“I’d like to,” I answered, to cover my embarrassment. “But I do understand you. You mean that her influence would remain.”
“I mean more than that.”
I would have liked nothing better than to have started the judge talking on “natural magic,” but just for this one afternoon it seemed as if we ought to keep to real estate. If I lived here, I could come back and talk to him again on psychic subjects.
“You think, then, that Mattie has some claim on the place?”
“No legal claim, no. But there is claims and claims. The claims on parents that children have, and the claims on children that parents have. And the claims of them that are not the true children of their parents, but adopted. Maybe not legally; but morally, yes. If people take children and bring them up, like Captain Jeremiah Hawes done, that makes them have some obligation toward them, doesn’t it? And then there are the claims that married people have on each other, and the people that ain’t married, and I sometimes think that the people that ain’t legally married have more claim on each other than people who are, just on account of that. It puts it up to the individual. And if the individual fails, it is more of a moral breakdown than if the law fails. For the law is only responsible to man, but man, he is responsible to God. Do you follow me?”
“All the way,” I said.
The judge got up and spit over the rail of the porch again.
“As I was sayin’, Mattie ain’t got no legal claim to the House of the Five Pines, and I could put her out in a minute if I was a mind to. I expect I could have done it five years ago, when the New Captain died, only it seemed the town would have to take care of her all the rest of her natural days. We’ve saved five years’ board on her at the poor-farm now, and it looks as if she might live quite a while longer. Plenty of ’em get to be a hundred around here, and she ain’t over seventy; not any older than I am, likely. At least, she didn’t used to be when she was young!” He sighed, as if suddenly feeling the weight of his days. “And the town, as a town, don’t hanker after the responsibility of taking on Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith.’”
“Why do they call her that?” interrupted Ruth. “Is that her name?”
“That’s as good a name as any for a person who ain’t got one of her own. Charles T. Smith was the vessel old Captain Hawes was sailin’ in, the time he picked her up out of the sea.”