Mermaid. Grant M. Overton
He made the absurd mistake of trying to impress his visitor.
“Under entail,” he began to explain, “an estate is so bequeathed that the inheritors cannot bequeath it at their pleasure; the fee is abridged and curtailed——”
An impatient sound escaped Miss Smiley.
“Curtail, if you please,” she said, “your fine-sounding description. As I understand the matter, my aunt left me all her property in and for my lifetime. I am to have the free use of it. I can throw it all in the bay if I like——”
“Except the real estate,” interjected the Judge.
“I daresay I could dam Hawkins creek and flood that,” retorted Keturah, then went on: “I can use every cent of it, spend it, waste it; and if there is nothing left, no one will inherit it.”
“Naturally not,” assented Judge Hollaby.
“Unnaturally,” said his client, sharply. “It would be an unnatural thing to do.”
“Certainly it would,” said her lawyer, nervously. “Not the least in your character.” Some misfortune of accent caught the lady’s ear and she rounded on him quickly.
“What is my character, Judge Hollaby?” she demanded.
Perhaps it was the oysters, perhaps it was Seneca on old age, perhaps it was a sign of old age itself; at any rate, the justice’s mind could not leap gracefully into the breach thus torn in his defences.
“Your character, Miss Smiley?” He tried to express a sense of shock by his intonation.
“I am not loved, I suspect,” Miss Smiley said, ignoring his palpable distress. “I think it very likely there are those who hate me. But if I am not respected in the community it is time I knew it. I am honest and I deal uprightly. I don’t write slanderous letters, like Maria Brand; I don’t cheat, like Jane Horton; I don’t try to improve everybody like that uncommon nuisance of an Errily woman. Nor do I countenance a disgraceful husband, as Amelia Dayton does. You will say that I talk like a Pharisee, ‘holier than thou’ and so forth. Judge Hollaby, if there were more Pharisees it would be a better world! A precious lot of men and women can only walk straight when it’s to outshine their neighbours who are walking crooked!”
Gradually recovering, the lawyer heard Miss Smiley saying:
“I’m not here to preach a sermon, but to get information and some advice. The advice I may take and I may not; the information I’ll certainly take if I can get it out of you.”
She reverted to Keturah Hawkins’s will. “I can do as I please absolutely with the property?”
“Unquestionably. But whatever you leave goes to your brother, if he survives you, and to his children, if he has any, in the event he predeceases you.”
“Predeceases!” snorted Miss Smiley, thrusting her hands in her pockets. “What a word! That applies only to the property my aunt left?”
“Only.”
“And only to so much of that as I leave?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you call it entail?”
The lawyer’s heart sank.
“Under our laws,” he explained, “the bequest could go no farther. The old English law of entail is broken here. You can doubly devise but you cannot do more. The law says that the dead hand shall not——”
Keturah reflected, her severe eyes looking at and through the man. She could question him freely whether he saw the drift of her questions or not. She had a moderate contempt for Horace Hollaby, as she had for most men, a contempt based on her dealings with them in which she invariably came out best. The justice had one virtue, however, that Keturah considered rare in males. There were things he heard, things he knew, and things he guessed, about which he never talked. On certain matters she had never been able to bully a word out of him. And whatever she told him would be kept in the back of his head.
“My brother,” she said, her face almost expressionless, “has, or had, a wife and child. Are they presumed to be legally dead?”
Judge Hollaby told her they were not.
“In any case, my sister-in-law could not come into any of the property?”
“No.”
“Could an adopted child of my brother inherit the property?”
“I should say not; I should want to look at the exact wording of your aunt’s will.”
“You needn’t,” said Miss Smiley, rising with abruptness. “For if my brother ever adopts a child I shall give away or throw away every cent of that money!” She moved with decision toward the door. With her hand on the knob she turned and said brutally: “Keep your mouth shut!”
The door came to after her with a business-like bang.
X
In winter the Great South Bay is sometimes frozen over, and then it can be crossed very swiftly on a scooter, a better vehicle than the Hudson River iceboat because it will go from ice into water and back again on to ice without a spill. It is also more easily handled and travels faster. But there are days and sometimes weeks when the bay is impassable even for a scooter, which is merely a tiny boat with a pair of runners, after all. Thaw and freeze, freeze and thaw; a bay full of big, floating masses of ice, or so ridged and hillocked that nothing but an airplane will take you over it. And there were no airplanes when Mermaid, all wrapped and mittened, looked out upon the bay that winter of her eighth year.
There was a telephone linking the Coast Guard stations on the beach with one at Quogue on the Island itself, but direct communication with the ordinary system there was none. On one side of the living room of the Quogue Station was the beach phone, on the opposite wall was a “local and long distance.” Members of the Quogue crew, called up on either wire, obligingly relayed messages along the other.
In this manner it was made known to Cap’n Smiley one February morning that his sister wished to see him.
The keeper was privately astounded. So far as a hasty recollection served him, his sister had never before asked to see him about anything. The bay could not be crossed and he sent her word to that effect, thinking that she might disclose her purpose. Her reply, toned down by the drawl of Surfman No. 3, Quogue Station, was merely for him to visit her as soon as possible and to bring the little girl.
While waiting for the bay to freeze smooth, or clear from further thaws, Cap’n Smiley had some uneasy moments. He had never taken Mermaid to his sister’s and he did not like the idea. She had seen the little girl; had met him walking with Mermaid on the streets of Blue Port; had stopped to exchange a frosty word or two and then had walked on, ignoring the child completely. What could she be up to now?
He was so uneasy that he raised the question, in a guarded way, with Ho Ha. He could do this, for Ho Ha knew all about his sister, and without actually saying very much, both could say a good deal.
“My opinion she has some proposition to lay before you,” commented Ho Ha.
“I don’t care to consider propositions,” replied the keeper.
Ho Ha drew his weathered cheek together with his fingers.
“It might advantage Mermaid some way,” he suggested.
The keeper made a motion indicative of distrust.
About a week elapsed before the bay froze hard. Mermaid, in many layers of wool, with a red muffler about her throat, trotted down to the bayside where her Dad put her in the scooter. Then as the odd little craft gathered way, he half reclined so as to steer with her jib