JUD AND JUSTINE.
Dudley Sherrod was the only son of John Sherrod, who had died about
four years before the marriage. Up to the day of his death he was
considered the wealthiest farmer in Clay Township. On that day he was
a pauper; his lands were no longer his own; his wife and his son were
penniless. In an upstairs room of the great old farmhouse, built by
his grandfather when the country was new, he blew out his brains,
unable to face the ruin that fate had brought to his door.
His father had been a member of the Legislature, and the boy had spent
two years in the city, attending a medical college. When the diploma
came he went back to the old home and hung out his shingle in quaint
little Glenville. In less than a year he brought a bride to the
farm--Cora Bloodgood, the daughter of a banker in the capital city of
his State. Before the end of another year he was, as heir, owner of
all his father's acres. So it was that John and Cora Sherrod began
life rich and happy. Their boy was born, grew up a bright and
sprightly lad, and was sent to college. From the rude country
schoolhouse and its simple teachings he was sent to the busy
university, among city boys and city girls, miserable in ungainly
self-consciousness, altogether out of place. He left behind him the
country lads and lasses, the tow-heads and the barefoots, and his heart
was sore. But in the beginning of his second year the simplicity of
his rural heart showed signs of giving way to urban improvements. His
strength won for him a place on the football team, and the sense of
dignity of this position displaced his self-consciousness and taught
him to be interested in the world beyond his home. He began to know
something besides the memory of green fields and meadows and clear blue
skies.
All these months he was faithful to a slip of a girl down in the
country to whom he had feared to utter a word of love. She knew she
loved him because she had cried when he went away and had cried when he
came back. Letters, stiff and painfully correct as to spelling and
chirography, came each week from dear little Justine Van. To her his
long letters, homesickness crowding between the lines, although she
could not see it, were like messages from paradise. A dozen times a
day she read each letter as she sat in her room, or in the hated
schoolroom at Glenville, or in the shady orchard, or in the lonely
lane. She longed to have him back at home, to hear his merry laugh, to
romp with him as they had romped before he went away to school--but
here she blushed and remembered that he was tall now, and dreadfully
old and grand, and she was--she was fifteen! Jud thrashed a fellow
student one day because he poked fun at an old tintype of Justine that
he happened to see in the boy's room. The victim had laughed at the
green bonnet, the long pig-tails, and the wide eyes of the girl in the
picture--"just as if they were looking for the photographer's bird, you
know."
Near the middle of his second year at college the crash came and the
half-dazed boy hurried home. His father was dead and the whole country
was telling the stories of his great financial losses. Every dollar,
every foot of land had been swept away by reverses arising from
investments in Arizona mines. Captain James Van went down in the same
disaster. When word reached his home of the suicide of John Sherrod,
he was on his way to the barn with a pistol hidden over his heart.
Horror and the awakening of courage made him cast the pistol aside and
turn to face the blow as a brave man should, with his wife and child
behind his back.
Jud and Justine could not at first, and did not for many days, realize
the force of the blow. One had lost father as well as home; the other
had lost home and had sunk to a depth of poverty that grew more and
more appalling as her young mind began to understand. The boy, when he
finally grasped the situation, bared his arms and set forth to support
himself and his mother by hard work. The shock of the suicide was too
great for Mrs. Sherrod. Her reason fled soon after her husband was
laid in the grave, but it was a year before death took her to him.
During that last year of life she lived in the old place, a helpless
invalid, mentally and physically, although the property belonged to
another. David Strong held a mortgage on the home place, but he did
not foreclose it until she was gone.
For a year Jud cared for his mother, and worked in the fields with
David Strong's men at wages of twelve dollars a month. Half of the
year's crop Strong gave to the widow of John Sherrod, although not a
penny's worth of it was hers by right. After her death Strong and his
family moved into the big old house, and Jud Sherrod lived in a room in
what had been his home.
Justine Van's grandmother, in her will, left to the girl a thirty-acre
piece of ground, half timber, half cultivated, about a mile from the
white house in which the beneficiary was born and which was swallowed
up by the great disaster. Bereft of every penny, James Van took his
wife and daughter to the miserable little cottage. The girl shouldered
as much of the burden of poverty as her young and tender shoulders
could carry. She begged for an appointment as teacher in the humble
schoolhouse where her a-b-abs had been learned, and for two years and a
half before her marriage she had taught the little flock of boys and
girls. Especially necessary did this means of earning a livelihood
become when, two years after the failure, her father died. Then Mrs.
Van followed him, and Justine, not nineteen, was face to face with the
world, a trembling, guileless child.
