The Mermaid
L >>
Lily Dougall >> The Mermaid
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19
The other children had wandered away. They were not to be seen.
Jim knelt down in a business-like way to untie the woman, who seemed now
to be as much stunned by circumstances as if she had been knocked as
just suggested.
A minute more, and Caius found himself running like one mad in the
direction of home. He cared nothing about the mother or the elder
children, or about his own half-dressed condition. The one thought that
excited him was a hope that the sea might have somewhere cast the child
on the shore before she was quite dead.
Running like a savage under the budding trees of the wood and across his
father's fields, he leaped out of the darkness into the heat and
brightness of his mother's kitchen.
Gay rugs lay on the yellow painted floor; the stove glistened with
polish at its every corner. The lamp shone brightly, and in its light
Caius stood breathless, wet, half naked. The picture of his father
looking up from the newspaper, of his mother standing before him in
alarmed surprise, seemed photographed in pain upon his brain for
minutes before he could find utterance. The smell of an abundant supper
his mother had set out for him choked him.
When he had at last spoken--told of the blow Farmer Day had struck, of
his wife's deed, and commanded that all the men that could be collected
should turn out to seek for the child--he was astonished at finding sobs
in the tones of his words. He became oblivious for the moment of his
parents, and leaned his face against the wooden wall of the room in a
convulsion of nervous feeling that was weeping without tears.
It did not in the least surprise his parents that he should cry--he was
only a child in their eyes. While the father bestirred himself to get a
cart and lanterns and men, the mother soothed her son, or, rather, she
addressed to him such kindly attentions as she supposed were soothing to
him. She did not know that her attention to his physical comfort hardly
entered his consciousness.
Caius went out again that night with those who went to examine the spot,
and test the current, and search the dark shores. He went again, with a
party of neighbours, to the same place, in the first faint pink flush of
dawn, to seek up and down the sands and rocks left bare by the tide.
They did not find the body of the child.
CHAPTER IV.
A QUIET LIFE.
In the night, while the men were seeking the murdered child, there were
kindly women who went to the house of the farmer Day to tend his wife.
The elder children had been found asleep in a field, where, after
wandering a little while, they had succumbed to the influence of some
drug, which had evidently been given them by the mother to facilitate
her evil design. She herself, poor woman, had grown calm again, her
frenzy leaving her to a duller phase of madness. That she was mad no one
doubted. How long she might have been walking in the misleading paths of
wild fancy, whether her insane vagaries had been the cause or the result
of her husband's churlishness, no one knew. The husband was a taciturn
man, and appeared to sulk under the scrutiny of the neighbourhood. The
more charitable ascribed his demeanour to sorrow. The punishment his
wife had meted out for the blow he struck her had, without doubt, been
severe.
As for Caius Simpson, his mind was sore concerning the little girl. It
was as if his nature, in one part of it, had received a bruise that did
not heal. The child had pleased his fancy. All the sentiment in him
centred round the memory of the little girl, and idealized her
loveliness. The first warm weather of the year, the exquisite but
fugitive beauties of the spring, lent emphasis to his mood, and because
his home was not a soil congenial to the growth of any but the more
ordinary sentiments, he began at this time to seek in natural solitudes
a more fitting environment for his musings. More than once, in the days
that immediately followed, he sought by daylight the spot where, in the
darkness, he had seen the child thrown into the sea. It soon occurred to
him to make an epitaph for her, and carve it in the cliff over which she
was thrown. In the noon-day hours in which his father rested, he worked
at this task, and grew to feel at home in the place and its
surroundings.
The earth in this place, as in others, showed red, the colour of red
jasper, wherever its face was not covered by green grass or blue water.
Just here, where the mother had sought out a precipice under which the
tide lay deep, there was a natural water-wall of red sandstone, rubbed
and corrugated by the waves. This wall of rock extended but a little
way, and ended in a sharp jutting point.
The little island that stood out toward the open sea had sands of red
gold; level it was and covered with green bushes, its sandy beach
surrounding it like a ring.
On the other side of the jutting point a bluff of red clay and crumbling
rock continued round a wide bay. Where the rim of the blue water lay
thin on this beach there showed a purple band, shading upward into the
dark jasper red of damp earth in the lower cliff. The upper part of the
cliff was very dry, and the earth was pink, a bright earthen pink. This
ribbon of shaded reds lay all along the shore. The land above it was
level and green.
