The Mermaid

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"Hush," she said; "don't say that. I am very sorry for you, but sorrow
must come to us all in some way."

"Don't, don't!" he cried--"don't tell me that suffering is good. It is
not good; it is an evil. It is right to shun evil; it is the only
right. The other is a horrid fable--a lie concocted by priests and
devils!"

"Suppose you loved someone--me, for instance--and I was dead, and you
knew quite certainly that by dying you would come to where I was--would
you call death good or evil?"

He demurred. He did not want to admit belief in anything connected with
the doctrine of submission.

"I said 'suppose,'" she said.

"I would go through far more than death to come near you."

"Suffering is just a gate, like death. We go through it to get the
things we really want most."

"I don't believe in a religion that calls suffering better than
happiness; but I know you do."

"No, I don't," she said, "and God does not; and people who talk as if He
did not want us to seek happiness--even our own happiness--are making to
themselves a graven image. I will tell you how I think about it, because
I have been alone a great deal and been always very much afraid, and
that has made me think a great deal, and you have been very kind, for
you risked your life for my poor people, and now you would risk
something more than that to help me. Will you listen while I try to tell
you?"

Caius signified his assent. He was losing all his hope. He was thinking
that when she had done talking he would go and get ready to do murder;
but he listened.

"You see," she began, "the greatest happiness is love. Love is greedy to
get as well as to give. It is all nonsense talking about love that gives
and asks for no return. We only put up with that when we cannot get the
other, and why? Why should we think it the grandest thing to give what
we would scorn to take? You, for instance--you would rather have a
person you loved do nothing for you, yet enjoy you, always demanding
your affection and presence, than that he or she should be endlessly
generous, and indifferent to what you give in return."

"Yes." He blushed as he said it.

"Well then, it is cant to speak as if the love that asks for no return
is the noblest. Now listen. I have something very solemn to say, because
it is only by the greatest things that we learn what the little ought to
be. When God came to earth to live for awhile, it was for the sake of
His happiness and ours; He loved us in the way that I have been saying;
He was not content only to bless us, He wanted us to enjoy Him. He
wanted that happiness from us; and He wanted us to expect it from Him
and from each other; and if we had answered, all would have been like
the first marriage feast, where they had the very best wine, and such
lots of it. But, you see, we couldn't answer; we had no souls. We were
just like the men on Cloud Island who laughed at you when you wanted
them to build a hospital. The little self or soul that we had was of
that sort that we couldn't even love each other very much with it, and
not Him at all. So there was only one way, and that was for us to grow
out of these stupid little souls, and get good big ones, that can enjoy
God, and enjoy each other, and enjoy everything perfectly." She looked
up over the yellow sand-hills into the deep sunny sky, and drew a long
breath of the April air involuntarily. "Oh," she said, "a good, big,
perfect soul could enjoy so much."

It seemed as if she thought she had said it all and finished the
subject.

"Well," said Caius, interested in spite of himself, "if God wanted to
make us happy, He could have given us that kind of soul."

"Ah, no! We don't know why things have to grow, but they must;
everything grows--_you_ know that. For some reason, that is the best
way; so there was just one way for those souls to grow in us, and He
showed us how. It is by doing what is quite perfectly right, and bearing
all the suffering that comes because of it, and doing all the giving
side of love, because here we can't get much. Pain is not good in
itself; it is a gate. Our souls are growing all through the gate of the
suffering, and when we get to the other side of it, we shall find we
have won them. God wants us to be greedy for happiness; but we must find
it by going through the gate He went through to show us the way."

Caius stood before her holding the horses; even they had been still
while she was speaking, as if listening to the music of her voice. Caius
felt the misery of a wavering will and conflicting thoughts.

"If I thought," he said, "that God cared about happiness--just simple
happiness--it would make religion seem so much more sensible; but I'm
afraid I don't believe in living after death, or that He cares----"

What she said was wholly unreasonable. She put out her hand and took
his, as if the hand-clasp were a compact.

"Trust God and see," she said.

