CHAPTER XIII
THE SURPRISE PARTY
He Ran straight on into – Emily.
The girl, having been attracted by the light back of her cabin, had just come out into her yard and so saw the impossible figure flying toward her, and in all the world there was never but one other man so homely and so beautiful.
"I – I thought your house was afire," Ambrose announced huskily.
He had stopped so close to the girl that she caught both his hands in hers, pressing one for an instant against her cheek.
"Something is burning in the woods; it doesn't matter," she answered; "but, oh, Ambrose, you have been such a long time in coming to me!"
The girl's eyes were shining, her figure perfectly distinct, and she wore the primrose dress, yet Ambrose knowing this did not believe he had dared look at her.
"I haven't come to you now," he defended stoutly; "I was just afeard to trust you to Miner in a fire."
Then Emily laughed the low understanding laugh that was her greatest charm, and all the while drawing her companion with her toward their bench in front of her door, she sat down beside him, still keeping one hand in his gently resisting fingers; there seemed to be no fear and no shyness about Emily to-night; she was too exquisitely a thing of love.
"Yet you were willing to trust my life and soul and everything there is about me to Miner," she said slowly. "Ah, isn't that like a man! But, dear, Miner hasn't been near me since early this afternoon," she continued, "and then he came for such a funny Miner reason. He wanted to tell me that if ever I'd thought he had any leaning toward me, it wasn't in no ways true. Because so far as he could see there wasn't nothin' a woman could be or do that could make up for her troublesomeness."
With this Emily quietly withdrew her hand and sitting still wondered if Ambrose had even heard her, for he did not speak at first, yet when turning he looked at her, the light of the fire making his face quite clear, the girl's eyes filled with tears. "Has it been so bad as that?" she whispered.
Ambrose nodded. "I ain't ever goin' to be able to tell you how I love you, honey, but it seems like everything that has gone before in my life and is comin' after is done made up fer by to-night."
Then after a little, when they had talked for a while and been silent a while longer, Emily put her head down on Ambrose's shoulder so that he might not see her face.
"I am thinking about Sarah; every woman thinks about the other woman some time," she confessed.
"Little Sarah?" Ambrose waited. "Was you wantin' me to say I didn't love her, honey? 'cause I can't. Would it 'a' been fairer to you, I wonder, ef I hadn't had a heart big enough fer lovin' some one before ever I set eyes on you? Sarah was young and needed me, and I reckon I loved her all I was able to then, but there wasn't so much of me to love her with as there is now. You see, Em'ly darlin', the dark waters has sort 'er passed over me, and I ain't in my springtime no more. Then lovin' and losin' does learn us a lot: but I ain't never goin' to care fer nobody as I do fer you, 'cause nobody else'll ever understand me and match up to me same as you do." But here Ambrose, sighing, pushed back his faded straw-coloured hair with the old puzzled gesture. "Still, honey, ef anything ever happens, I feel just obleeged to tell you, I reckon I'm the kind that plumb couldn't live on this earth without lovin' some one."
For a troubled instant Emily hesitated, and then with a sympathy so perfect that it was to last for ever and ever, and with another understanding laugh, she lifted up her head and kissed her truthful lover.
So that by and by when the fire in the woods back of them had died down they were both so happy that they neither saw nor heard the figure in the papaw grove stealing along a few yards to one side of them, though in the darkness of the tangled thicket it stumbled several times and for want of a helping arm limped painfully along.
Nevertheless five minutes later Ambrose and Emily both jumped hurriedly to their feet. For unexpectedly there sounded a noise as of many persons approaching the log cabin along the route which Ambrose had just taken. In another moment a procession came into sight and at the head and front walked Mrs. Barrows in her best purple linsey petticoat and scoop bonnet and carrying a basket on her arm. Following her were ten, twenty, thirty or more of the leading citizens of Pennyroyal, male and female, attired in their Sunday clothes and bearing packages.
"It's some kind of a forgiveness party," Ambrose whispered nervously; "seems like I'd better hide," and once again he attempted to flatten his thin body against the wall of the cabin.