At the other horn of the bay a small town stood; its white houses, seen
through the trembling lens of evaporating water, glistened with almost
pearly brightness between the blue spaces of sky and water. All the
scene was drenched in sunlight in those spring days.
The town, Montrose by name, was fifteen miles away, counting miles by
the shore. The place where Caius was busy was unfrequented, for the land
near was not fertile, and a wooded tract intervened between it and the
better farms of the neighbourhood. The home of the lost child and one
other poor dwelling were the nearest houses, but they were not very
near.
Caius did not attempt to carve his inscription on the mutable sandstone.
It was quite possible to obtain a slab of hard building-stone and
material for cement, and after carting them himself rather secretly to
the place, he gradually hewed a deep recess for the tablet and cemented
it there, its face slanting upward to the blue sky for greater safety.
He knew even then that the soft rock would not hold it many years, but
it gave him a poetic pleasure to contemplate the ravages of time as he
worked, and to think that the dimpled child with the sunny hair and the
sad, beautiful eyes had only gone before, that his tablet would some
time be washed away by the same devouring sea, and that in the sea of
time he, too, would sink before many years and be forgotten.
The short elegy he wrote was a bad mixture of ancient and modern thought
as to substance, figures, and literary form, for the boy had just been
dipping into classics at school, while he was by habit of mind a
Puritan. His composition was one at which pagan god and Christian angel
must have smiled had they viewed it; but perhaps they would have wept
too, for it was the outcome of a heart very young and very earnest,
wholly untaught in that wisdom which counsels to evade the pains and
suck the pleasures of circumstance.
There were only two people who discovered what Caius was about, and came
to look on while his work was yet unfinished.
One was an old man who lived in the one poor cottage not far away and
did light work for Day the farmer. His name was Morrison--Neddy Morrison
he was called. He came more than once, creeping carefully near the edge
of the cliff with infirm step, and talking about the lost child, whom he
also had loved, about the fearful visitation of the mother's madness,
and, with Caius, condemning unsparingly the brutality, known and
supposed, of the now bereaved father. It was a consolation to them both
that Morrison could state that this youngest child was the only member
of his family for whom Day had ever shown affection.
The other visitor Caius had was Jim Hogan. He was a rough youth; he had
a very high, rounded forehead, so high that he would have almost seemed
bald if the hair, when it did at last begin, had not been exceedingly
thick, standing in a short red brush round his head. With the exception
of this peculiar forehead, Jim was an ordinary freckled, healthy young
man. He saw no sense at all in what Caius was doing. When he came he sat
himself down on the edge of the cliff, swung his heels, and jeered
unfeignedly.
When the work was finished it became noised that the tablet was to be
seen. The neighbours wondered not a little, and flocked to gaze and
admire. Caius himself had never told of its existence; he would have
rather no one had seen it; still, he was not insensible to the local
fame thus acquired. His father, it was true, had not much opinion of his
feat, but his mother, as mothers will, treasured all the admiring
remarks of the neighbours. All the women loved Caius from that day
forth, as being wondrously warm-hearted. Such sort of literary folk as
the community could boast dubbed him "The Canadian Burns," chiefly, it
seemed, because he had been seen to help his father at the ploughing.
In due course the wife of the farmer Day was tried for murder, and
pronounced insane. She had before been removed to an asylum: she now
remained there.
CHAPTER V.
SEEN THROUGH BLEAR EYES.
It was foreseen by the elder Simpson that his son would be a great man.
He looked forth over the world and decided on the kind of greatness. The
wide, busy world would not have known itself as seen in the mind of this
gray-haired countryman. The elder Simpson had never set foot off the
edge of his native island. His father before him had tilled the same
fertile acres, looked out upon the same level landscape--red and green,
when it was not white with snow. Neither of them had felt any desire to
see beyond the brink of that horizon; but ambition, quiet and sturdy,
had been in their hearts. The result of it was the bit of money in the
bank, the prosperous farm, and the firm intention of the present farmer
that his son should cut a figure in the world.
