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

important person as himself could spend long afternoons and evenings thus without everyone's knowledge. He had a feeling, too, born, as many calculations are, of pure surmise, that he would have seen the mermaid again that afternoon, when he had made such elaborate arrangements to meet her, if Fate had destined them to meet again at all. No; he must give her up. He must forget the hallucination that had worked so madly on his brain.

Nevertheless, he did not deny himself the pleasure of walking very frequently to the spot, and this often, in the early hours before breakfast, a time which he could dispose of as he would without comment. As he walked the beach in the beauty of the early day, he realized that some new region of life had been opened to him, that he was feeling his way into new mysteries of beatified thought and feeling.

A week passed; he was again upon the shore opposite the island at the sunrise hour. He sat on the rock which seemed like a home to his restless spirit, so associated it was with the first thoughts of those new visions of beauty which were becoming dear to him.

He heard a soft splashing sound in the water, and, looking about him, suddenly saw the sea-child's face lifted out of the water not more than four or five yards from him. All around her was a golden cloud of sand; it seemed to have been stirred up by her startled movement on seeing him. For a moment she was still, resting thus close, and he could see distinctly that around her white shoulders there was a coil of what seemed like glistening rounded scales. He could not decide whether the brightness in her eye was that of laughing ease or of startled excitement. Then she turned and darted away from him, and having put about forty feet between them, she turned and looked back with easy defiance.

His eyes, fascinated by what was to him an awful thing, were trying to penetrate the sparkling water and see the outlines of the form whose clumsy skin seemed to hang in horrid folds, stretching its monstrous bulk under the waves. His vision was broken by the sparkling splash which the maiden deliberately made with her hands, as if divining his curiosity and defying it. He felt the more sure that his senses did not play him false because the arrangement of the human and fishy substance of the apparition did not tally with any preconceived ideas he had of mermaids.

Caius felt no loathing of the horrid form that seemed to be part of her. He knew, as he had never known before, how much of coarseness there was in himself. His hands and feet, as he looked down at them, seemed clumsy, his ideas clumsy and gross to correspond. He knew enough to know that he might, by the practice of exercises, have made his muscles and brain the expression of his will, instead of the inert mass of flesh that they now seemed to him to be. He might--yes, he might, if he had his years to live over again, have made himself noble and strong; as it was, he was mutely conscious of being a thing to be justly derided by the laughing eyes that looked up at him from the water, a man to be justly shunned and avoided by the being of the white arms and dimpled face.

And he sat upon the rock looking, looking. It seemed useless to rise or speak or smile; he remembered the mirth that his former efforts had caused, and he was dumb and still.

Perhaps the sea-child found this treatment more uninteresting than that attention he had lavished on her on the former occasion; perhaps she had not so long to tarry. As he still watched her she turned again, and made her way swift and straight toward the rocky point. Caius ran, following, upon the shore, but after a minute he perceived that she could disappear round the point before, either by swimming or wading, he could get near her. He could not make his way around the point by the shore; his best means of keeping her in sight was to climb the cliff, from which the whole bay on the other side would be visible.

Like a man running a race for life, he leaped back to a place where it was possible to climb, and, once on the top, made his way by main force through a growth of low bushes until he could overlook the bay. But, lo! when he came there no creature was visible in the sunny sea beneath or on the shelving red bank which lay all plain to his view. Far and wide he scanned the ocean, and long he stood and watched. He walked, searching for anyone upon the bank, till he came to Day's barns, and by that time he was convinced that the sea-maid had either vanished into thin air or sunk down and remained beneath the surface of the sea.

The farm to which he had come was certainly the last place in which he would have thought to look for news of the sportive sea-creature; and yet, because it stood alone there in that part of the earth, he tarried now to put some question to the owner, just as we look mechanically for a lost object in drawers or cupboards in which we feel sure it cannot be. Caius found Day in a small paddock behind one of the barns, tending a mare and her baby foal. Day had of late turned his attention to horses, and the farm had a bleaker look in consequence, because many of its acres were left untilled.

Caius leaned his elbows on the fence of the paddock. "Hullo!"

Day turned round, asking without words what he wanted, in a very surly way.

