Innocence and ignorance can be as easily hood-winked by kindness as
by contumely.
This little Jerome, who had leaped, under the spur of necessity, to
an independence of understanding beyond his years, allowed himself to
be quite misled by the Squire as to his attitude in the matter of the
mortgage. In spite of the momentary light reflected from the doctor's
shrewder intelligence which had flashed upon his scheme, the Squire
was able to delude him with a renewed belief in it, after he had
informed him of the transfer of the mortgage-deed, which took place
the next morning.
"I decided to buy that wood-lot of your father's, as your mother was
willing," said the Squire; "and as I had not the money in hand to pay
down, I gave my note to your mother for it, as you proposed the
doctor should do, and allowed six per cent. interest."
Jerome looked at him in a bewildered way.
"Well, what is the matter? Aren't you as willing to take my note as
the doctor's?" asked the Squire.
"Is it fair?" asked Jerome, hesitatingly.
"Fair to you?"
"No; to you."
"Of course it is fair enough to me. Why not?"
"The doctor didn't think it was," said the boy, getting more and more
bewildered.
"Why didn't he?"
"I don't--know--" faltered Jerome; and he did not, for the glimmer of
light which he had got from the doctor's worldly wisdom had quite
failed him. He had seen quite clearly that it was not fair, but now
he could not.
"Oh, well, I dare say it is fairer for me than for him," said the
Squire, easily. "Probably he had the ready money; I haven't the ready
money; that makes all the difference. Don't you see it does?"
"Yes--sir," replied Jerome, hesitatingly, and tried to think he saw;
but he did not. A mind so young and immature as his is not unlike the
gaseous age of planets, overlaid with great shifting masses of vapor,
which part to disclose dazzling flame-points and incomparable gleams,
then close again. Only time can accomplish a nearer balance of light
in minds and planets.
Then, too, as the first strain of unwonted demands relaxed a little
through use, Jerome's mental speed, which seemed to have taken him
into manhood at a bound, slackened, and he even fell back somewhat in
his tracks. He was still beyond what he had ever been before, for one
cannot return from growth. He would never be as much of a child
again, but he was more of a child than he had been yesterday.
His mother also had been instrumental towards replacing him in his
old ways. Ann, after her day of crushed apathy, aroused herself
somewhat. When the Squire, the lawyer, and Doctor Prescott came the
next morning, she kept them waiting outside while she put on her best
cap. She had a view of the road from her rocking-chair, and when she
saw the three gentlemen advancing with a slow curve of progress
towards her gate, which betokened an entrance, she called sharply to
Elmira, who was washing dishes, "Go into the bedroom and get my best
cap, quick," at the same time twitching off the one upon her head.
When poor little Elmira turned and stared, her pretty face quite
pale, thinking her mother beside herself, she made a fierce, menacing
gesture with her nervous elbow, and spoke again, in a whisper, lest
the approaching guests hear: "Why don't you start? Take this old cap
and get my best one, quick!" And the little girl scuttled into the
bedroom just as the first knock came on the door. Ann kept the three
dignitaries waiting until she adjusted her cap to her liking, and the
knocks had been several times repeated before she sent the trembling
Elmira to admit them and usher them into the best parlor, whither she
followed, hitching herself through the entry in her chair, and
disdainfully refusing all offers of assistance. She even thrust out
an elbow repellingly at the Squire, who had sprung forward to her
aid.
"No, thank you, sir," said she; "I don't need any help; I always go
around the house so. I ain't helpless."
Ann, when she had brought her chair to a stand, sat facing the three
callers, each of whose salutations she returned with a curtly polite
bow. She had a desperate sense of being at bay, and that the hands of
all these great men, whose supremacy she acknowledged with the futile
uprearing of any angry woman, were against her. She eyed the lawyer,
Eliphalet Means, with particular distrust. She had always held all
legal proceedings as a species of quagmire to entrap the innocent and
unwary. She watched while the lawyer took some documents from his bag
and laid them on the table. "I won't sign a thing, nohow," she avowed
to herself, and shut her mouth tight.
Squire Merritt discovered that besides dealing with his own scruples
he had to overcome his beneficiary's.
It took a long time to convince Ann that she was not being
overreached and cheated. She seemed absolutely incapable of
understanding the transfer of the mortgage note from Doctor Prescott
to Squire Merritt.
"I've signed one mortgage," said she, firmly; "I put my name under my
husband's. I ain't goin' to sign another."
"But nobody wants you to sign anything, Mrs. Edwards. The mortgage
note is simply transferred to Squire Merritt here. We only want you
to understand it," said Lawyer Means. He had a curiously impersonal
manner of dealing with women, being wont to say that only a man who
expected good sense in womenkind was surprised when he did not find
it.
"I ain't goin' to put two mortgages on this place," said Ann,
fronting him with the utter stupidity of obstinacy.
"Let me explain it to you, Mrs. Edwards," said Eliphalet Means, with
no impatience. He regarded a woman as so incontrovertibly a
patience-tryer, from the laws of creation, that he would as soon have
waxed impatient with the structural order of things. He endeavored to
explain matters with imperturbable persistency, but Ann was still
unconvinced.
"I ain't goin' to sign my name to any other mortgage," said she.