This stern man, as he trudged about at his labour, looked upon the
activities of city life with that same inward eye with which the maiden
looks forth upon her future; and as she, with nicety of preference,
selects the sort of lover she will have, so he selected the sort of
greatness which should befall his son. The stuff of this vision was, as
must always be, of such sort as had entered his mind in the course of
his limited experience. His grandfather had been an Englishman, and it
was known that one of the sons had been a notable physician in the city
of London: Caius must become a notable physician. His newspaper told him
of honours taken at the University of Montreal by young men of the
medical school; therefore, Caius was to study and take honours. It was
nothing to him that his neighbours did not send their sons so far
afield; he came of educated stock himself. The future of Caius was
prearranged, and Caius did not gainsay the arrangement.
That autumn the lad went away from home to a city which is, without
doubt, a very beautiful city, and joined the ranks of students in a
medical school which for size and thorough work is not to be despised.
He was not slow to drink in the new ideas which a first introduction to
modern science, and a new view of the relations of most things, brought
to his mind.
In the first years Caius came home for his summer vacations, and helped
his father upon the farm. The old man had money, but he had no habit of
spending it, and expenditure, like economy, is a practice to be
acquired. When Caius came the third time for the long summer holiday,
something happened.
He did not now often walk in the direction of the Day farm; there was no
necessity to take him there, only sentiment. He was by this time ashamed
of the emblazonment of his poetic effort upon the cliff. He was not
ashamed of the sentiment which had prompted it, but he was ashamed of
its exhibition. He still thought tenderly of the little child that was
lost, and once in a long while he visited the place where his tablet
was, as he would have visited a grave.
One summer evening he sauntered through the wood and down the road by
the sea on this errand. Before going to the shore, he stopped at the
cottage where the old labourer, Morrison, lived.
There was something to gossip about, for Day's wife had been sent from
the asylum as cured, and her husband had been permitted to take her home
again on condition that no young or weak person should remain in the
house with her. He had sent his two remaining children to be brought up
by a relative in the West. People said he could get more work out of his
wife than out of the children, and, furthermore, it saved his having to
pay for her board elsewhere. The woman had been at home almost a
twelvemonth, and Caius had some natural interest in questioning Morrison
as to her welfare and general demeanour. The strange gaunt creature had
for his imagination very much the fascination that a ghost would have
had. We care to hear all about a ghost, however trivial the details may
be, but we desire no personal contact. Caius had no wish to meet this
woman, for whom he felt repulsion, but he would have been interested to
hear Neddy Morrison describe her least action, for Neddy was almost the
only person who had constant access to her house.
Morrison, however, had very little to tell about Mrs. Day. She had come
home, and was living very much as she had lived before. The absence of
her children did not appear to make great difference in her dreary life.
The old labourer could not say that her husband treated her kindly or
unkindly. He was not willing to affirm that she was glad to be out of
the asylum, or that she was sorry. To the old man's imagination Mrs. Day
was not an interesting object; his interest had always been centred upon
the children. It was of them he talked chiefly now, telling of letters
that their father had received from them, and of the art by which he,
Morrison, had sometimes contrived to make the taciturn Day show him
their contents. The interest of passive benevolence which the young
medical student gave to Morrison's account of these children, who had
grown quite beyond the age when children are pretty and interesting,
would soon have been exhausted had the account been long; but it
happened that the old man had a more startling communication to make,
which cut short his gossip about his master's family.
He had been standing so far at the door of his little wooden house. His
old wife was moving at her household work within. Caius stood outside.
The house was a little back from the road in an open space; near it was
a pile of firewood, a saw-horse and chopping-block, with their
accompanying carpet of chips, and such pots, kettles, and household
utensils as Mrs. Morrison preferred to keep out of doors.
When old Morrison came to the more exciting part of his gossip, he poked
Caius in the breast, and indicated by a backward movement of his elbow
that the old wife's presence hampered his talk. Then he came out with an
artfully simulated interest in the weather, and, nudging Caius at
intervals, apparently to enforce silence on a topic concerning which the
young man as yet knew nothing, he wended his way with him along a path
through a thicket of young fir-trees which bordered the road.
The two men were going towards that part of the shore to which Caius was
bound. They reached the place where the child had been drowned before
the communication was made, and stood together, like a picture of the
personification of age and youth, upon the top of the grassy cliff.