There was in her white face such a look of glorious hope, that Caius,
half carried away by its inspiration, still quailed before her. After
he had wrung her hand, he found himself brushing his sleeve across his
eyes. As he thought that he had lost her, thought of all that she would
have to endure, of the murder he still longed to commit, and felt all
the agony of indecision again, and suspected that after this he would
scruple to commit it--when all this came upon him, he turned and leaned
against one of the horses, sobbing, conscious in a vague way that he did
not wish to stop himself, but only craved her pity.

Josephine comforted him. She did not apparently try to, she did not do
or say anything to the purpose; but she evinced such consternation at
the sight of his tears, that stronger thoughts came. He put aside his
trouble, and helped her to mount her horse.

They rode along the beach slowly together. She was content to go slowly.
She looked physically too exhausted to ride fast. Even yet probably,
within her heart, the conflict was going forward that had only been well
begun in her brief solitude of the sand valley.

Caius looked at her from time to time with feelings of fierce
indignation and dejection. The indignation was against Le Maitre, the
dejection was wholly upon his own account; for he felt that his plan of
help had failed, and that where he had hoped to give strength and
comfort, he had only, in utter weakness, exacted pity. Caius had one
virtue in these days: he did not admire anything that he did, and he did
not even think much about the self he scorned. With regard to Josephine,
he felt that if her philosophy of life were true it was not for him to
presume to pity her. So vividly had she brought her conception of the
use of life before him that it was stamped upon his mind in a brief
series of pictures, clear, indelible; and the last picture was one of
which he could not think clearly, but it produced in him an idea of the
after-life which he had not before.

Then he thought again of the cloud under which Josephine was entering.
Her decision would in all probability cut down her bright, useful life
to a few short years of struggle and shame and sorrow. At last he spoke:

"But why do you think it right to sacrifice yourself to this man? It
does not seem to me right."

He knew then what clearness of thought she had, for she looked with
almost horror in her face.

"Sacrifice myself for Le Maitre! Oh no! I should have no right to do
that; but to the ideal right, to God--yes. If I withheld anything from
God, how could I win my soul?"

"But how do you know God requires this?"

"Ah! I told you before. Why will you not understand? I have prayed. I
know God has taken this thing in his own hand."

Caius said no more. Josephine's way of looking at this thing might not
be true; that was not what he was considering just then. He knew that it
was intensely true for her, would remain true for her until the event of
death proved it true or false. This was the factor in the present
problem that was the enemy to his scheme. Then, furthermore, whether it
were true or false, he knew that there was in his mind the doubt, and
that doubt would remain with him, and it would prevent him from killing
Le Maitre; it would even prevent him from abetting O'Shea, and he
supposed that that abetting would be necessary. Here was cause enough
for dejection--that the whole miserable progress of events which he
feared most should take place. And why? Because a woman held a glorious
faith which might turn out to be delusion, and because he, a man, had
not strength to believe for certain that it was a delusion.

It raised no flicker of renewed hope in Caius to meet O'Shea at the turn
of the shore where the boats of the seal fishery were drawn up. O'Shea
had a brisk look of energy that made it evident that he was still bent
upon accomplishing his design. He stopped in front of the lady's horse,
and said something to her which Caius did not hear.

"Have ye arranged that little picnic over to Prince Edward's," he called
to Caius.

Caius looked at Josephine. O'Shea's mere presence had put much of the
spiritual aspect of the case to flight, and he suddenly smarted under
the realization that he had never put the question to her since she had
known her danger--never put the request to her strongly at all.

"Come," said Josephine; "I am going home. I am going to send all my
girls to their own homes and get the house ready for my husband."

O'Shea, with imperturbable countenance, pushed off his hat and scratched
his head.

"I was thinking," he remarked casually, "that I'd jist send Mammy along
with ye to Prince Edward." (Mammy was what he always called his wife.)
"I am thinking he'll be real glad to see her, for she's a real
respectable woman."

"Who?" asked Josephine, puzzled.

"Prince Edward, that owns the island," said O'Shea. "And she's that down
in the mouth, it's no comfort for me to have her; and she can take the
baby and welcome. It's a fair sea." He looked to the south as he spoke.
"I'd risk both her and the brat on it; and Skipper Pierre is getting
ready to take the boat across the ice."

