Carolina Lee

A lump came into Kate's throat so suddenly that it choked her.

When they arrived at Mrs. Goddard's, there was no need to ask the butler if the ladies were at home, for, instead of the formal household Mrs. Goddard used to boast, the house seemed now to have become a home. Even the butler looked human, as laughter and childish screams of delight floated down the hall from the second floor.

"Perkins, what is it?" asked Kate, pausing suddenly.

"Little Miss Gladys finds that she can stand alone, Miss Howard, and we are so delighted none of the servants can be got to do their work. They just stand around and gape at her and clap their hands."

But Perkins himself was smiling as Kate rushed past him up the stairs.

"Here, Perkins, my man," said St. Quentin, "lend a hand with this, will you, and send a footman out to the motor for the rest of those parcels."

The sight which met the eye was enough to make any one's heart leap, as Kate flung open the door and joined the group.

There were Mrs. Goddard, Rosemary, Miss Sue Yancey, Carolina, and the two children, Emmeline and Gladys. Gladys was standing in the corner, partly supporting herself by leaning in the angle of the walls, but standing, nevertheless, bearing her entire weight upon her slender, beautiful little feet, which never before had been of any use to her, nor, in their distorted position, even sightly. Now they were in a normal position and actually bearing her weight, and so excited was everybody that no one turned even to give the newcomers a greeting. Rosemary and Carolina were kneeling on the floor in front of the child, while Mrs. Goddard was audibly affirming that Gladys could walk. Gladys alone looked up at Kate and St. Quentin, and smiled a welcome.

"Thee, Katie!" she lisped, "Gladyth can thtand alone!"

"Gladys can walk," affirmed Mrs. Goddard, and, as they saw the child cautiously begin to remove her hands from the supporting walls and evidently intend to attempt a step, Kate snatched the huge box from Noel's hands, and, hastily unfastening it, silently held up before her a gorgeously beautiful French doll, in a long baby dress, frilled and trimmed with cobweb lace, and calculated not only to set a child crazy, but to turn the heads of the grown-ups, for such a doll is not often seen.

No one saw it at first. Then Gladys, looking up for encouragement, glanced at Kate, and, as her eyes rested on the baby doll, with one delighted mother-cry of "Baby, baby!" she started forward and fluttered across the floor, light as any thistle-down, until she clasped the doll in her arms, and Kate seized her little swaying body to keep her from falling.

"See what Divine Love has wrought!" exclaimed Mrs. Goddard, in a voice so filled with gratitude and a reverent exultation that it sounded like a prayer.

There were tense exclamations, excited laughter which ended in sudden tears, quivering smiles and murmurs of thanksgiving, until Carolina, turning to Noel, said:

"Noel, I am sure that doll was your doing," when error again claimed Kate for its own, for the look of gratitude Noel sent in return.

"Lord, but this Christian Science does make me t-tired," murmured Kate to herself, as she released Gladys, and the two children, in a fever of excitement, sat down on the floor to undress the doll. "F-first we go up, up, up, and th-then we go down, down, down! J-just as surely as I have an up feeling, I g-get it in the neck inside of the next thirty seconds. A-at any rate, there's no m-monotony about it. It k-keeps you guessing where it will hit you n-next."

Kate unconsciously made such a wry face as she murmured these words under her breath that Rosemary leaned over and whispered:

"What's the matter, Kate?"

"I th-think I've got an attack of what you call Error, but it cramps me most cruel. Or d-do you think I could have caught cholera infantum from holding that d-doll baby?"

"Kate, you are so funny!" laughed Rosemary.

"I s-spend a good deal of v-valuable time amusing m-myself," said Kate. "I sorta have to, in a way. Everybody else seems o-occupied."

As Kate made this indiscreet remark about error, Rosemary looked back at the other groups in the room, and surprised Noel looking at Carolina with an expression in his eyes he gave to no other, and again a spasm of pain crossed Kate's face. At once Rosemary understood, and Kate saw that she did. Kate's face flamed. She pushed Rosemary into the window-seat, thrust her violently down, and pulled the thick crimson curtains together, shutting them in.

