Carolina Lee Part 7

"Stop!" she said. "I have not uttered one complaint because you lost our money, nor would I complain at the loss of Guildford. You could not know how I cared for the place, because no one knew it. I never even told Cousin Lois. But don't, if you love me, belittle the place or try to excuse your having mortgaged it because it had no value in your eyes!

I know the house is gone, but the ground is there, and we Lees have owned it since we bought it from the Indians. That same ground that the Cherokees used to tread with moccasined feet has been in our family ever since they owned it, and the dream of my life has been to restore the house and to live there--to marry from Guildford and to give my children recollections that you and I were denied, and of which nothing can take the place. Oh, Sherman, doesn't it fairly break your heart to think that we are the only generation that Guildford skipped? Father remembered it and loved it beyond words to express."

"And you are like him," said her brother, gloomily. "I am like my mother. She never cared for Guildford, and refused to let father restore it. It was she who urged him into diplomacy--"

"Where he distinguished himself," cried Carolina, loyally.

"Yes, where he distinguished himself, as all the Lees have done except me!" he said, bitterly.

"It's your name!" cried Carolina, pa.s.sionately. "What could you expect with those two names pulling you in opposite directions! Why did they ever name you, a Southern man, Sherman?"

"Father named you, and mother named me," answered her brother. "I have heard them say that it was all planned before either of us was born.

Then, too, you must remember that--well, that I am not as enthusiastic over the traditions of the Lee family as you are. I think that my leanings are all toward the de Cliffords, if anything."

"It's only fair," said Carolina, with justice, "that you should be like mother and love her family best. Only--only I am glad my name is Carolina!"

Her brother bent down and kissed her flushed face.

"And I am glad, too, little sister, for you are a veritable Lee, and one to be proud of."

Carolina felt herself grow warm in every fibre of her being over the first compliment which had ever reached her heart.

Sherman was still holding her hand, and she pressed his fingers gratefully.

"I will look up the papers to-morrow, and let you know the moment I discover anything. I can easily guess what your plan is, but--without money?"

Carolina laughed strangely.

"Thank you, brother. And in the meantime I shall go to stay with Kate."

Again the slight lift to Sherman's eyebrows.

"You will doubtless be happier there," he said, quietly.

CHAPTER VI.

THE STRANGER

But when Carolina was comfortably established in the suite of rooms which Kate had joyfully placed at her disposal, she found that she could neither fix her attention on the new decorations of which Kate was so inordinately proud, nor could she wrench her mind from the subject of Guildford.

She had been so stunned by the knowledge, not that the estate was mortgaged, but that it had been parted with so lightly, with little thought and less regret, that she had not been able, nor had she wished to express to Sherman her intense feeling in the matter. The more she thought, the more she believed that some turn of the wheel would bring Guildford back. If it were only mortgaged and not sold, she felt that her yearning was so strong she even dared to think of a.s.suming the indebtedness and taking years, if need be, to free the place and restore the home of her fathers.

Her intimacy with her father had steeped her in the traditions of Guildford. The mere fact of their having lived abroad seemed to have accentuated in Captain Lee's mind his love for his native State, and no historian knew better the history of South Carolina than did this little expatriated American girl, Carolina Lee. By the hour these two would pace the long drawing-rooms and discuss this and that famous act or chivalric deed, Carolina's inflammable patriotism readily bursting into an ardent flame from a spark from her father's scintillant descriptions.

She fluently translated everything into French for her governess, and to this day, Mademoiselle Beaupre thinks that every large city in the Union is situated in South Carolina, that the President lives in Charleston, and that Fort Sumter protects everything in America except the Pacific Coast.

Carolina knew and named over all the great names in the State's history.

She could roll them out in her pretty little half-foreign English,--the Rutledges, the Pinckneys, the Gadsdens, the Heywards, the Allstons, the Hugers, the Legares, the Lowndes, the Guerards, the Moultries, the Manigaults, the Dessesseurs, the Rhetts, the Mazycks, the Barnwells, the Elliotts, the Harlestons, the Pringles, the Landgravesmiths, the Calhouns, the Ravenels,--she knew them all. The Lees were related to many of them. She knew the deeds of Marion's men as well as most men know of battles in which they have fought. She knew of the treaties with the Indians, those which were broken and those which were kept.

She had been told of some of the great families which even boasted Indian blood, and were proud to admit that in their veins flowed the blood of men who once were chiefs of tribes of savage red men. She found this difficult to believe from a purely physical prejudice, but her father had a.s.sured her that it was true.

In vain she tried to interest herself in Kate's plans for her amus.e.m.e.nt.

In vain she attempted to fix her attention on the white and silver decorations of her boudoir, all done in scenes from "Lohengrin."

Instead she found herself dreaming of the ruins of an old home; of the chimneys, perhaps, being partially left; of a double avenue of live-oaks, which led from the gate to the door and circled the house on all sides; of fallow fields, grown up in rank shrubbery; of palmetto and magnolia trees, interspersed with neglected bushes of crepe myrtle, opopinax, sweet olives, and azaleas; of the mocking-birds, the nonpareils, and bluebirds making the air tremulous with sound; of broken hedges of Cherokee roses twisting in and out of the embrace of the honeysuckle and yellow jessamine. Beyond, she could picture to herself how the pine-trees, left to themselves for forty years, had grown into great forests of impenetrable gloom, and she longed for their perfumed breath with a great and mighty longing. She felt, rather than knew, how the cedar hedges had grown out of all their symmetry, and how raggedly they rose against the sky-line. She knew where the ground fell away on one side into the marshes which hid the river--the river, salt as the ocean, and with the tide of the great Atlantic to give it dignity above its inland fellows. She knew of the deer, the bear even, which furnished hunters with an opportunity to test their nerve in the wildness beyond, and of the wild turkeys, quail, terrapin, and oysters to be found so near that one might also say they grew on the place. In her imagination the rows upon rows of negro cabins were rebuilt and whitewashed anew. The smoke even curled lazily from the chimneys of the great house, as she dreamed it. Dogs lay upon the wide verandas; songs and laughter resounded from among the trimmed shrubbery, and once more the great estate of Guildford was owned and lived upon by the Lees.

