The Mermaid

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"I can't see the ships on the other side of the world."

"Where did he go to?"

"Well, when he last sailed"--deliberately--"he went to Newcastle. His
ship is what they call a tramp; it don't belong to any loine. So at
Newcastle she was hired to go to Africy. Like enough, there she got
cargo for some place else."

"Oh! a very long voyage."

"She carries steam; the longest voyage comes to an end quick enough in
these days."

"Has Madame Le Maitre always lived on this island? Was she married
here?"

"She came here a year this October past. She came from a place near the
Pierced Rock, south of Gaspe Basin. I lived there myself. I came here
because the skipper had good land here that she said I could farm."

Caius meditated on this.

"Then, you have known her ever since she was a child?"

"Saw her married."

"What does her husband look like?"

"Well"--a long pause of consideration--"like a man."

"What sort of a man?"

"Neither like you nor me."

"I never noticed that we were alike."

"You trim your beard, I haven't any; the skipper, he's hairy."

Caius conceived a great disgust for the captain. He felt pretty well
convinced also that he was no favourite with O'Shea. He would have liked
much to ask if Madame Le Maitre liked her husband, but if his own
refinement had not forbidden, he had a wholesome idea that O'Shea, if
roused, would be a dangerous enemy.

"I don't understand why, if she is married, she wears the dress of a
religious order."

"Never saw a nun dressed jist like her. Guess if you went about kissing
and embracing these women ye would find it an advantage to be pretty
well covered up; but"--here a long time of puffing at the pipe--"it's an
advantage for more than women not to see too much of an angel."

"Has she any relations, anyone of her own family? Where do they live?"

There was no answer.

"I suppose you knew her people?"

O'Shea sprang up and opened the house door, and the snow drove in as he
held it.

"I thought," he said, "I heard a body knocking."

"No one knocked," said Caius impatiently.

"I heard someone." He stood looking very suspiciously out, and so good
was his acting, if it was acting, that Caius, who came and looked over
his shoulder, had a superstitious feeling when he saw the blank,
untrodden snow stretching wide and white into the glimmering night. He
remembered that the one relative he believed the lady to have had
appeared to him in strange places and vanished strangely.

"You didn't hear a knock; you were dreaming." Caius began to button on
his coat.

"I wasn't even asleep." O'Shea gave a last suspicious look to the
outside.

"O'Shea," said Caius, "has--has Madame Le Maitre a daughter?"

The farmer turned round to him in astonishment. "Bless my heart alive,
no!"

The snow was only two or three inches deep when Caius walked home; it
was light as plucked swan's-down about his feet. Everywhere it was
falling slowly in small dry flakes. There was little wind to make eddies
in it. The waning moon had not yet risen, but the landscape, by reason
of its whiteness, glimmered just visible to the sight.

CHAPTER XII.

THE MAIDEN INVENTED.

The fishing-boats and small schooners were dragged high up on the beach.
The ice formed upon the bay that lay in the midst of the islands. The
carpet of snow grew more and more thick upon field and hill, and where
the dwarf firwoods grew so close that it could not pass between their
branches, it draped them, fold above fold, until one only saw the green
here and there standing out from the white garment.

In these days a small wooden sleigh was given to Caius, to which he
might harness his horse, and in which he might sit snug among oxskins if
he preferred that sort of travelling to riding. Madame Le Maitre still
rode, and Caius discarded his sleigh and rode also. Missing the warmth
of the skins, he was soon compelled by the cold to copy Robinson Crusoe
and make himself breeches and leggings of the hides.

In these first weeks one hope was always before his eyes. In every new
house which he entered, at every turn of the roads, which began to be
familiar to him, he hoped to see the maiden who had followed him upon
the beach. He dreamed of her by night; he not only hoped, he expected to
see her each day. It was of course conceivable that she might have
returned to some other island of the group; but Caius did not believe
this, because he felt convinced she must be under the protection of his
friends; and also, since he had arrived the weather had been such that
it would have been an event known to all the fishermen if another party
had made a journey along the sands. When the snow came the sands were
impassable. As soon as the ice on the bay would bear, there would be
coming and going, no doubt; but until then Caius had the restful
security that she was near him, and that it could not be many days
before he saw her. The only flaw in his conclusion was that the fact did
not bear it out; he did not see her.

