Richard Hand the elder had come to own all Blue Port with the exception of Keturah Smiley when the balance of power, if you could call it that, was altered, imperceptibly at first, by the advent of Captain Vanton.
“Buel Vanton, Buel Vanton,” said Dick Hand, fretfully, to his wife one morning some months after the studding-sail whiskers became a familiar sight in Blue Port. “Should like you to tell me who this Buel Vanton is.”
Mrs. Hand, whose frequent tattling of village gossip made her more valuable to her husband than he ever admitted, repeated such news as was current. She described, not quite accurately, the mahogany and teakwood parlour, expatiated on the invalid wife, whowas never seen outdoors, referred to the small boy. It had got about that the boy was older than he looked, and the father more brutal than he spoke, and the wife as mysterious as she was invisible. The town figured that Captain Vanton flogged the boy, or had flogged him when he was little, thus arresting his growth; probably he had made his wife an invalid by his cruelty. Mrs. Hand repeated and worked speculative embroidery on the meagre facts and unsatisfying conjectures.
“Humph!” sneered Richard Hand, his eyes fixed on his plate. “How much money has he got?”
Mrs. Hand didn’t know. And what made things worse, there seemed absolutely no way of finding out. Captain Vanton didn’t own property in Blue Port, except a lot and the house he had built on it. He didn’t even have an account at a Patchogue bank. He sometimes made trips to the city, but they lived very simply. The only evidence of wealth, after all, was the costly fittings of that front parlour which no one in Blue Port had ever entered since the Vantons moved in. Mrs. Hand did not know of Cap’n Smiley’s short call. Keturah Smiley never met “with the ladies” and never talked any one else’s business unless it was her business, too.
Her husband meditated aloud:
“’F he has money,” he observed, “we might make some effort to get acquainted with them. You couldcall on his wife. And Dick,” with a glance at his son, “could make friends with his boy. I might stop the Captain on the street some day and ask him how he’s fixed to ’nvest a little money in shares of the Blue Port Bivalve Comp’ny.”
Dick Junior looked at his father rebelliously.
“Say, Pop,” he remarked, “I’m not a-going to have anything to do with that Guy Vanton for you nor nobody else. He’s—he’s a big softy!”
His father looked at the boy with his nearest approach to good nature.
“Maybe that girl that lives with Keturah Smiley—what’s her name?—some kind of fish—might tell you something about him.”
Young Mr. Hand choked on the coffee he was swallowing and rose from the table, though there were three steaming pancakes left of the morning’s pile.
“I don’t see why you insult Mermaid,” he said with a comical boyish rage in his voice. “She’s a—a—nice girl, even if that softy does get around her. Why—why, I wouldn’tthinkof asking her anything about that fellow. She might think I was jealous.”
Young Mr. Hand went out and wandered disconsolately down the street, thinking miserably of Mermaid and the three untouched pancakes. It was, however, incompatible with his wounded dignity to make overtures to either.
Old Richard Hand, shuffling down the street, lookingat the sidewalk, perhaps to see where he was going, perhaps to see where someone else had been, did not observe a large, heavy craft also outward bound but in the opposite direction and on the other side of the thoroughfare. No signals were exchanged and Captain Vanton, studding-sails set, went careering on his way. It was some time later when he showed up at the bare little room which was Richard Hand’s place of business and (except for Judge Hollaby’s office) the Blue Port Bivalve Company’s headquarters.
Captain Vanton was under all plain sail to royals. He was making ten knots or better when he entered the shabby room. He towered over the puny form of Richard Hand as might a great clipper, crowding her white canvas, tower above a fishing smack under her bows. And for a moment he appeared quite likely to run down the village miser. Richard Hand could feel himself cut in half and his wits drowning. He came to his senses with an effort. After all, it was merely the sea captain’s physical presence, aided by those expansive whiskers. Stage stuff! With an inward sneer Mr. Hand got hold of himself. He had always despised whiskers and was clean shaven because he had never been able to grow a beard. A beard would have covered that nasty chin and those cruelly tight lips, and would have softened the look in those eyes. With the benevolent aid of a beard Richard might have been a deacon, as his father had been before him; and he knew it. In abusiness way, it would have been an advantage to him, now and then, to have been Deacon Hand. Though it gave him the greatest possible satisfaction to collect interest six days a week there was something painful about the fact that none could be collected Sundays. Deacon Hand, passing the plate, would have felt a vicarious joy. The seventh day would not have been entirely wasted.
Rising hastily, the thwarted deacon managed a familiar but far from warming smile. “This is—er—Captain Vanton?” he asked, in a suave tone very few persons in Blue Port had ever heard.
The visitor did not say whether it was or was not. He looked around, as he might have on coming on deck, to see whether the mate was doing his work properly. Richard Hand lugged a chair forward, but Captain Vanton gave no sign that he noticed this. He spoke a few words in his best quarterdeck voice:
“When did you last hear from Captain King?”
The effect on Richard Hand was curious. For a moment his weak and vicious jaw dropped. A look of immense distrust invaded his crafty eyes. Then he seemed to recover himself. Rubbing his hands, as if they were cold, as they doubtless were, Mr. Hand eyed his questioner up and down a moment and then gave question for question:
“Have you a letter from him?”
Captain Vanton, who had not hitherto looked at thevillage miser at all, now turned and gazed squarely at him, and with so cold and glittering and truculent an eye that Mr. Hand seemed to become more shrunken than ever.
“No,” Captain Vanton told him. Then he asked, “Have you?”
The village miser shuffled and cleared his throat. He mumbled something, a negative apparently. There was a moment’s silence which was broken by the Captain, whose tone had a chilled steel edge.
“Why don’t you answer my question, sir?”
It was not the polite “sir” of the land but the formal, and often positively insulting, “sir” of the sea. Mr. Hand had never been so set down in his life. There was never much starch in him, and what there was went out completely.
