Standing well back in the hall Mermaid had heard this extraordinary
conversation. Now she slipped into the front parlour ahead of Miss
Smiley, who stood, apparently forgetful or stunned, for two or three
minutes in the open doorway. Then she closed the door with a bang,
entered the front parlour, and went through it into the living room.
She stood before the stove a moment, warming her hands. Her face was
working and her mouth was twisting, but her lips remained closed.
Mermaid looked at her with deep sympathy and with a certain terror at
the memory of what she had just heard. Neither emotion drowned the
awful curiosity within the girl to know what it had all been about. But
she dared not ask questions.
In silence the two got their supper, in silence they ate it. Once
Keturah Smiley sighed, once she spoke, but only to say: “Thank the
Lord, John will be coming over to-morrow!”
Mermaid, who had been looking forward to this visit of her Dad,
thinking he might give her a scooter ride on the smoothly frozen bay,
said: “How rich do you suppose Cap’n Vanton is, Miss Smiley?”
Keturah looked at her absently.
“Not rich enough to buy an easy conscience, probably,” she replied,
drily. Mermaid hesitated, and then took her courage in both hands.
“Miss Smiley, I heard some of what he said. I--I guess I heard most of
it,” she said.
Keturah showed neither surprise nor anger. She looked at Mermaid
attentively and there was a flicker of interest in her eyes as she
asked: “Well, and what did you make of it?”
“He said he’d killed a Captain King!” the girl blurted out. “How could
he do that and not be in jail for it?”
“Maybe he has been,” Keturah suggested.
“But then how could he be so rich?” persisted Mermaid.
“Maybe it isn’t his money,” Miss Smiley replied.
“It seems to be now.” Mermaid rested on the fact, solidly buttressed by
all appearances.
“So it does,” agreed the woman.
But she was at some pains, the next day, to talk to her brother only
after Mermaid had had her scooter ride and had gone out to do errands
at the store.
“When he first spoke of ‘a man named King,’” Keturah explained to John
Smiley, “I couldn’t make the connection. Then I remembered the entry
about the flogging in Uncle John’s log of that passage. Aunt Keturah
was with him on that voyage. The log only says that the mate refused to
obey orders. I never heard Aunt Keturah utter a word of such a thing,
but it’s perfectly possible; more than that, it’s likely. Mates, first
mates, weren’t flogged before the crew for insubordination. There was
something personal, I suspect. As for his--this fellow’s--having killed
King, that’s neither here nor there with us. He said King had done us
all the harm he ever would, but what harm did he ever do? Uncle John
and Aunt Keturah lived to a peaceful old age and died comfortably in
their beds--leastways, I suppose they were as comfortable as a person
can be dying.”
But the “Captain King” struck a full chord of memory in John Smiley’s
breast.
“Don’t you remember?” he cried. “That miserable devil we found on the
beach after the wreck of the _Mermaid_, one of the crew? Remember I
told you I sat up all night with him and that I made out from his
delirious talking that a ‘Captain King’ had had the little girl, and
had been sending her back to someone? He wanted to keep himself out
of it and he wanted ‘forgiveness’--at any rate, that was one word in
the letter we found in the pocket of the _Mermaid’s_ skipper.” He was
deep in the painful process of recollection. “But still I can’t make
head nor tail of it,” he confessed. “This man King may have hated John
Hawkins and been willing to do anything he could to hurt him, he may
have hated Aunt Keturah, but they’re dead and that’s an end of them!
As for his harming us, he never could have had a chance. And as he’s
dead he’ll never get one. And that’s an end of _him_! Captain Vanton
says he killed him, and probably if he did it was a good job. He must
have thought that King had bothered us somehow. Thoughtful of him to
come and assure us that the dirty dog’s dead. I suppose,” he continued,
reflectively, “I might go see him and talk with him. Perhaps he may
have learned something from King that will set us on the track of
Mermaid’s people. I’ll go!”
Keturah was inclined to dissuade him.
“He thinks,” she said, with her usual shrewdness, “that we know
something we don’t know, and that he does know. Or else,” she wavered,
“he’s after something, and if we go after him we’ll be playing right
into his hands. I don’t know----” She came to a dead stop for a moment,
and a rare look of uncertainty, almost of panic, appeared in her eyes.
