"Yes, of course he's dead. That is, we're all afraid he is, though we all hope for the best; but that ain't the question," said Simon Ba.s.set. "The question is, how did he die?"

Jerome looked up in Simon Ba.s.set's face. "He died the same way you will, some time," said he. And with that Simon Ba.s.set let go his arm suddenly, and he was gone.

"Lord!" said Jake Noyes, under his breath. Simon Ba.s.set said not another word; his grandfather, his uncle, and a brother had all taken their own lives, and he knew that the others were thinking of it.

They all wondered if the boy had been keen-witted enough to give this hard hit at Simon intentionally, but he had not. Poor little Jerome had never speculated on the laws of heredity; he had only meant to deny that his father had come to any more disgraceful end than the common one of all mankind. He did not dream, as he raced along home with his sister's shoes, of the different construction which they had put upon his words, but he felt angry and injured.

"That Sim' Ba.s.set pickin' on me that way," he thought. A wild sense of the helplessness of his youth came over him. "Wish I was a man,"

he muttered--"wish I was a man; I'd show 'em! All them men talkin'--sayin' anything--'cause I'm a boy."

Just before he reached home Jerome met two more men, and he heard his father's name distinctly. One of them stretched out a detaining hand as he pa.s.sed, and called out, "Hullo! you're the Edwards boy?"

"Let me go, I tell you," shouted Jerome, in a fury, and was past them with a wild flourish of heels, like a rebellious colt.

"What in creation ails the boy?" said the man, with a start aside; and he and the other stood staring after Jerome.

When Jerome got home and opened the kitchen door he stood still with surprise. It was almost ten o'clock, and his mother and Elmira had begun to make pies. His mother had pushed herself up to the table and was mixing the pastry, while Elmira was beating eggs.

Mrs. Edwards looked around at Jerome. "What you standin' there lookin' for?" said she, with her sharp, nervous voice. "Put them shoes down, an' bring that quart pail of milk out of the pantry. Be careful you don't spill it."

Jerome obeyed. When he set the milk-pail on the table, Elmira gave him a quick, piteously confidential glance from under her tearful lids. Elmira, with her blue checked pinafore tied under her chin, sat in a high wooden chair, with her little bare feet curling over a round, and beat eggs with a wooden spoon in a great bowl.

"What you doin'?" asked Jerome.

Her mother answered for her. "She's mixin' up some custard for pies,"

said she. "I dun'no' as there's any need of you standin' lookin' as if you never saw any before."

"Never saw you makin' custard-pies at ten o'clock at night before,"

returned Jerome, with blunt defiance.

"Do you s'pose," said his mother, "that I'm goin' to let your father go off an' die all alone an' take no notice of it?"

"Dun'no' what you mean?"

"Don't you know it's three days since he went off to get that wood an' never come back?"

Jerome nodded.

"Do you s'pose I'm goin' to let it pa.s.s an' die away, an' folks forget him, an' not have any funeral or anything? I made up my mind I'd wait until nine o'clock to-night, an' then, if he wa'n't found, I wouldn't wait any longer. I'd get ready for the funeral. I've sent over for Paulina Maria and your aunt B'lindy to come in an' help.

Henry come over here to see if I'd heard anything, and I told him to go right home an' tell his mother to come, an' stop on the way an'

tell Paulina Maria. There's a good deal to do before two o'clock to-morrow afternoon, an' I can't do much myself; somebody's got to help. In the mornin' you'll have to take the horse an' go over to the West Corners, an' tell Amelia an' her mother an' Lyddy Stokes's folks. There won't be any time to send word to the Greens over in Westbrook. They're only second-cousins anyway, an' they 'ain't got any horse, an' I dun'no' as they'd think they could afford to hire one. Now you take that fork an' go an' lift the cover off that kettle, an' stick it into the dried apples, an' see if they've begun to get soft."

Ann Edwards's little triangular face had grown plainly thinner and older in three days, but the fire in her black eyes still sparkled.

Her voice was strained and hoa.r.s.e on the high notes, from much lamentation, but she still raised it imperiously. She held the wooden mixing-bowl in her lap, and stirred with as desperate resolution, compressing her lips painfully, as if she were stirring the dregs of her own cup of sorrow.

Pretty soon there were voices outside and steps on the path. The door opened, and two women came in. One was Paulina Maria, Adoniram Judd's wife; the other was Belinda, the wife of Ozias Lamb.

Belinda Lamb spoke first. She was a middle-aged woman, with a pretty faded face. She wore her light hair in curls, which fell over her delicate, thin cheeks, and her blue eyes had no more experience in them than a child's, although they were reddened now with gentle tears. She had the look of a young girl who had been out like a flower in too strong a light, and faded out her pretty tints, but was a young girl still. Belinda always smiled an innocent girlish simper, which sometimes so irritated the austere New England village women that they scowled involuntarily back at her. Paulina Maria Judd and Ann Edwards both scowled without knowing it now as she spoke, her words never seeming to disturb that mildly ingratiating upward curve of her lips.

"I've come right over," said she, in a soft voice; "but it ain't true what Henry said, is it?"

"What ain't true?" asked Ann, grimly.

"It ain't true you're goin' to have a funeral?" Tears welled up afresh in Belinda's blue eyes, and flowed slowly down her delicate cheeks, but not a muscle of her face changed, and she smiled still.

"Why can't I have a funeral?"

