Jerome, A Poor Man Part 33

Upham," Jerome added. He had a great pitiful imagination for this unknown woe of maternity, which possibly gave him as great a power of sympathy as actual knowledge.

"You are a good fellow, Jerome, an' I hope I shall be able to do somethin' to pay you some day," John Upham said, huskily, when they were in the bedroom putting that also in order.

"I don't want any pay for what I give," Jerome returned.

When Jerome started for home, Mrs. Upham and the baby were both asleep in the clean bedroom. Retracing his steps along the pleasant road, he was keenly happy, with perhaps the true happiness of his life, to which he would always turn at last from all others, and which would survive the death and loss of all others.

He pictured John Upham's house as he found it and as he left it with purest self-gratulation. He had not gone far before he heard a clamor of childish voices; there were two, but they sounded like a troop.

John Upham's twin girls broke through the wayside bushes like little wild things. Their hands were full of withering flowers. He called them, and bade them be very still when they went home, so as not to waken their mother and the baby, and they hung their heads with bashful a.s.sent. They were pretty children in spite of their soiled frocks, with their little, pink, moist faces and curling crops of yellow hair.

"If you keep still and don't wake them up, I will bring you both some peppermints when I come to-morrow," said Jerome. He had nearly reached the village when he met the two eldest Upham children. They were boys, the elder twelve, the younger eight, st.u.r.dy little fellows, advancing with a swinging trot, one behind the other, both chewing spruce-gum. They had been in the woods, on their way home, for a supply. Jerome stopped them, and repeated the charge he had given to the little girls, then kept on. The bell was ringing for afternoon meeting--in fact, it was almost done. Jerome walked faster, for he intended to go. He drew near the little white-steepled meeting-house standing in its small curve of greensward, with the row of white posts at the side, to which were tied the farmers' great plough-horses harnessed to covered wagons and dusty chaises, and then he caught a glimpse of something bright, like a moving flower-bush, in the road ahead. Squire Eben Merritt, his wife, his sister Miss Camilla, and his daughter Lucina, were all on their way to afternoon meeting.

The Squire was with them that day, leaving heroically his trout-pools and his fis.h.i.+ng-fields; for was it not his pretty Lucina's second Sunday only at home, and was he not as eager to be with her as any lover? Squire Eben had gained perhaps twenty pounds of flesh to his great frame and a slight overcast of gray to his golden beard; otherwise he had not changed in Jerome's eyes since he was a boy. The Squire's wife Abigail, like many a small, dark woman who has never shown in her looks the true heyday of youth, had apparently not aged nor altered at all. Little and keenly pleasant, like some insignificant but brightly flavored fruit, set about with crisp silk flounced to her trim waist, holding her elbows elegantly aslant under her embroidered silk shawl, her small head gracefully alert in her bright-ribboned bonnet, she stepped beside her great husband, and then came Lucina with Miss Camilla.

Miss Camilla glided along drooping slenderly in black lace and lilac silk, with a great wrought-lace veil flowing like a bride's over her head, and shading with a black tracery of leaves and flowers her fair faded face; but Jerome saw her no more than he would have seen a shadow beside Lucina.

If Lucina's parents had changed little, she had changed much, with the wonderful change of a human spring, and this time Jerome saw her as well as her gown. She wore that same silken gown of a pale-blue color, spangled with roses, and the skirts were so wide and trained over a hoop and starched petticoats that they swung and tilted like a great double flower, and hit on this side and that with a quick musical slur. Over Lucina's shoulders, far below her waist, fell her wonderful fair hair, in curls, and every curl might well have proved a twining finger of love. Lucina wore a bonnet of fine straw, trimmed simply enough with a white ribbon, but over her face hung a white veil of rich lace, and through it her pink cheeks and lips and great blue eyes and lines of golden hair shone and bloomed and dazzled like a rose through a frosted window.