“Better keep away, John. Better wait and see what he does. If he comes
around here bragging of having killed another man I’ll ask him for the
death certificate.” She had recovered her usual poise. And when her
brother repeated his intention of calling on Captain Vanton she merely
remarked:
“Well, I sha’n’t mind hearing how you’re received.”
The interview between Captain Vanton and John Smiley was extremely
short and, to the keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station,
hopelessly baffling. Captain Vanton, with more courtesy than Keturah
had shown him, ushered her brother into a room which resembled nothing
so much as a ship’s cabin. He seated his visitor, but himself paced up
and down the floor, a very fine floor which seemed to have been freshly
scrubbed and holystoned until it was of the whiteness of an afterdeck.
Cap’n Smiley came to the point at once.
“The little girl who lives with my sister is my adopted daughter,” he
began. “She was rescued from the wreck of the _Mermaid_.” He went on
to tell of the few decipherable words in the letter found on the body
of the _Mermaid’s_ skipper; then of the delirious sailor who had talked
of “Captain King.” Captain Vanton paced to and fro in perfect silence.
He seemed not to be paying attention, but to be thinking.
“Anything you may have learned that would help us to find out the
child’s identity----” John Smiley began, and then he stopped with a
sudden sinking of the heart. If Mermaid’s identity were established he
would probably lose her! The thought gave him, as he afterward put it,
“a turn.” He never finished his sentence, and while he was recovering
himself Captain Vanton uttered his first words of the conversation.
“I know--knew of--the child,” he muttered. “He sent her back. Yes. No,
I don’t know anything that would make matters any better than they
are.” He did not look through Cap’n Smiley, as was his customary way
with people, but seemed to avoid his eye. He frowned at the floor as he
might have frowned at the deck if the holystoning and cleaning had not
been thorough. John Smiley, rising, thanked him and took his departure.
The sense of relief at the thought that Mermaid would not be taken
from him was so strong that he felt not in the least disappointed, but
really grateful for Vanton’s reticence. Captain Vanton may even have
thought him effusive in his thanks. Keturah Smiley heard her brother’s
report of his failure with calmness.
“Did he wear the scalp at his belt?” she inquired.
Mermaid appearing, they all sat down and had a hot supper after which
Cap’n Smiley and Mermaid played checkers and Keturah walked about with
a yardstick in an effort to decide where she would have three shelves
put up. She had a passion for shelves and drawers.
“What are these shelves to be for, Miss Smiley?” asked Mermaid, looking
up from the board after she had beat her Dad for the third time.
“Medicine, most like,” Keturah, told her.
“Why not for our books?” Mermaid suggested.
“Bottles break,” said Keturah, concisely. “Do you prefer books to
medicine? Not when you’re sick, I’ll warrant!”
“Yes, I do,” Mermaid insisted, and then she explained to her antagonist
with a smile:
“You see, Dad, it’s because--it’s because books can make you happy
while you’re dying, but medicine can only make you miserable while
you’re getting well!”
Keturah gave the girl a look in which a skilled observer might have
detected something resembling admiration.
“What an upside-down mind you have, child!” she said. “But then,” she
allowed, “you use it and do your own thinking!”
“I wish she’d do some of my thinking,” exclaimed Cap’n Smiley,
looking ruefully at the checkerboard. “Appears to me as if I had been
out-thunk again!” He liked the defeated, “ker-plunk” sound of this past
participle of his invention, and always used it to describe Mermaid’s
victories.
Mermaid got up, went to the pantry, came back with a pan of sugared
crullers, offered her Dad one, took one herself, put up the pan, and
then cuddled contentedly against his arm. “I made them myself,” she
murmured.
Her Dad stroked her hair. It was remarkably like the colour his own
had been before thirty years of beach sunshine--and other things--had
bleached the colour out of it.
“What are you going to be when you grow up, Mermaid?” he asked,
dreamily.
“I shall try to make you a good home and keep you happy,” she assured
him. “I’m knitting the slippers you’ll wear, now.”
They hugged each other in anticipation of their peaceful old age
together, and went to bed.
V
Sometimes it isn’t what you don’t know about people but what you do
know that makes them mysterious, as Mermaid once said.
She did not say it respecting the senior Dick Hand but she might well
have done so. Richard Hand First was not only his proper designation
but his motto, his war-cry, his watchword, and his slogan. Richard Hand
first and everybody else nowhere, just about summed up the golden rule
in Blue Port. Richard made the rule and Blue Port lived up to it.