Susan Barrows took Emily in her arms. "We're surprisin' you, child, and I hope we're pleasant," she explained. "Fer my own part I ain't never had nothin' happen to me suddint in my life that ain't been plumb distasteful, so I argued some with the folks to let you know we was comin'. But there's people in villages that finds things so slow and samewise it appears they think any kind of a start's better then nothin' happenin', so here we are!"
Susan's speech having been somewhat longer than her neighbours cared to listen to, the men and women of the party in the meanwhile had come crowding up around Emily until she had the sensation of shaking hands with a dozen persons at once, and all of them were smiling at her and saying how glad they were to know she was well again and wouldn't she live always in Pennyroyal, until Mrs. Barrows was actually thrust to one side. However, in that instant she managed to unearth Ambrose, who, appreciating what was taking place, had thought it best to step forth out of the shadow. Sheepishly he extended his hand to his neighbour and in the moonlight Susan got a good view of his face.
Her eyes snapped. "Good Lord! what a turn you've done give me!" she exclaimed, and then taking a closer survey: "Ambrose Thompson, I ain't more'n halfway suspicioned 'bout you and Em'ly Dunham before this night, but ef ever there's a surprise party in this village when you don't get there first, why I'd like to know!"
PART THREE
HIS THIRD WIFE
"Is there no ending of mirth?
Will time former unloosen
Fresh fonts clear, bubbling, and bright
From the drainless youth of the earth?"
CHAPTER XIV
THIRTY YEARS
Pennyroyal bore witness to the permanence of material things untroubled by spirit. Thirty years had passed since Ambrose Thompson's last honeymoon, and yet the little town had not greatly changed.
One afternoon in October, when from the same double row of linden trees, with only here and there a fallen comrade, a shower of wrinkled golden leaves was filling the ruts in the same road that once held the blossoms of an earlier spring, the door of a cottage opened and an elderly man stepped forth, humming a tune and began walking slowly down toward the front gate. He was dressed in gala attire and, observing a bed of purple asters that were growing near his path, stooped to gather one of the flowers. Getting up with a groan, he placed a hand on the small of his back, remarking testily: "Looks like I was gettin' powerful onlimber these days," and then jigging stiffly about to disprove his assertion he placed the aster in his buttonhole.
Pennyroyal was unusually stirred up over something, for at five o'clock her streets were filling with people in their best clothes, all moving toward the same spot – the new red brick Baptist church, with a cupola, which stood where Brother Bibbs's old frame meeting house had once held place.
A carriage advanced slowly, an open Victoria drawn by a pair of handsome Kentucky horses and containing besides the coachman two other persons, a man and a woman. The man was a product of an oratorical period in Kentucky; he had the beak nose, the rolling black eyes, long hair and heavy forensic shoulders that had already landed the Hon. Calvin Breckenridge Jones as representative of the Pennyroyal district in the State Capitol at Frankfort, while it was a common supposition that only a lack of money had kept him from climbing higher. His companion, the Widow Tarwater, was the richest widow in the county.
Now as the carriage drew near the man at the gate, the bow with which he greeted the widow had in it the dignity and devotion of a benediction.
"Lord, what a woman!" he exclaimed a moment later in a deliciously rich and reasonable voice. "Looks like there's some people same as fruits, they don't noways mellow till age gets 'em."
Then once more lifting his hat, the speaker, Ambrose Thompson, now a man of almost sixty, attempted pushing back the hair from his forehead, apparently forgetting that his hair had retreated so far backward over his high dome that the few remaining locks tastefully arranged in front suggested the ripples left by a receding wave along a shore. Also his face was deeply lined and his shoulders stooped considerably, and yet in spite of these and other signs of age in some indefinable way Ambrose Thompson had kept his boyishness. Not having travelled more than a hundred miles out of Pennyroyal, nevertheless he had the eternal youthfulness of spirit which belongs to all life's true adventurers.
