minded it much. Marion was the housekeeper and house-provider, and
everything went on like clock-work. Marion was like her father, it was
said; but nobody remembered him very clearly. He was a Northerner, who
had come southward seeking health, and finding none. But he found Miss
Forsythe instead, and married her. How it happened that Ambrose Cranch,
not a relative but a nondescript, should be living in a household
presided over by Forsythe blood, was as follows: First, he had put out
years before a fire in Mrs. Manning's kitchen which would otherwise have
burned the wooden house to the ground; that began the acquaintance.
Second, learning that her small property was in danger of being swept
away entirely, owing to unpaid taxes and mismanagement, he made a
journey to the capital of the State in her behalf, and succeeded after
much trouble in saving a part of it for her. It was pure kindness on his
part in a time of general distress, and from another man would have been
called remarkable; but nothing could be called remarkable in Ambrose
Cranch: he had never been of any consequence in Wilbarger or his life.
Mrs. Manning liked him, and, after a while, asked him to come and take
his meals at the cottage: the saw-mill was directly opposite, and it
would be neighborly. Ambrose, who had always eaten his dinners at the
old Wilbarger Hotel, in the dark, crooked dining-room, which had an air
of mystery not borne out by anything, unless it might be its soups,
gladly accepted, and transferred his life to the mainland point and the
cottage opposite, with the row-boat as a ferry between. He was so
inoffensive and willing, and so skillful with his hands, that he was
soon as much a part of the household as old Dinah herself; he mended and
repaired, praised the good dishes, watered the flowers, and was an
excellent listener. It would be amusing to know how much the fact of
being, or securing, a good listener has to do with our lives. Mrs.
Manning, fond of reminiscence and long narratives which were apt to run
off at random, so that, whereas you began with the Browns, you ended
with something about the Smiths, and never heard the Brown story at all,
actually retained Ambrose Cranch at her table for eleven years because
he listened well. But she did not realize it; neither did he. A simpler,
more unplotting soul never existed than that in the saw-miller's body. A
word now as to that body: it had a good deal to do with its owner's
life, and our story. (O brothers and sisters, if Justice holds the
balance, how handsome some of us are going to be in the next life!)
Ambrose Cranch was tall and thin, what is called rawboned; all his
joints were large and prominent, from his knuckles to his ankles. He had
large, long feet and hands, and large, long ears; his feet shambled when
he walked, his arms dangled from the shoulders like the arms of a wooden
doll, and he had a long, sinewed throat, which no cravat or collar could
hide, though he wore them up to his ears. Not that he did so wear them,
however: he had no idea that his throat was ugly; he never thought about
it at all. He had a long face, small, mild blue eyes, thin, lank brown
hair, a large mouth, and long, narrow nose; he was, also, the most
awkward man in the world. Was there no redeeming point? Hardly. His
fingers were nicely finished at the ends, and sometimes he had rather a
sweet smile. But in the contemplation of his joints, shoulders, elbows,
wrists, and knuckles, even the student of anatomy hardly got as far as
his finger-ends; and as to the smile, nobody saw it but the Mannings,
who did not care about it. In origin he was, as before mentioned, a
nondescript, having come from the up-country, where Southern ways shade
off into mountain roughness; which again gives place to the
river-people, and they, farther on, to the Hoosiers and Buckeyes, who
are felicitously designated by the expressive title of "Western
Yankees." He had inherited the saw-mill from an uncle, who had tried to
make something of it, failed, and died. Ambrose, being a patient man,
and one of smallest possible personal expenditure, managed to live, and
even to save a little money--but only a little. He had been there twelve
years, and was now thirty-eight years old. All this the whole town of
Wilbarger knew, or might have known; it was no secret. But the saw-mill
had a secret of its own, besides. Up stairs, in the back part, was a
small room with a lock on the door, and windows with red cloth nailed
over them in place of glass. Here Ambrose spent many moments of his day,
and all of his evenings, quite alone. His red lights shone across the
marsh, and could be seen from Vickery Island and the drawbridge; but
they were not visible on the Wilbarger side, and attracted, therefore,
no attention. However, it is doubtful whether they would have attracted
attention anyway. Wilbarger people did not throw away their somewhat
rarely excited interest upon Ambrose Cranch, who represented to them the
flattest commonplace. They knew when his logs came, they knew the
quantity and quality of his boards, they saw him superintending the
loading of the schooner that bore them away, and that was all. Even the
two negroes who worked in the mill--one bright, young, and yellow; the
other old, slow, and black--felt no curiosity about the locked room and
Cranch's absences; it was but a part of his way.
