"Mother's queer," Jerome told himself as he went down the road, and then dismissed the matter from his mind, for the consideration of the Upham baby and the probable nature of its ailment, upon which, however, he did not allow himself to dwell too long. Early in his amateur practice Jake Noyes had inculcated one precept in his mind, upon which he always acted.

"There's one thing I want to tell ye, J'rome, and I want ye to remember it," Jake Noyes had said, "and that is, a doctor had ought to be like jurymen--he'd ought to be sworn in to be unprejudiced when he goes to see a patient, just as a juryman is when he goes to court.

If you don't know what ails 'em, don't ye go to speculatin', as to what 'tis an' what ye'll do, on the way there. Ten chances to one, if you're workin' up measles in your mind an' what you'll do for them, you'll find it's mumps, an' then you've got to cure your own measles afore you cure their mumps; an' if you're hard-bitted an' can't stop yourself easy when you're once headed, you may give saffron tea to bring out the measles whether or no. Think of the prospect, or the gals, or your soul's salvation, or anythin' but the sick folks, before you get to 'em the first time and don't know what ails 'em."

In girls Jerome had, so far, no interest; in his soul's salvation he had little active concern. The revivals which were occasionally upstirred in the community by prayer, and the besom of threatened destruction, pa.s.sed over him like a hot wind, for which he had no power of sensation, sometimes to his own wonder. Probably the cause lay in the fact that he was too thoroughly, without knowing it, rooted and grounded in his own creed to be emotionally moved by religious appeals. Jerome had, as most have, consciously or not, and vitally or not, his own creed. He believed simply in the unquestionable justice of the intent of G.o.d, the thwarting struggles against it by free man, and that his duty to apply his small strength towards furthering what he could, if no more than an atom, of the eternal will lay plain before him.

Jerome, who had not yet been disturbed by love of woman, who fretted not over the salvation of his own soul, had therefore, in order to follow his mentor's advice, to turn his attention to the prospect.

His way led in an opposite direction from the church, and he was late, so met none of the worshippers bound to meeting. He was rather glad of that. After he left the village the road lay through the woods, and now and then between blueberry-fields or open s.p.a.ces of meadow, with green water-lines and shadows purple with violets in the hollows. Red cows in the meadows stared at him as he pa.s.sed, with their mysterious abstraction from all reflection, then grazed again, moving in one direction from the sun. The blueberry-patches spread a pale green glimmer of blossoms, like a sheen of satin in a high light; young ferns curled beside the road like a baby's fingers grasping at life; the trees, which were late in leafing, also reached out towards the sun little rosy clasping fingers whereby to hold fast to the motherhood of the spring. The air was full of that odor so delicate that it is scarcely an odor at all, much less a fragrance, which certain so-called scentless plants give out, and then only to wide recognition when they bloom in mult.i.tudes--it was only the simplest evidence of life itself. Through that came now and then great whiffs of perfume from some unseen flowering bush, calling, as it were, from its obscurity, with halloos of fragrance, to the careless pa.s.ser-by, to search it out.

Jerome pa.s.sed along, seeing and comprehending all the sweet pageant of the spring morning, yet as an observer merely. Nature had as yet not established her fullest relationship to himself, and he knew not that her secret glory of meaning was like his own.

Chapter XXI

John Upham's farm, or rather what had been John Upham's farm (Doctor Prescott owned it now), began at the end of a long stretch of woods, with some fine fields sloping greenly towards the west. Farther on, behind a row of feathery elm-trees, stood the old Upham homestead.

John Upham did not live there now; his mortgage had been foreclosed nearly a year before, about the time the last baby was born. People said that the mother had been cruelly hurried out of her own house into the little shanty, which her husband was forced to rent for a shelter. Poor John Upham had lost all his ancestral acres to Doctor Prescott now, and did not fairly know himself how it had happened.

