There never was a lovelier place for a little girl—to say nothing of a dog—to play in than the yard about the Stagg homestead; and this Carolyn May confided to Aunty Rose one forenoon after her arrival at The Corners.
Behind the house the yard sloped down to a broad, calmly flowing brook. Here the goose and duck pens were fenced off, for Aunty Rose would not allow the web-footed fowl to wander at large, as did the other poultry.
It was difficult for Prince to learn that none of these feathered folk were to be molested. He loved to jump into the water after a stick, and whenever he did so, the quacking and hissing inside the wire-fenced runs showed just how unpopular his dogship was in that community.
There was a wide-branching oak tree on a knoll overlooking the brook. Around its trunk Uncle Joe had built a seat. Carolyn May found this a grand place to sit and dream, while Prince lay at her feet with his pink tongue out, occasionally snapping at a gnat.
When they saw Aunty Rose, in her sunbonnet, going towards the fenced-in garden, they both jumped up and bounded down the slope after her. It was just here, at the corner of the garden fence, that Carolyn May had her first adventure.
Prince, of course, disturbed the serenity of the poultry. The hens went shrieking one way, the guinea fowl lifted up their voices in angry chatter, the turkey hens scurried to cover, but the old turkey cock, General Bolivar, a big, white Holland fowl, was not to have his dignity disturbed and his courage impugned by any four-footed creature with waggish ears and the stump of a tail.
Therefore, General Bolivar charged with outspread wings and quivering fan. His eyesight was not good, however. He charged the little girl instead of the roistering dog.
Carolyn May frankly screamed. Thirty-five pounds, or more, of solid meat, frame, and feathers catapulted through the air at one is not to be ignored. Had the angry turkey reached the little girl, he would have beaten her down, and perhaps seriously injured her.
He missed her the first time, but turned to charge again. Prince barked loudly, circling around the bristling turkey cock, undecided just how to get into the battle. But Aunty Rose knew no fear of anything wearing feathers.
“Scat, you brute!” she cried, and made a grab for the turkey, gripping him with her left hand behind his head, bearing his long neck downward. In her other hand she seized a piece of lath, and with it chastised the big turkey across the haunches with vigour.
“Oh, don’t spank him any more, Aunty Rose!” gasped Carolyn May at last. “He must be sorry.”
With a final stroke Aunty Rose allowed the big fowl to go—and he ran away fast enough. But the austere Mrs. Kennedy did not consider the matter ended there. She had punished one culprit; now she turned to Prince.
“Your dog, child, does not know his manners. If he is going to stay here with you, he must learn that fowl are not to be chased nor startled.”
“Oh, Aunty Rose!” begged the little girl, “don’t punish Prince! Not—not that way. Please, don’t! Why, he’s never been spanked in his life! He wouldn’t know what it meant. Dear Aunty Rose——”
“I shall not beat him, Car’lyn May,” interrupted Aunty Rose. “But he must learn his lesson. He has never run at liberty in his life before, as he does here, I warrant.”
“Oh, no, ma’am; he never has. Only in the park early in the morning. Papa used to take him out for a run before he went to bed. The policemen didn’t mind if Prince was off his leash then.”
“‘Before he went to bed?’” repeated Aunty Rose curiously. “What time did your papa go to bed, pray?”
“Why, he worked on a morning paper, you see, and he didn’t get home till ’most sunrise—in summer, I mean. He slept in the forenoon.”
“Oh, such a way to live!” murmured Aunty Rose, scandalised. Then she returned to the subject of Prince’s punishment. “Your dog must learn that liberty is not license. Bring him here, Car’lyn May.”
She led the way to an open coop of laths in the middle of the back yard. This was a hutch in which she put broody hens when she wished to break up their desire to set. She opened the gate of it and motioned Prince to enter.
The dog looked pleadingly at his little mistress’ face, then into the woman’s stern countenance. Seeing no reprieve in either, with drooping tail he slunk into the cage.
With one hand clutching her frock over her heart, Carolyn May’s big blue eyes overflowed.
“It’s just as if he was arrested,” she said. “Poor Prince! Has he got to stay there always, Aunty Rose?”
“He’ll stay till he learns his lesson,” said Mrs. Kennedy grimly, and went on into the garden.
Carolyn May sat down close to the side of the cage, thrust one hand between the slats, and held one of the dog’s front paws. She had hoped to go into the garden to help Aunty Rose pick peas, but she could not bear to leave Prince alone.
By-and-by Mrs. Kennedy came up from the garden, her pan heaped with pods. She looked neither in the direction of the prisoner nor at his little mistress. Carolyn May wanted awfully to shell the peas. She liked to shell peas, and Aunty Rose had more in her pan than the little girl had ever shelled at one time at home.
Prince whined and lay down. He had begun to realise now that this was no play, at all, but punishment. He blinked his eyes at Carolyn May and looked as sorry as ever a dog with cropped ears and an abbreviated tail could look.