What was in this room, then? Nothing finished as yet, save dreams.
Cranch had that strong and singular bias of mind which makes, whether
successful or unsuccessful, the inventor.
It was a part of his unconsequence in every way that all persons called
him "Bro"--even his negro helpers at the mill. When he first came to
live with Mrs. Manning, she had tried hard to speak of him as "Mr.
Cranch," and had taught her daughter to use the title; but, as time wore
on, she had dropped into Bro again, and so had Marion. But, now that
Marion was twenty-five and her own mistress, she had taken up the custom
of calling him "Ambrose," the only person in the whole of Wilbarger who
used, or indeed knew, the name. This she did, not on his account at all,
but on her own; she disliked nicknames, and did not consider it
dignified to use them. Cranch enjoyed her "Ambrose" greatly, and felt an
inward pride every time she spoke it; but he said nothing.
There was a seminary at Wilbarger--a forlorn, ill-supported institution,
under the charge of the Episcopal Church of the diocese. But the
Episcopal Church of the diocese was, for the time being, extremely poor,
and its missions and schools were founded more in a spirit of hope than
in any certainty of support; with much the same faith, indeed, which its
young deacons show when they enter (as they all do at the earliest
possible moment) into the responsibilities of matrimony. But in this
seminary was, by chance, an excellent though melancholy-minded
teacher--a Miss Drough, equally given to tears and arithmetic. Miss
Drough was an adept at figures, and, taking a fancy to Marion Manning,
she taught her all she knew up to trigonometry, with chess problems and
some astronomy thrown in. Marion had no especial liking for mathematics
in the beginning, but her clear mind had followed her ardent teacher
willingly: at twenty-five she was a skilled arithmetician, passably well
educated in ordinary branches, well read in strictly old-fashioned
literature, and not very pious, because she had never liked the reverend
gentleman in charge of the seminary and the small church--a thin man who
called himself "a worm," and always ate all the best bits of meat,
pressing, meanwhile, with great cordiality, the pale, watery
sweet-potatoes upon the hungry schoolgirls. She was also exceedingly
contemptuous in manner as to anything approaching flirtation with the
few cavaliers of Wilbarger. It is rather hard to call them cavaliers,
since they no longer had any good horses; but they came from a race of
cavaliers, the true "armed horsemen" of America, if ever we had any. The
old-time Southerners went about on horseback much more than on foot or
in carriages; and they went armed.
"Bro, will you mend the gate-latch?" said Mrs. Manning at the
breakfast-table. They did not breakfast early; Mrs. Manning had never
been accustomed to early breakfasts: the work at the saw-mill began and
went on for three hours before the saw-miller broke his fast. Bro mended
the latch, and then, after a survey of the garden, went up to the open
window of the dining-room and said:
"Shall I water the flowers, Miss Marion? They look sadly this morning."
"Yes, if you please, Ambrose," replied the erect young person within,
who was washing the cups, and the few old spoons and forks she called
"the silver." The flowers were a link between them; they would not grow,
and everybody told her they would not save Bro, who believed in them to
the last, and watched even their dying struggles with unfailing hope.
The trouble was that she set her mind upon flowers not suited to the
soil; she sent regularly for seeds and slips, and would have it that
they must grow whether they wished to or not. Whatever their wishes
were, floral intentions necessarily escaping our grosser senses, one
thing was certain--grow they did not, in spite of Bro's care. He now
watered the consumptives of the day tenderly; he coaxed straggling
branches and gently tied up weak ones, saw with concern that the latest
balsam was gone, and, after looking at it for a while, thought it his
duty to tell its mistress.
"I am sorry, Miss Marion," he said, going to the window-sill, "but the
pink balsam is dead again."
