"Well, there's no chance of his being put to the test," said Lamson.

"Chance!" exclaimed the lawyer. "Good heavens! You might as well talk of his chance of inheriting the throne of the Caesars. I know the Edwards family, and I know Jerome's mother's family, root and branch, and there isn't five thousand dollars among them down to the sixth cousins; and as for the boy's acc.u.mulating it himself--where are the twenty-five thousand dollars in these parts for him to acc.u.mulate in ten years? You might as well talk of his discovering a gold-mine in that famous wood-lot. But I'll be d.a.m.ned if Ba.s.set wasn't as much scared as if the poor fellow had been jingling the gold in his pocket. If Jerome Edwards _does_, through the Lord or the devil, get twenty-five thousand dollars, I hope I shall be alive to see the fun."

"Hush," whispered John Jennings; "he is behind us, and I would not have such a generous young heart as that think itself spoken of lightly."

"Would he do it?" Colonel Lamson asked, short-winded and reflective.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned if he wouldn't!" cried the lawyer.

"By the Lord Harry, he would!" cried Squire Eben, each using his favorite oath for confirmation of his opinion.

Jerome, following in their tracks with his uncle Ozias, heard perfectly their last remarks, and lagged behind to hear no more, though his heart leaped up to second with fierce affirmation the lawyer and the Squire.

"Keep behind them," he whispered to Ozias; "I don't want to listen."

"Think you'd give it away if you had it, do ye?" his uncle asked, with his dry chuckle.

"I don't _think_--I _know_."

"How d'ye know?"

"I _know_."

"Lord!"

"You think I wouldn't, do you?" asked Jerome, angrily.

"I'd be more inclined to believe ye if I see ye more generous with what ye've got to give now."

Jerome started, and stared at his uncle's face, which, in the freezing moonlight, looked harder, and more possessed of an inscrutable bitterness of wisdom. "What d'ye mean?" he asked, sharply. "What on earth have I got to give, I'd like to know?"

Ozias Lamb tapped his head. "How about that?" he asked. "How about the strength you're puttin' into algebry an' Latin? You don't expect ever to learn enough to teach, do ye?"

Jerome shook his head.

"Well, then it's jest to improve your own mind. Improve your mind--what's that? What good is that goin' to do your fellow-bin's? I tell ye, Jerome, ye ain't givin' away what you've got to give, an' we ain't none of us."

"Maybe you're right," Jerome said, after a little.

After having left his uncle, he walked more slowly still. Soon the Squire and his friends were quite out of sight. The moonlight was very full and brilliant, the trees were crooked in hard lines, and the snow-drifts crested with white lights of ice; there was no softening of spring in anything, but the young man felt within him one of those flooding stirs of the spirit which every spring faintly symbolizes. A great pa.s.sion of love and sympathy for the needy and oppressed of his kind, and an ardent defence of them, came upon Jerome Edwards, poor young shoemaker, going home with his sack of meal over his shoulder. Like a bird, which in the spring views every little straw and twig as towards his nest and purpose of love, Jerome would henceforth regard all powers and instrumentalities that came in his way only in their bearing upon his great end of life.

On reaching home that night he packed away his algebra and his Latin books on the shelf in his room, and began a new study the next evening.

Chapter XVIII

Seth Prescott was the only practising physician for some half-dozen villages. His mud-bespattered sulky and his smart mare, advancing always with desperate flings of forward hoofs--which caused the children to scatter--were familiar objects, not only in the cl.u.s.ter of Uphams, but also in Dale and Granby, and the little outlying hamlet of Ford's Hill, which was nothing but a scattering group of farm-houses, with a spire in their midst, and which came under the jurisdiction of Upham. In all these villages people were wont to run from the windows to the doors when they saw the doctor's sulky whirl past, peer after it, up or down the road, to see where it might stop, and speculate if this old soul were about to leave the world, or that new soul to come into it.

One afternoon, not long before he was twenty-one, Jerome Edwards walked some three miles and a half to Ford's Hill to carry some shoes to a woman binder who was too lame to come for them herself. Jerome walked altogether of late years, for the white horse was dead of old age: but it was well for him, since he was saved thereby from the permanent crouch of the shoe-bench.

When, having left his shoes, he was returning down the steep street of the little settlement, he saw Doctor Prescott's sulky ahead of him. Then, just before it reached a small weather-beaten house on the right, he saw a woman rush out as if to stop it, and a man follow after her and pull her back through the door.

The sulky was driven past at a rapid pace; for the weather was sharp, and the doctor's mare stepped out well after standing. When Jerome reached the house the doctor was scarcely within hailing distance; but the woman was out again, calling after him frantically: "Doctor!

Doctor! Doctor Prescott! Stop! Stop here! Doctor!"

Jerome sprang forward to offer his a.s.sistance in summoning him, but at that instant the man reappeared again and clutched the woman by the arm. "Come back, come back in the house, Laura," he gasped, faintly, and yet with wild energy.

Jerome saw then that the man was ghastly, staggering, and yellow-white, except for blazing red spots on the cheeks, and that his great eyes were bright with fever. Jerome knew him; he was a young farmer, Henry Leeds by name, and not long married. Jerome had gone to school with the wife, and called her familiarly by name.

"What's the matter, Laura?" he asked.

"Oh, J'rome," she half sobbed, "do help me--do call the doctor.

Henry's awful sick; I know he is. He'd ought to have the doctor, but he won't because it costs so much. Do call him; I can't make him hear."