“I—I heard from him—why, quite recently, less than a month ago, in fact,” he explained not very readily. “But you—you have later news of him, I can see that.” The Uriah Heep in the man came to the surface and old Mr. Hand exhibited his favourite brand of cordiality—the oily voice and the skimped smile. “Yes-yes. I hope he is well!”
“He is,” affirmed Captain Vanton and added non-committally: “He is dead.”
An expression of shocked surprise appeared on the face of the village miser. He made curious, clucking noises.
“Dear me. Dear me,” he managed to say, finally, as an inadequate expression of his regret that Captain King was well—and dead.
Captain Vanton glared at the opposite wall, resolutely taking no notice of this contemptible land creature.
“How did he die?” pursued the much-affected Hand.
“Violently,” barked Captain Vanton. The mortgage miser recoiled. When he spoke again his voice was feeble:
“I suppose you knew him very well?”
The Captain paid no attention to this. Suddenly he turned and looked through Mr. Hand about two inches to the left of the breastbone and in the latitude of the third rib, where Mr. Hand’s heart should have been sighted by the experienced mariner, if the miser had had any. Mr. Hand could not have been more disconcerted if Captain Vanton had pulled a sextant from his pocket and taken an observation with that.
“Why do you lie to me?” asked Captain Vanton at length, and the tone which had made men perspire off Cape Horn induced a cold kind of sweat on the body of Hand, the miser. It really was the tone more than the words, and surely the words were unpleasant enough.
“I don’t know what you mean. I lie to you?” the land crab got out.
“Certainly. Why, damn your eyes, you know you haven’t heard from Captain King in a month, nor six months, not a year!”
Mr. Hand stuttered in a process of recollection. Captain Vanton muttered something about “chronometer error” and seemed to swell up with a slow inflation of wrath. He might have expanded with this until the pinprick of the miser’s speech punctured the envelope of his maritime self-command, but, as if some thought arrested him, he stood still, and regarded Mr. Hand attentively for the first time. Captain Vanton’s regard was neither favourable nor unfavourable, and it took no account of what Mr. Hand seemed to be trying to say. “A month?” Of course he had been mistaken. It must have been longer than that; much longer, come to think it over. Several months and by gracious! it might be a full year. Time slips by so fast, and he was a busy man with the affairs of the Blue Port Bivalve Company on his hands as well as personal business. Investments. Couldn’t be neglected. Must be watched night and day....
Mr. Hand trailed off easily into an account of the operations of the Blue Port Bivalve Company. He painted its bivalvular prospects. Aided by his descriptive faculty Blue Port ceased to be Blue Port and became another Golden Gate.
At the name of that entrance—and exit—to and from El Dorado Captain Vanton’s large bulk quivered slightly about the back and shoulders.
With fixed eyes he listened to all that Mr. Hand poured forth, saying nothing, storing in his brain,perhaps, some of these wonderful adjectives. Along with the adjectives Mr. Hand delivered a well-assorted general lading of information, in fragments and pieces which Captain Vanton seemed to be carefully ticketing for ready reassembling on some distant pier.
At length Mr. Hand’s discourse dwindled. Would Captain Vanton care to invest in the Blue Port Bivalve Company’s shares? More capital was needed and substantial men, men of affairs. But the man of affairs, after drinking in all that Mr. Hand had to say, shut up as tightly as one of Mr. Hand’s own bivalves. He had nothing to say and said it. Mr. Hand, concealing his disappointment, expressed the hope that Captain Vanton would consider. The Captain, who perhaps thought no answer necessary in view of his very obvious consideration of something, turned to go. And then it was that the same stray thought that had struck Keturah Smiley struck Richard Hand. How did he know of Captain King’s death?
Captain Vanton explained in not more than three words. They were, in fact, the same three words with which he had answered Miss Smiley.
Richard Hand was left all of a tremble. “Killed him myself!” A self-confessed murderer! Good God, what was the world coming to that such men stalked about in it!
Tommy Lupton had made up his mind to knock the block off Guy Vanton, and no suitable pretext or occasion offering, he went around to the Vanton house one day and rather awkwardly invited the objectionable Guy to take a walk with him.
Guy Vanton, with a flicker of surprise which changed quickly into a look of pleasure, accepted the invitation. The two boys started north toward the woods encircling a small pond. They said little to each other at first. Tommy was concerned only to reach a small clearing in the woods, a place carpeted with pine needles and reasonably secure from intrusion by passersby. Guy was puzzled by Mr. Lupton’s stride and a feeling that this was somehow less a pleasure stroll than an errand.
“You’re almost through High School, aren’t you?” asked Mr. Vanton.
“Year more,” returned Tommy, going rapidly ahead on the wood path.
“Shall you go to college after that?”
“Cornell,” Tommy informed him.
“For the engineering course?” guessed Guy amicably.
“For the crew,” corrected Tommy.
“I’ve never rowed,” Guy commented, finding it difficult to make conversation at the pace they weretravelling. “Except a little, on the Seine near Paris, just for sport.”
“Bragging of where he’s been,” thought the grim young man beside Mr. Vanton. “I’ll give him something to brag about!” Aloud he said: “Ever box?”
“No. I’ve had fencing lessons. I used to wrestle a little. Nothing else much.”
They had gained the clearing. Tommy moved to the centre of it and then turned and faced his companion.
“I’ve brought you up here to tell you something,” he began, white-faced and with blazing eyes. “You—you’ve got to have nothing to do with—with her—with Mermaid,” Tommy found it distasteful to name the woman in the case, “from now on or I’ll knock your block off. I think I’ll just do it, anyway,” shouted Tommy, his fury, the accumulation of weeks of suffering, breaking forth. “You don’t box, but you say you can wrestle. I’m going to hit you and you can clinch and we’ll see who comes out on top! Being a—adamnforeigner I suppose you won’t fight fair, but if you try biting or gouging I’llgetyou, don’t you forget it!”
Guy Vanton, open-mouthed with surprise at the first few words, had reddened with anger. His curious, wild-animal eyes, ordinarily so shy, had lost their light and were fixed steadily but unseeingly on the boiling young man confronting him. The colour left his face. He lowered his eyes, stepped back several paces, muttered, “En garde,” and awaited Tommy’s onset.