Lucina Merritt was a rare beauty, and she knew it, from her looking-gla.s.s as well as the eyes of others, and dealt with herself meekly wherewithal, and prayed innocently that she might consider more the embellishment of her heart and her mind than her person, and not to be too well pleased at the admiring looks of those whom she met. Indeed, it was to this end that she wore the white veil over her face, though not one of the maiden mates would believe that. She fancied that it somewhat dimmed her beauty, and that folk were less given to staring at her, not realizing that it added to her graces that subtlest one of suggestion, and that folk but stared the harder to make sure whether they saw or imagined such charms.

Jerome Edwards saw this beautiful Lucina coming, and it was suddenly as if he entered a new atmosphere. He did not know why, but he started as if he had gotten a shock, and his heart beat hard.

Squire Merritt made as if he would greet him in his usual hearty fas.h.i.+on, but remembering the day, and hearing, too, the first strains of the opening hymn from the meeting-house, for the bell had stopped tolling, he gave him only a friendly nod as he pa.s.sed on with his wife. Miss Camilla inclined her head with soft graciousness; but Jerome looked at none of them except Lucina. She did not remember him; she glanced slightly at his face, and then her long fair lashes swept again the soft bloom of her cheeks, and her silken skirts fairly touched him as she pa.s.sed. Jerome stood still after they had all entered the meeting-house; the long drone of the hymn sounded very loud in his ears.

He made a motion towards the meeting-house, hesitated, made another, then turned decidedly to the road. It seemed suddenly to him that his clothes must be soiled and dusty after his work in John Upham's house, that his hair could not be smooth, that he did not look well enough to go to meeting. So he went home, yielding for the first time, without knowing that he did so, to that decorative impulse which comes to men and birds alike when they would woo their mates.

Chapter XXII

The next morning Jerome went early to his uncle Ozias Lamb for some finished shoes, which he was to take to Dale. For the first time in his life, when he entered the shop, he had an impulse to avert his eyes and not meet his uncle's fully. Ozias had grown old rapidly of late. He sat, with his usual stiff crouch, on his bench and hammered away at a shoe-heel on his lapstone. His hair and beard were white and s.h.a.ggy, his blue eyes peered sharply, as from a very ambush of old age, at Jerome loading himself with the finished shoes.

After the usual half-grunt of greeting, which was scarcely more than a dissyllabic note of salutation between two animals, Ozias was silent until Jerome was going out.

"Ain't ye well this mornin'?" he asked then.

"Yes," replied Jerome, "I'm well enough."

"When a man's smart," said Ozias Lamb, "and has got money in his pocket, and don't want folks to know it, he don't keep feelin' of it to see if it's safe. He acts as if he hadn't got any money, or any pocket, neither. I s'pose that's what you're tryin' to do."

"Don't know what you mean," returned Jerome, coloring.

"Oh, nothin'. Go along," said his uncle.

But he spoke again before Jerome was out of hearing. "There ain't any music better than a squeak, in the grind you an' me have got to make out of life," said he, "an' don't you go to thinkin' there is. If you ever think you hear it, it's only in your own ears, an' you might as well make up your mind to it."

"I made up my mind to it as long ago as I can remember," Jerome answered back, yet scarcely with bitterness, for the very music which his uncle denied was too loud in his ears for him to disbelieve it.

When Jerome was returning from Dale, an hour later, his back bent beneath great sheaves of newly cut shoes, like a harvester's with wheat, he heard a hollow echo of hoofs in the road ahead, then presently a cloud of dust arose like smoke, and out of it came two riders: Lawrence Prescott, on a fine black horse--which his father used seldom for driving, he was so unsuited for standing patiently at the doors of affliction, yet kept through a latent fondness for good horse-flesh--and Lucina Merritt, on his pretty bay mare. Lucina galloped past at Lawrence's side, with an eddying puff of blue riding-skirt and a toss of yellow curls and blue plumes. Jerome stood back a little to give them s.p.a.ce, and the dust settled slowly over him after they were by. Then he went on his way, with his heart beating hard, yet with no feeling of jealousy against Lawrence Prescott. He even thought that it would be a good match. Still, he was curiously disturbed, not by the reflection that he was laden with sheaves of leather--he would have been more ashamed had he been seen idling on a work-day--but because he feared he looked so untidy with the dust of the road on his shoes. She might have noticed his clothes, although she had galloped by so fast.

