Chapter 33

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_ Chapter XXXIII

Jerome gave his mother the same reason which he had given Ozias for the postponement of the mill.

"It seems to me it's dreadful queer you didn't find out it wa'n't best till the day before you were goin' to start work on it," said she, but she suspected nothing.

As for Elmira, she manifested little interest in that or anything else. She was not well that autumn. Elmira's morbidly sensitive temperament was working her harm under the trial of circumstances. Extreme love, sensitiveness, and self-depreciation in some natures produce jealousy as unfailingly as a chemical combination its given result. Elmira, though constantly spurring herself into trust in her lover, was again jealous of him and Lucina Merritt.

Lawrence had been seen riding and walking with Lucina. He had called at the Squire's on several evenings, when Elmira had hoped that he might visit her. She was too proud to mention the matter to Lawrence, but she began to be galled into active resentment by her clandestine betrothal. Why should not everybody know that she had a beau like other girls; that Lawrence was hers, not Lucina Merritt's? Elmira wished, recklessly and defiantly, that people could find out every time that Lawrence came to see her. Whenever she heard a hint to the effect that he was attentive to her, she gave it significance by her bearing. Possibly in that way she herself precipitated matters.

She had not been feeling well for some time, having every afternoon a fever-ache in her limbs and back, and a sensation of weariness which almost prostrated her, when, one evening, Lawrence came, and, an hour afterwards, his father.

Elmira never forgot, as long as she lived, Doctor Prescott's handsome, coldly wrathful old face, as he stood in the parlor door looking at her and Lawrence. He had come straight in, without knocking. Mrs. Edwards had gone to bed, Jerome was not at home.

Lawrence had been sitting on the sofa with Elmira, his arm around her waist. He arose with her, still clasping her, and confronted his father. "Well, father," he said, with an essay at his gay laugh, though he blushed hotly, and then was pale. As for Elmira, she would have slipped to the floor had it not been for her lover's arm.

Doctor Prescott stood looking at them.

"Father, this is the girl I am going to marry," Lawrence said, finally, with a proudly defiant air.

"Very well," replied the doctor; "but when you marry her, it will be without one penny from me, in realization or anticipation. You will have only what your wife brings you."

"I can support my wife myself," returned Lawrence, with a look which was the echo of his father's own.

"So you can, before long, at the expense of your father's practice, which he himself has given you the ability to undermine," said the doctor, in his cold voice. "I bid you both good-evening. You, my son, can come home within a half-hour, or you will find the doors locked." With that the doctor went out; there was a creak of cramping wheels, and a lantern-flash in the window, then a roll, and clatter of hoofs.

Elmira showed more decision of spirit than her lover had dreamed was in her. She drove him away, in spite of his protestations. "All is over between us, if you don't go at once--at once," said she, with a strange, hysterical force which intimidated him.

"Elmira, you know I will be true to you, dear. You know I will marry you, in spite of father and the whole world," vowed Lawrence; but he went at her insistence, not knowing, indeed, what else to do.

The next day Elmira wrote him a letter setting him free. When she had sent the letter she sat working some hours longer, then she went up-stairs and to bed. That night she was in a high fever.

Lawrence came, but she did not know it. He had a long talk with Jerome, and almost a quarrel. The poor young fellow, in his wrath and shame of thwarted manliness, would fain have gone to that excess of honor which defeats its own ends. He insisted upon marrying Elmira out of hand. "I'll never give her up--never, I'll tell you that. I've told father so to his face!" cried Lawrence. When he went up-stairs with Jerome and found Elmira in the uneasy stupor of fever, he seemed half beside himself.

"I'm to blame, father's to blame. Oh, poor girl--poor girl," he groaned out, when he and Jerome were down-stairs again.

That night Lawrence had a stormy scene with his father. He burst upon him in his study and upbraided him to his face. "You've almost killed her; she's got a fever. If she lives through it I am going to marry her!" he shouted.

