The Mermaid

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Caius said nothing; but in a minute, grasping at the one straw of hope
which he saw, "What are you going to do?" he asked.

O'Shea smoothed out the letter he held.

"Well, you needn't speak so quick; it's just that there I thought we
might have our considerations upon. I'm not above asking advoice of a
gintleman of the world like yerself; I'm not above giving advoice,
neither."

He sat looking vacantly before him with a grim smile upon his face.
Caius saw that his mind was made up.

"What are you going to do?" he asked again.

At the same moment came the sharp consciousness upon him that he himself
was a murderer, that he wanted to have Le Maitre murdered, that his
question meant that he was eager to be made privy to the plot, willing
to abet it. Yet he did not feel wicked at all; before his eyes was the
face of Josephine lying asleep, unconscious and peaceful. He felt that
he fought in a cause in which a saint might fight.

"What I may or may not do," said O'Shea, "is neither here nor there just
now. The first thing is, what you're going to do. The schooner's out
there to the north-east; the boat that's been used for the sealing is
over here to the south-west; now, there ain't no sinse, that I know of,
in being uncomfortable when it can be helped, or in putting ourselves
about for a brute of a man who ain't worth it. It's plain enough what's
the easy thing to do. To-morrow morning ye'll make out that ye can't
abide no longer staying in this dull hole, and offer the skipper of one
of them sealing-boats fifty dollars to have the boat across the ice and
take you to Souris. Then ye will go up and talk plain common-sinse to
madame, and tell her to put on her man's top-coat she's worn before, and
skip out of this dirty fellow's clutches. There ain't nothing like being
scared out of their wits for making women reasonable--it's about the
only time they have their sinses, so far as I know."

"If she won't come, what then?" Caius demanded hastily.

"My woife says that if ye're not more of a fool than we take ye for,
she'll go."

There was something in the mechanical repetition of what his wife had
said that made Caius suspect.

"You don't think she'll go?"

O'Shea did not answer.

"That is what you'll do, any way," he said; "and ye'll do it the best
way ye know how."

He sat upon the bed some time longer, wrapped in grim reserve. The
candle guttered, flared, burned itself out. The two men were together in
the dark. Caius believed that if the first expedient failed, and he felt
it could not but fail, murder was their only resource against what
seemed to them intolerable evil.

O'Shea got up.

"Perhaps ye think the gintleman that is coming has redeeming features
about him?" A fine edge of sarcasm was in his tone. "Well, he hain't.
Before we lost sight of him, I got word concarning him from one part of
the world and another. If I haven't got the law of him, it's because
he's too much of a sneak. He wasn't anything but a handsome sort of
beast to begin with; and, what with drinking and the life he's led, he's
grown into a sort of thing that had better go on all fours like
Nebuchadnezzar than come nigh decent people on his hind-legs. Why has he
let her alone all these years?" The speech was grimly dramatic. "Why,
just because, first place, I believe another woman had the upper hand of
him; second place, when he married madame it was the land and money her
father had to leave her that made him make that bargain. He hadn't that
in him that would make him care for a white slip of a girl as she was
then, and, any way, he knew that the girl and the money would keep till
he was sick of roving. It's as nasty a trick as could be that he's
served her, playing dead dog all these years, and coming to catch her
unawares. I tell ye the main thing he has on his mind is revenge for the
letters she wrote him when she first got word of his tricks, and then,
too, he's coming back to carouse on her money and the money she's made
on his father's land, that he niver looked to himself."

O'Shea stalked through the small dark rooms and went out, closing the
outer door gently behind him. Caius sat still, wrapped in his blankets.
He bowed his head upon his knees. The darkness was only the physical
part of the blackness that closed over his spirit. There was only one
light in this blackness--that was Josephine's face. Calm he saw it,
touched with the look of devotion or mercy; laughing and dimpled he saw
it, a thing at one with the sunshine and all the joy of earth; and then
he saw it change, and grow pale with fear, and repulsion, and disgust.
Around this one face, that carried light with it, there were horrid
shapes and sounds in the blackness of his mind. He had been a good man;
he had preferred good to evil: had it all been a farce? Was the thing
that he was being driven to do now a thing of satanic prompting, and he
himself corrupt--all the goodness which he had thought to be himself
only an organism, fair outside, that rotted inwardly? Or was this fear
the result of false teaching, the prompting of an artificial conscience,
and was the thing he wished to do the wholesome and natural course to
take--right in the sight of such Deity as might be beyond the curtain of
the unknown, the Force who had set the natural laws of being in motion?
Caius did not know. While his judgment was in suspense he was beset by
horrible fears--the fear that he might be driven to do a villainous
deed, the greater fear that he should not accomplish it, the awful fear,
rising above all else in his mind, of seeing Josephine overtaken by the
horrible fate which menaced her, and he himself still alive to feel her
misery and his own.

