THE FIRST GRIEF
Then, with no illness to prepare her for so awful a blow, with nothing
but a stopping of the heart-beats, Carolina's father fell into his last,
long sleep, and before she could fairly realize her loss, her mother
followed him.
Within six weeks, the girl found herself orphaned and mistress of the
great Lee fortune, but utterly alone in the world, for her grandfather
had died the year previous and Sherman had just married and gone back to
America.
That Carolina felt her mother's loss no one could doubt, but the change
in the young girl wrought by her father's death was something awful to
behold. She had not dreamed that he could die. He was so young, so
strong, so noble, so upright, such an honour to his country and to his
race! Why should perfection cease to exist and the ignorant, wicked,
and common live on? Carolina resisted the thought with tigerish
fierceness, and openly blasphemed the God who created her.
"God my father?" she stormed at Cousin Lois, who listened with blanched
face and trembling fear of further vengeance on the part of outraged
Deity. "Why, would my own precious father send me a moment of such
suffering as I have passed through ever since they took him away from
me? He would have given his life to save me from one heart-pang, and
you ask me to believe that God is a father, when He sends such awful
anguish into this world?"
"He sends it for your good, Carolina, dear," pleaded Cousin Lois.
"Oh, He does, does He? He thinks it will do me good to suffer? _Daddy_
thought so, didn't he? Daddy _liked_ to make me unhappy, didn't he? He
didn't realize how blissful heavenly love could be, so he only loved me
in a poor, blind, earthly fashion, which made every day a joy and every
hour we spent together a song! Poor daddy! To be so ignorant of the
real way to love his children!"
"Oh, Carolina!" moaned Mrs. Winchester.
"God hates me, Cousin Lois," said the girl, dropping her impassioned
manner and speaking with bitter calmness.
"I have been recognizing it for some time. I have felt that He was
jealous of my happiness. You know it says: 'For I the Lord thy God am a
jealous God.' He admits it Himself. So He took vengeance on me through
His power and killed my parents just to show me that He could! But if He
thinks that I am going to kneel down and thank Him for murder, and love
Him for ruining my life--"
A steel blue light seemed to blaze from the girl's eyes as she thus
raised her tiny hand and shook it at her Creator.
Cousin Lois burst into tears. Carolina viewed her without sympathy.
"I am so little," she said, suddenly. "It is a brave thing for God to
pit His great strength against mine, isn't it? Listen to me, Cousin
Lois, I am done with religion from now on. I will never say another
prayer as long as I live. The worst has happened to me which could
happen. Nothing more counts."
It was while she was in this terrible state of mind that Mrs. Winchester
took charge of her.
Sherman and his wife came over for the funeral of their father, and
before they could so arrange their affairs as to be able to leave for
home, they were called upon to bury, instead of try to console, their
mother.
Neither Carolina nor Mrs. Winchester liked Adelaide, Sherman's wife.
She was selfish and ignorant, but, with true loyalty to their own, they
never expressed themselves on the subject, even to each other. After
the period of mourning was over, they accepted her invitation to visit
her, and spent a month in New Work. Then, with no explanation whatever,
Mrs. Winchester and Carolina went abroad and travelled--travelled now
furiously, now in a desultory way; now stopping for one month or six;
now hurrying away from a spot as if plague-stricken--all at Carolina's
whim.
It was a strange life for an ardent young American to lead, but Noel St.
Quentin and Kate Howard, who knew Carolina best, shook their heads, and
fancied that the two travellers found in Mrs. Sherman Lee their
incentive to remain away from America so long and so persistently.
Mrs. Winchester and Carolina were an oddly assorted pair, but their very
dissimilarity made them congenial.
Mrs. Winchester was a woman who merited the attention she always
received.
At first sight she did not invariably attract, being stout, asthmatic,
vague of manner, and of middle age. She had her figure well in hand,
however, large though she was. Her waist-line, she was fond of saying,
had remained the same for twenty years, though the rest of her had
outgrown all recollection of the trim young girl she doubtless had been.
But it was her complexion of which she was most proud. It was still a
blending of cream and roses, and her blush was famous.
"Carolina, child," she used to say, "don't let me be ridiculous, just
because I am large. Promise me that you will never leave crumbs on my
breast, even if they fall there and I can't see them. If you only knew
how I suffered from not knowing where all of me is. Why, with my
figure, it is just like the women we used to see in Russia with little
tables on each hip and a tray around their necks. Don't laugh, child.
It's dreadful, my dear."
"Well, but Cousin Lois, it wouldn't be so bad if you wouldn't pinch your
waist in so. Just let that out and you will find yourself falling into
place, so to speak."
"What!" cried Mrs. Winchester. "Lose the only--the only thing I have
left to be proud of, except my complexion? Carolina, you are crazy. I'd
rather never draw another comfortable breath than to add one inch to my
waist-line. No, Carolina. Don't advise me. Just watch for the crumbs.
For I will not be guilty of the inelegance of tucking a napkin under my
chin if I ruin a dress at each meal."
Thus it will be seen that Mrs. Winchester was quite determined in spite
of the gentlest manner of putting her ultimatum into words.
She carefully cultivated her asthma, as, without affording her too much
discomfort, it was always an excuse to travel.
"Asthma is the most respectable disease I know of," she often said to
Carolina. "Gout is more aristocratic, but so uncomfortable. Asthma is
refined and thoroughly convenient, besides always forming a safe topic
of conversation, especially with strangers."
"That makes it almost indispensable for persistent travellers like us,
doesn't it?" said Carolina.
