After I became rich--so rich that I could not waste my substance in a night, or a week, or a year; so old that caution was the stronger impulse always and made me hoard what I had--after the death of Guy Vanton’s mother I lived just outside San Francisco with the boy and the memories of a vicious life. There is nothing like old age to intensify the good or evil in a man. Here was I with my memories, which all at once, in my loneliness, became vivid, alive, crawling. I thought of Keturah Hawkins and writhed. I thought of her jewels and a terrible greed filled me. I thought of that flogging on the _China Castle_ and my shoulders twitched; of the impact of Captain Hawkins’s fists and quivered, half raising a protective arm. I wrote again to Richard Hand and learned that these two people were dead; that their nephew had married and displeased Keturah Hawkins; that her fortune had gone to her niece. From Richard Hand I was able to learn something about these persons and to figure out a way I might strike at them and hurt or crush them. How was I able to get this out of him? Partly by threats to show him up as compounding with me to keep his brother out of a lawful inheritance; partly with money. I have no time for details and there are things that are better to go forever unrecorded.
It was I, Jacob King, who hired a man to make love to and fascinate John Smiley’s wife. It was an easy thing to do, with her husband mostly absent on the beach. To avoid the townspeople’s eyes was more difficult, but it was managed with secret meetings of one sort or another. She was led to leave him, taking her baby girl with her; eventually she was led to me. How much of this Richard Hand surmised I don’t know or care. But he had no part in it beyond giving me facts about the Smileys to go upon.
I subjected Mary Smiley to all the tortures I could devise. She lived with me though she was John Smiley’s wife. She was a silly, childish creature and she was absolutely at my mercy. I made her life a hell for several years. In the meantime, her little girl was growing--into a tiny image of Keturah Hawkins. It was that which conquered me, or the settled wickedness within me. I, who had set out to wreak remotely my revenge on Keturah Hawkins, was myself becoming the victim of a living punishment. For here was Keturah Hawkins in the house with me. Every physical characteristic was there in the child later known as Mermaid Smiley, the daughter of John Smiley and Mary Rogers Smiley, the grandniece of the woman I remembered. The child had Keturah Hawkins’s hair, eyes, skin, and features; even, in embryo, her manner. I could torture her silly and pitiable mother and the child would enter the room, a living taunt to me. Here she was, and she would outlive me; she would be flesh and blood, wonderful glinting hair, flashing blue eyes, matchless white skin, unconquerably alive and superb, unconquerably young and gay when I was not merely a cruel and old and despicable man, but dust. She would dance on my grave.