Part 3 (1/2)
”Won't yew slick up my hair a leetle bit, Mother?” he asked, somewhat shamefacedly. ”I can't see extry well this mornin'.”
”Why, Abe! It's slicked ez slick ez it kin be naow.” However, the old wife reached up as he bent his tall, angular form over her, and smoothed again his thin, wet locks. He laughed a little, self-mockingly, and she laughed back, then urged him into the hall, and, slipping ahead, led the way down-stairs. At the first landing, which brought them into full view of the lower hall, he paused, possessed with the mad desire to run away and hide, for at the foot of the stairway stood the entire flock of old ladies. Twenty-nine pairs of eyes were lifted to him and Angy, twenty-nine pairs of lips were smiling at them. To the end of his days Abraham remembered those smiles. Rea.s.suring, unselfish, and tender, they made the old man's heart swell, his emotions go warring together.
He wondered, was grateful, yet he grew more confused and afraid. He stared amazed at Angeline, who seemed the embodiment of self-possession, lifting her dainty, proud little gray head higher and higher. She turned to Abraham with a protecting, motherly little gesture of command for him to follow, and marched gallantly on down the stairs. Humbly, trembling at the knees, he came with gingerly steps after the little old wife. How unworthy he was of her now! How unworthy he had always been, yet never realized to the full until this moment. He knew what those smiles meant, he told himself, watching the uplifted faces; they were to soothe his sense of shame and humiliation, to touch with rose this dull gray color of the culmination of his failures. He pa.s.sed his hand over his eyes, fiercely praying that the tears might not come to add to his disgrace.
And all the while brave little Angy kept smiling, until with a truly glad leap of the heart she caught sight of a blue ribbon painted in gold s.h.i.+ning on the breast of each one of the twenty-nine women. A pale blue ribbon painted in gold with--yes, peering her eyes she discovered that it was the word ”WELCOME!” The forced smile vanished from Angeline's face. Her eyes grew wet, her cheek white. Her proud figure shrank. She turned and looked back at her husband. Not for one instant did she appropriate the compliment to herself. ”This is for _you_!” her spirit called out to him, while a new pride dawned in her working face.
Forty years had she spent apologizing for Abraham, and now she understood how these twenty-nine generous old hearts had raided him to the pedestal of a hero, while she stood a heroine beside him. Angy it was who trembled now, and Abe, gaining a manly courage from that, took hold of her arm to steady her--they had paused on a step near the foot of the stairs--and, looking around with his whimsical smile, he demanded of the bedecked company in general, ”Ladies, be yew 'spectin' the President?”
Cackle went the cracked old voices of the twenty-nine in a chorus of appreciative laughter, while the old heads bobbed at one another as if to say, ”Won't he be an acquisition?” And then, from among the group there came forward Blossy--Blossy, who had sacrificed most that this should come to pa.s.s; Blossy, who had sat till midnight painting the gold-and-blue ribbons; Blossy, the pride and beauty of the Home, in a delicate, old, yellow, real lace gown. She held her two hands gracefully and mysteriously behind her back as she advanced to the foot of the stairs. Looking steadily into Abraham's eyes, she kept a-smiling until he felt as if the warmth of a belated spring had beamed upon him.
”The President!” Her mellow, well-modulated voice shook, and she laughed with a mingling of generous joy and tender pity. ”Are we expecting the President? You dear modest man! We are welcoming--_you_!”
Abe looked to Angy as if to say, ”How shall I take it?” and behold! the miracle of his wife's bosom swelling and swelling with pride in him. He turned back, for Blossy was making a speech. His hand to his head, he bent his good ear to listen. In terms poetical and touching she described the loneliness of the life at the Home as it had been with no man under the roof of the house and only a deaf-and-dumb gardener, who hated her s.e.x, in the barn. Then in contrast she painted life as it must be for the sisters now that the thirty tender vines had found a stanch old oak for their clinging. ”Me?” queried Abraham of himself and, with another silent glance, of Angy.