"You'll not believe me," said the old man, with excitement obviously
growing within him, "but I tell you, young sir, I've sat jist here
behind those near bushes like, and watched the creatur for an hour at a
time."
"What was it you watched?" asked Caius, superior to the other's
excitement.
"I tell you, it was a girl in the sea; and more than that--she was half
a fish."
The mind of Caius was now entirely scornful.
"You don't believe me," said the old man, nudging him again.
But Caius was polite.
"Well, now"--good-humouredly--"what did you see?"
"I'll tell you jist what I saw." (The old man's excitement was growing.)
"You understand that from the top here you can see across the bay, and
across to the island and out to sea; but you can't see the shore under
the rocky point where it turns round the farm there into the bay, and
you can't see the other shore of the island for the bushes on it."
"In other words, you can see everything that's before your eyes, but you
can't see round a corner."
The old man had some perception that Caius was humorous. "You believe me
that far," he said, with a weak, excited cackle of a laugh. "Well, don't
go for to repeat what I'm going to tell you further, for I'll not have
my old woman frightened, and I'll not have Jim Hogan and the fellows he
gets round him belabouring the thing with stones."
"Heaven forbid!" A gleam of amusement flitted through the mind of Caius
at the thought of the sidelight this threw on Jim's character. For Jim
was not incapable of casting stones at even so rare a curiosity as a
mermaid.
"Now," said the old man, and he laughed again his weak, wheezy laugh,
"if _you_ told _me_, I'd not believe it; but I saw it as sure as I stand
here, and if this was my dying hour, sir, I'd say the same. The first
time it was one morning that I got up very early--I don't jist remember
the reason, but it was before sun-up, and I was walking along here, and
the tide was out, and between me and the island I saw what I thought was
a person swimming in the water, and I thought to myself, 'It's queer,
for there's no one about these parts that has a liking for the water.'
But when I was younger, at Pictou once, I saw the fine folks ducking
themselves in flannel sarks, at what they called a 'bathing-place,' so
the first thing I thought of was that it was something like that. And
then I stood here, jist about where you are now, and the woman in the
water she saw me--"
"Now, how do you know it was a woman?" asked Caius.
"Well, I didn't know for certain that day anything, for she was a good
way off, near the island, and she no sooner saw me than she turned and
made tracks for the back of the island where I couldn't see her. But I
tell you this, young sir, no woman or man either ever swam as she swam.
Have you seen a trout in a quiet pool wag its tail and go right
ahead--_how_, you didn't know; you only knew that 'twasn't in the one
place and 'twas in t'other?"
Caius nodded.
"Well," asked the old man with triumph in his voice, as one who capped
an argument, "did you ever see man or woman swim like that?"
"No," Caius admitted, "I never did--especially as to the wagging of the
tail."
"But she _hadn't_ a tail!" put in the old man eagerly, "for I saw her
the second day--that I'm coming to. She was more like a seal or walrus."
"But what became of her the first day?" asked Caius, with scientific
exactitude.
"Why, the end of her the first day was that she went behind the island.
Can you see behind the island? No." The old man giggled again at his own
logical way of putting things. "Well, no more could I see her; and home
I went, and I said nothink to nobody, for I wasn't going to have them
say I was doting."
"Yet it would be classical to dote upon a mermaid," Caius murmured. The
sight of the dim-eyed, decrepit old man before him gave exquisite humour
to the idea.
Morrison had already launched forth upon the story of the second day.
"Well, as I was telling you, I was that curious that next morning at
daybreak I comes here and squats behind those bushes, and a dreadful
fright I was in for fear my old woman would come and look for me and see
me squatting there." His old frame shook for a moment with the laugh he
gave to emphasize the situation, and he poked Caius with his finger.
"And I looked and I looked out on the gray water till I had the cramps."
Here he poked Caius again. "But I tell you, young sir, when I saw her
a-coming round from behind the bank, where I couldn't see jist where
she had come from, like as if she had come across the bay round this
point here, I thought no more of the cramps, but I jist sat on my heels,
looking with one eye to see that my old woman didn't come, and I watched
that 'ere thing, and it came as near as I could throw a stone, and I
tell you it was a girl with long hair, and it had scales, and an ugly
brown body, and swum about like a fish, jist moving, without making a
motion, from place to place for near an hour; and then it went back
round the head again, and I got up, and I was that stiff all day I could
hardly do my work. I was too old to do much at that game, but I went
again next morning, and once again I saw her; but she was far out, and
then I never saw her again. Now, what do you think of that?"
