Читать книгу Mermaid - Grant M. Overton - Страница 11

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Keturah Smiley stopped digging potatoes and walked briskly back to her house. She washed her hands, but did not change her shabby old man’s coat. Keturah’s everyday attire was preponderantly masculine. She refrained, however, from wearing trousers. But a man’s soft hat was generally pinned to her head, a man’s coat was usually on her back, and her low-heeled, heavy-soled walking shoes were number eights.

She dried her hands, put them in the coat pockets and started up the lane to the centre of the village. On the way she met Sim Jenkins, and told him sharply that if he didn’t pay the interest on his mortgage more promptly she would demand the principal. Sim looked frightened. He knew that Keturah would not hesitate to foreclose.

At the principal street intersection of Blue Port stood the postoffice and the few clustered shops. There was one two-story structure which constituted Blue Port’s only office building. On the ground floor were a real estate agent, a milliner, and a store where cigars and soft drinks, magazines and writing paper could be bought. Up the flight of stairs were a doctor’s office and the places of business of Blue Port’s lawyers. Blue Port had one saloon, two churches, and three lawyers, one of whom was a justice of the peace. To this functionary, Judge Hollaby, Miss Smiley made her way.

The Judge was sitting in his office with his feet on the desk and his hat on his head, reading Seneca on old age. He had not enjoyed a plate of oysters the evening before with his usual relish, and this had profoundly depressed him. He was therefore reading; Judge Hollaby found in reading the consolation that some men find in drink, although he was by no means a teetotaler.

Miss Smiley opened the door without knocking. As she entered rapidly Judge Hollaby put down his feet with an almost youthful spryness, and hastily removed his hat. His visitor, to his pain, picked up the half-smoked cigar that lay extinguished on a corner of his desk and threw it in the cuspidor. The name of it was La Coloratura and it had cost 13 cents straight.

Judge Hollaby knew better than to waste breath in formal greetings. Keturah Smiley seated herself and said:

“Don’t beat around the bush but tell me in words I understand just the disposition of the property my aunt left me.”

The lawyer felt momentarily flurried. He really had forgotten the provisions of old Keturah Hawkins’s will. However, it would not do to say so—wouldn’t do at all.

“Entailed, Miss Smiley, entailed,” he said with what he intended to be a retrospective and thoughtful air. To his client it seemed merely absent-minded.

“Please put your mind on this, Judge Hollaby!” she commanded in a tone that reminded the lawyer of several schoolma’ams rolled into one. “I ask you to use plain words and you start off by using a word like ‘entailed’! Explain yourself. What is entail?”

The Judge was very uncomfortable. 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.