After listening to this peculiar and interesting legend, I led the conversation to the book I wished to purchase, and which Ambrosia had brought home with her on purpose. Reinhold knew the value of it perfectly well, and firmly resisted my well-meant attempts to fix a price upon it beyond what even its merits warranted. I was hardly able to indulge in such extravagance, yet bibliomania had always been my besetting sin, and I had curtailed our little household in many ways to feed my library. Besides, here was a charity as well-deserved as it seemed well-placed; how else, with my limited means, could I help my poor friends? But my fellow-bookworm was proof against all such artifices, and I was reduced to ask him, point-blank, was there anything which he would allow me to do for him? Without the least show of fussy pride, but with a quiet, manly gratitude that was immeasurably more dignified, he answered at once, his voice shaking as he looked at his little son:
“A very little would make my child’s life happy and useful, and, lieber Herr, that little I have it not.”
“How stupid of me!” I exclaimed. “I might have thought of that myself. Is he to be a scholar, or an artist, or what?” I said, stroking his hair, while his great eyes were fixed hungrily on mine.
“Books are his passion,” said his father, “and he knows all our poets by heart. He should have a literary education, I think.”
“But,” said I, “he could not go alone to the university, and if you do not mind leaving Augsburg, would it not be best for you all to go together? I have some English friends at Bonn, Catholics and rich people; they will do much for your child that I cannot do, though my heart would rejoice to do it, so suppose we start to-morrow?”
Reinhold looked up incredulously. Ambrosia laughed, and the poor little cripple clapped his hands in ecstasy. I watched the girl to see whether a shade of regret denoted ties of a tenderer or more passionate nature than her strong, calm family affections; but there was no sign of anything save quiet joy and a gratitude that in its fulness made me feel quite ashamed. I kept thinking of what could be done for her; whether my English friends at Bonn could or would be kind to her in any practical way, and whether in that case she and her father would ever submit to being provided for by the kindness of strangers. She seemed too self-reliant for that; and although she evidently longed for the same education her brother was to have, and had, indeed, already amassed in the intervals of her active work such miscellaneous knowledge as mere reading could give her, yet I felt sure that she would insist on earning her bread and helping to support her father. I decided on introducing the old man to the notice of some great publisher, with whom an arrangement about his manuscripts might perhaps be made; but of this we did not speak just now. I left the room full of our new projects, and spent the early part of the next day in carefully visiting the scenes of Ambrosia’s life, death, and marvellous resurrection. In the afternoon I went back to Reinhold’s old-fashioned abode, and found everything nearly ready. The books were packed in a curious old chest, which was certainly a quaint contrast to the trunks and valises of modern tourists; this and some of the old furniture, endeared to Reinhold and his daughter by the associations of a lifetime, were to be forwarded to their new destination through the care of the good “Pfarrer” (parish-priest), and a few little necessaries (a very slender amount in the eyes of our “girls of the period,” I fancy!) together with the precious manuscripts, were to go with us in a large leather hand-bag, which I volunteered to carry. I asked to be allowed to take charge of the little brother too, as we were too near the railway to need a carriage, but Ambrosia laughingly caught him up, and, with gentle deftness, insisted on carrying him, telling me to give my disengaged arm to her invalid father. As soon as we were seated in the train, Ambrosia began to tell me that she had never been in one before. I asked if she were sorry to leave the old town.
“Oh! no,” she said, “I know I shall go back there one day, when I know more than I do now.”
I wondered if there were any hidden meaning in the words. Reinhold and I talked “shop” all the way, till our fellow-passengers must have been bored with our enthusiastic bibliomania. Ambrosia sat chatting gayly to her little brother, whose glee and wonder were sometimes gravely expressed in questions that made our neighbors laugh. When we got to Bonn, and were comfortably settled at a quiet, old-fashioned hotel, absolutely perfect in its appointments, but as unobtrusive of its merits as its gaudy, noisy rivals were shrilly eager about theirs, I set out to find my friends. They were out of town. Without their influence I was powerless, so I had to wait a few days for their return. They took up the matter as warmly as I could have wished, and were particularly anxious to do something for Ambrosia; the difficulty was to find something she would accept. In the meantime, the crippled child was recommended to the college authorities with plenty of guarantees, seen to by the priest, who was my friend’s adviser and fellow-worker in all his good schemes, and Reinhold was quietly put in the way of good opportunities for the publication of some of his accumulated writings. The little boy promised well, and I was more anxious about Ambrosia, who wanted to support herself by needlework.
“You see,” she said to me, a week after our arrival, “some of the work will be knitting, and I can read as I knit; then I will go to school at night and on Sundays, and pick up what I can, and twice a week I will make time for the singing-class. There is a very good one, and so cheap, attached to our church here, and the master is a really great artist, though he is old and very poor now. He and my father will be friends, I know, so you see I shall be as well off as it is possible.”
Nothing could move her from her resolve, and as I had to leave Bonn shortly after, I was obliged to take things as they were. I received monthly bulletins of my little protégé’s conduct and progress, and sometimes heard from Ambrosia and Reinhold, through their rare but warm letters, though oftener from my friends established at Bonn. After awhile, I heard that the girl had consented to take music lessons twice a week, in the evening, with Miss L., my friend’s niece, and sometimes to share her French and Latin lessons. English she already knew. The needlework was not abandoned, however, and Ambrosia, I was told, seemed to gain new energy with each new pursuit she undertook. Reinhold’s works were in a fair way of being successfully published, and his circumstances were actually beginning to mend. I never heard of such a lucky venture as that hurriedly made at the Augsburg book-stall! Everything and everybody favored it, and my quiet old sister at home used to make me tell the story over and over again, as we turned over the pages of the book that had been the first deus ex machinâ of the romance. She was certainly disappointed in the want of a lover for Ambrosia, and, to console herself, would sometimes so arrange the little we knew as to make it the frame of a possible love-story that we did not, and never might, know.