"Ambrose Thompson's lookin' powerful spruce this evenin', ain't he?" A woman of about forty, with quick birdlike movements, shrieked this remark into an ear trumpet which was being held up by a shrivelled figure in a wheeled chair that had just been projected forth from the house next door with such suddenness that it seemed likely to spill out its feeble occupant.
The old woman's head nodded helplessly, and yet out of her withered face her black eyes still shone with an unquenchable fire. At this instant Ambrose, catching sight of Mrs. Barrows, blew a kiss across his dividing fence to her, so that she laughed, before replying, the pleased monotonous laugh of deafness and old age.
"Ef it's an evergreen spruce you're meanin', Susan Jr., then you're more'n right, for it seems Ambrose Thompson's leaves are forever green and the sap runnin' in him same as spring. But hurry me along, I don't want to miss nothin' of this oyster party, and mebbe ef you kin set me right about in the middle of the new Sunday-school room, I kin sort er reckon on what's goin' on."
The two women then moved so rapidly down the street that they almost ran into a man who was hobbling in the opposite direction leaning on a cane; his face as dry of any human emotion as though it had been a squeezed-out dishcloth. He was attempting to move past the wheeled chair without speaking, when a claw hand reached out after him. "Scared of a female past eighty, Miner Hobbs," the old voice cheered. "Ain't it a God's blessing no woman has run off with you – yet?"
Still at the gate the smile that greeted the approach of this dried-up little man was as radiant as the love of a woman.
"It's mortal good of you, Miner, to be goin' to the oyster show with me to-night, bein's as how you hate gatherin's," Ambrose began affectionately; "you've done give up a heap of tastes fer me first and last, ain't you, old friend? Now ef you'll wait here for me a few moments longer I'll be wholly ready to join you, for I kinder thought I'd like to speak with a few friends before the supper begins."
Ambrose started hastily back toward his front door with such an unmistakably jaunty air, such a forgetting of his rheumatic joints, that Miner's ferret eyes gleamed upon him suspiciously. Besides, was he not wearing an historic long coat, a strangely rusty stovepipe hat, and a white starched shirt over which his large lavender silk tie was crossed like a breastplate, and was he not also revealing yards of newly gray trousered legs?
"You wasn't aimin' to speak to no one in particular, was ye?" Miner inquired.
The long man stopped, noticeably blushing, and then, although the rest of his face remained grave, his eyes twinkled. "S'pose you don't know, Miner, how hard it is sometimes not to lie to the folks you love just because you love 'em? The Widow Tarwater druv past here a few minutes agone, she that was Peachy Williams, and though I ain't had more'n a bowin' acquaintance with her fer nigh forty years, knowin' that the Honourable Jones and our new Baptist preacher the Rev. Elias Tupper, are both after her, I kinder thought I'd like to see which one she favours the most."
Then Ambrose went quickly inside his cottage while Miner patiently waited on the outside, understanding that this moment of withdrawal to his own bedroom before finally leaving his home had become his friend's invariable custom since the death of his second wife, Emily, five years before.
In his bedroom the elderly man was standing before his bureau, where to one side hung the daguerreotype of a young woman.
"It's mortal queer, honey," he said aloud, "how I ain't ever able to go places or to do things 'thout expectin' you to come along, yet there's times when it feels like you'd been gone from me forever and then agen when it don't seem more'n a few weeks."
He was afterward leaving the room with his head bent and his eyes misty with tears when suddenly a smile twitched the end of his nose and the corners of his mouth lifted as he turned once more toward his picture.
"Lord, Em'ly darlin', wouldn't you laugh if three old codgers was to get into the race after the widow instid of two? I would admire to see them sure winners beaten by a dark horse!"
Five minutes later, Uncle Ambrose Thompson as he was now called by almost everybody in Pennyroyal, with every trace of lamentation removed clean from his face, was walking toward the new red brick church, having Miner's arm through his after their custom of more than thirty years. Moses could no longer accompany them, but was resting somewhat deeper under the apple tree than had been his habit in life.