The hutch was under a wide-branching tree. It was shady, and the bees hummed. A motherly hen with thirteen black chickens paraded by.
“I wonder,” thought Carolyn May dozily, “how the mother can be so white and her family can be so black. I believe there must be a mistake somewhere. Suppose they shouldn’t turn out to be chickens at all, but crows! Maybe she was fooled about the eggs. You often are fooled about eggs, you know. You can’t tell by the outside of an eggshell whether what’s inside is fresh or not.
“And if those are little crows, and not chicks, they’ll fly right up into the air some day and leave her, and go sailing off across the brook, saying, ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’”
“Why, there they go now!” gasped Carolyn May—only, she thought she gasped, just as she thought she saw the baker’s dozen of chicks flying across the brook—for she was fast asleep and dreaming.
Prince slept, too, and fought imaginary battles with the turkey cock in his dreams, jerking all four of his legs, and growling dreadfully. Carolyn May went wandering through fairyland, perhaps following the chicken-crows she had first imagined.
The peas and potatoes were cooking for dinner when Aunty Rose appeared again. There was the little girl, all of a dewy sleep, lying on the grass by the prison-pen. Aunty Rose would have released Prince, but, though he wagged his stump of a tail at her and yawned and blinked, she had still her doubts regarding a mongrel’s good nature.
She could not allow the child to sleep there, however; so, stooping, picked up Carolyn May and carried her comfortably into the house, laying her down on the sitting-room couch to have her nap out—as she supposed, without awakening her.
It had been many a long day since Aunty Rose Kennedy had stood over a sleeping child and watched the silky eyelashes flutter and the breath part the rosy lips ever so little. Carolyn May’s limbs were dimpled; her golden hair was wavy, though it did not curl; she was sweet and lovable in every way.
Aunty Rose came away softly and closed the door, and while she finished getting dinner she tried to make no noise which would awaken the child.
Mr. Stagg came home at noon, quite as full of business as usual. To tell the truth, Mr. Stagg always felt bashful in Aunty Rose’s presence; and he tried to hide his affliction by conversation. So he talked steadily through the meal.
But somewhere—about at the pie course, it was—he stopped and looked around curiously.
“Bless me!” he exclaimed, “where’s Hannah’s Car’lyn?”
“Taking a nap,” said Aunty Rose composedly.
“Hum! can’t the child get up to her victuals?” demanded Mr. Stagg. “You begin serving that young one separately and you’ll make yourself work, Aunty Rose.”
“Never trouble about that which doesn’t concern you, Joseph Stagg,” responded his housekeeper rather tartly. “The Lord has placed the care of Hannah’s Car’lyn on you and me, and I shall do my share, and do it proper.”
Mr. Stagg shook his head and lost interest in his wedge of berry pie. “There are institutions—” he began weakly; but Aunty Rose said quickly:
“Joseph Stagg! I know you for what you are—other people don’t. If the neighbours heard you say that, they’d think you were a heathen. Your own sister’s child!
“Now, you send Tim, the hackman, up after me this afternoon. I’ve got to go shopping. The child hasn’t a thing to wear but that fancy little black frock, and she’ll ruin that playing around. She’s got to have frocks, and shoes, and another hat—all sorts of things. Seems a shame to dress a child like her in black—it’s punishment. Makes her affliction double, I do say.”
“Well, I suppose we’ve got to flatter Custom, or Custom will weep,” growled Mr. Stagg. “But where the money’s coming from——”
“Didn’t Car’lyn’s pa leave her none?” asked Aunty Rose promptly.
“Well—not what you’d call a fortune,” admitted Mr. Stagg slowly.
“Thanks be, you’ve got plenty, then. And if you haven’t, I have,” said the woman in a tone that quite closed the question of finances.
“Which shows me just where I get off at,” muttered Joseph Stagg as he started down the walk for the store. “I knew that young one would be a nuisance.”
Carolyn May, who was quite used to taking a nap on the days that she did not go to school, woke up, as bright as a newly minted dollar, very soon after her Uncle Joe left for the store.
“I’m awfully sorry I missed him,” she confided to Aunty Rose when she danced into the kitchen. “You see, I want to get acquainted with Uncle Joe just as fast as possible. And he’s at home so little, I guess that it’s going to be hard to do it.”
“Oh, is that so? And is it going to be hard to get acquainted with me?” asked the housekeeper curiously.
“Oh, no!” cried Carolyn May, snuggling up to the good woman and patting her plump, bare arm. “Why, I’m getting ’quainted with you fast, Aunty Rose! You heard me say my prayers, and when you laid me down on the couch just now you kissed me.”
Aunty Rose actually blushed. “There, there, child!” she exclaimed. “You’re too noticing. Eat your dinner, that I’ve saved warm for you.”
