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Updated: June 8, 2025
After that Deolda went off in Conboy's motor as soon as her dishes were done and after supper there would be handsome Johnny Deutra. We were profoundly shocked. You may be sure village tongues were already busy after a few days of these goings on. "Deolda," my aunt said, sternly, "what are you going out with that old Conboy for?" "I'm going to marry him," Deolda answered. "You're what?"
While she stood there, her shoulders drooping, her eyes searching my aunt's face, she still found time to shoot a glance like a flaming signal to Johnny Deutra, staring at her agape. I surprised the glance, and so did my aunt Josephine, who must have known she was in for nothing but trouble.
And so was Johnny Deutra, for from that first glance of Deolda's that dared him, love laid its heavy hand on his young shoulders. "What's your name, dear?" my aunt asked. "Deolda Costa," said she. "Oh, you're one-armed Manel's girl. I don't remember seeing you about lately." "I been working to New Bedford. My father an' mother both died. I came up for the funeral.
She had a whole city in love with her and she gave up everything to run away with my father. He was jealous and wanted her for himself. He got her to marry him. Then he lost his arm and they were poor and her voice went. I've seen where love goes. If I married Johnny I'd go and live at Deutra's and I'd have kids, and old Ma Deutra would hate me and scream at me just like my mother used to.
"Have your own way; I'll marry you if you want me to!" She made him pay for this. "You see," she said to my aunt, "I told you I was going to marry him." "Well, then come out motoring tonight when you've got your dishes done," called old Conboy. "I'm going to the breakwater with Johnny Deutra tonight," said Deolda, in that awful truthful way of hers.
He read aloud from the newspaper he had brought, a word at a time, like a grammar-school kid: "With a lame propeller and driven out of her course, the Anita made Plymouth this morning without her Captain, Mark Hammar. John Deutra, who brought her in, made the following statement: "'I was lying in my bunk unable to sleep, for we were being combed by waves again and again.
Why isn't my Johnny grown up? Why don't he take me away from them all?" After that Captain Hammar kept coming to the house. He showed well enough he was serious. "That black devil's hypnotized her," my aunt put it. Deolda seemed to have some awful kinship to Mark Hammar, and Johnny Deutra, who never paid much attention to old Conboy, paid attention to him.
You can make a hundred dollars tonight by taking the Anita across to Gloucester with me. We'll start right off." Everyone was quiet. Then old Conboy cried out: "Don't go, Mark. Don't go! Why, it's murder to tempt that boy out there." At the word "murder" Deolda drew her breath in and clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes staring at Johnny Deutra. "Nick" Hammar pretended he hadn't noticed.
She never gave one any chance for an illusion about her, for there was handsome Johnny Deutra still hanging round the gate watching Deolda, and she already held my aunt's heart in her slender hand. My aunt went around muttering, "One-armed Manel's girl!" She appealed to me: "She's got to live somewhere, hasn't she?"
But I knew that she was crying because Johnny Deutra was only a boy. Then she would change into a mood of wild gayety, whip the shawl around her, and dance for me, looking a thousand times more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen. And then she would shove me out of the room, leaving me feeling as though I had witnessed some strange rite at once beautiful and unholy.
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