The Loves of Ambrose

Susan paused for a reply, but her neighbour continued his unusual silence, the while pensively engaged in studying the toe of his boot. Coming farther out on to her porch, Mrs. Barrows' belligerent black curls fluttered like a war banner in the breeze.

"Course we women knowed you men tried to make this Miss Em'ly Dunham go, and she wouldn't, but women ain't so easy turned from things they sets out to do. So I told her we didn't want no Yankee school teacher in our district, that we were talkin' things over and meant to get some one to teach our little darkies ourselves. And that our intention in comin' forth to see her had not been to say howdy, but good-bye."

Here the joy of battle, even though it had resulted in defeat, actually spread a retrospective glow over the mind of the speaker, for, with her saucepan resting on her one hip and her dishcloth on the other, she was forgetting her work in the glory of narration.

"What do you think that girl done when I said them last words to her, Ambrose? She put her head down on the doctor's wife's bosom, bein's as she had more'n the rest of us, and actually shed tears, said she thought that the war was over, and wouldn't we let her stay on for a time until mebbe we'd like her better. And at this the ladies was so outdone they kind of scurried off without gettin' down to anything definite. But I fixed up matters on the way home. I told 'em that if Miss Dunham wouldn't go polite fer the askin', why, 'Pennyrile' could try and see what freezin' out would do, so there ain't a single woman or girl in this here town goin' to exchange the time of day with that girl, ask her to come in and set fer a spell or even bow to her on the street."

Still Ambrose remained silent. He knew that Mrs. Barrows was not unkind, but that she loved a fight for its own dramatic sake, and yet what could he do or say to her now that would not by the very force of opposition make things worse for Miner's romance?

Susan was growing restless, for she was missing the clash of steel that usually came from the striking of her neighbour's against hers.

"One of the ladies said we was boycottin'," she concluded, showing plain evidences of her wish to retire into her own home for the night; "seemed kind of foolish to me, bein's as there ain't so much as a boy in it."

Perforce Ambrose had now to withdraw. And yet he said nothing, although as he moved slowly across her side yard Susan thought she heard him mutter: "I was a stranger and you took me in."

Sternly then she ordered her offspring to bed, but, before following her, lingered until the last vestige of her visitor's coat-tail had disappeared, when in feminine fashion she had the final words:

"I reckon it's a good thing we ain't all took in so easy as Ambrose Thompson."

CHAPTER IX

"The tides of love and laughter run

Increasing aye from sun to sun."

Nothing could have been more characteristic of Ambrose Thompson than his sudden decision to have a second look at Miss Emily Dunham. Several days had passed since his conversation with Mrs. Barrows, and village information had given definite assurance that her plan for freezing out the Yankee schoolmistress was being put into execution. And, although little else had had place in Ambrose's mind, so far he had not been able to think out a plan of salvation.

It was curious, however, the effect that the thought of a possible love affair for Miner had had upon him. Actually after their talk under the apple tree his step grew lighter, there was more of the boyhood spring to it, and the stoop in his shoulders that had showed after Sarah's passing certainly became less apparent; even his smile unconsciously offered more encouragement to well-meant feminine sympathizers in Pennyroyal. For such was this tall man's love of romance that the music of it sounding for another had awakened his own vibrations. Also he had almost driven Miner crazy in his repeated efforts to blow on whatever he considered signs of smouldering passion in his friend until one afternoon, when Miner had fairly pushed him from the shop in order to have peace, coming home to his empty cottage and feeling a sudden horror of its loneliness, he had set out for the log cabin. A vision of Miss Dunham, a meeting, or possibly a conversation with her, doubtless would add the spur his imagination needed in her defence. For poor Ambrose was blind to the fact that he had any interest but Miner's before him, exquisitely unaware that he had lately been growing weary of his own deserted altar and the life of high abnegation he had planned for himself, although once or twice he had wondered, if he lived to so great an age as fifty, how he could possibly endure so many lonely evenings.

