The Mermaid
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Lily Dougall >> The Mermaid
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"Come in," she said briefly.
Caius went in, and had reason to regret, as well on his own account as
on hers, that she shut the door. To be out in the summer would have been
longer life for her, and to have the summer shut out made him realize
forcibly that he was alone in the desolate house with a woman whose
madness gave her a weird seeming which was almost equivalent to
ghostliness.
When one enters a house from which the public has long been excluded and
which is the abode of a person of deranged mind, it is perhaps natural
to expect, although unconsciously, that the interior arrangements should
be very strange. Instead of this, the house, gloomy and sparsely
furnished as it was, was clean and in order. It lacked everything to
make it pleasant--air, sunshine, and any cheerful token of comfort; but
it was only in this dreary negation that it failed; there was no
positive fault to be found even with the atmosphere of the kitchen and
bare lobby through which he was conducted, and he discovered, to his
surprise, that he was to be entertained in a small parlour, which had a
round polished centre table, on which lay the usual store of such things
as are seen in such parlours all the world over--a Bible, a couple of
albums, a woollen mat, and an ornament under a glass case.
Caius sat down, holding his hat in his hand, with an odd feeling that he
was acting a part in behaving as if the circumstances were at all
ordinary.
The woman also sat down, but not as if for ease. She drew one of the big
cheap albums towards her, and began vigorously searching in it from the
beginning, as if it were a book of strange characters in which she
wished to find a particular passage. She fixed her eyes upon each small
cheap photograph in turn, as if trying hard to remember who it
represented, and whether it was, or was not, the one she wanted. Caius
looked on amazed.
At length, about the middle of the book, she came to a portrait at which
she stopped, and with a look of cunning took out another which was
hidden under it, and thrust it at Caius.
"It's for you," she said; "it's mine, and I'm going to die, and it's you
I'll give it to."
She looked and spoke as if the proffered gift was a thing more precious
than the rarest gem.
Caius took it, and saw that it was a picture of a baby girl, about three
years old. He had not the slightest doubt who the child was; he stood by
the window and examined it long and eagerly. The sun, unaided by the
deceptive shading of the more skilled photographer, had imprinted the
little face clearly. Caius saw the curls, and the big sad eyes with
their long lashes, and all the baby features and limbs, his memory
aiding to make the portrait perfect. His eager look was for the purpose
of discovering whether or not his imagination had played him false; but
it was true what he had thought--the little one was like Josephine.
"I shall be glad to have it," he said--"very glad."
"I had it taken at Montrose," said the poor mother; and, strange to say,
she said it in a commonplace way, just as any woman might speak of
procuring her child's likeness. "Day, he was angry; he said it was waste
of money; that's why I give it to you." A fierce cunning look flitted
again across her face for a moment. "Don't let him see it," she
whispered. "Day, he is a bad father; he don't care for the children or
me. That's why I've put her in the water."
She made this last statement concerning her husband and child with a
nonchalant air, like one too much accustomed to the facts to be
distressed at them.
For a few minutes it seemed that she relapsed into a state of dulness,
neither thought nor feeling stirring within her. Caius, supposing that
she had nothing more to say, still watched her intently, because the
evidences of disease were interesting to him. When he least expected it,
she awoke again into eagerness; she put her elbows on the table and
leaned towards him.
"There's something I want you to do," she whispered. "I can't do it any
more. I'm dying. Since I began dying, I can't get into the water to look
for her. My baby is in the water, you know; I put her in. She isn't
dead, but she's there, only I can't find her. Day told me that once you
got into the water to look for her too, but you gave it up too easy, and
no one else has ever so much as got in to help me find her."
The last part of the speech was spoken in a dreary monotone. She stopped
with a heart-broken sigh that expressed hopeless loneliness in this mad
quest.
"The baby is dead," he said gently.
She answered him with eager, excited voice:
"No, she isn't; that's where you are wrong. You put it on the stone that
she was dead. When I came out of th' asylum I went to look at the stone,
and I laughed. But I liked you to make the stone; that's why I like you,
because nobody else put up a stone for her."
Caius laid a cool hand on the feverish one she was now brandishing at
him.
"You are dying, you say"--pityingly. "It is better for you to think that
your baby is dead, for when you die you will go to her."