"Why, Ann, how can you have a funeral, when there ain't--when they 'ain't found him?"

"I'd like to know why I can't!"

Belinda's blue, weeping eyes surveyed her with the helpless bewilderment of a baby. "Why, Ann," she gasped, "there won't be any--remains!"

"What of that? I guess I know it."

"There won't be nothin' for anybody to go round an' look at; there won't be any coffin--Ann, you ain't goin' to have any coffin when he ain't found, be you?"

"Be you a fool, Belindy Lamb?" said Ann. A hard sniff came from Paulina Maria.

"Well, I didn't s'pose you was," said Belinda, with meek abashedness.

"Of course I knew you wasn't--I only asked; but I don't see how you can have a funeral no way, Ann. There won't be any coffin, nor any hea.r.s.e, nor any procession, nor--"

"There'll be mourners," broke in Ann.

"They're what makes a funeral," said Paulina Maria, putting on an ap.r.o.n she had brought. "Folks that's had funerals knows."

She cast an austere glance at Belinda Lamb, who colored to the roots of her fair curls, and was conscious of a guilty lack of funeral experience, while Paulina Maria had lost seven children, who all died in infancy. Poor Belinda seemed to see the other woman's sternly melancholy face in a halo of little coffins and funeral wreaths.

"I know you've had a good deal more to contend with than I have," she faltered. "I 'ain't never lost anybody till poor--Abel." She broke into gentle weeping, but Paulina Maria thrust a broom relentlessly into her hand.

"Here," said she, "take this broom an' sweep, an' it might as well be done to-night as any time. Of course you 'ain't got your spring cleanin' done, none of it, Ann?"

"No," replied Mrs. Edwards; "I was goin' to begin next week."

"Well," said Paulina Maria, "if this house has got to be all cleaned, an' cookin' done, in time for the funeral, somebody's got to work. I s'pose you expect some out-of-town folks, Ann?"

"I dare say some 'll come from the West Corners. I thought I wouldn't try to get word to Westbrook, it's so far; but mebbe I'd send to Granby--there's some there that might come."

"Well," said Paulina Maria, "I shouldn't be surprised if as many as a dozen came, an' supper 'll have to be got for 'em. What are you goin'

to do about black, Ann?"

"I thought mebbe I could borrow a black bonnet an' a veil. I guess my black bombazine dress will do to wear."

"Mis' Whitby had a new one when her mother died, an' didn't use her mother's old one. I don't believe but what you can borrow that," said Paulina Maria. She was moving about the kitchen, doing this and that, waiting for no commands or requests. Jerome and Elmira kept well back out of her way, although she had not half the fierce impetus that their mother sometimes had when hitching about in her chair. Paulina Maria, in her limited field of action, had the quick and unswerving decision of a general, and people marshalled themselves at her nod, whether they would or no. She was an example of the insistence of a type. The prevailing traits of the village women were all intensified and fairly dominant in her. They kept their houses clean, but she kept hers like a temple for the footsteps of divinity. Marvellous tales were told of Paulina Maria's exceeding neatness. It was known for a fact that the boards of her floors were so arranged that they could be lifted from their places and cleaned on their under as well as upper sides. Could Paulina Maria have cleaned the inner as well as the outer surface of her own skin she would doubtless have been better satisfied. As it was, the colorless texture of her thin face and hands, through which the working of her delicate jaws and muscles could be plainly seen, gave an impression of extreme purity and cleanliness. "Paulina Maria looks as ef she'd been put to soak in rain-water overnight," Simon Ba.s.set said once, after she had gone out of the store. Everybody called her Paulina Maria--never Mrs. Judd, nor Mrs. Adoniram Judd.

The village women were, as a rule, full of piety. Paulina Maria was austere. She had the spirit to have scourged herself had she once convicted herself of wrong; but that she had never done. The power of self-blame was not in her. Paulina Maria had never labored under conviction of sin; she had had no orthodox conversion; but she set her slim unswerving feet in the paths of righteousness, and walked there with her head up. In her the uncompromising spirit of Puritanism was so strong that it defeated its own ends. The other women were at times inflexible; Paulina Maria was always rigid. The others could be severe; Paulina Maria might have conducted an inquisition. She had in her possibilities of almost mechanical relentlessness which had never been tested in her simple village life. Paulina Maria never shirked her duty, but it could not be said that she performed it in any gentle and Christ-like sense. She rather attacked it and slew it, as if it were a dragon in her path. That night she was very weary. She had toiled hard all day at her own vigorous cleaning. Her bones and muscles ached. The spring languor also was upon her. She was not a strong woman, but she never dreamed of refusing to go to Ann Edwards's and a.s.sist her in her sad preparations.

She and Belinda Lamb remained and worked until midnight; then they went home. Jerome had to escort them through the silent village street--he had remained up for that purpose. Elmira had been sent to bed. When the boy came home alone along the familiar road, between the houses with their windows gleaming with blank darkness in his eyes, with no sound in his ears save the hoa.r.s.e bark of a dog when his footsteps echoed past, a great strangeness of himself in his own thoughts was upon him.

He had not the feminine ability to ease descent into the depths of sorrow by catching at all its minor details on the way. He plunged straight down; no questions of funeral preparations or mourning bonnets arrested him for a second. "My father is dead," Jerome told himself; "he jumped into the pond and drowned himself, and here's mother, and Elmira, and the mortgage, and me."