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A Jerome, Poor Man: A Novel, a novel by Mary E Wilkins Freeman |
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Chapter 30 |
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_ Chapter XXX Lucina did not go into her aunt Camilla's house again that afternoon. She crossed the fields--her aunt's garden--skirted the house to the road--thence home. When she entered the south door her mother met her. "Why didn't you wait until it was cooler?" she asked; then, before the girl could answer, "What is the matter? Why, Lucina, you have been crying!" "Nothing," replied Lucina, piteously, pushing past her mother. "Where are you going?" "Up-stairs to my chamber." With that Lucina was on the stairs, and her mother followed. The two were a long time in Lucina's chamber; then Abigail came down alone to her husband in the sitting-room. The Squire, who was as alert as any fox where his beloved daughter was concerned, had scented something wrong, and looked up anxiously when his wife entered. "She isn't sick, is she?" he asked. "She will be, if we don't take care," Abigail replied, shortly. "You don't mean it!" cried the Squire, jumping up. "I'll go for the doctor this minute. It was the heat. Why didn't you keep her at home, Abigail?" "Sit down, for mercy's sake, Eben!" said Abigail. She sat down herself as she spoke, and crossed her little slender feet and hands with a quick, involuntary motion, which was usual to her. "It is as I told you," said she. Abigail Merritt, good comrade of a wife though she was, yet turned aggressively feminine at times. The Squire sat down. "What do you mean, Abigail?" "I mean--that I wish that Edwards boy had never entered this house." "Abigail, you don't mean that Lucina-- What _do_ you mean, Abigail?" finished the Squire, feebly. "I mean that I was right in thinking some harm would come from that boy being here so much," replied his wife. Then she went on and repeated in substance the innocent little confession which Lucina had made to her in her chamber. The Squire listened, his bearded chin sunken on his chest, his forehead, under the crest of yellow locks, bent gloomily. "It seems as if you and I had done everything that we could for the child ever since she was born," he said, huskily, when his wife had finished. His first emotion was one of cruel jealousy of his daughter's love for another man. Abigail looked at him with quick pity, but scarcely with full understanding. She could never lose, as completely as he, their daughter, through a lover. She had not to yield her to another of the same sex, and in that always the truest sting of jealousy lies. "So far as that goes, it is no more than we had to expect, Eben," she said. "You know that. I turned away from my parents for you." "I know it, Abigail, but--I thought, maybe, it wouldn't come yet a while. I've done all I could. I bought her the little horse--she seemed real pleased with that, Abigail, you know. I thought, maybe, she would be contented a while here with us." "Eben Merritt, you don't for a minute think that she can be anywhere but with us, for all this!" "It's the knowledge that she's willing to be that comes hard," said the Squire, piteously--"it's that, Abigail." "I don't know that she's any too willing to," returned Abigail, half laughing. "The principal thing that seems to trouble the child is that Jerome won't come to see her. I rather think that if he would come to see her she would be perfectly contented." "And why can't he come to see her, if she wants him to--will you tell me that?" cried the Squire, with sudden fervor. "Eben Merritt, would you have the poor child getting to thinking more of him than she does, when he isn't going to marry her?" "And why isn't he going to marry her, if she wants him? By the Lord Harry, Lucina shall have whoever she wants, if it's a prince or a beggar! If that fellow has been coming here, and now--" "Eben, listen to me and keep quiet!" cried Abigail, running at her great husband's side, with a little, wiry, constraining hand on his arm, for the Squire had sprung from his seat and was tramping up and down in his rage that Lucina should be denied what she wanted, even though it were his own heart's blood. "You know what I told you," Abigail said. "Jerome is behaving well. You know he can't marry Lucina--he hasn't a penny." "Then I'll give 'em pennies enough to marry on. The girl shall have whom she wants; I tell you that, Abigail." "How much have you got to give them until we are gone, even if Jerome would marry under such conditions; and I told you what he said to Lucina about it," returned his wife, quietly. "I'll go to work myself, then," shouted the Squire; "and as for the boy, he shall swallow his damned pride before he gives my girl an anxious hour. What is he, to say he will or will not, if she lifts her little finger? By the Lord Harry, he ought to go down on his face like a heathen when she looks at him!" "Eben," said Abigail, "will you listen to me? I tell you, Jerome is behaving as well as any young man can. I know he is, from what Lucina has told me. He loves her, and he is proving it by giving her up. You know that he cannot marry her unless he drags her into poverty, and you know how much you have to help them with. You know, too, good as Jerome is, and worthy of praise for what he has done, that Lucina ought to do