when hosea hand, otherwise and generally ho ha, learned through a visit from lucius brown that $12,000 had been left him by a cousin he was astounded, happy, and perplexed. for some time he did nothing but treat his friends and acquaintances. he bought mermaid countless ice cream sodas and mr. brown countless cigars, and various others a considerable number of drinks (always taking a cigar himself). occasionally he got confused in his happiness, as when he asked mermaid to have a cigar and lawyer brown whether he wanted lemon or orange phosphate. his perplexity arose over the cousin whose beneficiary he had so unexpectedly become. mr. brown seemed unable to make this end of the wonder suitably clear.
“a fourth or fifth cousin, hosea,” said the lawyer,[137] carelessly, over the substitute for the phosphate. “she—he—they—i mean, it—was someone you never knew. she—they—had a lot of money. remembered all the relatives.”
“well, father and mother both came of large families,” observed ho ha. “i must have had a couple dozen cousins. i can’t remember who was fourth and who was fifth among ’em. i don’t know—would you think i might show my appreciation by putting up a nice tombstone to this cousin?”
“good lord, certainly not! i mean—i’m sure there will be a suitable memorial,” replied mr. brown, slightly choking over the near-phosphate as his mind imaged a tall shaft in honour of keturah smiley.
“what was the name?” asked ho ha.
“ke——” began the lawyer, thoughtlessly, caught himself in time, and changed the syllable to the similitude of a sneeze. “ke-chew! ke-chew!” he sneezed again, as though an encore might confer verisimilitude. ho ha did not appear to suspect the sneeze.
“i s’pose that cussed brother of mine got a share,” ho ha meditated aloud. “the wonder is he didn’t get mine, too.”
mermaid mixed her drinks recklessly, following a pineapple ice cream soda with a raspberry. it was before the day of the more fanciful concoctions or mermaid would have had a week of sundaes.
“what are you going to do, uncle ho?” she inquired[138] with the interest that, from a young woman, is always so flattering to a man, even an uncle.
“oh, i guess i’ll build a little shack on the beach and put the rest in the bank,” ho ha told her.
“i didn’t mean what are you going to do with the money, but what are you going to do with yourself?”
hosea twinkled. “p’raps i’ll marry,” he hinted. “now if i was only a young man——” he looked at her roguishly.
“it’s never too late to marry,” mermaid said, between spoonfuls. “but if you’re going to marry you won’t want a shack on the beach—or your wife won’t, which amounts to the same thing.”
ho ha nodded repeatedly. “i don’t want to marry the first woman that proposes to me,” he announced with his most sagacious air. “i might advertise, eh?”
they strolled down the street together until they reached keturah smiley’s. mermaid commanded her uncle to enter. keturah was making a batch of cookies in the kitchen.
“come in, hosea,” she said, cordially. “child, if dickie hand comes here this evening, do for goodness’ sake make the boy eat yesterday’s crullers so we can have a taste of these cookies ourselves. i declare, hosea, i don’t know what my own cake tastes like any longer.”
“i do,” said ho ha, looking at her attentively.
[139]“have one,” said keturah, slightly flustered by the look he gave her. could he have learned anything? ho ha fell silent a moment, and then after several mouthfuls said: “you were always a great hand for relationships, keturah. can you tell me who this cousin was that’s left me some money?”
miss smiley faced away from him and began energetically stowing her batch in a cake box.
“i don’t know, hosea,” she answered. “i never could keep track of your relations.”
“i don’t believe this cousin was a relation,” said ha ha. “i never heard of any relations except poor relations. most likely this was some conscience-stricken person, repenting of evil gains——”
“nonsense!” exclaimed miss smiley with an emphasis and a touch of indignation that seemed unnecessary. “she had as clear a conscience as some others, i guess.”
“oh, so ’twas a woman?” observed ho ha, innocently. “well, now, that’s funny. i can’t think of any woman——”
“i didn’t say ’twas a woman,” parried keturah. “she or he or whoever it was probably had more than she—he—knew what to do with. left to the next of kin. it’s a common thing.”
“uncommon common,” agreed ho ha somewhat paradoxically. “happens every day. you read about it in the newspapers. i dare say she, he, or it got the[140] idea while lining the pantry shelves with ’em. what’s money for, anyway, keturah?”
“money,” interjected mermaid, “is to make those who haven’t it want it and those who have it want more.”
“money,” said miss smiley, sententiously, “is to hang on to until you know when to let go.”
“money,” ho ha framed his own definition, “is only to make some other things more valuable.”
“you’re right, uncle ho,” mermaid conceded. “if dickie hand’s father—your brother—didn’t have as much money as he has, dickie would be worth almost nothing to me.”
“child!” keturah rebuked her.
“oh, aunt keturah, i don’t mean that i value dickie for his father’s money,” explained mermaid, impatiently, “but don’t you see if his father were poor dickie would be so—so unmanageable. i shouldn’t be able to do a thing with him! but his father’s rather rich, even if he did lose a lot of money a while ago, and i can just make dickie behave himself by telling him that he can’t possibly get any credit for what he makes of himself because there’s all that money to help him. that makes dickie simply wild, and he says he’ll be somebody in spite of his father and his money. he gets almost desperate—which is quite necessary,” she added, thoughtfully. “the other day he said, ‘damn my father’s money! i’ll show you it hasn’t anything to[141] do with me!’ of course i gave him the—the dickens but i couldn’t help being rather pleased.”
miss smiley regarded mermaid with great sternness, but ho ha’s shoulders seemed to move queerly. finally he choked.
“if my cooking chokes you, hosea, you’d better not eat it,” keturah said with considerable dignity.