“Isn’t Prince to have any dinner, Aunty Rose?” asked the little girl.
“You may let him out, if you wish, after you have had your own dinner. You can feed him under the tree. But stand by and keep the hens away, for hens haven’t any more morals than they have teeth, and they’ll steal from him. I don’t want him to snap any of their heads off before they’re ready for the pot.”
“Oh, Aunty Rose,” said Carolyn May seriously, “he’s too polite. He wouldn’t do such a thing. Really, you don’t know yet what a good dog Prince is.”
Carolyn May was very much excited about an hour later when a rusty, closed hack drew up to the front gate of the Stagg place and stopped. She and Prince were then playing in the front yard—at least, she was stringing maple keys into a long, long chain (a delight heretofore unknown to the little city girl), and the dog was watching her with wrinkling nose and blinking eyes.
An old man with a square-cut chin whisker and clothing and hat as rusty as the hack itself held the reins over the bony back of the horse that drew the ancient equipage.
“I say, young’un, ain’t ye out o’ yer bailiwick?” queried Tim, the hackman, staring at the little girl in the Stagg yard.
Carolyn May stood up quickly and tried to look over her shoulder and down her back. It was hard to get all those buttons buttoned straight.
“I don’t know,” she said, perturbed. “Does it show?”
“Huh?” grunted Tim. “Does what show?”
“What you said,” said Carolyn May accusingly. “I don’t believe it does.”
“Hey!” chuckled the hack driver suddenly. “I meant, do you ’low Mrs. Kennedy knows you’re playing in her front yard?”
“Aunty Rose? Why, of course!” Carolyn May declared. “Don’t you know I live here?”
“Live here? Get out!” exclaimed the surprised hackman.
“Yes, sir. And Prince, too. With my Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose.”
“Pitcher of George Washington!” ejaculated Tim. “You don’t mean Joe Stagg’s taken a young-’un to board?”
“He’s my guardian,” said the little girl primly.
“‘Guardian’?” repeated the hackman, puzzled. “You don’t mean you’re one o’ them fresh-airs, be ye?”
Carolyn May was quite as much puzzled by that expression as she had been by “bailiwick.” She shook her head.
“I don’t think I am,” she confessed. “Mrs. Price said I was an orphan. Is that anything like a fresh-air?”
“Most of them is,” the hackman said sententiously. “But here’s Mrs. Kennedy.”
Aunty Rose appeared. She wore a close bonnet, trimmed very plainly, and carried a parasol of drab silk. Otherwise, she had not changed her usual attire, save to remove the voluminous apron she wore when at her housework.
“I would take you with me, child,” she said, looking at Carolyn May, “only I don’t know what to do with that dog. I suppose he would tear the house down if we shut him in?”
“I expect so,” admitted the little girl.
“And if he was outside, he would follow the hack?”
“Yes, ma’am,” agreed Carolyn May again.
“Then you’ll have to stay at home and watch him,” said Aunty Rose decisively. “I always claimed a dog was a nuisance.”
Between Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose, both of the visitors at the Stagg place were proving to be nuisances.
Aunty Rose climbed into the creaky old vehicle.
“Are you going to be gone long?” asked Carolyn May politely.
“Not more than two hours, child,” said the housekeeper. “Nobody will bother you here——”
“Not while that dog’s with her, I reckon,” put in Tim, the hackman.
“May I come down the road to meet you, Aunty Rose?” asked the little girl. “I know the way to Uncle Joe’s store.”
“I don’t know any reason why you can’t come to meet me,” replied Mrs. Kennedy. “Anyway, you can come along the road as far as the first house. You know that one?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Parlow’s,” said Carolyn May.
“She knows her way ’round, I warrant,” put in Tim.
“Very well, child,” said Aunty Rose, and the bony old horse started slowly down the dusty road. Carolyn May stood at the gate and watched it wabble away. The hush of the afternoon wrapped the place about. Such a stir as there had been about The Corners in the forenoon seemed to have been quite quenched. Not even the clank of iron on iron from the blacksmith shop was now audible.
Carolyn May went back into the yard and sat on the front-porch steps, and Prince, yawning unhappily, curled down at her feet. There did not seem to be much to do at this place. The little girl lost interest in the maple-key chain which Aunty Rose had shown her how to make.
She had time now, had Carolyn May, to compare The Corners with the busy Harlem streets with which she had been familiar all her life. At this time of the afternoon the shady sides of the cross streets and the west side of the avenues were a-bustle with baby carriages and children, with nurses and mothers. And there were street pianos, and penny peep shows, and ice-cream-cone peddlers, and wagons, and many automobiles.
“Goodness me!” thought Carolyn May, startled by her own imagination, “suppose all the folks in all these houses around here were dead!”
They might have been, for all the human noises she heard. She could count seven dwellings from where she sat on the Stagg porch, and there were others not in sight. No apparent life at the blacksmith shop; none at the store. Not even a vehicle on the road, now that the hack had crawled out of view towards Sunrise Cove.