Caius saw that resolution had fled from Josephine. She too looked at the
calm blue southern sea, and agonized longing came into her eyes. It
seemed to Caius too cruel, too horribly cruel, that she should be
tortured by this temptation. Because he knew that to her it could be
nothing but temptation, he sat silent when O'Shea, seeing that the
lady's gaze was afar, signed to him for aid; and because he hoped that
she might yield he was silent, and did not come to rescue her from the
tormentor.

O'Shea gave him a look of undisguised scorn; but since he would not woo,
it appeared that this man was able to do some wooing for him.

"Of course," remarked O'Shea, "I see difficulties. If the doctor here
was a young man of parts, I'd easier put ye and Mammy in his care; but
old Skipper Pierre is no milksop."

Josephine looked, first alert, as if suspecting an ill-bred joke, and
then, as O'Shea appeared to be speaking to her quite seriously,
forgetting that Caius might overhear, there came upon her face a look of
gentle severity.

"That is not what I think of the doctor; I would trust him more quickly
than anyone else, except you, O'Shea."

The words brought to Caius a pang, but he hardly noticed it in watching
the other two, for the lady, when she had spoken, looked off again with
longing at the sea, and O'Shea, whose rough heart melted under the
trustful affection of the exception she made, for a moment turned away
his head. Caius saw in him the man whom he had only once seen before,
and that was when his child had died. It was but a few moments; the easy
quizzical manner sat upon him again.

"Oh, well, he hasn't got much to him one way or the other, but----" this
in low, confidential tones.

Caius could not hear her reply; he saw that she interrupted, earnestly
vindicating him. He drew his horse back a pace or two; he would not
overhear her argument on his behalf, nor would he trust O'Shea so far as
to leave them alone together.

The cleverness with which O'Shea drove her into a glow of enthusiasm for
Caius was a revelation of power which the latter at the moment could
only regard curiously, so torn was his heart in respect to the issue of
the trial. He was so near that their looks told him what he could not
hear, and he saw Josephine's face glow with the warmth of regard which
grew under the other's sneers. Then he saw O'Shea visibly cast that
subject away as if it was of no importance; he went near to her,
speaking low, but with the look of one who brought the worst news, and
Caius knew, without question, that he was pouring into her ears all the
evil he had ever heard of Le Maitre, all the detail of his present
drunken condition. Caius did not move; he did not know whether the scene
before him represented Satan with powerful grasp upon a soul that would
otherwise have passed into some more heavenly region, or whether it was
a wise and good man trying to save a woman from her own fanatical
folly. The latter seemed to be the case when he looked about him at the
beach, at the boats, at the lighthouse on the cliff above, with a
clothes-line near it, spread with flapping garments. When he looked, not
outward, but inward, and saw Josephine's vision of life, he believed he
ought to go forward and beat off the serpent from the dove.

The colloquy was not very long. Then O'Shea led Josephine's horse nearer
to Caius.

"Madame and my wife will go with ye," he said. "I've told the men to get
the boat out."

"I did not say that," moaned Josephine.

Her face was buried in her hands, and Caius remembered how those pretty
white hands had at one time beckoned to him, and at another had angrily
waved him away. Now they were held helplessly before a white face that
was convulsed with fear and shame and self-abandonment.

"There ain't no particular hurry," remarked O'Shea soothingly; "but
Mammy has packed up all in the houses that needs to go, and she'll bring
warm clothes and all by the time the boat's out, so there's no call for
madame to go back. It would be awful unkind to the girls to set them
crying; and"--this to Caius--"ye jist go and put up yer things as quick
as ye can."

His words were accompanied by the sound of the fishermen putting rollers
under the small schooner that had been selected. The old skipper,
Pierre, had begun to call out his orders. Josephine took her hands from
her face suddenly, and looked towards the busy men with such eager
hungry desire for the freedom they were preparing for her that it seemed
to Caius that at that moment his own heart broke, for he saw that
Josephine was not convinced but that she had yielded. He knew that
Mammy's presence on the journey made no real difference in its guilt
from Josephine's standpoint; her duty to her God was to remain at her
post. She had flinched from it out of mere cowardice--it was a fall.
Caius knew that he had no choice but to help her back to her better
self, that he would be a bastard if he did not do it.

Three times he essayed to speak; he had not the right words; then, even
without them, he broke the silence hurriedly:

"I think you are justified in coming with me; but if you do what you
believe to be wrong--you will regret it. What does your heart say?
Think!"

