“Oh! yes, of course,” answered the girl with a hearty smile; and for the first time I noticed her features and expression. She was not beautiful—I hope you did not expect the romance to be perfect?—but there was a pure, calm steadiness in her look, and an air of unconscious dignity about her that made her striking to the eye. She seemed made for fidelity and helpfulness, and as to external charms, if you admire hair, she simply had superabundant masses of it. German-like, it was put up in broad plaits, tightly coiled round the head, without a shadow of coquettishness, and just as if she thought it no ornament at all. Now I have noticed your Italian girls know how to make a good deal more of their advantages. I have seen poor girls in Venice with as elaborate a coiffure—ringlets, puffs, plaits, and wavings—as any Parisian hair-dresser could exhibit on his waxen models.
“Libels again!” I answered. “I have seen the very contrary at Naples, and there are women there like Grecian statues. Venice is half Eastern, you know. But to go on with your impromptu romance.”
Well, when evening came, I went to the address the young girl had given me, and as you may imagine, it was not a palace that I entered. The neighborhood was as commonplace as any in an old German city can be, that is, picturesqueness itself compared with our modern “back slums.” Still, through the picturesqueness, there stared the most unmistakable poverty. I went up a good many flights of steep, narrow stairs, with curious balusters that would have driven a dealer in old carving wild with delight, and knocked at a door that I recognized by the rude cross and bit of palm over the archway. There was just such another cross and sprig of green inside the door, and a little holy-water vessel in stamped brass hung at the side nearest the door-handle. There was nothing very peculiar about the room, except that it had an air of freshness and cleanliness, which, considering its sick inmates and its cramped locality, was the more pleasant because it was a surprise. A great German bed, with a feather-bed of traditional height, filled one side of the room, and there was a stove in the middle. The remains of the supper were on a side-table, and a lamp drawn close to the father’s arm-chair stood on a centre-table laden with domestic “mending.” The little crippled brother sat in a low easy-chair by the stove, which chair was the only luxury in the room: My friend, the young girl, came quickly forward and said:
“My father is so glad you have come, mein Herr.”
I sat down beside him, and soon got into conversation with the old scholar. He was still very weak, but seemed to feel better when excited. I found him a thorough bookworm, full of knowledge that, in another man’s hands, would have made his fortune. I discovered, or rather forced him to tell me, that in that press (pointing to a common painted chest of drawers) were manuscripts ready to be published, if a publisher could be found to undertake the risk, but the author had no ambition, though he was full to the brim of literary enthusiasm. His researches had lain chiefly among works of mediæval ecclesiastical lore, legends and poems, etc. The emblems borne by the various saints were a favorite subject of his. His uncle’s theological collection and the libraries in which he had spent his youth, had furnished him with means to prosecute his studies even after his father’s reverses in fortune—the public libraries had done the rest. His wife’s help had been very important, and piles of her notes and references lay among his own manuscripts. He spoke with pride of his little crippled son, whom he said he had made as good a scholar as if the poor boy had been to the universities; and as to his daughter, his looks said more than his words, as he gazed at her across the table, she sitting so calmly there amid her heap of “mending,” her dark-blue dress reminding me of the coloring of a mediæval virgin martyr in the stained-glass window of some old cathedral. She was more queenly than slender in figure, and neither her face nor her hands were small, though they were perfectly shaped; there was more majesty than grace in her whole air, yet she was thoroughly girl-like. I unconsciously invested her in my mind with royal robes, heavily jewelled, like the Byzantine saints, or with the ample cloak of the brave and learned Portia. Presently she went into a smaller room, opening into the one where we were sitting, and during her absence I ventured to hint to the father that for her sake he should try to make those literary treasures of his more remunerative. He smiled; I asked him if she were already provided for, or if he did not feel it his duty to put by some kind of fortune for her.
“My child is watched over from heaven,” he said; “she will never come to harm.”
“What is her name?” I asked. I had already ascertained his family name to be Reinhold.
“Ambrosia,” he answered.
“Rather an uncommon name,” I remarked, well pleased, somehow, that it should be so.