No, rather than that he would himself kill the man. It was not the part
that had been assigned to him, but if she would not save herself it
would be the noblest thing to do. Was he to allow O'Shea, with a wife
and children, to involve himself in such dire trouble, when he, who had
no one dependent upon him, could do the deed, and take what consequences
might be? He felt a glow of moral worth like that which he had felt when
he decided upon his mission to the island--greater, for in that his
motives had been mixed and sordid, and in this his only object was to
save lives that were of more worth than his own. Should he kill the man,
he would hardly escape death, and even if he did, he could never look
Josephine in the face again.

Why not? Why, if this deed were so good, could he not, after the doing
of it, go back to her and read gratitude in her eyes? Because
Josephine's standard of right and wrong was different from his. What was
her standard? His mind cried out an impatient answer. "She believes it
is better to suffer than to be happy." He did not believe that; he would
settle this matter by his own light, and, by freeing her and saving her
faithful friends, be cut off from her for ever.

It would be an easy thing to do, to go up to the man and put a knife in
his heart, or shoot him like a dog!

His whole being revolted from the thought; when the deed came before his
eyes, it seemed to him that only in some dark feverish imagination could
he have dreamed of acting it out, that of course in plain common-sense,
that daylight of the mind, he could not will to do this.

Then he thought again of the misery of the suffering wife, and he
believed that, foreign as it was to his whole habit of life, he could do
this, even this, to save her.

Then again came over him the sickening dread that the old rules of right
and wrong that he had been taught were the right guides after all, and
that Josephine was right, and that he must submit.

The very thought of submission made his soul rise up in a mad tempest of
anger against such a moral law, against all who taught it, against the
God who was supposed to ordain it; and so strong was the tempest of this
wrath, and so weak was he, perplexed, wretched, that he would have been
glad even at the same moment to have appealed to the God of his fathers,
with whom he was quarrelling, for counsel and help. His quarrel was too
fierce for that. His quarrel with God made trust, made mere belief even,
impossible, and he was aware that it was not new, that this was only the
culminating hour of a long rebellion.

CHAPTER VII.

THE WILD WAVES WHIST.

Next morning, when Caius walked forth into the glory of the April
sunshine, he felt himself to be a poor, wretched man. There was not a
fisherman upon the island, lazy, selfish as they were, and despised in
his eyes, that did not appear to him to be a better man than he. All the
force of training and habit made the thing that he was going to do
appear despicable; but all the force of training and habit was not
strong enough to make his judgment clear or direct his will.

The muddy road was beginning to steam in the sunshine; the thin shining
ice of night that coated its puddles was melting away. In the green
strip by the roadside he saw the yellow-tufted head of a dandelion just
level with the grass. The thicket of stunted firs on either side smelt
sweet, and beyond them he saw the ice-field that dazzled his eyes, and
the blue sea that sparkled. From this side he could not see the bay and
the ship of fate lying at anchor, but he noticed with relief that the
ice was not much less.

There was no use in thinking or feeling; he must go on and do what was
to be done. So he told himself. He shut his heart against the influence
of the happy earth; he felt like a guest bidden by fate, who knew not
whether the feast were to be for bridal or funeral. That he was not a
strong man was shown in this--that having hoped and feared, dreamed and
suffered, struggling to see a plain path where no path was, for half the
night, he now felt that his power of thought and feeling had burned out,
that he could only act his part, without caring much what its results
might be.

