trodden worm. "My
wife and my children are my own!" he cried out, with a great roar.
"It's between me and my Maker, my having 'em, and I'll answer to no
man for it!" With that he was gone, and the door shut hard after
him.

Then Doctor Prescott, no whit disturbed, turned to Jerome and looked
at him. Jerome made his manners again. "You are the Edwards boy,
aren't you?" said the doctor.

Jerome humbly acknowledged his identity.

"What do you want? Has your mother sent you on an errand?"

"No, sir."

"Well, what is it, then?"

"Please, sir, may I speak to you a minute?"

"Speak to me?"

"Yes, sir."

Doctor Prescott wore a massive gold watch-chain festooned across his
fine black satin vest. He pulled out before the boy's wondering and
perplexed eyes the great gold timepiece attached to it and looked at
it. "You must be quick," said he. "I have to go in five minutes. I
will give you five minutes by my watch. Begin."

But poor little Jerome, thus driven with such a hard check-rein of
time, paled and reddened and trembled, and could find no words.

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