The woman laughed, not harshly, but happily.
"She isn't dead. She came back to me once. She was grown a big girl, and
had a wedding-ring on her hand. Who do you think she was married to? I
thought perhaps it was you."
The repetition of this old question came from her lips so suddenly that
Caius dropped her hand and stepped back a pace. He felt his heart
beating. Was it a good omen? There have been cases where a half-crazed
brain has been known, by chance or otherwise, to foretell the future.
The question that was now for the second time repeated to him seemed to
his hope like an instance of this second sight, only half understood by
the eye that saw it.
"It was not your little daughter that came back, Mrs. Day. It was her
cousin, who is very like her, and she came to help you when you were
ill, and to be a daughter to you."
She looked at him darkly, as if the saner powers of her mind were
struggling to understand; but in a minute the monomania had again
possession of her.
"She had beautiful hair," she said; "I stroked it with my hand; it
curled just as it used to do. Do you think I don't know my own child?
But she had grown quite big, and her ring was made of gold. I would like
to see her again now before I die."
Very wistfully she spoke of the beauty and kindness of the girl whose
visit had cheered her. The poor crazed heart was full of longing for the
one presence that could give her any comfort this side of death.
"I thought I'd never see her again." She fixed her dark eyes on Caius as
she spoke. "I was going to ask you, after I was dead and couldn't look
for her any more, if you'd keep on looking for her in the sea till you
found her. But I wish you'd go now and see if you couldn't fetch her
before I die."
"Yes, I will go," answered Caius suddenly.
The strong determination of his quick assent seemed to surprise even her
in whose mind there could be no rational cause for surprise.
"Do you mean it?"
"Yes, I mean it. I will go, Mrs. Day."
A moment more she paused, as if for time for full belief in his promise
to dawn upon her, and then, instead of letting him go, she rose up
quickly with mysterious looks and gestures. Her words were whispered:
"Come, then, and I'll show you the way. Come; you mustn't tell Day. Day
doesn't know anything about it." She had led him back to the door of the
house and gone out before him. "Come, I'll show you the way. Hush! don't
talk, or someone might hear us. Walk close to the barn, and no one will
see. I never showed anyone before but her when she came to me wearing
the gold ring. What are you so slow for? Come, I'll show you the way to
look for her."
Impelled by curiosity and the fear of increasing her excitement if he
refused, Caius followed her down the side of the open yard in which he
had once seen her stand in fierce quarrel with her husband. It had
seemed a dreary place then, when the three children swung on the gate
and neither the shadow of death nor madness hung over it; it seemed far
more desolate now, in spite of the bright summer sunlight. The barns and
stable, as they swiftly passed them, looked much neglected, and there
was not about the whole farmstead another man or woman to be seen. As
the mad woman went swiftly in front of him, Caius remembered, perhaps
for the first time in all these years, that after her husband had struck
her upon that night, she had gone up to the cowshed that was nearest the
sea, and that afterwards he had met her at the door of the root-house
that was in the bank of the chine. It was thither she went now, opening
the door of the cowshed and leading him through it to a door at the
other end, and down a path to this cellar cut in the bank.
The cellar had apparently been very little used. The path to it was well
beaten, but Caius observed that it ran past the cellar down the chine to
a landing where Day now kept a flat-bottomed boat. They stood on this
path before the heavy door of the cellar. Rust had eaten into the iron
latch and the padlock that secured it, but the woman produced a key and
opened the ring of the lock and took him into a chamber about twelve
feet square, in which props of decaying beams held up the earth of the
walls and roof. The place was cold, smelling strongly of damp earth and
decaying roots; but, so far, there was nothing remarkable to be seen;
just such a cellar was used on his father's farm to keep stores of
potatoes and turnips in when the frost of winter made its way through
all the wooden barns. In three corners remains of such root stores were
lying; in the fourth, the corner behind the door, nearest the sea, some
boards were laid on the floor, and on them flower-pots containing stalks
of withered plants and bulbs that had never sprouted.
"They're mine," she said. "Day dursn't touch them;" and saying this, she
fell to work with eager feverishness, removing the pots and boards. When
she had done so, it was revealed that the earth under the boards had
broken through into another cellar or cave, in which some light could be
seen.
