Jerome, A Poor Man Part 47

"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."

Chapter x.x.xI

On the evening of the next day Jerome went to call on Lawyer Eliphalet Means. Lawyer Means lived near the northern limit of the village, on the other side of the brook.

Jerome, going through the covered bridge which crossed the brook, paused and looked through a s.p.a.ce between the side timbers. This brook was a st.u.r.dy little torrent at all times; in spring it was a river. Now, under the white concave of wintry moonlight, it broke over its stony bed with a fierce persistency of advance. Jerome looked down at the rapid, s.h.i.+fting water-hillocks and listened to their lapsing murmur, incessantly overborne by the gathering rush of onset, then nodded his head conclusively, as if in response to some mental question, and moved on.

Lawyer Eliphalet Means lived in the old Means house. It upreared itself on a bare moon-silvered hill at the right of the road, with a solid state of simplest New England architecture. It dated back to the same epoch as Doctor Prescott's and Squire Merritt's houses, but lacked even the severe ornaments of their time.

Jerome climbed the s.h.i.+ning slope of the hill to the house door, which was opened by Lawyer Means himself; then he followed him into the sitting-room. A great cloud of tobacco smoke came in his face when the sitting-room door was thrown open. Through it Jerome could scarcely see Colonel Jack Lamson, in a shabby old coat, seated before the blazing hearth-fire, with a tumbler of rum-and-water on a little table at his right hand.

"Sit down," said Means to Jerome, and pulled another chair forward.

"Quite a sharp night out," he added.

"Yes, sir," replied Jerome, seating himself.

Lawyer Means resumed his own chair and his pipe, at which he puffed with that jealous comfort which comes after interruption. Colonel Lamson, when he had given a friendly nod of greeting to the young man, without removing his pipe from his mouth, leaned back his head again, stretched his legs more luxuriously, and blew the smoke in great wreaths around his face. This sitting-room of Lawyer Means's was a scandal to the few matrons of Upham who had ever penetrated it.

"Don't look as if a woman had ever set foot in it," they said. The ancient female relative of Lawyer Means who kept his house had not been a notable house-keeper in her day, and her day was nearly past.

Moreover, she had small control over this particular room.

The great apartment, with the purple clouds of tobacco smoke, which were settling against its low ceiling and in its far corners, transfused with golden gleams of candles and rosy flashes of fire-light, dingy as to wall-paper and carpet, with the dust of months upon all s.h.i.+ny surfaces, seemed a very fortress of bachelorhood wherein no woman might enter.

The lawyer's books in the tall cases were arranged in close ranks of strictest order, as were also the neatly ticketed files of letters and doc.u.ments in the pigeon-holes of the great desk; otherwise the whole room seemed fluttering and protruding out of its shadows with loose ends of paper and corners of books. All the free lines in the room were the tangents of irrelevancy and disorder.

The lawyer, puffing at his pipe, with eyes half closed, did not look at Jerome, but his att.i.tude was expectant.

Jerome stared at the blazing fire with a hesitating frown, then he turned with sudden resolution to Means. "Can I see you alone a minute?" he asked.

The Colonel rose, without a word, and lounged out of the room; when the door had shut behind him, Jerome turned again to the lawyer. "I want to know if you are willing to sell me two hundred and sixty-five dollars' worth of your land," said he.

"Which land?"

"Your land on Graystone brook. I want one hundred and thirty-two dollars and fifty cents' worth on each side."

"Why don't you make it even dollars, and what in thunder do you want the land on two sides for?" asked the lawyer, in his dry voice, threaded between his lips and pipe.

Jerome took an old wallet from his pocket. "Because two hundred and sixty-five dollars is all the money I've got saved," he replied, "and--"

"You haven't brought it here to close the bargain on the spot?"

interrupted the lawyer.

"Yes; I knew you could make out the deed."

Means puffed hard at his pipe, but his face twitched as if with laughter.

"I want it on both sides of the brook," Jerome said, "because I don't want anybody else to get it. I want to build a saw-mill, and I want to control all the water-power."

"I thought you said that was all the money you had."

"It is."

"How are you going to build a saw-mill, then? That money won't pay for enough land, let alone the mill."

"I am going to wait until I save more money; then I shall buy more land and build the mill," replied Jerome.

"Why not borrow the money?"