There had been heavy bills for medicines and attendance, and the doctor had loaned him money oftentimes, with his land as security, for other debts. A little innocent saying of one of his six children to another was much repeated to the village, "Father bought you of Doctor Prescott, and paid for you with all the clover-field he had left, and you must be very good, for you came very dear."

It was known positively that John Upham had gone to Doctor Prescott's the day after he had left his old home, and told him to his face what he thought of him. "You have planned and manoeuvred to get all my property into your hands from the very first of it," said John Upham.

"You've drained me dry, an' now I hope you're satisfied."

"You had full value in return," replied the doctor, calmly.

"I haven't had time. In nine cases out of ten, if you had given me a little time, I could have got myself out, and you know it. You've screwed me down to the very second."

"I cannot afford to give my debtors longer time than that regulated by the laws of the commonwealth."

Then a sudden strange gleam had come into John Upham's blue eyes.

"Thank the Lord," he cried out, in a trembling fervor of wrath--"thank the Lord, He gives all the time there is to His debtors, an' no commonwealth on the earth can make laws agin it." He had actually then raised a great fist and shaken it before the doctor's face. "Now, don't you ever da.r.s.e to darken my doors again, Doctor Seth Prescott!" he had cried out. "If my wife or my children are sick, I'll let them lay and die before I'll have you in the house!" So saying, John Upham had stridden forth out of the doctor's yard, where he had held the conversation with him, with Jake Noyes and two other men covertly listening.

After that Jake Noyes had given surrept.i.tious advice, with sly shoving of medicine-vials into John Upham's or his wife's hands when the children were ailing, and lately Jerome had taken his place.

"Guess you had better go there instead of me when the young ones are out of sorts," Jake Noyes had told Jerome. Then he had added, with a crafty twist and wink: "When ye can quarrel with your own bread an'

b.u.t.ter with a cat's-paw might as well do it, especially when you're gettin' along in years. You 'ain't got anything to lose if you do set the doctor again ye, and I have."

The house in which the Uphams had taken shelter was in sight of the old homestead, some rods farther on, on the opposite side of the road. It stood in a sandy waste of weeds on the border of an old gravel-pit--an ancient cottage, with a wretched crouch of humility in its very roof. It had been covered with a feeble coat of red paint years ago, and cloudy lines of it still survived the wash of old rains and the beat of old sunbeams.

Behind it on the north and west rose the sand-hill, dripping with loose gravel as with water, hollowed out at its base until its crest, bristling with coa.r.s.e herbage, magnified against the sky, projected far out over the cottage roof. The sun was reflected from the sand in a great hollow of arid light. Jerome, nearing it, felt as if he were approaching an oven. The cottage door was shut, as were all the windows. However, he heard plainly the shrill wail of the sick baby.

John Upham opened the door. "Oh, it's you, Jerome!" said he.

"Good-day."

"Good-day," returned Jerome. "How is the baby?"

"Well, he seems kind of ailin'. Laury has been up with him all night.

Thought maybe you might give him something. Come in, won't ye?"

There were only two rooms on the lower floor of the cottage--one was the kitchen, the other the bedroom where John Upham and his wife slept with the three youngest children.

Jerome followed Upham across the kitchen to the bedroom beyond. The kitchen was littered with all John Upham's poor household goods, prostrate and unwashed, degraded even from their one dignity of use.

One of the kitchen windows opened towards the sand-hill; the room was full of its garish glare of reflected sunlight, and the revelations were pitiless. Laura Upham, once a model housekeeper, had lost all ambition and domestic pride, now she had such a poor house to keep and so many children to tend.

Upham muttered an apology as Jerome picked his way across the room.

"Laury has been up all night with the baby, an' she hasn't had any time to redd up the room," he said. "The children have been in here all the mornin', too, an' they've stirred things up some. I've just sent 'em out to pick flowers to keep 'em quiet."

As he spoke he gathered up awkwardly, with a curious over-motion of his broad shoulders, as if he would conceal the action, various articles in his path. When he opened the door into the bedroom he crammed them behind it with a quick, shifty motion.

