PART TWO
ON THE morning of the last day of October, several years after it was decided that Mermaid should live with Keturah Smiley in Blue Port, a thin, pleasant-faced boy stopped in front of Keturah Smiley’s house and whistled. Thereupon a girl of eleven slipped out of the second front door of the house, the front door that faced the street from a jog on the south side of the building, and ran out to meet him. She was as tall as the boy, and he was thirteen; she had long and slightly curling hair of so coppery a red as almost to match the polished mahogany in Keturah Smiley’s tight-shut front parlour. She had a very white skin, accentuated by three freckles of varying size on and about her straight little nose. The firm and rounded chin was without a dimple, but two dimples showed in her cheeks as she smiled, and she was smiling now; and her blue eyes were of that brilliant and flashing blue that is to be seen, as seamen say, “off soundings.” People who had occasion to say much to Mary Smiley, whom everyone in Blue Port called Mermaid, were frequently deceived by her eyes. The blue ofthem was so light that it seemed shallow, nothing more than the reflection of the day’s sunshine or the quicksilvering on two round little mirrors reflecting the merry heart within her. Only a mariner, after all, could be expected to guess that the very brightness and blueness was a sign of unfathomable depths.
“Good morning, Richard Hand, Jr.,” said the girl.
“Howdy, Mermaid,” retorted the boy.
They looked at each other a moment and smiled. They had become chums at school on the day they discovered an uncle in common. But Hosea Hand of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, known as Ho Ha, was Dick Hand’s real uncle, the brother of his father, whereas he was only Mermaid’s uncle by adoption.
“To-night’s the night,” said the boy, amicably offering a jawbreaker. Mermaid accepted the candy and said, with her mouth full, “I’ve unfastened most of ’em, so if the wind doesn’t blow and make them bang, they’ll be all ready for you. All you’ll have to do is unhinge them. Do you suppose you can do that?”
“Sure,” said Dick. “They’re just ordinary shutters. Maybe a little rusted.”
“I oiled some of them while she was up street yesterday,” the girl reassured him.
They were conspiring, as a Hallowe’en prank, to detach as many shutters as possible from Keturah Smiley’s tightly shuttered house; and particularly, the shutters were to be got off the windows of the sacred, sealed frontparlour. In the three years or more that Mermaid had been living with Cap’n Smiley’s sister these shutters had been unfastened but twice a year: for a few hours in spring and a few hours in fall at the time of Keturah Smiley’s semi-annual housecleaning. For six months, from spring to fall, and again for six months, from fall to spring, the front parlour and most of the other rooms of the house lay in darkness. It seemed impossible that anything, even dust, could enter there, but dust there always was when cleaning time came. At which Mermaid used to wonder greatly, and Keturah Smiley to rage.
“Where do you suppose it comes from?” the girl would ask Miss Smiley.
“I don’t know where it comes from, but I know where it’s going to,” Keturah replied, with such a savage accent as to make her remark almost profane.
“Hell?” inquired Mermaid.
Miss Smiley straightened up and looked at her sternly.
“I was only asking a question,” explained Mermaid. “I wouldn’t think of saying ‘hell’ except to ask a question. But any one who says ‘hell’ is asking a big question, isn’t he, Miss Smiley?”
The funny child, as some folks in Blue Port called her, was not expressing her doubt for the first time. She had first shocked a Sunday School teacher with it. The Sunday School teacher had spoken to KeturahSmiley but had regretted it immediately, for Keturah had said:
“Well, what’s the matter? Can’t you convince her there’s a hell? That’syourjob! Why put it on me?”
So now when Mermaid put the general inquiry as to whether any one saying “hell” were not asking a big question, Keturah merely gazed at her darkly and replied:
“Most likely he’s answering one about himself.”
This tickled Mermaid. She renewed an old controversy concerning the front parlour.
“What’s the use of singing, as we do at Sunday School, ‘Let a Little Sunshine In,’ if the shutters are always fastened?” she demanded. “How can you expect me to stand up and sing, ‘There’s Sunshine in My Heart To-day,’ Miss Smiley, when there’s not even sunshine in the house?”
Keturah snorted. “My heart is not as big as my house,” she answered. “Sunshine in some people’s hearts, like sunshine in some people’s houses, would show up a good deal that would better be hidden.”
Mermaid’s blue eyes shone, even in the semi-darkness. From the very first she had liked living with her Dad’s sister, despite that sister’s dark moods and bleak rages, because Keturah Smiley had a gift for saying sharp, true things, and saying them so you remembered them. She had not been unkind to the girl and had even shown a certain grudging liking forher as Mermaid, whether from some natural gift or from crossing blades in conversational fencing, developed a faculty for thinking her own thoughts and putting them in her own words—and more and more the right words.
They had many duels, and Keturah Smiley did not always win them. She early found in the child a streak of obstinacy as pronounced as her own. When Mermaid was convinced of her right Keturah might be able to silence her, but she would not be able to move her. And sometimes, to her dumb astonishment, Miss Smiley found herself giving ground.
