The Debtor Part 29

"Papa, you don't wish I were going to be married too? You don't want me to go away like Ina?" Charlotte demanded, with a sudden grieved catch in her voice.

"I never want you to go, darling," Carroll replied, and he looked down with adoration at the little face whose whole meaning seemed one of innocent love for and belief in him. He realized the same terror at the mere fancy of losing this artless and unquestioning devotion as one might feel at the fancy of losing his only prop from the edge of a precipice. The man really had for an instant a glimpse of a sheer descent in his own nature which might be ever before his sickened vision if this one little faith and ignorance were removed.

In a curious fas.h.i.+on a man sometimes holds an innocent love between himself and himself, and Carroll so held Charlotte's.

"I will never leave you for any other man. I don't care who he is,"

Charlotte reiterated, and this time her father let her a.s.sertion go unchallenged. He pressed the little, clinging hand on his arm closer.

Charlotte looked at him as she might have looked at a king as he walked along in his stately fas.h.i.+on. She was unutterably proud of him.

The carriage had reached the house some time before they arrived. The man was just driving round to the stable when they came up to the front door. The guest and Ina were nowhere to be seen, but on the porch stood Mrs. Carroll and Anna. They were both laughing, but Anna looked worried in spite of her laugh.

"What do you think, Arthur," whispered Mrs. Carroll, with a cautious glance towards a chamber window. "Here he has come, the son-in-law, and there is no meat again for dinner." Mrs. Carroll burst into a peal of laughter.

"I don't see much to laugh at," said Anna, but she laughed a little.

Carroll made a step to the side of the porch and called to the coachman. "Martin," he called, "don't take the horse out. Come back here. We must send for something," he declared, a little brusquely for him.

"It is all very well to send, Arthur," said Mrs. Carroll, "but the butcher won't let us have it if we do send."

"It is no use, Arthur," Anna Carroll said. "We cannot get a thing for this man's dinner, and not only to-day, but to-morrow and while he stays, unless we pay cash."

Carroll turned to the coachman, who had just come alongside.

"Martin," he said, "you will have to drive to New Sanderson before dinner. We cannot get the meat which Mrs. Carroll wishes, and you will have to drive over there. Go to that large market on Main Street and tell them that I want the best cut of porterhouse with the tenderloin that he has. Tell him it is for Captain Carroll of Banbridge. And I want you to get also a roast of lamb for to-morrow."

"Yes, sir," said the coachman. He gathered up the lines, but sat looking hesitatingly at his employer.

"What are you waiting for?" asked Carroll. "Drive as fast as you can.

We are late as it is."

"Shall I pay, sir?" asked the man, timidly, in a low voice.

Carroll took out his pocket-book, then replaced it. "No, not to-night," he said, easily. "Tell him it is for Captain Carroll of Banbridge."

The man still looked doubtful and a trifle alarmed, but he touched his hat and drove out of the grounds. Carroll turned and saw his wife and sister staring at him.

"Oh, Arthur, dear, do you think the butcher will let him have it?"

whispered Mrs. Carroll.

"Yes, honey," said Carroll.

"If he shouldn't--"

"Don't worry; he will."

"It is one of your coups, isn't it, Arthur?" said Anna, sarcastically, but rather admiringly. She and Mrs. Carroll both laughed.

"We have never bought any meat in New Sanderson, so maybe Martin can get it," Mrs. Carroll said, as she seated herself in one of the large willow-rockers on the porch.

Dinner was very late that night at the Carrolls'. Even with a fast horse, driving to New Sanderson and back consumed some time, but Martin finally returned triumphant. When he drove into the yard it was dusk and the family and the guest were all seated on the porch.

There was a steady babble of talk and laughter on the part of the ladies, who were nervously intent on concealing, or at least softening, the fact that dinner was so late that Major Arms might well be excused for judging that there was to be no dinner at all.

Once, Ina had whispered to Charlotte, when the conversation among the others swelled high: "What is the matter? Do you know?"

"Hus.h.!.+ Poor papa had to send to New Sanderson for meat," whispered Charlotte.

Ina made a face of consternation; Charlotte looked sadly troubled.

"I'm afraid he is awfully hungry," whispered Ina. "I pity him."