With a desperate sort of roar Tommy charged. His blood was up, his head was down. His fist shot out but only grazed Guy’s cheek. At the same instant his head struck his antagonist’s collarbone, he felt himself caught under the shoulders, and before he could steady himself he was on his back on the ground. Young Mr. Vanton made no effort to keep him pinned there. Tommy rose and attacked again.
This time he flung himself on the other boy, head up and ready to clinch. But he clutched the air. Something slipped under his arm and caught his leg, throwing him from his balance. As he staggered he was picked up and thrown bodily a few feet through the air, landing on his shoulder.
A sense of awful lameness came over Tommy as he picked himself up. Unsteadily he planted a fist where his opponent’s breathing apparatus should have been, but wasn’t. He felt his head caught in a vise and shoved downward with such violence as to make it seem likely it had been permanently detached from his body. Shoulders fitted themselves into the extended curve of Tommy’s right arm; he half spun about like a tee-totum, and then, having four legs instead of the usual two, at right angles to each other, Tommy was uncertain which way he faced. All four legs gave way under him, his face brushed the pine needles, he turned a low somersault and found himself lying on the soft and scented earth, looking with a blurred vision at the tops of thepine trees and a patch of blue sky. They faded from sight after a second. Tommy was senseless.
Water trickling down his face awakened him, water brought by his late antagonist. Young Mr. Vanton’s black hair was in disarray, his normally white face looked whiter than ever, and his strange eyes were filled with anxiety.
“Tommy!”
Closing his eyes for a moment to consider whether this referred to the late Tommy Lupton or to himself, the young man with the wetted face decided that he would take the chance that it was intended for him. He opened his eyes again, sat up with a painful effort, looked at Guy Vanton, and smiled—a sad, calm smile such as befitted the victim of a mistake. But Guy Vanton seemed to think he had made no mistake. He flung himself on the ground beside the warrior and put his arm about the warrior’s shoulders. The shoulders gave a sharp twinge, but the warrior, with an effort, reached up his arm and crooked it reciprocally about the shoulders of the black-haired boy. So intertwined they sat side by side on the pine needles for a moment, and then Tommy struggled to his feet, the arm of the other helping him. After a moment of dizziness Tommy disengaged himself and held out his hand.
“Shake!”
They shook. Young Mr. Vanton exhibited no air of triumph. Instead, he seemed actually dejected. Thetwo, as by common consent, took the homeward path. Tommy burst out: “You licked me fair and square. I—I’d like to be friends. I—I guess you’re all right. Mermaid——”
Tommy stopped. For the first time it struck full upon him that though he had done all that lay in him to settle matters and settle them right, matters, at any rate the all-important matter, remained much as they were before.
Mr. Vanton broke in: “I want to be friends, too. We ought to be, hadn’t we, after this?”
A point bothered Mr. Lupton. “You haven’t made me take back what I said about you.”
Looking down at the ground Mr. Vanton flushed and said: “Oh, well, you didn’t mean it. It—it’s not important I’m not a foreigner, you know. I was born in San Francisco. I keep dropping into French. You just poke me when I do it. And about—her——” Mr. Vanton broke off, seeming to find the exact words difficult. Then he went on: “You see, it isn’t anything. She likes to hear me talk about France and San Francisco and she’s learning a little French. And—there’s nothing to it, except that I don’t know any one here and she’s company.”
A doubt deep in Mr. Lupton found expression. “I s’pose she won’t want anything to do with me after this.”
“Iwon’t tell her,” asserted the other boy. Hehesitated, then said: “Tommy, you know she thinks an awful lot of you. And, anyway, she’s got to decide for herself.”
To this mature and final view old, young Mr. Lupton assented. “Ofcourse! I guess it’s not how we feel about her, but howshefeels. Well, I don’t care if I do,” concluded Mr. Lupton, recklessly, taking one of Mr. Vanton’s cigarettes. He lit it, finding the flavour much unlike a pipe of cornsilk. It was not his, however, to pronounce the taste inferior in the face of the world’s judgment. Tommy puffed and felt a strange sense of elevation. “That was a dandy fight you put up,” he conceded. “Say, where did you get all that stuff? Will you show me how?” Mr. Vanton agreed. “I’ve forgotten a lot,” he confessed. “I used to have a Japanese wrestler when I was a kid in San Francisco, and later I had some lessons in Paris.” Mr. Lupton had ceased to listen, however. The curing of Turkish tobacco was suddenly distasteful to him. After a while he apologized: “You pretty well knocked me out,” and managed an admirable smile. They walked back to Blue Port together and Tommy did not even wince at an allusion by the shy-eyed Mr. Vanton to the fact that Mr. Vanton had a longing to become a writer some day. “I scribble a lot now. I even write verse,” explained Mr. Vanton, his innocent brown eyes glancing for a moment into Tommy’s more worldly blue ones. Tommy did not smile or shout. His allegiance to the new friendshipwas complete and unequivocal; and besides, there was coming into his mind a recognition of certain impalpable things which a girl always fell for and which he, Tommy Lupton, had not to offer. Travel, a foreign language, manners that were polite without being stuck-up, an ability to talk, and a gift of expression; a sort of good looks, too, in spite of the snub nose and the pallor; sophistication extending to the consumption of Turkish cigarettes; and a knack of writing poetry. Tommy, who ached not a little, felt a spiritual depression. What had he to offer Mermaid in comparison with these endowments? He had a good spirit, however; he was a sport and quite ready to exclaim, “May the best man win!” And Guy had won in a fair fight, and he and Guy were friends.
A feeling that school was intolerable crept over young Mr. Lupton. He longed to be with his father at the Coast Guard Station on the beach where, in the fortunate event of a shipwreck, he might alone and single-handed save life.