It was eight o'clock. He had groomed his horse, and tidied his house,
and bathed, and breakfasted. He did not think it seemly to intrude upon
the lady before this hour, and now he ascended her steps and knocked at
her door. The dogs thumped their tails on the wooden veranda; it was
only of late they had learned this welcome for him. Would they give it
now, he wondered, if they could see his heart? As he stood there waiting
for a minute, he felt that it would be good, if possible, to have laid
his dilemma fairly before the canine sense and heart, and to have let
the dogs rise and tear him or let him pass, as they judged best. It was
a foolish fancy.

It was O'Shea's wife who opened the door; her face was disfigured by
crying.

"You have told her?" demanded Caius, with relief.

The woman shook her head.

"It was the fine morning that tempted her out, sir," she said. "She sent
down to me, saying how she had taken a cup of milk and gone to ride on
the beach, and I was to come up and look after the girls. But look here,
sir"--eagerly--"it's a good thing, I'm thinking, for her spirits are
high when she rides in fine weather, and she's more ready for games and
plays, and thinking of pleasure. She's gone on the west shore, round by
the light, for O'Shea he looked at the tracks. Do you get your horse
and ride after, where you see her tracks in the sand."

Caius went. He mounted his horse and rode down upon the western shore.
He found the track, and galloped upon it. The tide was low; the ice was
far from shore; the highway, smoothed by the waves, was firm and good.
Caius galloped to the end of the island where the light was, where the
sealing vessels lay round the base of the lighthouse, and out upon the
dune, and still the print of her horse's feet went on in front of him.
It was not the first time that he and she had been upon the dune
together.

A mile, two miles, three; he rode at an easy pace, for now he knew that
he could not miss the rider before him. He watched the surf break gently
on the broad shallow reach of sand-ridges that lay between him and the
floating ice. And when he had ridden so far he was not the same man as
when he mounted his horse, or at least, his own soul, of which man has
hardly permanent possession, had returned to him. He could now see, over
the low mists of his own moods, all the issues of Josephine's case--all,
at least, that were revealed to him; for souls are of different stature,
and it is as the head is high or low that the battlefield is truly
discerned.

Long before he met her he saw Josephine. She had apparently gone as far
as she thought wise, and was amusing herself by making her horse set his
feet in the cold surf. It was a game with the horse and the wavelets
that she was playing. Each time he danced back and sunned himself he had
to go in again; and when he stood, his hind-feet on the sand and his
fore-feet reared over the foam, by way of going where she wished and
keeping himself dry, Caius could see her gestures so well that it
seemed to him he heard the tones of playful remonstrance with which she
argued the case.

When she perceived that Caius intended to come up to her, she rode to
meet him. Her white cap had been taken off and stuffed into the breast
of her dress; the hood surrounded her face loosely, but did not hide it;
her eyes were sparkling with pleasure--the pure animal pleasure of life
and motion, the sensuous pleasure in the beauty and the music of the
waves; other pleasures there might be, but these were certain, and
predominated.

"Why did you come?"

She asked the question as a happy child might ask of its playmate--no
hint of danger.

To Caius it was a physical impossibility to answer this question with
the truth just then.

"Is not springtime an answer?" he asked, then added: "I am going away
to-day. I came for one last ride."

She looked at him for a few moments, evidently supposing that he
intended to go to Harbour Island to wait there for his ship. If that
were so, it seemed that she felt no further responsibility about her
conduct to him. His heart sank to see that her joy in the spring and the
morning was such that the thought of parting did not apparently grieve
her much.

In a moment more her eyes flashed at him with the laughter at his
expense which he knew so well; she tried not to laugh as she spoke, but
could not help it.

"I have been visiting the band of men who were going to murder you the
night you came. Would you like to see them?"

"If you will take care of me."

As she turned and rode before him he heard her laughing.

"There," she said, stopping and pointing to the ground--"there is the
place where the quicksand was. I have not gone over it this morning.
Sometimes they last from one season to another; sometimes they change
themselves in a few days. I was dreadfully frightened when we began to
sink, but it was you who saved the pony."

"Don't," said Caius--"don't attempt to make the best of me. I would
rather be laughed at." He spoke lightly, without feeling, and that
seemed to please her.

