"If you are referring to that depraved woman who claims to have cured you, Miss Lee, that morphine fiend, that drunkard, that reformed character, I beg that you will not name her as a physician in any sense of the word. The medical profession is too n.o.ble to be degraded in such a manner!"
"Oh, doctor," cried Carolina, reproachfully, "if you could only hear the beautiful way in which she speaks of you!"
"Oh, doctor, aren"t you a little severe?" asked Mrs. Winchester.
Noel St. Quentin smothered an amused laugh.
"Pooh!" cried Kate. "Why pay any attention to him? He"s o-only a man, and men are always wrong! H-he"s talking through his h-hat, that"s w-what he"s doing. He"s jealous."
She was sitting near St. Quentin, and, turning to him under cover of the conversation, she murmured:
"What are you laughing at behind your hand?"
"I was simply remarking a phenomenon that I have often remarked before, and that is, that Christian Science seems to possess a peculiar power--"
"Oh, oh! are you going over to the enemy?" asked Kate.
"You didn"t let me finish. I was going to say that it possesses a peculiar power of making well-bred people forget what is due a civilized community. I have never, I think, heard so much rudeness, such rank inelegance, such brutal prejudice expressed on any subject which polite society discusses. It takes Christian Science every time to make people absolutely insulting to their best friends."
"Funny, isn"t it? I don"t mind it so much since Carolina got into it; she is so honest and so brave about answering it, b-but I used to hate it so it c-cankered the roof of my mouth j-just to speak the name of it."
"Another curious thing I have noticed," said St. Quentin, speaking for Kate"s ear only, "is that those who hate it most violently at first generally end by adopting it, so look out!"
"You don"t mean it!" cried Kate, in such a horror-stricken voice that every one heard her. "D-don"t ask me what we are t-talking about, because it is not f-fit for you to hear," she cried.
"Carolina," said Mr. Howard, tactfully, "please tell us what you have found in Christian Science. I have always had a great respect for your intelligence, and I am not prepared to find it befogged in this instance, or that you have been deceived."
He never forgot the luminous grat.i.tude of her look.
"Thank you, dear Mr. Howard. Let me see if I can tell you what it is and what it has done for me. It is the theory of mind over matter, put in practice and lived up to. It teaches us to understand before we are called upon to believe. It is the study of Christian metaphysics, or metaphysics spiritualized. It takes all the impossible out of the Scriptures, and makes them understandable, not to a fool, but to the wise man,--the man capable of understanding a great matter. Having done this for the brain, it teaches so absolutely a G.o.d of Love, a G.o.d who is both father and mother in the love and yearning tenderness of His thought toward us, that it eliminates all fear from our lives. All fear! Can you take that in at once? It makes the ninety-first psalm a personal talk between a father and his dearly loved child. To me it sounds just as if daddy were talking to me from the Beyond. That would be just his att.i.tude toward me if he possessed G.o.d"s power. And if you believe it,--if you can once let yourself believe it, it makes this earth instantly into heaven."
"Yes, yes, I can see that it would," said Mr. Howard. "But do not Scientists believe that it also prospers you in a worldly sense?"
"Are you giving Kate everything that heart could wish now, and are you going to leave her all your money when you die?" asked Carolina.
"That knocked his eye out," murmured Kate, in an aside to St. Quentin, but he observed that she looked singularly pleased when Carolina scored a point.
Mr. Howard waved his hand in a slightly deprecatory way.
"Ah, that is just it!" cried Carolina. "You are thinking, "Oh, but, Carolina, I am Kate"s own father, and G.o.d is just G.o.d!" Heavenly Father doesn"t mean a thing to most Christians. Christian Scientists can"t shirk their beliefs. If they do, they are just as they were before,--pretending or rather trying to believe what they feel that they ought to believe, but getting no satisfaction and no comfort from it. A Scientist who does not put his belief into practice can neither heal his own body nor others. So he is literally forced to be honest."
"Well," said St. Quentin, "I can easily see where the supreme and slightly irritating happiness of Christian Scientists comes in. I could be supremely happy myself if I could believe in it."
"So could I," declared Kate. "A-and I suppose it is sheer envy on my part, when I see their Cheshire-cat grins, to want to slap their faces for being happier than I am!"
"But what makes them so happy?" asked Mrs. Winchester, plaintively.
"Why should they be any happier than we are? We both have the same Bible, and I flatter myself that I am just as capable of understanding it as any self-styled priestess of a new religion."
"But _do_ you understand it, Cousin Lois?" asked Carolina, gently.
