The Mermaid

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The mother was comparatively at ease about Mabel; she had little idea
that Caius would ever make love to her, so she could enjoy her
good-natured slyness to the full. What hurt Caius was that she did enjoy
it, that it was just her natural way never to see two young people of
opposite sex together without immediately thinking of the subject of
marriage, and sooner or later betraying her thought. Heretofore he had
been so accustomed to this cast of mind that, when it had tickled
neither his sense of humour nor his vanity, he had been indifferent to
it. To-night he knew it was vulgar; but he had no contempt for it,
because it was his mother who was betraying vulgarity. He felt sorry
that she should be like that--that all the men and women with whom she
was associated were like that. He felt sorry for Mabel, because she
enjoyed it, and consequently more tenderhearted towards her than he had
ever felt before.

He had not, however, a great many thoughts to give to this sorrow, for
he was thinking continually of the bright apparition of the afternoon.

When he went to his room to get ready for tea he fell into a muse,
looking over the fields and woods to the distant glimpse of blue water
he could see from his window. When he came down to the evening meal, he
found himself wondering foolishly upon what food the child lost in the
sea had fed while she grew so rapidly to a woman's stature. The present
meal was such as fell to the daily lot of that household. In homely blue
delft cups a dozen or more eggs were ranged beside high stacks of
buttered toast, rich and yellow. The butter, the jugs of yellow cream,
the huge platter heaped with wild raspberries--as each of these met his
eye he was wondering if the sea-maid ever ate such food, or if her diet
was more delicate.

"Am I going mad?" he thought to himself. The suspicion was depressing.

Three hours after, Caius sough his father as the old man was making his
nightly tour of the barns and stables. By way of easing his own sense of
responsibility he had decided to tell his father what he had seen, and
his telling was much like such confession of sins as many people make,
soothing their consciences by an effort that does not adequately reveal
the guilt to the listener.

Caius came up just as his father was locking the stable door.

"Look here, father; wait a minute. I have something to say. I saw a very
curious thing down at the shore to-day, but I don't want you to tell
mother, or Mabel, or the men."

The old man stood gravely expectant. The summer twilight just revealed
the outline of his thin figure and ragged hair and beard.

"It was in the water swimming about, making darts here and there like a
big trout. Its body was brown, and it looked as if it had horny balls
round its neck; and its head, you know, was like a human being's."

"I never heard tell of a fish like that, Caius. Was it a porpoise?"

"Well, I suppose I know what a porpoise is like."

"About how large was it?" said the elder man, abandoning the porpoise
theory.

"I should think about five or six feet long."

"As long as that? Did it look as if it could do any harm?"

"No; I should think it was harmless; but, father, I tell you its head
looked like a person's head."

"Was it a shark with a man stuck in its throat?"

"N--n--no." Not liking to deny this ingenious suggestion too promptly,
he feigned to consider it. "It wasn't a dead man's head; it was like a
live woman's head."

"I never heard of sharks coming near shore here, any way," added the old
man. "What distance was it off--half a mile?"

"It came between me and the little island off which we lost baby Day. It
lay half-way between the island and the shore."

The old man was not one to waste words. He did not remark that in that
case Caius must have seen the creature clearly, for it went without
saying.

"Pity you hadn't my gun," he said.

Caius inwardly shuddered, but because he wished to confide as far as he
might, he said outwardly: "I shouldn't have liked to shoot at it; its
face looked so awfully human, you know."

"Yes," assented the elder, who had a merciful heart "it's wonderful what
a look an animal has in its eyes sometimes." He was slowly shuffling
round to the next door with his keys. "Well, I'm sure, my lad, I don't
know what it could ha' been, unless 'twas some sort of a porpoise."

"We should be quite certain to know if there was any woman paying a
visit hereabout, shouldn't we? A woman couldn't possibly swim across the
bay."

"Woman!" The old man turned upon him sternly. "I thought you said it was
a fish."

"I said she _swam_ like a fish. She might have been a woman dressed in
a fish-skin, perhaps; but there isn't any woman here that could possibly
be acting like that--and old Morrison told me the same thing was about
the shore the summer before he died."

His father still looked at him sharply. "Well, the question is, whether
the thing you saw was a woman or a fish, for you must have seen it
pretty clear, and they aren't alike, as far as I know."

Caius receded from the glow of confidence. "It lay pretty much under the
water, and wasn't still long at a time."

The old man looked relieved, and in his relief began to joke. "I was
thinking you must have lost your wits, and thought you'd seen a
mermaid," he chuckled.

"I'd think it was a mermaid in a minute"--boldly--"if there were such
things."

Caius felt relieved when he had said this, but the old man had no very
distinct idea in his mind attached to the mythical word, so he let go
the thought easily.