At length it became clear that the maiden was hiding herself. Caius
ceased to hope that he would meet her by chance, because he knew he
would already have done so if it were not willed otherwise. Then his
mind grew restless again, and impatient; he could not even imagine where
she could lie hidden, or what possible reason there could be for a life
of uncomfortable concealment.

Caius had not allowed either O'Shea or Madame Le Maitre to suspect that
in his stumble he had involuntarily seen his companion on the midnight
journey. He did not think that the sea-maid herself knew that he had
seen her there. He might have been tempted now to believe that the
vision was some bright illusion, if its reality had not been proved by
the fact that Madame Le Maitre knew that he had a companion, and that
O'Shea had staked much that he should not take that long moonlight walk
by her side.

Since the day on which he had become sure that the sea-maid had such
close and real connection with human beings that he met every day, he
had ceased to have those strange and uncomfortable ideas about her,
which, in half his moods, relegated her into the region of freaks
practised upon mortals by the denizens of the unseen, or, still farther,
into the region of dreams that have no reality. However, now that she
had retired again into hiding, this assurance of his was small comfort.

He would have resolutely inquired of Madame Le Maitre who it was who had
been sent to warn him of danger if need be upon the beach, but that the
lady was not one to allow herself willingly to be questioned, and in
exciting her displeasure he might lose the only chance of gaining what
he sought. Then, too, with the thought of accosting the lady upon this
subject there always arose in his mind the remembrance of the brief
minute in which, to his own confounding, he had seen the face of the
sea-maid in the lady's own face, and a phantom doubt came to him as to
whether she were not herself the sea-maid, disfigured and made aged by
the wrappings she wore. He did not, however, believe this. He had every
reason to refuse the belief; and if he had had no other, this woman's
character was enough, it appeared to him, to give the lie to the
thought. A more intelligent view concerning that fleeting likeness was
that the two women were nearly related to one another, the younger in
charge of the elder; and that the younger, who had for some purpose or
prank played about in the waters near his home, must have lived in some
house there, must have means of communication with the place, and must
have acquainted Madame Le Maitre with his position when the need of a
physician arose. What was so dissatisfying to him was that all this was
the merest conjecture, that the lady whom he loved was a person whom he
had been obliged to invent in order to explain the appearances that had
so charmed him. He had not a shadow of proof of her existence.

The ice became strong, and bridged over the bay that lay within the
crescent of islands. All the islands, with their dunes, were covered
with snow; the gales which had beaten up the surf lessened in force; and
on the long snow-covered beaches there was only a fringe of white
breakers upon the edge of a sea that was almost calm.

The first visitor of any importance who came across the bay was the
English clergyman. Nearly all the people on Cloud Island were
Protestants, in so far as they had any religion. They were not a pious
people, but it seemed that this priest had been exceedingly faithful to
them in their trouble, and when he had been obliged to close the church
for fear of the contagion, had visited them regularly, except in those
few weeks between the seasons when the road by the beach had been almost
impassable.

Caius was first aware of the advent of this welcome visitor by a great
thumping at his door one morning before he had started on his daily
round. On opening it, he saw a hardy little man in a fur coat, who held
out his hand to him in enthusiastic greeting.

"Well, now, this is what I call being a good boy--a very good boy--to
come here to look after these poor folk."

Caius disclaimed the virtue which he did not feel.

"Motives! I don't care anything about motives. The point is to do the
right thing. I'm a good boy to come and visit them; you're a good boy to
come and cure them. They are not a very grateful lot, I'm sorry to say,
but we have nothing to do with that; we're put here to look after them,
and what we feel about it, or what they feel about it, is not the
question."

He had come into Caius' room, stamping the snow off his big boots. He
was a spare, elderly man, with gray hair and bright eyes. His horse and
sleigh stood without the door, and the horse jingled its bells
continually.

Here was a friend! Caius decided at once to question this man concerning
Madame Le Maitre, and--that other lady in whose existence he believed.