She had had to yield in quite a number of instances. When the eight-year-old girl had come to live in Blue Port she had refused to sleep with Miss Smiley, and Keturah had been forced to open a small bedroom for her after the night when the child had run out of the house and fastened herself in the woodshed. Mermaid had declined to walk two miles in the noon recess of school and Keturah found herself putting up a lunch and having the hot meal of her day at suppertime. This had irked her a good deal, for Mermaid would not merely walk but run two miles at play. The girl refused outright to wear to school a man’s old coat fixed over as a jacket. She was as contrary as possible, it seemed to Keturah, about her clothes. After repeated quarrels on the subject, in the last of which Mermaid had threatened to appeal to her Dad the next time he came over from the beach, Miss Smiley gave in. For itwas true that her brother gave her money to clothe the child, and she knew him well enough to know that he would make her account for every cent of it. Keturah Smiley was strictly honest, but it galled her to put money on any one’s back. She would not even buy a mustard plaster, though she would buy those mustard plasters which went by the name of first mortgages—when she could get them sufficiently cheap. But she did not starve the girl; she set a good table. She was stingy with money and affection, but not with food and principles.
In three years she had come to respect her brother’s adopted daughter, and sometimes to wonder where the girl got her firmness of character and general good humour. Keturah had never seen her in tears. Once, when she had been so angered as to lift her hand with a threat to strike Mermaid, the girl, without wincing, had said quietly:
“If you hit me I’ll go away.”
She had not said she would tell her father. She had never, in any of their disputes, threatened to appeal to Cap’n Smiley except in the long dispute about what she should have to wear. And she had explained that at the time by saying: “It’s only that Dad is buying them. If he says you’re right, that’ll settle it.”
Keturah never reopened the argument. She put the money in the girl’s hand.
“All right, Missy, spend the last cent and wear ribbons!”
But Mermaid had insisted on Miss Smiley’s going with her to the shop, and had followed her advice on the quality of the goods, which Keturah shredded with her fingers along the selvage and bit, a thread at a time, with her very sound (and very own) teeth. Mermaid had then made her own selection of styles and patterns, and on the way home had handed Keturah $5 with the remark: “Will you send that to the savings bank in Patchogue for me?”
“It might have been twice as much,” was Keturah’s only remark.
“And it might have been twice as little. And I might be half as happy,” Mermaid exclaimed. “Would you be twice as happy if you had twice as much money, Miss Smiley?”
“I’d be willing to try and find out,” said Keturah, sententiously.
Mermaid looked at her speculatively. “If there’s a chance of it, I’ll help you all I can to get rich!” she declared with so much seriousness that Keturah was uncertain how to take her, and so took her in silence.
Probably Mermaid’s words were not really so ironical as they sounded. The girl was generally in earnest when she was not plainly in fun; as children usually are. She had only the vaguest notion of Miss Smiley’s means, and a very vivid notion of her money-stinting ways; Mermaid, however, liked her Dad’s sister inspite of the difficulties of living with her. Miss Smiley was “square” for all her harshness and even hardness; she said cutting things which were, however, never mean, and seldom really unkind. She could be wrathful, but she did not sneer, and she had only scorn for those who sneered at her. Very little mercy, but a rigid adherence to what she thought just, distinguished Keturah in the girl’s eyes. And no one, Mermaid concluded, could live with Miss Smiley and not be struck by the fact that she was thoroughly unhappy. What would make her happy Mermaid had not the least idea; but if the child could have given it to the woman she would have done it, even at some cost to herself. For she was a generous child and she felt generosity all about her, guarding her, befriending her, helping her. Her Dad’s and her uncles’ liberality to her always touched her heart. She knew now, at the age of eleven, that her Dad was not really her Dad and that her uncles were not related to her by blood or marriage. She knew she was a nameless child of unknown lineage, washed ashore from the wreck of the ship by whose name she was known. Everyone except Miss Smiley called her Mermaid; Miss Smiley called her Mary when she called her by name at all, or “Missy,” when Mermaid had irritated her. From the first the girl had called the woman Miss Smiley; it had never occurred to her to address her as “Aunt Keturah,” and no one, not even her Dad, had suggested it.
In the evening of the day when Mermaid ran out to meet young Dick Hand on the sidewalk, sprites were abroad. As if it had conspired with Dick and Mermaid, the wind refrained all day long from blowing and rattling Keturah Smiley’s unfastened shutters, and thus giving the two youthful conspirators away. But at night there came a wrenching sound, as if the broadside of the house were being ripped off. Keturah Smiley gave an exclamation and jumped to her feet. She rushed from the room and returned a moment later carrying a pistol.
Mermaid saw it and screamed. Then she flung herself at the woman.
“No, no! Miss Smiley,” she implored in little gasps. “It’s only boys! It’s only Hallowe’en!”
