young Mr. Vickery thinks a good one. I am going to apply for a patent on
it."
"Dear me! Apply for a patent? Do you know how?"
"Yes, I know how," replied the inventor quietly.
Marion was looking at him in surprise.
"You _invented_ the screw, Ambrose?"
"Yes, Miss Marion." Then, unable to keep down his feelings any
longer--"But there is a valve also," he added with pride, "which seems
to _me_ more important; and there is a self-register."
"Lawrence was over there this evening, was he not? And you showed him
your inventions then?"
"Yes, Miss Marion, I did."
"But why in the world, Bro, have you not told _us_, or, indeed, any one,
about them all these years?" interposed Mrs. Manning, surveying her
listener with new eyes.
"You did not ask; nobody has ever asked. Mr. Vickery is the only one."
"Then it was Lawrence who advised you to write to Washington?" said
Marion.
"Yes."
"You will take me over to the mill immediately," said the girl, rising;
"I wish to see everything.--And, mother, will you come, too?"
"Certainly," replied Mrs. Manning, with a determination to go in spite
of her avoirdupois, the darkness, the row-boat, and the steep
mill-stairs. She was devoured by curiosity, and performed the journey
without flinching. When they reached the work-room at last, Bro, in his
excitement, lighted all the lamps he had in the mill and brought them
in, so that the small place was brilliant. Mrs. Manning wondered and
ejaculated, tried not to knock over small articles, listened,
comprehended nothing, and finally took refuge mentally with the screw
and physically in an old arm-chair; these two things at least she
understood. Marion studied the valve a long time, listening attentively
to Bro's eager explanations. "I can make nothing of it," she said at
last, in a vexed tone.
"Neither could Mr. Vickery," said Bro.
She next turned to the register, and, before long, caught its idea.
"It is not _quite_ right yet, for some reason," explained the inventor,
apologetically.
She looked over his figures.
"It is plain enough why it is not right," she said, after a moment, in
her schoolmistress tone. "Your calculations are wrong. Give me a
pencil." She went to work at once, and soon had a whole sheet covered.
"It will take me some time," she said, glancing up at the end of a
quarter of an hour. "If you are tired, mother, you had better go back."
"I think I will," said Mrs. Manning, whose mind was now on the darkness
and the row-boat. Bro went with her, and then returned. The mother no
more thought of asking her daughter to leave a column of unfinished
figures than of asking a child to leave an unfinished cake.
"Do not interrupt me now, but sit down and wait," said Marion, without
looking up, when Bro came back. He obeyed, and did not stir; instead, he
fell to noticing the effect of her profile against the red cloth over
the window. It took Marion longer than she expected to finish the
calculation; her cheeks glowed over the work. "There!" she said at last,
throwing down the pencil and pushing the paper toward him. She had
succeeded; the difficulty was practically at an end. Bro looked at the
paper and at her with admiring pride.
"It is your invention now," he said.
"Oh, no; I only did the sum for you. Astronomers often have somebody to
do the sums for them."
"I shall apply for patents on all three now," said Bro; "and the
register _is_ yours, Miss Marion. In eleven years I have not succeeded
in doing what you have just done in an hour."
"So much the worse for you, Ambrose," replied Marion lightly. She was
quite accustomed to his praise, she had had it steadily from childhood.
If not always gracefully expressed, at least it was always earnest; but,
like Ambrose, of no consequence.
Bro made his application in due form. Young Vickery volunteered to write
to an acquaintance in Washington, a young lawyer, who aspired to "patent
business," asking him, as he expressed it, to "see Bro through." "No
sharp practice in this case, Dan," he wrote privately. "Cranch is poor,
and a friend of friends of mine; do your best for him."
But, although he thus good-naturedly assisted the man, he laughed at the
woman for her part in the figures, which Bro had related with pride.
"What will you do next?" he said. "Build a stone wall--or vote? Imagine
a girl taking light recreation in equations, and letting her mind wander
hilariously among groves of triangles on a rainy day!"