"The main thing that you want on these islands is nerve," said the
clergyman. "It would be no good at all now"--argumentatively--"for the
Bishop to send a man here who hadn't nerve. You never know where you'll
meet a quicksand, or a hole in the ice. Chubby and I nearly went under
this morning and never were seen again. Some of these fellows had been
cutting a hole, and--well, we just saw it in time. It would have been
the end of us, I can tell you; but then, you see, if you are being a
good boy and doing what you're told, that does not matter so much."

It appeared that Chubby was the clergyman's pony. In a short time Caius
had heard of various other adventures which she and her master had
shared together. He was interested to know if any of them would throw
any light upon the remarkable conduct of O'Shea and his friends; but
they did not.

"The men about here," he said--"I can't make anything out of them--are
they lawless?"

"You see"--in explanatory tone--"if you take a man and expose him to the
sea and the wind for half his life, you'll find that he is pretty much
asleep the other half. He may walk about with his eyes open, but his
brain's pretty much asleep; he's just equal to lounging and smoking.
There are just two things these men can do--fish, and gather the stuff
from wrecks. They'll make from eight dollars a day at the fishing, and
from sixteen to twenty when a wreck's in. They can afford to be idle the
rest of the time, and they are gloriously idle."

"Do they ever gather in bands to rob wrecked ships, or for other
unlawful purposes?"

"Oh no, not in the least! Oh no, nothing of the kind! They'll steal from
a wreck, of course, if they get the chance; but on the sly, not by
violence. Their worst sin is independence and self-righteousness. You
can't teach the children anything in the schools, for instance, for the
parents won't have them punished; they are quite sure that their
children never do anything wrong. That comes of living so far out of the
world, and getting their living so easily. I can tell you, Utopia has a
bad effect on character."

Caius let the matter go for that time; he had the prospect of seeing the
clergyman often.

Another week, when the clergyman had come to the island and Caius met
him by chance, they had the opportunity of walking up a long snowy hill
together, leading their horses. Caius asked him then about Madame Le
Maitre and O'Shea, and heard a plain consecutive tale of their lives and
of their coming to the island, which denuded the subject of all unknown
elements and appeared to rob it of special interest.

Captain Le Maitre, it appeared, had a life-long lease of the property on
Cloud Island, and also some property on the mainland south of Gaspe
Basin; but the land was worth little except by tillage, and, being a
seaman, he neglected it. His father had had the land before him.
Pembroke, the clergyman, had seen his father. He had never happened to
see the son, who would now be between forty and fifty years of age; but
when Madame Le Maitre had come to look after the farm on Cloud Island,
she had made herself known to him as in charge of her husband's affairs.
She found that she could not get the land worked by the islanders, and
had induced O'Shea, who it seemed was an old farm hand of her own
father's, to settle upon this farm, which was a richer one than the one
he had had upon the mainland. The soil of the islands, Pembroke said,
was in reality exceedingly rich, but in no case had it ever been
properly worked, and he was in hopes that now Madame Le Maitre might
produce a model farm, which would be of vast good in showing the
islanders how much they lost by their indifferent manner of treating
their land.

"Why did she come to the islands?"

"Conscientiousness, I think. The land here was neglected; the people
here certainly present a field white to harvest to anyone who has the
missionary spirit."

"Is she--is she very devout?" asked Caius.

"Well, yes, in her own way she is--mind, I say in her own way. I
couldn't tell you, now, whether she is Protestant or Papist; I don't
believe she knows herself."

"He that sitteth between two stools----" suggested Caius, chiefly for
want of something to say.

"Well, no, I wouldn't say that. Bless you! the truest hearts on God's
earth don't trouble about religious opinions; they have got the
essential oil expressed out of them, and that's all they want."

To Caius this subject of the lady's religion appeared a matter in which
he had no need to take interest, but the other went on:

"She was brought up in a convent, you know--a country convent somewhere
on the Gaspe coast, and, from what she tells me, the nuns had the good
policy to make her happy. She tells me that where the convent gardens
abutted on the sea, she and her fellows used to be allowed to fish and
row about. You see, her mother had been a Catholic, and the father,
being an old miser, had money, so I suppose the sisters thought they
could make a nun of her; and very likely they would have done, for she
is just that sort, but the father stopped that little game by making her
marry before he died."

"I always had an idea that the people on the coast up there were all
poor and quite uneducated."

