“Yes, he said he would wait, always. But I told him he must not. And I told him he must go and not see me again. I couldn’t see him as I have been doing; Uncle, I couldn’t!”
“I know, dearie, I know. But didn’t you say anything more? Didn’t you give him any hope?”
“I said,” she hesitated, and added in a whisper, “I said if I should ever need him or—or change my mind, I would send for him. I shouldn’t have said it. It was weak and wicked of me, but I said it. Please let me go now, Uncle dear. Good night.”
She kissed him and hurried away. He ate his lonely dinner absent-mindedly and with little appetite. After it was finished he sat in the living room, the lamp still unlighted, smoking and thinking.
And in her chamber Caroline, too, sat thinking—not altogether of the man she loved and who loved her. She thought of him, of course; but there was something else, an idea, a suspicion, which over and over again she dismissed as an utter impossibility, but which returned as often.
The Stock Exchange seat had been a part of her father’s estate, a part of her own and Steve’s inheritance. Sylvester had told her so, distinctly. And such a seat was valuable; she remembered her brother reading in the paper that one had recently sold for ninety thousand dollars. How could Captain Warren have retained such a costly part of the forfeited estate in his possession? For it was in his possession; he was going to give it to her brother when the latter left college. But how could he have obtained it? Not by purchase; for, as she knew, he was not worth half of ninety thousand dollars. Surely the creditor, the man who had, as was his right, seized all Rodgers Warren’s effects, would not have left that and taken the rest. Not unless he was a curiously philanthropic and eccentric person. Who was he? Who was this mysterious man her father had defrauded? She had never wished to know before; now she did. And the more she pondered, the more plausible her suspicion became. It was almost incredible, it seemed preposterous; but, as she went back, in memory, over the events since her father’s death and the disclosure of his astonishing will, little bits of evidence, little happenings and details came to light, trifles in themselves, but all fitting in together, like pieces of an inscription in mosaic, to spell the truth.
CHAPTER XXII
November weather on Cape Cod is what Captain Elisha described as “considerable chancey.” “The feller that can guess it two days ahead of time,” he declared, “is wastin’ his talents; he could make a livin’ prophesyin’ most anything, even the market price of cranberries.” When Caroline, Sylvester, and the captain reached South Denboro after what seemed, to the two unused to the leisurely winter schedule of the railroad, an interminable journey from Fall River, the girl thought she had never seen a more gloomy sky or a more forbidding scene. Gray clouds, gray sea, brown bare fields; the village of white or gray-shingled houses set, for the most part, along the winding main street; the elms and silver-leaf poplars waving bare branches in the cutting wind; a picture of the fag end of loneliness and desolation, so it looked to her. She remembered Mr. Graves’s opinion of the place, as jokingly reported by Sylvester, and she sympathized with the dignified junior partner.