July in Kentucky brings a swift maturity. Already ears of corn were full ripe in their sheaths and the other grain bowed by its own abundance. Yet Ambrose took little of his accustomed interest in the landscape. Rapidly he walked in spite of the heat and as rapidly evolved and set aside his plans for aiding Miner and Miss Dunham. He knew his own people; the girl had been sent into Pennyroyal by the Freedmen's Bureau, a product of the Civil War hated by most Southerners; and while Pennyroyal might not mean to be cruel, her pride and clannishness had no parallel outside of early Scottish history. And, in spite of Kentucky's far-famed hospitality, truly there is no other place in the world where an outsider may be made to feel so outside.

Finally when he had come to the edge of the clearing and could see the log school-house ahead, Ambrose was weary, and so sat down on the stump of a tree. He should have preferred to go boldly to Miss Dunham's door and ask that she talk with him, but while his courage had carried him thus far, the recollection of his first visit to her halted him at this spot. Surely the girl would some time come to her door or else be taking a walk through the woods, for the papaw grove of small slender trees was thickly shaded, cool and still, many of the birds that earlier inhabited it having flown farther north, while for those which remained behind it was a season of home responsibilities.

How long Ambrose waited and watched he did not know, since time is of so little importance to a lonely man, and, moreover, he possessed a long and beautiful patience with men and things, even with that Providence whose ways are past finding out. Only once did anything happen to encourage him, and then some one did come out of the school-house door to look toward the setting sun, but she proved to be the coloured woman who was Miss Dunham's sole guardian and caretaker. Still Ambrose managed to keep cheerful, when unexpectedly and without warning a dreadful change came over him. His head sank upon his chest, his delicate nose quivered, and boyish tears sprang up in his eyes. And this change was brought about in the oddest fashion. Ambrose had been idly carving his own initials in the stump of the tree where he sat, when all of a sudden it was borne in upon him that this was the first time in his life that he had ever carved his own initials without some girl's to entwine with them. And this brought such a longing for Sarah that Ambrose straightway forgot both Miner and Miner's cause, remembering only his own loss and the single plate and cup and saucer that must be waiting for him on his supper table at home.

"Lord," Ambrose whispered, "I'm all in." Then leaping up from his seat he started running, running away from the thought of himself. He must have appeared rather like an animated scarecrow with his straw-coloured hair, his long arms flopping and his legs covering such stretches of ground that his coat-tails stood out straight behind, for in deference to a possible meeting with a young woman Ambrose was wearing the swallow tail and carrying the stove-pipe hat of his wedding journey.

He stopped, however, when the mouth of an old war pistol was suddenly placed in front of his left shoulder.

"Please don't move," its owner said tremulously.

And Ambrose's lips twitched as he answered politely, "I ain't a-goin' to," and then he kept absolutely still, noticing that the arm that held the pistol was trembling nervously and that the girl at the end of the arm wore a yellow sunbonnet and a primrose covered dress, and that the face within the sunbonnet was possibly a shade paler and more startled than his own.

"I am sorry if I frightened you," she apologized after a little further study of her companion, "but I am so often alone in these woods and now that the war is just over and things so unsettled I thought it best to carry my father's pistol, and you startled me so running toward me."

Ambrose inclined his head, not daring to make any further move, for the girl still held her pistol so confidingly near the neighbourhood of his heart; nevertheless, he was able to see that Miss Dunham had changed since the day of her visit to their shop. Her eyes were bright, but the laughter lines had disappeared from her mouth and chin, and while she still meant to be firm, the man could see that the firmness cost.

Her pistol drooped listlessly downward. "You must not mind; it isn't loaded," she explained, "and even if it were, I couldn't shoot."

But still she handled the weapon in so ingenuous and distinctly feminine a manner that Ambrose reached out. "You wouldn't mind my having a look, Miss Dunham?" Emptying the barrels, a single shot slid into his hand.

"Oh, oh," cried the girl helplessly, "I am so sorry; I might have killed you." Then she wavered for a moment and except for Ambrose's arm might have fallen. The yellow sunlight bathed her and her dress in a golden light. It was a curious thing for the tall man to have a woman's eyes so nearly on a level with his own, though she righted herself almost instantly and taking off her sunbonnet began making odd pats at her hair as girls so frequently do after almost every upsetting situation.