"Well, yes, for the most part they are pretty much what you would see on
these islands; but our Bishop tells me that, here and there, there are
excellent private houses, and the priests' houses and the convents are
tolerably well off. But, to tell you the truth, I think this lady's
father had some education, and his going to that part of the country may
be accounted for by what she told me once about her mother. Her mother
was a dancer, a ballet-dancer, a very estimable and pious woman, her
daughter says, and I have no doubt it is true; but an educated man who
makes that sort of marriage, you know, may prefer to live out of the
world."

Caius was becoming interested.

"If she has inherited her mother's strength and lightness, that explains
how she gets on her horse. By Jove! I never saw a woman jump on a horse
without help as she does."

"Just so; she has marvellous strength and endurance, and the best proof
of that, is the work she is doing nowadays. Why, with the exception of
three days that she came to see my wife, and would have died if she
hadn't, she has worked night and day among these sick people for the
last six months. She came to see my wife pretty much half dead, but the
drive on the sand and a short rest pretty well set her up again."

Pembroke drifted off here into discourse about the affairs of his
parish, which comprised all the Protestant inhabitants of the island.
His voice went on in the cheerful, jerky, matter-of-fact tone in which
he always talked. Caius did not pay much heed, except that admiration
for the sweet spirit of the man and for the pluck and hardihood with
which he carried on his work, grew in him in spite of his heedlessness,
for there was nothing that Pembroke suspected less than that he himself
was a hero.

"Pretty tough work you have of it," said Caius at last; "if it was only
christening and marrying and burying them all, you would have more than
enough to do, with the distances so great."

"Oh, bless you! my boy, yes; it's the distance and the weather; but what
are we here for but to do our work? Life isn't long, any way, but I'll
tell you what it is--a man needs to know the place to know what he can
do and what he can't. Now, the Bishop comes over for a week in summer--I
don't know a finer man than our Bishop anywhere; he doesn't give himself
much rest, and that's a fact; but they've sent him out from England,
and what does he know about these islands? He said to me that he wanted
me to have morning service every Sunday, as I have it at Harbour Island,
and service every Sunday afternoon here on The Cloud."

"He might as well have suggested that you had morning service on the
Magdalens, afternoon service in Newfoundland, and evening service in
Labrador."

"Exactly, just as possible, my boy; but they had the diphtheria here, so
I couldn't bring him over, even in fair weather, to see how he liked the
journey."

All this time Caius was cudgelling his brains to know how to bring the
talk back to Madame Le Maitre, and he ended by breaking in with an
abrupt inquiry as to how old she was.

A slight change came over Pembroke's demeanour. It seemed to Caius that
his confidential tone lapsed into one of suspicious reserve.

"Not very old"--dryly.

Caius perceived that he was being suspected of taking an undue interest
in the benefactress of the island. The idea, when it came from another,
surprised him.

"Look here! I don't take much interest in Madame Le Maitre, except that
she seems a saint and I'd like to please her; but what I want to know is
this--there is a girl who is a sister, or niece, or daughter, or some
other relation of hers, who is on these islands. Who is she, and where
is she?"

"Do you mean any of the girls she has in her house? She took them from
families upon the island only for the sake of training them."

"I don't mean any of those girls!"--this with emphasis.

"I don't know who you mean."

Caius turned and faced him. Do what he would, he could not hide his
excited interest.

"You surely must know. It is impossible that there should be a girl,
young, beautiful and refined, living somewhere about here, and you not
know."

"I should say so--quite impossible."

"Then, be kind enough to tell me who she is. I have an important reason
for asking."

"My dear boy, I would tell you with all the pleasure in the world if I
knew."

"I have seen her." Caius spoke in a solemn voice.

The priest looked at him with evident interest and curiosity. "Well,
where was she, and who was she?"

"You must know: you are in Madame Le Maitre's confidence; you travel
from door to door, day in and day out; you know everybody and everything
upon these islands."

"I assure you," said the priest, "that I never heard of such a person."

CHAPTER XIII.

WHITE BIRDS; WHITE SNOW; WHITE THOUGHTS.