better than marry him." "He is a good boy, Abigail, and if she's got her heart set on him she shall have him." "You don't know that her heart is set on him, Eben. I think the best thing we can do is to send her down to Boston for a little visit--she may feel differently when she comes home." "I won't have her crossed, Abigail. Was she crying when you left her?" "She will soon be quiet and go to sleep. I am going to make some toast for her supper. Eben, where are you going?" The Squire had set forth for the door in a determined rush. "I am going to see that boy, and know what this work means," he cried, in a loud voice of wrath and pity. However, Abigail's vivacious persistency of common-sense usually overcame her husband's clumsy headlongs of affection. She carried the day at last, and the Squire subsided, though with growls of remonstrance, like a partially tamed animal. "Have your way, and send her down to Boston, if you want to, Abigail," said he; "but when she comes back she shall have whatever she wants, if I move heaven and earth to get it for her." So that day week Jerome, going one morning to his work, stood aside to let the stage-coach pass him, and had a glimpse of Lucina's fair face in the wave of a blue veil at the window. She bowed, but the stage dashed by in such a fury of dust that Jerome could scarcely discern the tenor of the salutation. He thought that she smiled, and not unhappily. "She is going away," he told himself; "she will go to parties, and see other people, and forget me." He tried to dash the bitterness of his heart at the thought, with the sweetness of unselfish love, but it was hard. He plodded on to his work, the young springiness gone from his back and limbs, his face sternly downcast. As for Lucina, she was in reality leaving Upham not unhappily. She was young, and the sniff of change is to the young as the smell of powder to a war-horse. New fields present always wide ranges of triumphant pleasure to youth. Lucina, moreover, loved with girlish fervor the friend, Miss Rose Soley, whom she was going to visit in Boston. She had not seen her for some months, and she tasted in advance the sweets of mutual confidences. That morning Jerome's face was a little confused in Lucina's mind with that of a rosy-cheeked and dark-ringleted girl, and young passion somewhat dimmed by gentle affection for one of her own sex. Then, too, Lucina had come, during the last few days, to a more cheerful and hopeful view of the situation. After all, Jerome loved her, and was not that the principal thing? Perhaps, in time, it would all come right. Jerome might get rich; in the meantime, she was in no hurry to be married and leave her parents, and if Jerome would only come to see her, that would be enough to make her very happy. She thought that after her return he would very probably come. She reasoned, as she thought, astutely, that he would not be able to help it, when he saw her after a long absence. Then she had much faith in her father's being able to arrange this satisfactorily for her, as he had arranged all other matters during her life. "Now don't you fret, Pretty," he had said, when she bade him good-bye, "father will see to it that you have everything you want." And Lucina, all blushing with innocent confusion, had believed him. In addition to all this she had in her trunks, strapped at the back of the stage-coach, two fine, new silk gowns, and one muslin, and a silk mantilla. Also she carried a large blue bandbox containing a new plumed hat and veil, which cheered her not a little, being one of those minor sweets which providentially solace the weak feminine soul in its unequal combat with life's great bitternesses. Lucina was away some three months, not returning until a few days before Thanksgiving; then she brought her friend, Miss Rose Soley, with her, and also a fine young gentleman, with long, curling, fair locks, and a face as fair as her own. While Lucina was gone, Jerome led a life easier in some respects, harder in others. He had no longer the foe of daily temptation to overcome, but instead was the steady grind of hunger. Jerome, in those days, felt the pangs of that worst hunger in the world--the hunger for the sight of one beloved. Some mornings when he awoke it seemed to him that he should die of mere exhaustion and starvation of spirit if he saw not Lucina before night. In those days he would rather have walked over fiery plough-shares than visited any place where he had seen Lucina, and where she now was not. He never went near the wood, where they had sat together; he would not pass even, if he could help it, the Squire's house or Miss Camilla's. His was one of those minds for whom, when love has once come, place is only that which holds, or is vacant of, the beloved. He was glad when the white frost came and burned out the gardens and the woodlands with arctic fires of death, for then the associations with old scenes were in a measure lost. One Sunday after the frost, when the ground was shining stiff with it, as with silver mail, and all the trees thickened the distance as with glittering furze, he went to his woodland, and found that he could bear the sight of the place where he and Lucina had been together; its strangeness of aspect seemed to place it so far in the past. Jerome threw up his head in the thin, sparkling air. "I will have her yet," he said, quite aloud; and "if I do not, I can bear that." He felt like one who would crush the stings of fate, even if against his own heart. He had grown old and thin during the last weeks; he had worked so hard and resolutely, yet with so little hope; and he who toils without hope is no better than a slave to his own will. That day, when he went home, his eyes were bright and his cheeks glowing. His mother and sister noticed the difference. "I was afraid he was gettin' all run down," Ann Edwards told Elmira; "but he looks better to-day." Elmira herself was losing her girlish bloom. She was one who needed absolute certainties to quiet distrustful imaginations, and matters betwixt herself and Lawrence Prescott were less and less on a stable footing. Lawrence was working hard; she should not have suspected that his truth towards her flagged, but she sometimes did. He did not come to see her regularly. Sometimes two weeks went past, sometimes three, and he had not come. In fact, Lawrence endeavored to come only when he could do so openly. "I hate to deceive father more than I can help," he told Elmira, but she did not understand him fully. She was a woman for whom the voluntary absence of a lover who yet loves was almost an insoluble problem, and in that Lucina was not unlike her. She was not naturally deceptive, but, when it came to love, she was a Jesuit in conceiving it to sanctify its own ends. The suspense, the uncertainty, as to her lover coming or not, was beginning to tell upon her. Every nerve in her slight body was in an almost constant state of tension. It was just a week from that day that Jerome and Elmira, being seated in meeting, saw Lucina enter with her parents and her visiting friends. Jerome's heart leaped up at the sight of Lucina, then sank before that of the young man following her up the aisle. "He is going to marry her; she has forgotten me," he thought, directly. As for Elmira, she eyed Miss Rose Soley's dark ringlets under the wide velvet brim of her hat, the crimson curve of her cheek, and the occasional backward glance of a black eye at Lawrence Prescott seated directly behind her. When meeting was over, she caught Jerome by the arm. "Come out quick," she said, in a sharp whisper, and Jerome was glad enough to go. Lucina's guests spent Thanksgiving with her. Jerome saw them twice, riding horseback with Lawrence Prescott--Lucina on her little white horse, Miss Soley on Lawrence's black, the strange young man on the Squire's sorrel, and Lawrence on a gray. Lucina colored when she saw Jerome, and reined her horse, lingering behind the others, but he did not seem to notice it, and never looked at her after his first grave bow; then she touched her horse, and galloped after her friends with a windy swirl of blue veil and skirts. Jerome wondered if his sister would hear that Lawrence Prescott had been out riding with Lucina and her friends. When he got home that night, he met Belinda Lamb coming out of the gate; when he entered, he saw by Elmira's face that she had heard. She was binding shoes very fast; her little face was white, except for red spots on the cheeks, her mouth shut hard. Her mother kept looking at her anxiously. "You'd better not worry till you know you've got something to worry about; likely as not, they asked him to go with them 'cause Lucina's beau don't know how to ride very well, and he couldn't help it," she said, with a curious aside of speech, as if Jerome, though on the stage, was not to hear. He took no notice, but that night he had a word with his sister after their mother had gone to bed. "If he has asked you to marry him, you ought to trust him," said he. "I don't believe his going to ride with that girl means anything. You ought to believe in him until you know he isn't worthy of it." Elmira turned upon him with a flash of eyes like his own. "Worthy!" she cried--"don't I think he would be worthy if he did leave me for her! Do you think I would blame him if he did leave anybody as poor as I am, worked 'most to skin and bone, of body and soul too, for anybody like that girl? I guess I wouldn't blame him, and you needn't. I don't blame him; it's true, I know, he'll never come to see me again, but I don't blame him." "If he doesn't come to see you again he'll have me to hear from," Jerome said, fiercely. "No, he won't. Don't you ever dare speak to him, or blame him, Jerome Edwards; I won't have it." Elmira ran into her chamber, leaving an echo of wild sobs in her brother's ears. The day after Thanksgiving, Lucina's friends went away; when Jerome came home that night Elmira's face wore a different expression, which Mrs. Edwards explained with no delay. "Belinda Lamb has been here," she said, "and that young man is that Boston girl's beau; he ain't Lucina's, and Lawrence Prescott ain't nothing to do with it. He was up there last night, but it wa'n't anything. Why, Jerome Edwards, you look as pale as death!" Jerome muttered some unintelligible response, and went out of the room, with his mother staring after him. He went straight to his own little chamber, and, standing there in the still, icy gloom of the winter twilight, repeated the promise which he had made in summer. "If you are true to me, Lucina," he said, in a straining whisper--"if you are true to me--but I'll leave it all to you whether you are or not, I'll work till I win you." _ |
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