"I pity papa," whispered Charlotte. She kept glancing at her father with loving sympathy and understanding as the time went on. His face was quite undisturbed, but Charlotte saw beneath the calm. When at last she heard the carriage-wheels her heart leaped and she turned pale. Then she dared not look at her father. Suppose Martin should not have been successful. The eyes of all the family except Carroll himself, who was talking about the tariff and politely supporting the government against a hot-headed rebellion on the part of the ex-army officer, were on him. Not an inflection in his voice changed when Martin drove past the porch, but the others, even Eddy, who was seated at his sister's feet on the porch-step, eyed the arrival with undisguised eagerness. A brown-paper parcel was distinctly visible on the seat beside Martin.

"Thank G.o.d!" Mrs. Carroll whispered, under her breath to her sister.

"He's got it."

Eddy gave vent to a small whoop of delight which he immediately suppressed with a scared glance at his father. However, he could not refrain from sniffing audibly with rapture when the first fragrance of the broiling beefsteak spread through the house to the porch. Mrs.

Carroll giggled, and so did Ina, but Charlotte looked severely at her brother.

"After all, though, the excessive tax on articles purchased by travellers abroad and brought to this country serves as a legitimate balance-wheel," said Carroll, coolly. One would not have thought that he was in the least conscious of what was going on around him. "It is mostly the very wealthy who go abroad and purchase articles of foreign manufacture," he added, gently, "and it serves to even up things a little for those who cannot go. It marks a notch higher on the equality of possessions."

"Equality of fiddlesticks!" said the other man. "What the devil do the ma.s.ses of the poor in this country care about the foreign works of art, anyhow? They don't want 'em. And what is going to compensate this country for not possessing works of art which it will never produce here, and which would tend to the liberal education of its citizens?"

"Not many of its citizens in the broader sense would ever see those works of art when they were here and shrined in the drawing-rooms of the millionaires," said Carroll, smiling; "and as far as that goes, the millionaires have them, anyhow. They are not stopped by the tariff."

"Yes, they are, too, more than you think," declared the major; "and not the millionaires alone are defrauded. Suppose I go over now, as I may do"--he cast a glance at Ina--"as I may do, I say. Now there are things over there that I want in my home--things that are not to be had for love nor money in this country. Nothing of the sort is or ever will be manufactured here. I am doing nothing whatever to injure home industries if I bring them over. On the contrary, I am benefiting the country by bringing to it articles which are, in a way, an education which may serve as a stimulus to the growth of art here. I enable those who can never go abroad, and to whom they will be otherwise forever unknown, an opportunity to become acquainted with them. But I have to leave them over there because I cannot afford to pay this government for the privilege of spending my own money and gratifying my own taste."

Anna Carroll, to cover her absorption in the beefsteak and the dinner, joined in the conversation with feminine daring of conclusion. "I suppose," said she, with a kind of soft sarcasm, "that the government would not need to charge so much for its citizens'

privilege of buying little foreign vases and mosaics and breastpins and little Paris frills if it did not conduct so many humanitarian wars."

"The humanitarian wars are all right, all right," said the major, hastily; "so far as that goes, all right."

"I suppose," said Mrs. Carroll, "that it would cost so much to bring home gowns from Paris that no one can do it unless they have a great deal of money. I understand that it costs more than it did."

"Yes," replied the major, "and this government can't see or won't see that even in the matter of women's clothes it would pay in the end to bring over every frill and tuck free of duty until our dressmakers here had caught on to their tricks. Then we could pay them back in their own coin. But, no; and the consequence is that we shall be dependent on France for our best clothes for generations more."

"It does seem such a pity," said Mrs. Carroll. "It would be so nice to have Ina's things made in Paris if it didn't cost anything to get them over here--wouldn't it?"

"I would just as soon have my dresses made in Banbridge," said Ina.

"Madame Griggs is as good as a French dressmaker."

"She is fine," said Charlotte.

Ina blushed as the major looked at her with a look that penetrated the dusk. Very soon Marie appeared in the doorway, and they went into dinner.

"How lucky it is that Anderson does not object to trusting us and we can have canned soup and pease," whispered Mrs. Carroll to Anna.

It was a very good dinner at last, and the guest was evidently hungry, for he did justice to it. There were no apologies for the delay. Carroll did not believe in apologies for such things. There was a salad from their own garden, and a dessert of apple-pudding from an early apple-tree in the grounds. The coffee was good, too.

There was no lack of anything which could be purchased at the grocery.

"That grocer must be a very decent sort of man as grocers go," Mrs.