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 73 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. 74 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.”
She had watched the huge vessel
sweep off from the dock
By-and-by Prince began to get very uneasy. It was long past his dinner hour, and every time he heard the screen door slam he jumped up and gazed eagerly and with cocked ears and wagging tail in that direction.
“You poor thing, you,” said Carolyn May at last. “I s’pose you are hungry. It isn’t going to do you a bit of good to eat; but you don’t know it. I’ll ask Aunty Rose if she has something for you.”
She got up wearily and went across the yard. Aunty Rose stood just inside the screen door.
“Don’t you want any dinner, Car’lyn May?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. I guess I’d better not eat,” said the child.
“Why not?”
“’Cause my stomach’s so trembly. I just know I couldn’t keep anything down, even if I could swallow it. But Prince’ll eat his, please. He—he don’t know any better.”
“Tut, tut!” murmured the woman. “He’s the most sensible of the two of you, I declare.”
But she did not urge Carolyn May to eat. There was a platter of broken meat and bread for the dog, and Prince ate with apparent thankfulness.
“But you wouldn’t gobble that down so, if you knew what was going to happen to us, you poor dear,” Carolyn May whispered. 76
Later she took Prince around the premises on his leash. She led him along the edge of the brook. The Stagg place bordered on both sides of the stream, and on the farther side were hayfields. Uncle Joe did not till any land save the garden in which the unhappy Prince had done such damage.
The little girl found, she believed, what must be the deepest hole in the brook. It was not far beyond the great, widely spreading tree on the knoll where she loved to sit. The water was brown and cloudy in this pool, and a trout jumped there and left a wake of bubbles behind him where he dived again with the luckless fly he had snapped out of the air.
“I wonder if that trout will stay there if you are drownd-ed right where he lives?” Carolyn May asked of Prince.
Prince wagged his abbreviated tail and yawned. Really, he seemed very little impressed by the tragic fate that overhung him. Perhaps Carolyn May’s feelings would have been less desperate had she been blessed, as Prince was just then, by a full stomach.
Nevertheless, the tragedy was all very real to the child. She saw Aunty Rose sitting in one of her stiffest and most straight-backed chairs on the porch, knitting. Carolyn May would not go near her, for she knew she would burst out crying at the first kind word.
She had learned to love Aunty Rose. The old lady always waited for Carolyn May to say her prayers now, when bedtime came. And the child 77 had a well-grounded suspicion that before Mrs. Kennedy sought her own bed she crept into Carolyn May’s room and kissed her softly and saw that she was tucked in.
She felt that she would be sorry to leave Aunty Rose. And there was the woman whose husband kept the store on the other corner from the Stagg house. She had given Carolyn May a stick of candy one day.
“I expect she’ll be sorry not to see me again,” the little girl told herself. “And there’s Mrs. Gormley—and Chet. They’ll think it funny I didn’t bid them good-bye. And, then, there’s Mr. Parlow.”
After all, there seemed to be quite a number of people Carolyn May knew—“just to be acquainted with.” But she had never yet seen the fulfilment of her strong desire to become acquainted with the carpenter’s daughter, Miss Amanda Parlow.
All these thoughts shuttled back and forth in Carolyn May’s brain. The minutes of that afternoon dragged by in most doleful procession. There was no idea in the little girl’s mind that Uncle Joe might change his intention and Prince be saved from the watery grave promised him. When she saw the hardware dealer come into the yard almost an hour earlier than their usual supper time she was not surprised. Nor did she think of pleading with him for the dog’s life.
The little girl watched him askance. Mr. Stagg came directly through the yard, stopping only at the 78 shed for a moment. There he secured a strong potato sack, and with it trailing from his hand went halfway up the knoll to where there was a heap of stones. He stooped down and began to select some of these, putting them in the bag.
This was too much for Carolyn May. With a fearful look at Uncle Joe’s uncompromising shoulders, she went to the tree where Prince was chained. Exchanging the chain for the leather leash with which she always led him about, the little girl guided the mongrel across the yard and around the corner of the house.
Her last backward glance assured her that the hardware dealer had not observed her. Quickly and silently she led Prince to the front gate, and they went out together into the dusty road.
“I—I know we oughtn’t to,” whispered Carolyn May to her canine friend, “but I feel I’ve just got to save you, Prince. I—I can’t see you drownd-ed dead like that!”
