The Debtor | Page 7

seemed to find delicious humor in
one another's remarks.
"Amy never thinks any of us can catch anything," said Charlotte, the
younger daughter, and they all laughed again.
Mrs. Carroll was always Amy in her family. Never did one of her
children address her as a parent.
They were a charming group in the little, green, gloomy place, each
with the strongest possible family likeness to the others. They were as
much alike as the roses on one bush; all were, although not tall, long,
and slim of body, and childishly round of face, with delicate coloring;
all had pathetic dark eyes and soft lengths of dark hair. Mrs. Carroll and
her husband's sister, although not nearly related (Mrs. Carroll had
married her many-times-removed cousin), resembled each other 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