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.