“Goodness me!” she said again, and this time she jumped up, startling Prince from his nap. “Maybe there is a spell cast over all this place,” she went on. “Everybody has been put to sleep, just like in a fairy story. I don’t know whether a little girl who isn’t asleep can wake ’em up, or whether it must be a prince.
“Why, Princey,” she added, looking at the dog, “maybe it will be you that wakes ’em up. Anyway, let’s go and see if we can find somebody that’s alive.”
They went out of the yard together and took the dusty road towards the town. They passed the broad front of the church, its windows like so many blind eyes, and the little girl peered timidly over the rusty railing into the neglected churchyard, where many of the headstones were moss-grown and toppling.
“This is just the very deadest place,” murmured Carolyn May. “And I guess these folks buried here aren’t much quieter than the live folks. Oh, dear me! these folks here at The Corners don’t look up to brighter things any more than the folks that are under ground. Why, maybe I’ll get that way if I stay here! And I know Papa Cameron wouldn’t approve of that!”
She sighed, and trudged on in the dust. The perspiration began to trickle down her pink face. The powdery dust rose from beneath her feet and was drifted over the wayside grass and weeds by the fretful breeze.
Prince paced on by her side, his nose wrinkling at the strange odours the breeze brought to his nostrils. A toad hopped suddenly out of its ambuscade beside the path, and Prince jumped.
“Don’t touch the toad, Princey,” said the little girl. “You know we learned about toads at school—and how good they are. And there was one in Central Park—don’t you ’member?”
A minute later, however, as they went on, something flashed into view on the top rail of the boundary fence. It brought a yelp of delight from Prince and a startled cry to Carolyn May’s lips.
“A squirrel!”
Prince leaped for the fence. With a whisk of its tail, the squirrel went up the hole of the nearest tree, and out on one of the branches, right over their heads.
Prince danced about madly in the dust and yelped.
“You silly thing, you,” the little girl told him. “You know you can’t climb that tree.”
The squirrel chattered angrily overhead.
“Now, come away,” Carolyn May commanded. “Don’t you see you’ve made that squirrel mad at you? You’ll never make friends out here in the country, if you act this way, Princey.”
Prince seemed little impressed by this prophecy, but he followed after his little mistress and left the squirrel to its own devices. They soon came in sight of the Parlow house and carpenter shop.
“We can’t go beyond that,” said Carolyn May. “Aunty Rose told us not to. And Uncle Joe says the carpenter-man isn’t a pleasant man.”
She looked wistfully at the premises. The cottage seemed quite as much under the “spell” as had been those dwellings at The Corners. But from the shop came the sound of a plane shrieking over a long board.
“Oh, Princey!” gasped Carolyn May. “I b’lieve he’s making long, curly shavings!”
If there was one thing Carolyn May adored, it was curls. Because her own sunny hair was almost perfectly straight, she thought the very loveliest thing a fairy godmother could do for her was to fit her out with a perfect suit of curls.
There had been a carpenter shop only two blocks from where she lived in Harlem, and she and her friend, Edna Price, had sometimes gone there and begged a few curly shavings with which to bedeck themselves. But they could never get as many shavings as they wanted there, for the man swept them up every day and put them in bags, to be sold for baling.
But here, at this carpenter’s shop, she had seen, only the afternoon before, great heaps of the most beautiful, curly, smelly shavings! She drew nearer, her hand upon Prince’s collar, and stood looking at the old man with the silver-bowed spectacles pushing away at the jack-plane.
Suddenly, Mr. Jedidiah Parlow looked up and saw the wistful, dust-streaked face under the black hat-brim and above the black frock. He stared at her for fully a minute, poising the plane over his work. Then he put it down and came to the door of the shop.
“You’re Hannah Stagg’s little girl, aren’t you?” he asked in a voice Carolyn May thought almost as dry as his shavings.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and sighed. Dear me, he knew who she was right away! There would not be any chance of her getting a suit of long curls.
“You’ve come here to live, have you?” said Mr. Parlow slowly.
“Yes, sir. You see, my papa and mamma were lost at sea—with the Dunraven. It was a mistake, I guess,” sighed the little girl, “for they weren’t fighting anybody. But the Dunraven got in the way of some ships that were fighting, in a place called the Mediterranean Ocean, and the Dunraven was sunk, and only a few folks were saved from it. My papa and mamma weren’t saved.”
“So?” said the carpenter, pushing his big spectacles up to his forehead. “I read about it. Too bad—too mighty bad! I remember Hannah Stagg,” he added, winking his eyes, Carolyn May thought, a good deal as Prince did. “You look like her.”
“Do I?” Carolyn May returned, drawing nearer. “I’m glad I do. And I’m glad I sleep in what used to be her bed, too. It doesn’t seem so lonesome.”