"I think"--after a moment's reflection--"that it's a very remarkable
story."
"But you don't believe it," said the old man, with an air of excited
certainty.
"I am certain of one thing; you couldn't have made it up."
"It's true, sir," said the old man. "As sure as I am standing here, as
sure as the tide goes in and out, as sure as I'll be a-dying before
long, what I tell you is true; but if I was you, I'd have more sense
than to believe it." He laughed again, and pressed Caius' arm with the
back of his hard, knotted hand. "That's how it is about sense and truth,
young sir--it's often like that."
This one gleam of philosophy came from the poor, commonplace mind as a
beautiful flash may come from a rough flint struck upon the roadside.
Caius pondered upon it afterwards, for he never saw Neddy Morrison
again. He did not happen to pass that place again that summer, and
during the winter the old man died.
Caius thought at one time and another about this tale of the girl who
was half a fish. He thought many things; the one thing he never happened
to think was that it was true. It was clear to him that the old man
supposed he had seen the object he described, but it puzzled him to
understand how eyes, even though so dim with age, could have mistaken
any sea-creature for the mermaid he described; for the man had lived his
life by the sea, and even the unusual sight of a lonely white porpoise
hugging the shore, or of seal or small whale, or even a much rarer
sea-animal, would not have been at all likely to deceive him. It would
certainly have been very easy for any person in mischief or malice to
have played the hoax, but no locality in the wide world would have
seemed more unlikely to be the scene of such a game; for who performs
theatricals to amuse the lonely shore, or the ebbing tide, or the
sea-birds that poise in the air or pounce upon the fish when the sea is
gray at dawn? And certainly the deception of the old man could not have
been the object of the play, for it was but by chance that he saw it,
and it could matter to no one what he saw or thought or felt, for he was
one of the most insignificant of earth's sons. Then Caius would think of
that curious gleam of deeper insight the poor old mind had displayed in
the attempt to express, blunderingly as it might be, the fact that truth
exceeds our understanding, and yet that we are bound to walk by the
light of understanding. He came, upon the whole, to the conclusion that
some latent faculty of imagination, working in the old man's mind,
combining with the picturesque objects so familiar to his eyes, had
produced in him belief in this curious vision. It was one of those
things that seem to have no reason for coming to pass, no sufficient
cause and no result, for Caius never heard that Morrison had related the
tale to anyone but himself, nor was there any report in the village that
anyone else had seen an unusual object in the sea.
CHAPTER VI.
"FROM HOUR TO HOUR WE RIPE----"
The elder Simpson gradually learned to expend more money upon his son;
it was not that the latter was a spendthrift or that he took to any evil
courses--he simply became a gentleman and had uses for money of which
his father could not, unaided, have conceived. Caius was too virtuous to
desire to spend his father's hardly-gathered stores unnecessarily;
therefore, the last years of his college life in Montreal he did not
come home in summer, but found occupation in that city by which to make
a small income for himself.
In those two years he learned much of medical and surgical lore--this
was of course, for he was a student by nature; but other things that he
learned were, upon the whole, more noteworthy in the development of his
character. He became fastidious as to the fit of his coat and as to the
work of the laundress upon his shirt-fronts. He learned to sit in easy
attitude by gauzily-dressed damsels under sparkling gaslight, and to
curl his fair moustache between his now white fingers as he talked to
them, and yet to moderate the extent of the attention that he paid to
each, not wishing that it should be in excess of that which was due. He
learned to value himself as he was valued--as a rising man, one who
would do well not to throw himself away in marriage. He had a moustache
first, and at last he had a beard. He was a sober young man: as his
father's teaching had been strict, so he was now strict in his rule over
himself. He frequented religious services, going about listening to
popular preachers of all sorts, and critically commenting upon their
sermons to his friends. He was really a very religious and
well-intentioned man, all of which stood in his favour with the more
sober portion of society whose favour he courted. As his talents and
industry gained him grace in the eyes of the dons of his college, so his
good life and good understanding made him friends among the more worthy
of his companions. He was conceited and self-righteous, but not
obviously so.
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19