“Nonsense,” Keturah retorted, holding the pistol out of reach and checking the girl with her other hand. “I’m not going to murder ’em. I’m only going to frighten ’em into behaving themselves, and leaving my property alone!”
She moved quickly to the door, opened it, and fired two shots. From the darkness came an awful cry, as of mortal pain, followed by whimpers and the sound of scurrying feet. Keturah became utterly pale, and her tall figure seemed to lose its rigidity.
“Do you suppose one of those boys could have beenperched in the big maple?” she inquired, faintly. “I shot in the air!”
There was a great rushing about and the woman and girl finally went outside with a lantern. The light bobbed about under the maple and around the house, but no white, stricken face was illuminated by the rays; they heard no other cries, no moans; and except for the rustle of the fallen leaves they trod upon there was no sound. Gradually recovering herself in the chill air Keturah strode indoors, Mermaid following her. Miss Smiley, as her fright left her, became more and more indignant.
“It’s that Dick Hand’s boy,” she commented. “Always up to mischief, like his father. A bad lot, the Hands, all except Hosea, who’s a fool.”
At this mention of her Uncle Ho Mermaid pricked up her ears. Miss Smiley was in a talkative mood, seeking relief from her vexation. The girl could not refrain from asking, “Is Uncle Ho a fool?”
“Yes, he is, to have let his brother cheat him out of his rightful property all these years,” Keturah Smiley told her.
Mermaid felt a pang.
“Uncle Ho is awfully good to me,” she said, sadly. “I can’t have anything to do with Dick if his father cheated Uncle Ho.”
Keturah gave her a curious look.
“Don’t make other folks’ quarrels your quarrels,Mary,” she observed. “And while ‘the boy is father to the man,’ Dick Hand’s boy may be a better man than his father.”
“I won’t be friends with Dick if his father cheated Uncle Ho,” the girl persisted.
“You go on being friends with Dick,” Keturah advised her, “and leave me to deal with his father.”
A strange, grim expression was on her face, an expression which had more of satisfaction in it than Mermaid had ever observed before, an expression that was almost happy, and that was not unknown in Blue Port. The senior Richard Hand had seen it on the day when he first came to Keturah Smiley to borrow money. His brother, Hosea Hand, had never witnessed it; and Hosea Hand thought he knew every shade of Keturah Smiley’s countenance—a countenance that was singularly inapt at denoting the finer shades of feeling. For Hosea Hand had even seen a look of tenderness in those sharp eyes; he had seen that mouth, so firm at the corners, relax into smiles at the smile he gave her. Once upon a time Hosea Hand had been young, and once upon a time Keturah Smiley had been young, and it was about that time that Hosea Hand’s brother—of whom a reasonable doubt might be entertained as to whether he had ever been young at all—that Dick Hand, the older, had come between two lovers.
In the morning three shutters were gone from thefront parlour windows and the streaming sunshine had already, according to Keturah Smiley’s emphatic pronouncement, begun to fade the old rose carpet. What was worse, the shutters could not be found, though what appeared to be their ashes lay, still smouldering, in a lot a quarter of a mile away. Keturah poked through the black remains and fished out a peculiarly shaped hinge, adding to her observations of the evening before on the badness of the Hands. But she expressed no intention of putting her hand in her pocket to buy new window coverings. With a wrench that bade fair to take them from their rollers she pulled down the parlour shades. Yet a spell had been broken. The sacred room could never regain its dark repose. Mermaid, dusting the mahogany “deacon’s chairs,” ventured discreetly to raise the shades a little at the bottom, and gradually they rose higher and higher until they shielded the upper sashes only. An agreeable light streamed into the room and lit up the curios brought back from his sea voyages by Captain John Hawkins, husband of Keturah Hawkins and master of the clipper shipChina Castle, curios that Keturah Smiley had inherited from Keturah Hawkins along with the house and her aunt’s land and money. Though not more wonderful than the full-rigged ship which Uncle Ho had carved in the glass bottle, these heirlooms were perceptibly more precious.
There was a jade Buddha which, on its first appearancein Blue Port fifty years earlier, had administered its shock to the Christian ladies of the Missionary Society, and had long been retired into oblivion. There was a collection of swords and cutlasses with which Keturah Smiley might have defended herself against all Blue Port advancing against her. On a mantel were ivory ornaments, intricately carved, and on either side of the fireplace were mammoth elephants’ tusks. Gold gleamed from damascened swords; silver bands shone more coldly from the tusks; some copper vessels on the floor dully reflected the unaccustomed daylight; but the precious stones which had once enhanced the beauty of these relics of far ports had been removed from their settings and their fires smothered forever in the feathers of a pillow on Keturah Smiley’s four-poster bed.
Mermaid used to look at the empty sockets and express sorrow that all these must once have held jewels which had been lost. She took an imaginative joy in restoring them, in her mind’s eye, to their rightful places, and in deciding just what gem belonged with every background. She had a sense in these matters, and she never enshrined a diamond where a ruby should have been bleeding.
