Jerome's mind, during the two days after the party, was in a sort of
dazzle of efflorescence, and could not precipitate any clear ideas
for his own understanding. Love had been so outside his calculation
of life, that his imagination, even, had scarcely grasped the
possibility of it.
He worked on stolidly, having all the time before his mental vision,
like one with closed eyes in a bright room, a shifting splendor as of
strange scenes and clouds.
He could not sleep nor eat, his spirit seemed to inhabit his flesh so
thoroughly as to do away with the material needs of it. Still, all
things that appealed to his senses seemed enhanced in power, becoming
so loud and so magnified that they produced a confusion of hearing
and vision. The calls of the spring birds sounded as if in his very
ear, with an insistence of meaning; the spring flowers bloomed where
he had never seen them, and the fragrance of each was as evident to
him as a voice.
Jerome wondered vaguely if this strange exaltation of spirit were
illness. Sunday morning, when he could not eat his breakfast, his
mother told him that there were red spots on his cheeks, and she
feared he was feverish.
He laughed scornfully at the idea, but looked curiously at himself in
his little square of mirror, when he was dressing for meeting. The
red spots were there, burning in his cheeks, and his eyes were
brilliant. For a minute he wondered anxiously if he were feverish, if
he were going to be ill, and, if so, what his mother and sister would
do. He even felt his own pulse as he stood there, and discovered that
it was quick. Then, all at once, his face in the glass looked out at
him with a flash as from some sub-state of consciousness in the
depths of his own being, which he could not as yet quite fathom.
"I don't know what ails me," he muttered, as he turned away. He felt
as he had when puzzling over the unknown quantity in an algebraic
equation. It was not until he was sitting in meeting, looking forward
at Lucina's fair profile, cut in clear curves like a lily, that the
solution came to him.
"I'm what they call in love," Jerome said to himself. He turned very
pale, and looked away from Lucina. He felt as if suddenly he had come
to the brink of some dread abyss of nature.
"That is why I want to go to see her to-night," he thought. "I won't
go; I won't!"
Just before the bell stopped tolling, Doctor Prescott's family went
up the aisle in stately file, the doctor marching ahead with an
imperious state which seemed to force contributions from followers
and beholders, as if a peacock were to levy new eyes for his plumage
from all admiration along his path. The doctor's wife, in her satins
and Indian cashmeres, followed him, moving with massive gentleness, a
long ostrich plume in her bonnet tossing softly. Last came Lawrence,
slight and elegantly erect, in his city broadcloth and linen, a
figure so like his father as to seem almost his double, and yet with
a difference beyond that of age, so palpable that a child might see
it--a self-spelled word, with a different meaning in two languages.
The Merritt pew was just behind Doctor Prescott's. Lawrence had not
been seated long before he turned slightly and cast a smiling glance
around at beautiful Lucina, who inclined her head softly in response.
Jerome had thus far never felt on his own account jealousy of any
human being, he had also never been made ignominious by self-pity;
now, both experiences came to him. Seeing that look of Lawrence
Prescott's, he was suddenly filled with that bitterness of grudging
another the sweet which one desires for one's self which is like no
other bitterness on earth; and he who had hitherto pitied only the
deprivations of others pitied his own, and so became the pauper of
his own spirit. "He likes her," he told himself; "of course she'll
like him. He's Doctor Prescott's son. He's got everything without
working for it--I've got nothing."
Jerome looked at neither of them again. When meeting was over, he
strode rapidly down the aisle, lest he encounter them.
"What ailed you in meeting, Jerome?" Elmira asked as they were going
home.
"Nothing."
"You looked so pale once I thought you were going to faint away."
"I tell you nothing ailed me."
"You were dreadfully pale," persisted Elmira. She was so happy that
morning that she had more self-assertion than usual. Lawrence
Prescott had looked around at her three times; he had smiled at her
once, when he turned to leave the pew at the close of meeting. Jerome
had not noticed that, and she had not noticed Lawrence's smile at
Lucina. She had been too fluttered to look up when Lawrence first
entered.
That afternoon Jerome and Elmira set out for meeting again, but when
they reached the turn of the road Jerome stopped.
"I guess I won't go this afternoon," said he.
"Why, what's the matter? Don't you feel well?" Elmira asked.
"Yes, I feel well enough, but it's warm. I guess I won't go." Elmira
stared at him wonderingly. "Run along; you'll be late," said he,
trying to smile.
"I'm afraid you are sick, Jerome."
"I tell you I am not. You'll be late."
Finally Elmira went on, though with many backward glances. Jerome sat
down on the stone wall, behind a huge growth of lilac. He could see
through a leafy screen the people in the main road wending their way
to meeting. He had suddenly resolved not to go, lest he see Lucina
Merritt again.
Presently there was out in the main road a graceful swing of light
skirts and a gliding of shoulders and head which made his heart leap.
Lucina was going to meeting with her mother. The moment she stirred
the distance with dim advances of motion, Jerome knew her. It seemed
to him that he would have known her shadow among a nightful, her step
among a thousand. It was as if he had developed ultimate senses for
her recognition.