None of these thoughts seemed to fill the mind of Guy Vanton, who was talking desultorily about San Francisco and Telegraph Hill and the Presidio and the Mission; Paris, boating on the Seine, and streets with meaningless French names. The two boys parted in front of the Vanton house, guarded by tall evergreens, a ship stranded in a forest of Christmas trees. To and fro on the veranda, walking with short steps and heavytread, paced Captain Vanton, a mysterious Santa Claus wearing enormous sidewhiskers.
The way in which Richard Hand senior came to go to Keturah Smiley for money was this: The affairs of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, though generally prosperous, required, at certain seasons, ready money. And despite his $20,000, now considerably grown, Richard Hand could not always put his fingers on it. He had little use for banks. He paid doctor’s bills for babies at about eight per cent., equipped young married couples at as high as sixteen per cent.—for had they not the rest of their lives to pay it off in?—and buried people at an average rate of twelve per cent. This was good business.
He had got all Blue Port under his thumb except Keturah Smiley. It irked him to see walking along Main Street the tall, stiff figure of the only woman who had ever turned him down on a business proposition. He would go over, speculatively, the character, disposition, and probable fortune of his lost sister-in-law.
She owned a good deal of land. Richard Hand did not love land, but this was good land, in one large tract, reaching from the South Country Road to the bay. The larger part was high ground, partly wooded. Through the centre of it flowed Hawkins Creek. Summercottages, the creek being dredged as a boat basin, or, with a spur of track, a factory site?
When he saw Keturah Smiley he explained, with a good deal of tiresome detail, the affairs of the Blue Port Bivalve Company.
“I won’t put a cent in it,” Keturah told him.
“I don’t ask you to. I don’t ask you to,” Mr. Hand explained, soothingly. “I know how women feel about such things. ’Tirely right, too, ’tirely right. But it’s a good company and in good shape. Only we need money in hand to lease more oyster beds to p’vide for expanding business. Just $5,000 would set us right.”
“Five thousand shucks! I wouldn’t trust you with five cents!”
“Well, maybe you’d trust Horace Hollaby. I’ll pledge the leases with him as security.”
Keturah thought it over. There could be no question of Judge Hollaby’s honesty. A $5,000 mortgage coming due in six months was certain to be paid. Meantime, the bank would let her have the money. There would be no profit in it, of course, but curiously enough, for once she was not thinking of that. She was thinking of an interview many years ago, and of how she would love to hurt this man.
A desire to pay him off surprised and dominated her. She did not see in the least how it was to be done, but if it was to be done this entrance into business relationswith him was necessary and would constitute, in some way not now clear, the first step.
“You take the leases up to Judge Hollaby. I’ll go over them with him, and if they’re all right you go to him and get the money,” she directed.
And then she thought—hard.
Keturah Smiley was no fool. When the leases of the oyster beds were made out they were made out in her name, and the Blue Port Bivalve Company had exactly nothing to do with the transaction. Judge Hollaby, purely in his capacity as Miss Smiley’s lawyer, attended to the matter. Purely as Miss Smiley’s lawyer he attended to the details of a loan of $5,000 by Miss Smiley to Richard Hand. Solely as a man, an oldish fellow who had seen a good deal of human nature and knew both parties in the case, he wondered what would happen next.
He had not long to wait. The oyster beds were not extensive, but they were the richest in that part of the Great South Bay. Keturah Smiley, deserting Judge Hollaby for the first time in her life, went to a Patchogue lawyer and formed with him the Luscious Oyster Corporation.
The Luscious Oyster Corporation took over the leases of the oyster beds held by Keturah Smiley and took an option on a large part of the Smiley land. ThePatchogue lawyer held that indiscretion was sometimes the better part of valour. He was very, very indiscreet; he was deliberately and extensively indiscreet. And the world that cared about Blue Port oysters soon knew all the plans and purposes of the Luscious Oyster Corporation.
It would build a large factory on Hawkins Creek. Arrangements for special railway trackage were being made. There was plenty of capital back of the new corporation. It had the rights to a new and hitherto unannounced process for making several first-class products from oyster shells. Its oysters, the best, the fattest, the most succulent in all the Great South Bay, would be shipped, opened, in sanitary containers with a distinctive label and carried in refrigerator cars. The shells would be turned over to the factory where, aside from certain novelties and trinkets and toys, vast numbers of them would be used in the composition of a new kind of cement for floors in office buildings and for roofing.
This cement was superior to anything yet discovered for these two purposes, and possibly for others—experimentation with it was still going on. As a roofing it was clean, smooth, of an attractive dull white finish which could be tinted to any desired shade. It was absolutely tight and waterproof and noiseless! The hardest shower, striking upon it, was inaudible. As a flooring the cement had all these advantages and several others besides. It could be flushed with water,and if wiped only partly dry would dry quickly by atmospheric absorption. Footsteps could hardly be heard upon it. If left white it reflected artificial light and enhanced the illumination of the room; moreover, it was, because of its whiteness, next to impossible to lose anything upon it. Tinted, it matched any rug or floor covering. And it was tremendously durable. Prolonged tests with hard substances scuffing continuously over a sample of the cement had not worn away the surface perceptibly, but should it wear away, the texture of the cement was uniform throughout. The worn spot would look exactly like the rest of the floor.
No stock was for sale.
This last announcement filled with incredulity the dismayed Richard Hand, reading the newspapers and gnashing his teeth which were not so well preserved as Keturah Smiley’s. There must be stock for sale! There always was, in a thing like this. What was the use of all this puffing if it was not to unload stock on unsuspecting purchasers? Still, this piece of canniness did not help Mr. Hand along mentally.Hedidn’t want the worthless stock. He wanted those oyster beds; and most particularly he wanted this talk about the Luscious Oyster Corporation, its plans, its purposes, its enterprise, and its prospective glory stopped—absolutely stopped. It was hurting the business of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, and if unchecked would hurt it still more.
He went to see Keturah.
“Unfair?” snapped Miss Smiley, answering Mr. Hand’s principal accusation. “When did you ever take up the little problems of fairness, Dick Hand? Besides, I have nothing to do with it. I am not the Luscious Oyster Corporation, and sha’n’t be. I’ve merely sub-leased some oyster beds to them and given them an option on a piece of land. Go see Mr. Brown. He’s doing the talking.”