"I understand all that is good for me, dear child. I understand all that our Lord wants me to, or He would have made me Mrs. Eddy and made Mrs.
Eddy, Mrs. Winchester. We are fulfilling G.o.d"s will."
"I d-don"t believe that, either," whispered Kate to St. Quentin. "I--I have to admit that Carolina"s G.o.d is a more consistent Being than Mrs.
Winchester"s."
"But you have not answered my question, Carolina," said Cousin Lois.
"What makes us so happy? Well, I wonder if I can tell you. In the first place, it is the relief of dropping all anxiety. We don"t have to worry about a single solitary thing. We put all responsibility off on G.o.d. You know it says "Cast thy burdens on the Lord!""
"But how can you?" cried Kate. "I--I"m sure I"d like to, but I c-can"t get my own consent."
"That"s exactly it. Well, we do it. Then, having put all fear out of our lives, what is there left to make one unhappy? If you are no longer afraid of losing your health or your money or of dying or of being maimed or injured in accidents by land or sea, or of old age or any misfortune coming to any of your dear ones, so that it leaves you perfectly free to come and go as you please, to eat at all hours things which used to produce indigestion, to eat lobster and ice-cream together, drink strong coffee late at night and drop off to sleep like a baby, and, if it eliminates all dread of the unseen and the unknowable, what more is there left to fret about, I"d like to know?"
"How about waking up in the middle of the night to worry about your debts?" asked St. Quentin.
"The answer to that is that, at first you begin by remembering that as G.o.d is the Source of all supply, if you are consistent, the way will be opened to pay your debts. And, after you once master that comforting fact, it is easy to see that the next thing will be that you won"t wake up in the night to worry or even to think."
"Carolina!" exclaimed Mrs. Winchester, "do you mean to tell me that you, who used to lie awake hours and hours every night of your life, can sleep through till morning?"
"I do, Cousin Lois. Often actually without turning over. And with no bad dreams. Can you believe me?"
Doctor Colfax rose abruptly, as if he could bear no more, and when, with a little more leave-taking, St. Quentin had offered to drive Mrs.
Winchester back to Sherman"s in his new motor-car, and the Howards and Carolina were left alone, Mr. Howard turned to Carolina and said:
"Carol, I have heard a great deal, here and there, about your interest in Guildford and your wish to restore the place. Would you mind telling me your plans?"
"Not in the least, Mr. Howard. The place has been sold under its mortgage, as you doubtless know, but it is of no more value to its present owner than any of the land surrounding it, which is equally arable. Its only value to us was because it was our ancestral estate.
It has a water-front, and, having been left intact for over two hundred years, its timber is enormously valuable. If I owned it, and had a little working capital, I could pay off the mortgage and restore the house with the timber alone."
"Why, how is that, Carolina? Is it so extensive as all that?"
"It is only about two thousand acres,--a mere handful of land to a Northern millionaire, who buys land along the Hudson and in the Catskills and Adirondacks of ten times that amount, but that is a very decent size for a Southern plantation. But the value is in the kind of timber. It is long-leaf yellow pine, which produces turpentine and rosin first, by the orchard process, then what is left is suitable for the lumber men, and the fallen trees and stumps for the new process of making turpentine. My plan was to sell the turpentine rights to the orchard people for, say, three years, then sell the timber, and afterward sell the stumpage and refuse to the patent people, or perhaps erect a plant myself. There is a tremendous profit in turpentine and a constant and ready market."
Mr. Howard sat in a large armchair, with his finger-tips together and his head bent forward, looking at the girl from under his heavy eyebrows. He was amazed at her statement of Guildford"s possibilities.
Hitherto he had regarded her unknown plan as probably only a woman"s sentimental idea, and doubtless wild and impracticable.
"You say that the timber has been untouched for two hundred years?"
"Practically untouched. We had it examined four years ago, and I have heard of nothing since."
"Is any of this land suitable for cotton?"
"Yes, for both cotton and rice, and I should raise both. There is no reason to my mind why a Southerner should not be as thrifty with every acre of ground as the Northerner is, nor why every inch should not be made to yield in America as it does in France."
"Right! right! And the Southerners will accept such incendiary sentiments from you, because you are one of them, but, when I ventured something on the same order, but much more mild, I was called "a d.a.m.ned Yankee," who wanted to "make truck-farmers out of gentlemen.""
"Oh, oh!" laughed Carolina, merrily. "How like them that sounds! You know, dear Mr. Howard, they think we have no gentlemen in the North."