“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 the front 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 ship China 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 appearance in 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 of them 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 relationships that sprang out of her rescue from the surf, waggled his head.