"I didn't faint, I never have fainted in my life," she explained indignantly. "I did feel a little sick, because as I didn't know my pistol was loaded I might so easily have – "

"Just so," Ambrose answered gravely, and then without rhyme or reason both of them laughed, not just for an instant, but for the longest time, as though one of the funniest things in the world had just taken place; and afterward, without asking permission, Ambrose walked back with the girl to the log cabin. He would have gone home immediately, then, but at her door Emily turned to him with hot cheeks like a child longing to make a request and yet afraid.

"Would you mind staying and talking to me for a little?" she begged at length. "You see, it seems to me I haven't laughed for such a long while, and I like to laugh so much."

And Ambrose's face quivered in its old sympathetic fashion. "Course I will," he almost added "honey," but stopped himself in time. "Ef you and I can set a while on this bench by the door I wouldn't be a mite surprised ef we couldn't think up some way to make livin' in 'Pennyrile' a heap more of a laughin' matter for you."

CHAPTER X

THE REVELATION

After this it was extraordinary the number of absolutely unassailable reasons that kept Ambrose so frequently on his way back and forth from the village to the school-house. Certainly twenty-four hours rarely passed without his getting up a wholly new idea to assist Miss Dunham, and therefore Miner, about which it was necessary to ask her advice. And possibly Emily encouraged him in this, for often she had postponed or put aside a perfectly good suggestion with the proposition that they talk the question over later, and that Ambrose come out again to the log cabin to see if they were of the same mind.

Of course Ambrose was extremely particular not to permit the hours of his visits to conflict with those of his partner, but as Miner no longer spent his evenings with him, naturally he concluded that these evenings were devoted to Emily, and therefore his appearances were usually made during the long summer twilight. And this not with any idea of hiding or of disloyalty, but simply that he should not be in his friend's way; for Ambrose's heart was singularly light these days and the sun shone with its old glory. Why, even the one little cloud that had troubled him for a while had been with laughter pushed away. On his mind during the first of his two or three visits had been the thought that Miss Dunham could not know of his presence in the midnight raid.

They were in the woods together one evening, a little beyond the papaw thicket, when Ambrose, thrusting his hand into his pocket, drew forth a carefully wrapped up package. "It ain't a present; it's yours already," he announced, pushing it toward Emily with his face crimsoning, and digging his toes into the earth like a big, awkward boy.

Slowly the girl unfolded her lost hairbrush, and, though her eyes immediately shone with laughter, womanlike she kept her lids down, asking with a kind of over-emphasized wonder, "How on earth, Mr. Ambrose Thompson, could you ever have come upon my hairbrush?"

And in another moment Ambrose had confessed everything of his own part in the raid, told his story miserably and without extenuating circumstances, and ending with the statement that he couldn't endure to have her friendship until she knew the full extent of his unmanliness.

Then Emily allowed herself to look straight at him and her laughter brimmed over. "Why, I've known all along," she whispered, putting her hand for just the briefest, comforting second over the top of his. "Don't you suppose that I recognized the voice coming from the longest shadow I ever saw as soon as I saw the longest man in Pennyroyal?"

Two weeks afterward it happened as usual that Miner and Ambrose were both in their shop closing up for the night, but, what was most remarkable, Miner was allowing Ambrose to do the greater part of the work, and for fifteen minutes had been sitting on the top of a vinegar barrel idly whittling at a stick and every once in a while clearing his throat as though he were getting ready to speak, notwithstanding he kept his face turned from the sight of his partner.

"Looks like Miss Dunham's gettin' more cheerfuller lately," he blurted at last, not glancing up, but whittling so briskly that the chips about him on the floor looked like the shorn curls of a lamb.

Ambrose lifted his face from the depth of a large ledger where he had been laboriously writing down the day's accounts. "Yes, ain't she?" he returned happily; "seems like she's sorter too big to be hurt by other folk's meannesses." Then walking across the shop he laid his hand on his friend's shoulder with a gesture that was almost a caress.

"You been goin' out to see her yourself considerable lately, ain't you? So mebbe she ain't needin' much other comp'ny," Miner suggested, raising his eyes and then lowering them quickly before the other man could catch his glance.

