Mermaid
9781465632470
311 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“NO ONE,” snapped Keturah Smiley, “can play Providence to a married couple.” “Some women can play Lucifer,” retorted her brother. His hoarse but not unmusical voice shook with anger. “I had nothing to do with your wife’s running away,” Keturah Smiley answered. “What is this child you have adopted?” “I have adopted no child,” said Cap’n John Smiley with coldness. “A child was saved from the wreck of the Mermaid and the men at the station have adopted her. The fancy struck them and—I certainly had no objection. It’s—she’s—a girl, a little girl of about six. We don’t know her name. The men are calling her Mermaid after the ship.” Keturah Smiley sniffed. She wrapped the man’s coat she wore more closely about her, and made as if to return to her gardening. Her brother eyed her with a wrathful blue eye. He never saw her that they did not quarrel. He was aware that, deep down, she loved him; he was aware that it was this jealous love of Keturah’s which had caused her to nag the young girl he had married some seven years earlier. Mary Rogers, in Keturah’s eyes, was a silly, thoughtless, flighty person quite unfitted to fill the rôle of John Smiley’s wife and the mother of John Smiley’s children. She must be made to feel this; Keturah had done her best to make her feel it. And there could be no question that the young wife had felt it. So much so that, joined to John Smiley’s long absences on duty at the Coast Guard station on the beach, joined to her loneliness, joined to who knows what secret doubts and anguish, she had disappeared one day some months after their child was born, taking the baby girl with her and leaving no word, no note, no token. And she had never come back. She had never been traced. She might be dead; the child might be dead; no one knew. Of course this was the crowning evidence of the unfitness Keturah Smiley had found in her; but somehow Keturah Smiley did not make that triumphant point before her brother. It is possible that Keturah Smiley who wore a man’s old coat, who drove hard bargains at better than six per cent., whose tongue made the Long Islanders of Blue Port shrink as under a cutting lash—it is possible that Keturah Smiley was just the least bit afraid of her brother. If so she could hardly be said to show it. There was no trace of the stricken conscience in the air with which she always faced him. There was none now. “Well, John,” she said, almost pleasantly, as she hoed her onion bed. “You’re blowing from the southeast pretty strong to-day and you appear to be bringing trouble. I’ll just take three reefs in my temper and listen to what further you have to say.” John Smiley was not heeding her. He had found that there are times in life when it is necessary not to listen if you would keep sane and kind. He was reflecting on the difficulty of his errand. “Keturah,” he asked, off-handedly, “this little girl has got to have some clothes. Do you suppose——” “Perhaps you would like me to adopt her,” his sister interrupted. “No, I thank you, John. As for clothes, I daresay that if you and your men are going to bring up a six-year-old girl the lot of you can get clothes from somewhere.” Do we always torture the things we love? Love and jealousy, jealousy and torture. Cap’n Smiley saw red for a moment; then he turned on his heel and strode down the path and out the gate. He walked up the long main street until he came to the handful of stores at the crossroads. Entering one of the largest he went to the counter where a pleasant-faced woman confronted him. “Oh, Cap’n Smiley!” exclaimed the shopwoman. “Are you all right? Are all the men all right? What a terrible time you havebeen a-having! That ship—she’s pounded all to pieces they say.” The Coast Guard keeper nodded. He began his errand: “I’ve got to get some clothes for a little girl that was saved—only one we got ashore alive except one of the hands. I guess I need a complete outfit for a six-year-old,” he explained.