She went to the door with him. “Mind you’re ready with that money when it’s due,” she admonished him.
Mr. Hand was ready neither with money not a retort. He repaired to the office of Mr. Brown, the Patchogue lawyer.
“Absolutely true, every word of it, Mr. Hand,” said Lucius Brown, bringing his right fist against the palm of his left hand. “Ab-so-lute-ly true! No stock for sale. Patents all right. Samples over there on the desk. Tests whenever you’d like to see them.”
“I don’t care for your samples and tests,” snarled old Mr. Hand, showing how bad his teeth were. “What do you want to quit this nonsense?”
“What do you mean?” inquired the younger man, suddenly grave.
“How much money?” shouted Richard Hand, his fingers closing and unclosing. He trembled with rage.The face of the other man suddenly assumed a dark and menacing expression.
“Is this a bribe, Mr. Hand?”
“Call it what you like. I want you should shet up,” answered the caller, doggedly. “Only question is, how much will you take to shet up this fool’s talk?”
Mr. Brown’s face mirrored mixed emotions.
“You’re making a serious mistake, Mr. Hand, when you address me that way,” he informed the miser. “You are badly advised when you talk about paying me money to ‘shet up.’ If you want to make a business proposition to buy the leases of oyster beds held by the Luscious Oyster Corporation and our option on Miss Smiley’s land, I am here to receive it.”
Richard Hand reflected. His crafty glance travelled out of the window and across the street. As if she were there precisely to focus his thoughts at this moment, Keturah Smiley, with Mermaid beside her, walked along the opposite side of the thoroughfare bent on some enterprise of shopping. She was very straight, as usual; her shoulders, thrown squarely back, were inexpressibly odious in the sight of the drooping Mr. Hand. Even more odious was the relaxation of her severe face as she turned to answer some question the girl beside her had been asking. Mr. Hand made up his mind quickly.
“I don’t want none o’ your patents nor samples nor stock,” he declared in a surly and savage tone. “I’llbuy those leases of you for just what they cost me—$5,000.” A thought stunned him. Then he raised his voice almost to a scream.
“Here,” he cried, “what am I buying back my own property for? Them leases is mine. It’s a swindle!”
Mr. Brown seemed interested. A thin foam appeared on Richard Hand’s lips.
“I borrowed $5,000 from Keturah Smiley to lease those beds,” he shouted. “That fool Hollaby makes out the leases in her name. Makes out a note for ninety days for $5,000, my note, and gives it t’ her. Hands me the money and I pay for the leases. I—why, Iownthose leases. Give ’em back, you robber, give ’em back!”
“Moderate your language or I’ll throw you out of here and down the stairs,” Lucius Brown advised the old man. “Don’t talk robbery or swindling in this office. Now see here, let’s see just what this is. You borrowed $5,000 of Miss Smiley to lease these beds. But the leases were made out in her name. Well, then, man, everything depends upon your understanding with Keturah Smiley. Can’t you see that there are two separate transactions? Can’t you see that it was no concern of hers what you did with $5,000 she lent you? The owners of those beds got their money. And you got $5,000 on your personal note. Did Judge Hollaby conceal from you the fact that the leases were being made out to Miss Smiley?”
“No,” groaned Richard Hand.
“Then there’s nothing more to say,” finished the lawyer. “You put yourself in her hands. Has she broken faith? Did she ever promise you in word or writing any money or other valuable consideration for those leases? No? Was there any verbal understanding with you respecting them?”
“I told her I’d pledge ’em with Judge Hollaby, but when they were drawn she insisted they be made out to her,” Mr. Hand explained. He was dazed. “She threatened to back out at the last moment. She—she didn’t exactly promise anything. She said they must be leased to her. She said she’d lend me $5,000 on my note of hand.”
“As nearly as I can make out,” observed Lucius Brown, “Miss Smiley talked little and made no engagements. You can’t prove anything by what she said, and you can’t prove anything by what she thought. You might succeed in proving your own lack of brains; in fact, you have satisfied me that you haven’t any.”
Mr. Hand said no more. With a look of actual agony on his face he turned and drooped away in the direction of the door. But with the tenacity of a drowning man—drowning in grief, rage, mortification, and dismay—he clutched at a straw. Pausing at the doorway of the lawyer’s office he took a half step back.
“But—now—there’s that option on the Smiley tract,” he stammered. “I might buy that. I’vebeen thinking for a long time of buying a likely piece of land. How long’s that option for, and how much would you want for it?”
Mr. Brown considered. “Twenty thousand dollars,” he said, finally. Mr. Hand, recoiling, sneered.
“Twenty thousand! Nonsense! Why, the land itself ain’t worth more’n ten. I’d be buying it twice over.”
“Well, it seems to be a passion with you to buy things twice over,” said the lawyer, reflectively. “It’s an option to buy only, and must be exercised in six months, otherwise it is forfeit. But you must consider that in buying this option you practically do away with the Luscious Oyster Corporation. All our plans are predicated upon dredging Blue Port oysters from a few beds and preparing and shipping them from this nearest available site, working up the shells for commercial purposes. If you buy our option we cannot go on. There is no other site, and there are no other beds except the free beds, unsuitably located for our purpose and yielding inferior oysters. You might as well buy our capital stock, patent rights, and everything, lock, stock, and barrel, as buy that option. Naturally we have to ask a high price for it, even if we only paid $1,000 to get it.”
“You figure your assets, outside the option, at $19,000,” deduced Richard Hand. “Option, $1,000; leases of beds, $5,000; patents and prospects andlawyer’s fees”—here he sneered—“$14,000. I’m to pay you $20,000 and then pay Keturah Smiley $5,000 more for part of that $20,000 worth.”
