Jerome, when his mill went down, felt that his dearest hope in life
went with it. His fighting spirit did not fail him; he had not the
least inclination to settle back for the buffets of fate; but the
combat henceforth would be for honor only, not victory. He felt that
his defeats had established themselves in an endless ratio to his
efforts.
"I shall go to work again, and save up money for a new mill. I shall
build it after a long while; but something will always happen to put
me back, and I shall never marry her," he told himself.
Had he the money with which he had made good his father's loss, he
could have rebuilt in a short time, but he did not consider the
possibility of taking that and, perhaps, supplementing it by a loan
from his father. "It would break the old man's heart to touch his
money," he said, "and the mill might go again, and it would all be
lost."
On the morning after the destruction of his mill, Squire Eben Merritt
came to Jerome's door, and gave him a daintily folded little note.
"Lucina sent this to you," he said, and eyed him with a sort of sad
keenness as he took it and thanked him in a bewildered fashion, his
haggard face reddening.
The Squire himself looked as if he had passed a sleepless night, his
fresh color had faded, his face was elongated. "I'm sorry enough
about your loss, my boy," he said, "but I can't say as much as I
might, or feel as much as I might, if my old friend hadn't gone down
in--a deeper flood." The Squire's voice broke. Jerome looked away
from his working face. He had scarcely, in his own selfishness of
loss, grasped the news of Colonel Lamson's death, which had taken
place before the bridge went down and before the doctor arrived. He
muttered something vaguely sympathetic in response. Lucina's little
letter seemed to burn his fingers.
The Squire dashed his hand across his eyes, coughed hard, then
glanced at the letter. "Lucina has been talking to her mother," he
said, abruptly. "It seems the--Colonel Lamson had told her something
that you said to him. We didn't know how matters stood. By-and-by you
and I will have a talk. Don't be too down-hearted over the
mill--there's more than one way out of that difficulty. In the
meantime, there's her letter--I've read it. She's cried all night
because your damned mill has gone, and looks sick enough to call the
doctor this morning, and, by the Lord Harry! sir, you can think
yourself a lucky fellow!" With that the Squire shook his head
fiercely and strode down the path with bowed shoulders. Jerome went
up-stairs with his letter.
"What did the Squire want?" his mother called, but he did not heed
her.
It was his first letter from Lucina. He opened it and read; there
were only a few delicately formed lines, but for him they were as
finely cut, with all possible lights of meaning, as a diamond:
"Dear Friend" [wrote Lucina],--"I beg you to accept my sympathy in
the disaster which has befallen your property, and I implore you not
to be disheartened, and not to consider me unmaidenly for signing
myself your ever faithful and constant friend, through all the joys
or vicissitudes of life.
"Lucina Merritt."
This letter, modelled after the fashion which Lucina had learned at
school, whereby she bound and laced over with set words and phrases,
as with a species of emotional stays, her love and pity, not
considering it decorous to give them full breath, filled Jerome with
happiness and despair. He understood that Colonel Lamson had betrayed
him, that Lucina, all unasked, had bound herself in love and
faithfulness to him through all his failing efforts.
"I won't have it--I won't have it!" he muttered, fiercely, but he
kissed the little letter with exulting rapture. "I've got this much,
anyhow," he thought.
He wondered if he should answer it. How could he refuse her dear
constancy and affection, yet how could he accept it? He had no hope
of marrying her, he reasoned that it would be better for her should
he even repulse her rudely. It would be like screwing the rack for
his own body to do that, but he declared to himself that he ought.
"She'll never marry at all, if she waits for you; it'll hinder her
looking at somebody else; she'll be an old maid, she'll be all alone
in the world, with no husband or children, and you know it," he told
himself, with a kind of mental squaring of his own fists in his face.
All the time, with that curious, dogmatic selfishness which has
sometimes its roots in unselfishness itself, he never considered the
effect upon poor Lucina of the repulse of her love and constancy.
Such was his ardor for unselfishness that, in its pursuit, he would
have made all others selfish nor cared.
That day the sun shone in a bright, windy sky. The snow was nearly
gone, the brook still leaped in a furious torrent, but there was no
more danger from it. The waters were, in fact, receding slowly.
Jerome worked all day near the ruinous site of his mill, and Martin
Cheeseman with him. He had a quantity of logs and lumber, which had
escaped the flood, to care for. Cheeseman inquired if he was going to
rebuild the mill.
"When I get money enough," Jerome replied, with a sturdy fling of a
log.
"'Ain't ye got most enough?"
"No."
"Ye ought to have. What ye done with it?"
"Put it to a good use," Jerome said, with no resentment of the
other's curiosity.
"Why don't ye hire money, if ye 'ain't got enough?"
"I don't hire money," answered Jerome, and heaved another log with a
splendid swing from his shoulders.
Cheeseman looked at him doubtfully. "Well," he said, "I 'ain't got
none to hire. I've got my money out of mills on the banks of roarin'
streams, an' I'm goin' to keep it out. I believe in Providence, but I
don't believe in temptin' of it. I 'ain't got no money to hire."
"And I don't want to hire, so we sha'n't quarrel about that," Jerome
replied, shortly.
"I don't say that I wouldn't let ye have a little money, if you
needed it, an' it was for somethin' safe for both of us," said
Cheeseman, uneasily, "but, as I said before, I don't believe in
temptin' of Providence, especially when it seems set agin you."
"I am not going to shirk any blame off on to Providence," Jerome
responded, scornfully. "It was Stimson's weak dam up above."