Of the permanent results of their Hallowe’en pranks she apprised thirteen-year-old Dick Hand when they met at school. She told him of some of the treasures brought to light, but she said nothing of the value ofthem and she never spoke of the vanished jewels. She was curious, however, about the cry of pain and the whimpering that had frightened Miss Smiley on the night of the raid. Dick, who was a merry boy, laughed. “Oh, we knew she’d fire a pistol in the air; she’s done it before. I just made those noises to scare her,” he explained.
Then, as Mermaid laughed with him, the boy became suddenly earnest. He looked at the girl with an air of surprise.
“Say, Mermaid, you’re an awful nice girl,” he said, and looking at her he slowly reddened. In a moment he recovered himself and finished successfully, “An awful nice girl to be living with that—that—old cat!”
Mermaid was really indignant. She told him so, and then she left him, which was not what he wanted at all. He hardly knew what he wanted. As for Mermaid, she was too incensed to be observant; she was certainly not aware that he wanted anything. The boy stood looking after her faintly dismayed, but a good deal more perplexed. Then he scratched his head, gave a whistle to another boy across the street, and sang out: “Hey, Tom! Did you find out who that new feller is on your street?”
Young Tom Lupton, son of Tom Lupton of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, and therefore one of Mermaid’s cousins by courtesy in the queer relationshipsthat sprang out of her rescue from the surf, waggled his head.
“C’m over and I’ll tell you all about him,” he invited.
Dick crossed the street and punched Tom’s head in a comradely fashion. They clinched, broke away, sparred a little, and then stopped, breathless and satisfied.
“Who is he?”
“Search me,” replied Tom Lupton 2nd, less in the voice of entreaty than with the air of a man making a succinct statement. “I tried to talk to him to-day over the fence and the guy only said ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to ever’thing. I got his name—that Guy.”
“What is it?” asked Dick, innocently.
“Guy,” answered Tom. “Ow!” He doubled over to protect his ribs from the impatient Mr. Hand. “I told yuh, Guy! Guy! His name is Guy! Like—like ‘Guy Mannering,’” explained Mr. Lupton, who was fifteen and didn’t look it, and was taking English I in Patchogue High School, and didn’t speak it.
“Mannering, what sort of a name is that?” demanded Mr. Hand.
“It isn’t Mannering, it’s Vanton,” said Tom, wisely not trying to explain. Whereupon Mr. Hand, remarking, “You said it was Mannering, I’ll Mannering you!” fell upon him afresh and they punched each other happily for several minutes until a shadow fell athwart them.
Stopping to see who approached, they were almostborne down by a huge, elderly man who walked with a peculiar tread, planting his feet firmly at each step and taking short steps. His preoccupied and lordly expression took no cognizance of the young men as he went through them, like a massive keel cutting in two a couple of sportive little waves.
Immense sidewhiskers, like studding sails, expanding the spread of his ample countenance, fluttered in the breeze. His weathered cheeks looked hard as the sides of a steel ship; there was a stony, distant stare in his eyes, wrinkled at their corners. He wore a coat cut like a huge boy’s reefer; there were brass buttons on it and his hands were thrust in the pockets.
The boys gazed at his wake, and when he was out of all possible hearing young Mr. Lupton nudged his companion.
“That’s him!” he exclaimed. “That’s Captain Vanton, this Guy’s father. You know they say he was master of a three skysail-yarder that made a passage from New York to Honolulu in 90 days. Doesn’t he look like a Damn-Your-Eyes?”
Dick agreed.
“A regular brute!” ejaculated Tom. “Must have wads of money. Built that house and it’s finished in mahogany and teakwood like a ship’s cabin—cost a fortune! He must have been in the slave trade, eh? Where does a sea captain get all that money, even if he’s been master of a clipper ship?”
Dick, who reeked naught of the sea and cared less, didn’t know.
“That kid of his,” the garrulous Tom continued, “he’s a regular sissy. I s’pose his father frightens the life out of him. Probably flogs him with a rope’s end before breakfast.”
“Is he coming to school?” inquired young Mr. Hand.
“Naw. Leastways, I don’t believe so,” Tom responded. “He’d been by this time. They were here before school started. Why, it’s months since they moved into that house, and none of ’em has ever so much as spoke to anybody in Blue Port. They eat their meals at the Roncador House, but they never goanywhere. Not even to church.”
Everybody went to church in Blue Port. The information was astounding. The two boys agreed that a real mystery invested the Vantons; and as for Captain Vanton, he must have done something hellish to have so much money and hold so aloof and walk down Main Street as if it were his sacred quarterdeck on the queenlyChina Castle.