The doctor was pounding some drugs in his mortar. He brought the pestle down with a dull thud, as he replied, without looking at his son. "You will marry her or not, as you choose, my son. I have not forbidden you; I have simply stated the conditions, so far as I am concerned."

The next morning, before light, Lawrence was over to see Elmira. After breakfast his mother came and remained the greater part of the day. Elmira grew worse rapidly. Since Doctor Prescott was out of the question, under the circumstances, a physician from Westbrook was summoned. Elmira was ill several weeks; Lawrence haunted the house; his mother and Paulina Maria did much of the nursing, as Mrs. Edwards was unable. Neither Lawrence nor Mrs. Prescott ever fairly knew if Doctor Prescott was aware that she nursed the sick girl. If he was, he made no sign. He also said nothing more to Lawrence about his visits.

It was nearly spring before Elmira was quite recovered. Her illness had cost so much that Jerome had not been able to make good the deficit occasioned by his loan to Ozias Lamb, as he would otherwise have been. He postponed his mill again until autumn, and worked harder than ever. That summer he tried the experiment of raising some of the fine herbs, such as summer savory, sweet-marjoram, and thyme, for the market. Elmira helped in that. There is always a relief to the soul in bringing it into intimate association with the uniformity of nature. Elmira, bending over the bed of herbs, with the sweet breath of them in her nostrils, gained a certain quiet in her unrest of youth and passion. It was as if she kept step with a mightier movement which tended towards eternity. She had persisted, in spite of Lawrence's entreaties, in her determination that he should cease all attention to her. He had gone away, scarcely understanding, almost angry, with her, but she was firm, with a firmness which she herself had not known to be within her capacity.

She looked older that summer, and there was a staidness in her manner. She always worked over the herb-beds with her back to the road, lest by any chance she should see Lawrence riding by with Lucina.

"I know what you're working so extra hard for," she told Jerome one day, with wistful, keen eyes upon his face.

"I've always worked hard, haven't I?" he said, evasively.

"Yes, you've worked hard, but this is extra hard. Jerome Edwards, you think, maybe, if you can earn enough, you can marry her by-and-by."

Jerome colored, but he met his sister's gaze freely. "Well, suppose I do," said he.

"Oh, Jerome, do you suppose it's any use--do you suppose she will?" Elmira cried out, in a kind of incredulous pity.

"I know she will."

"Did she say so--did she say she would wait? Oh, Jerome!"

"Do you think I would bind her to wait?"

"But she must have owned she liked you. Did she?"

"That's between her and me."

"Don't you feel afraid that she may turn to somebody else? Don't you, Jerome?" Elmira questioned him with a feverish eagerness which puzzled him.

"Not with her," he answered.

Elmira felt comforted by his faith in a way which he did not suspect. It strengthened her own. Perhaps, after all, Lawrence would not care for Lucina; perhaps he would work and wait for her, as, indeed, he had vowed to do. After that Elmira worked over the herb-beds with her face to the road. When Belinda Lamb reported that Lawrence and Lucina had been out riding, and Ann said, with a bitter screw of her nervous little face, "Fish in shallow waters bites easy, especially when there's gold on the hook," she was not much disturbed.

Ann fully abetted her daughter in her resolution to dismiss her suitor, after his father's manifestation. "I guess there's as good fish in the sea as ever was caught," said she, "and I guess Doctor Seth Prescott 'll find out that. If there's them he don't think fit to tie his son's shoestrings, there's them that feels above tyin' 'em."

In September Jerome began work on his mill. He had never been so hopeful in his life. It cost him more self-denial not to go to Lucina and speak out his hope than ever before. He queried with himself if he could not go, then shut his heart, opening like a mouth of hunger for happiness, hard against it. "The mill may burn down; they may not buy the logs. I've got to wait," he told himself.

By early spring the mill was in full operation. The railroad through Dale was surveyed, and work was to be commenced on it the next fall, and Jerome had the contract for the sleepers. Again he wondered if he should not go to Lucina and tell her, and again he resolved to wait. He had made up his mind that he would not speak until a fixed income was guaranteed by at least a year's test.