“See here, Mr. Hand,” said the lawyer, earnestly. He changed his tone to one of warning persuasion. “I have no doubt that when the time comes Miss Smiley will refuse to take any money on that note for $5,000, preferring to keep the lease of the oyster beds. Mr. Hand,” and Lucius Brown’s voice had a ring in it, “this is a dead serious proposition. The Luscious Oyster Corporation, which honours me by misspelling my first name, is no joke. Everything that I have said about it can be substantiated and will be. Every prediction I have made will be verified. What that will mean to the Blue Port Bivalve Company and to you personally I can’t say, because I don’t know and I don’t care. But this much I do know: if you buy anything from us you will not pay too high a price for it, and you will pay for it only once. What you don’t buy you will go without. We purpose to go ahead with our plans and do not expect to be molested; but if you are looking for a fight you can get it right here.”
Richard Hand was facing a man younger than himself, of greater intelligence and better education, a man trained in the law who presumably knew exactly what he could do, and when and how—and how much. There was no knowing what was behind him. It might be one of the banks, Richard Hand reflected. It might be (ashudder) rich New Yorkers; capitalists that you read about. The young man named no names, but this only enhanced the dread stirring in Richard Hand’s mind. The unknown is fearful.
If the Luscious Oyster Corporation once got started it very likely spelled the ruin of the Blue Port Bivalve Company. It would break the monopoly he had so carefully and laboriously built up, take away from him the little czardom he had created, and leave him a poor man.
But $20,000! He was worth, now, more than that. Not somuchmore, though. It would take away from him exactly the sum with which he had started operations in Blue Port; it would put him back where he had been then. He would have enough left to keep him out of the poorhouse.... Either that or a life—and—death grapple, with the loss of every cent he had!
There was a sort of mist before his eyes as he stood in Lucius Brown’s office. He had never been so terrified in his life. A pain that had arisen in the back of his head troubled him. He seemed to be on fire, all aching; and the next moment he was cold, his head swam, and he felt near to nausea. Gradually every other feeling but the one of fear left him—fear and physical pain. His mind, as distinguished from the head that contained it, was numb. He could not think. He heard himself saying:
“I’ll buy. I’ll buy. I’ll buy—everything. Only I must have my note back. Keturah Smiley must giveme my note back.” He began to whimper like a little child. “My note, give me back my note! It’s $5,000. Five—thousand—dollars.”
Lucius Brown turned away in a sort of pity, which was for the man’s physical distress only.
“Come in to-morrow and I will have things ready for you,” he said, sitting down at his desk and leaving his caller to get out as well as he might.
And so it came about that Richard Hand, as president of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, signed a contract whereby the Blue Port Bivalve Company bought the capital stock of the Luscious Oyster Corporation, with all rights, leases, options, patents, etc., etc., held by the said corporation; in consideration whereof the company aforesaid agreed to pay and deliver to the said corporation the sum of $20,000—of which $1,000 was payable in cash on the signing of the contract, and the remaining $19,000 was payable in instalments as thereinafter set forth.
With a copy of this agreement, Lucius Brown handed to Richard Hand the note for $5,000. In the street Richard Hand suddenly stopped, pulled this note from his pocket, and with frenzied fingers tore it to shreds.
“Damn you!” he sobbed.
The relation of Keturah Smiley to the events in Lucius Brown’s office was fairly simple; at least, she andMr. Brown seemed to find it so. They met later in the day. Miss Smiley was unaccompanied.
“Now about this money,” she said, in her most decided tones. “Most of it must go to Hosea Hand. It will be the sum Dick Hand withheld from him, with interest at 6 per cent. for more’n a quarter of a century. If Hosea knows where it came from he won’t take it,” she told Mr. Brown with a grin. “Fix it up. Left him by a cousin several thousand dollars removed.
“I’ll take the $1,000 for the option on my land and run the risk Dick Hand’ll exercise it. He hasn’t enough money left forthat. How much do you want?”
Mr. Brown, without affecting embarrassment, named a fee.
“Too little,” Keturah commented. “I have, besides the money for the option, $5,000 for the leases, the money I lent that old fox. That’s $6,000. I figure it’ll take $12,000 to set Hosea right. That leaves $2,000. Take it. You deserve all of it. I’m not saying you don’t deserve more. It’s worth that to me to take the hair and some of the hide off that man.”
“About the patents, Miss Smiley?” Lucius Brown suggested.
“I’m not forgetting them,” answered Keturah. “But they didn’t cost me anything and I don’t want anything for them. I once fed and housed a crazy inventor—that is, he was crazy some ways but his inventions seem to be all right. He left ’em to me forhis keep and out of gratitude, maybe. Anyway, I’ve had ’em, along with other odds and ends, these many years. I saw enough to convince me that they were worth something; so did you. Just how much I don’t know; I was never one to monkey with those things. But it won’t hurt Richard Hand to part with a few thousands for them. They’re all in good shape and order. If he goes ahead and makes a mint o’ money with them I’ll be sorry!”
“He hasn’t the necessary capital,” said Brown.
“And he can’t get it,” finished Miss Smiley. “And he has no more nerve than a hen crossing the road. It takes a young man to do those things. Some day that boy of his might make something out of them—if he’s got any stuff in him besides the Hand meanness!” she concluded, thoughtfully.
“I don’t know why I’m so generous with Dick Hand,” she continued, after a moment. “Twelve thousand dollars of this money represents an accumulated sum unrighteously withheld from his brother. Two thousand dollars represents your fee. That’s fourteen thousand—and for it he is getting patents that may be worth ten times that. But we had to give him something,” she said, half humorously. “I wish I had a little less conscience so’s to use him as he’s used others!”
A knock sounded on the door. Mr. Brown called out, “Come in,” and Mermaid entered. She wore a dark green tailored suit, and her skirts had lengthened. Herabundant coppery red hair had been “put up,” and she looked an astonishingly mature young lady. The three freckles remained in place and the dimples had deepened.
“Aunt Keturah,” she said, using a new form of address, “time to go home! Dickie Hand is outside waiting for me. Have you heard the news? His father told Dickie and his mother that he’d broken a tooth and lost all his money. Must have been his wisdom tooth,” surmised the girl as Miss Smiley rose to go with her.