“So? I reckoned you’d be lonesome up there at The Corners,” said the carpenter. “Is that your dog?”
“He’s Prince—yes, sir,” Carolyn May said, looking at the panting mongrel proudly. “He’s a splendid dog. I know he must be valuable, even if he is a mongorel. He got his paw hurt once, and papa and I took him to a vetrernary.
“A vetrernary,” explained Carolyn May, “is a dog doctor. And I heard this one tell my papa that there must be blood of ’most all kinds of dogs there was in Prince’s veins. There aren’t many dogs like him.”
“No, I reckon not. Not many have such a pedigree,” admitted the carpenter, taking up his plane. Then he squinted curiously across it at Carolyn May. “I guess your papa was some different from Joe Stagg, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, yes; he didn’t look much like Uncle Joe. You see, they aren’t really related,” explained Carolyn May innocently.
Mr. Parlow grunted and stripped another shaving from the edge of the board he was planing. Carolyn May’s eager eyes followed that curling ribbon, and her lips parted. There were just bushels of shavings lying all about the shop—and Uncle Joe said Mr. Parlow would not give away a single one!
The carpenter paused before pushing the plane a second time the length of the board. “Don’t you want a drink of water, little girl?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, sir—I would. And I know Prince would like a drink,” she told him quickly.
“Go right around to the well in the back yard,” said Mr. Parlow. “You’ll find a glass there—and Mandy keeps a pan on the well-curb for the dogs and cats.”
“Thank you; I’ll go,” the little girl said, and started around by the green lane to the yard behind the cottage and the carpenter shop.
She hoped she would see Miss Amanda Parlow; but she saw nobody. The well was like the one in the Stagg back yard—it had a sweep and a smooth pole and chain that lowered the bucket into the depth of the shaft.
But it seemed as though somebody must have known the little girl was coming, for a dripping bucket of water had just been lifted upon the shelf, and the pan on the well-curb was filled. Prince lapped up the water from this eagerly.
All the time Carolyn May was getting her drink she felt she was being watched. She gazed frankly all about, but saw nobody. The green blinds were tightly closed over the cottage windows; yet the child wondered if somebody inside was not looking out at her. Was it the nice-looking lady she had seen the day before—Miss Amanda, who would not look at Uncle Joe?
She went back to the door of the carpenter shop and found Mr. Parlow still busily at work.
“Seems to me,” he said, in his dry voice, after a little while, “you aren’t much like other little girls.”
“Aren’t I?” responded Carolyn May wonderingly.
“No. Most little girls that come here want shavings to play with,” said the carpenter, quizzically eyeing her over his work.
“Oh!” cried Carolyn May, almost jumping. “And do you give ’em to ’em?”
“’Most always,” admitted Mr. Parlow.
“Oh! Can I have some?” she gasped.
“All you want,” said Mr. Parlow, and perhaps that funny noise he made in his throat was as near to a laugh as he ever got.
When Tim’s old hack crawled along the road from town, with Aunty Rose sitting inside, enthroned amidst a multitude of bundles, Carolyn May was bedecked with a veritable wig of long, crisp curls, each carefully thrust under the brim of her hat. And when she shook the curls, Prince barked at her.
“Well, child, you certainly have made a mess of yourself,” said the housekeeper. “Has she been annoying you, Jedidiah Parlow?”
“She’s the only Stagg that ain’t annoyed me since her mother went away,” said the carpenter gruffly.
Aunty Rose looked at him levelly. “I wonder,” she said. “But, you see, she isn’t wholly a Stagg.”
This, of course, did not explain matters to Carolyn May in the least. Nor did what Aunty Rose said to her on the way home in the hot, stuffy hack help the little girl to understand the trouble between her uncle and Mr. Parlow.
“Better not let Joseph Stagg see you so friendly with Jedidiah Parlow. Let sleeping dogs lie,” Mrs. Kennedy observed.
Such was the introduction of Carolyn May to The Corners. It was not a very exciting life she had entered into, but the following two or three weeks were very full.
Aunty Rose insisted upon her being properly fitted out with clothing for the summer and fall. Mrs. Price sent on by express certain of the child’s possessions that would be useful, but Aunty Rose declared the local seamstress must make a number of dresses for Carolyn May. The latter had to go to the dressmaker’s house to be fitted, and that is how she became acquainted with Chet Gormley’s mother.
Mrs. Gormley was helping the dressmaker, and they both made much of Carolyn May. Aunty Rose allowed her to go for her fittings alone—of course, with Prince as a companion—so, without doubt, Mrs. Gormley, who loved a “dish of gossip,” talked more freely with the little girl than she would have done in Mrs. Kennedy’s presence.
One afternoon the little girl appeared at the dressmaker’s (it was only two houses nearer the centre of Sunrise Cove than the Parlow cottage) with Prince’s collar decorated with short, curly shavings. This Elizabethan ruff may or may not have caused the dog to look “extinguished,” as Carolyn May pointed out, but it certainly made him uncomfortable. However, he endured this dressing-up to please his little mistress.