Marion colored highly, but said nothing. Her incisiveness seemed to fail
her when with Lawrence Vickery. And, as he was never more than half in
earnest, it was as hard to use real weapons against him as to fence with
the summer wind. The young man seemed to have taken a fancy to Bro; he
spent an hour or two at the saw-mill almost every day, and Cæsar had
become quite accustomed to his voice shouting for the boat. But the old
negro liked him, and came across cheerfully, even giving him voluntarily
the title "marse," which the blacks withheld whenever they pleased now,
and tenaciously. Vickery took Bro over to see his grandfather, the old
house, and the wastes which were once their cotton-fields. He had no
pride about the old gentleman's lowly office; he had roamed about the
world too much for that. And, when Bro suggested that he should take the
position himself and relieve his grandfather, he answered carelessly
that his grandfather did not want to be relieved, which was true--old
Mr. Vickery deriving the only amusement of his life now in plans for
outwitting, in various small ways, the spirited superintendent.
"However," said Lawrence, "I could not in any case; I have plans of
importance waiting for me."
"Where?" asked Bro.
"Well--abroad. I don't mind telling _you_," said Vickery; "but it is a
secret at present."
"Then you do not intend to stay here?"
"Here? Bless you, no! The place is a howling, one-horse desert. I only
came back awhile to see the old man."
The "while" lasted all winter, Young Vickery exhausted the town, the
island, and the whole district; he was "hail fellow" with everybody,
made acquaintance with the lighthouse-keeper, knew the captains of all
the schooners, and even rode on the hand-car and was admitted to the
friendship of the superintendent. But, in the way of real intimacy, the
cottage and the saw-mill were his favorite haunts. He was with Marion a
part of every day; he teased her, laughed at her flowers, mimicked her
precise pronunciation, made caricatures of her friend Miss Drough, and
occasionally walked by with Nannie Barr, the most consummate little
flirt in the town. Marion changed--that is, inwardly. She was too proud
to alter her life outwardly, and, beyond putting away the chess-problem
book, and walking with Miss Drough in quiet paths through the andromeda
and smilax thickets, or out on the barrens among the saw-palmettoes,
rather than through the streets of the town, what she _did_ was the same
as usual. But she was not what she had been. She seemed to have become
timid, almost irresolute; she raised her eyes quickly and dropped them
as quickly: the old calm, steady gaze was gone; her color came and went.
She was still erect as ever: she could not change that; but she seemed
disposed to sit more in the shadow, or half behind the curtain, or to
withdraw to her own room, where the bolt was now often used which had
formerly rusted in its place. Bro noticed all this. Marion's ways had
not been changeable like those of most girls, and he had grown into
knowing them exactly: being a creature of precise habit himself, he now
felt uncomfortable and restless because she was so. At last he spoke to
her mother. "She is certainly changed: do you think there is any danger
of fever?" he asked uneasily. But Mrs. Manning only blinked and nodded
smilingly back in answer, holding up her finger to signify that Marion
was within hearing. Supposing that he had comprehended her, of course,
and glad to have a confidant, she now blinked and nodded at him from all
sides--from behind doors, from over Marion's head, from out of the
windows, even throwing her confidential delight to him across the river
as he stood in the saw-mill doorway. Marion, then, was going through
something--something not to be mentioned, but only mysteriously
nodded--which was beneficial to her; what could it be? She had taken to
going very frequently to church lately, in spite of her dislike to "the
worm," who still occupied the pulpit. Bro went back to the experience of
his youth in the up-country, the only experience he had to go back to,
and decided that she must be having what they used to call there "a
change of heart." Upon mentioning this in a furtive tone to Mrs.
Manning, she laughed heartily, rather to his surprise, for he was a
reverent sort of non-churchgoing pagan, and said, "Very good, Bro--very
good, indeed!"
He decided that he had guessed rightly; the Episcopalian was, he had
heard, a very cheerful kind of religion, tears and groaning not being
required of its neophytes.
