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A Jerome, Poor Man: A Novel, a novel by Mary E Wilkins Freeman |
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Chapter 29 |
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_ Chapter XXIX One Sunday afternoon, during the latter part of July, Lucina Merritt strolled down the road to her aunt Camilla's. The day was very warm--droning huskily with insects, and stirring lazily with limp leaves. There had been no rain for a long time, and the road smoked high with white dust at every foot-fall. Lucina raised her green and white muslin skirts above her embroidered petticoat, and set her little feet as lightly as a bird's. She carried a ruffled green silk parasol to shield herself from the sun, though her hat had a wide brim and flapped low over her eyes. Her mother had remonstrated with her for going out in the heat, since she had not looked quite well of late. "You will make your head ache," said she. "It is so cool in Aunt Camilla's north room," pleaded Lucina, and had her way. She walked slowly, as her mother had enjoined, but it was like walking between a double fire of arrows from the blazing white sky and earth; when she came in sight of her aunt Camilla's house her head was dizzy and her veins were throbbing. Lucina had not been happy during the last few weeks, and sometimes, in such cases, physical discomfort acts like a tonic poison. For the latter part of the way she thought of nothing but reaching the shelter of Camilla's north room; her mind regarding all else was at rest. Miss Camilla's house was closed as tightly as a convent; not a breath of out-door air would she have admitted after the early mornings of those hot days. Lucina entered into night and coolness in comparison with the glare of day outside. When she had her hat removed, and sat in the green gloom of the north parlor, sipping a glass of water which Liza had drawn from the lowest depths of the well, then flavored with currant-jelly and loaf-sugar, she felt almost at peace with her own worries. Her aunt Camilla, clad in dimly flowing old muslin, sat near the chimney-place, swaying a feather fan. She had her Bible on her knees, but she had not been reading; the light was too dim for her eyes. The fireplace was filled with the feathery green of asparagus, which also waved lightly over the gilded looking-glass, and was reflected airily therein. Asparagus plumes waved over all the old pictures also. The whole room from this delicate garnishing, the faded green tone of the furniture covers and carpet, from the wall-paper in obscure arabesques of green and satiny white, appeared full of woodland shadows. Miss Camilla, swaying her feather fan, served to set these shadows slowly eddying with a motion of repose. She had dozed in her chair, and her mind had lapsed into peaceful dreams before her niece arrived. Now she sat beaming gently at her. "Do you feel refreshed, dear?" she asked, when Lucina had finished her tumbler of currant-jelly water. "Yes, thank you, Aunt Camilla." "I fear you were not strong enough to venture out in such heat, glad as I am to see you, dear. Had you not better let 'Liza bring you a pillow, and then you can lie down on the sofa and perhaps have a little nap?" "No, thank you, Aunt Camilla, I am not sleepy. I am quite well. I am going to sit by the window and read." With that Lucina rose, got a book bound in red and gold from the stately mahogany table, and seated herself by the one window whose shutters were not tightly closed. It was a north window, and only one leaf of the upper half of the shutter was open. The aperture disclosed, instead of burning sky, a thick screen of horse-chestnut boughs. The great fan-like leaves almost touched the window-glass, and tinted all the dim parallelogram of light. Even Lucina's golden head and fair face acquired somewhat of this prevailing tone of green, being transposed into another key of color. All her golden lights, and her roses, were lost in a delicate green pallor, which might have beseemed a sea-nymph. Her aunt, sitting aloof in that same green shaft of day filtered through horse-chestnut leaves, and also changed thereby, kept glancing at her uneasily. She knew that her brother and his wife had been anxious lately about Lucina. She ventured a few more gently solicitous remarks, which Lucina met sweetly, still with a little impatience of weariness, scarcely lifting her face from her book; then she ventured no more. "The child does not like to have us so anxious over her," she thought, with that unfailing courtesy and consideration which would spare others though she torment herself thereby. She longed exceedingly to offer Lucina a wineglass of a home-brewed cordial, compounded from the rich juice of the blackberry, the finest of French brandy, and sundry spices, which was her panacea, but she abstained, lest it disturb her. Miss Camilla set a greater value upon peace of mind than upon aught else. Lucina bent her face over her book, and turned the leaves quickly, as if she were reading with absorption. Presently Miss Camilla thought she looked better. The soft lapping as of waves, of the Sabbath calm, began again to oversteal her body and spirit. Visions of her peaceful past seemed to confuse themselves with the present. "You--must stay to tea, and--not--go home until--after sunset, when it is cooler," she