“I take it you’ve stopped at Jed Parlow’s shop, child,” said Mrs. Gormley with a sigh.
“Yes, ma’am,” returned Carolyn May. “Do you know, he’s very lib’ral.”
“‘Lib’ral’?” repeated Mrs. Gormley. “I never heard of old Jed Parlow bein’ accused of that before. Did you, Mrs. Maine?”
Mrs. Maine was the dressmaker; and she bit off her words when she spoke, much as she bit off her threads.
“No. I never—heard Jed Parlow—called that—no!” declared Mrs. Maine emphatically.
“Why, yes,” little Carolyn May said quite eagerly, “he gives me all the shavings I want. I—I guess folks don’t just understand about Mr. Parlow,” she added, remembering what her uncle had first said about the carpenter. “He is real lib’ral.”
“It’s a wonder to me,” drawled Mrs. Gormley, “that he has a thing to do with a certain party, Mrs. Maine, considerin’ how his daughter feels towards that certain party’s relation. What d’you think?”
“I guess—there’s sumpin—to be said—on both sides—o’ that controversy,” responded the dressmaker.
“Meanin’ that mebbe a certain party’s relative feels just as cross as Mandy Parlow?” suggested Mrs. Gormley.
“Yep,” agreed the other woman, biting off her answer and her thread at the same instant.
Carolyn May listened, much puzzled. She wondered just who “a certain party” could be. It sounded very mysterious.
Mrs. Maine was called away upon some household task, and Mrs. Gormley seemed to change the subject of conversation.
“Don’t your uncle, Mr. Stagg, ever speak to you about Mandy Parlow?” she asked the little girl.
Carolyn May had to think about this before answering. Then she remembered.
“Oh, yes,” she said brightly.
“He does? Do tell!” exclaimed Mrs. Gormley eagerly. “What does he say?”
“Why, he says her name is Miss Amanda Parlow.”
Mrs. Gormley flushed rather oddly and glanced at the child with suspicion. But little Carolyn May was perfectly frank and ingenuous.
“Humph!” ejaculated Chet’s mother. “He never says nothing about bein’ in love with Mandy, does he? They was goin’ with each other steady once.”
The little girl looked puzzled.
“When folks love each other they look at each other and talk to each other, don’t they?” she asked.
“Well—yes—generally,” admitted Mrs. Gormley.
“Then my Uncle Joe and Miss Amanda Parlow aren’t in love,” announced Carolyn May with confidence, “for they don’t even look at each other.”
“They used to. Why, Joseph Stagg and Mandy Parlow was sweethearts years and years ago! Long before your mother left these parts, child.”
“That was a long time ’fore I was borned,” said the little girl wonderingly.
“Oh, yes. Everybody that went to The Corners’ church thought they’d be married.”
“My Uncle Joe and Miss Mandy?”
“Yes.”
“Then, what would have become of Aunty Rose?” queried Carolyn May.
“Oh, Mrs. Kennedy hadn’t gone to keep house for Mr. Stagg then,” replied Mrs. Gormley. “He tried sev’ral triflin’ critters there at the Stagg place before she took hold.”
Carolyn May looked at Mrs. Gormley encouragingly. She was very much interested in Uncle Joe and Miss Amanda Parlow’s love affair.
“Why didn’t they get married—like my papa and mamma?” she asked.
“Oh, goodness knows!” exclaimed Mrs. Gormley. “Some says ’twas his fault and some says ’twas hern. And mebbe ’twas a third party’s that I might mention, at that,” added Mrs. Gormley, pursing up her lips in a very knowing way.
Here was another mysterious “party”! Carolyn May wondered if this “party” could be related to the “certain party” who seemed so familiar to both of the “dressmaking ladies.”
“You couldn’t get nothin’ out of either Mr. Stagg or Mandy about it, I don’t believe. They’re both as tight-mouthed as clams,” pursued Mrs. Gormley. “But one day,” she said, growing confidential, “it was in camp-meeting time—one day somebody seen Joe Stagg drivin’ out with another girl—Charlotte Lenny, that was. She was married to a man over in Springdale long ago. Mr. Stagg took Charlotte to Faith Camp Meeting.
“Then, the very next week, Mandy went with Evan Peckham to a barn dance at Crockett’s, and nobody ain’t ever seen your uncle and Mandy Parlow speak since, much less ever walk together.
“Now stand up, child, and let’s see if this frock fits. I declare, your uncle is a-fittin’ you out right nice.”
If the truth were told, Uncle Joe did not agree to the making of all these “frocks and furbelows” for Hannah’s Car’lyn without the filing of some objections.