But his eyes were to be opened. The last trump could not have startled
him more than something he saw with his own eyes one day. It happened in
this way: There was an accident on the wharf; a young man was crushed
between the end of the dock and the side of the steamer; some one came
running to the cottage and said it was Lawrence Vickery. Mrs. Manning,
the hands at the mill, and even old Dinah, started off at once; the
whole town was hurrying to the scene. Bro, shut up in his workroom,
going over his beloved valve again, did not hear or see them. It was
nearly dinner-time, and, when he came out and found no boat, he was
surprised; but he paddled himself across on a rude raft he had, and went
up to the cottage. The doors stood open all over the house as the hasty
departures had left them, and he heard Marion walking up and down in her
room up stairs, sobbing aloud and wildly. He had never heard her sob
before; even as a child she had been reticent and self-controlled. He
stood appalled at the sound. What could it betoken? He stole to the foot
of the stairs and listened. She was moaning Lawrence's name over and
over to herself--"Lawrence! Lawrence! Lawrence!" He started up the
stairs, hardly knowing what he was doing. Her grief was dreadful to him:
he wanted to comfort her, but did not know how. He hardly realized what
the cry meant. But it was to come to him. The heart-broken girl, who
neither saw nor heard him, although he was now just outside the door,
drew a locket from her bosom and kissed it passionately with a flood of
despairing, loving words. Then, as if at the end of her strength, with
a sigh like death, she sank to the floor lifeless; she had fainted.
After a moment the man entered. He seemed to himself to have been
standing outside that door for a limitless period of time; like those
rare, strange sensations we feel of having done the same thing or spoken
the same words before in some other and unknown period of existence. He
lifted Marion carefully and laid her on a lounge. As he moved her, the
locket swung loose against her belt on the long ribbon which was
fastened underneath her dress around her throat. It was a clumsy,
old-fashioned locket, with an open face, and into its small frame she
herself had inserted a photograph of Lawrence Vickery, cut from a _carte
de visite_. Bro saw it: the open face of the locket was toward him, and
he could not help seeing. It occurred to him then vaguely that, as she
had worn it concealed, it should be again hidden before other eyes saw
it--before she could know that even his had rested upon it. With shaking
fingers he took out his knife, and, opening its smallest blade, he
gently severed the ribbon, took off the locket, and put it into her
pocket. It was surprising to see how skillfully his large, rough hands
did this. Then, with an afterthought, he found a worn place in the
ribbon's end, and severed it again by pulling it apart, taking the cut
portion away with him. His idea was, that she would think the ribbon had
parted of itself at the worn spot, and she did think so. It was a
pretty, slender little ribbon, of bright rose-color. When all was
finished, he went to seek assistance. He knew no more what to do for her
physically than he would have known what to do for an angel. Although
there was not the faintest sign of consciousness, he had carefully
refrained from even touching her unnecessarily in the slightest degree:
it seemed to him profanation. But there was no one in the house. He went
to the gate, and there caught sight of Mrs. Manning hurrying homeward
across the sandy waste.
"It is all a mistake," she panted, with the tears still dropping on her
crimson cheeks. "It was not Lawrence at all, but young Harding.
Lawrence has gone down the road with the superintendent; but poor young
Harding is, I fear, fatally injured."
Even then automatic memory brought to Bro's mind only the idea, "He will
never twist his feet around chair-legs any more! It was almost the only
fault he had, poor fellow!"
"Miss Marion is not quite well, I think," he said. "I heard her crying a
little up stairs as I came in."
"Of course," said the mother, "poor child! But it is all over now.--It
was not Lawrence at all, Marion," she cried loudly, hurrying up the path
to the doorway; "it was only young Harding."
Love has ears, even in semi-death, and it heard that cry. When Mrs.
Manning, breathless, reached her daughter's room, she found her on the
lounge still, but with recovered consciousness, and even palely smiling.
The picture was safely in her pocket; she supposed, when she found it,
that she must have placed it there herself. She never had any suspicion
of Bro's presence or his action.
The saw-miller had disappeared. Mrs. Manning supposed that he, in his
turn, had gone to the dock or to the Harding cottage.
When he came in to tea that night he looked strangely, but was able to
account for it.
"Letters from Washington," he said. Then he paused; they looked at him
expectantly. "The idea of the register is not a new one," he added
slowly; "it has already been patented."
"My inheritance is gone, then," said Marion gayly.
She spoke without reflection, being so happy now in the reaction of her
great relief that she was very near talking nonsense, a feminine
safety-valve which she hardly ever before had had occasion to seek.
"Yes," said Bro, a pained quiver crossing his face for an instant. "The
valve also is pronounced worthless," he added in a monotonous voice.