"I always heard the sea when I was in this place, and one day I broke
through this hole. The man that first had the farm made it, I s'pose, to
pitch his seaweed into from the shore."
She let her long figure down through the hole easily enough, for there
were places to set the feet on, and landed on a heap of earth and dried
weed. When Caius had dropped down into this second chamber, he saw that
it had evidently been used for just the purpose she had mentioned. The
seaweed gathered from the beach after storms was in common use for
enriching the fields, and someone in a past generation had apparently
dug this cave in the soft rock and clay of the cliff; it was at a height
above the sea-line at which the seaweed could be conveniently pitched
into it from a cart on the shore below. Some three or four feet of dry
rotten seaweed formed its carpet. The aperture towards the sea was
almost entirely overgrown with such grass and weeds as grew on the
bluff. It was evident that in the original cutting there had been an
opening also sideways into the chine, which had caved in and been grown
over. The cellar above had, no doubt, been made by someone who was not
aware of the existence of this former place.
To Caius the secret chamber was enchanted ground. He stepped to its
window, framed in waving grasses, and saw the high tide lapping just a
little way below. It was into this place of safety that Josephine had
crept when she had disappeared from his view before he could mount the
cliff to see whither she went. She had often stood where he now stood,
half afraid, half audacious, in that curious dress of hers, before she
summoned up courage to slip into the sea for daylight or moonlight
wanderings.
He turned round to hear the gaunt woman beside him again talking
excitedly. Upon a bit of rusty iron that still held its place on the
wall hung what he had taken to be a heap of sacking. She took this down
now and displayed it with a cunning look.
"I made it myself," she said, "it holds one up wonderful in the water;
but now I've been a-dying so long the buoys have burst."
Caius pityingly took the garment from her. Her mad grief, and another
woman's madcap pleasure, made it a sacred thing. His extreme curiosity
found satisfaction in discovering that the coarse foundation was
covered with a curious broidery of such small floats as might, with
untiring industry, be collected in a farmhouse: corks and small pieces
of wood with holes bored through them were fastened at regular
intervals, not without some attempt at pattern, and between them the
bladders of smaller animals, prepared as fishermen prepare them for
their nets. Larger specimens of the same kind were concealed inside the
neck of the huge sack, but on the outside everything was comparatively
small, and it seemed as if the hands that had worked it so elaborately
had been directed by a brain in which familiarity with patchwork, and
other homely forms of the sewing-woman's art, had been confused with an
adequate idea of the rough use for which the garment was needed. Some
knowledge of the skill with which fishermen prepare their floats had
also evidently been hers, for the whole outside of the garment was
smeared or painted with a brownish substance that had preserved it to a
wonderful extent from the ravages of moisture and salt. It was torn now,
or, rather, it seemed that it had been cut from top to bottom; but,
besides this one great rent, it was in a rotten condition, ready to fall
to pieces, and, as the dying woman had said, many of the air-blown
floats had burst.
Caius was wondering whether the occasion on which this curious
bathing-dress had been torn was that in which he, by pursuing Josephine,
had forced her to cease pushing herself about in shallow water and take
to more ordinary swimming. He looked around and saw the one other
implement which had been necessary to complete the strange outfit; it,
too, was a thing of ordinary appearance and use: a long pole or poker,
with a handle at one end and a small flat bar at the other, a thing
used for arranging the fire in the deep brick ovens that were still in
use at the older farmsteads. It was about six feet long. The woman,
seeing his attention directed to it, took it eagerly and showed how it
might be used, drawing him with her to the aperture over the shore and
pointing out eagerly the landmarks by which she knew how far the shallow
water extended at certain times of the tide. Her topographical knowledge
of all the sea's bed within about a mile of the high-water mark was
extraordinarily minute, and Caius listened to the information she poured
upon him, only now beginning to realize that she expected him to wear
the dress, and take the iron pole, and slip from the old cellar into the
tide when it rose high enough, and from thence bring back the girl with
the soft curls and the golden ring. It was one of those moments in which
laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy
over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as
its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality
was that to his companion it was intensely real.
"You said you would go." Some perception of his hesitation must have
come to her; her words were strong with insistence and wistful with
reproach. "You said you would go and fetch her in to me before I die."
