Keturah Smiley stopped digging potatoes and walked briskly back to her
house. She washed her hands, but did not change her shabby old man’s
coat. Keturah’s everyday attire was preponderantly masculine. She
refrained, however, from wearing trousers. But a man’s soft hat was
generally pinned to her head, a man’s coat was usually on her back, and
her low-heeled, heavy-soled walking shoes were number eights.
She dried her hands, put them in the coat pockets and started up the
lane to the centre of the village. On the way she met Sim Jenkins, and
told him sharply that if he didn’t pay the interest on his mortgage
more promptly she would demand the principal. Sim looked frightened. He
knew that Keturah would not hesitate to foreclose.
At the principal street intersection of Blue Port stood the postoffice
and the few clustered shops. There was one two-story structure which
constituted Blue Port’s only office building. On the ground floor were
a real estate agent, a milliner, and a store where cigars and soft
drinks, magazines and writing paper could be bought. Up the flight of
stairs were a doctor’s office and the places of business of Blue Port’s
lawyers. Blue Port had one saloon, two churches, and three lawyers, one
of whom was a justice of the peace. To this functionary, Judge Hollaby,
Miss Smiley made her way.
The Judge was sitting in his office with his feet on the desk and his
hat on his head, reading Seneca on old age. He had not enjoyed a plate
of oysters the evening before with his usual relish, and this had
profoundly depressed him. He was therefore reading; Judge Hollaby found
in reading the consolation that some men find in drink, although he was
by no means a teetotaler.
Miss Smiley opened the door without knocking. As she entered rapidly
Judge Hollaby put down his feet with an almost youthful spryness,
and hastily removed his hat. His visitor, to his pain, picked up the
half-smoked cigar that lay extinguished on a corner of his desk and
threw it in the cuspidor. The name of it was La Coloratura and it had
cost 13 cents straight.
Judge Hollaby knew better than to waste breath in formal greetings.
Keturah Smiley seated herself and said:
“Don’t beat around the bush but tell me in words I understand just the
disposition of the property my aunt left me.”
The lawyer felt momentarily flurried. He really had forgotten the
provisions of old Keturah Hawkins’s will. However, it would not do to
say so--wouldn’t do at all.
“Entailed, Miss Smiley, entailed,” he said with what he intended to
be a retrospective and thoughtful air. To his client it seemed merely
absent-minded.
“Please put your mind on this, Judge Hollaby!” she commanded in a tone
that reminded the lawyer of several schoolma’ams rolled into one. “I
ask you to use plain words and you start off by using a word like
‘entailed’! Explain yourself. What is entail?”
The Judge was very uncomfortable. He made the absurd mistake of trying
to impress his visitor.
“Under entail,” he began to explain, “an estate is so bequeathed
that the inheritors cannot bequeath it at their pleasure; the fee is
abridged and curtailed----”
An impatient sound escaped Miss Smiley.
“Curtail, if you please,” she said, “your fine-sounding description. As
I understand the matter, my aunt left me all her property in and for my
lifetime. I am to have the free use of it. I can throw it all in the
bay if I like----”
“Except the real estate,” interjected the Judge.
“I daresay I could dam Hawkins creek and flood that,” retorted Keturah,
then went on: “I can use every cent of it, spend it, waste it; and if
there is nothing left, no one will inherit it.”
“Naturally not,” assented Judge Hollaby.
“Unnaturally,” said his client, sharply. “It would be an unnatural
thing to do.”
“Certainly it would,” said her lawyer, nervously. “Not the least in
your character.” Some misfortune of accent caught the lady’s ear and
she rounded on him quickly.
“What _is_ my character, Judge Hollaby?” she demanded.
Perhaps it was the oysters, perhaps it was Seneca on old age, perhaps
it was a sign of old age itself; at any rate, the justice’s mind could
not leap gracefully into the breach thus torn in his defences.
“Your character, Miss Smiley?” He tried to express a sense of shock by
his intonation.
