PAGE 26
A Blue-Grass Penelope
by
“Well! go on, then,” said the woman, laughing and nudging him. “Go on–introduce me–can’t you? Don’t stand there like a tombstone. You won’t? Well, I’ll introduce myself.” She laughed again, and then, with an excellent imitation of Patterson’s lugubrious accents, said, “Mr. Spencer Tucker’s wife that is, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Spencer Tucker’s sweetheart that was! Hold on! I said that was. For true as I stand here, ma’am–and I reckon I wouldn’t stand here if it wasn’t true–I haven’t set eyes on him since the day he left you.”
“It’s the gospel truth, every word,” said Patterson, stirred into a sudden activity by Mrs. Tucker’s white and rigid face. “It’s the frozen truth, and I kin prove it. For I kin swear that when that there young woman was sailin’ outer the Golden Gate, Spencer Tucker was in my bar-room; I kin swear that I fed him, lickered him, give him a hoss and set him in his road to Monterey that very night.”
“Then, where is he now?” said Mrs. Tucker, suddenly facing them.
They looked at each other, and then looked at Mrs. Tucker. Then both together replied slowly and in perfect unison, “That’s–what–we–want–to–know.” They seemed so satisfied with this effect that they as deliberately repeated, “Yes–that’s–what–we–want–to–know.”
Between the shock of meeting the partner of her husband’s guilt and the unexpected revelation to her inexperience, that in suggestion and appearance there was nothing beyond the recollection of that guilt that was really shocking in the woman–between the extravagant extremes of hope and fear suggested by their words, there was something so grotesquely absurd in the melodramatic chorus that she with difficulty suppressed an hysterical laugh.
“That’s the way to take it,” said the woman, putting her own good-humored interpretation upon Mrs. Tucker’s expression. “Now, look here! I’ll tell you all about it,” She carefully selected the most comfortable chair, and sitting down, lightly crossed her hands in her lap. “Well, I left here on the 13th of last January on the ship Argo, calculating that your husband would join the ship just inside the Heads. That was our arrangement, but if anything happened to prevent him, he was to join me at Acapulco. Well! he didn’t come aboard, and we sailed without him. But it appears now he did attempt to join the ship, but his boat was capsized. There now, don’t be alarmed! he wasn’t drowned, as Patterson can swear to–no, catch him! not a hair of him was hurt. But I—I was bundled off to the end of the earth in Mexico alone, without a cent to bless me. For true as you live, that hound of a captain, when he found, as he thought, that Spencer was nabbed, he just confiscated all his trunks and valuables and left me in the lurch. If I had not met a man down there that offered to marry me and brought me here, I might have died there, I reckon. But I did, and here I am. I went down there as your husband’s sweetheart, I’ve come back as the wife of an honest man, and I reckon it’s about square!”
There was something so startlingly frank, so hopelessly self-satisfied, so contagiously good-humored in the woman’s perfect moral unconsciousness, that even if Mrs. Tucker had been less preoccupied her resentment would have abated. But her eyes were fixed on the gloomy face of Patterson, who was beginning to unlock the sepulchers of his memory and disinter his deeply buried thoughts.
“You kin bet your whole pile on what this Mrs. Capting Baxter–ez used to be French Inez of New Orleans–hez told ye. Ye kin take everything she’s onloaded. And it’s only doin’ the square thing to her to say, she hain’t done it out o’ no cussedness, but just to satisfy herself, now she’s a married woman and past such foolishness. But that ain’t neither here nor there. The gist of the whole matter is that Spencer Tucker was at the tienda the day after she sailed and after his boat capsized.” He then gave a detailed account of the interview, with the unnecessary but truthful minutiae of his class, adding to the particulars already known that the following week he visited the Summit House and was surprised to find that Spencer had never been there, nor had he ever sailed from Monterey.