The brave lad paused again, modestly. Miss Spence's expression was encouraging. Her eyes were wide with astonishment, and there may have been in them, also, the mingled beginnings of admiration and self-reproach. Penrod, warming to his work, felt safer every moment.
"And so," he continued, "I had to sit up with Aunt Clara.
She had some pretty big bruises, too, and I had to----"
"But why didn't they send for a doctor?" However, this question was only a flicker of dying incredulity.
"Oh, they didn't want any DOCTOR," exclaimed the inspired realist promptly. "They don't want anybody to HEAR about it because Uncle John might reform--and then where'd he be if everybody knew he'd been a drunkard and whipped his wife and baby daughter?"
"Oh!" said Miss Spence.
"You see, he used to be upright as anybody," he went on explanatively. "It all begun----"
"Began, Penrod."
"Yes'm. It all commenced from the first day he let those travelling men coax him into the saloon." Penrod narrated the downfall of his Uncle John at length. In detail he was nothing short of plethoric; and incident followed incident, sketched with such vividness, such abundance of colour, and such verisimilitude to a drunkard's life as a drunkard's life should be, that had Miss Spence possessed the rather chilling attributes of William J. Burns himself, the last trace of skepticism must have vanished from her mind. Besides, there are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink. And in every sense it was a moving picture which, with simple but eloquent words, the virtuous Penrod set before his teacher.
His eloquence increased with what it fed on; and as with the eloquence so with self-reproach in the gentle bosom of the teacher. She cleared her throat with difficulty once or twice, during his description of his ministering night with Aunt Clara.
"And I said to her, `Why, Aunt Clara, what's the use of takin' on so about it?' And I said, `Now, Aunt Clara, all the crying in the world can't make things any better.' And then she'd just keep catchin' hold of me, and sob and kind of holler, and I'd say, `DON'T cry, Aunt Clara--PLEASE don't cry."'
Then, under the influence of some fragmentary survivals of the respectable portion of his Sunday adventures, his theme became more exalted; and, only partially misquoting a phrase from a psalm, he related how he had made it of comfort to Aunt Clara, and how he had besought her to seek Higher guidance in her trouble.
The surprising thing about a structure such as Penrod was erecting is that the taller it becomes the more ornamentation it will stand. Gifted boys have this faculty of building magnificence upon cobwebs--and Penrod was gifted. Under the spell of his really great performance, Miss Spence gazed more and more sweetly upon the prodigy of spiritual beauty and goodness before her, until at last, when Penrod came to the explanation of his "just thinking," she was forced to turn her head away.
"You mean, dear," she said gently, "that you were all worn out and hardly knew what you were saying?"
"Yes'm."
"And you were thinking about all those dreadful things so hard that you forgot where you were?"
"I was thinking," he said simply, "how to save Uncle John."
And the end of it for this mighty boy was that the teacher kissed him!