Her wages at the schoolhouse were twenty-five dollars a month, for six
months in a year, and the yield of grain from her poorly tilled farm
was barely enough to pay the taxes and the help hire. Old Jim Hardesty
farmed the place for her, and he robbed her. For six months after the
mother's death she lived alone in the cottage, and then the neighbors
finally taking the matter in hand and insisting that she be provided
with a companion, her old nurse, Mrs. Crane, came to the place. She
was shrewd from years of adversity and persuaded Justine to send Jim
Hardesty packing--and that was the hardest duty Justine had ever had to
meet.
The discouraged boy, over on David Strong's place, worn thin with hard
work and sickness, deprived of every chance, as he thought, to realize
his ambitions, found in the girl a sympathetic comrade. Of all the
people in his world she was the only one who understood his desires,
and could, in a way, share with him the despair that made life as he
lived it seem like a narrow cell from which he could look longingly
with no hope of escape. Tired and sore from misfortune, these two
simple, loving natures turned to each other. His first trembling kiss
upon her surprised, parted lips was a treasure that never left her
memory. The bloom came to her cheeks, lightness touched her flagging
heart, happiness shone through the gloom, and the whole countryside
marveled at her growing beauty. This slim, budding maid of the meadow
and wood was as fair a bit as nature ever perfected. The sweetness and
purity of womanhood undefiled dwelt in her body and soul. No taint of
worldliness had blighted her. She was a pure, simple, country girl,
ignorant of wile, sinless and trustful.
Justine was like her father, fair faced and straight of form. Her hair
was long and reddish-brown, her brow was broad and full, her eyes big
and brown and soft with love, her cheeks smooth and clear. A trifle
above the medium height, straight and strong, of slender mold, she was
as graceful as a gazelle. Health seemed to glow in the atmosphere
about her.
With Jud, too, the realization of love and the feeling that there was
something to live for, brought a change. His stooping shoulders
straightened, his eyes brightened, his steps became springy. He
whistled and sang at his work, took an interest in life, and presently
even resumed his drawing. The country folk winked knowingly. The two
were constantly together when opportunity afforded, so it soon became
common report that he was her "feller, fer sure," and she was his
"girl."
One evening, as they sat in the dusk down by the creek, which ran
through her bit of pasture land, Jud drew his mother's plain gold ring
from his little finger and slipped it upon Justine's third. They were
betrothed.
Never were such sweethearts as Jud and Justine. They were lovers,
friends, comrades. Her sweet, serious face took a new life, new color
at his approach, her dreamy eyes grew softer and more wistful, her low
voice more musical. Her soul was his, her life belonged to him, her
heart beat only for him. Jud's famished hopes of something beyond the
farm found fresh encouragement in her simple, wondering praise. She
was his critic, his unconscious mentor. Beneath her untrained eye he
sketched as he never sketched before. Looking over his shoulder as he
lay stretched upon the grass, she marveled at the skill with which his
pencil transferred the world about them to the dearly bought drawing
pads, and her enthusiastic little cries of delight were tributes that
brought confidence to the heart of the artist.
The girl had scores of admirers. Every boy, every man in the township
longed to "make up" to her, but she gave no thought to them. Half a
dozen widowers with children asked her to marry them. She and Jud
laughed when Eversole Baker besought her to become mother to his nine
children, including two daughters older than herself.
But there was one determined suitor, and she feared him with an uncanny
dread that knew no rest until she was safely Jud's on the wedding
night. That one was Eugene Crawley, drunkard and blasphemer.
Crawley was born in the dense timber land north of Glenville. His
father had been a woodchopper, hunter, and fisherman. Hard stories
came down to town about Sam Crawley. Of 'Gene, the boy, nothing
against his honesty at least could be said. He was a vile wretch when
drinking, little better when sober, but he was as honest as the sun.
He had gone to school with Jud and Justine when they were little
"tads," and his rough affection for her began when they were mastering
the "first reader." He and Jud had fought over her twice and each had
been a victor. The girl despised him, from childhood, and he knew it.
Still, he clung to the hope that he could take her away from his rival.
He dogged her footsteps, frightened her with his mad protestations, and
finally alarmed her by his threats. The day before the wedding he had
met her as she left the schoolhouse and had sworn to kill Jud Sherrod.
She did not tell Jud of this, nor did she tell him that she had pleaded
with Crawley to spare her lover's life. Had she told Jud all this she
would have been obliged to tell him how the brute had suddenly burst
into tears and promised he would not harm Jud if he could help it.