"I think," she said candidly, "we behaved very badly; but it was
O'Shea's fault--I only enjoyed it. And I don't see what else we could
have done, because those two French sailors had to watch if anyone came
to steal from the wreck, and they were going to help us so far as to go
to the sheds on the cliff for boards to get up the cart; but O'Shea
could not have stayed all night with the bags unless I had left him my
coat as well as his own."

"You might have trusted me," said Caius. Still he spoke with no
sensibility; she grew more at her ease.

"O'Shea wouldn't; and I couldn't control O'Shea. And then we had to meet
so often, that I could not bear that you should know I had worn a man's
coat. I had to do it, for I couldn't drive home any other way." Here a
pause, and her mind wandered to another recollection. "Those men we met
brought us word that one of my friends was so ill; I had to hurry to
him. In my heart I thought you would not respect me because I had worn a
man's coat; and because---- Yes, it was very naughty of me indeed to
behave as I did in the water that summer. Even then I did try to get
O'Shea to let me walk with you, but he wouldn't."

She had been slowly riding through a deep, soft sand-drift that was
heaped at the mouth of the hollow, and when they had got through the
opening, Caius saw the ribs of one side of an enormous wreck protruding
from the sand, about six feet in height. A small hardy weed had grown
upon their heads in tufts; withered and sear with the winter, it still
hung there. The ribs bent over a little, as the men he had seen had
bent.

"The cloud-shadows and the moonlight were very confusing," remarked
Josephine; "and then O'Shea made the two sailors stand in the same way,
and they were real. I never knew a man like O'Shea for thinking of
things that are half serious and half funny. I never knew him yet fail
to find a way to do the thing he wanted to do; and it's always a way
that makes me laugh."

If Josephine would not come away with him, would O'Shea find a way of
killing Le Maitre? and would it be a way to make her laugh? With the
awful weight of the tidings he brought upon his heart, all that he said
or did before he told them seemed artificial.

"I thought"--half mechanically--"that I saw them all hold up their
hands."

"Did you?" she asked. "The first two did; O'Shea told them to hold up
their hands."

"There is something you said a minute ago that I want to answer," he
said.

She thought he had left the subject of his illusion because it mortified
him.

"You said"--he began now to feel emotion as he spoke--"that you thought
I should not respect you. I want to tell you that I respected you as I
respect my mother, even when you were only a mermaid. I saw you when I
fell that night as we walked on this beach. If you had worn a boy's
coat, or a fishskin, always, I had sense enough to see that it was a
saint at play. Have you read all the odd stories about the saints and
the Virgin--how they appear and vanish, and wear odd clothes, and play
beneficent tricks with people? It was like that to me. I don't know how
to say it, but I think when good people play, they have to be very, very
good, or they don't really enjoy it. I don't know how to explain it, but
the moderate sort of goodness spoils everything."

Caius, when he had said this, felt that it was something he had never
thought before; and, whatever it might mean, he felt instinctively that
it meant a great deal more than he knew. He felt a little shabby at
having expressed it from her religious point of view, in which he had no
part; but his excuse was that there was in his mind at least the doubt
that she might be right, and, whether or not, his mission just then was
to gain her confidence. He brushed scruples aside for the end in view.

"I am glad you said that," she said. "I am not good, but I should like
to be. It wasn't becoming to play a mermaid, but I didn't think of that
then. I didn't know many things then that I know now. You see, my
uncle's wife drowned her little child; and afterwards, when she was ill,
I went to take care of her, and we could not let anyone know, because
the police would have interfered for fear she would drown me. But she is
quite harmless, poor thing! It is only that time stopped for her when
the child was drowned, and she thinks its little body is in the water
yet, if we could only find it. I found she had made that dress you call
a fishskin with floats on it for herself, and she used to get into the
sea, from the opening of an old cellar, at night, and push herself about
with a pole. It was the beautiful wild thing that only a mad person with
nice thoughts could do. But when she was ill, I played with it, for I
had nothing else to do; it was desecration."

"I thought you were like the child that was lost. I think you are like
her."

"She thought so, too; she used to think sometimes that I was her little
daughter grown up. It was very strange, living with her; I almost think
I might have gone mad, too, if I hadn't played with you."

