The Mermaid, Lily Dougall [beach read .TXT] 📗

with the sunlight and an incoming tide, did not expect to see her now; frequent disappointment had bred the absence of hope. He stood on the shore, looking at the current in which he had so nearly perished as a boy. It was glittering with white moon-rays. He thought of himself, of the check and twisting which his motives and ideas had lately received, and as he thought how slight a thing had done it, how mysterious and impossible a thing it was, his mind became stunned, and he faced the breeze, and simply lived in the sweetness of the hour, like an animal, conscious, not of itself, but only of what is external, without past or future.

And now he heard a little crooning song from the waters--no words, no tune that could be called a tune. It reminded him more of a baby's toneless cooing of joy, and yet it had a rhythm to it, too, and both joy and pathos in its cadence. Across the bright path of the moon's reflection he saw her come. Her head and neck were crowned and garlanded with shining weed, as if for a festival, and she stretched out her white arms to him and beckoned to him and laughed. He heard her soft, infant-like laughter.

To-night her beckoning was like a breeze to a leaf that is ready to fall. Caius ceased to think; he only acted. He threw his cap and coat and boots on the shore. The sea-child, gazing in surprise, began to recede quickly. Caius ran into the water; he projected himself toward the mermaid, and swam with all the speed of which he was capable.

The salt in his eyes at first obscured his vision. When he could look about, the sea-child had gone out of the track of the moonlight, and, taking advantage of the current, was moving rapidly out to sea.

He, too, swam with the current. He saw her curly head dark as a dog's in the water; her face was turned from him, and there was evident movement in her body. For the first time he thought he perceived that she was swimming with arms and feet as a woman must swim.

As for Caius, he made all the effort that in him lay, and as she receded past the line of the island right out into the moonlit sea, he swam madly after, reckless of the fact that his swimming power gave him no assurance of being able to return, reckless of everything except the one welcome fact that he was gaining on the sea-child. A fear oppressed him that perhaps this apparent effort of hers and her slow motion were only a ruse to lead him on--that at any moment she might dart from him or sink into her familiar depths. But this fear he did not heed as long as she remained in sight, and--yes, across the surface of the warm moonlit water he was slowly but surely gaining upon her.

On he swam, making strenuous effort at speed. He was growing exhausted with the unaccustomed exercise; he knew that his strength would not hold out much longer. He hardly knew what he hoped or dreamed would come to pass when he overtook the sea-maiden, and yet he swam for dear love, which was more to him than dear life, and, panting, he came close to her.

The sea-maid turned about, and her face flashed suddenly upon him, bright in the moonlight. She put out a glistening arm, perhaps in human feebleness to ward him off, perhaps, in the strength of some unknown means of defence, to warn him that at his peril he approached her.

Caius, reckless of everything, grasped the white wrist, and, stopping his motion, knowing he could not lie mermaid-fashion with head reared in the water, he turned on his back to float, still holding the small hand in his. He held it, and retained his consciousness long enough to know from that time forth that the hand had actually been in his--a living, struggling hand, not cold, but warm. He felt, too, in that wonderful power which we have in extreme moments of noting detail, that the hand had a ring upon it--it was the left hand--and he thought it was a plain gold ring, but it did not occur to him to think of a wedding-ring. Then he knew that this dear hand that he had captured was working him woe, for by it he was drawn beneath the water.

Even then he did not let go, but, still holding the hand, struck out to regain the surface in one of those wild struggles to which inexpert swimmers resort when they feel the deep receiving them into itself.

It would have been better for him if he had let go, for in that vehement struggle he felt the evidence of the sea-maid's power. He remembered--his last thought as he lost consciousness--that with the fishy nature is sometimes given the power to stun an enemy by an electric shock. Some shock came upon him with force, as if some cold metal had struck him on the head. As his brain grew dull he heard the water gurgling over him.

How long he remained stunned he did not know. He felt the water rushing about his head again; he felt that he had been drowned, and he knew, too--in that foolish way in which the half-awakened brain knows the supposed certainties of dreams--that the white hand he had essayed to hold had grasped his beard firmly under his chin, and that thus holding his head above the surface of the water, she was towing him away to unknown regions.