Jerome, when he had once glimpsed her, looked away until he was sure
that she had passed. When the bell had stopped ringing, he arose and
climbed over the stone wall, then went across a field to the path
skirting the poor-house which he had used to follow to school.
When he came opposite the poor-house in the hollow, he looked down at
it. The day was so mild that the paupers were swarming into evidence
like insects. Many of the house windows were wide open, and old heads
with palsied nods, like Chinese toys, appeared in them; some children
were tumbling about before the door.
Old Peter Thomas--who seemed to have become crystallized, as it were,
in age and decrepitude, and advanced no further in either--was
pottering around the garden, eying askant, like an old robin, the new
plough furrows. Pauper women humped their calico backs over the green
slopes of the fields, searching for dandelion greens, but not
digging, because it was Sunday.
Their shrill, plaintive voices, calling to one another, came plainly
to Jerome. When he reached the barn, there sat Mindy Toggs, as of
old, chanting his accusatory refrain, "Simon Basset, Simon Basset."
Hitherto Jerome had viewed all this humiliation of poverty from a
slight but no less real eminence of benefaction; to-day he had a
miserable sense of community with it. "It is not having what we want
that makes us all paupers," he told himself, bitterly; "I'm as much a
pauper as any of them. I'm in a worse poor-house than the town of
Upham's. I'm in the poor-house of life where the paupers are all fed
on stones."
Then suddenly, as he went on, a brave spirit of revolt seized him.
"It is wanting what we have not that makes us paupers," he said, "and
I will not be one, if I tear my heart out."
Jerome climbed another stone wall into a shrubby pasture, and went
across that to a pine wood, and thence, by devious windings and
turnings, through field and forest, to his old woodland. It was his
now; he had purchased it back from the Squire. Then he sat himself
down and looked about him out of his silence and self-absorption, and
it was as if he had come into a very workshop of nature. The hummings
of her wheels and wings were loud in his ear, the fanning of them
cool on his cheek. The wood here was very light and young, and the
spring sun struck the roots of the trees.
Little swarms of gossamer gnats danced in the sunlit spaces; when he
looked down there was the blue surprise of violets, and anemones
nodded dimly out of low shadows. There was a loud shrilling of birds,
and the tremulousness of the young leaves seemed to be as much from
unseen wings as wind. However, the wind blew hard in soft, frequent
gusts, and everything was tilting and bowing and waving.
Jerome looked at it all, and it had a new meaning for him. The outer
world is always tinctured more or less to the sight by one's mental
states; but who can say, when it comes to outlooks from the keenest
stresses of spirit, how impalpable the boundary-lines between
beholder and object may grow? Who knows if a rose does not really
cease to be, in its own sense, to a soul in an extremity of joy or
grief?
Whatever it might be for others, the spring wood was not to-day what
it had ever been before to Jerome. All its shining, and sweetening,
and growing were so forced into accord with himself that the whole
wood took, as it were, the motion of his own soul. Jerome looked at a
fine young poplar-tree, and saw not a tree but a maid, revealing with
innocent helplessness her white body through her skirts of
transparent green. The branches flung out towards him like a maiden's
arms, with shy intent of caresses. Every little flower upon which his
idle gaze fell was no flower, but an eye of love--a bird called to
his mate with the call of his own heart. Every sight, and sound, and
sweetness of the wood wooed and tempted him, with the reflex motion
of his own new ardor of love and passion. He had not gone to meeting
lest he see Lucina Merritt again, and wished to drive her image from
his mind, and here he was peopling his solitude with symbols of her
which were bolder than she, and made his hunger worse to bear.
A childlike wonder was over him at the whole. "Why haven't I ever
felt this way before?" he thought. He recalled all the young men he
knew who had married during the last few years, and thought how they
must have felt as he felt now, and he had no conception of it. He had
been secretly rather proud that he had not encumbered himself with a
wife and children, but had given his best strength to less selfish
loves. He remembered his scorn of the school-master and his adoring
girls, and realized that his scorn had been due, as scorn largely is,
to ignorance. Instead of contempt, a fierce pity seized him for all
who had given way to this great need of love, and yet he felt strange
indignation and shame that he himself had come into the common lot.
"It is no use; I can't," he said, quite out loud, and set a hard face
against all the soft lights and shadows which moved upon him with the
motion of his own desires.
When he said "I can't," Jerome meant not so much any ultimate end of
love as love itself. He never for a second had a thought that he
could marry Lucina Merritt, Squire Eben Merritt's daughter, nor
indeed would if he could. He never fancied that that fair lady in her
silk attire could come to love him so unwisely as to wed him, and had
he fancied it the fierce revolt at receiving so much where he could
give so little, which was one of his first instincts, would have
seized him. Never once he thought that he could marry Lucina, and
take her into his penury or profit by her riches. All he resolved
against was the love itself, which would make him weak with the
weakness of all unfed things, and he made a stand of rebellion.
"I'm going to put her out of my mind," said Jerome, and stood up to
his full height among the sweet spring growths, flinging back his
head, as if he defied Nature herself, and went pushing rudely through
the tremulous outreaching poplar branches, and elbowed a cluster of
white flowering bushes huddling softly together, like maidens who
must put themselves in a man's way, though to their own shaming.