"What can you mean by 'dead again'"? said a vexed but clear voice
within. "It can not be dead but once, of course."
"We have had a good many balsams," replied Bro apologetically, "and even
a good many pink ones, like this; I forget sometimes."
"That is because you have no _real_ love for flowers," said the irate
young mistress from her dish-pan: she was provoked at the loss of the
balsam--it was her last one.
Bro, who could not see her from where he stood, waited a moment or two,
shuffled his feet to and fro on the sand, and noiselessly drummed on the
sill with his long fingers; then he went slowly down to the shore, where
his boat was drawn up, and rowed himself across to the saw-mill. He felt
a sort of guilt about that pink balsam, as though he had not perhaps
taken enough care of it; but, in truth, he had watched every
hair's-breadth of its limp, reluctant growth, knew its moist veining
accurately, and even the habits and opinions, as it were, of two minute
green inhabitants, with six legs, of the size, taken both together, of a
pin's point, who considered the stalk quite a prairie.
When she was eighteen and nineteen years old, Marion Manning had refused
several suitors, giving as a reason to her mother that they were all
detestable; since then, she had not been troubled with suitors to
refuse. There were girls with more coloring and brighter eyes in
Wilbarger, and girls with warmer hearts: so said the gossips. And,
certainly, the calm reserve, the incisive words, and clear gray eyes
that looked straight at you of Marion Manning were not calculated to
encourage the embarrassed but at the same time decidedly
favor-conferring attentions of the youths of the town. Mrs. Manning, in
the course of the years they had been together, had gradually taken Bro
as a humble confidant: he knew of the offers and refusals; he knew of
the succeeding suitorless period which Mrs. Manning, a stanch believer
in love and romance, bewailed as wasted time. "_I_ could never have
resisted young Echols," she said, "sitting there on the door-step as he
used to, with the sun shining on his curly hair. But there! I always had
a fancy for curls." Bro received these confidences with strict
attention, as valuable items. But one peculiarity of his mind was that
he never generalized; and thus, for instance, instead of taking in the
fact that curly hair plays a part in winning a heart, he only understood
that Mrs. Manning, for some reason or other, liked kinks and twists in
the covering of the head; as some persons liked hempen shoestrings,
others leathern.
"But Miss Marion is happy," he said once, when the suitorless period was
two years old, and the mother lamenting.
"Yes; but we can not live our lives more than once, Bro, and these years
will never come back to her. What keeps _me_ up through all the
privations I have suffered but the memory of the short but happy time of
my own courtship and marriage?" Here Mrs. Manning shed tears. The
memory must, indeed, have been a strong one, the unregenerated humorist
would have thought, to "keep up" such a weight as hers. But Bro was not
a humorist: that Mrs. Manning was fat was no more to him than that he
himself was lean. He had the most implicit belief in the romance of her
life, upon which she often expatiated; he knew all about the first time
she saw him, and how she felt; he knew every detail of the courtship.
This was only when Marion was absent, however; the mother, voluble as
she was, said but little on that subject when her daughter was in the
room.
"But Miss Marion is happy," again said Bro, when the suitorless period
was now five years old.
"No, she is not," replied the mother this time. "She begins to feel that
her life is colorless and blank; I can see she does. She is not an
ordinary girl, and needlework and housekeeping do not content her. If
she had an orphan asylum to manage, now, or something of that kind--But,
dear me! what would suit her best, I do believe, would be drilling a
regiment," added Mrs. Manning, her comfortable amplitude heaving with
laughter. "She is as straight as a ramrod always, for all her delicate,
small bones. What she would like best of all, I suppose, would be
keeping accounts; she will do a sum now rather than any kind of
embroidery, and a page of figures is fairly meat and drink to her. That
Miss Drough has, I fear, done her more harm than good: you can not make
life exactly even, like arithmetic, nor balance quantities, try as you
may. And, whatever variety men may succeed in getting, we women have to
put up with a pretty steady course of subtraction, I notice."
"I am sorry you do not think she is happy," said Bro thoughtfully.
"There you go!" said Mrs. Manning. "I do not mean that she is exactly
_un_happy; but you never understand things, Bro."
