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"I guess I may as well go back, ma," said Mellony, rising. "I was wonderin' when you cal'lated on going," remarked her mother, as she rose too, more slowly and stiffly, and straightened her decent black bonnet. "I suppose you was afraid Mellony wouldn't get back safe without you came after her," broke out Ira.
"I'm going to save you, Mellony," she said, her indomitable will making her voice harsher than it had been, "whether you want to be saved or not. I'm not going to have you marry, and be sworn at and cuffed." Mellony moved to protest, but her strength was futility beside her mother's at a time like this. "I'm not going to have you slave and grub, and get blows for your pains.
I'm going to follow you about and set wherever you be, whenever you go off with Ira Baldwin, if that'll stop it; and if that won't, I'll try some other way, I know other ways. I'm not going to have you marry! I'm going to have you stay along with me!" With a slight gesture of despair, Mellony turned away. The flash had burned itself out. The stronger nature had reasserted itself.
"Mellony," she said again, "you've no call to talk so." "I've no call to talk at all. I've no place anywhere. I'm not anybody. I haven't any life of my own." The keen brutality of the thoughtlessness of youth, and its ignoring of all claims but those of its own happiness, came oddly from the lips of submissive Mellony. Mrs. Pember quivered under it.
Mis' Pember, you see Mellony Mellony's married." "Mellony married!" Strangely enough she had not thought of that. She grasped the doorpost for support. "Yes, she up and married him," went on the captain more blithely. "I hardly thought it of Mellony," he added in not unpleasurable reflection, "nor yet of Ira." "Nor I either." Mrs. Pember's lips moved with difficulty. Mellony married!
The weakness for grog, unfortunately supposed to be inherent in a nautical existence, was carried by Captain Pember to an extent inconsiderate even in the eyes of a seafaring public; and when, under its genial influence, he knocked his wife down and tormented Mellony, the opinion of this same public declared itself on the side of the victims with a unanimity which is not always to be counted upon in such cases.
There was the chair in which Mellony sat the night of her rebellious outbreak, Mellony, her daughter, her married daughter. Other women talked about their "married daughters" easily enough, and she had pitied them; now she would have to talk so, too. She felt unutterably lonely. Her household, like her hope, was shattered.
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