murmured, drowsily, and with a dim conviction that this was a Sabbath of long ago, that Lucina was a little girl in a short frock and pantalettes; then in a few minutes her head drooped limply towards her shoulder, and all her thoughts relaxed into soft slumberous breaths. When her aunt fell asleep, Lucina looked up, with that quick, startled sense of loneliness which sometimes, in such case, comes to a sensitive consciousness. "Aunt Camilla is asleep," she thought; she turned to her book again. It was a copy of Mrs. Hemans's poems. Somehow the vivid sentiment of the lines failed to please her, though she, like her young lady friends, had heretofore loved them well. Lucina read the first stanza of "The warrior bowed his crested head" with no thrill of her maiden breast; then she turned to "The Bride of the Greek Isles," and that was no better. She arose, tiptoed softly over to the table, and examined the other books thereon. There were volumes of the early English poets, an album, and _A Souvenir of Friendship_, in red and gold, like the Hemans. She opened the souvenir, and looked idly at the small, exquisitely fine steel engravings, the alliterative verses, the tales of sentiment beginning with long preambles couched in choicest English. She shut the book with a little weary sigh, and looked irresolutely at her sleeping aunt, then at the chair by the north window. Lucina felt none of the languor which is sometimes caused by extreme heat. Instead, there was a fierce electric tension through all her nerves. She was weary almost to death, the cool of this dark room was unutterably grateful to her, yet she could not remain quiet. She had left her parasol and hat on the hall-table. She stole out softly, with scarcely the faintest rustle of skirts, tied on her hat, took her parasol, and went through the house to the back-garden door. Looking back, she saw the old servant-woman's broadly interrogatory face in a vine-wreathed kitchen-window. "I am going out in the garden a little while, 'Liza," said Lucina. The garden was down-crushed, its extreme of sweetness pressed out beneath the torrid sunbeams as under flaming hoofs. Lucina passed between the wilting ranks and flattened beds of flowers, and the breath of them in her face was like the rankest sweetness of love, when its delicacy, even for itself, is all gone. The pungent odor of box was like a shameless call from the street. Lucina went into the summer-house and sat down. It was stifling, and the desperate sweetnesses of the garden seemed to have collected there, as in a nest. Lucina, after a minute, sprang up, her face was a deep pink, she had a gentle distracted frown on her sweet forehead, her lips were pouting; she did not look in the least like the Lucina of the early spring. She went out of the summer-house, and down the garden paths, and then over a stone wall, into the rear field, which bounded it. This field had been mowed not long before, and the stubble was pink and gold in the afternoon light. The field was broad, and skirted on the west by a thick wood. Lucina, holding her green parasol, crossed the field to the wood. The stubble was hot to her feet, white butterflies flew in her face, rusty-winged things hurled themselves in her path, like shrill completions from some mill of insect life. All along the wood there was a border of shadow. Lucina kept close to the trees, and so down the field. A faint, cool dampness stole out from the depths of the wood and tempered the heat for the width of its shade. Lucina put down her parasol; she was walking quite steadily, as if with a purpose. The wood extended the length of many fields, running parallel with the main village street, behind the houses. Lucina, passing the Prescott house from the rear, instead of the front, seeing the unpainted walls and roof-slopes of barn and wood-sheds, and the garden, had a curious sense of retroversion in material things which suited well her mind. She felt that day as if she were turned backward to her own self. The fields were divided from one another by stone walls. Lucina crossed these, and kept on until she reached a field some distance beyond Doctor Prescott's house. Then she left the shadow of the wood, and crossed the field to the main road. In crossing this she kept close to the wall, slinking along rapidly, for she felt guilty; this field was all waving with brown heads of millet which should not have been trampled. She got to the road and nobody had seen her. She crossed it, entered a rutty cart-path, and was in the Edwards' woodland. For the first time in her life, Lucina Merritt was doing something which she acknowledged to herself to be distinctly unmaidenly. She had come to this wood because she had heard Jerome say that he often strolled here of a Sunday afternoon. Her previous little schemes for meeting him had been innocent to her own understanding, but now she had tasted the fruit of knowledge of her own heart. She felt fairly sick with shame at what she was doing, she blushed to her own thoughts, but she had a helpless impulse as before, some goading spur in her own nature which she could not withstand. She hurried softly down the cart-path between the trees, then suddenly stood still, for under a great pine-tree on the right lay Jerome. His hat was off, one arm was thrown over his head, his face was flushed with heat and slumber. Lucina, her