TheChina Castle! She had been a wonderful ship in her day, a Bath-built clipper. John Hawkins, husband of Keturah Hawkins, uncle by marriage of Keturah Smiley, had been the first master of her; Captain Vanton had come to her cabin much later, in the days ofher decline. It was John Hawkins and not Buel Vanton who had made the passage from New York to Honolulu in 90 days. Young Tom Lupton had not known or remembered the name of the three skysail-yarder whose glory descended upon every master who trod her quarterdeck. Only a few persons in Blue Port, indeed, recalled anything when they heard that Captain Vanton had been master of theChina Castle. “Eh?” said these old fogies to each other. “She was John Hawkins’s ship!” This Captain Vanton could not, of course, have been the mariner that John Hawkins was, for Captain John had sailed his fine, fast vessel to California, making quick passages, and afterward took her into the China trade for which she had been built. Nevertheless, out of a sense of politeness, these oldtimers had, on one occasion or another, attempted to address Captain Vanton; it was a sort of duty to let him know that he was not a total stranger in Blue Port. No man could have a better sponsor than a ship John Hawkins had sailed. They were frozen by Captain Vanton’s hard stare. At the mention of theChina Castlehe merely looked through their eyes and out the backs of their heads and into the bar of the Roncador House. At the various polite and hearty references to “Cap’n John Hawkins” he had but one course of behaviour: uttering a loud “Humph!” he would turn squarely on his heel, and lurch away evenly in the opposite direction.
An exasperating man; did he think himself above everybody ashore, as if he were still the master of a vessel? Be hornswoggled ifwe’dgo out of our way again to speak to such an uncivil devil. He could take his money and his pindling boy and his sick wife—she always appeared to be just convalescing—and shut himself up in his expensive house and be hanged to him. Why, Cap’n John Hawkins!—and then the oldtimers would go off into reminiscences all wool, a yard wide and the afternoon long, sitting about the stove in the store and postoffice in winter or in back-tilted chairs on the store porch in summer. When Captain Vanton came in for his mail there was a momentary silence, faces were carefully averted, and tobacco juice was sprinkled on the floor.
Buel Vanton never noticed the idlers. He never noticed anybody. Therefore Mermaid was stricken almost mute with astonishment one day when, answering a peremptory rap at the door, not the side front door, but the frontest front door leading into the small hall that gave into the front parlour, she opened it to find the bulky form of Captain Vanton standing before her. As usual he did not look at her, but merely asked in a loud, hard voice if this had been John Hawkins’s house. Mermaid affirmed it; he then asked if her mother were in.
“Miss Smiley is in. She is not my mother. I just live with her,” the girl replied. Captain Vanton madeno response, but as he continued to stand there she added, “I will call her.”
She did not invite him to enter, and as she went in search of Keturah Smiley she murmured to herself, “Rude old man! She can ask him in, I won’t!”
Keturah Smiley, summoned, confronted the visitor and asked abruptly, “You wish to see me?”
Captain Vanton did not indicate whether he did or not. His eyes dropped for the merest instant and he replied: “I was told this was John Hawkins’s house.”
“It was in his lifetime,” said Keturah, shortly. “He was my uncle,” she added. “Mother’s sister’s husband.”
Captain Vanton made no reply. He said, as if it were relevant: “I commanded theChina Castleafter he left her. Some time after,” he added. “Did he ever speak of a man named King?” And now he looked Keturah Smiley straight in the eyes. Keturah gave his stare back.
“King?” she rasped. “I can’t say he did, and I can’t say he didn’t. What King?”
“First officer, Boston to Shanghai, third voyage,” answered Buel Vanton in his hard, uninflected tones. “Triced up by the thumbs and flogged before the crew by Captain Hawkins’s orders. First officer, too! Insulted Mrs. Hawkins.”
Keturah Smiley’s face settled into its severest lines.
“You’re likely mistaken,” she said with a bite in herwords. “Captain Hawkins would never have flogged a man for that: he’d have killed him!”
“Did almost. Killing too easy. Better to flog. Torture,” declared Buel Vanton, reflectively. “Afterward Captain King. Knew him in San Francisco. Retired. Devil. Swore he’d get even. Then Captain Hawkins died. King heard of it. Near crazy. I’ve come to tell you he’s dead!”
“Dead?” echoed Keturah Smiley, who had become slightly confused by the visitor’s elliptical language. “Captain Hawkins is dead. Of course he’s dead, what of it?”
“Not Hawkins, King!” barked Captain Vanton from his impassive face framed in the spreading sidewhiskers. “He’s done you all the harm he ever will. All of you. He’s dead. ‘The King is dead. Long live the King!”’ He uttered a harsh sound, a bitter laugh. Turning squarely about he started off the porch and away from the house. Keturah Smiley, who had been eyeing him with amazement, suddenly called after him, “How do you know he’s dead?”
Captain Vanton half turned his head.
“Killed him myself,” he declared abruptly, and lurched away.
Standing well back in the hall Mermaid had heard this extraordinary conversation. Now she slipped intothe 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 ofinterest 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 apeaceful 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 theMermaid, 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 theMermaid’sskipper.” 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 ofhim! 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 thatwill 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 thewreck of theMermaid.” He went on to tell of the few decipherable words in the letter found on the body of theMermaid’sskipper; 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. KeturahSmiley 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,” exclaimedCap’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.