But what was this? Blossy, leading all the others in a resounding call of ”Welcome!” and then Blossy drawing her two hands from behind her back. One held a huge blue cup, the other, the saucer to match. She placed the cup in the saucer and held it out to Abraham. He trudged down the few steps to receive it, unashamed now of the tears that coursed down his cheeks. With a burst of delight he perceived that it was a mustache cup, such as the one he had always used at home until it had been set for safe-keeping on the top pantry shelf to await the auction, where it had brought the price of eleven cents with half a paper of tacks thrown in.
And now as the tears cleared away he saw also, what Angy's eyes had already noted, the inscription in warm crimson letters on the s.h.i.+ning blue side of the cup, ”To Our Beloved Brother.”
”Sisters,” he mumbled, for he could do no more than mumble as he took his gift, ”ef yew'd been gittin' ready fer me six months, yew couldn't have done no better.”
V
THE HEAD OF THE CORNER
Everybody wore their company manners to the breakfast-table--the first time in the whole history of the Home when company manners had graced the initial meal of the day. Being pleasant at supper was easy enough, Aunt Nancy used to say, for every one save the unreasonably cantankerous, and being agreeable at dinner was not especially difficult; but no one short of a saint could be expected to smile of mornings until sufficient time had been given to discover whether one had stepped out on the wrong or the right side of the bed.
This morning, however, no time was needed to demonstrate that everybody in the place had gotten out on the happy side of his couch. Even the deaf-and-dumb gardener had untwisted his surly temper, and as Abraham entered the dining-room, looked in at the east window with a conciliatory grin and nod which said as plainly as words:
”'T is a welcome sight indeed to see one of my own kind around this establishment!”
”Why don't he come in?” questioned Abe, waving back a greeting as well as he could with the treasured cup in one of his hands and the saucer in the other; whereupon Sarah Jane, that ugly duckling, explained that the fellow, being a confirmed woman-hater, cooked all his own meals in the smokehouse, and insisted upon all his orders being left on a slate outside the tool-house door. Abe sniffed disdainfully, contemplating her homely countenance, over which this morning's mood had cast a not unlovely, transforming glow.
”Why, the scalawag!” He frowned so at the face in the window that it immediately disappeared. ”Yew don't mean ter tell me he's sot ag'in' yew gals? He must be crazy! Sech a handsome, clever set o' women I never did see!”
Sarah Jane blushed to the roots of her thin, straight hair and sat down, suddenly disarmed of every porcupine quill that she had hidden under her wings; while there was an agreeable little stir among the sisters.
”Set deown, all hands! Set deown!” enjoined Miss Abigail, fluttering about with the heaviness of a fat goose. ”Brother Abe,--that 's what we've all agreed to call yew, by unanimous vote,--yew set right here at the foot of the table. Aunt Nancy always had the head an' me the foot; but I only kept the foot, partly becuz thar wa'n't no man fer the place, an' partly becuz I was tew sizable ter squeeze in any-whar else. Seein'
as Sister Angy is sech a leetle mite, though, I guess she kin easy make room fer me t' other side o' her.”
Abe could only bow his thanks as he put his gift down on the table and took the prominent place a.s.signed to him. The others seated, there was a solemn moment of waiting with bowed heads. Aunt Nancy's trembling voice arose,--the voice which had jealously guarded the right of saying grace at table in the Old Ladies' Home for twenty years,--not, however, in the customary words of thanksgiving, but in a peremptory ”Brother Abe!”
Abraham looked up. Could she possibly mean that he was to establish himself as the head of the household by repeating grace? ”Brother Abe!”
she called upon him again. ”Yew've askt a blessin' fer one woman fer many a year; supposin' neow yew ask it fer thirty!”
Amid the amazement of the other sisters, Abe mumbled, and muttered, and murmured--no one knew what words; but all understood the overwhelming grat.i.tude behind his incoherency, and all joined heartily in the Amen.
Then, while Mrs. Homan, the cook of the week, went bustling out into the kitchen, Aunt Nancy felt that it devolved upon her to explain her action. It would never do, she thought, for her to gain a reputation for self-effacement and sweetness of disposition at her time of life.