Jerome, A Poor Man Part 50

However, Lucina from that day on improved. She took up her little tasks; she seemed quite as formerly, only, possibly, somewhat older and more staid.

The Squire thought that her recovery was due to a certain bitter medicine which Doctor Prescott had given her, and often extolled it to his wife. "It is singular that medicine should work like a flash of lightning after she had been taking it for weeks with no effect,"

thought Abigail, but she said nothing.

One afternoon, not long after her talk with Colonel Lamson, Lucina met Jerome face to face in the road, and stopped and held out her hand to him. "How do you do?" she said, paling and blus.h.i.+ng, and yet with a sweet confidence which was new in her manner.

Jerome bowed low, but did not offer his hand. She held out hers persistently.

"I can't shake hands," he said, "mine is stained with leather; it smells of it, too."

"I am not afraid of leather," Lucina returned, gently.

"I am," Jerome said, with a defiance in which there was no bitterness. Then, as Lucina still looked at him and held out her hand, with an indescribable air of pretty, childish insistence and womanly pleading, her blue eyes being sober almost to tears, he motioned her to wait a moment, and swung over the fence and down the road-side, which was just there precipitous, to the brook-bed. He got down on his knees, plunged his hands into the water, like a golden net-work in the afternoon light, washed his hands well, and returned to Lucina. She laid her little hand in his, but she shook her head, smiling. "I liked it better the other way," said she.

"I couldn't touch your hand with mine like that."

"You would give me more if you let me give you something sometimes,"

said Lucina, with a pretty, sphinx-like look at him as she drew her hand away.

Jerome wondered what she had meant after they had separated. Acute as he was, and of more masterly mind than she, he was at a loss, for she had touched that fixed idea which sways us all to greater or less degree and some to delusion. Jerome, with his one principle of giving, could not even grasp a problem which involved taking.

He puzzled much over it, then decided, not with that lenient slighting, as in other cases when womankind had vexed him with blind words, but with a fond reverence, as for some angelic mystery, that it was because Lucina was a girl. "Maybe girls are given to talking in that riddlesome kind of way," thought Jerome.

He was blissfully certain upon one point, at all events. Lucina's whole manner had given evidence to a confidence and understanding upon her part.

"She knows what I am doing," he told himself. "She knows how I am working, and she is contented and willing to wait. She knows, but she isn't bound." Jerome had not dreamed that Lucina's indisposition had had aught to do with distress of mind upon his account.

Now he fell upon work as if it had been a veritable dragon of old, which he must slay to rescue his princess. He toiled from earliest dawn until far dark, and not with hands only. Still he did not neglect his gratuitous nursing and doctoring. He saved like a miser, though not at his mother's and sister's expense. He himself would taste, in those days, no b.u.t.ter, no sugar, no fresh meat, no bread of fine flour, but he saw to it that is mother and Elmira were well provided.

When winter came again, he used to hasten secretly along the road, not wis.h.i.+ng to meet Lucina for a new reason--lest she discover how thin his coat was against the wintry blast, how thin his shoes against the snow.

"I never thought Jerome was so close," Elmira sometimes said to her mother.

"He ain't close, he's got an object," returned Ann, with a shrewd, mysterious look.

"What do you mean, mother?"

"Nothin'."

Elmira's and Lawrence's courts.h.i.+p progressed after the same fas.h.i.+on.

If Doctor Prescott suspected anything he made no sign. Lawrence was attending patients regularly with his father and reading hard.

Sometimes, during his occasional calls upon Elmira, he saw Jerome.

The two young men, when they met on the road, exchanged covertly cordial courtesies; a sort of non-committal friends.h.i.+p was struck up between them. Lawrence was the means of introducing Jerome to a new industry, of which he might otherwise never have heard.

"Father and I were on the old Dale road this morning," he said, "and there is a fine cranberry-meadow there on the left, if anybody wants to improve it. There's plenty of chance for drainage from that little stream that runs into Graystone, and it's sheltered from the frost.

Old Jonathan Hawkins owns it; we went there--his wife is sick--and he said he used to sell berries off it, but it had run down. He said he'd be glad to let somebody work it on shares, just allowing him for the use of the land. He's too old to bother with it himself, and he is pretty well straitened for money. There's money in it, I guess."

Jerome listened, and the next day went over to Jonathan Hawkins's place, on the old Dale road, and made his bargain. Some of his work on the cranberry-meadow was done before light, his lantern moving about the misty expanse like a marsh candle. When the berries were ripe he employed children to pick them, John Upham's among the rest.

He cleared quite a sum by this venture, and added it to his store. In two years' time he had saved enough money for his mill, and early in the fall had the lumber all ready. He had engaged one carpenter from Dale; he thought that he could build the mill himself with his help, and that of some extra hands for raising.