"I know it; I have had so little experience," said the other. But Bro's
experience, large or small, was a matter of no interest to Mrs.
Manning, who rambled on about her daughter.
"The Mannings were always slow to develop, Edward used to say: I
sometimes think Marion is not older now at heart than most girls of
eighteen. She has always been more like the best scholar, the
clear-headed girl at the top of the class, than a woman with a woman's
feelings. She will be bitterly miserable if she falls in love at last,
and all in vain. An old maid in love is a desperate sight."
"What do you call an old maid?" asked Bro.
"Any unmarried woman over--well, I used to say twenty-five, but Marion
is that, and not much faded yet--say twenty-eight," replied Mrs.
Manning, decisively, having to the full the Southern ideas on the
subject.
"Then Miss Marion has three years more?"
"Yes; but, dear me! there is no one here she will look at. What I am
afraid of is, that, after I am dead and gone, poor Marion, all thin and
peaked (for she does not take after me in flesh), with spectacles on her
nose, and little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, will be falling in
love with some one who will not care for her at all. I should say a
clergyman," pursued Mrs. Manning meditatively, "only Marion hates
clergymen; a professor, then, or something of the kind. If I only had
money enough to take her away and give her a change! She might see
somebody then who would not wind his legs around his chair."
"Around his chair?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Manning, beginning on another knitting-needle. "Have
you not noticed how all the young men about here twist their feet around
the legs of their chairs, especially when telling a long story or at
table? Sometimes it is one foot, sometimes the other, and sometimes
both, which I acknowledge _is_ awkward. What pleasure they find in it I
can not imagine; _I_ should think it would be dislocating. Young
Harding, now, poor fellow! had almost no fault but that."
"And Miss Marion dislikes it? I hope _I_ do not do it then," said Bro
simply.
"Well, no," replied Mrs. Manning. "You see, your feet are rather long,
Bro."
They were; it would have taken a giant's chair to give them space enough
to twist.
So Bro's life went on: the saw-mill to give him bread and clothes, Mrs.
Manning to listen to, the flowers to water, and, at every other leisure
moment night and day, his inventions. For there were several, all
uncompleted: a valve for a steam-engine, an idea for a self-register,
and, incidentally, a screw. He had most confidence in the valve; when
completed, it would regenerate the steam-engines of the world. The
self-register gave him more trouble; it haunted him, but would not come
quite right. He covered pages of paper with calculations concerning it.
He had spent about twenty thousand hours, all told, over that valve and
register during his eleven years at the saw-mill, and had not once been
tired. He had not yet applied for patents, although the screw was
complete. That was a trifle: he would wait for his more important works.
One day old Mr. Vickery, having watched the superintendent roll safely
past down the road on his way to Bridge No. 2, left his charge in the
care of old Julius for the time being, and walked up the track toward
Wilbarger. It was the shortest road to the village--indeed, the only
road; but one could go by water. Before the days of the railroad, the
Vickerys always went by water, in a wide-cushioned row-boat, with four
pairs of arms to row. It was a great day, of course, when the first
locomotive came over Vickery Marsh; but old Mr. Vickery was lamentably
old-fashioned, and preferred the small days of the past, with the
winding, silver channels and the row-boat, and the sense of wide
possession and isolation produced by the treeless, green expanse which
separated him from the town. To-day, however, he did not stop to think
of these things, but hastened on as fast as his short legs could carry
him. Mrs. Manning was an old friend of his; to her house he was
hurrying.
"You are both--you are both," he gasped, bursting into the sitting-room
and sinking into a chair--"you are both--ah, ugh! ugh!"
He choked, gurgled, and turned from red to purple. Mrs. Manning seized a
palm-leaf fan, and fanned him vigorously.
"Why _did_ you walk so fast, Mr. Vickery?" she said reproachfully. "You
know your short breath can not stand it."
"You would, too, Nannie," articulated the old man, "if--if _your_ boy
had come home!"
"What, Lawrence? You do not mean it!" she exclaimed, sinking into a
chair in her turn, and fanning herself now. "I congratulate you, Mr.
Vickery; I do, indeed. How long is it since you have seen him?"