The kitchen had been repulsive, but the bedroom fairly shocked with the very indelicacy of untidiness. Jerome felt an actual modesty about entering this room, in which so many disclosures of the closest secrets of the flesh were made. The very dust and discolorations of the poor furnishings, the confined air, made one turn one's face aside as from too coa.r.s.e a betrayal of personal reserve. The naked indecency of domestic life seemed to display and vaunt itself, sparing none of its homely and ungraceful details, to the young man on the threshold of the room.

"Laury 'ain't had a chance to redd up this, either," poor John Upham whispered in his ear, and gathered up with a furtive swoop some linen from the floor.

"Oh, that's all right!" Jerome whispered back, and entered boldly, shutting as it were all the wretched disclosures of the room out of his consciousness, and all effort to do was needless when he saw Mrs.

Upham's face.

Laura Upham's great hollow eyes, filled with an utter pa.s.siveness of despair, stared up at him out of a sallow gloom of face. She had been pretty once, and she was not an old woman now, but her beauty was all gone. Her slender shoulders rounded themselves over the little creature swathed in soiled flannel on her lap. Just then it was quiet; but it began wailing again, distorting all its miserable little face into a wide mouth of feeble clamor as Jerome drew near.

Mrs. Upham looked down at it hopelessly. She did not try to hush it.

"It's cried this way all night," she said, in a monotonous tone.

"It's goin' to die."

"Now, Laury, you know it ain't any sicker than it was before," John said, with a kind of timid conciliation; but she turned upon him with a fierce gleam lighting her dull eyes to life.

"You needn't talk to me," said she--"you needn't talk to me, John Upham, when you won't have the doctor when it's your own flesh an'

blood that's dyin'. I don't care what he's done. I don't care if he has taken the roof from over our heads. My child is worth more than anything else. He'd come if you asked him, he couldn't refuse--you know he couldn't, John Upham!"

John Upham's face was white; his forehead and his chin got a curious hardness of outline. "He won't have a chance," he said, between his teeth.

"Let your own flesh and blood die, then!" cried his wife; but the fierceness was all gone from her voice; she had no power of sustained wrath, so spent was she. She gave a tearless wail that united with the child's in her lap in a pitiful chord of woe.

"Now, Laury, you know J'rome gave Minnie somethin' that helped her, and she seemed every mite as sick as the baby," her husband said, in a softer voice. But she turned her hopeless eyes again upon the little, squalid, quivering thing in her lap, and paid no more heed to him. She let Jerome examine the child, with a strange apathy. There was no hope, and consequently no power of effort, left in her.

When Jerome brought some medicine in a spoon, she a.s.sisted him to feed the child with it, but mechanically, and as if she had no interest. Her sharp right elbow shone like a k.n.o.b of ivory through a great rent in her sleeve; her dress was unfastened, and there was a gleam of white flesh through the opening; she neither knew nor cared.

There was no consciousness of self, no pride and no shame for self, in her; she had ceased to live in the fullest sense; she was nothing but the concentration of one emotion of despairing motherhood.

She heard Jerome and her husband moving about in the next room, she heard the crackling of fire in the stove, the clinking din of dishes, the sc.r.a.pe of a broom, not realizing in the least what the sounds meant. She heard with her mind no sound of earth but the wail of the sick baby in her lap.

Jerome Edwards could tidy a house as well as a woman, and John Upham followed his directions with clumsy zeal. When the kitchen was set to rights Mrs. Upham went in there, as she was bidden, with the baby, and sat down in a rocking-chair by the open window towards the road, through which came a soft green light from some opposite trees, and a breath of apple-blossoms.

"We've got the room all redd up, Laury," John Upham said, pitifully, stooping over her and looking into her face. She nodded vaguely, looking at the baby, who had stopped crying.

Jerome dropped some more medicine, and she took the spoon and fed it to the baby. "I think it will go to sleep now," said Jerome. Mrs.

Upham looked up at him and almost smiled. Hope was waking within her.

"I think it is nothing but a little cold and feverishness, Mrs.