On the evening before the day on which he expected to begin work he went to see Adoniram Judd. The Judds lived off the main road, in a field connected with it by a cart-path. Their house, after the commonest village pattern--a long cottage with two windows on either side of the front door--stood closely backed up against a wood of pines and larches. The wind was cold, and the sound of it in the evergreens was like a far-off halloo of winter. The house had a shadowy effect in waning moonlight, the walls were mostly gray, being only streaked high on the sheltered sides with old white paint.

Since Paulina Maria could not afford to have a coat of new paint on her house, she had a bitter ambition, from motives of tidiness and pride, to at least remove all traces of the old. She felt that the chief sting of present deprivation lay in the evidence of its contrast with former plenty. She hated the image in her memory of her cottage glistening with the white gloss of paint, and would have weakened it if she could. Paulina Maria accordingly, standing on a kitchen-chair, had scrubbed with soap and sand the old paint-streaks as high as her long arms would reach, and had, at times, when his rheumatism would permit, set her tall husband to the task. The paint, which was difficult to remove by any but its natural effacers--the long courses of nature--was one of those minor material antagonisms of life which keep the spirit whetted for harder ones.

Paulina Maria Judd had many such; when the p.r.i.c.ks of fate were too firm set against her struggling feet she saved herself from the despair of utter futility by taking soap and water and sand, and going forth to attack the paint on her house walls, and also the front door-stone worn in frequent hollows for the collection of dirt and dust.

This evening, when Jerome drew near, he saw a long rise of back over the door-step, and a swiftly plying shoulder and arm. Paulina Maria looked up without ceasing when Jerome stood beside her.

"You're working late," he said, with an attempt at pleasantry.

"I have to do my cleanin' late or not at all," replied Paulina Maria, in her cold, calm voice. She rubbed more soap on her cloth.

"Uncle Adoniram at home?" Jerome had always called Adoniram "Uncle,"

though he was his father's cousin.

"Yes."

"I want to see him a minute about something."

"You'll have to go round to the back door. I can't have more dirt tracked into this while it's wet."

Jerome went around the house to the back door. As he pa.s.sed the lighted sitting-room windows he saw a monstrous shadow with steadily moving hands on the curtain. He fumbled his way through the lighted room, in which sat Adoniram Judd closing shoes and his son Henry knitting. When the door opened Henry, whose shadow Jerome had seen on the window-pane, looked up with the vacant peering of the blind, but his fingers never ceased twirling the knitting-needles.

"How are you?" said Jerome.

Adoniram returned his salutation without rising, and bade him take a chair. Henry spoke not at all, and bent his dim eyes again over his knitting without a smile. Henry Judd had the lank height of his father, and his blunt elongation of face and features, informed by his mother's spirit. The result in his expression was an absolute ferocity instead of severity of gloom, a fury of resentment against his fate, instead of that bitter leaning towards it which is the acme of defiance.

Henry Judd bent his heavy, pale brows over the miserable feminine work to which he was forced. His long hands were white as a girl's, and revealed their articulation as they moved; his face, transparently pale, showed a soft furze of young beard on cheek and chin.

"How are you, Henry?" asked Jerome.

Henry made no reply, only scowled more gloomily. Paulina Maria's ardent severity of Christianity had produced in her son, under his first stress of life, a fierce rebound. To no word of Scripture would Henry Judd resort for comfort; he never bent knee in prayer, and would not be led, even by his mother's authority, to meeting on Sunday. The voice of his former mates, who had with him no sympathy of like affliction, filled him with a sullen rage of injury. He was somewhat younger than Jerome, but had seemed formerly much attracted to him. Now he had not spoken to him for a year.

Jerome, when he entered, had looked happy and eager, as if he was burdened with some pleasant news. Now his expression changed; he looked at Adoniram, then at Henry, then at Adoniram again, and motioned an inquiry with his lips. Adoniram shook his head sadly.

Paulina Maria came in through the kitchen, where she had left her scrubbing utensils, got an unfinished shoe, and sat down to her binding. She did not notice Jerome again, and he sat frowning moodily at the floor.

"It is a cold night for the season," remarked Adoniram, at length, with an uneasy attempt at entertainment, to which Jerome did not respond with much alacrity. He acted at first as if he did not hear, then collected himself, said that it was cold, and there might be a frost if the wind went down, and rose.

"You ain't goin' so soon?" asked Adoniram, with slow surprise.

"I only ran over for a minute; I've got some work to do," muttered Jerome, and went out.

He went along the ridgy cart-path across the field to the road, but when he reached it he stopped short. He stood for ten minutes or more, motionless, thinking so intently that it was as if his body stood aside from his swift thought, then he returned to the Judd house.

He went around to the back door, but when he reached it he stopped again. After a little he crept noiselessly back to the cart-path, and so to the road again.