Carolyn of the Corners Part 41

"How brave and helpful it is of Miss Amanda!" Carolyn May cried. "Dear me, when I grow up, I hope I can be a gradjerate nurse like Miss Mandy."

"I reckon that's some spell ahead," chuckled Mr. Parlow, to whom she said this when he picked her up for a drive after taking his daughter to the camp.

"And you'll come nigh to wantin' to be a dozen other things 'fore you're old enough to go to work in a hospital, I shouldn't wonder. Gid-ap, Cherry!"

Cherry tossed his head and increased his stride. The carpenter had one weakness-that was horseflesh. He was always the owner of a roadster of note.

"That's a funny name for a horse, Mr. Parlow," observed Carolyn May.

"Cherry red. That's his colour."

"Oh!"

"And I got a cat home that's cherry colour, too."

"Why-e-e-e!" exclaimed the little girl, "I'm sure I never saw that one, Mr. Parlow. Your cat is black-all black."

"Well," chuckled the old man over the ancient joke, "he's the colour of a blackheart cherry."

"Oh, my! I never thought of that," giggled Carolyn May. She looked up into his hard, dry face with an expression of perplexity in her own.

"Mr. Parlow," she went on seriously, "don't you think _now_ that Miss Amanda ought to be happy?"

"Happy!" exclaimed the carpenter, startled. "What about, child?"

"Why, about everything. You know, once I asked you about her being happy, and-and you didn't seem fav'rable. You said 'Bah!'"

Carolyn May's imitation of that explosive word as previously used by Mr.

Parlow was absolutely funny; but the carpenter only looked at her sidewise, and his face remained grim.

"So I said 'Bah,' did I?" he grunted. "And what makes you think I might not say it now?"

"Why," explained Carolyn May earnestly, "I hoped you'd come to see things like-like I do. You are lots pleasanter than you used to be, Mr.

Parlow-indeed, you are. You are happier yourself."

The old man made no reply for a minute, and Carolyn May had the patience to wait for her suggestion to "sink in." Finally, he said:

"I dunno but you're right, Car'lyn May. Not that it matters much, I guess, whether a body's happy or not in this world," he added grudgingly.

"Oh, yes, it does, Mr. Parlow! It matters a great deal, I am sure-to us and to other people. If we're not happy _inside_ of us, how can we be cheerful _outside_, and so make other people happy? And that is what I mean about Miss Amanda."

"What about Mandy?"

"She isn't happy," sighed Carolyn May. "Not really. She's just as good as good can be. She is always doing for folks, and helping. But she can't be real happy."

"Why not?" growled Mr. Parlow, his face turned away.

"Why-'cause-Well, you _know_, Mr. Parlow, she can't be happy as long as she and my Uncle Joe are mad at each other."

Mr. Parlow uttered another grunt, but the child went bravely on.

"You know very well that's so. And I don't know what to do about it. It just seems too awful that they should hardly speak, and yet be so fond of each other deep down."

"How d'you know they're so fond of each other-deep down?" Mr. Parlow demanded.

"I know my Uncle Joe likes Miss Mandy, 'cause he always speaks so-so respectful of her. And I can see she likes him, in her eyes," replied the observant Carolyn May. "Oh, yes, Mr. Parlow, they ought to be happy again, and we ought to make 'em so."

"Huh! Who ought to?"

"You and me. We ought to find some way of doing it. I'm sure we can, if we just think hard about it."

"Huh!" grunted the carpenter again, turning Cherry into the dooryard.

"Huh!"

This was not a very encouraging response. Yet he did think of it. The little girl had started a train of thought in Mr. Parlow's mind that he could not sidetrack.

He knew very well that what she had said about his daughter and Joseph Stagg was quite true. In his selfishness he had been glad all these years that the hardware merchant was balked of happiness. As for his daughter's feelings, Mr. Parlow had put them aside as "women's foolishness." He had never much considered women in his life.

The carpenter had always been a self-centred individual, desirous of his own comfort, and rather miserly. He had not approved, in the first place, of the intimacy between Joseph Stagg and his daughter Amanda.

"No good'll come o' _that_," he had told himself.

That is, no good to Jedidiah Parlow. He foresaw at the start the loss of the girl's help about the house, for his wife was then a helpless invalid.

Then Mrs. Parlow died. This death made plainer still to the carpenter that Mandy's marriage was bound to bring inconvenience to him.

Especially if she married a close-fisted young business man like Joe Stagg would this be true. For, at the reading of his wife's will, Mr.

Parlow discovered that the property they occupied, even the shop in which he worked, which had been given to Mrs. Parlow by her parents, was to be the sole property of her daughter. Mandy was the heir. Mr. Parlow did not possess even a life interest in the estate.

It was a blow to the carpenter. He made a good income and had money in bank, but he loved money too well to wish to spend it after he had made it. He did not want to give up the place. If Mandy remained unmarried there would never be any question between them of rent or the like.

Therefore, if he was not actually the cause of the difference that arose between the two young people, he seized and enlarged upon it and did all in his power to make a mere misunderstanding grow into a quarrel that neither of the proud, high-spirited lovers would bridge.

Jedidiah Parlow knew why Joe Stagg had taken that other girl to Faith Camp Meeting. The young man had stopped at the Parlow place when Amanda was absent and explained to the girl's father. But the latter had never mentioned this fact to his daughter.

Instead, he had made Joe's supposed offense the greater by suggestion and innuendo. And it was he, too, who had urged the hurt Mandy to retaliate by going to the dance with another young man. Meeting Joe Stagg later, the carpenter had said bitter things to him, purporting to come from Mandy. It was all mean and vile; the old man knew it now-as he had known it then.

All these years he had tried to add fuel to the fire of his daughter's anger against Joe Stagg. And he believed he had benefited thereby. But, somehow, during the past few months, he had begun to wonder if, after all, "the game was worth the candle."

Suddenly he had gained a vision of what Amanda Parlow's empty life meant to her. And it was empty, he knew-empty of that love which every woman craves; empty of the greatest thing that can come into her life.

Mr. Parlow had realised what had been denied his daughter when he had first seen Carolyn May in Mandy's arms. That was the thing lacking. The love of children, the right to care for children of her own. He had been practically the cause of this denial. Sometimes, when he thought of it, the carpenter was rather shaken. Suppose he should be called to account for his daughter's loss?

Carolyn May, interested only in seeing her friends made happy, had no idea of the turmoil she had created in Mr. Parlow's mind. She went her way as usual, scattering suns.h.i.+ne, and hiding as much as she could the trouble that gnawed in her own heart.

The love of Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose and Miss Amanda and Mr. Driggs and the host of her other friends at The Corners and in Sunrise Cove could not take the place in faithful little Carolyn May's heart of that parental affection which had been so lavished on her all the days of her life, until the sailing of the _Dunraven_.

Had the little girl possessed brothers and sisters, it might have been different. Mr. and Mrs. Cameron could not, in that case, have devoted themselves so entirely to the little girl.

She had been her mother's close companion and her father's chum. True, it had made her "old-fas.h.i.+oned"-old in speech and in her att.i.tude towards many things in life, but she was none the less charming because of this difference between her and other children.