In the evening of the day when Mermaid ran out to meet young Dick Hand on the sidewalk, sprites were abroad. As if it had conspired with Dick and Mermaid, the wind refrained all day long from blowing and rattling Keturah Smiley’s unfastened shutters, and thus giving the two youthful conspirators away. But at night there came a wrenching sound, as if the broadside of the house were being ripped off. Keturah Smiley gave an exclamation and jumped to her feet. She rushed from the room and returned a moment later carrying a pistol.
Mermaid saw it and screamed. Then she flung herself at the woman.
“No, no! Miss Smiley,” she implored in little gasps. “It’s only boys! It’s only Hallowe’en!”
“Nonsense,” Keturah retorted, holding the pistol out of reach and checking the girl with her other hand. “I’m not going to murder ’em. I’m only going to frighten ’em into behaving themselves, and leaving my property alone!”
She moved quickly to the door, opened it, and fired two shots. From the darkness came an awful cry, as of mortal pain, followed by whimpers and the sound of scurrying feet. Keturah became utterly pale, and her tall figure seemed to lose its rigidity.
“Do you suppose one of those boys could have been[67] perched in the big maple?” she inquired, faintly. “I shot in the air!”
There was a great rushing about and the woman and girl finally went outside with a lantern. The light bobbed about under the maple and around the house, but no white, stricken face was illuminated by the rays; they heard no other cries, no moans; and except for the rustle of the fallen leaves they trod upon there was no sound. Gradually recovering herself in the chill air Keturah strode indoors, Mermaid following her. Miss Smiley, as her fright left her, became more and more indignant.
“It’s that Dick Hand’s boy,” she commented. “Always up to mischief, like his father. A bad lot, the Hands, all except Hosea, who’s a fool.”
At this mention of her Uncle Ho Mermaid pricked up her ears. Miss Smiley was in a talkative mood, seeking relief from her vexation. The girl could not refrain from asking, “Is Uncle Ho a fool?”
“Yes, he is, to have let his brother cheat him out of his rightful property all these years,” Keturah Smiley told her.
Mermaid felt a pang.
“Uncle Ho is awfully good to me,” she said, sadly. “I can’t have anything to do with Dick if his father cheated Uncle Ho.”
Keturah gave her a curious look.
“Don’t make other folks’ quarrels your quarrels,[68] Mary,” she observed. “And while ‘the boy is father to the man,’ Dick Hand’s boy may be a better man than his father.”
“I won’t be friends with Dick if his father cheated Uncle Ho,” the girl persisted.
“You go on being friends with Dick,” Keturah advised her, “and leave me to deal with his father.”
A strange, grim expression was on her face, an expression which had more of satisfaction in it than Mermaid had ever observed before, an expression that was almost happy, and that was not unknown in Blue Port. The senior Richard Hand had seen it on the day when he first came to Keturah Smiley to borrow money. His brother, Hosea Hand, had never witnessed it; and Hosea Hand thought he knew every shade of Keturah Smiley’s countenance—a countenance that was singularly inapt at denoting the finer shades of feeling. For Hosea Hand had even seen a look of tenderness in those sharp eyes; he had seen that mouth, so firm at the corners, relax into smiles at the smile he gave her. Once upon a time Hosea Hand had been young, and once upon a time Keturah Smiley had been young, and it was about that time that Hosea Hand’s brother—of whom a reasonable doubt might be entertained as to whether he had ever been young at all—that Dick Hand, the older, had come between two lovers.
In the morning three shutters were gone from the[69] front parlour windows and the streaming sunshine had already, according to Keturah Smiley’s emphatic pronouncement, begun to fade the old rose carpet. What was worse, the shutters could not be found, though what appeared to be their ashes lay, still smouldering, in a lot a quarter of a mile away. Keturah poked through the black remains and fished out a peculiarly shaped hinge, adding to her observations of the evening before on the badness of the Hands. But she expressed no intention of putting her hand in her pocket to buy new window coverings. With a wrench that bade fair to take them from their rollers she pulled down the parlour shades. Yet a spell had been broken. The sacred room could never regain its dark repose. Mermaid, dusting the mahogany “deacon’s chairs,” ventured discreetly to raise the shades a little at the bottom, and gradually they rose higher and higher until they shielded the upper sashes only. An agreeable light streamed into the room and lit up the curios brought back from his sea voyages by Captain John Hawkins, husband of Keturah Hawkins and master of the clipper ship China Castle, curios that Keturah Smiley had inherited from Keturah Hawkins along with the house and her aunt’s land and money. Though not more wonderful than the full-rigged ship which Uncle Ho had carved in the glass bottle, these heirlooms were perceptibly more precious.
There was a jade Buddha which, on its first appearance[70] in Blue Port fifty years earlier, had administered its shock to the Christian ladies of the Missionary Society, and had long been retired into oblivion. There was a collection of swords and cutlasses with which Keturah Smiley might have defended herself against all Blue Port advancing against her. On a mantel were ivory ornaments, intricately carved, and on either side of the fireplace were mammoth elephants’ tusks. Gold gleamed from damascened swords; silver bands shone more coldly from the tusks; some copper vessels on the floor dully reflected the unaccustomed daylight; but the precious stones which had once enhanced th............