Jerome, A Poor Man | Page 9

father's fainted away," he muttered.
Finally he became sure that his father was nowhere in the clearing, and
he raised his voice again and shouted, and hallooed, and listened, and
hallooed again, and got no response.
Suddenly a chill seemed to strike Jerome's heart. He thought of the

pond. Little given as he was to forebodings of evil, when once he was
possessed of one it became a certainty.
"Father's fell in the pond and got drowned," he burst out with a great
sob. "What will mother do?"
The boy went forward, stumbling half blindly over the stumps. Once he
fell, bruising his knee severely, and picked himself up, sobbing
piteously. All the child in Jerome had asserted itself.
Beyond the clearing was a stone wall that bounded Abel Edwards's
property. Beyond that was a little grove of old thick-topped pine-trees;
beyond that the little woodland pond. It was very shallow in places, but
it never dried up, and was said to have deep holes in it. The boys told
darkly braggart stories about this pond. They had stood on this rock and
that rock with poles of fabulous length; they had probed the still water
of the pond, and "never once hit the bottom, sir." They had flung stones
with all their might, and, listening sharply forward like foxes, had not
heard them "strike bottom, sir."
One end of this pond, reaching up well among the pine-trees, had the
worst repute, and was called indeed a darkly significant name--the
"Dead Hole." It was confidently believed by all the village children to
have no bottom at all. There was a belief current among them that once,
before they were born, a man had been drowned there, and his body
never found.
They would stand on the shore and look with horror, which yet gave
somehow a pleasant titillation to their youthful spirits, at this water
which bore such an evil name. Their elders did not need to caution
them; even the most venturesome had an awe of the Dead Hole, and
would not meddle with it unduly.
Jerome climbed over the stone wall. The land on the other side
belonged to Doctor Prescott. He went through the grove of pine-trees
and reached the pond--the end called the Dead Hole. He stood there
looking and listening. It was a small sheet of water; the other shore,
swampy and skirted with white-flowering bushes and young trees,

looked very near; a cloying, honey sweetness came across, and a
silvery smoke of mist was beginning to curl up from it. The frogs were
clamorous, and every now and then came the bass boom of a bull-frog.
A red light from the westward sun came through the thin growth
opposite, and lay over the pond and the shore. Little swarms of gnats
danced in it.
A swarm of the little gauzy things, so slight and ephemeral that they
seemed rather a symbolism of life than life itself, whirled before the
boy's wild, tearful eyes, and he moved aside and looked down, and then
cried out and snatched something from the ground at his feet. It was the
hat Abel Edwards had worn when he left home that morning. Jerome
stood holding his father's hat, gazing at it with a look in his face like an
old man's. Indeed, it may have been that a sudden old age of the spirit
came in that instant over the boy. He had not before conceived of
anything but an accident happening to his father; now all at once he
saw plainly that if his father, Abel Edwards, had come to his death in
the pond it must have been through his own choice. "He couldn't have
fell in," muttered Jerome, with stiff lips, looking at the gently curving
shore and looking at the hat.
Suddenly he straightened himself, and an expression of desperate
resolution came into his face. He set his teeth hard; somehow, whether
through inherited instincts or through impressions he had got from his
mother, he had a firm conviction that suicide was a horrible disgrace to
the dead man himself and to his family.
"Nobody shall ever know it," the boy thought. He nodded fiercely, as if
to confirm it, and began picking up stones from the shore of the pond.
He filled the crown of the hat with them, got a string out of his pocket,
tied it firmly around the crown, making a strong knot; then he swung
his arm back at the shoulder, brought it forward with a wide sweep, and
flung the hat past the middle of the Dead Hole.
"There," said Jerome; "guess nobody 'll ever know now. There ain't no
bottom to the Dead Hole." The boy hurried out of the woods and down
the road again. When he reached the