Jerome opened his mouth to shout, but the sick man flew at him with an awful, piteous cry. "Don't ye, don't ye," he wailed out; "I tell ye not to, J'rome Edwards. I 'ain't got any money to pay him with."

"But you're sick, Henry," said Jerome, putting his hand on the man's shaking shoulder to steady him. "You'd better let me run after him--I can make him hear now. It won't cost much."

"Don't ye do it," almost sobbed the young farmer. "It costs us a dollar every time he comes so far, an' he'll say right off, the way he did about mother that last time she was sick--when she broke her hip--that he'd take up a little piece of land beforehand; it would jest pay his bill. He'll do that, an' I tell ye I 'ain't got 'nough land now to support me. I 'ain't got 'nough land now, J'rome."

The poor young wife was weeping almost like a child. "Do let him call the doctor, do let him, Henry," she pleaded.

"There's another thing, J'rome," half whispered the young man, turning his back on his wife and fastening mysterious bright eyes on Jerome's--"there's another thing. Laura, she'll have to have the doctor before long, you can see that, an'--there'll be another mouth to fill, an' I've been savin' up a little, an' it ain't goin' for _me_--I tell ye it ain't goin' for _me_, J'rome."

All the while poor Henry Leeds, in spite of hot red spots on his cheeks, was shivering violently, but stiffly, like a tree in a freezing wind. The doctor had whirled quite out of sight over the hill. "He's gone," wailed the wife--"he's gone, and Henry 'll die--oh, I know he'll die!"

Then Jerome, who had been standing bewildered, not knowing whether he should or should not run and call after the doctor, and listening first to one, then to the other, collected himself. "No, he isn't going to die, either," he said to the poor girl, who was very young; and he said it quite sharply, because he so pitied her in her innocent helplessness, and would give her courage even in a bitter dose. He asked her, furthermore, as brusquely as Doctor Prescott himself could have done, what medicine she had in the house. Then he bade her hasten, if she wished to help and not hurt her husband, to the nearest neighbor and beg some sweat-producing herbs--thoroughwort or sage or catnip--all of which he had heard were good for fever.

She went away, wrapped in the thick shawl which Jerome had found in a closet, and himself pinned over the wild fair head, under the quivering chin, while he quieted her with grave admonitions, as if he were her father. Then he led poor Henry Leeds--still crying out that he would not have the doctor--into his house and his bedroom, and got him to bed, though it was a hard task.

"I tell you, Henry," pleaded Jerome, struggling with him to loosen his neck-band, "you shall not have the doctor; I'll doctor you myself."

"You don't know how--you don't know how, J'rome! She'll say you don't know how; she'll send for him, an' then, when he's got all my land, how am I goin' to get them a livin'?"

"I tell you, Doctor Prescott sha'n't darken your doors, Henry Leeds, if you'll behave yourself," said Jerome, stoutly; "and I can break up a fever as well as he can, if you'll only let me. Mother broke up one for me, and I never forgot it. You let me get your clothes off and get you into bed, Henry."

Jerome had had some little experience through nursing his mother, but, more than that, had the natural instinct of helpfulness, balanced with good sense and judgment, which makes a physician.

Moreover, he worked with as fiery zeal as if he were a surgeon in a battle-field. Soon he had Henry Leeds in his feather bed, with all the wedding quilts and blankets of poor young Laura piled over him.

The fire was almost out, for the girl was a poor house-keeper, and not shod by nature for any of the rough emergencies of life. Jerome had the fire blazing in short s.p.a.ce, and some hot water and hot bricks in readiness.

Poor young Laura Leeds had to go almost half a mile for her healing herbs, as the first neighbor was away from home and no one came in answer to her knocks. By the time she returned, with a stout neighboring mother at her side--both of them laden with dried aromatic bouquets, and the visitor, moreover, clasping a bottle or two of household panaceas, such as camphor and castor-oil--Jerome had the sick man steaming in a circle of hot bricks, and was rubbing him under the clothes with saleratus and water.

Jerome's proceedings might not have commended themselves to a school of physicians; but he reasoned from the principle that if remedies were individually valuable, a combination of them would increase in value in the proportion of the several to one. Sage and thoroughwort, sarsaparilla, pennyroyal, and burdock--nearly every herb, in fact, in the neighbor's collection--were infused into one black and eminently flavored tea, into which he dropped a little camphor, and even a modic.u.m of castor-oil. Jerome afterwards wondered at his own daring; but then, with a certainty as absolute as the rush of a stung animal to a mud bath--as if by some instinct of healing born with him--he concocted that dark and bitter beverage, and fed it in generous doses to the sick man. n.o.body interfered with him. The neighbor, though older than Laura and the mother of several children, had never known enough to bring out their measles and loosen their colds. The herbs had been gathered and stored by her husband's mother, and for many a year hung all unvalued in her garret. Luckily Jerome, through his old gathering for the apothecary, knew them all.

Jerome set one of the neighbor's boys to Upham Corners to tell his mother of his whereabouts; then he remained all night with young Henry Leeds, and by dint of his medley of herbs, or his tireless bathing and nursing, or because the patient had great elasticity of habit, or because the fever was not, after all, of a dangerous nature, his treatment was quite successful.

Jerome went home the next morning, and returned late in the afternoon, to stay overnight again. The day after, the fever did not appear, and Henry Leeds was on the fair way to recovery. A few weeks later came the affair of the contract in Robinson's store, and Jerome grasped a new purpose from the two.