Mother and daughter noticed his tone and his lifeless look; they
attributed it to his deep, bitter disappointment, and felt sorry for
him.
"But the screw, Bro?" said Mrs. Manning.
"That is successful, I believe; the patent is granted."
"I knew it," she replied triumphantly. "Even _I_ could see the great
merits it had. I congratulate you, Bro."
"So do I," said Marion. She would have congratulated anybody that
evening.
"The valve is a disappointment to me," said the man, speaking steadily,
although dully. "I had worked over it so long that I counted upon it as
certain."
Then he rose and went over to the mill.
In the mean time Lawrence Vickery was riding homeward comfortably on the
hand-car, and had no idea that he was supposed to be dead. But he
learned it; and learned something else also from Marion's sensitive,
tremulous face, delicate as a flower. A warm-hearted, impulsive fellow,
he was touched by her expression, and went further than he intended.
That is to say, that, having an opportunity, thanks to Mrs. Manning, who
went up stairs, purposely leaving them alone together, he began by
taking Marion's hand reassuringly, and looking into her eyes, and ended
by having her in his arms and continuing to look into her eyes, but at a
much nearer range. In short, he put himself under as firm betrothal
bonds as ever a man did in the whole history of betrothals.
In the mean time the soft-hearted mother, sitting in the darkness up
stairs, was shedding tears tenderly, and thinking of her own betrothal.
That Lawrence was poor was a small matter to her, compared with the fact
that Marion was loved at last, and happy. Lawrence was a Vickery, and
the son of her old friend; besides, to her, as to most Southern women,
the world is very well lost for the sake of love.
And Bro, over at the saw-mill?
His red lights shone across the marsh as usual, and he was in his
work-room; in his hand was the model of his valve. He had made it tell
a lie that night; he had used it as a mask. He gazed at it, the creature
of his brain, his companion through long years, and he felt that he no
longer cared whether it was good for anything or not! Then he remembered
listlessly that it _was_ good for nothing; the highest authorities had
said so. But, gone from him now was the comprehension of their reasons,
and this he began to realize. He muttered over a formula, began a
calculation, both well known to him; he could do neither. His mind
strayed from its duty idly, as a loose bough sways in the wind. He put
his hands to his head and sat down. He sat there motionless all night.
But oh, how happy Marion was! Not effusively, not spokenly, but
internally; the soft light shining out from her heart, however, as it
does through a delicate porcelain shade. Old Mr. Vickery was delighted
too, and a new series of invitations followed in honor of the betrothal;
even the superintendent was invited, and came on his hand-car. Bro was
included also, but he excused himself. His excuses were accepted without
insistence, because it was understood that he was almost heart-broken by
his disappointments. Joy and sorrow meet. When the engagement had lasted
five weeks, and Marion had had thirty-five days of her new happiness,
the old grandfather died, rather suddenly, but peacefully, and without
pain. Through a long, soft April day he lay quietly looking at them all,
speechless but content; and then at sunset he passed away. Mrs. Manning
wept heartily, and Marion too; even Lawrence was not ashamed of the
drops on his cheeks as he surveyed the kind old face, now for ever
still. Everybody came to the funeral, and everybody testified respect;
then another morning broke, and life went on again. The sun shines just
the same, no matter who has been laid in the earth, and the flowers
bloom. This seems to the mourner a strange thing, and a hard. In this
case, however, there was no one to suffer the extreme pain of violent
separation, for all the old man's companions and contemporaries were
already gone; he was the last.
Another month went by, and another; the dead heats of summer were upon
them. Marion minded them not; scorching air and arctic snows were alike
to her when Lawrence was with her. Poor girl! she had the intense,
late-coming love of her peculiar temperament: to please him she would
have continued smiling on the rack itself until she died. But why, after
all, call her "poor"? Is not such love, even if unreturned, great
riches?
Bro looked at her, and looked at her, and looked at her. He had fallen
back into his old way of life again, and nobody noticed anything unusual
in him save what was attributed to his disappointment.
"You see he had shut himself up there, and worked over that valve for
years," explained Mrs. Manning; "and, not letting anybody know about it
either, he had come to think too much of it, and reckon upon it as
certain. He was always an odd, lonely sort of man, you know, and this
has told upon him heavily."