When Hosea Hand, otherwise and generally Ho Ha, learned through a visit from Lucius Brown that $12,000 had been left him by a cousin he was astounded, happy, and perplexed. For some time he did nothing but treat his friends and acquaintances. He bought Mermaid countless ice cream sodas and Mr. Brown countless cigars, and various others a considerable number of drinks (always taking a cigar himself). Occasionally he got confused in his happiness, as when he asked Mermaid to have a cigar and Lawyer Brown whether he wanted lemon or orange phosphate. His perplexity arose over the cousin whose beneficiary he had so unexpectedly become. Mr. Brown seemed unable to make this end of the wonder suitably clear.
“A fourth or fifth cousin, Hosea,” said the lawyer,carelessly, over the substitute for the phosphate. “She—he—they—I mean, it—was someone you never knew. She—they—had a lot of money. Remembered all the relatives.”
“Well, father and mother both came of large families,” observed Ho Ha. “I must have had a couple dozen cousins. I can’t remember who was fourth and who was fifth among ’em. I don’t know—would you think I might show my appreciation by putting up a nice tombstone to this cousin?”
“Good Lord, certainly not! I mean—I’m sure there will be a suitable memorial,” replied Mr. Brown, slightly choking over the near-phosphate as his mind imaged a tall shaft in honour of Keturah Smiley.
“What was the name?” asked Ho Ha.
“Ke——” began the lawyer, thoughtlessly, caught himself in time, and changed the syllable to the similitude of a sneeze. “Ke-chew! Ke-chew!” He sneezed again, as though an encore might confer verisimilitude. Ho Ha did not appear to suspect the sneeze.
“I s’pose that cussed brother of mine got a share,” Ho Ha meditated aloud. “The wonder is he didn’t get mine, too.”
Mermaid mixed her drinks recklessly, following a pineapple ice cream soda with a raspberry. It was before the day of the more fanciful concoctions or Mermaid would have had a week of sundaes.
“What are you going to do, Uncle Ho?” she inquiredwith the interest that, from a young woman, is always so flattering to a man, even an uncle.
“Oh, I guess I’ll build a little shack on the beach and put the rest in the bank,” Ho Ha told her.
“I didn’t mean what are you going to do with the money, but what are you going to do with yourself?”
Hosea twinkled. “P’raps I’ll marry,” he hinted. “Now if I was only a young man——” He looked at her roguishly.
“It’s never too late to marry,” Mermaid said, between spoonfuls. “But if you’re going to marry you won’t want a shack on the beach—or your wife won’t, which amounts to the same thing.”
Ho Ha nodded repeatedly. “I don’t want to marry the first woman that proposes to me,” he announced with his most sagacious air. “I might advertise, eh?”
They strolled down the street together until they reached Keturah Smiley’s. Mermaid commanded her uncle to enter. Keturah was making a batch of cookies in the kitchen.
“Come in, Hosea,” she said, cordially. “Child, if Dickie Hand comes here this evening, do for goodness’ sake make the boy eat yesterday’s crullers so we can have a taste of these cookies ourselves. I declare, Hosea, I don’t know what my own cake tastes like any longer.”
“I do,” said Ho Ha, looking at her attentively.
“Have one,” said Keturah, slightly flustered by the look he gave her. Could he have learned anything? Ho Ha fell silent a moment, and then after several mouthfuls said: “You were always a great hand for relationships, Keturah. Can you tell me who this cousin was that’s left me some money?”
Miss Smiley faced away from him and began energetically stowing her batch in a cake box.
“I don’t know, Hosea,” she answered. “I never could keep track of your relations.”
“I don’t believe this cousin was a relation,” said Ha Ha. “I never heard of any relations except poor relations. Most likely this was some conscience-stricken person, repenting of evil gains——”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Miss Smiley with an emphasis and a touch of indignation that seemed unnecessary. “She had as clear a conscience as some others, I guess.”
“Oh, so ’twas a woman?” observed Ho Ha, innocently. “Well, now, that’s funny. I can’t think of anywoman——”
“I didn’t say ’twas a woman,” parried Keturah. “She or he or whoever it was probably had more than she—he—knew what to do with. Left to the next of kin. It’s a common thing.”
“Uncommon common,” agreed Ho Ha somewhat paradoxically. “Happens every day. You read about it in the newspapers. I dare say she, he, or it got theidea while lining the pantry shelves with ’em. What’s money for, anyway, Keturah?”
“Money,” interjected Mermaid, “is to make those who haven’t it want it and those who have it want more.”
“Money,” said Miss Smiley, sententiously, “is to hang on to until you know when to let go.”
“Money,” Ho Ha framed his own definition, “is only to make some other things more valuable.”
“You’re right, Uncle Ho,” Mermaid conceded. “If Dickie Hand’s father—your brother—didn’t have as much money as he has, Dickie would be worth almost nothing to me.”
“Child!” Keturah rebuked her.
“Oh, Aunt Keturah, I don’t mean that I value Dickie for his father’s money,” explained Mermaid, impatiently, “but don’t you see if his father were poor Dickie would be so—sounmanageable. I shouldn’t be able to do athingwith him! But his father’s rather rich, even if he did lose a lot of money a while ago, and I can just make Dickie behave himself by telling him that he can’t possibly get any credit for what he makes of himself because there’s all that money to help him. That makes Dickie simply wild, and he says he’ll be somebody in spite of his father and his money. He gets almost desperate—which is quite necessary,” she added, thoughtfully. “The other day he said, ‘Damn my father’s money! I’ll show you it hasn’t anything todo withme!’ Of course I gave him the—the dickens but I couldn’t help being rather pleased.”
Miss Smiley regarded Mermaid with great sternness, but Ho Ha’s shoulders seemed to move queerly. Finally he choked.
“If my cooking chokes you, Hosea, you’d better not eat it,” Keturah said with considerable dignity.
“I beg your pardon, Keturah,” was the humble reply.