"It's n-not so!" she whispered, excitedly. "I know w-what you think, b-but it's not true. He loves C-Carolina, and in time, no doubt, she'll l-love him. I d-don't see how she can help it. I d-don't care."

"Oh, Kate, that is not true! I certainly hope Carolina will not fall in love with him. He is not suited to her, she doesn't want him, and he is suited to you. You can't deny it."

"I do d-deny it!" cried Kate, but the look that swept over her face at Rosemary's remark belied her words. "And you are to t-think no more about it. And Rosemary Goddard, if you go to t-treating the situation, as if N-Noel and I were a couple of hunchbacks or yellow fevers or s-snake-bites, I'll h-half kill you! I-I'm no subject for p-prayer, let me tell you that now."

"Kate, I wouldn't think of such a thing!" cried Rosemary, biting her lips. "Now go on. There's Noel calling for you to go home!"

"As if she could mislead me," said Rosemary to herself. "She wouldn't even try if she could have seen her own face when I said, on purpose to try her, 'There's Noel calling you to go home.' Well, bless her dear heart! I hope her love-affair will turn out as luckily as mine has, and without all my misery. Good-bye, all!"

CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH TRUTH HOLDS HER OWN

Perhaps, as a student of human nature, Roscoe Howard rather looked forward with enjoyment to his encounter with Colonel Yancey in the matter of the purchase of Guildford. With the promptness and decision which gave the fundamental strength to his character, he at once investigated the whole transaction, beginning with the private history of the syndicate, which, in his bitterness, Sherman Lee was only too ready to give him. He drew from Carolina, by adroit conversations, much of the story of Colonel Yancey's connection with the Lee family abroad, and, to a man with an imagination, he soon was able to formulate, though by a somewhat elliptical process, a theory concerning Colonel Yancey's designs on Carolina, which fitted the case as it stood, but which needed a personal interview with the colonel to enable Mr. Howard to decide whether the man was anxious to marry Carolina from love of herself alone or with the ulterior motive of having discovered some unsuspected source of wealth on the Guildford estate.

"This man is a very accomplished rascal!" he said to himself, as he followed the winding clues in the labyrinth of the colonel's transactions. "I feel sure that Sherman's money is done for. He will never get any of that back. Yet Yancey, rascal as he is, is too shrewd to put himself in the clutches of the law. However, he is also clever enough to be willing to have Sherman think him a fool for failing. At the same time, I believe that Yancey has made a fortune. The question is, where is it?"

He fell to musing on the man's extraordinary career. Serving governments with honesty for years, waiting, studying, learning, biding his time until he could make a grand haul without fear of detection, with his honourable career to throw suspicion off the scent, and finding his quarry at last in wrecking the orphaned children of his best friend.

It was a curious type of character, – a curious code of honour, – but not phenomenal. It simply showed the effect of climate on a man's definition of honesty. Doubtless Colonel Yancey considered the syndicate of New Yorkers "damned Yankees," and therefore his legitimate prey. Did not the carpet-baggers rob the South? And, as to getting possession of Guildford, even if only in order to force Carolina to accept him with it-all's fair in love and war. Doubtless Colonel Yancey was an honourable man in his own eyes, and ready to defend his honour to the death if necessary. Mr. Howard had spent several years in the South, and did not underestimate his personal danger in the coming interview should he impinge on what the colonel was pleased to call his "honour." Mr. Howard felt that he must fortify himself with serpent-wisdom and dove-harmlessness.

For Colonel Yancey was coming home, and Mr. Howard had arranged for a meeting with him without stating his errand.

He was prepared for a confident, even a dignified, bearing in the colonel, but let it be said that he had not looked for the jaunty air with which Colonel Yancey met him when Mr. Howard called at his office at the time appointed. Considering that Colonel Yancey must be aware that Mr. Howard knew of the crookedness of the whole transaction in oil, his audacity was, to say the least, extraordinary when he rose, held out his hand to the older man, and said, genially:

"Well, sir, what can I do for you?"

