“Fifty, maybe. The house was put up in the first place by ships’ carpenters from Boston, and there’s some is still jealous of that. Still, when the New Captain added to it, seems as if he might have hired folks around here. Instead of that he was so stingy that he built it all himself, him and Mattie. He had her working around there just like a man. Pretty near killed her carrying lumber. I’d ’a’ seen myself hammerin’ and climbing up and down ladders for any of them Haweses!”
“Did she really do that?”
“She did anything he said. Anything at all! From the time that he used to chase her barefooted in and out of the drying-frames on the shore lot where the cod was spread, she just worshiped him. And what good did it do her? Mis’ Hawes was so set against her that she made her life a torment, trying to keep her busy and away from him.”
“Why wouldn’t she let him marry her?”
“How did you know about that? Oh, you seen Caleb Snow! People that talk all the time has to say something. I bet the judge didn’t mention it!”
“He said that Mattie was picked up out of the sea.”
“Oh, as for that!”
“And that Mrs. Hawes came from Maine.”
“Did he? Well, she did, then. And she always thought there was nothing good enough for her in Star Harbor. There was hardly a family on Cape Cod that she would associate with. Her father was one of them old sea-captains, pirates, I call them, who took slaves up there in his own vessels, and she just naturally had it in her to make Mattie into a slave of her own. She would no more have let her son marry that orphan girl than if she was a nigger. I was a child then myself, and I used to hear her hollerin’ at Mattie. She was bedridden the last six years, and she used to lie by the window, downstairs in the front room, and call out to people passing in the street. Stone deaf, Mis’ Hawes was, and so as she could hear the sound of her own voice she used to shout loud enough to call the hands in off the ships in the harbor. Yes, ma’am, her lightest whisper could be heard all over the bay.”
“Did she live longer than her husband?”