Mermaid. Grant M. Overton
know he’s ten years older than me.”
Cap’n Smiley gave an ejaculation of surprise. There had been some unfairness of dealing by Richard Hand with Hosea Hand after their father’s death, but the keeper did not know exactly what it was. The Blue Port story had it that Richard Hand had wanted his brother to stay and help work the farm, and Ho Ha had run off to sea instead. Back of this lay a tale of the father’s will. This had left the dead man’s estate to be divided equally between the sons. Richard, however, was to have the farm intact; and he was to effect such a settlement as would assure Hosea of his share in cash for whatever use he wanted to make of it. The father’s idea had been simple: the younger boy hated the farm and wanted an education; this money would help him get it; after that he must fend for himself.
So much Cap’n Smiley knew; so much, indeed, everybody knew. The rest no one appeared exactly to know, but the general impression was that Richard, as executor, had wound up his father’s affairs to suit himself.
“What happened?” Cap’n Smiley asked himself as he picked away, giving only absent attention to Mermaid’s chatter. “Knowing Richard Hand as I do, I suspect Hosea never got a cent of money and never will. I can make a pretty good guess that after paying the debts there was nothing left but the farm. To settle fairly with the boy, Dick Hand would have had to borrow money by mortgaging the place—and I don’t see him doing that!
“Humph!” concluded the keeper to himself. “Fourteen-year-old boy with no one to look out to see he got his rights. No lawyer had a hand in that estate! Dick delays the settlement; in the meantime, his young brother gets restless. Dick treats him badly; insists the boy stay and help work the farm; Hosea runs away. Dick winds up the estate; represents himself willing to settle with his brother but unable to; don’t know his whereabouts. Ho Ha away for years; when he comes back he tells his brother to go to the devil!”
Mermaid was conducting a dialogue with the wronged Hosea.
“Uncle Ho!” she cried, and Cap’n Smiley was reminded of the “Land, ho!” of the sailor. “Wasn’t that a queer way for David to deal with the Ph’listines?” Mrs. Biggles read the Bible Sunday mornings to her Henry and Mermaid.
“Why,” inquired Mermaid, “do you suppose he spanked them?”
“Who spanked?”
“David spanked the Ph’listines,” explained Mermaid. Ho Ha and the keeper eyed each other and then looked perplexedly at the red-haired mite. “How do you know he spanked the Philistines?” ventured the keeper.
“Why, it says he smote—that means struck—them ‘hip and thigh,’ ” she replied. “I’ll be awful glad when I can read about it myself. David threw a stone at Gollyath and killed him. Maybe a good spanking was all Gollyath needed.”
“Maybe,” assented Cap’n Smiley. Ho Ha was speechless. The keeper looked at him. “See your uncle, Mermaid,” he directed. “Living up to his name, isn’t he?”
The child caught the contagion of laughter and bubbled with it herself. “Do tell me what’s so funny, Uncle Ho,” she begged. “Please do!”
“A ghost just told me a joke,” said Ho Ha, looking at her with twinkling eyes. Mermaid was alert and excited at once. She believed in ghosts, not only because she was seven years old but because she lived on the Great South Beach where ghosts are natural and both respectable and respected. She clamoured to hear the joke. Ho Ha considered. He did not know as he ought to tell her; perhaps the ghost would not like that; it might want to tell Mermaid itself.
“Could you tell me what ghost it is?” the youngster besought him. “Was it the Duneswoman?”
“No,” Ho Ha answered. “It was one of the pirates. One of Kidd’s men. One of those fellows with gold earrings and black whiskers. Well—I don’t know’s there’s any harm in my telling you. He said if Kidd had been spanked proper as a boy——” Ho Ha stopped, as if no more need be said, and shook his head with a regretful air. Mermaid remarked:
“Do you suppose, Uncle Ho, that Mrs. Biggles spanks Mr. Biggles?”
“No doubt she has to sometimes,” agreed Ho Ha, with perfect seriousness.
Mermaid emptied her apron of a pint of plums. Her mind slipped back to ghosts.
“Dad,” she asked Cap’n Smiley, “does the Duneswoman know everything about the beach?”
“I think she does, pretty nearly,” the keeper told her. “Do you see much of her?”
“Only her head and arms. Sometimes she reaches out her arm to me.”
“I meant, do you see her often?”
“Oh, yes! Except when I’m with Mrs. Biggles. Mrs. Biggles says she never has seen her. She says I ought not to see her and mustn’t pay any ’tention to her,” Mermaid informed him.
“Perhaps that’s because Mrs. Biggles never sees her and doesn’t know how nice she is.”
“Just what I said.” Mermaid bit a plum and made a wry face. She wanted to ask Dad more about the Duneswoman.
That was a ghost only he and she had seen—a lovely Face and Arm that sometimes floated for an instant on the dark summer ocean, looked toward you … and was gone.
VIII
A golden October when, for days, the sun shone and the beach was veiled with faintly coloured mists; when the crack of duck hunters’ guns came from over the bay; when the ocean advanced on the smoothly sanded shore in long and majestic curves, so that to stand upon the dunes and look at it was like looking down a flight of steps of boundless width. … The Atlantic made itself into a glittering staircase leading straight to the sun.
October! Driftwood was gathered from the beach for burning in the Biggles’s fireplace where it snapped and was consumed by the green and blue and parti-coloured flames. Before the singing and rainbow fire Mermaid often knelt at dusk. Mrs. Biggles would spread a slice of bread for her with jelly made from the beach plums gathered a month earlier. There is a wild-woodish, bitter-sweet flavour peculiar to beach plum jelly and preserves. Mermaid loved it. To taste it while dreaming before the magic fire was delicious beyond words.
October! It began to be sharp o’ nights. The men at the station rolled themselves in blankets, as they slept without sheets in an unheated attic. Only Mermaid had a regular bed with sheets and pillow cases and a gay comforter. Stormy days began, and long, wonderful evenings about the blazing stove in the station’s big room. Cap’n Smiley read aloud and told stories; the men asked questions and spun yarns. Mermaid, curled up in a corner, listened eagerly, hardly daring to speak lest the hour be noted and they pack her off to bed.
Wild stories, weird stories. Cap’n Smiley is speaking.
“Ah,” says the keeper. “There was that steamship which broke her machinery some way off here and could only move on reversed propellers. She backed all the way from here to Sandy Hook. And there was that ship with the cargo of salt. When she came ashore it salted the ocean; the water was a little brinier for days. And we got aboard as she lay on the bar at low tide, the sea having gone down. Not a soul. All swept overboard and lost. We peered down a hatch, then I went down all alone. I had an awful setback when, on my moving some sacks, out bobbed a dead man staring straight at me. Dead, and propped up in the salt. But the worst was the wreck of the Farallone. Some of you weren’t here then and as for you, Joe”—he addressed the youngest surfman—“you hadn’t been born. The Farallone. Yes.
“She came ashore on a night when you couldn’t see your upraised hand. She struck hard on the outer bar and broached to in the trough of the sea. It was freezing cold. We saw—nothing. Up there on the dunes we fired shot after shot, sending out line