Читать книгу The Sherrods - George Barr McCutcheon - Страница 8

Dudley Sherrod was the only son of John Sherrod, who had died about four years before the marriage. Up to the day of his death he was considered the wealthiest farmer in Clay Township. On that day he was a pauper; his lands were no longer his own; his wife and his son were penniless. In an upstairs room of the great old farmhouse, built by his grandfather when the country was new, he blew out his brains, unable to face the ruin that fate had brought to his door.

His father had been a member of the Legislature, and the boy had spent two years in the city, attending a medical college. When the diploma came he went back to the old home and hung out his shingle in quaint little Glenville. In less than a year he brought a bride to the farm—Cora Bloodgood, the daughter of a banker in the capital city of his State. Before the end of another year he was, as heir, owner of all his father's acres. So it was that John and Cora Sherrod began life rich and happy. Their boy was born, grew up a bright and sprightly lad, and was sent to college. From the rude country schoolhouse and its simple teachings he was sent to the busy university, among city boys and city girls, miserable in ungainly self-consciousness, altogether out of place. He left behind him the country lads and lasses, the tow-heads and the barefoots, and his heart was sore. But in the beginning of his second year the simplicity of his rural heart showed signs of giving way to urban improvements. His strength won for him a place on the football team, and the sense of dignity of this position displaced his self-consciousness and taught him to be interested in the world beyond his home. He began to know something besides the memory of green fields and meadows and clear blue skies.

All these months he was faithful to a slip of a girl down in the country to whom he had feared to utter a word of love. She knew she loved him because she had cried when he went away and had cried when he came back. Letters, stiff and painfully correct as to spelling and chirography, came each week from dear little Justine Van. To her his long letters, homesickness crowding between the lines, although she could not see it, were like messages from paradise. A dozen times a day she read each letter as she sat in her room, or in the hated schoolroom at Glenville, or in the shady orchard, or in the lonely lane. She longed to have him back at home, to hear his merry laugh, to romp with him as they had romped before he went away to school—but here she blushed and remembered that he was tall now, and dreadfully old and grand, and she was—she was fifteen! Jud thrashed a fellow student one day because he poked fun at an old tintype of Justine that he happened to see in the boy's room. The victim had laughed at the green bonnet, the long pig-tails, and the wide eyes of the girl in the picture—"just as if they were looking for the photographer's bird, you know."

Near the middle of his second year at college the crash came and the half-dazed boy hurried home. His father was dead and the whole country was telling the stories of his great financial losses. Every dollar, every foot of land had been swept away by reverses arising from investments in Arizona mines. Captain James Van went down in the same disaster. When word reached his home of the suicide of John Sherrod, he was on his way to the barn with a pistol hidden over his heart. Horror and the awakening of courage made him cast the pistol aside and turn to face the blow as a brave man should, with his wife and child behind his back.

Jud and Justine could not at first, and did not for many days, realize the force of the blow. One had lost father as well as home; the other had lost home and had sunk to a depth of poverty that grew more and more appalling as her young mind began to understand. The boy, when he finally grasped the situation, bared his arms and set forth to support himself and his mother by hard work. The shock of the suicide was too great for Mrs. Sherrod. Her reason fled soon after her husband was laid in the grave, but it was a year before death took her to him. During that last year of life she lived in the old place, a helpless invalid, mentally and physically, although the property belonged to another. David Strong held a mortgage on the home place, but he did not foreclose it until she was gone.

For a year Jud cared for his mother, and worked in the fields with David Strong's men at wages of twelve dollars a month. Half of the year's crop Strong gave to the widow of John Sherrod, although not a penny's worth of it was hers by right. After her death Strong and his family moved into the big old house, and Jud Sherrod lived in a room in what had been his home.

Justine Van's grandmother, in her will, left to the girl a thirty-acre piece of ground, half timber, half cultivated, about a mile from the white house in which the beneficiary was born and which was swallowed up by the great disaster. Bereft of every penny, James Van took his wife and daughter to the miserable little cottage. The girl shouldered as much of the burden of poverty as her young and tender shoulders could carry. She begged for an appointment as teacher in the humble schoolhouse where her a-b-abs had been learned, and for two years and a half before her marriage she had taught the little flock of boys and girls. Especially necessary did this means of earning a livelihood become when, two years after the failure, her father died. Then Mrs. Van followed him, and Justine, not nineteen, was face to face with the world, a trembling, guileless child.