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 HandFirst 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. JohnSmiley 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 youwant 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—tocheathim! 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 wassure 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 goslow 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.
Mermaid, hurrying down the street from school, did not notice a boy coming out of the side street on which young Dick Hand lived. The boy was walking along with a most unboyish air. His head was down and he looked up too late to avoid a collision. It nearly knocked Mermaid’s breath out of her. When she could talk she accepted his confused apology, and smiled.
“You’re Guy Vanton, aren’t you?”
He was a short boy with very black hair, a snub nose, and a pale face. His eyes, which were brown, had something uncanny about them; Mermaid was struck with their resemblance to the eyes of wild animals. She had seen deer with eyes like that. The boy stood before her with his cap in his hand; he was somehow not in the least like Dick Hand or Tommy Lupton or any of the other Blue Port boys. He seemed to have very good manners and to be politely exercising them. Mermaid unconsciously assumed her own.
“Guy Vanton, yes,mademoiselle.” The French word aroused Mermaid to a high pitch of curiosity, and the immediate effect of her heightened curiosity was to make her still more polite.
“I—I beg your pardon,” the boy repeated. “It was all my fault. I was not looking where I was going,mademoiselle.”
She noticed that he spoke English without the Blue Port twang, but also without a foreign accent; his speech was like that of one or two of the schoolteachers she had had.
He seemed about to replace his cap and hurry away. He made a little bow to her—from the waist. Mermaid had seen the bow before. Dickie Hand had learned it in a children’s dancing class at Patchogue. She smiled at young Mr. Vanton, who was so eager to get along. She had no intention he should go until they were fairly acquainted.
“You speak French?”
“Mais oui, mademoiselle!” His uncanny eyes fixed her for a moment and his pale face flushed a little.
“Oh, I don’t speak it,” Mermaid explained, hastily, whereupon he looked down at the ground, as if he had lost interest. “What was that you just said?”
“I said: ‘But yes!’”
“I wish I knew it,” she exclaimed. “I should love to study it, but I don’t think they teach it even in High School at Patchogue.”
He said, without looking at her: “I learned it in Paris. I—we used to live there. My mother——” He stopped.
Mermaid said, sympathetically: “She’s an invalid, isn’t she?”
“Oh, that isn’t—I mean—why, why, yes. She is—she has to walk with a crutch. And then, only alittle.” His confusion was so evident that Mermaid felt sorry for him. With true feminine instinct she decided that he must suffer some more so that ultimately she might help him. She knew he did not go to school, she knew that he lived all alone, shut up in that expensive house, surrounded by gloomy evergreens, which must be as sunless as Miss Smiley’s front parlour had been once on a time. He lived there with a crippled mother and a formidable father, a retired sea captain who was undoubtedly a stern disciplinarian. He was pale and undersized. Mermaid had heard stories of sea captains all her remembering life and knew them to be a peculiar race of men. Her imagination worked rapidly on the problem presented by Guy Vanton, and she concluded, perhaps somewhat rashly, that his father had spent most of his money on the mahogany and teakwood of the parlour and fed his boy on ship’s biscuits and water. At any rate, he looked it. But his eyes fascinated her. Considering briefly the means of further advancing their acquaintance she decided that he should teach her French. In turn, she would ask him home with her to supper, and see that he got a square meal.
“I wonder if you wouldn’t teach me French?”
Guy Vanton looked surprised, but then an expression of pleasure came into the brown eyes. He nodded. Mermaid continued: “I could come over in the afternoon, sometimes, when I haven’t to help Miss Smileyclean house. We could be very still and not bother your mother. And sometimes you could come to our house. I’m sure Miss Smiley wouldn’t mind. I bring Dickie Hand there and she gives him cookies though she hates his father like anything.”
They were walking along the street together. Young Mr. Vanton had got his cap back on his head at last, but he walked stiffly, a little deferentially, his body half turned toward the girl. Mermaid chattered along easily on whatever themes came into her head, occasionally punctuating her talk with a question calling for no answer more elaborate than a “Yes” or a “No.” She was much gratified when Dick Hand and Tommy Lupton stopped their regular afternoon pastime of punching each other’s heads to stare across the street at her escort. She heard Dickie say to Tom: “Well, will you look? Girls make me sick!”
As if this were the very effect she desired to produce, Mermaid was remarking to the Vanton heir: “That’s Dick Hand over there, and Tommy Lupton. You know them, don’t you? Dick is thirteen and Tommy’s fifteen. I’m only eleven, but I’m as big as either of them. You’re fifteen, aren’t you?”
“I’m seventeen,” he divulged. Mermaid stood still in her astonishment.