“I tell you, Aunty Rose,” he said to his austere housekeeper (and it took courage for him to say this), “I tell you the child will get it into her head that she can always have all these things. Her father didn’t leave anything—scarcely any money at all. I don’t suppose, if I sell out that flat, I’d get a hundred dollars for it. How are all these frocks and furbelows going to be paid for?”
“You can stop in at the First National, Joseph Stagg, and draw enough out of my account to pay for them,” said Aunty Rose placidly.
“Huh? I guess not!” ejaculated the hardware dealer angrily. “I can pay my just debts yet, I hope—and them of Hannah’s Car’lyn, too. If there’s money got to be spent on the child, I’m the one to spend it.”
“Then don’t talk as though you were afraid the sheriff was going to tack a notice on your store door to-morrow morning,” returned the old lady tartly. To herself she observed, out of his hearing: “It will do Joseph Stagg good to learn to spend money, as well as to make it.”
But Mr. Stagg did not take kindly to this, nor to other innovations that the coming of Carolyn May to The Corners brought about. Especially was he outspoken about Prince. That faithful follower of “Hannah’s Car’lyn” he failed to discover any use for or any good in.
Prince was a friendly creature, and he did not always display good judgment in showing his affection. In his doggish mind he could not see why Mr. Stagg did not like him; he approved of Mr. Stagg very much indeed.
One particularly muddy day he met the returning hardware merchant at the gate with vociferous barkings and a plain desire to implant a welcoming tongue on the man’s cheek. He succeeded in muddying Mr. Stagg’s suit with his front paws, and almost cast the angry man full length into a mud puddle.
“Drat the beast!” ejaculated Mr. Stagg. “I’d rather have an epileptic fit loose around here than him. Now, look at these clo’es! I declare, Car’lyn, you’ve jest got to tie that mongrel up—and keep him tied!”
“All the time, Uncle Joe?” whispered the little girl.
“Yes, ma’am, all the time! If I find him loose again, I’ll tie a bag of rocks to his neck and drop him in the deepest hole in the brook. He’d oughter been drowned by that man when he was a pup.”
After this awful threat, Prince lived a precarious existence, and his mistress was much worried for him. Never, when Uncle Joe was at home, could the dog have a run. Aunty Rose said nothing, but she saw that both the little girl and her canine friend were very unhappy.
Mrs. Kennedy, however, had watched Mr. Joseph Stagg for years. Indeed, she had known him as a boy, long before she had closed up her own little cottage around on the other road and come to the Stagg place to save the hardware merchant from the continued reign of those “trifling creatures” of whom Mrs. Gormley had spoken.
As a bachelor, Joseph Stagg had been preyed upon by certain female harpies so prevalent in a country community. Some had families whom they partly supported out of Mr. Stagg’s larder; some were widows who looked upon the well-to-do merchant as a marrying proposition.
Aunty Rose Kennedy did not need the position of Mr. Stagg’s housekeeper and could not be accused of assuming it from mercenary motives. Over her back fence she had seen the havoc going on in the Stagg homestead after Hannah Stagg went to the city and Joseph Stagg’s final female relative had died and left him alone in the big house.
One day the old Quaker-like woman could stand no more. She put on her sunbonnet, came around by the road to the front door of the Stagg house, which she found open, and walked through to the rear porch on which the woman who then held the situation of housekeeper was wrapping up the best feather bed and pillows in a pair of the best home-spun sheets, preparatory to their removal.
The neighbours enjoyed what followed. Aunty Rose came through the ordeal as dignified and unruffled as ever; the retiring incumbent went away wrathfully, shaking the dust of the premises from her garments as a testimony against “any sich actions.”
When Mr. Stagg came home at supper time he found Aunty Rose at the helm and already a different air about the place.
“Goodness me, Aunty Rose,” he said, biting into her biscuit ravenously, “I was a-going down to the mill-hands’ hotel to board. I couldn’t stand it no longer. If you’d stay here and do for me, I’d feel like a new man.”
“You ought to be made over into a new man, Joseph Stagg,” the woman said sternly. “A married man.”
“No, no! Never that!” gasped the hardware dealer.
“If I came here, Joseph Stagg, it would cost you more money than you’ve been paying these no-account women.”
“I don’t care,” said Mr. Stagg recklessly. “Go ahead. Do what you please. Say what you want. I’m game.”
Thereby he had put himself into Aunty Rose’s power. She had renovated the old kitchen and some of the other rooms. If Mr. Stagg at first trembled for his bank balance, he was made so comfortable that he had not the heart to murmur. And, besides, he believed in keeping his word. He had declared himself “game.”
But that had all happened years before. This matter of expense for Hannah’s Car’lyn was an entirely different matter. Moreover, the mischievousness of Prince, the mongrel, was really more than Mr. Joseph Stagg thought he was called upon to bear.
Of course, Carolyn May let Prince run at large when she was sure Uncle Joe was well out of sight of the house, but she was very careful to chain him up again long before her uncle was expected to return.
