Ruth smiled then at the look Caleb gave me. It was as much as to say that he had suspected I was right along, and that now I had admitted it.
“She only appears to us to act,” my friend defended me, “as any one might who had always lived in one place and felt she had a right to stay there. Especially, because she is out of contact with life and does not know any longer how to take it up. There is nothing weak-minded in the course she is pursuing.”
“No mind at all,” Caleb contradicted her.
But there was something important that I wanted to find out.
“Why,” I asked, “didn’t the New Captain leave Mattie anything in his will?”
Caleb cocked one eye at the thing that he was whittling.
“He was past the place.”
“You mean that there was a time when he would have left her his money?”
“There was a time when he would have married her—only his mother wouldn’t let him.”
Somehow the idea of the rugged Captain Hawes, a sailor in his youth and a terrifying figure in his old age, a recluse around whom strange tales had been woven by his townspeople, did not seem like a man who could have been prevented by his mother from marrying an orphan girl.