"I wish they would put railroads through for us every year," he said to the man whom he had secured to help him. He was an elderly man from Granby, who had owned a mill there, which had been sold three years before. He had a tidy sum in bank, and people wondered at his going to work again.

"I 'ain't got so very many years to work," he told Jerome when he sought to hire him, "an' I thought I'd give up for good three years ago; thought I'd take it easy, an' have a comfortable old age. I got fifty dollars more'n I expected when I sold out the mill, an' I laid it out for extras for mother an' me; bought her a sofy an' stuffed rockin'-chair, a new set of dishes, an' some teaspoons, an' some strainers for the windows agin fly-time. 'Now, mother,' says I, 'we'll jest lay down in the daytime, an' rock, an' eat with our new spoons out of our new dishes, an' keep the flies out, the rest of our lives.'

"But mother she looked real sober. 'What's the matter?' says I.

"'Nothin',' says she, 'only I was thinkin' about your father.'

"'What about him?' says I.

"'Nothin',' says she, 'only I remember mother's sayin', when he quit work, he wouldn't live long. She always said it was a bad sign.'

"That settled me. I remembered father didn't live six months after he quit work, an' grandfather before him, an' I'd every reason to think it run in the family. So says I to mother, 'Well, I'm havin' too good a time livin' to throw it away settin' in rockin'-chairs an' layin' down in the daytime. If work is goin' to keep up the picnic a while longer, why, I'm goin' to work.'

"So the very next day I hired out to the man that bought my mill, an' there I've worked ever since, till now, when he's got his son he wants to give the job to. I'll go with ye, an' welcome, for a spell. Mother ain't afeard to stay alone, an' I'll go home over Sundays. Ye need somebody who knows somethin' about a mill, if ye're green at it yourself."

This man, whose name was Martin Cheeseman, was hoary with age, but far from being past his prime of work. He had a large and shambling strength of body and limb, like an old bear, and his sinews were, of their kind, as tough as those of the ancient woods which he severed.

One afternoon, when the mill had been in operation about two months, Squire Eben Merritt, John Jennings, and Colonel Lamson came through from the thick woods into the clearing. The Squire bore his fishing-rod and dangled a string of fine trout. John Jennings had a book under his arm.

When they emerged into the clearing, the Colonel sat down upon a stump and wiped his red face. The veins in his forehead and neck were swollen purple, and he breathed hard. "It's hotter than seven devils," he gasped.

"Devils are supposed to be acclimated," John Jennings remarked, softly. He stood looking about him. The Squire had gone into the mill, where Jerome was at work.

Martin Cheeseman was outside, shearing from lengths of logs some last straggling twigs before they were taken into the mill for sawing. The old man's hat had lost its brim, and sat back on his head like a crown; some leaves were tangled in his thick, gray fleece of hair and beard. His shaggy arms were bare; he wielded his hatchet with energy, grimacing at every stroke.

"He might be the god Pan putting his fallen trees out of their last agonies," said Jennings, dreamily, and yet half laughing, as if at himself, for the fancy.

The Colonel only groaned in response. He fanned himself with his hat. Jennings stood, backed up against a tree, surveying things, his fine, worn face full of a languid humor and melancholy.

The place looked like a sylvan slaughter-field. The ground was thick-set with the mangled and hacked stumps of great chestnut-trees, and strewn with their lifeless limbs and trunks, as with members of corpses; every stump, as Jennings surveyed it with fanciful gaze, looked with its spread of supporting roots upon the surface, curiously like a great foot of a woody giant, which no murderer could tear loose from its hold in its native soil.

All the clearing was surrounded with thickets of light-green foliage, amidst which clouds of white alder unfolded always in the soft wind with new surfaces of sweetness.

