“I have something to answer for in that connection,” her aunt said, and in spite of the harshness with which she spoke, her voice trembled. “I made Mary Smiley, that was Mary Rogers, very unhappy. I thought her unfit to be John’s wife. I—I rubbed it into her that she was unfit. Little, silly, childish, frivolous creature. How much I am to blame for her running away with her baby I don’t know—never shall, I suppose, until the time comes to answer for it.”
“Whatever you said to her, the facts remain,” the girl commented. “Actions not only speak louder than words, they talk the universal language. She ran away.”
“I think John felt that,” said Keturah. “He has a strict sense of justice and she wronged it. It was the child. That cut him to the heart, and no wonder. After five years you were washed ashore. I’ve always believed in miracles since that day.”
Mermaid nodded.
“When you study science, Aunt,” she said, confidingly, “you come to believe in miracles as a matter of course. That is, unless you have one of these impossible minds that thinks a thing more wonderful than the explanation. It’s the explanation of everything that’s really miraculous. For instance, you used to scoff at Dad and myself because we saw ghosts. There was the Duneswoman——”
“You wrote me that it was an effect of phosphor——” Mrs. Hand paused, helplessly.
“Phosphorescence,” supplied Mermaid, “the wonderful glow you see sometimes in sea water. It’s rare as far north as this but very common in the tropics. But to say it is an effect of phosphorescence doesn’t explain it, except to the impossible, narrow little mind. The real explanation lies in the mind of the person seeing it. If it were just a peculiar phosphorescent outline everybody should see it—everybody who was around. Dad and I see it; the others don’t. Do you know why?”
Keturah hesitated, then shook her head.
“It is something in common,” Mermaid told her. “There is, or was, someone who knew us both, and who becomes manifest to us both in that way. It’s like two people seeing the same ghost. Why should the ghost appear in that way? I can’t tell you. Perhaps the person was drowned. Why should the Duneswoman appear to us at all? Perhaps to witness to something. We may never discover what; and then again the day may come when that vision will be the last impalpable evidence necessary to make something clear. Then the Duneswoman may make complete the explanation of a surprising but perfectly ordinary set of facts; and the explanation, and not the facts themselves, will make up the miracle.”
“I guess likely you’re right enough,” surmised Mrs. Hand, “though I’m not sure I follow you all through. I’m a matter-of-fact kind of a person. That’s why any one like Captain Vanton gives me the creeps and gets on my nerves so. I don’t know what he does to that wife of his, or what he has done, but I don’t wonder we never see anything of her. She must be a wreck, living with that man. And he’s ruining that boy.”