“I don’t know what you meant,” said Caleb, “but when I told him to quit shootin’ I meant I was gosh-darned afraid he was goin’ to hit me.”
They continued their argument as they went down the street, and Jasper and I sat and smiled. They were not half so surprised as I thought they would be. They had lived too close to the sea to be much amazed at anything. If we wanted to keep Mattie and take care of her, they had no objections. The ways of city people were inexplicable, but as we had taken the burden of decision off their hands, they were glad to be relieved. The future of Mattie “Charles T. Smith” would not rest with the town council and the town home, nor would her financial needs embarrass the tax-payers. They eased their conscience by saying we would not be bothered very long. Consoling us and congratulating themselves, they went off arguing. It was something, after the trouble of their long evening’s hunt through the woods, to have the glory of spreading the news.
CHAPTER XX
JEZEBEL
“BUT what made her do it?” asked Jasper.
We had gone into the house and prepared a supper, and as it was the first meal either of us had eaten since early morning, we were sitting a long time at the kitchen table. The oil-lamp shed a cosy radiance over the blue china on the red checkered cloth, and a bowl of golden-rod between four brass candlesticks added a touch of festivity to our late repast. We had begun our home-making.
“She wanted to frighten us away,” I answered.
“Do you think she was here, all those weeks before we moved in, after they thought she was drowned?”
“She never left the house, I fancy; she moved into the cellar. You see, Jasper, she always thought the place belonged to her. All her life she had known no other home, no other way of living, except here. She could not allow herself to be evicted, because she had nowhere to go. The New Captain left her nothing to live on, and she had no earning capacity. You heard how those men talked. She would have become an unwelcome public charge, and she had suffered too much from the townspeople to tolerate having them support her. She preferred death.”
“Well, then, why didn’t she really drown herself, instead of just pretending she did?”
“Ah, that is different,” I answered; “that leads us out of practical speculation into the realms of psychology. She was not that kind of person.”