body bent aloof with an indescribable poise of delicacy and the impulse of flight, yet looked at her sleeping lover until her whole heart seemed to feed itself through her eyes. Lucina had not seen him for more than six weeks, except by sly glimpses at meeting and on the road. She thought, pitifully, that he had grown thin; she noticed what a sad droop his mouth had at the corners. She pitied, loved, and feared him, with all the trifold power of her feminine heart. As she looked at him, her remembrance of old days so deepened and intensified that they seemed to close upon the present and the future. Love, even when it has apparently no past, is at once a memory and a revelation. Lucina saw the little lover of her innocent childish dreams asleep there, she saw the poor boy who had gone hungry and barefoot, she saw the young man familiar in the strangeness of the future. And, more than that, Lucina, who had hitherto shown fully to her awakening heart only her thought of Jerome, having never dared to look at him and love him at the same time, now gazed boldly at him asleep, and a sense of a great mystery came over her. In Jerome she seemed to see herself also, the unity of the man and woman in love dawned upon her maiden imagination. She felt as if Jerome's hands were her hands, his breath hers. "I never knew he looked like me before," she thought with awe. Then suddenly Jerome, with no stir of awaking, opened his eyes and looked at her. Often, on arousing from a deep sleep, one has a sense of calm and wonderless observation as of a new birth. Jerome looked for a moment at Lucina with no surprise. In a new world all things may be, and impossibilities become commonplaces. Then he sprang up, and went close to her. "Is it you?" he said, in a sobbing voice. Lucina looked at him piteously. She wanted to run away, but her limbs trembled, her little hands twitched in the folds of her muslin skirt. Jerome saw her trembling, and a soft pink suffusing her fair face, even her sweet throat and her arms, under her thin sleeves. He knew, with a sudden leap of tenderness, which would have its way in spite of himself, why she was there. She had wanted to see him so, the dear child, the fair, wonderful lady, that she had come through the heat of this burning afternoon, stealing away alone from all her friends, and even from her own decorous self, for his sake. He pointed to the clear space under the pine where he had been lying. "Shall we sit down there--a minute?" he stammered. "I--think I--had better go," said Lucina, faintly, with the quick impulse of maidenhood to flee from that which it has sought. "Only a few minutes--I have something to tell you." They sat down, Lucina with her back against the pine-tree, Jerome at her side. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but instead it widened into a vacuous smile. He looked at Lucina and she at him, then he came closer to her and took her in his arms. Neither of them spoke. Lucina hid her face on his breast, and he held her so, looking out over her fair head at the wood. His mouth was shut hard, his eyes were full of fierce intent of combat, as if he expected some enemy forth from the trees to tear his love from him. For the first time in his life he realized the full might of his own natural self. He felt as if he could trample upon the needs of the whole world, and the light of his own soul; to gain this first sweet of existence, whose fragrance was in his face. The strongest realization of his nature hitherto, that of the outreaching wants of others, weakened. He was filled with the insensate greed of creation for himself. He held Lucina closer, and bent his head down over hers. Then she turned her face a little, and their lips met. Lucina had never since her childhood kissed any man but her father, and as for Jerome, he had held such things with a shame of scorn. This meant much to both of them, and the shock of such deep meaning caused them to start apart, as if with fear of each other. Lucina raised her head, and even pushed Jerome away, gently, and he loosened his hold and stood up before her, all pale and trembling. "You must forgive me--I--forgot myself," he said, with quick gasps for breath, "I won't--sit--down there again." Then he went on, speaking fast: "I have been--wanting to tell you, but there was no chance. I could not come to see you any longer. I could not. I thought a man could go to see a woman when he was in love with her, and could bear it when the love was all on his side, and there was no--chance of marriage. I thought I could bear it if it pleased you, but--I didn't know it would be like this. I was never in love, and I did not know. I could think of nothing but wanting you. It was spoiling me for everything else, and there are other things in the world besides this. If I came much longer I should not be fit to come. I _could_ not come any longer." Jerome looked down at Lucina, with an air of stern, yet wistful, argument. She sat before him with downcast, pale, and sober face, then she rose, and all her girlish irresolution and shame dropped from her, and left for a moment the woman in her unveiled. "I love you as much as you love me," she said, simply. Jerome looked at her. "You--don't mean--that?" "Yes, I suppose I did when you told me first, but I did not know it then. Now I know it. I have been very unhappy because I