However, all the fragrant evidence of the new leaves and blossoms was lost and overpowered here. One perceived only that pungent aroma of death which the chestnut-trees gave out from their fresh wounds and their spilled sap of life. One also could scarcely hear the spring birds for the broad whir of the saw-mill, which seemed to cut the air as well as the logs. Even the gurgling rush of the brook was lost in it, but not the roar of water over the dam.

The Squire came out of the mill, whither he had been to say a good word to Jerome, and stood by Martin Cheeseman. "Lord," he said, "think of the work those trees had to grow, and the fight they made for their lives, and then along comes a man with an axe, and breaks in a minute what he can never make nor mend! What d'ye mean by it, eh?"

Martin Cheeseman looked at him with shrewd, twinkling eyes. He was waist-deep in the leafy twigs and boughs as in a nest. "Well," he said, "we're goin' to turn 'em into somethin' of more account than trees, an' that's railroad-sleepers; an' that's somethin' the way Natur' herself manages, I reckon. Look at the caterpillar an' the butterfly. Mebbe a railroad-sleeper is a butterfly of a tree, lookin' at it one way."

"That's all very well, but how do you suppose the tree feels?" said the Squire, hotly.

"Not bein' a tree, an' never havin' been a tree, so's to remember it, I ain't able to say," returned the old man, in a dry voice; "but, mebbe, lookin' at it on general principles, it ain't no more painful for a tree to be cut down into a railroad-sleeper than it is for a man to be cut down into an angel."

John Jennings laughed.

"You'd make a good lawyer on the defence," said the Squire, good-naturedly, "but, by the Lord Harry, if all the trees of the earth were mine, men might live in tents and travel in caravans till doomsday for all I'd cut one down!"

The Colonel and Jennings did not go into the mill, but they nodded and sang out good-naturedly to Jerome as they passed. He could not leave--he had an extra man to feed the saw that day, and had been rushing matters since daybreak--but he looked out at them with a radiant face from his noisy interior, full of the crude light of fresh lumber and sawdust.

The Squire's friendly notice had pleased his very soul.

"That's a smart boy," panted the Colonel, when they had passed.

"Yes, sir; he's the smartest boy in this town," assented the Squire, with a nod of enthusiasm.

Not long after they emerged from the woods into the road they reached Jennings's house, and he left his friends.

The Colonel lived some quarter of a mile farther on. He had reached his gate, when he said, abruptly, to the Squire, "Look here, Eben, you remember a talk we had once about Jerome Edwards and your girl?"

The Squire stared at him. "Yes; why?"

"Nothing, only seeing him just now set me to wondering if you were still of the same mind about it."

"If being willing that Lucina should have the man she sets her heart on is the same mind, of course I am; but, good Lord, Jack, that's all over! He hasn't been to the house for a year, and Lucina never thinks of him!"

Colonel Lamson laughed wheezily. "Well, that's all I wanted to know, Eben."

"What made you ask me that?" asked the Squire, suspiciously.

"Nothing; seeing Jerome and his mill brought it to mind. Well, I'll be along to-night."

"That's all over," the Squire called out again to the Colonel, going slowly up the hill to the house door. However, when he got home, he questioned Abigail.

"I haven't heard Lucina mention Jerome Edwards's name for months," said she, "and he never comes here; but she seems perfectly contented and happy. I think that's all over."

"I thought so," said Eben.

Abigail was preparing the punch, for the Squire expected his friends that evening. Jennings came first; some time after Means and Lamson arrived. They had a strange air of grave excitement and elation.

When the game of cards was fairly under way, the Colonel played in a manner which confused them all.

"By the Lord Harry, Jack, this is the third time you've thrown away an honor!" the Squire roared out, finally. "Is it the punch that's gone to your head?"

"No, Eben," replied the Colonel, in a hoarse voice, with solemn and oratorical cadences, as if he rose to address a meeting. "It is not the punch. I am _used_ to punch. It is money. I've just had word that--that old mining stock I bought when I was in the service, and haven't thought worth more than a New England sheep farm, has been sold for sixty-five thousand dollars." _

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