All the way home this living anxiety for his mother and sister, and this dead sorrow haunted him. He thought as he struggled through the snow, his face bent before the drive of the sleet as before a flail of ice, how often in all weathers his father had traversed this same road, how his own feet could scarcely step out of his old tracks. He thought how many a night, through such a storm as this, his father had toiled wearily home, and with no such fire of youth and hope in his heart to cheer him on. “Father must have given up a long time before he died,” he said to himself.
The imagination of his father plodding homeward in his old harness of hopeless toil grew so strong that his own identity paled. He seemed to lose all ambition and zeal, a kind of heredity of discouragement overspread him. “I don't know but I'll have to give up, finally, the way he did,” he muttered, panting under the buffeting of the snow wind.
He met no one on his way home. Once a loaded wood-sled came up behind him with a faint creak and jingle of harness, then the straining flanks of the horse, the cubic pile of wood shaded out of shape by the snow, the humped back of the driver on the top, passed out of sight, as behind a slanting white curtain. The village houses receded through shifting distances of pale gloom; one could scarcely distinguish the white slants of their roofs, and the lamp-lights which shone out newly in some of the windows made rosy nimbuses.
When Jerome drew near his own home he looked eagerly, and saw, with relief, that the white thickness of the storm was suffused with light opposite the kitchen windows.
“Everything all right?” he asked, when he entered, stamping and shaking himself.
Elmira was toasting bread, and she turned her flushed face wonderingly. “Yes; why shouldn't it be?” she said.
“No reason why. It's an awful storm.”
Ann was knitting fast, sitting over against a window thick with clinging shreds of snow. Her face was in the shadow, but she looked as if she had been crying. She did not speak when Jerome entered.
“What ails mother?” he whispered to Elmira, following her into the pantry when he had a chance.
“She's been telling a dream she had last night about father, and it made her feel bad. Hush!”