Sometimes it isn’t what you don’t know about people but what you do know that makes them mysterious, as Mermaid once said.
She did not say it respecting the senior Dick Hand but she might well have done so. Richard Hand[86] First was not only his proper designation but his motto, his war-cry, his watchword, and his slogan. Richard Hand first and everybody else nowhere, just about summed up the golden rule in Blue Port. Richard made the rule and Blue Port lived up to it.
If Blue Port had been a pretty good-sized town, like near-by Patchogue, with a couple of mills, two or three banks, an electric light company, and other rudiments of an American municipality, Dick Hand would have owned them all—not outright, of course, but as the heaviest shareholder and the preferred creditor. But Blue Port had none of these things. Blue Port had only a two-three of stores, a justice of the peace (Judge Hollaby), an unorganized oyster industry, a faded little railroad station, and a postoffice. Nearly all the people in Blue Port got their living on or from the Great South Bay. They went oystering, fishing, eeling, clamming, duck shooting. They kept, some of them, a cow and a few pigs; all of them raised vegetables. Thus there was plenty to eat. There was not so much to wear, but there was enough. As for making money, mostly no one made any money. There was no way to. A few hundred dollars in cash, to buy a few clothes and pay, perhaps, a low rent, was enough for a whole family from one year’s end to the other. Such a place might be considered, and rightly, to offer very restricted opportunities for the capitalist, but Dick Hand made it do.
[87]He was not a daring financier. For years he had lived on a farm in the middle of Long Island, a farm in semi-hilly country, the farm left him by his father. It had to be worked hard, and when, after some dozen years of labour, the chance came to Dick Hand to sell it at a fabulous figure, he lost no time in doing so. A wealthy New Yorker had come along and bought the place simply because he saw in the lie of the land possibilities for a corkingly good private golf course. The course was never laid out. The New Yorker died while still quarrelling with his architect over the plans for a $200,000 summer “cottage,” and his executors and heirs looked ruefully at the large tract of land which had been his latest whim and which was difficult to “turn over”—even with a plough. But Dick Hand had received $20,000 in cold cash for 200 acres. He was satisfied.
It was an impressive lot of money. It would have been greeted respectfully in Patchogue, and even in larger places. But the sudden possession of so much riches made Mr. Hand more cautious than ever. How to make it grow fastest?
He had had enough of land. By most wonderful fortune, he had been enabled to convert land into money. It was a miracle. Water had been turned into wine; he would not depend upon it happening again. His wife, who had always been submissive to him, ventured a single suggestion:
[88]“Now would be a good time to straighten out matters with Hosea,” she remarked. Dick Hand looked at her coldly. She went on, uncomfortably: “I s’pose ’twouldn’t take so much. It wasn’t more’n $2,500, his share of father’s estate, was it?”
“He had no share of the estate,” her husband answered, shortly. “For God’s sake, Fanny, how often have I got to tell you that there wa’n’t nothing for him.” Under stress of emotion Mr. Hand used colloquial speech. “The will read plain: I was to have the farm and he was to have the rest to do as he pleased with, but after father’s debts had been paid there wa’n’t nothing. I stood ready to mortgage the farm if nec’ssary to give him what he’d oughter had,” said the man, virtuously and untruthfully—doubtless he thought his wife would readjust her recollection accordingly—“but he run away and went to sea. Stayed away for years, and me struggling with the farm.” Mr. Hand began gradually doing himself justice as a heavily laden, plodding, self-sacrificing figure. “When he finally showed up I offered to do what was right and he sneered at me, the ongrateful and onnatural brother. I says to Hosea, ‘I’m ready to forget and forgive. Bygones kin be bygones.’ He was courting Keturah Smiley. It was before her aunt died, and she hadn’t a cent. O’ course it was plain she’d have prop’ty some day, though no one could foresee she’d have all the Hawkins’s money. John[89] Smiley hadn’t married that Mary Rogers then. So after I’d talked with Hosea and offered to do right by him—and more’n right, considering how he’d acted—I went to Keturah Smiley, and told her just how things stood.”
“Oh, Richard, you hadn’t ought to have done that,” Mrs. Hand murmured. “You had ought to have kept out of it.”
“Maybe I had, maybe I had,” retorted her husband. “But I was never one to reckon the consequences of doing a neighbourly act. I was trying to do the square thing, and............