Her wages at the schoolhouse were twenty-five dollars a month, for six months in a year, and the yield of grain from her poorly tilled farm was barely enough to pay the taxes and the help hire. Old Jim Hardesty farmed the place for her, and he robbed her. For six months after the mother's death she lived alone in the cottage, and then the neighbors finally taking the matter in hand and insisting that she be provided with a companion, her old nurse, Mrs. Crane, came to the place. She was shrewd from years of adversity and persuaded Justine to send Jim Hardesty packing—and that was the hardest duty Justine had ever had to meet.

The discouraged boy, over on David Strong's place, worn thin with hard work and sickness, deprived of every chance, as he thought, to realize his ambitions, found in the girl a sympathetic comrade. Of all the people in his world she was the only one who understood his desires, and could, in a way, share with him the despair that made life as he lived it seem like a narrow cell from which he could look longingly with no hope of escape. Tired and sore from misfortune, these two simple, loving natures turned to each other. His first trembling kiss upon her surprised, parted lips was a treasure that never left her memory. The bloom came to her cheeks, lightness touched her flagging heart, happiness shone through the gloom, and the whole countryside marveled at her growing beauty. This slim, budding maid of the meadow and wood was as fair a bit as nature ever perfected. The sweetness and purity of womanhood undefiled dwelt in her body and soul. No taint of worldliness had blighted her. She was a pure, simple, country girl, ignorant of wile, sinless and trustful.

Justine was like her father, fair faced and straight of form. Her hair was long and reddish-brown, her brow was broad and full, her eyes big and brown and soft with love, her cheeks smooth and clear. A trifle above the medium height, straight and strong, of slender mold, she was as graceful as a gazelle. Health seemed to glow in the atmosphere about her.

With Jud, too, the realization of love and the feeling that there was something to live for, brought a change. His stooping shoulders straightened, his eyes brightened, his steps became springy. He whistled and sang at his work, took an interest in life, and presently even resumed his drawing. The country folk winked knowingly. The two were constantly together when opportunity afforded, so it soon became common report that he was her "feller, fer sure," and she was his "girl."

One evening, as they sat in the dusk down by the creek, which ran through her bit of pasture land, Jud drew his mother's plain gold ring from his little finger and slipped it upon Justine's third. They were betrothed.

Never were such sweethearts as Jud and Justine. They were lovers, friends, comrades. Her sweet, serious face took a new life, new color at his approach, her dreamy eyes grew softer and more wistful, her low voice more musical. Her soul was his, her life belonged to him, her heart beat only for him. Jud's famished hopes of something beyond the farm found fresh encouragement in her simple, wondering praise. She was his critic, his unconscious mentor. Beneath her untrained eye he sketched as he never sketched before. Looking over his shoulder as he lay stretched upon the grass, she marveled at the skill with which his pencil transferred the world about them to the dearly bought drawing pads, and her enthusiastic little cries of delight were tributes that brought confidence to the heart of the artist.

The girl had scores of admirers. Every boy, every man in the township longed to "make up" to her, but she gave no thought to them. Half a dozen widowers with children asked her to marry them. She and Jud laughed when Eversole Baker besought her to become mother to his nine children, including two daughters older than herself.

But there was one determined suitor, and she feared him with an uncanny dread that knew no rest until she was safely Jud's on the wedding night. That one was Eugene Crawley, drunkard and blasphemer.

Crawley was born in the dense timber land north of Glenville. His father had been a woodchopper, hunter, and fisherman. Hard stories came down to town about Sam Crawley. Of 'Gene, the boy, nothing against his honesty at least could be said. He was a vile wretch when drinking, little better when sober, but he was as honest as the sun.

He had gone to school with Jud and Justine when they were little "tads," and his rough affection for her began when they were mastering the "first reader." He and Jud had fought over her twice and each had been a victor. The girl despised him, from childhood, and he knew it. Still, he clung to the hope that he could take her away from his rival. He dogged her footsteps, frightened her with his mad protestations, and finally alarmed her by his threats. The day before the wedding he had met her as she left the schoolhouse and had sworn to kill Jud Sherrod. She did not tell Jud of this, nor did she tell him that she had pleaded with Crawley to spare her lover's life. Had she told Jud all this she would have been obliged to tell him how the brute had suddenly burst into tears and promised he would not harm Jud if he could help it.