While in the course of their walk Miner never once lifted his hat, Ambrose's was seldom allowed to rest for a moment on his head, for women of all ages smiled upon him and children breaking away from grown up hands came to be tossed in the air by his long arms. Uncle Ambrose had grown very popular with the children of Pennyroyal since the death of his and Emily's only child twenty years before, since it was then that he began bringing home to Emily for repairs all the crying babies he could steal, the boys who had stumped their toes and the girls with torn frocks and feelings.
In the Sunday-school room he immediately sailed up to the widow as gallantly as though his ship had not failed to enter her port in nearly forty years, and this when she was sheltered between the law and the gospel. But before Uncle Ambrose could speak a large soft hand grasped his lean and vital one.
"Welcome!" said the minister with unction.
Three years before, the Rev. Elias Tupper had entered Pennyroyal and with this same soft hand had since patted and soothed his congregation into following where their shepherd led. Indeed, the building of the brick church had been a tribute to his powers and to-night's oyster supper a kind of harvest festival to celebrate the last payment of the church's debt.
Nevertheless an unspoken antagonism had always existed between the Reverend Tupper and Ambrose Thompson, and indeed this was the first appearance of the tall man within the new church's domains.
Brother Tupper was a man of only medium height, but of considerable breadth, with cheeks as smooth and clean as a woman's. And while his lips were thin and his eyes expressionless his face managed to give the impression of a permanent smile, the kind of smile that can come from but one source, having nothing to do with amusement over people or things, nor even contentment in God's plan for His universe, but manifests only a supreme and personal self-satisfaction.
Now for the life of him Ambrose could not refrain from frowning, because, while his lips said, "Thank you," to himself he protested: "I ain't able to bear it; this man actin' toward me as though he was forgivin' me some mortal sin every time we meet."
Neither was the widow's greeting of him cheering, since forty years had not completely wiped away a certain never-explained retreat.
The promised plenitude of Peachy Williams' girlhood had been nobly fulfilled in the Widow Tarwater, for now she suggested an abundant harvest. A handsome black silk gown folded over her more than ample bosom, a double chin rippled from under the soft fulness of her broad face, her skin was white and crimson as a child's, her auburn hair without a thread of gray in it, and her huge brown eyes never having looked deep down into the waters of life showed none of its troubled reflections.
Uncle Ambrose nodded approvingly at her appearance the while she looked at him coldly, saying: "I ain't seen you to talk to in a long time, Ambrose Thompson."
His reply flatteringly included the member of the Kentucky legislature on the widow's right. "'Course you ain't, Peachy," he answered gallantly, "for when big stars is shinin' so close to a planet, t'ain't to be expected that the planet kin notice the little ones twitterin' about in her neighbourhood."
And yet when supper was served the widow found herself placed at a table for four whose other occupants were three men instead of the two whom she had expected.
CHAPTER XV
ORIGINAL SIN
The Widow Tarwater was in truth a pleasing vision.
Not once had Ambrose Thompson left her side, yet he had been uncommonly silent. Thoughts, rose coloured as a boy's dream of a holiday, were floating before his mind's eye; he had been but dimly conscious that two plates of warm soup had lately flowed into him the while the conversation around him flowed on unceasingly. For the spirit of romance, which is an eternal though elusive thing, was surely taking fresh hold on him this evening as his pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, and only Miner Hobbs, the little wooden figure of a man seated several tables off, was yet aware of his friend's exalted state.
At the present moment the Rev. Elias Tupper was talking to the widow. He had but lately traversed the room crowded with tables and resplendent with decorations of harvest apples, pumpkins, goldenrod and tall tasselled stalks of corn, dispensing pleasantries as one would lollipops; and now amid much joking, laughter, and nudging had been allowed to take his place next the widow, only the legislator, who was making but a few weeks' visit in Pennyroyal, appearing disquieted.
It was past seven o'clock and assuredly the new Baptist Sunday-school room was now the centre of Pennyroyal's social activities, when unexpectedly the tall figure of a boy lurched into the room – Pennyroyal's black sheep, a boy taller than any man in the village save Ambrose Thompson.
There was a dismayed flutter and then an uncomfortable silence.