The first thing Jerome did, when he reached home, was to brush and blacken his shoes, though there was no chance of Lucina's seeing them. He felt as if he ought not to think of her when he had on dusty shoes.

The greater part of the next day Jerome pa.s.sed, as usual, soling shoes in Ozias Lamb's shop. When he came home to supper, he noticed something unusual about his mother and sister. They had the appearance of being strung tightly with repressed excitement, like some delicate musical instruments. To look at or to speak to them was to produce in them sensitive vibrations which seemed out of proportion to the cause.

Jerome asked no questions. These disturbances in the feminine current always produced a corresponding stiffness of calm in his masculine one, as if by an instinct to maintain the equilibrium of dangerous forces for the safety of the household.

Elmira and her mother kept looking at each other and at him, pulses starting up in their delicate cheeks, flushes coming and going, motioning each other with furtive gestures to speak, then countermanding the order with sharp negatory shakes of the head.

At last Mrs. Edwards called back Jerome as he was going to his chamber, books under arm and lighted candle in hand.

"Look here," said she; "I want to show you something."

Jerome turned. Elmira was extending towards him a nicely folded letter, with a little green seal on it.

"What is it?" asked Jerome.

"Read it," said his mother. Jerome took it, unfolded it, and read, Elmira and his mother watching him. Elmira was quite pale. Mrs.

Edwards's mouth was set as if against antic.i.p.ated opposition, her nervously gleaming eyes were fierce with ready argument. Jerome knit his brows over the letter, then he folded it nicely and gave it back to Elmira.

"You see what it is?" said his mother.

"Yes, I see," replied Jerome, hesitatingly. He looked confused before her, for one of the few times of his life.

"An invitation for you an' Elmira to Squire Merritt's--to a party; it's Lucina's birthday," said his mother, and she fairly smacked her lips, as if the words were sweet.

Elmira looked at her brother breathlessly. n.o.body knew how eager she was to go; it was the first party worthy of a name to which she had been bidden in her whole life. She and her mother had been speculating, ever since the invitation had arrived, upon the possibility of Jerome's refusing to accept it.

"n.o.body can tell what he'll do," Mrs. Edwards had said. "He's just as likely to take a notion not to go as to go."

"I can't go if he doesn't," said Elmira.

"Why can't you, I'd like to know?"

Elmira shrank timidly. "I never went into Squire Merritt's house in my life," said she.

"I guess there ain't anything there to bite you," said her mother.

"I'm goin' to say all I can to have your brother go; but if he won't, you can put on your new dress an' go without him." However, Mrs.

Edwards privately resolved to use as an argument to Jerome, in case he refused to attend the party, the fact that his sister would not go without him.

She used it now. Mrs. Edwards's military tactics were those of direct onslaught, and no saving of powder. "Elmira's afraid to go unless you do," said she. "You'll be keepin' her home, an' she ain't had a chance to go to many parties, poor child!"

Jerome met Elmira's beseeching eyes and frowned aside, blus.h.i.+ng like a girl. "Well, I don't know," said he; "I'll see."

That was the provincial form of masculine concession to feminine importunity. Mrs. Edwards nodded to Elmira when Jerome had shut the door. "He'll go," said she.

Elmira smiled and quivered with half-fearful delight. Lawrence Prescott was coming to see her the next day, and the day after that she would be sure to meet him again at Squire Merritt's. She trembled before her own happiness, as before an angel whose wings cast shadows of the dread of delight.