At the distance at which he stood, and without receiving any encouragement, Caius found a difficulty in forming his question.

"You haven't seen anything odd in the sea about here, have you?"

"What sort of a thing?"

"I thought I saw a queer thing swimming in the water--did you?"

"No, I didn't."

It was evident that no spark of interest had been roused in the farmer by the question. From that, more than anything else, Caius judged that his words were true; but, because he was anxious to make assurance doubly sure, he blundered into another form of the same inquiry:

"There isn't a young girl about this place, is there?"

Day's face grew indescribably dark. In an instant Caius remembered that, if the man had any feeling about him, the question was the sorest he could have asked--the child, who would now have been a girl, drowned, her sister and brother exiled, and Day bound over by legal authority to see to it that no defenceless person came in the way of the wife who had killed her child! A moment more, and Day had merely turned his back, going on with his work. Caius did not blame him; he respected the man the more for the feeling he displayed.

Vexed with himself, and not finding how to end the interview, Caius waited a minute, and then turned suddenly from the fence, without knowing why he turned until he saw that the constraining force was the presence of Day's wife, who stood at the end of the barn, out of sight of her husband, but looking eagerly at Caius. She made a sign to him to come. No doubt she had heard what had been said.

Caius went to her, drawn by the eagerness of her bright black eyes. Her large form was slightly clad in a cotton gown; her abundant black hair was fastened rather loosely about her head. Her high-boned cheeks were thinner than of old, and her face wore a more excited expression; otherwise, there was little difference in her. She had been sent from the asylum as cured. Caius gave her a civil "Good-day."

"She has come back to me!" said the woman.

"Who?"

"My baby as you've put up the stone to. I've allers wanted to tell you I liked that stone; but she isn't dead--she has come back to me!"

Now, although the return of the drowned child had been an idea often in his mind of late, that he had merely toyed with it as a beautiful fancy was proved by the fact that no sooner did the mother express the same thought than Caius recognised that she was mad.

"She has come back to me!" The poor mother spoke in tones of exquisite happiness. "She is grown a big girl; she has curls on her head, and she wears a marriage-ring. Who is she married to?"

Caius could not answer.

The mother looked at him with curious steadfastness.

"I thought perhaps she was married to you," she said.

Surely the woman had seen what he had seen in the sea; but, question her as he would, Caius could gain nothing more from her--no hint of time or place, or any fact that at all added to his enlightenment. She only grew frightened at his questions, and begged him in moving terms not to tell Day that she had spoken to him--not to tell the people in the village that her daughter had come back, or they would put her again in the asylum. Truly, this last appeared to Cains a not unlikely consequence, but it was not his business to bring it about. It was not for him, who shared her delusion, to condemn her.

After that, Caius knew that either he was mad or what he had seen he had seen, let the explanation be what it might--and he ceased to care much about the explanation. He remembered the look of heart-satisfaction with which Day's wife had told him that her child had returned. The beautiful face looking from out the waves had no doubt wrought happiness in her; and in him also it had wrought happiness, and that which was better. He ceased to wrestle with the difference that the adventure had made in his life, or to try to ignore it; he had learned to love someone far better than himself, and that someone seemed so wholly at one with the nature in which she ranged, and also with the best he could think concerning nature, human or inanimate, that his love extended to all the world for her sake.


CHAPTER X.

TOWED BY THE BEARD.

Every morning Caius still took his early way along the shore, but on all these walks he found himself alone in possession of the strand and the vast blue of sea and sky. It was disappointing, yet the place itself exercised a greater and greater charm over him.

He abstained from fooling away his days by the sea. After his one morning walk he refused himself the luxury of being there again, filling his time with work. He felt that the lady of the lovely face would despise him if he spent his time absurdly.

Thus some days passed; and then there came a night when he left a bed on which he had tossed wakefully, and went in the hot August night to the side of the sea when no one knew that he went or came.

The air was exceedingly warm. The harvest moon in the zenith was flooding the world with unclouded light. The tide was ebbing, and therefore there was in the channel that swift, dangerous current sweeping out to sea of which he had once experienced the strength. Caius, who associated his sea-visitant only