Then Caius put back the dress she held on the rusty peg where it had
hung for so long.
"I am a man," he said. "I can swim without life-preservers. I will go
and try to bring the girl back to you. But not now, not from here; it
will take me a week to go and come, for I know that she lives far away
in the middle of the deep gulf. Come back to the house and take care of
yourself, so that you may live until she comes. You may trust me. I will
certainly bring her to you if she's alive and if she can come."
With these promises and protestations he prevailed upon the poor woman
to return with him to her lonely home.
Caius had not got far on his road home, when he met Day coming from the
village. Caius was full of his determination to go for Josephine by the
next trip of the small steamer. His excuse was valid; he could paint the
interview from which he had just come so that Josephine would be moved
by it, would welcome his interference, and come again to nurse her
uncle's wife. Thus thinking, he had hurried along, but when he met Day
his knight-errantry received a check.
"Your wife ought not to be alone," he said to Day.
"No; that's true!" the farmer replied drearily; "but it isn't everybody
she'll have in the house with her."
"Your son and daughter are too far away to be sent for?"
"Yes"--briefly--"they are in the west."
Caius paused a moment, thinking next to introduce the subject which had
set all his pulses bounding. Because it was momentous to him, he
hesitated, and while he hesitated the other spoke.
"There is one relation I've got, the daughter of a brother of mine who
died up by Gaspe Basin. She's on the Magdalens now. I understood that
you had had dealings with her."
"Yes; I was just about to suggest--I was going to say----"
"I wrote to her. She is coming," said Day.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE EVENING AND THE MORNING.
Josephine had come. All night and all the next day she had been by her
aunt's bedside; for Day's wife lay helpless now, and death was very
near. This much Caius knew, having kept himself informed by
communication with the village doctor, and twenty-four hours after
Josephine's arrival he walked over to the Day farm, hoping that, as the
cool of the evening might relax the strain in the sick-room, she would
be able to speak to him for a few minutes.
When he got to the dreary house he met its owner, who had just finished
his evening work. The two men sat on wooden chairs outside the door and
watched the dusk gathering on sea and land, and although they did not
talk much, each felt glad of the other's companionship.
It was nine years since Caius had first made up his mind that Day was a
monster of brutality and wickedness; now he could not think himself back
into the state of mind that could have formed such a judgment When Caius
had condemned Day, he had been a religions youth who thought well of
himself; now his old religious habits and beliefs had dropped off, but
he did not think well of himself or harshly of his neighbour. In those
days he had felt sufficient for life; now all his feeling was summed up
in the desire that was scarcely a hope, that some heavenly power, holy
and strong, would come to his aid.
It is when the whole good of life hangs in a trembling balance that
people become like children, and feel the need of the motherly powers of
Heaven. Caius sat with Day for two hours, and Josephine did not come
down to speak to him. He was glad to know that Day's evening passed the
more easily because he sat there with him; he was glad of that when he
was glad of nothing that concerned himself.
Day and Caius did not talk about death or sorrow, or anything like that.
All the remarks that they interchanged turned upon the horses Day was
rearing and their pastures. Day told that he had found the grass on the
little island rich.
"I remember finding two of your colts there one day when I explored it.
It was four years ago," said Caius dreamily.
Day took no interest in this lapse of time.
"It's an untidy bit of land," he said, "and I can't clear it. 'Tisn't
mine; but no one heeds the colts grazing."
"Do you swim them across?" asked Caius, half in polite interest, half
because his memory was wandering upon the water.
"They got so sharp at swimming, I had to raise the fence on the top of
the cliff," said Day.
The evening wore away.
In the morning Caius, smitten with the fever of hope and fear, rose up
at dawn, and, as in a former time he had been wont to do, ran to the
seashore by the nearest path and walked beside the edge of the waves.
He turned, as he had always done, towards the little island and the Day
Farm.
How well he knew every outward curve and indentation of the soft red
shelving bank! how well he knew the colouring of the cool scene in the
rising day, the iridescent light upon the lapping waves, the glistening
of the jasper red of the damp beach, and the earthen pinks of the upper
cliffs! The sea birds with low pathetic note called out to him
concerning their memories of the first dawn in which he had walked there
searching for the body of the dead baby. Then the cool tints of dawn
passed into the golden sunrise, and the birds went on calling to him
concerning the many times in which he had trodden this path as a lover
whose mistress had seemed so strange a denizen of this same wide sea.