If Blue Port had been a pretty good-sized town, like near-by Patchogue,
with a couple of mills, two or three banks, an electric light company,
and other rudiments of an American municipality, Dick Hand would
have owned them all--not outright, of course, but as the heaviest
shareholder and the preferred creditor. But Blue Port had none of these
things. Blue Port had only a two-three of stores, a justice of the
peace (Judge Hollaby), an unorganized oyster industry, a faded little
railroad station, and a postoffice. Nearly all the people in Blue Port
got their living on or from the Great South Bay. They went oystering,
fishing, eeling, clamming, duck shooting. They kept, some of them,
a cow and a few pigs; all of them raised vegetables. Thus there was
plenty to eat. There was not so much to wear, but there was enough. As
for making money, mostly no one made any money. There was no way to.
A few hundred dollars in cash, to buy a few clothes and pay, perhaps,
a low rent, was enough for a whole family from one year’s end to the
other. Such a place might be considered, and rightly, to offer very
restricted opportunities for the capitalist, but Dick Hand made it do.
He was not a daring financier. For years he had lived on a farm in the
middle of Long Island, a farm in semi-hilly country, the farm left him
by his father. It had to be worked hard, and when, after some dozen
years of labour, the chance came to Dick Hand to sell it at a fabulous
figure, he lost no time in doing so. A wealthy New Yorker had come
along and bought the place simply because he saw in the lie of the land
possibilities for a corkingly good private golf course. The course
was never laid out. The New Yorker died while still quarrelling with
his architect over the plans for a $200,000 summer “cottage,” and his
executors and heirs looked ruefully at the large tract of land which
had been his latest whim and which was difficult to “turn over”--even
with a plough. But Dick Hand had received $20,000 in cold cash for 200
acres. He was satisfied.
It was an impressive lot of money. It would have been greeted
respectfully in Patchogue, and even in larger places. But the sudden
possession of so much riches made Mr. Hand more cautious than ever. How
to make it grow fastest?
He had had enough of land. By most wonderful fortune, he had been
enabled to convert land into money. It was a miracle. Water had
been turned into wine; he would not depend upon it happening again.
His wife, who had always been submissive to him, ventured a single
suggestion:
“Now would be a good time to straighten out matters with Hosea,” she
remarked. Dick Hand looked at her coldly. She went on, uncomfortably:
“I s’pose ’twouldn’t take so much. It wasn’t more’n $2,500, his share
of father’s estate, was it?”
“He had no share of the estate,” her husband answered, shortly. “For
God’s sake, Fanny, how often have I got to tell you that there wa’n’t
nothing for him.” Under stress of emotion Mr. Hand used colloquial
speech. “The will read plain: I was to have the farm and he was to
have the rest to do as he pleased with, but after father’s debts had
been paid there wa’n’t nothing. I stood ready to mortgage the farm if
nec’ssary to give him what he’d oughter had,” said the man, virtuously
and untruthfully--doubtless he thought his wife would readjust her
recollection accordingly--“but he run away and went to sea. Stayed away
for years, and me struggling with the farm.” Mr. Hand began gradually
doing himself justice as a heavily laden, plodding, self-sacrificing
figure. “When he finally showed up I offered to do what was right
and he sneered at me, the ongrateful and onnatural brother. I says
to Hosea, ‘I’m ready to forget and forgive. Bygones kin be bygones.’
He was courting Keturah Smiley. It was before her aunt died, and she
hadn’t a cent. O’ course it was plain she’d have prop’ty some day,
though no one could foresee she’d have all the Hawkins’s money. John
Smiley hadn’t married that Mary Rogers then. So after I’d talked with
Hosea and offered to do right by him--and more’n right, considering
how he’d acted--I went to Keturah Smiley, and told her just how things
stood.”
“Oh, Richard, you hadn’t ought to have done that,” Mrs. Hand murmured.
“You had ought to have kept out of it.”