By and by it became evident that Lawrence was restless. He had sold off
what he could of his inheritance, but that was only the old furniture;
no one wanted the sidling, unrepaired house, which was now little better
than a shell, or the deserted cotton-fields, whose dikes were all down.
He had a scheme for going abroad again; he could do better there, he
said; he had friends who would help him.
"Shall you take Miss Marion?" asked Bro, speaking unexpectedly, and, for
him, markedly. They were all present.
"Oh, no," said Lawrence, "not now. How could I? But I shall come back
for her soon." He looked across at his betrothed with a smile. But
Marion had paled suddenly, and Bro had seen it.
The next event was a conversation at the mill.
Young Vickery wandered over there a few days later. He was beginning to
feel despondent and weary: everything at Wilbarger was at its summer
ebb, and the climate, too, affected him. Having become really fond of
Marion now, and accustomed to all the sweetness of her affection, he
hated to think of leaving her; yet he must. He leaned against the
window-sill, and let out disjointed sentences of discontent to Bro; it
even seemed a part of his luck that it should be dead low water outside
as he glanced down, and all the silver channels slimy.
"That saw makes a fearful noise," he said.
"Come into my room," said Bro; "you will not hear it so plainly there."
It was not the work-room, but the bedroom. The work-room was not
mentioned now, out of kindness to Bro. Lawrence threw himself down on
the narrow bed, and dropped his straw hat on the floor. "The world's a
miserable hole," he said, with unction.
Bro sat down on a three-legged stool, the only approach to a chair in
the room, and looked at him; one hand, in the pocket of his old, shrunk
linen coat, was touching a letter.
"Bah!" said Lawrence, clasping his hands under his head and stretching
himself out to his full length on the bed, "how in the world _can_ I
leave her, Bro? Poor little thing!"
Now to Bro, to whom Marion had always seemed a cross between a heavenly
goddess and an earthly queen, this epithet was startling; however, it
was, after all, but a part of the whole.
"It is a pity that you _should_ leave her," he replied slowly. "It would
be much better to take her with you."
"Yes, I know it would. I am a fickle sort of fellow, too, and have all
sorts of old entanglements over there, besides. They might take hold of
me again."
Bro felt a new and strange misgiving, which went through three distinct
phases, with the strength and depth of an ocean, in less than three
seconds: first, bewilderment at the new idea that anybody _could_ be
false to Marion; second, a wild, darting hope for himself; third, the
returning iron conviction that it could never be, and that, if Lawrence
deserted Marion, she would die.
"If you had money, what would you do?" he asked, coming back to the
present heavily.
"Depends upon how much it was."
"Five thousand dollars?"
"Well--I'd marry on that, but not very hilariously, old fellow."
"Ten?"
"That would do better."
Nothing has as yet been said of Lawrence Vickery's appearance. It will
be described now, and will, perhaps, throw light backward over this
narration.
Imagine a young man, five feet eleven inches in height, straight,
strong, but slender still, in spite of his broad shoulders; imagine, in
addition, a spirited head and face, bright, steel-blue eyes, a bold
profile, and beautiful mouth, shaded by a golden mustache; add to this,
gleaming white teeth, a dimple in the cleft, strongly molded chin, a
merry laugh, and a thoroughly manly air; and you have Lawrence Broughton
Vickery at twenty-eight.
When at last he took himself off, and went over to see Marion and be
more miserable still, Bro drew the letter from his pocket, and read it
for the sixth or seventh time. During these months his screw had become
known, having been pushed persistently by the enterprising young lawyer
who aspired to patent business in the beginning, and having held its own
since by sheer force of merit. The enterprising young lawyer had,
however, recently forsaken law for politics; he had gone out to one of
the Territories with the intention of returning some day as senator when
the Territory should be a State (it is but fair to add that his chance
is excellent). But he had, of course, no further knowledge of the screw,
and Bro now managed the business himself. This letter was from a firm
largely engaged in the manufacture of machinery, and it contained an
offer for the screw and patent outright--ten thousand dollars.
"I shall never invent anything more," thought Bro, the words of the
letter writing themselves vacantly on his brain. "Something has gone
wrong inside my head in some way, and the saw-mill will be all I shall
ever attend to again."
Then he paused.