It was a feeble, stammered protest; he felt no dignity in it; he almost
felt it to be the craven insult seen in it by O'Shea, who swore under
his breath and glared at him.

Josephine gave only a long sobbing sigh, as one awakening from a dream.
She looked at the boat again, and the men preparing it, and then at
Caius--straight in his eyes she looked, as if searching his face for
something more.

"Follow your own conscience, Josephine; it is truer than ours. I was
wrong to let you be tempted," he said. "Forgive me!"

She looked again at the boat and at the sea, and then, in the stayed
subdued manner that had become too habitual to her, she said to O'Shea:

"I will go home now. Dr. Simpson is right. I cannot go."

O'Shea was too clever a man to make an effort to hold what he knew to be
lost; he let go her rein, and she rode up the path that led to the
island road. When she was gone O'Shea turned upon Caius with a look of
mingled scorn and loathing.

"Ye're afraid of Le Maitre coming after ye," he hissed; "or ye have a
girl at home, and would foind it awkward to bring her and madam face to
face; so ye give her up, the most angel woman that ever trod this earth,
to be done to death by a beast, because ye're afraid for yer own skin.
Bah! I had come to think better of ye."

With that he cut at the horse with a stick he had in his hand, and the
creature, wholly unaccustomed to such pain and indignity, dashed along
the shore, by chance turning homeward. Caius, carried perforce as upon
the wings of the wind for half a mile, was thrown off upon the sand. He
picked himself up, and with wet clothes and sore limbs walked to his
little house, which he felt he could no longer look upon as a home.

He could hardly understand what he had done; he began to regret it. A
man cannot see the forces at work upon his inmost self. He did not know
that Josephine's soul had taken his by the hand and lifted it up--that
his love for her had risen from earth to heaven when he feared the
slightest wrong-doing for her more than all other misfortune.

CHAPTER IX.

"GOD'S PUPPETS, BEST AND WORST."

All that long day a hot sun beat down upon the sea and upon the ice in
the bay; and the tide, with its gentle motion of flow and ebb, made
visibly more stir among the cakes of floating ice, by which it was seen
that they were smaller and lighter than before. The sun-rays were doing
their work, not so much by direct touch upon the ice itself as by
raising the temperature of all the flowing sea, and thus, when the sun
went down and the night of frost set in, the melting of the ice did not
cease.

Morning came, and revealed a long blue channel across the bay from its
entrance to Harbour Island. The steamer from Souris had made this
channel by knocking aside the light ice with her prow. She was built to
travel in ice. She lay now, with funnel still smoking, in the harbour, a
quarter of a mile from the small quay. The Gaspe schooner still lay
without the bay, but there was a movement of unfurling sails among her
masts, by which it was evident that her skipper hoped by the faint but
favourable breeze that was blowing to bring her down the same blue
highway.

It was upon this scene that Caius, wretched and sleepless, looked at
early dawn. He had come out of his house and climbed the nearest knoll
from which the bay could be seen, for his house and those near it looked
on the open western sea. When he reached this knoll he found that O'Shea
was there before him, examining the movements of the ship with his glass
in the gray cold of the shivering morning. The two men stood together
and held no communication.

Pretty soon O'Shea went hastily home again. Caius stood still to see the
sun rise clear and golden. There were no clouds, no vapours, to catch
its reflections and make a wondrous spectacle of its appearing. The blue
horizon slowly dipped until the whole yellow disc beamed above it; ice
and water glistened pleasantly; on the hills of all the sister isles
there was sunshine and shade; and round about him, in the hilly field,
each rock and bush cast a long shadow. Between them the sun struck the
grass with such level rays that the very blades and clumps of blades
cast their shadows also.

Caius had remained to watch if the breeze would strengthen with the
sun's uprising, and he prayed the forces of heat and cold, and all
things that preside over the currents of air, that it might not
strengthen but languish and die.

What difference did it make, a few hours more or less? No difference, he
knew, and yet all the fresh energy the new day brought him went forth in
this desire that Josephine might have a few hours longer respite before
she began the long weary course of life that stretched before her.