Prince had learned not to chase anything that wore feathers; Aunty Rose herself had to admit that he was a very intelligent dog and knew what punishment was for. But how did he know that in trying to dig out a mole he would be doing more harm than good?
The mole in question lived under a piece of rock wall near the garden fence. When let free for his first morning run, Prince had been much interested in the raised roofs of the tunnels he found in the sod down there.
Aunty Rose called the mole “a pesky creature.” Uncle Joe had threatened to bring home a trap with which to impale it. How should Prince know—and this was the question Carolyn May asked afterwards—that he would not be considered a general benefactor if he managed to capture the little blind nuisance?
At any rate, when Uncle Joe came home to dinner on one particular Saturday he walked down to the corner of the garden fence, and there saw the havoc Prince had wrought. In following the line of the mole’s last tunnel he had worked his way under the picket fence and had torn up two currant bushes and done some damage in the strawberry patch.
“And the worst of it is,” grumbled the hardware dealer, “he never caught the mole. That mongrel really isn’t worth a bag of dornicks to sink him in the brook. But that’s what he’s going to get this very evening when I come home. I won’t stand for him a day longer.”
Carolyn May positively turned pale as she crouched beside the now chained-up Prince, both arms about his rough neck. He licked her cheek. Fortunately, he could not understand everything that was said to him, therefore the pronouncement of this terrible sentence did not agitate him an atom.
But his little mistress held to him tightly, dry sobs shaking her slight form. Uncle Joe went in to dinner with little appreciation of the horror and despair that filled the soul of Hannah’s Car’lyn, out under the tree in the back yard.
First, of course, Carolyn May thought she would run away—she and Prince. She could not eat any dinner, although Aunty Rose called her twice and she did feel a little faint, for she possessed a hearty appetite. But the child knew that the very first mouthful she tried to swallow would choke her—and then she would cry.
Perhaps Aunty Rose understood this, for she did not trouble the little girl again. Carolyn May sat for a long time under the tree beside the sleeping dog and thought how different this life at The Corners was from that she had lived with her father and mother in the city home.
If only that big ship, the Dunraven, had not sailed away with her papa and her mamma!
Carolyn May had been very brave on that occasion. She had gone ashore with Mrs. Price and Edna after her mother’s last clinging embrace and her father’s husky “Good-bye, daughter,” with scarcely a tear. She had watched the huge vessel sweep off from the dock and out into the stream, carried by the outgoing tide and helped by a fussy tug, which latter she had thought preposterously small to be of any real service to such a huge craft as the Dunraven.
They had run to the very end of the pier, too; so as to see the last of the outgoing ship. Of course, the faces of her father and mother were lost to her vision in the crowd of other passengers, but her mother had waved her pink veil, as agreed, and Carolyn May could see that for a long while.
Of course, she had been brave! Mamma would return in a few weeks, and then, after a time, papa would likewise come back—and, oh! so rosy and stout! No more cough, no longer a feeble step, no longer breathless after he had climbed the two flights to their apartment.
These things the little girl, left behind, had fully understood. She looked forward confidently to the happy return of both her parents.
And then, in two weeks, came the fatal news of the sinking of the Dunraven and the loss of all but a small part of her crew and passengers. The steamer had gone down quickly, and in the night, with the dim coast of Africa far, far to the southward and many, many leagues of troubled sea between her grave and the Spanish coast.
The two warring vessels—which one had caused the sinking of the Dunraven would probably never be known—had not even discovered till daylight that there was a remnant of the Dunraven’s company adrift on the sea. These were finally rescued by the victorious combatant, and in a heavy fog. The exact spot where the Dunraven had sunk was not known.
Vaguely these facts had become known to Carolyn May. She never spoke of them. They did not seem real to the little girl. After all, she could not believe that her father and mother had gone on so long a journey that they would never again return to her.
But now, sitting beside the condemned Prince—her companion and only real comforter during these weeks of her orphanhood—the little girl felt bitterly her loneliness and grief.
If Uncle Joe did as he had threatened, what should she do? There seemed to be no place for her and Prince to run away to. She did not know her way about Sunrise Cove and The Corners. During the weeks she had lived here she had learned to know nobody well enough to fly to for protection, or of whom to beg shelter for herself and her dog.
She knew Mr. Stagg to be a very firm and determined man. Even Aunty Rose, who in most things guided affairs at the Stagg homestead, could go only so far. What Uncle Joe really determined to do, not even the austere housekeeper could balk. No, there seemed no escaping the awful tragedy that was to be. And if Prince had to die——
“I’m quite sure I don’t want to live,” thought Carolyn May dismally. “If papa, and mamma, and Prince are all dead—why! there aren’t enough other folks left in the world to make it worth while living in, I don’t believe. If Prince isn’t going to be alive, then I don’t want to be alive, either.”