By degrees Caius was obliged to give up his last lingering belief in the
existence of the lady he loved. It was a curious position to be in, for
he loved her none the less. Two months of work and thought for the
diseased people had slipped away, and by the mere lapse of time, as well
as by every other proof, he had come to know that there was no maiden in
any way connected with Madame Le Maitre who answered to the visions he
had seen, or who might be wooed by the man who had ceased to care for
all other women for her sweet sake.

After Caius had arrived the epidemic had become worse, as it had been
prophesied it would, when the people began to exclude the winter air
from their houses. In almost every family upon the little isle there was
a victim, and Caius, under the compelling force of the orders which
Madame Le Maitre never gave and the wishes she never expressed, became
nurse as well as doctor, using what skill he had in every possible
office for the sick, working early and late, and many a time the night
through. It was not a time to prattle of the sea-maid to either Madame
Le Maitre or O'Shea, who both of them worked at his side in the battle
against death, and were, Caius verily believed, more heroic and
successful combatants than himself. Some solution concerning his
lady-love there must be, and Caius neither forgot nor gave up his
intention of probing the lives of these two to discover what he wished;
but the foreboding that the discovery would work him no weal made it the
easier to lay the matter aside and wait. They were all bound in the same
icy prison; he could afford patience.

The question of the hospital had been solved in this way. Madame Le
Maitre had taken O'Shea and his wife and children to live with her, and
such patients as could be persuaded or forced into hospital were taken
to his house and nursed there. Then, also, as the disease became more
prevalent, people who had thus far refused all sanitary measures, in
dire fear opened their doors, and allowed Caius and O'Shea to enter with
whitewash brushes and other means of disinfection.

Caius was successful in this, that, in proportion to the number of
people who were taken ill, the death-rate was only one third of what it
had been before he came. He and his fellow-workers were successful also
in a more radical way, for about the end of January it was suddenly
observed among them that there were no new cases of illness. The ill and
the weak gradually recovered. In a few more weeks the Angels of Death
and Disease retired from the field, and the island was not depopulated.
Whether another outbreak might or might not occur they could not tell;
but knowing the thoroughness of the work which they had done, they were
ready to hope that the victory was complete. Gradually their work
ceased, for there was no one in all the happy island who needed nursing
or medical attendance. Caius found then how wonderfully free the place
was from all those ailments which ordinarily beset humanity.

This was in the middle of February, when the days were growing long, and
even the evening was bright and light upon the islands of snow and the
sea of ice.

It appeared to Caius that Madame Le Maitre had grown years older during
the pestilence. Deep lines of weariness had come in her face, and her
eyes were heavy with want of sleep and sympathetic tears. Again and
again he had feared that the disease would attack her, and, indeed, he
knew that it had only been the constant riding about the island hills in
the wonderful air that had kept the little band of workers in health. As
it was, O'Shea had lost a child, and three of the girls in the house of
Madame Le Maitre had been ill. Now that the strain was over, Caius
feared prostration that would be worse than the disease itself for the
lady who had kept up so bravely through it all; but, ever feeling an
impossibility in her presence of speaking freely of anything that
concerned herself, he had hardly been able to express the solicitude he
felt before it was relieved by the welcome news that she had travelled
across the bay to pay a visit to Pembroke's wife.

She had gone without either telling Caius of her intention or bidding
him good-bye, and, glad as he was, he felt that he had not deserved this
discourtesy at her hands. Indeed, looking back now, he felt disposed to
resent the indifference with which she had treated him from first to
last. Not as the people's doctor. In that capacity she had been eager
for his services, and grateful to him with a speechless, reverent
gratitude that he felt to be much more than his due; but as a man, as a
companion, as a friend, she had been simply unconscious of his
existence. When she had said to him at the beginning, "You will be
lonely; there is no one on the island to whom you can speak as a
friend," he perceived now that she had excluded herself as well as the
absent world from his companionship. It seemed to him that it had never
once occurred to her that it was in her power to alter this.

Truly, if it had not been for Pembroke, the clergyman, Caius would never
have had a companionable word; and he had found that there were limits
to the interest he could take in Pembroke, that the stock of likings and
disliking that they had in common was not great. Then, too, since the
day on which he had questioned him so vehemently about the relatives of
Madame Le Maitre, he fancied that the clergyman had treated him with
apprehensive reserve.

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