“I am not loved, I suspect,” Miss Smiley said, ignoring his palpable
distress. “I think it very likely there are those who hate me. But
if I am not respected in the community it is time I knew it. I am
honest and I deal uprightly. I don’t write slanderous letters, like
Maria Brand; I don’t cheat, like Jane Horton; I don’t try to improve
everybody like that uncommon nuisance of an Errily woman. Nor do I
countenance a disgraceful husband, as Amelia Dayton does. You will say
that I talk like a Pharisee, ‘holier than thou’ and so forth. Judge
Hollaby, if there were more Pharisees it would be a better world! A
precious lot of men and women can only walk straight when it’s to
outshine their neighbours who are walking crooked!”
Gradually recovering, the lawyer heard Miss Smiley saying:
“I’m not here to preach a sermon, but to get information and some
advice. The advice I may take and I may not; the information I’ll
certainly take if I can get it out of you.”
She reverted to Keturah Hawkins’s will. “I can do as I please
absolutely with the property?”
“Unquestionably. But whatever you leave goes to your brother, if he
survives you, and to his children, if he has any, in the event he
predeceases you.”
“Predeceases!” snorted Miss Smiley, thrusting her hands in her pockets.
“What a word! That applies only to the property my aunt left?”
“Only.”
“And only to so much of that as I leave?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you call it entail?”
The lawyer’s heart sank.
“Under our laws,” he explained, “the bequest could go no farther. The
old English law of entail is broken here. You can doubly devise but you
cannot do more. The law says that the dead hand shall not----”
Keturah reflected, her severe eyes looking at and through the man. She
could question him freely whether he saw the drift of her questions
or not. She had a moderate contempt for Horace Hollaby, as she had
for most men, a contempt based on her dealings with them in which
she invariably came out best. The justice had one virtue, however,
that Keturah considered rare in males. There were things he heard,
things he knew, and things he guessed, about which he never talked. On
certain matters she had never been able to bully a word out of him. And
whatever she told him would be kept in the back of his head.
“My brother,” she said, her face almost expressionless, “has, or had, a
wife and child. Are they presumed to be legally dead?”
Judge Hollaby told her they were not.
“In any case, my sister-in-law could not come into any of the property?”
“No.”
“Could an adopted child of my brother inherit the property?”
“I should say not; I should want to look at the exact wording of your
aunt’s will.”
“You needn’t,” said Miss Smiley, rising with abruptness. “For if my
brother ever adopts a child I shall give away or throw away every cent
of that money!” She moved with decision toward the door. With her hand
on the knob she turned and said brutally: “Keep your mouth shut!”
The door came to after her with a business-like bang.
X
In winter the Great South Bay is sometimes frozen over, and then it
can be crossed very swiftly on a scooter, a better vehicle than the
Hudson River iceboat because it will go from ice into water and back
again on to ice without a spill. It is also more easily handled and
travels faster. But there are days and sometimes weeks when the bay is
impassable even for a scooter, which is merely a tiny boat with a pair
of runners, after all. Thaw and freeze, freeze and thaw; a bay full of
big, floating masses of ice, or so ridged and hillocked that nothing
but an airplane will take you over it. And there were no airplanes when
Mermaid, all wrapped and mittened, looked out upon the bay that winter
of her eighth year.
There was a telephone linking the Coast Guard stations on the beach
with one at Quogue on the Island itself, but direct communication with
the ordinary system there was none. On one side of the living room of
the Quogue Station was the beach phone, on the opposite wall was a
“local and long distance.” Members of the Quogue crew, called up on
either wire, obligingly relayed messages along the other.
In this manner it was made known to Cap’n Smiley one February morning
that his sister wished to see him.
The keeper was privately astounded. So far as a hasty recollection
served him, his sister had never before asked to see him about
anything. The bay could not be crossed and he sent her word to that
effect, thinking that she might disclose her purpose. Her reply, toned
down by the drawl of Surfman No. 3, Quogue Station, was merely for him
to visit her as soon as possible and to bring the little girl.