"Mebbe the dam was weak, but Providence took advantage of it,"
insisted Cheeseman, who, in spite of his cheerful temperament, had a
gloomy theology. "I'd like to know why ye think your mill went down;
do ye think ye done anything to deserve it?" he said, further, in an
argumentative tone.
"If I thought I had, I'd do it again," Jerome returned, and went off
to a distant pile of lumber out of sound of Cheeseman's voice.
He felt a proud sensitiveness, almost a shame, over his calamity,
which he would have been at a loss to explain. All day long, when men
came to view the scene of disaster, he tried to avoid them. He shrank
in spirit even from their sympathy.
"No worse for me than for anybody else," he would reply, when told
repeatedly, with gruff condolence, that it was hard luck. His
sensitiveness might have arisen from some hereditary taint from his
orthodox ancestors of their belief that misfortune is the whip-lash
for sin, or from his native resentment of pity. At home he could not
talk of it either with his mother or Elmira; as for his father, he
sat in the sun and dozed. It was doubtful if he fully realized what
had happened.
Jerome worked in the woods that day until after dark; when he went
home he found that the Squire had been there with a request for him
to be one of the bearers at the Colonel's funeral. That was
considered a post of melancholy honor, and his mother looked sadly
important over it.
"I s'pose as long as the poor Colonel is gone himself, an' there's
only three left that he used to be so intimate with, that they
thought you would be a good one," said she.
"It is strange they did not ask some one nearer his age," Jerome
said, wonderingly.
The funeral was appointed for the next afternoon. Jerome sat in the
parlor of the Means house with the mourners, who were few, as the
dead man had no kin in Upham. Indeed, there was nobody except his
three old friends, his house-keeper, and Abigail Merritt and Lucina.
Jerome did not look at Lucina, nor she at him; as the service went
on, he heard her weeping softly. The minister, Solomon Wells,
standing near the black length of the coffin, lifted his voice in
eulogy of the dead. The parlor door-way and that of the room beyond,
were set with faces straining with attention.
The minister's voice was weak; every now and then people looked
inquiringly at one another, and there were fine hisses of
interrogation. This parlor of the Means house had never been used
since the time of the lawyer's mother. Women had been hard at work
there all day, but still there was over everything a dim, filmy
effect, as of petrified dust and damp. A great pier-glass loomed out
of the gloom of a wall like a sheet of fog, with scarcely a gleam of
gold left in its tarnished frame. The steel engravings over the
mantel-shelf and between the windows showed blue hazes of mildew. The
mahogany and rosewood of the furniture was white in places; there had
been a good fire all day, but all the covers and the carpet steamed
in one's face with cold damp. However, scarcely a woman in Upham but
would have been willing to be a legitimate mourner for the sake of
investigating the mysterious best-room, which had had a certain glory
in the time of the lawyer's mother.
A great wreath of white flowers lay on the coffin. Its breathless
sweetness clung to the nostrils and seemed to fill the whole house.
Now and then a curl of pungent smoke floated from the door-cracks of
the air-tight stove. All the high lights in the room were the silver
of the coffin trimmings and the white wreath.
Solomon Wells had a difficult task. The popular opinion of Colonel
Jack Lamson in Upham was that he had led a hard life, and had
hastened his end by strong drink. He could neither tell the commonly
accepted truth out of respect to the deceased, nor lies out of regard
to morality. However, one favorable point in the character of the
deceased, upon which people were agreed, was his geniality and bluff
heartiness of good-humor. That the minister so enlarged and displayed
to the light of admiration that he almost made of it the aureole of a
saint. He was obliged then to take refuge in the broad field of
generalities, and discourse upon his text of "All flesh is as grass,"
until his hearers might well lose sight of the importance of any
individual flicker of a grass blade to this wind or that, before the
ultimate end of universal hay.
Solomon Wells was not a brilliant man, but he had a fine instinct for
other people's corns and prejudices. Everybody agreed that his
remarks were able; there were no dissenting voices. He concluded with
an apt and solemnly impressive reference to the wheat and the chaff,
the garnering and the casting into furnace, leaving the application
concerning the deceased wholly to his audience. That completed his
success. When he sat down there was a heaving sigh of applause.
All through the discourse, the hymns, and the concluding prayer,
Lucina sobbed softly at intervals, her face hidden in her cambric
handkerchief. Somehow it went to her tender soul that the poor
Colonel should be lying there with no wife or child to mourn him;
then she had loved him, as she had loved everybody and everything
that had come kindly into her life. Every time she thought of the
corals and the beautiful ear-rings which the Colonel had given her
she wept afresh. Moreover, the motive for tears is always complex;
hers may have been intensified somewhat by her anxiety about her
lover and his misfortune. Now and then her mother touched her arm
remonstratingly. "Hush; you'll make yourself sick, child," she
whispered, softly; but poor Lucina was helpless before her grief.
The Squire, John Jennings, and Lawyer Means all sat by the dead body
of their friend, with pale and sternly downcast faces. Jerome looked
scarcely less sad. He remembered as he sat there every kind word
which the Colonel had ever spoken to him, and every one seemed
magnified a thousand-fold. This call to lend his living strength
towards the bearing of the dead man to his last home seemed like a
call to a labor of love and gratitude, though he was still much
perplexed that he should have been selected.
"There's Doctor Prescott and Cyrus Robinson and Uncle Ozias--any one
of them nearer his own age," he thought. It was not until the next
day but one that the mystery was solved. That night Lawyer Eliphalet
Means came to see Jerome, and informed him that the Colonel had left
a will, whereby he was entitled to a legacy of twenty-five thousand
dollars.