Jerome, A Poor Man: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“I'll tell you when I get back,” replied Jerome. He went out with dignity, and Elmira heard him on the stairs. “He's goin' to dress up,” she thought.

She sat down by the window, well behind the curtain, that any one approaching might not see her, and waited. She had wakened that morning as into a new birth of sense, and greeted the world with helpless childish weeping, but now she was beginning to settle comfortably into this strange order of things. Her face, as she sat thus, wore the ready curves of smiles instead of tears. Elmira was one whose strength would always be in dependence. Now her young brother showed himself, as if by a miracle, a leader and a strong prop, and she could assume again her natural attitude of life and growth. She was no longer strange to herself in these strange ways, and that was wherein all the bitterness of strangeness lay.

When Jerome came down-stairs, in his little poor best jacket and trousers and his clean Sunday shirt, she stood in the door and looked at him curiously, but with a perfect rest of confidence.

Jerome looked at her with dignity, and yet with a certain childish importance, without which he would have ceased to be himself at all. “Look out for mother,” he whispered, admonishingly, and went out, holding his head up and his shoulders back, and feeling his sister's wondering and admiring eyes upon him, with a weakness of pride, and yet with no abatement of his strength of purpose, which was great enough to withstand self-recognition.

The boy that morning had a new gait when he had once started down the road. The habit of his whole life—and, more than that, an inherited habit—ceased to influence him. This new exaltation of spirit controlled even bones and muscles.

Jerome, now he had fairly struck out in life with a purpose of his own, walked no longer like his poor father, with that bent shuffling lope of worn-out middle age. His soul informed his whole body, and raised it above that of any simple animal that seeks a journey's end. His head was up and steady, as if he bore a treasure-jar on it, his back flat as a soldier's; he swung his little arms at his sides and advanced with proud and even pace.

Jerome's old gaping shoes were nicely greased, and he himself had made a last endeavor to close the worst apertures with a bit of shoemaker's thread. He had had quite a struggle with himself, before starting, regarding these forlorn old shoes and another pair, spick and span and black, and heavily clamping with thick new soles, which Uncle Ozias Lamb had sent over for him to wear to the funeral.

“He sent 'em over, an' says you may wear 'em to the funeral, if you're real careful,” his aunt Belinda had said, and then added, with her gentle sniff of deprecation and apology: “He says you'll have to give 'em back again—they ain't to keep. He says he's got so behindhand lately he 'ain't got any tithes to give to the Lord. He says he 'ain't got nothing that will divide up into ten parts, 'cause he 'ain't got more'n half one whole part himself.” Belinda Lamb repeated her husband's bitter saying out of his heart of poverty with a scared look, and yet with a certain relish and soft aping of his defiant manner.

“I don't want anybody to give when I can't give back again,” Ann had returned. “Ozias has always done full as much for us as we've done for him.” Then she had charged Jerome to be careful of the shoes, and not stub the toes, so his uncle would have difficulty in selling them.

“I'll wear my old shoes,” Jerome had replied, sullenly, but then had been borne down by the chorus of feminine rebuke and misunderstanding of his position. They thought, one and all, that he was wroth because the shoes were not given to him, and the very pride which forbade him to wear them constrained him to do so.