Caius had packed up all his belongings. There was nothing for him to do
but drive along the dune with his luggage, as he had driven four months
before, and take the steamer that night to Souris. The cart that took
him would no doubt bring back Le Maitre. Caius had not yet hired a cart;
he had not the least idea whether O'Shea intended to drive him and bring
back his enemy or not. That would, no doubt, be Josephine's desire.
Caius had not seen Josephine or spoken to O'Shea; it mattered nothing to
him what arrangement they would or would not make for him.

As he still stood watching to see if the breeze would round and fill the
sails which the Gaspe schooner had set, O'Shea came back and called from
the foot of the knoll. Caius turned; he bore the man no ill will.
Josephine's horse had not been injured by the accident of yesterday, and
his own fall was a matter of complete indifference.

"I'm thinking, as ye packed yer bags, ye'll be going for the steamer."

O'Shea spoke with that indefinable insult in his tone which had always
characterized it in the days of their first intercourse, but, apart from
that, his manner was crisp and cool as the morning air; not a shade of
discouragement was visible.

"I am going for the steamer," said Caius, and waited to hear what offer
of conveyance was to be made him.

"Well, I'm thinking," said O'Shea, "that I'll just take the boat across
the bay, and bring back the captain from Harbour Island; but as his
honour might prefer the cart, I'll send the cart round by the dune.
There's no saying but, having been in tropical parts, he may be a bit
scared of the ice. Howsomever, knowing that he's in that haste to meet
his bride, and would, no doubt, grudge so much as a day spent between
here and there on the sand, I'll jist give him his chice; being who he
is, and a foine gintleman, he has his right to it. As for you"--the tone
instantly slipped into insolent indifference--"ye can go by one or the
other with yer bags."

It was not clear to Caius that O'Shea had any intention of himself
escorting Le Maitre if he chose to go by the sand. This inclined him to
suppose that he had no fixed plan to injure him. What right had he to
suppose such plan had been formed? The man before him wore no look of
desperate passion. In the pleasant weather even the dune was not an
unfrequented place, and the bay was overlooked on all sides. Caius could
not decide whether his suspicion of O'Shea had been just or a monstrous
injustice. He felt such suspicion to be morbid, and he said nothing. The
futility of asking a question that would not be answered, the difficulty
of interference, and his extreme dislike of incurring from O'Shea
farther insult, were enough to produce his silence. Behind that lay the
fact that he would be almost glad if the murder was done. Josephine's
faith had inspired in him such love for her as had made him save her
from doing what she thought wrong at any cost; but the inspiration did
not extend to this. It appeared to him the lesser evil of the two.

"I will go with the boat," said Caius. "It is the quicker way."

He felt that for some reason this pleased O'Shea, who began at once to
hurry off to get the luggage, but as he went he only remarked grimly:

"They say as it's the longest way round that is the shortest way home.
If you're tipped in the ice, Mr. Doctor, ye'll foind that true, I'm
thinking."

Caius found that O'Shea's boat, a heavy flat-bottomed thing, was
already half launched upon the beach, furnished with stout boat-hooks
for pushing among the ice, as well as her oars and sailing gear. He was
glad to find that such speedy departure was to be his. He had no thought
of saying good-bye to Josephine.

CHAPTER X.

"DEATH SHRIVE THY SOUL!"

It was an immense relief to stand in the boat with the boat-hook, whose
use demanded all the skill and nerve which Caius had at command. For the
most part they could only propel the boat by pushing or pulling the bits
of ice that surrounded it with their poles. It was a very different sort
of travel from that which they had experienced together when they had
carried their boat over islands of ice and launched it in the great gaps
between them. The ice which they had to do with now would not have borne
their weight; nor was there much clear space for rowing between the
fragments. O'Shea pushed the boat boldly on, and they made their journey
with comparative ease until, when they came near the channel made by the
steamship, they found the ice lying more closely, and the difficulty of
their progress increased.

Work as they would, they were getting on but slowly. The light wind blew
past their faces, and the Gaspe schooner was seen to sail up the path
which the steamer had made across the bay.

"The wind's in the very chink that makes her able to take the channel.
I'm thinking she'll be getting in before us."

O'Shea spoke with the gay indifference of one who had staked nothing on
the hope of getting to the harbour first; but Caius wondered if this
short cut would have been undertaken without strong reason.

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