The Debtor: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“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.

“It is not everybodee would take a propertee, with such a condeetion attached, Arthur, boy,” he said. He had at times a touch of the Scotch in his accent. His father had been straight from the old country when he married the planter's daughter. “Not everybodee, with such a condeetion,” he repeated, and the boy innocently believed him. He had been used, ever since he was a child and could remember anything, to seeing a good deal of the man. The Southern wife had died early and the man had been lonely and given to frequent friendly meetings with Mr. Carroll, who had valued him.

“He's the right sort, Arthur,” he had often told the boy; “you can depend on him. He has given his gold and his flesh and blood for the South, although he came on one side of another race and might have sided against us. He's the right sort.”

So the Scotch-Southern planter had been one of the bearers at the old Carroll's funeral, and the son, when he had formulated his business schemes, had gone to this friend with them, and with his proposal for the sale of the Carroll property. The boy, who was honorable to the finish, had been loath to ask, in the then reduced state of the property, for a loan on mortgage to the extent which he would require; therefore he proposed this conditional sale as offering rather better, or at least more evident, security, and he regarded it in his own mind as practically amounting to the same thing. He was as sure of his being able to purchase back his own, should he secure the necessary funds, as he would have been of paying up the mortgage. The advance price would about twice cover the interest at a goodly rate, had the affair been conducted on the mortgage basis. Arthur himself had proposed that, and “I will of course pay for any improvements you may have made in the mean time,” he said. There was nothing in the least mean or ungenerous about Arthur Carroll. He meant, on the whole, rather more squarely to his fellow-men than to himself.

Then with the money obtained from the sale of his patrimony he went to work on his coal-mine. A very trifle of a beginning had been made on it before the war, so he had not actually to break the first ground. The previous owner had died bankrupt from lack of capital, and his minor daughter had inherited it. It was from the minor daughter that the elder Carroll had purchased it, partly with a view to assisting the child, who had been left penniless except for the mine, at the death of her father, who was of a distant branch of Carroll's own family. With the proceeds of the sale the girl was supported and educated; then she lost the remainder through the dishonesty of her guardian. That was the year after young Carroll began to work the mine. Then he married her. She was a beautiful girl, and helpless as a flower. He married her without a cent to support her except the old coal-mine, and he worked as hard and bravely as a man could. And he prospered, to the utter amazement of everybody who watched him, and who had prophesied failure from the start. In four years he was looked upon with respect. People said he was fast getting rich. He went to the man who had bought the Carroll place, at the end of the four years, with the money in his hand and proposed purchasing it. He had not a doubt, such was his trust in the friendliness of the man, that he would gladly consent and pat him on the back with fatherly affection for his success; but, to his amazement, he was refused, although still under the guise of the purest philanthropy.

“No, Arthur, boy,” he said. “It is best for you to keep the money in your business awhile longer. It will not do, in a big undertaking like a mine, for you to be creepled. No, Arthur, boy, wait until the next year is up. It is for your good.”

In vain Arthur offered an advance upon the original advance price. “No, Arthur, boy,” he repeated.

“No, Arthur, boy,” he continued to repeat. “It is not wise for you to be creepled in your business.”