While waiting for the bay to freeze smooth, or clear from further
thaws, Cap’n Smiley had some uneasy moments. He had never taken Mermaid
to his sister’s and he did not like the idea. She had seen the little
girl; had met him walking with Mermaid on the streets of Blue Port;
had stopped to exchange a frosty word or two and then had walked on,
ignoring the child completely. What could she be up to now?
He was so uneasy that he raised the question, in a guarded way, with Ho
Ha. He could do this, for Ho Ha knew all about his sister, and without
actually saying very much, both could say a good deal.
“My opinion she has some proposition to lay before you,” commented Ho
Ha.
“I don’t care to consider propositions,” replied the keeper.
Ho Ha drew his weathered cheek together with his fingers.
“It might advantage Mermaid some way,” he suggested.
The keeper made a motion indicative of distrust.
About a week elapsed before the bay froze hard. Mermaid, in many layers
of wool, with a red muffler about her throat, trotted down to the
bayside where her Dad put her in the scooter. Then as the odd little
craft gathered way, he half reclined so as to steer with her jib and
roll about handily to ballast her.
They shot along at a mile a minute or better. The air was like
impalpable ice pressing against Mermaid’s small cheeks and roaring in
her ears. She could hardly open her eyes for the rush of tears. She
shouted, but could barely make herself heard. It was all over in five
or six minutes. The five-mile stretch had been crossed; Dad rounded to;
the sail, so enormous a top-hamper on so tiny a potbellied body, came
down, and they were off Blue Port, with only a little way to walk to
tread the reassuring, if rutty, earth.
Mermaid put her hand in Dad’s and they walked to the old-fashioned and
heavily shuttered house where Keturah lived. She met them at the door
and ushered them into the living room, which was also the kitchen, but
very large, so that there was no sense of crowding. A hot fire burned
in the stove, and slowly Cap’n Smiley divested Mermaid of her cocoon.
It was a little butterfly of an unusual sort that emerged. Keturah,
looking with a severe, impassive face at the proceeding, said at last,
without altering a muscle of her face or softening her customary tone:
“She looks very much as you would have looked, John, at her age, if you
had been a girl.”
Her brother stared at the child with a gentleness in his eyes that left
them when he glanced at his sister.
“Are you going to adopt her, John?”
The answer came with decision.
“I think I shall.”
“What about her schooling?”
“I shall arrange for that next year. She knows her letters.”
“I’ll take her here and look after her.”
The keeper was startled, but he had long kept himself in hand in the
presence of his sister.
“Thank you,” he paused slightly, “but I shall send her to the
Biggleses’.”
Keturah, as if recalling the duties of hospitality, said, “Sit down.
I’ll make a cup of tea. Do you like bread and jelly?”
The question was directed at Mermaid. The child had been eyeing the
woman with attentiveness. Now she answered politely, though she did not
smile:
“I’m fond of it.”
Keturah Smiley entered her pantry and emerged with a brown jar and a
loaf. She cut two large slices, spread them, and set a teapot on the
stove. She said no more until the tea was brewed. As she poured out
two steaming cups of it she remarked, pushing one toward her brother:
“What I leave of Aunt Keturah’s property goes to you. As I am not a
spendthrift, in the natural course of events I would leave you more
than I inherited. If you die before me it goes to your children. It
would go to her.”
John Smiley swallowed too hastily and burnt his throat.
“This is not a matter to discuss before Mermaid,” he said, shortly.
“I sent for her because I wanted to have a good look at her, and I
wanted you to have her to look at while you choose,” Keturah rejoined.
“At first I thought it would not go to an adopted child, and so did
Judge Hollaby. But he looked it up and the wording of the will is such
that he thinks it would. I said once, to him, that if you ever adopted
a child I would give or throw away every cent of that money. I was
a fool; I can be as big a fool sometimes as any one else, brother.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to add “yourself included,” but she
checked it.
“Now I’ve had a good look at her. You take a good look at her, too. I
know you more than half hate me, but that’s neither here nor there. Let
the girl live with me and go to school and you can adopt her if you
like, and I’ll do all I can in reason for her. Send her here to live
with the Biggleses, and I’ll keep my promise to Judge Hollaby!”