Then he seemed to know nothing again; and again he opened his eyes, to find himself lying on a beach in the moonlight, and the sea-maid's face was bending over his. He saw it distinctly, all tender human solicitude written on the moonlit lineaments. As his eyes opened more her face receded. She was gone, and he gazed vacantly at the sky; then, realizing his consciousness more clearly, he sat up suddenly to see where she had gone.

It seemed to him that, like a kind enchantress, she had transformed herself to break his passion. Yes, he saw her, as he had so often curiously longed to see her, moving over the dry shore--she was going back to her sea. But it was a strange, monstrous thing he saw. From her gleaming neck down to the ground was dank, shapeless form. So a walrus or huge seal might appear, could it totter about erect upon low, fin-like feet. There was no grace of shape, no tapering tail, no shiny scales, only an appearance of horrid quivering on the skin, that here and there seemed glossy in the moonlight.

He saw her make her way toilsomely, awkwardly over the shingle of the beach; and when she reached the shining water, it was at first so shallow that she seemed to wade in it like a land-animal, then, when the water was deep enough to rise up well around her, she turned to him once more a quick glance over her shoulder. Such relief came with the sight of her face, after this monstrous vision, that he saw the face flash on him as a sword might flash out of darkness when light catches its blade. Then she was gone, and he saw the form of her head in the water while she swam swiftly across the silver track of the moonbeams and out into the darkness beyond.

Caius looked around him with senses still drowsy and head aching sorely. He was in no fairy region that might be the home of mermaids, but on the bit of beach from which he had launched himself into the water. His coat and hat lay near him, and just above the spot where he lay was the rude epitaph of baby Day, carved by his own boyish hand so long ago.

Caius put his hand to his head, and found it badly bruised on one side. His heart was bruised, too, partly by the sight of the monstrous body of the lovely sea-child, partly by the fresh experience of his own weakness and incapacity.

It was long before he dragged himself home. It seemed to him to be days before he recovered from the weariness of that secret adventure, and he bore the mark of the bruise on his head for many a day. The mermaid he never saw again.


CHAPTER XI.

YEARS OF DISCRETION.

Caius Simpson took ship and crossed the sea. The influence of the beautiful face remained with him. That which had come to him was the new birth of mind (not spirit), which by the grace of God comes to many an individual, but is more clearly recognised and recorded when it comes in the life of nations--the opening of the inward eye to the meaning and joy of all things that the outward senses have heretofore perceived as not perceiving them. The art of the Old World claimed him as her own, as beauty on land and sea had already done. The enjoyment of music and pictures became all-important to him, at first because he searched in them for the soul he had seen in the sea-maid's eyes.

Caius was of noble birth, because by inheritance and training he was the slave of righteousness. For this reason he could not neglect his work, although it had not a first place in his heart. As he was industrious, he did not fail in it; because it was not the thing he loved best, he did not markedly succeed. It was too late to change his profession, and he found in himself no such decided aptitude for anything else as should make him know that this or that would have been preferable; but he knew now that the genius of the physician was not his, that to do his work because it was duty, and to attain the respectable success which circumstance, rather than mental pre-eminence, gives, was all that he could hope. This saddened him; all his ambition revived under the smarting consciousness of inferiority to his more talented companions. The pleasures of his life came to him through his receptive faculties, and in the consciousness of having seen the wider vision, and being in consequence a nobler man. But all this, which was so much to him for a year or two, grew to be a less strong sensation than that of disappointment in the fact that he could only so meagrely fulfil his father's ideal and his own. There came a sense of dishonesty, too, in having used the old man's money chiefly in acquiring those mental graces which his father could neither comprehend nor value.

Three years passed. Gradually the memory of his love for the sea-maid had grown indistinct; and, more or less unconscious that this love had been the door to the more wealthy gardens of his mind, he inclined to despise it now as he despised the elegy he had written for the child who was drowned. It was his own passion he was inclined to forget and despise; the sea-maid herself was remembered, and respected, and wondered at, and disbelieved in, and believed in, as of old, but that which remains in the mind, never spoken of, never used as a cause of activity of either thought or action, recedes into the latent rather than the active portion of the memory.

Once, just once, in the first year of his foreign life, he had told to a friend the history of that, his one and only love-story. The result had not been satisfactory. His companion was quite sure that Caius had been the subject of