It was very strange, Caius thought, that on this day of all days she
should be willing to talk to him about herself, should be willing to
laugh and chat and be happy with him. The one day that he dare not
listen long, that he must disturb her peace, was the only time that she
had seemed to wish to make a friend of him.

"When you lived so near us," he asked, "did you ever come across the
woods and see my father's house? Did you see my father and mother? I
think you would like them if you did."

"Oh, no," she said lightly; "I only knew who you were because my aunt
talked about you; she never forgot what you had done for the child."

"Do not turn your horse yet." He allowed himself to be urgent now. "I
have something to say to you which must be said. I am going home; I do
not want to wait for the steamer; I want to bribe one of those sealing
vessels to start with me to-day. I have come to ask you if you will not
come with me to see my mother. You do not know what it is to have a
mother. Mothers are very good; mine is. You would like to be with her, I
know; you would have the calm of feeling taken care of, instead of
standing alone in the world."

He said all this without letting his tone betray that that
double-thoughted mind of his was telling him that this was doubtful,
that his mother might be slow to believe in Josephine, and that he was
not sure whether Josephine would be attracted by her.

Josephine looked at him with round-eyed surprise; then, apparently
conjecturing that the invitation was purely kind, purely stupid, she
thanked him, and declined it graciously.

"Is there no folly with which you would not easily credit me?" He smiled
faintly in his reproach. "Do you think I do not know what I am saying? I
have been awake all night thinking what I could do for you." For a
moment he looked at her helplessly, hoping that some hint of the truth
would come of itself; then, turning away his face, he said hoarsely: "Le
Maitre is on the Gaspe schooner. O'Shea has had the news. He is lying
drunk in his berth."

He did not turn until he heard a slight sound. Then he saw that she had
slipped down from her horse, perhaps because she was afraid of falling
from it. Her face was quite white; there was a drawn look of abject
terror upon it; but she only put her horse's rein in his hand, and
pointed to the mouth of the little valley.

"Let me be alone a little while," she whispered.

So Caius rode out upon the beach, leading her horse; and there he held
both restive animals as still as might be, and waited.

CHAPTER VIII.

"GOD'S IN HIS HEAVEN."

Caius wondered how long he ought to wait if she did not come out to him.
He wondered if she would die of misery there alone in the sand-dune, or
if she would go mad, and meet him in some fantastic humour, all the
intelligence scorched out of her poor brain by the cruel words he had
said. He had a notion that she had wanted to say her prayers, and,
although he did not believe in an answering Heaven, he did believe that
prayers would comfort her, and he hoped that that was why she asked to
be left.

When he thought of the terror in her eyes, he felt sanguine that she
would come with him. Now that he had seen her distress, it seemed to him
worse than any notion he had preconceived of it. It was right that she
should go with him. When she had once done that, he would stand between
her and this man always. That would be enough; if she should never care
for him, if he had nothing more than that, he would be satisfied, and
the world might think what it would. If she would not go with him--well,
then he would kill Le Maitre. His mind was made up; there was nothing
left of hesitation or scruple. He looked at the broad sea and the
sunlight and the sky, and made his vow with clenched teeth. He laughed
at the words which had scared him the night before--the names of the
crimes which were his alternatives; they were made righteousness to him
by the sight of fear in a woman's face.

It is one form of weakness to lay too much stress upon the emotion of
another, just as it is weak to take too much heed of our own emotions;
but Caius thought the sympathy that carried all before it was strength.

After awhile, waiting became intolerable. Leading both horses, he walked
cautiously back to a point where he could see Josephine. She was sitting
upon the sandy bank near where he had left her. He took his cap in his
hand, and went with the horses, standing reverently before her. He felt
sure now that she had been saying her prayers, because, although her
face was still very pallid, she was composed and able to speak. He
wished now she had not prayed.

"You are very kind to me." Her voice trembled, but she gave him a little
smile. "I cannot pretend that I am not distressed; it would be false,
and falsehood is not right. You are very, very kind, and I thank
you----"

She broke off, as if she had been going to say something more but had
wearily forgotten what it was.

"Oh, do not say that!" His voice was like one pleading to be spared a
blow. "I love you. There is no greater joy to me on earth than to serve
you."

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