feared you might be staying away because you thought I did not love you, but I dared not try to see you as I did before, because I had found myself out. To-day I could not help it, whatever you might think of me, or whatever I might think of myself. I could not bear to worry any longer, lest you might be unhappy because you thought I did not love you. I do, and you need not stay away any more for that." "Lucina--you don't mean--" "Do you think I would have let you--do as you did a minute ago, if I had not?" said she, and a blush spread over her face and neck. "I--thought--it was all--me--that--_you_--did not--" "No, I let you," whispered Lucina. "Oh, you don't mean that you--like me this same way that I do you--enough to marry me! You don't mean that?" "Yes, I do," replied Lucina; she looked up at him with a curious solemn steadfastness. She was not blushing any more. "I--never thought of this," Jerome said, drawing a long, sobbing breath. He stood looking at her, his face all white and working. "Lucina," he began, then paused, for he could not speak. He walked a little way down the path, then came back. "Lucina," he said, brokenly, "as God is my witness--I never thought of this--I never--thought that you--could-- Oh, look at yourself, and look at me! You know that I could not have thought--oh, look at yourself, there was never anybody like you! I did not think that you could--care for or--be hurt by--_me_." "I have never seen anybody like you, not even father," Lucina said. She looked at him with the shrinking yet loving faithfulness of a child before emotion which it cannot comprehend. She could not understand why, if Jerome loved her and she him, there was anything to be distressed about. She could not imagine why he was so pale and agitated, why he did not take her in his arms and kiss her again, why they could not both be happy at once. "Oh, my God!" cried Jerome, and looked at her in a way which frightened her. "Don't," she said, softly, shrinking a little. "Lucina, you know how poor I am," he said, hoarsely. "You know I--can't--marry." "I don't need much," said she. "I couldn't--give you what you need." "Father would, then." "No, he would not. I give my wife all or nothing." Lucina trembled. The same look which she remembered when Jerome would not take her little savings was in his eyes. "Then--I would not take anything from father," she said, tremulously. "I wouldn't mind--being--poor." "I have seen the wives of poor men, and you shall not be made one by me. If I thought I had not strength enough to keep you from that, as far as I was concerned, I would leave you this minute, and throw myself in the pond over there." "I am not afraid to be the wife of--a poor man--if I love him. I--could save, and--work," Lucina said, speaking with the necessity of faithfulness upon her, yet timidly, and turning her face aside, for her heart had begun to fear lest Jerome did not really love her nor want her, after all. A woman who would sacrifice herself for love's sake cannot understand the sacrifice, nor the love, which refuses it. "You shall not be, whether you are afraid or not!" Jerome cried out, fiercely. "Haven't I seen John Upham's wife? Oh, God!" Lucina began moving slowly down the path towards the road; Jerome followed her. "I must go," she said, with a gentle dignity, though she trembled in all her limbs. "I came across the fields from Aunt Camilla's. I left her asleep, and she will wake and miss me." "Oh," cried Jerome, "I wish--" then he stopped himself. "Yes, she will, I suppose," he added, lamely. "He does not want me to stay," thought Lucina, with a sinking of heart and a rising of maiden pride. She walked a little faster. Jerome quickened his pace, and touched her shoulder. "You must not think about me--about this," he murmured, hoarsely. "_You_ must not be unhappy about it!" Lucina turned and looked in his face sadly, yet with a soft stateliness. "No," said she, "I will not. I do not see, after all, why I should be unhappy, or you either. Many people do not marry. I dare say they are happier. Aunt Camilla seems happy. I shall be like her. There is nothing to hinder our friendship. We can always be friends, like brothers and sisters even, and you can come to see me--" "No, I can't," said Jerome, "I can't do that even. I told you I could not." Lucina said no more. She turned her face and went on. She said good-bye quickly when she reached the road, and was across it and under the bars into the millet. Jerome did not attempt to follow her; he stood for a moment watching her moving through the millet, as through the brown waves of a shallow sea; then he went back into the woods. When he reached the place where he had sat with Lucina he stopped and spoke, as if she were still there. "Lucina," he said, "I promise you before God, that I will never, so long as I live, love or marry any other woman but you. I promise you that I will work as I never did before--my fingers to the bone, my heart to its last drop of blood--to earn enough to marry you. And then, if you are free, I will come to you again. I will fight to win you, with all the strength that is in me, against the whole world, and I will love you forever, forever, but I promise you that I will never say this in your hearing to bind you and make you wait, when I may die and never come." _ |
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