"Thirteen years; thir--teen years! He was fifteen when he went away, you
know," whispered the old man, still giving out but the husky form of
words without any voice to support them. "Under age, but would go. Since
then he has been wandering over the ocean and all about, the bold boy!"
"Dear me!" said Mrs. Manning; "how glad I shall be to see him! I was
very fond of his mother."
"Yes; Sally was a sweet little woman, and Lawrence takes after his
mother more than after his father, I see. My son was a true Vickery;
yes, a true Vickery. But what I came to say was, that you and Marion
must both come over to-morrow and spend the day. We must kill the fatted
calf, Nannie--indeed we must."
Then, with his first free breath, the old man was obliged to go, lest
the superintendent should return unexpectedly and find him absent. There
was also the fatted calf to be provided: Julius must go across to the
mainland and hunt down a wild turkey.
At dinner Mrs. Manning had this great news to tell her listener--two
now, since Marion had returned.
"Who do you think has come home?" she said, enjoying her words as she
spoke them. "Who but old Mr. Vickery's grandson, Lawrence, his only
living grandchild! He went away thirteen years ago, and one of the
sweetest boys I ever knew he was then.--You remember him, Marion."
"I remember a boy," answered Marion briefly. "He never would finish any
game, no matter what it was, but always wanted to try something new."
"Like his mother," said Mrs. Manning, heaving a reminiscent sigh, and
then laughing. "Sally Telfair used to change about the things in her
work-basket and on her table every day of her life. Let me see--Lawrence
must be twenty-eight now."
"He has come back, I suppose, to take care of his grandfather in his old
age," said Bro, who was eating his dinner in large, slow mouthfuls, in a
manner which might have been called ruminative if ruminating animals
were not generally fat.
"Yes, of course," replied Mrs. Manning, with her comfortable belief in
everybody's good motives.
When Marion and her mother returned home the next day at dusk a third
person was with them as they walked along the track, their figures
outlined clearly against the orange after-glow in the west. Bro, who had
come across for his tea, saw them, and supposed it was young Vickery. He
supposed correctly. Young Vickery came in, staid to tea, and spent the
evening. Bro, as usual, went over to the mill. The next day young
Vickery came again, and the next; the third day the Mannings went over
to the island. Then it began over again.
"I do hope, Bro, that your dinners have been attended to properly," said
Mrs. Manning, during the second week of these visitations.
"Oh, yes, certainly," replied Bro, who would have eaten broiled
rhinoceros unnoticingly.
"You see Mr. Vickery has the old-time ideas about company and visiting
to celebrate a great occasion, and Lawrence's return is, of course,
that. It is a perfect marvel to hear where, or rather where not, that
young man has been."
"Where?" said Bro, obediently asking the usual question which connected
Mrs. Manning's narratives, and gave them a reason for being.
"Everywhere. All over the wide world, I should say."
"Oh, no, mother; he was in Germany most of the time," said Marion.
"He saw the Alps, Marion."
"The Bavarian Alps."
"And he saw France."
"From the banks of the Moselle."
"And Russia, and Holland, and Bohemia," pursued Mrs. Manning. "You will
never make me believe that one can see all _those_ countries from
Germany, Marion. Germany was never of so much importance in _my_ day.
And to think, too, that he has lived in Bohemia! I must ask him about
it. I have never understood where it was, exactly; but I _have_ heard
persons called Bohemians who had not a foreign look at all."
"He did not _live_ in Bohemia, mother."
"Oh, yes, he did, child; I am sure I heard him say so."
"You are thinking of Bavaria."
"Marion! Marion! how can you tell what I am thinking of?" said Mrs.
Manning oracularly. "There is no rule of arithmetic that can tell you
that. But here is Lawrence himself at the door.--You _have_ lived in
Bohemia, have you not?" she asked, as the young man entered: he came in
and out now like one of the family. "Marion says you have not."
"Pray, don't give it up, but stick to that opinion, Miss Marion," said
the young man, with a merry glint in his eyes. Ah! yes, young Vickery
had wandered, there was no doubt of it; he used contractions, and such
words as "stick." Mrs. Manning and Marion had never said "don't" or
"can't" in their lives.