“Maybe I had, maybe I had,” retorted her husband. “But I was never one
to reckon the consequences of doing a neighbourly act. I was trying to
do the square thing, and more’n square, by Hosea. So I went to Keturah
and I says to her: ‘Hosea won’t take this money. Of course,’ I says,
‘there’s no claim upon me for it, and never was a valid claim, but I
always wanted to do the utmost by the boy and I want to be generous to
the man; even if he has behaved badly and said things to me he oughter
be ashamed of, and will be some day, I don’t hold it against him. I
harbour no resentment,’ I says, ‘and if he won’t take this money I
wish you would. Every one knows,’ I went on, ‘that you’ll have prop’ty
some day and you can pay me back then if you feel you should. Or,’ I
continued, wanting to make it as easy as I could for her, ‘you can
give me your note o’ hand for the amount at six per cent., and I’ll
promise you it won’t leave my hands. I’ll shave it for nobody,’ I says,
reassuring her, ‘and nobody need ever know about it unless you want to
tell Hosea about it afterward to bring him to a proper appreciation of
the onnatural things he said to his brother.’”
Mrs. Hand, who had been clasping and unclasping her fingers, exclaimed:
“But, Richard! Don’t you think ’twas a mistake to go to Keturah with
it? A girl is so likely to misunderstand such matters.”
A look of inscrutable sorrow crept into Mr. Hand’s crafty eyes. He
hunched up his shrunken body and nodded earnestly.
“Yes-yes!” he confirmed, using a characteristic ejaculation of the Long
Islander. “Keturah was never the woman to understand things in any but
her own way. She flared right up at me and said some hard things. I
won’t repeat’em, though I remember some of ’em to this day. For one
thing,” he went on, disregarding his promise of the breath before,
“she accused me of trying to cheat Hosea--to _cheat_ him! She p’tended
to think I was trying to keep from Hosea what was rightfully his, when
I was right there trying to give it back! She says to me: ‘I’ve heard
of folks who wanted to eat their cake and have it, too, but you’re the
first ever I see that wanted to give someone else his bite and have it
back.’ Then she cried out: ‘I wouldn’t marry a man with a brother so
mean as you!’ I went away a good deal upset, for I was real consarned
to see her married to Hosea and them both happy. Hosea didn’t have
nothing, but she was sure to have plenty from her aunt, and I figgered
’twould be money in the family.” Mr. Hand shook his head regretfully
and a sigh whistled between his teeth.
Mrs. Hand smoothed her apron. After a few moments’ silence she
observed: “Well, I s’pose it’s all for the best.” It was her favourite
observation, and on the philosophy compressed into that one short
sentence she had managed to live, hardly but not so unhappily, with
Richard Hand for these many years. She wanted to ask him what he was
going to do with the extraordinary sum of $20,000 of which he was now
possessed, but she knew he would not tell her. Afterward, she would
learn, little by little. She did not have to worry, for he was not
likely to lose it. She fell to speculating as to whether he would give
her enough to buy a black silk dress for Sundays--but it was an idle
speculation.... Her thoughts went along in an ineffectual fashion until
she rose to get supper.
Her husband ate in silence, undisturbed by his boy’s chatter about
the people of Blue Port, to which they had just removed. His mind was
already occupied with the possibilities of $20,000 carefully handled,
as he would handle it. He would not buy land, he would buy people. He
would look about for good mortgages that could be picked up cheap.
There must be a few Keturah Smiley had not got hold of. He would go
slow and keep money in the savings bank for a while, even though it
yielded him only a miserable four per cent. If something good came
along he would have it handy. Perhaps he could organize some industry
and have people working for him directly. He liked to drive people.
The oyster industry, for example--there ought to be something in that
for a man who would use a little capital and get control of the trade.
Blue Port oysters were famous the world over. A little legal work would
be necessary; the thought of paying a lawyer hurt him, but there were
papers that would have to be drawn up, articles of incorporation, etc.
He would stop in and talk with Judge Hollaby to-morrow.
The upshot of this meditation ultimately was the formation of the
Blue Port Bivalve Company, Richard Hand, president; Horace Hollaby,
vice-president and secretary; Richard Hand, treasurer. The company
gradually obtained liens on most of the boats in which the men of
Blue Port went forth to dredge the oyster beds. It acquired these
beds. There were also free beds, belonging to the township, but as
Richard Hand’s company came to own the boats it suffered less and less
competition. Everything went on about as before; the only difference
was that everybody came to be in debt to Richard Hand and worked for
him. The only person in Blue Port who remained independent of him was
Keturah Smiley.