Ambrose hesitated. "Why, mebbe I have," he confessed slowly; "funny I ain't ever thought of it in that light! You see I've been a-tryin' to do what you asked and hatch up some scheme to make 'Pennyrile' understand and like Miss Dunham better, but Em'ly and me ain't come to any conclusion yet that's good enough, so I reckon that's why I keep on a-goin'."

"Em'ly!" Miner sprung off his barrel top like he had been struck. "So it's come to that, has it?" And by this time his sneer and anger were so unmistakable that his companion, whose expression had been perfectly frank a moment before, turned a dull red and for the first time in his life his eyes dropped before those of his friend.

"I ain't callin' her Em'ly to her face, Miner, at least not more'n once or twice," he answered painfully, feeling himself turn hot and cold in the same instant, and an awful weight settle itself upon his chest. Then a relieved light broke over him. "Mebbe now I'm thinkin' upon her as Em'ly because some day you and she – "

"Liar!" The little man, blinded with passion, struck out somewhere into the region of his friend's chest and, when Ambrose caught his hands and held them, twisted and growled like a little dog in the grasp of a big one, repeating over and over in a thick voice, "Liar, liar, you know you want her for yourself, you know you love her, so what damn use is there in you pretendin' before me?" until his rage had partly spent itself.

Ambrose had made no sort of answer or defence; indeed, his big hands had seemed to cling to Miner rather than to restrain him, besides which there was something in his appearance that would have made it hard to continue angry with him even if you had not loved him.

"I didn't know, Miner," he said at last, hushed and frightened, "I didn't know until you spoke it. I reckon I do love her, but now I know I won't see or speak with her no more."

Then when Miner had banged his way out of the store the tall man, sitting down on the deserted barrel, began to shake, and there was shame on his face and the look of a man who has suddenly heard that the ship on which he is sailing must go down. For several hours he remained in his shop, sometimes walking up and down and then reseating himself on the barrel, but wherever he went and whatever he did old Moses dragged his rheumatic legs after him. Two or three times the man patted the dog, whispering reassuringly, "It's all right; don't you be worryin' none about me, old fellow."

It was so dark in the shop that when Mrs. Barrows, carrying a lantern, opened the door she could not at first find Ambrose. And afterward, when he did come toward her and her light fell full upon his face, to Susan's eternal credit let it be set down that she turned away her eyes.

"You come along home, Ambrose Thompson," she began sternly; "ain't I been watchin' and waitin' for you to go by to your supper these past two hours? It's mighty nigh time I was gittin' to bed and I ain't able to sleep less'n my mind's easy."

Taking the man by the arm she led him toward home, talking in a tone that few persons had ever heard from Susan. "Whatever's happened to you to-day, Ambrose Thompson, don't you be scaired," she said once. "I tell you it's the folks that things never happen to that ought to be scaired, 'cause you're livin' and they ain't." And then when Ambrose would have left her at her gate, climbing up the few steps that led into her yard she was able thus to place her hands on his shoulders.

"Ambrose," she said then, "there was a neighbour remarked to me the other day, 'Ain't Ambrose Thompson changed a lot since his wife died?' I told her, 'No, folks don't change none in what I calls their fundamentals. They alter some; of course learnin' life don't mean to make no exception of them with troubles, but leopards don't stripe, nor zebras spot, nor human bein's get made over by experiences. You been livin' lately thinkin' you was changed entirely inside by Sarah's death, but you ain't changed – you've just been restin'. You've seen other folks git over things that hit 'em as hard as Sarah's dyin' done you, but course you thought you were differ'nt." Leaning over, Susan gave Ambrose a peck certainly intended as a kiss. "It's awful hard, boy, to wake up sometimes, after one has been adreamin', but I reckon you're wakin' up."

Susan was correct, Ambrose's dream had passed and by morning no mists of it remained. Since the revelation of Miner's accusation in the shop he had made no effort at self-deception, understanding now why since his meeting with the Yankee school teacher his world had been again so strangely vivid, so full of adventure, that even his trips back and forth to the shop had been filled with delightful impressions, ideas that might some day be confided to her. For, after all, is there not so much of life in the smallest place in this world when you are fully alive in it, and so little in the biggest when you are not?