Mermaid had been eyeing the two as if a surprising notion had just occurred to her. Now she slipped on a jacket and started to leave the house, “I have to see Dickie,” she explained to Miss Smiley, “and get him mad enough so he’ll study to-night and pass his chemistry examination to-morrow.” She slipped out.
Left alone, the man and the woman said nothing for a while. Miss Smiley found various supper preparations to occupy her. Ho Ha watched her with the air of a person who wanted to say something but found it difficult to choose the right words. At length, “Keturah,” he got out, “do you remember a time when money made trouble between us?”
Miss Smiley did not answer him. She did not look at him.
“Of course you do,” Ho Ha resumed, undisturbed, apparently, by the silence. “Now what I would like to know is whether the thing that made us trouble can’t be made to mend it?”
Still she did not answer nor appear to heed him.
“I know very well,” said Ho Ha, as if to the furniture, and nodding at the grandfather’s clock which stood at one end of the large living room, “I know well that my fourth cousin or fifth cousin or whoever it was that left me this money left it to me because it belonged to me. I suspect Cousin What’s-the-Namegotthe money because it belonged to me, and got it from the person who owed it to me expressly to put in my hands. I’m obliged to Cousin Who’s-This as much for trying to do the right thing as for getting me the money. And I feel, somehow, that Cousin You-Can-Guess-Whom thought less about the money than about something else. A cousinly sort of a cousin, but real cousins don’t act that way. Real cousins let each other fend for themselves. But, anyway, that’s no matter, one way or t’other. The main thing is to set things right. The money was only good to show something else that was worth a good deal more than the money—and that was a good feeling. A—astrongandenduringfeeling,” emphasized Ho Ha. “A feeling that’s there’s only one word for, and the word doesn’t express it. Keturah,” he exclaimed, getting up and approaching the woman who kept her back so persistently toward him, “you and I aren’t young any longer. We—we were cheated out of something, or else we cheated ourselves out of something, and it was a good deal. But, Keturah, it isn’t all gone. We didn’t lose everything. We made a mistake, a terrible mistake, but it was only a mistake;it wasn’t an ’ntentional wrong either of us did the other. Keturah, can’t—can’t we just salvage some happiness out of the wreckage?” He was standing close to her now.
Suddenly he put his arm awkwardly and eagerly about her. She had raised her hands to her face, and as she took them away he could see she was crying....
Out of doors, Mermaid, without any definite knowledge of what was going on inside, strained her diplomacy to the utmost to keep young Mr. Hand from entering the yard and passing the living-room windows and even, like as not, entering in quest of food to sustain his strength until supper. Dickie was a tall, thin, light-haired boy with a blond skin of singular freshness and brown eyes of singular alterations. Just now they showed a puzzled impatience with Mermaid’s whims.
“Will you go to the dance with me this evening?” he demanded.
Mermaid shook her head. “I want you to walk up street with me,” she announced.
“But why?” interrogated the young man. “I’ve just come from there, and you say you don’t want anything.”
“I want a serious talk with you,” corrected Mermaid. “How would you prepare H2SO4, Dickie?”
“Hang chemistry!” ejaculated Mr. Hand. “Wait a moment till I get a cookie.” He started into the yard. Mermaid made a short dash and checked him.
“Nothing but yesterday’s crullers,” she stated.
“Well, a cruller, then,” grumbled Dickie.
Mermaid plucked at his sleeve.
“Dick Hand,” she informed him, “you must not go in that house, now. Aunt Keturah has a—a caller.”
“Huh. I don’t suppose he’ll bite me.”
“Well, I will,” the exasperated young woman retorted. “I’ll not speak to you or go to a party with you, if you don’t come along this minute!” Then a purely feminine inspiration seized her. “Do as you like,” she said, with excellent indifference, “I daresay I can get Guy Vanton or Tommy——”
Leaving the sentence unfinished, she controlled herself with an effort and half turned away. Dickie forgot the need of sustenance. Intolerable feelings prompted the young man to fall in at her side. Together they marched solemnly northward. Said Mr. Hand: “Say, Mermaid, I—it—you——”
“They—we—him. Yes, Dickie?”
“You—don’t you think we might become engaged?”
“Why—I suppose we might, some day, Dickie.”
“To-day. I’m going on eighteen and you’re sixteen. Lots of people are engaged for years—as long as three years. I’d be twenty-one and you nineteen.”
“Yes, Dickie; when you’re twenty-one, I’ll be nineteen.”
“But, Mermaid, don’t you—don’t youcare?”
“If it would help you pass that chemistry exam, I’d become engaged to you right away, Dickie,” sighed Mermaid. “Of course I care. If you flunk that you can’t enter technical school or anywhere else.”
“Oh,damnthe chemistry!” roared Mr. Hand. “Exam, Damn!”
“That’s a short poem; remarkable poem,” Mermaid commented with some coldness. “Full of—full of emotion. Conforms to Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ But you’re not tranquil enough, Dickie. I don’t think I want to be engaged to any one who swears regularly.”
“Beg your pardon, ’m sure,” Mr. Hand mumbled, sulkily. “I won’t say it again. Go on, don’t mind me! Go on, go with Tommy. He’s almost twenty. OrMisterVanton, who is twenty-two.I’monly about eighteen.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and said loftily: “If you don’t mind.” Lifting his cap, he inclined his head and moved away.
Mermaid looked after him uneasily. Suddenly she called out, “Dickie!”
He returned, but with a certain effect of distant politeness.
“Come over after supper and I’ll quiz you on the chemistry best I can,” she offered.
He relaxed somewhat. “All right,” he agreed, magnanimously. “I’ll walk back with you,” he went on, as if uttering an after-thought.
Mermaid acquiesced. As they entered the yard they met Ho Ha coming out of the house. He stopped, looking at them happily and mysteriously, and propounded a riddle to Mermaid.
“If an uncle of yours,” he said, “were to marry your aunt, what relation would that make your uncle’s nephew to your aunt’s niece?”
“Friends once removed,” said Mermaid. “Oh, Uncle Ho, I’m tickled to death!”
At sixteen Mermaid was not adequately to be described by Longfellow’s lines about the maiden