In Great Waters: Four Stories

by Thomas A. Janvier

The girls laughed at that, knowing well what Grace was driving at. But Tess was ready with her answer and whipped back with it: "Well, it's better to tag at a man's heels and he pleased with it than it is to want to tag there and he not letting you—liking a may-pole, maybe, better than a butter-tub, and caring more, maybe, for grace by nature than for Grace by name."

That turned the joke—only it was no joke—on Grace again; and as the girls had not much more liking for her than they had for Tess, seeing that she spoiled what few man-chances Tess left them, they laughed at her as hard as they could laugh.

Grace's slow anger had been getting hotter and hotter in her. That shot of Tess's, and the girls all laughing at her, brought it to a boil.

"Who be'st thou, to open thy ugly mouth to me?" she jerked out, with a squeak in her voice and her blue eyes blazing. "Who be'st thou, anyway? Who knows the father or the mother of thee? Who knows what foul folk in what foul land bore thee? Dog-tag thou may'st, but—mark my words—naught will come of it: because thou'rt not fit for John Heath or for any other honest man to have dealings with—thou rotten upcast of the sea!"

Tess was holding her head high and was scornful-looking when this speech began; but the ending of it, so Mary Benacre told my mother, seemed like a knife in her heart. Her face went a sort of a pasty white, so Mary said; and she seemed to choke, somehow, and put her hand up to her throat in a fluttering kind of way as if her throat hurt her. And then she sort of staggered, and made a grab at the boat she was standing by and leaned against it—looking, so Mary said, as if she was like to die.

"Mayhap now thou'lt keep quiet a bit," Grace said, with her hands on her fat hips and her elbows out; and with that, and a flounce at her, turned away. The other girls, all except Mary, went along with Grace; but not talking, and most of them scared-looking: feeling, like enough, as men would feel standing by at the end of a knife-fight, when one man is down with a cut that has done for him and there is a smell of blood in the air.

Mary staid behind—she was a good sort, was Mary Benacre—and went to Tess and tried to comfort her. Tess didn't answer her, but just looked at her with a pitiful sort of stare out of her black eyes that Mary said was like the look of some poor dumb thing that had no other way of telling how bad its hurt was. And then, rousing herself up, Tess pushed Mary away from her and started for home on a run. Mary did not follow her, but later on she came and told my mother just what had happened and gave her Grace Gryce's words.

It was well that Mary came, that way, and told a clear story about it all. What Tess told—when she came flying into the house and caught my mother around the neck and put her poor head on my mother's breast and went off into a passion of crying there—was such a muddle that my mother knew only that Grace Gryce had said something to her that was wickedly cruel. Tess cried and cried, as if she'd cry the very life out of her; and kept sobbing out that she was a sea upcast, and a nobody's daughter, and that the sea would have done better by her had it drowned her, and that she hoped she'd die soon and be forgotten—until she drove my mother almost wild.

And so it went for a long while with her, my mother petting her and crying over her, until at last—the feel, I suppose, of my mother's warm love for her getting into her poor hurt heart and comforting her—she began to quiet down. Then my mother got her to bed—she was as weak as water—and made a pot of bone-set tea for her; and pretty soon after she'd drunk a cup or two of it she dropped off to sleep. She still was sleeping when Mary Benacre came and told the whole story; and so stirred up my mother's anger—and she was a very gentle-natured woman, my mother was—that it was all she could do, she said afterwards, not to go straight off to Grace Gryce and give her a beating with her own hands.