"I do not know what you mean," replied Marion, a slight color rising in
her cheeks. "It is not a matter of opinion one way or the other, but of
fact. You either have lived in Bohemia, or you have not."
"Well, then, I have," said Vickery, laughing.
"There! Marion," exclaimed Mrs. Manning triumphantly.
Vickery, overcome by mirth, turned to Bro, as if for relief; Bro was at
least a man.
But Bro returned his gaze mildly, comprehending nothing.
"Going over to the mill?" said Vickery. "I'll go with you, and have a
look about."
They went off together, and Vickery examined the mill from top to
bottom; he measured the logs, inspected the engine, chaffed the negroes,
climbed out on the roof, put his head into Bro's cell-like bedroom, and
came at last to the locked door.
"What have we here?" he asked.
"Only a little workshop of mine, which I keep locked," replied Bro.
"So I see. But what's inside?"
"Nothing of much consequence--as yet," replied the other, unable to
resist adding the adverb.
"You must let me in," said Vickery, shaking the door. "I never could
abide a secret. Come, Bro; I won't tell. Let me in, or I shall climb up
at night and break in," he added gayly.
Bro stood looking at him in silence. Eleven years had he labored there
alone, too humble to speak voluntarily of his labors; too insignificant,
apparently, for questions from others. Although for the most part happy
over his work, there were times when he longed for a friendly ear to
talk to, for other eyes to criticise, the sympathy of other minds, the
help of other hands. At these moments he felt drearily lonely over his
valve and register; they even seemed to mock him. He was not
imaginative, yet occasionally they acted as if moved by human motives,
and, worse still, became fairly devilish in their crooked perverseness.
Nobody had ever asked before to go into that room. Should he? Should he
not? Should he? Then he did.
Lawrence, at home everywhere, sat on a high stool, and looked on with
curiosity while the inventor brought out his inventions and explained
them. It was a high day for Bro: new life was in him; he talked rapidly;
a dark color burned in his thin cheeks. He talked for one hour without
stopping, the buzz of the great saw below keeping up an accompaniment;
then he paused.
"How do they seem to you?" he asked feverishly.
"Well, I have an idea that self-registers are about all they can be now;
I have seen them in use in several places at the North," said Lawrence.
"As to the steam-valve, I don't know; there may be something in it. But
there is no doubt about that screw: for some uses it is perfect, better
than anything we have, I should say."
"Oh, the screw?" said the other man, in a slow, disappointed voice.
"Yes, it is a good screw; but the valve--"
"Yes, as you say, the valve," said Lawrence, jumping down from his
stool, and looking at this and that carelessly on his way to the door.
"I don't comprehend enough of the matter, Bro, to judge. But you send up
that screw to Washington at once and get a patent out on it; you will
make money, I know."
He was gone; there was nothing more to see in the saw-mill, so he
paddled across, and went down toward the dock. The smoke of a steamer
coming in from the ocean could be seen; perhaps there would be something
going on down there.
"He is certainly a remarkably active young fellow," said Mrs. Manning,
as she saw the top of his head passing, the path along-shore being below
the level of the cottage. "He has seen more in Wilbarger already than I
have ever seen here in all my life."
"We are, perhaps, a little old-fashioned, mother," replied Marion.
"Perhaps we are, child. Fashions always were a long time in reaching
Wilbarger. But there! what did it matter? We had them sooner or later,
though generally later. Still, bonnets came quite regularly. But I have
never cared much about bonnets," pursued Mrs. Manning reflectively,
"since capes went out, and those sweet ruches in front, full of little
rose-buds. There is no such thing now as a majestic bonnet."
Bro came over to tea as usual. He appeared changed. This was remarkable;
there had never been any change in him before, as far back as they could
remember.
"You are surely not going to have a fever?" asked Mrs. Manning
anxiously, skilled in fever symptoms, as are all dwellers on that shore.
"No; I have been a little overturned in mind this afternoon, that is
all," replied Bro. Then, with a shadow of importance, "I am obliged to
write to Washington."
"What _do_ you mean?" asked Mrs. Manning, for once assuming the position
of questioner.