The Debtor | Page 7

as if they had been sisters of one family, and the children resembled their mother. The only difference among any of them was a slight difference of expression that existed mostly in the youngest girl, Charlotte. There were occasions when Charlotte Carroll's expression of soft and pathetic wistfulness and pleading could change to an expression of defiance, almost fierceness.
Her mother often told her that she resembled in disposition her paternal grandmother, who had been a woman of high temper, albeit a great beauty.
"Charlotte, dear, you are just like your grandmother, dear Arthur's mother, who was the worst-tempered and loveliest woman in Kentucky," Mrs. Carroll often remarked. She scarcely sounded the t in Kentucky, since she also was of the South, where the languid air tends to produce elisions. The Carrolls came originally from Kentucky, and had lived there until after the births of the two daughters. When they were scarcely more than infants, Arthur Carroll had experienced the petty and individual, but none the less real, cataclysm of experience which comes to most men sooner or later. It is the earthquake of a unit, infinitesimal, but entirely complete of its kind, and possibly as far-reaching in its thread of consequences. Arthur Carroll had had his palmy days, when he was working with great profits, and, as he believed, with entire righteousness and regard to his fellow-men, a coal-mine in the Kentucky mountains. He had inherited it from his father, as the larger part of his patrimony. When most of the property had been dissipated, at the time of the civil war, the elder Carroll, who was broken by years and reverses, used often to speak of this unimproved property of his, to his son Arthur, who was a young boy at the time. Anna, who was a mere baby, was the only other child.
"When you are a man, Arthur," he was fond of remarking--"when you are a man, you must hire some money, sell what little is left here, if necessary, and work that coal-mine. I always meant to do it myself, and reckon I should have, if that damned war had not taken the money and the strength out of the old man. But when you are a man, Arthur, you must work that mine, and you must build up what the war has torn down. You can buy back and restore, Arthur, and if the South should get back her rights by that time, as she may, why, then, you can stock up the old place again, and go on as your father did."
The old man, who was gouty and full of weary chills of body and mind, used to sit in the sun and dream, to his faint solace, until Arthur was a grown man and through college, and Anna a young girl at school near by. The little that had been left, with the bare exception of the home estate, the plantation, and the mine, had been sold to pay for Arthur's education. Arthur had been out of college only one summer when his father died. His mother, whose proud spirit had fretted the flesh from her bones and drunk up her very blood with futile rage and repining, had died during the war. Then Arthur, who had control of everything, as his sister's guardian, set to work to carry out his father's cherished dream with regard to the coal-mine. He sold every foot of the estate to a neighboring planter, an old friend of his father's, at a sacrifice, with a condition attached that he should have the option of buying it back for cash, at an advanced price, at the end of five years. The purchaser, who was a shrewd sort, of Scotch descent, curiously grafted on to an impetuous, hot-blooded Southern growth, looked at the slim young fellow with his expression of ingenuous almost fatuous confidence in his leading-strings of fate, and considered that he was safe enough and had made a good bargain. He too had suffered from the war, in more ways than one. He had come out of the strife shorn in his fleece of worldly wealth and mutilated as to his body. He limped stiffly on a wooden leg, and his fine buildings had gone up in fire and smoke. But during the years since the war he had retrieved his fortunes. People said he was worth more than before; everything he had handled had prospered. He was one of those men whose very touch seems to multiply possessions. He was a much younger man than Arthur's father, and robust at the time of his death. He explained to Arthur that he was doing him an incalculable service in purchasing his patrimonial estate, when he announced his decision so to do, after taking several weeks to conceal his alacrity.
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