Prince whined in sympathy. Perhaps he felt, too, that life held much that was good and beautiful to his doggish soul.
Carolyn May had no idea where they should go to hide from Uncle Joe. This venture was the result of a sudden and unpremeditated determination. Her only thought at first was to get out of sight of the Stagg premises.
So she turned the nearest corner and went up the road towards the little closed, gable-roofed cottage 79 where Aunty Rose had lived before she had come to be Uncle Joe’s housekeeper.
Carolyn May had already peered over into the small yard of the cottage and had seen that Mrs. Kennedy still kept the flower-beds weeded and the walks neat and the grass plot trimmed. But the window shutters were barred and the front door built up with boards.
Carolyn May went in through the front gate and sat down on the doorstep, while Prince dropped to a comfortable attitude beside her. The dog slept. The little girl ruminated.
She would not go back to Uncle Joe’s—no, indeed! She did not know just what she would do when dark should come, but Prince should not be sacrificed to her uncle’s wrath.
In the morning she would walk to the railroad station. She knew how to get there, and she knew what time the train left for the south. The conductor had been very kind to her all the way up from New York, and she was sure he would be glad to take her back again.
She and Prince! They were both happier in that small Harlem apartment, even with papa and mamma away, than they ever could be at Sunrise Cove. And, of course, Prince could not be happy after he was “drownd-ed dead!”
So it all seemed to the heart-hungry child sitting on the doorstep of the abandoned house. A voice, low, sweet, yet startling, aroused her. 80
“What are you doing there, little girl?”
Both runaways started, but neither of them was disturbed by the appearance of her who had accosted Carolyn May.
“Oh, Miss Mandy!” breathed the little girl, and thought that the carpenter’s daughter had never looked so pretty.
“What are you doing there?” repeated Miss Parlow.
“We—we’ve run away,” said Carolyn May at last. She could be nothing but frank; it was her nature.
“Run away!” repeated the pretty woman. “You don’t mean that?”
“Yes, ma’am. I have. And Prince. From Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose,” Carolyn May assured her, nodding her head with each declaration.
“Oh, my dear! What for?” asked Miss Amanda.
So Carolyn May told her—and with tears.
Meanwhile the woman came into the yard and sat beside the child on the step. With her arm about the little girl, Miss Amanda snuggled her up close, wiping the tears away with her own handkerchief.
“I just can’t have poor Prince drownd-ed,” Carolyn May sobbed. “I’d want to be drownd-ed myself, too.”
“I know, dear. But do you really believe your Uncle Joseph would do such a thing? Would he drown your dog?” 81
“I-I saw him putting the stones in the bag,” sobbed Carolyn May. “And he said he would.”
“But he said it when he was angry, dear. We often say things when we are angry—more’s the pity!—which we do not mean, and for which we are bitterly sorry afterwards. I am sure, Carolyn May, that your Uncle Joe has no intention of drowning your dog.”
“Oh, Miss Amanda! Are you pos’tive?”
“Positive! I know Joseph Stagg. He was never yet cruel to any dumb creature. Go ask him yourself, Carolyn May. Whatever else he may be, he is not a hater of helpless and dumb animals.”
“Miss Amanda,” cried Carolyn May, with clasped hands, “you—you are just lifting an awful big lump off my heart! I’ll run and ask him right away.”
She put up her lips for Miss Amanda to kiss, but she could not wait to walk properly with her new friend to the corner. Instead, she raced with the barking Prince back to the Stagg premises. Mr. Stagg had just finished filling in with the stones the trench Prince had dug under the garden fence.
“There,” he grunted. “That dratted dog won’t dig this hole any bigger, I reckon. What’s the matter with you, Car’lyn?”
“Are—are you going to drownd Princey, Uncle Joe? If—if you do, it just seems to me, I—I shall die!”
He looked up at her searchingly.
“Humph! is that mongrel so all-important to 82 your happiness that you want to die if he does?” demanded the man.
“Yes, Uncle Joe.”
“Humph!” ejaculated the hardware dealer again. “I believe you think more of that dog than you do of me.”
“Yes, Uncle Joe.”
The frank answer hit Mr. Stagg harder than he would have cared to acknowledge.
“Why?” he queried.
“Because Prince never said a word to hurt me in his life!” said Carolyn May, sobbing.
The man was silenced. He felt in his inmost heart that he had been judged.