Filled so full of these ideas that she could think of nothing else, she sprang to her feet and decided to see Sherman without losing another day. She would put ruthless questions to him and see if any power under Heaven could bring Guildford within her eager grasp. What a life work would lie before her, if it could be accomplished! Europe, with all its history and glamour, faded into a thin and hazy memory before the living, vital enthusiasm which filled her heart almost to the point of bursting.

It was, indeed, the intense longing of her ardent soul for a home. All her life had been spent in a country not her own, upon which her eager love could not expend itself. It was as if she had been called upon to love a stepmother, while her own mother, divorced, yet beloved, lived and yearned for her in a foreign land.

It was four o'clock on a crisp January day when Carolina found herself in the throng on Fifth Avenue. It was the first pleasant day after a week of wretched weather, and the whole world seemed to have welcomed it.

Carolina was all in gray, with a gray chinchilla m.u.f.f. Her colour glowed, her eyes flashed, as she walked along with her chin tilted upward so that many who saw her carried in their minds for the rest of the day the recollection of the girl who had formed so attractive a picture.

Suddenly and directly in front of her, Carolina saw a young woman, arm in arm with a tall man, whose broad-brimmed, soft felt hat, added to a certain nameless quality in his clothes and type of face, proclaimed him to be a Southerner. They were laughing and chatting with the blitheness of two children, frankly staring at the panorama of Fifth Avenue on a bright day. If the whim seized them to stop and gaze into shop windows, they did it with the same disregard of appearances which induced them to link arms and not to notice the attention they attracted. No one could possibly mistake them for anything but what they were--bride and groom.

Having reached her brother's house, Carolina paused for a moment in an unpremeditated rush of interest in the young couple. Something in the man's appearance stirred some vague memory, but even as she searched in her mind for the clue, she saw an expression of abject terror spread over the young bride's face, and pulling her husband madly after her by the arm to which she still clung, she darted across the walk and into a waiting cab. Her husband, after a hasty glance in the direction she had indicated, plunged after her, and the wise cabby, scenting haste, if not danger, without waiting for orders, lashed his horse, the cab lurched forward and was quickly swallowed up in the line of moving vehicles.

This had necessarily created a small commotion in the avenue, and a tall man who had also been walking south behind Carolina and who would soon have met the young couple face to face, chanced to raise his head at the crack of the cabman's whip, and thus caught a glimpse of the bride's face out of the window of the cab.

Instantly, with an exclamation, he looked wildly for another cab. None was at hand, but Sherman Lee's dog-cart stood at the curb, and Carolina had paused on the lowest step of the house and was looking at him.

There was desperate anxiety in his face.

"May I use your carriage, madam? I promise not to injure the horse!"

It was the strange young man who had stood in the balcony all during the opera of "Faust."

Carolina never knew why she did it, but something told her that this young man's cause was just. In spite of the pleading beauty of the young couple, she arrayed herself instinctively on their pursuer's side.

"Yes, yes!" she cried. "Follow them!"

He sprang in, and the groom loosed the horse's head and climbed nimbly to his place. A moment more and the dog-cart was lost to view.

Most of the good which is done in this world is the result of impulse, yet so false is our training, that the first thing we do after having been betrayed into a perfectly natural action is to regret it.

The moment Carolina came to herself and realized what she had done, a great uneasiness took possession of her. She had no excuse to offer even to herself. She felt that she had done an immeasurably foolish thing and that she deserved to take the consequences, no matter what they might be. If the stranger injured Sherman's favourite horse, that would be bad enough, but the worst result was the mortification her rash act had left in her own mind. It is hard for the most humble-minded to admit that one has been a fool, and to the proud it is well-nigh impossible.

But Carolina admitted it with secret viciousness, directed, let it be said, entirely against herself. In her innermost heart she realized that she had yielded, without even the decent struggle prompted by self-respect, to the compelling influence of a strong personality. This unknown man had wrested her consent from her by a power she never had felt before.

At first she decided that it was her duty to tell her brother at once what she had done. Then she realized that, in that case, they must both wait some little time before the dog-cart could possibly be expected to return, and Sherman would no doubt exhaust himself in an anxiety which, if the horse returned in safety, could be avoided. She therefore compromised on a bold expedient.

"Sherman," she said, when she found her brother, "I saw the dog-cart at the door; were you going out?"

"I was, but since I came in, I have decided differently. Ring, that's a good girl, and tell Powell to see that the horse is well exercised and put him up."

"I saw Marie in the hall. I'll just send her with the message to Powell," said Carolina. "There is no doubt in my mind," she murmured, as she went out, "that the horse will be well exercised."

She sent word by Marie that when Powell returned he was to be told to see to the condition of the horse himself by Miss Carol's express orders, and then to report to Miss Carol herself privately.