Jerome, who had stood listening in the door, slid up to his mother
and touched her arm. "Oh, mother," he whispered, "I know all about
it--it's all right!"
Ann gave him a thrust with a little sharp elbow. "What do you know
about it?" she cried. "I'm here to look out for you and your sister,
and take care of what little we've got, an' I'm goin' to. Go out an'
tend to your work."
"Oh, mother, do let me stay!"
"Go right along, I tell you." And Jerome, who was the originator of
all this, went out helplessly, slighted and indignant. He did think
the Squire might have interceded for him to stay, knowing what he
knew. Even youth has its disadvantages.
But Squire Eben stood somewhat aloof, looking at the small, frail,
pugnacious woman in the rocking-chair with perplexity and growing
impatience. He wanted to go fishing that morning, and the vision of
the darting trout in their still, clear pool was before him, like a
vision of his own earthly paradise. He gave a despairing glance at
Doctor Prescott, who had hitherto said little. "Can't you convince
her it is all right? She knows you better than the rest of us," he
whispered.
Doctor Prescott nodded, arose--he had been sitting apart--went to
Mrs. Edwards, and touched her shoulder. "Mrs. Edwards," said he--Ann
gave a terrified yet wholly unyielding flash of her black eyes at
him--"Mrs. Edwards, will you please attend to what we have come to
tell you. I have transferred the mortgage note given me by your late
husband to Squire Eben Merritt; there is nothing for you to sign. You
will simply pay the interest money to him, instead of to me."
"You can tear me to pieces, if you want to," said Ann, "but I won't
sign away what little my poor husband left to me and my children, for
you or any other man."
"Look at me," said the doctor.
Ann never stirred her head.
"Look at me."
Ann looked.
"Now," said the doctor, "you listen and you understand. I can't waste
any more time here. Squire Merritt has bought that mortgage which
your husband gave me, and paid me for it in land. You have simply
nothing to do with it, except to understand. Nobody wants you to sign
anything."
Ann looked at him with some faint light of comprehension through her
wild impetus of resistance. "I'd ruther it would stay the way it was
before," said she. "My husband gave you the mortgage. He thought you
were trustworthy. I'd jest as soon pay you interest money as Squire
Merritt."
Then Eliphalet Means spoke dryly, still with that utter patience of
preparation and expectation: "If Doctor Prescott retains this
mortgage he intends to foreclose."
Ann looked at him, and then at Doctor Prescott. She gasped,
"Foreclose!"
Doctor Prescott nodded.
"You mean to foreclose? You mean to take this place away from us?"
Ann cried, shrilly. "You with all you've got, and we a widow and
orphans! And you callin' yourself a good man an' a pillar of the
sanctuary!"
Doctor Prescott's face hardened. "Your husband owed me for a
half-year's interest," he began, calmly.
"My husband didn't owe you any interest money. He paid you in work
and wood."
"That was for medical attendance," proceeded the doctor,
imperturbably. "He owed me half a year's interest. I considered it
best for your interests, as well as mine, to foreclose, and should
have done so had not Squire Merritt taken the matter out of my hands.
I should advise him to a like measure, but he is his own best judge."
"Squire Merritt will not foreclose," said Eliphalet Means; "and he
will be easy about the payments."
"Well," said Ann, with a strange, stony look, "I guess I understand.
I'm satisfied."
Doctor Prescott gathered up his medicine-chest, bade the others a
gruff, ceremonious good-morning, and went out. His sulky had been
drawn up before the gate for some time, and Jake Noyes had been
lounging about the yard.
The lawyer and the Squire lingered, as they had yet the business
regarding the sale of the woodland to arrange.
Curiously enough, Ann was docile as one could wish about that.
Whether her previous struggle had exhausted her or whether she began
to feel some confidence in her advisers, they could not tell. She
made no difficulty, but after all was adjusted she looked at the
lawyer with a shrewd, sharp gleam in her eyes.
"Doctor Prescott can't get his claws on it now, anyhow," she said;
"and he always wanted it, 'cause it joined his."
The Squire and the lawyer looked at each other. The Squire with
humorous amazement, the lawyer with a wink and glance of wise
reminder, as much as to say: "You know what I have always said about
women. Here is a woman."
Jerome was digging out in his garden-patch, and Elmira, in her blue
sunbonnet, was standing, full of scared questioning, before him, when
the Squire came lounging up the slope and reported as before said, to
the convincing of the boy in innocent credulity.
When he had finished, he laid hold on Elmira's little cotton sleeve
and pulled her up to her brother, and stood before them with a kindly
hand on a shoulder of each, smiling down at them with infinite
good-humor and protection.
"Don't you worry now, children," he said. "Be good and mind your
mother, and you'll get along all right. We'll manage about the
interest money, and there'll be meal in the barrel and a roof over
your heads as long as you want it, according to the Scriptures, I'll
guarantee."
With that Squire Eben gave each a shake, to conceal, maybe, the
tenderness of pity in him, which he might, in his hearty and merry
manhood, have accounted somewhat of a shame to reveal, as well as
tears in his blue eyes, and was gone down the hill with a great
laugh.
Elmira looked after him. "Ain't he good?" she whispered. But as for
Jerome, he stood trembling and quivering and looking down at a print
the Squire's great boot had made in the soft mould. When Elmira had
gone, he went down on his knees and kissed it passionately.