“i beg your pardon, keturah,” was the humble reply.
mermaid had been eyeing the two as if a surprising notion had just occurred to her. now she slipped on a jacket and started to leave the house, “i have to see dickie,” she explained to miss smiley, “and get him mad enough so he’ll study to-night and pass his chemistry examination to-morrow.” she slipped out.
left alone, the man and the woman said nothing for a while. miss smiley found various supper preparations to occupy her. ho ha watched her with the air of a person who wanted to say something but found it difficult to choose the right words. at length, “keturah,” he got out, “do you remember a time when money made trouble between us?”
miss smiley did not answer him. she did not look at him.
“of course you do,” ho ha resumed, undisturbed, apparently, by the silence. “now what i would like to know is whether the thing that made us trouble can’t be made to mend it?”
still she did not answer nor appear to heed him.
[142]“i know very well,” said ho ha, as if to the furniture, and nodding at the grandfather’s clock which stood at one end of the large living room, “i know well that my fourth cousin or fifth cousin or whoever it was that left me this money left it to me because it belonged to me. i suspect cousin what’s-the-name got the money because it belonged to me, and got it from the person who owed it to me expressly to put in my hands. i’m obliged to cousin who’s-this as much for trying to do the right thing as for getting me the money. and i feel, somehow, that cousin you-can-guess-whom thought less about the money than about something else. a cousinly sort of a cousin, but real cousins don’t act that way. real cousins let each other fend for themselves. but, anyway, that’s no matter, one way or t’other. the main thing is to set things right. the money was only good to show something else that was worth a good deal more than the money—and that was a good feeling. a—a strong and enduring feeling,” emphasized ho ha. “a feeling that’s there’s only one word for, and the word doesn’t express it. keturah,” he exclaimed, getting up and approaching the woman who kept her back so persistently toward him, “you and i aren’t young any longer. we—we were cheated out of something, or else we cheated ourselves out of something, and it was a good deal. but, keturah, it isn’t all gone. we didn’t lose everything. we made a mistake, a terrible mistake, but it was only a mistake;[143] it wasn’t an ’ntentional wrong either of us did the other. keturah, can’t—can’t we just salvage some happiness out of the wreckage?” he was standing close to her now.
suddenly he put his arm awkwardly and eagerly about her. she had raised her hands to her face, and as she took them away he could see she was crying....
out of doors, mermaid, without any definite knowledge of what was going on inside, strained her diplomacy to the utmost to keep young mr. hand from entering the yard and passing the living-room windows and even, like as not, entering in quest of food to sustain his strength until supper. dickie was a tall, thin, light-haired boy with a blond skin of singular freshness and brown eyes of singular alterations. just now they showed a puzzled impatience with mermaid’s whims.
“will you go to the dance with me this evening?” he demanded.
mermaid shook her head. “i want you to walk up street with me,” she announced.
“but why?” interrogated the young man. “i’ve just come from there, and you say you don’t want anything.”
“i want a serious talk with you,” corrected mermaid. “how would you prepare h2so4, dickie?”
“hang chemistry!” ejaculated mr. hand. “wait a moment till i get a cookie.” he started into the yard. mermaid made a short dash and checked him.
[144]“nothing but yesterday’s crullers,” she stated.
“well, a cruller, then,” grumbled dickie.
mermaid plucked at his sleeve.
“dick hand,” she informed him, “you must not go in that house, now. aunt keturah has a—a caller.”
“huh. i don’t suppose he’ll bite me.”
“well, i will,” the exasperated young woman retorted. “i’ll not speak to you or go to a party with you, if you don’t come along this minute!” then a purely feminine inspiration seized her. “do as you like,” she said, with excellent indifference, “i daresay i can get guy vanton or tommy——”
leaving the sentence unfinished, she controlled herself with an effort and half turned away. dickie forgot the need of sustenance. intolerable feelings prompted the young man to fall in at her side. together they marched solemnly northward. said mr. hand: “say, mermaid, i—it—you——”
“they—we—him. yes, dickie?”
“you—don’t you think we might become engaged?”
“why—i suppose we might, some day, dickie.”
“to-day. i’m going on eighteen and you’re sixteen. lots of people are engaged for years—as long as three years. i’d be twenty-one and you nineteen.”
“yes, dickie; when you’re twenty-one, i’ll be nineteen.”
“but, mermaid, don’t you—don’t you care?”
[145]“if it would help you pass that chemistry exam, i’d become engaged to you right away, dickie,” sighed mermaid. “of course i care. if you flunk that you can’t enter technical school or anywhere else.”
“oh, damn the chemistry!” roared mr. hand. “exam, damn!”
“that’s a short poem; remarkable poem,” mermaid commented with some coldness. “full of—full of emotion. conforms to wordsworth’s definition of poetry, ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ but you’re not tranquil enough, dickie. i don’t think i want to be engaged to any one who swears regularly.”
“beg your pardon, ’m sure,” mr. hand mumbled, sulkily. “i won’t say it again. go on, don’t mind me! go on, go with tommy. he’s almost twenty. or mister vanton, who is twenty-two. i’m only about eighteen.” he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and said loftily: “if you don’t mind.” lifting his cap, he inclined his head and moved away.
mermaid looked after him uneasily. suddenly she called out, “dickie!”
he returned, but with a certain effect of distant politeness.
“come over after supper and i’ll quiz you on the chemistry best i can,” she offered.
he relaxed somewhat. “all right,” he agreed, magnanimously. “i’ll walk back with you,” he went on, as if uttering an after-thought.
[146]mermaid acquiesced. as they entered the yard they met ho ha coming out of the house. he stopped, looking at them happily and mysteriously, and propounded a riddle to mermaid.
“if an uncle of yours,” he said, “were to marry your aunt, what relation would that make your uncle’s nephew to your aunt’s niece?”
“friends once removed,” said mermaid. “oh, uncle ho, i’m tickled to death!”
