“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, passed 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 God, 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 spaces of meadow, with green water-lines and shadows purple with violets in the hollows. Red cows in the meadows stared at him as he passed, 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 multitudes—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 passer-by, to search it out.
Jerome passed 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 manœuvred 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.”