The tight-lipped rather hard-visaged woman was determined, but she
was curiously excited, too. Her rather flat chest rose and fell with
her breath, and her breathing was almost audible in the stillness of
the room. Mermaid, who had finished her slices of bread, looked with
wonder, but with a childish gravity and apparently a suspension of
judgment, at this strange woman. The little girl knew who she was: she
was Dad’s sister, but evidently as unlike him as possible. Still, her
Dad’s sister was entitled to respect and a certain deference, if not
to affection. They were talking about money and Dad was angry. She had
never seen him so angry, not even when her youngest uncle, Uncle Joe,
had capsized the life boat in the surf.
John Smiley was indeed mad clear through. Only the presence of Mermaid
restrained him. He stood up in all his height and placed himself
squarely in front of his sister, his hands clenching and unclenching
and clenching again.
“You can take your money, Keturah,” he said, rather slowly, “and give
it away or throw it away, as you please. I don’t care what you do with
it. But there are some things it won’t buy you!”
“I know money means nothing to you, John,” said Keturah,
sarcastically, “but it might mean something to someone else. You’re
forgetting her, John, you’re forgetting the girl. Money can’t buy me
some things I want, maybe, and it can’t buy you some things you want,
maybe; but it can buy her things she’ll want. You’ve no right to throw
away her chance!”
Her brother, his eyes on the child, seemed just perceptibly to waver,
and then he burst out:
“What’s at the bottom of this? What are _you_ after?”
Keturah, calmed a little by the success of her argument, answered him:
“It might be just wanting to have a young and growing creature around
me, John! It might be that I’m not the inhuman creature you take me
for, that I’m sometimes lonely; that company would cheer me up; that I
might even be a softer body than I’m generally considered to be if I
had someone to talk to and listen to and work for and with! It might
be all that, but I won’t tax your powers of belief, brother, by asking
you to suppose so. No! The real reason is simply this--” her excitement
returned and she appeared almost feminine in her rage--“that I am just
human enough, and just woman enough, and just fool enough to hate
having people say my own brother couldn’t trust his adopted daughter
to live with me, and had to farm her out to Susan and Henry Biggles to
care for!”
The keeper was impressed. There was no denying Keturah spoke the
truth, so far as her own feeling was concerned. She, who cared nothing
for the good will of her neighbours, for gossip, for backbiting, for
well-earned dislike or worse, she, Keturah Smiley, with her grasping
ways and her old clothes and her bitter tongue, had a streak of
femininity--or plain humanity--left in her after all these years.
She could still care for public opinion on some things. They might
call her stingy, mean, heartless in many ways; they might laugh at
her, sneer at her, and hate her for many things; but that they should
hold her in contempt; that they should be able to say that her own
brother would not trust her with his little girl--that she dreaded.
The prospect of it cut her like a lash. She might not care what people
said about her behaviour toward John Smiley’s wife, for John Smiley’s
wife had run away and left him, taking their baby, and so had sealed
her unworthiness. She _would_ care what people said about her behaviour
toward John Smiley’s daughter, whether a daughter of his own blood or
a waif washed ashore from the ocean. She cared about that now and she
would continue to care. John Smiley saw this and knew that he held a
hostage for her good behaviour. While the feeling lasted, anyway.... He
spoke gently:
“Mermaid, would you be willing to live with my sister here, and go to
school?”
The child, with the soberness that was so unlike her usual mood, but
that had been evident since she entered the house, looked straight at
him and then straight at Keturah Smiley. She had gathered that a matter
of importance was at stake. It might be that she could help her Dad in
some way, doing this. She said clearly and gravely:
“Yes, Dad.”
Keturah gave no demonstration of pleasure. She was not triumphant, but
she seemed genuinely relieved. She looked at Mermaid with a stern sort
of satisfaction, and said nothing.
As they left the house and headed for the bay Mermaid’s hand closed in
a tight pressure over the keeper’s.
“You’ll come to see me as often as you are over, won’t you, Dad?” she
asked him, anxiously.
His answer was to lift her in his arms and kiss her.