Caius did not think with scorn now of this old puzzle and bewilderment,
but remembered it fondly, and went and sat beneath baby Day's epitaph,
on the very rock from which he had first seen Josephine. It was very
early in the morning; the sun had risen bright and warm. At that season
even this desolate bit of shore wag garlanded above with the most lovely
green; the little island was green as an emerald.
Caius did not intend to keep his present place long. The rocky point
where the red cliff ended hid any portion of the Day farm from his view,
and as soon as the morning was far enough advanced he intended to go and
see how the owner and his household had fared during the night.
In the meantime he waited, and while he waited Fate came to him
smiling.
Once or twice as he sat he heard the sound of horse's feet passing on
the cliff above him. He knew that Day's horses were there, for they were
pastured alternately upon the cliff and upon the richer herbage of the
little island. He supposed by the sounds that they were catching one of
them for use on the farm. The sounds went further away, for he did not
hear the tread of hoofs again. He had forgotten them; his face had
dropped upon his hands; he was looking at nothing, except that, beneath
the screen of his fingers, he could see the red pebbles at his feet.
Something very like a prayer was in his heart; it had no form; it was
not a thing of which his intellect could take cognizance. Just then he
heard a cry of fear and a sound as if of something dashing into the
water. The sounds came from behind the rocky point. Caius knew the voice
that cried and he rose up wildly, but staggered, baffled by his old
difficulty, that the path thither lay only through deep water or round
above the cliff.
Then he saw a horse swimming round the red rocks, and on its back a
woman sat, not at ease--evidently distressed and frightened by the
course the animal was taking. To Caius the situation became clear.
Josephine had thought to refresh herself after her night's vigil by
taking an early ride, and the young half-broken horse, finding himself
at large, was making for the delicacies which he knew were to be found
on the island pasture. Josephine did not know why her steed had put out
to sea, or whither he was going. She turned round, and, seeing Caius,
held out her hand, imploring his aid.
Caius thanked Heaven at that moment It was true that Josephine kept her
seat upon the horse perfectly, and it was true that, unless the animal
intended to lie down and roll when he got into the deep grass of the
island, he had probably no malicious intention in going there. That did
not matter. Josephine was terrified by finding herself in the sea and
she had cried to him for aid. A quick run, a short swim, and Caius waded
up on the island sands. The colt had a much longer distance to swim, and
Caius waited to lay his hand on the bridle.
For a minute or two there was a chase among the shallow, rippling waves,
but a horse sinking in heavy sand is not hard to catch. Josephine sat
passive, having enough to do, perhaps, merely to keep her seat. When at
length Caius stood on the island grass with the bridle in his hand, she
slipped down without a word and stood beside him.
Caius let the dripping animal go, and he went, plunging with delight
among the flowering weeds and bushes. Caius himself was dripping also,
but, then, he could answer for his own movements that he would not come
too near the lady.
Josephine no longer wore her loose black working dress; this morning she
was clad in an old habit of green cloth. It was faded with weather, and
too long in the skirt for the fashion then in vogue, but Caius did not
know that; he only saw that the lower part of the skirt was wet, and
that, as she stood at her own graceful height upon the grass, the wet
cloth twisted about her feet and lay beside them in a rounded fold, so
that she looked just now more like the pictures of the fabled sea-maids
than she had ever done when she had floated in the water.
The first thing Josephine did was to look up in his face and laugh; it
was her own merry peal of low laughter that reminded him always of a
child laughing, not more for fun than for mere happiness. It bridged for
him all the sad anxieties and weary hours that had passed since he had
heard her laugh before; and, furthermore, he knew, without another
moment's doubt, that Josephine, knowing him as she did, would never have
looked up to him like that unless she loved him. It was not that she was
thinking of love just then--that was not what was in her face; but it
was clear that she was conscious of no shadow of difference between them
such as would have been there if his love had been doomed to
disappointment. She looked to him to join in her laughter with perfect
comradeship.
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