Now there are black sheep and black sheep with extenuating circumstances, but this boy had none of the extenuating circumstances – a respectable family, money in the bank, or a line of distinguished but self-indulgent ancestors; no, he was simply a sandy-haired, loose-jointed boy of about twenty-one who worked about the Widow Tarwater's stables – one of nature's curious anomalies, a boy without a father.
He looked about the homely, cheerful company at first with defiance, and then, feeling the weight of his loneliness and degradation, fell to crying foolishly. "I don't see why I ain't a right to your church social; if I ain't no name of my own, I got to be the son of some man in this town!"
It was such a sudden, unlooked for accusation piercing the holy covering of every hard-shelled Baptist brother in the new Sunday-school room that for the moment the little group of men were staggered. Then while they were making up their minds as to which one should have the privilege of throwing out the intruder, a familiar tall figure was seen crossing the floor, and putting his arm about the lubbering, drunken boy.
"Come along, sonnie; steady now," he whispered, leading him quickly away.
Half an hour later, sauntering back to the church social, Uncle Ambrose found that supper time was past and that the tables having been cleared away there was more and more room for conversation. Once again he sought the Widow Tarwater's side, but this time was received more graciously, for, putting out a trembling hand, she clasped Uncle Ambrose's with gratitude. "I'm obliged to you, Ambrose Thompson," she said. "That boy's ever been a thorn in my flesh. I have kept him at the farm because my late husband was good to him, but after to-night I don't feel called to have him stay on."
The Rev. Elias Tupper's voice thereafter was sufficiently loud to reach the ears of a number of the members of his congregation who were grouped about nearby.
"That boy," he announced, folding his short arms across his chest and sighing deeply, "is a painful example of original sin."
Since his return to the room up to this time Uncle Ambrose had made no remark, but now clearing his throat he eyed the last speaker for so long in silence that a little clacking noise was heard close by him and an old, old woman with an ear trumpet held to her ear leaned so far out of her wheeled chair that only her daughter's restraining hand kept her from falling.
"Original sin, Brother Elias?" The tall man drawled his question thoughtfully. "I wonder now why you speak of this boy's weaknesses as original sin? I've done lived in Pennyrile a right smart number of years and I ain't been witness to a single original sin. Seems like every fault a human crittur commits is just a plain copy of some fault that has gone before him. And I reckon it's more'n likely there's a good many original sinners among us men here to-night that has been original along pretty much the same lines as this here boy."
There was an unspoken yet moving appeal in the sympathetic tones of the well-known voice, softening some of the women listeners and a few of the men, but the Hon. Calvin Jones had still to be heard from.
There are men in this world to whom even the simplest exchange of words is a chance for oratory. So the Honorable Calvin, frowning and with one finger thrust in his coat, by his dramatic silence held his audience for a moment spellbound.
"May I inquire," he thundered, "if this lad whom Mr. Ambrose Thompson has just rescued and – er – defended, is any relation of his?"
In the interrogation itself there was no offence, but to every grown-up person who heard, the insinuation was plain enough.
To the tips of his big ears Uncle Ambrose flushed. "No, sir, he's not my son," he answered the man, who was a stranger to him before this evening, "and maybe I'm glad and maybe I'm sorry. For I won't say since my daughter and Em'ly's died that I ain't thought most any kind of a child's better than no child at all." He hesitated and then went on in pretty much his same old fashion of talking to himself: "Come to think of it now, mebbe in a way this boy is a son of mine, for I kind er think that every young man that plays the fool is the son of every man that's played the fool before him."
And then with a friendly smile he turned again toward the widow.
"Ambrose," she faltered, with two round tears rolling down her plump cheeks, "Brother Elias and Mr. Jones advise against it, but maybe you are thinkin' I ought to give that boy another chance."
The tall man pressed the soft hand and shook his head.
"No, Peachy, I ain't never felt in my life that I knowed what another person ought to do, but ef I've studied 'em long enough and close enough I know pretty well what they will do. I took that boy home to spend the night with me, but I'll be drivin' out to your place with him to-morrow toward sundown. I'm more'n anxious fer a little old-time chat with you."