Then the bitterest part of Ambrose's fight was that he knew Emily to be his real mate, knew that Sarah had been a boy's spring fancy, but that the summer had now set the seal of her warmth and fruition upon his second love. Moreover, he also knew that Emily might be made to care for him, since love like his is rarely without its answer.

Nevertheless when dawn came he had written this letter and taken it out to the post:

Dear Miss Dunham: I've got to quit comin' to see you and I can't say why, except it's best.

Then I haven't got the old reason, for to-night it's come to me the way to make Pennyroyal not treat you so bad. Can't you give out that you're sick, for if only the Pennyroyal ladies can get the chance to take care of you they'll be real pleased. Seems like letting people do good things for you is the surest way to make them quit doing mean; it's kind of human nature.

And there is one other thing I'd like to say to you: It's about Miner; he's a whole lot bigger than he looks and there can't no man on earth beat him at loving if you'll only help him a little at the start.

Yours truly,Ambrose Thompson, Esq.

It was an odd, stiff letter, and yet that afternoon when Emily had received it she laughed and placed it inside the folds of her primrose dress; although a moment afterward she sighed with the thought of the lonely hour before sunset.

CHAPTER XI

FOLLOWING HIS ADVICE

No further reference was made to the difference between the two friends, but Ambrose had reason to believe a few days later that Miss Dunham was following his advice; for coming out in his yard before breakfast, after a restless night, he was just in time to spy Mrs. Barrows climbing into the gig with Doctor Webb, carrying a basket on her arm and wearing so glorified an expression that it could come of nothing but the opportunity of ministering to the sick. For the care of the sick gave to Susan the same glow of pleasure that the act of creation gives to the artist or the command of his army gives the born general. Once stationed by the bedside of a patient, was she not the main source from which news of the illness must flow as well as the basin into which all inquiries must be poured? Certainly Ambrose had so considered her.

Moreover, that afternoon his suspicion was justified by Miner's growling at him over the opening of a new hogshead of molasses: "Miss Dunham's powerful poorly," and then going on furiously with his work as though he had never spoken.

And Ambrose did not dare ask questions nor prolong the subject of their conversation, though wistful to hear that Miner as well as Emily approved his plan. However, there was little doubt of its success, for the turning of the tide in favour of the Yankee schoolmistress soon could be seen, heard, and felt. Rivers of soup were made to flow toward the once anathematized cabin, and mountains of sponge cake and jelly were dumped at its door.

Since the day of the first visit there had always been in Pennyroyal a small number of women headed by Mrs. Dr. Webb who were not so manifestly unfavourable to Emily, but according to report they had lately been most unmercifully snubbed and put down by Mrs. Barrows, who would allow no one else inside the cabin and actually barred other ministering angels from the door.

Hearing word of the approach of these ladies one morning through Emily's coloured maid, Susan came forth into the clearing to meet them and stood waiting as usual with one hand resting on each sharp hip. Then before any other mouth could be opened hers was at work.

"I am powerful glad, Maria Webb, that you have had a change of heart toward the poor young girl," she commenced, "but you needn't try now to be gettin' inside her home after havin' so long kep' her out of your own. Besides, she's too sick to see no one 'cept the doctor and me. Doctor Webb says she's real ill with chills and fever 'cause papaw trees won't flourish 'ceptin' where it's damp, but I call it human ague the child's got. Talkin' about millstones hung about your neck, they're necklaces compared to the way women tries to drag down other women when they start in to do something a mite different."

And this intense irritation of Mrs. Barrows showing itself thus to her female friends even extended to her comparatively favoured next door neighbour, although Ambrose could not understand the cause. Emily of course had taken Susan into her confidence and she was a natural dramatist and yet why should she positively glare at him one evening as he stood snipping the dead stalks from the rose bushes in his yard?

Indeed her disapproval was so evident that Ambrose straightening up asked in amazement: "Whatever have I done, Susan?"