"Well, you may get tired of hearing about it, but with me it is always a
test of a person's manners. When a stranger says to me 'How do you do,
Mrs. Winchester?' I don't consider him polite if he makes that merely a
form of salutation. I want him to stand still and listen while I answer
his question and tell him just how I feel!"
She also had a slight cast in her eye, which added to this gentleness
and likewise led the casual observer to suspect her of vagueness of
purpose, but her intimates made no such mistake. The mere fact that one
of her light gray eyes was not quite in line with the other rather added
to her attractions, for if her features and manner had carried out the
suggestions of her figure, she would have been a formidable addition to
society instead of the charming one she really proved.
She habitually wore light mourning for the two excellent reasons she
herself gave, although General Winchester had been dead these twelve
years.
"In the first place," she always said, when Carolina tried to coax her
to leave off her veil at least in warm weather, "mourning is so
dignified, especially in the chaperoning of a young and charming girl.
In the second place, age shows first of all in a woman's neck, try as
she may to conceal it. In the third place, a large woman ought always
to wear black if she knows what she is about, and as to my bonnet always
being a trifle crooked, as you say it is, well, Carolina, little as I
like to say it, I really think that is your fault. It would be so easy
for you to keep your eye on it and give me a hint. I only ask these two
things of you."
"I'll try, Cousin Lois," Carolina always hastened to say, "though really
a crooked bonnet on you does not look as bad as it would on some women.
If you can understand me, it really seems to become you--it looks so
natural and so comfortable."
"Now, Carolina, that is only your dear way of trying to set me _a mon
aise_! As if a crooked bonnet ever could look nice!"
Yet she cast a glance into the mirror as she spoke, and seeing that her
bonnet was even then a point off the compass she forebore to change it.
Such graceful yielding to flattery was in itself a charm. But the thing
about Mrs. Winchester, which proved a never-failing source of amusement
to the laughter-loving, was her amusing habit of miscalling words. She
habitually interpolated into her sentences words beginning with the same
letter as the term she had intended, as if her brain had been switched
off before completing its thought and her tongue did the best it could,
left without a guide.
"Carolina," she would say, "come and look up Zurich on the map for me; I
can't see without my gloves."
In her hours of greatest depression this trait never failed to amuse
Carolina, and when, on one occasion, Cousin Lois took the tissue-paper
from around a new bonnet, folded the paper carefully and put it in the
hat-box and threw the bonnet in the waste-basket, Carolina laughed
herself into hysterics.
Carolina was genuinely fond of Cousin Lois, but it must be confessed
that one great secret of her attractiveness for the girl was because
much of Cousin Lois's early childhood had been spent at Guildford, when
she had been a ward of General Lee's, and thus had met his nephew, Rhett
Winchester, whom she afterward married.
Thus, while not related to their immediate family, Cousin Lois was
inextricably mixed up with their history and knew all the traditions
which Carolina so prized.
Although Mrs. Winchester deplored Carolina's persistence in so dwelling
upon the past and brooding over her loss, nothing ever really interested
this girl except to talk about her father or the golden days of
Guildford.
She cared nothing for her wealth. She shifted the burden of investing
it upon Sherman's shoulders, and refused even to read his reports upon
its earnings.
Admirers failed to interest her for the reason that she was unable to
believe that they sought her for herself alone. Her fortune had the
effect upon her of keeping her modest concerning her own great beauty.
But grief and a rooted discontent with everything life has to offer will
mar the rarest beauty and undermine the most robust health, and the
change struck Colonel Yancey with such force when he met them in Rome
that he became almost explosive to Mrs. Winchester.
"The girl is losing her beauty, madam!" he said. "Look at the healthful
glow of your complexion and then look at her pale face! Her eyes used
to dance! Her lips were all smiles! Her cheeks were like two roses!
And what do I find now? A sneer on that perfect mouth! Coldness,
cruelty, if you like, in those eyes! Why, madam, it is a sin for so
beautiful a creature as Miss Carolina to destroy herself in this way.
She might as well shoot herself and be done with it! What does she
want?"
"She wants what she can never have, Colonel Yancey," said Mrs.
Winchester, sadly. "Carolina wants her father to come back."
"We all want that, madam!" said the colonel, gravely. "I no less than
the others. His loss never grows less."
When Cousin Lois repeated this conversation to Carolina, she laughed at
what he said about her beauty, but flushed with gratitude at his praise
of her father, and was so kind to the colonel for two days afterward
that he proposed to her again and so fell from grace, as he persisted in
doing with somewhat annoying regularity.
They travelled for another year, and Carolina grew no better. She
seldom complained, but her lack of interest in everything, added to her
restless love of change, preyed upon Mrs. Winchester.
They were in Bombay when this restlessness got beyond control.
"I am not happy!" she cried, passionately, "and knowing I ought to be is
what makes me even more miserable!"
"What you need is a good dose of America," said Cousin Lois, decidedly.
"You are homesick!"
"I believe I am!" she answered, with brightening eyes. "I am homesick,
though, for something in America which I've never found there."
"You are homesick for South Carolina," said Cousin Lois, with timid
daring.
At these words a look came into Carolina's eyes which half-frightened
Mrs. Winchester, for Carolina had suddenly recalled her father's words.
"My dearest wish is to restore Guildford, and pass the remainder of my
days in the old place."
Instantly her life-work spread itself out before her. Here was the
solution to all her restlessness, the answer to all her questionings of
Fate, the link which could bind her closer to her beloved father! If he
could have spoken, she knew that he would have urged her to give her
life, if need be, to the restoration of Guildford.
Her interest in existence returned with a gush. A new light gleamed in
her eyes. A new smile wreathed her too scornful lips. Her face was
irradiated by the first look of love which Cousin Lois had seen upon it
since her father's death.
They began to pack in an hour.