“Seven-teen!” she gasped. “Why, but you’re no bigger than Dickie—though you know French and he doesn’t, and you know a lot more than he does and arelots—lots nicer,” she added, by way of retrieving her blunder. “But you won’t want anything to do with me,” she said with honest candor. “You’ll think I’m only a little girl. I suppose I am.”
He did not seem ready to cast her off as infantile and beneath his notice.
“I am too small,” he admitted. “I was not so small in Paris—I mean, the boys at school there were not so large as fellows of the same age here. I was average height. Here I’m a little—runt.”
“What a lot you must have seen,” Mermaid marvelled. “I hope you’ll tell me all about it. You can do that and teach me French that way, can’t you? I’ve never been anywhere except here and on the beach. You know I came ashore in a shipwreck.”
She told him about the wreck, what she had heard of it from her Dad and other men of the Lone Cove Station; of her home with Keturah Smiley, and of life on the beach. Then she spoke of Captain John Hawkins and the clipper shipChina Castle.
“You know your father commanded her afterward.”
Guy did not seem to know it. “He never talks about his ships,” the boy explained. With the help of some questions from Mermaid, he told her about himself.
He had been born in San Francisco and had lived there for some years. In the Presidio section of the city. As he talked of the town Mermaid’s face took on a puzzled look.
“It’s the funniest thing,” she declared. “Do you know, I have a feeling that I lived there once on a time. It seems as if it came back to me, as if I just sort of half-remembered—— You know theMermaid, the ship I was aboard, came from San Francisco.”
After they left San Francisco, the Vantons had gone to live in Paris. Guy’s father had then given up definitely all idea of going to sea again.
“He had really never had a ship since I was born,” the boy explained. “But he kept thinking, up to the time we went to Paris, that he would take another command. My mother——” he hesitated, with a trace of the confusion he had shown before in speaking of her, and then went on: “We had plenty of money, and so there was no need for him to go, but in San Francisco he kept thinking of it, and every day he would walk down to the foot of Market Street and along the waterfront and look at all the ships. Sometimes he would go aboard them and talk to the captains. He used to take me with him. It was very interesting. Ships from all over the world—British, Japanese, American, German, French, Norwegian, Russian and a lot more. He would take me on board the square-riggers and teach me the ropes. ‘This,’ he would say, ‘is the fore t’ gallant halyard. This is the fore royal sheet. This is the fore topmast stays’l sheet. Now what is this?’ I always got it wrong and it used to make him terribly angry. Then he would tell me togo aloft. I liked that, because you could always get such a splendid view of San Francisco Bay and the city, built on hills, and the mountains over in Marin County, with Oakland and Alameda and all the other places spread out before you.”
“Weren’t you dizzy?” Mermaid asked.
“Only the first time.”
They had reached Keturah Smiley’s house. Mermaid invited little, old Mr. Vanton in. She gave him crullers and coffee, made him acquainted with Miss Smiley, and then said good-bye to him at the gate. It was agreed that they should meet the next afternoonpour parler Français. As the French instructor hurried homeward he lit a cigarette. This was observed by the Messrs. Hand and Lupton, who were considerably dazed.
“And I called him a sissy,” murmured Mr. Hand.
“D’ye know what I think?” exclaimed his side partner. “He’s a foreigner, that’s what he is, a cigarette-smoking foreigner. Mermaid ought not to have anything to do with a fellow like that,” Tommy concluded, virtuously, and with the sense of the protecting male.
Mermaid and Monsieur Guy Vanton made friends with each other quickly, aided, perhaps, by the graces of the French language. At eleven years it is not hard tolearn French, especially if your instructor speaks with a pure accent and makes conversation in it the order of the day. Mermaid found that Guy did not go to school because his father didn’t wish him to, for reasons not given. Guy said he didn’t know what was back of his father’s objections, unless it was that he would have to go away from home. “You see, I’ve had the equivalent of high school,” he told Mermaid. “It would have to be college—or maybe a year somewhere to get ready for college. I don’t much care. I read a lot—we’ve heaps of books—and I—I write sometimes,” he confessed, diffidently.
“What do you write?” Mermaid ventured. “Say it in French,” he reminded her and after he had corrected her question so put, he replied in French: “Mostly poetry.”
He got quite red, so that Tommy Lupton, who had been dishonourably spying from behind a shrub in the next yard, was incensed.
“Some day I’m going to knock his block off,” Tommy told himself.
Afterward he accosted Mermaid down the street, greeting her calmly but with a touch of sadness in his tone. She was a nice, if misguided, girl; Tommy didn’t want to hurt her feelings but this business couldn’t be allowed to go on.
“Say, Mermaid,” he began, and then faltered a moment in the performance of his unpleasant duty.“We—we never see anything of you any more these days,” he finished. It was not just the thing, but it was, perhaps, best to lead up to the point gradually.
Mermaid seemed unaware that anything was wrong.
“Come down to the house, Tommy, and I’ll give you a cookie,” she invited him sweetly.
“I don’t believe I want a cookie. I don’t believe I want anything to eat,” answered Mr. Lupton, seriously.
