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.