The impertinence of the remark, to say nothing of its bad taste under the circumstances, for a moment staggered even the Northerner's good breeding, and, for one brief breathing spell, Mr. Howard felt impelled to imperil the whole situation by the trenchant reply:

"Not a damned thing, sir!"

But his self-control came to his rescue, and with it a determination to master the natural and inevitable irritation which many Northern men feel at being called upon to transact business with a Southern man, and which all Southern men feel when doing business with Northern men. The whole code is different and all the conditions misunderstood. Nor will there be harmony until each endeavours to obtain and comprehend the other's point of view.

It was only by detaining the conversation upon strictly neutral grounds for a few moments that Mr. Howard was able to see that the fault lay largely with himself. Perhaps Colonel Yancey was unaware that his visitor knew anything of his private history or was at all interested in the Lees. It was only Mr. Howard's smarting under the real injuries Colonel Yancey had inflicted on Winchester Lee's children which caused him to resent Colonel Yancey's assumption of the role which he essayed on all occasions and inevitably with strangers. At first, he was the bland, suave, genial, open-hearted Southerner. But at the first hint of Mr. Howard's errand, the openness snapped shut. The thin lips were compressed, the crafty eyes narrowed, and Colonel Wayne Yancey, like a pirate craft, "prepared to repel boarders."

"Now, Mr. Howard," he said, "in broaching the subject of the purchase of Guildford, may I ask whom you are representing?"

"Why should you imagine that I am representing any one?" inquired Mr. Howard. "Why not imagine that I want Guildford for my own use? It is a good property. It has a water-front. It is picturesque. Why not suppose that I merely want to acquire a winter home in South Carolina?"

"Then why not look at property just as good, nearer to the town of Enterprise than Guildford lies, and with a good stone house already on it? For instance, my sister's late husband's place, Whitehall, is for sale."

"Thank you for mentioning it," said Mr. Howard, "but I especially want Guildford."

"Then-pardon me for saying so-you must have some ulterior motive for wanting it, for the place is worth no more than the adjoining property of Sunnymede or half a dozen other contiguous estates."

"That is exactly the thought which came to me, if you will pardon me for mentioning it, when I heard that you had bought and foreclosed the mortgage on Guildford!"

Mr. Howard laid his finger-tips together, with a quiet satisfaction in thus having trapped his antagonist. But he little knew Wayne Yancey.

With an assumption of honesty, which fairly took the Northern man's breath away, Colonel Yancey looked first out of the window, as if to consider, and then said:

"You are right, Mr. Howard, and to a man of honour like yourself, I will tell you the real reason why I bought the mortgage on Guildford, why I foreclosed it in order to own the place, and why I hope you will drop the idea of purchasing it, for I tell you frankly at the outset that, if you press the matter, I shall simply put a prohibitive price upon the property, and you have no legal recourse by which you can compel me to part with it. Please bear this in mind. And for explanation of this unalterable decision-here it is. I love Carolina Lee. I told her father so when she was only a girl of sixteen in London. He gave me his blessing, and told me he would rather leave her to me than to any other man in the world. He was my dearest friend. I was the unhappy means of bringing a loss on Sherman, which it shall be my life-work to make good. If Winchester Lee can hear me in the place where he has gone, he knows that I mean well by both of his children. I adore Carolina, but she has refused to marry me, and, knowing her love for her old home, I obtained possession of it in order to restore it to her. If you do not believe that I mean this, ask her if I did not offer her Guildford as a free gift."

"You are a clever man, Colonel Yancey, and you knew then, as well as you know now, that to offer a girl of Carolina's spirit a valuable gift like that was to insult the Lee pride. What did you hope to gain by it?"

"The girl herself! I confess it without shame, sir. I would move heaven and earth in order to have that girl for my wife! You do not know Wayne Yancey, Mr. Howard, or you would know that that means more than appears on the surface."