Mermaid looked at him with attention. “You aren’t sick, are you?” she said, anxiously. “There’s two cases of scarlet fever in Patchogue, I heard. You ought not to be going there to high school if you feel that way.”
Indignation at the turn the conversation was taking overcame Mr. Lupton. He did not want to talk about himself but about Mermaid, and particularly about the dangerous acquaintances—well, acquaintance—she was cultivating. He abandoned the possible diplomatic approaches to the subject and blurted out: “What do you want to have anything to do with that Vanton feller, for, anyway, Mermaid? If we fellers don’t have anything to do with him I shouldn’t think you’d—you’d——” He stuck hopelessly.
Mermaid’s very bright blue eyes were on him and he found it difficult to collect his thoughts and present his argument.
“Shouldn’t think you’d—have him around,” he concluded, unhappily.
Mermaid lifted her chin and her eyes flashed.
“I’d like to know, Tommy Lupton, whatyouknow about him, anyway!”
Just the opening Mr. Lupton craved. He poured it all out eagerly.
“Why—why, he’s a regular sissy, Mermaid, and you know it. He’s a—a hermit. I mean he never mixes with us fellers, and of course we’re glad of it; we wouldn’t have anything to do with him,” Tommy assured her, not bothering the logic. “He’s some kind of a foreigner, probably a dago,” he inferred, darkly. “He smokes cigarettes.” Mr. Lupton, who smoked only cornsilk in secret, saw the distinction clearly. “If you don’t look out some of these days he’ll be putting his arm around you!”
He stopped, appalled at his own frankness. But Mermaid merely laughed.
“He’snota foreigner; he only just speaks French. He lived in Paris and learned it there,” she said quite easily. “That doesn’t make him a foreigner; besides, he learned good manners, Tommy. And as for his not mixing with you and Dickie and the rest, he’s older and doesn’t go to school—and anyway, you never go near him. I don’t care if he does smoke.Yousmoke. Only you hide, and he doesn’t! I guess if he’s seventeen and has lived abroad where everybody smokes early he can smoke if he wants to. I guess if his father didn’t think it was all right he’d stop him. If he putshis arm around me and I need your help I’ll scream, Tommy, and when you come I’ll tell him you kissed me at your last birthday party! Will you fight him, Tommy? While he was in Paris he learned all about duelling, and you two can have a duel. I’ll steal one of the swords from our front parlour and you can practise with it.”
Mr. Lupton was perfectly red with rage and white with mortification. He was two colours, and presented an alarming spectacle. Mermaid, done with taunting, suddenly approached him and laid her hand on his arm.
“Don’t be mad, Tommy. I was only teasing. Of course he’s different from you and Dick, but he’s lived in strange places—in San Francisco and Paris—and he’s moved around a lot. And he has a sick mother and a queer father. You’d be funny in his place. And queer. And he’s seventeen, Tommy, and no bigger than you and I are! Don’t you think you could eat a cookie?” she asked, solicitously.
“It’s only—only that I think such a lot of you, Mermaid,” he protested. His natural dignity reasserted itself. “I’ll walk home with you.”
The procession formed, two abreast, and they went on toward Keturah Smiley’s. Mr. Lupton ate three cookies and an apple and examined, with an air of interest, the swords and cutlasses in the front parlour, which he had never handled before.
“Does Vanton really know how to fight with a sword?” he ventured, curiously.
“He had fencing lessons. Not a sword, a rapier,” Mermaid explained. “A sharp point that you stick into the other man. I think I’ll get him to give me lessons.”
“What would a girl be doing with fencing lessons?” exclaimed Mr. Lupton, scornfully.
“Oh, I don’t know. Just exercise. It might be useful sometime,” said Mermaid, vaguely.
“You’re just thinking of something you two can do together.” Jealousy reawakened in Mr. Lupton’s bosom.
“Well, he writes poetry, and we can’t write poetry together.”
“No, but he can write it and read it to you,” the youth said, bitterly. “Wishy-washy stuff, poetry. All except ‘Marmion,’” he qualified.
“Oh, Tommy, don’t be foolish,” sighed the young woman.
An amusing thought struck Mr. Lupton.
“Wait till I tell Dick he writes poetry,” he cried. “Ow! Won’t he yell? Won’t he?
“Just like a foreigner to stab a man with a thing like this,” Tommy continued, imperilling the haircloth seat of one of the “deacon’s chairs” with an unskilful lunge.
At this Mermaid lost all patience.
“He’snota foreigner!” she snapped. “And if you think he can’t put up his fists you just try him some day. I’ll bet you’ll find you made a mistake!”
Mr. Lupton sulked for a moment, but recovered, and after borrowing a book and eating two more cookies took a calm departure. On the highway, however, the thoughts that had disturbed him returned.
“Just the same I’ll have to give him a good licking yet, I bet,” he muttered. He hoped supper would be ready, for he felt hungry after the strife and passions of the afternoon.