"Was it a dog swimming?"

"No," said Caius, "it wasn't a dog."

"Well, I give it up. Next time you see it, you'd better come and fetch
the gun, and then you can take it to the musee up at your college, and
have it stuffed and put in a case, with a ticket to say you presented
it. That's all the use strange fish are that I know of."

When Caius reflected on this conversation, he knew that he had been a
hypocrite.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SEA-MAID'S MUSIC.

At dawn Caius was upon the shore again, but he saw nothing but a red
sunrise and a gray sea, merging into the blue and green and gold of the
ordinary day. He got back to breakfast without the fact of his matutinal
walk being known to the family.

He managed also in the afternoon to loiter for half an hour on the same
bit of shore at the same hour as the day before without anyone being the
wiser, but he saw no mermaid. He fully intended to spend to-morrow by
the sea, but he had made this effort to appear to skip to-day to avoid
awaking curiosity.

He had a horse and buggy; that afternoon he was friendly, and made many
calls. Wherever he went he directed the conversation into such channels
as would make it certain that he would hear if anyone else had seen the
mermaid, or had seen the face of a strange woman by sea or land. Of one
or two female visitors to the neighbourhood within a radius of twenty
miles he did hear, but when he came to investigate each case, he found
that the visit was known to everyone, and the status, lineage and habits
of the visitors all of the same humdrum sort.

He decided in his own mind that ten miles was the utmost length that a
woman could possibly swim, but he talked boldly of great swimming feats
he had seen in his college life, and opined that a good swimmer might
even cross the bay from Montrose or from the little port of Stanhope in
the other direction; and when he saw the incredulity of his listeners,
he knew that no one had accomplished either journey, for the water was
overlooked by a hundred houses at either place, and many a small vessel
ploughed the waves.

When he went to sleep that night Caius was sure that the vision of the
mermaid was all his own, shared only by old Morrison, who lay in his
grave. It was perhaps this partnership with the dead that gave the
matter its most incredible and unreal aspect. Three years before this
lady of the sea had frequented this spot; none but the dead man and
himself had been permitted to see her.

"Well, when all's said and done," said Caius to himself, rolling upon a
sleepless bed, "it's a very extraordinary thing."

Next morning he hired a boat, the nearest that was to be had; he got it
a mile and a half further up the shore. It was a clumsy thing, but he
rowed it past the mouth of the creek where he used to fish, all along
the water front of Day's farm, past the little point that was the
beginning of the rocky part of the shore, and then he drew the boat up
upon the little island. He hid it perfectly among the grass and weeds.
Over all the limited surface, among the pine shrubs and flowering weeds,
he searched to see if hiding-place for the nymph could be found. Two
colts were pastured on the isle. He found no cave or hut. When he had
finished his search, he sat and waited and watched till the sun set over
the sea; but to-day there was no smiling face rearing itself from the
blue water, no little hand beckoning him away.

"What a fool I was not to go where she beckoned!" mused Caius. "Where?
Anywhere into the heart of the ocean, out of this dull, sordid life into
the land of dreams."

For it must all have been a dream--a sweet, fantastic dream, imposed
upon his senses by some influence, outward or inward; but it seemed to
him that at the hour when he seemed to see the maid it might have been
given him to enter the world of dreams, and go on in some existence
which was a truer reality than the one in which he now was. In a
deliberate way he thought that perhaps, if the truth were known, he, Dr.
Caius Simpson, was going a little mad; but as he sat by the softly
lapping sea he did not regret this madness: what he did regret was that
he must go home and--talk to Mabel.

He rowed his boat back with feelings of blank disappointment. He could
not give another day to idleness upon the shore. It was impossible that
such an important person as himself could spend long afternoons and
evenings thus without everyone's knowledge. He had a feeling, too, born,
as many calculations are, of pure surmise, that he would have seen the
mermaid again that afternoon, when he had made such elaborate
arrangements to meet her, if Fate had destined them to meet again at
all. No; he must give her up. He must forget the hallucination that had
worked so madly on his brain.

Nevertheless, he did not deny himself the pleasure of walking very
frequently to the spot, and this often, in the early hours before
breakfast, a time which he could dispose of as he would without comment.
As he walked the beach in the beauty of the early day, he realized that
some new region of life had been opened to him, that he was feeling his
way into new mysteries of beatified thought and feeling.

A week passed; he was again upon the shore opposite the island at the
sunrise hour. He sat on the rock which seemed like a home to his
restless spirit, so associated it was with the first thoughts of those
new visions of beauty which were becoming dear to him.

He heard a soft splashing sound in the water, and, looking about him,
suddenly saw the sea-child's face lifted out of the water not more than
four or five yards from him. All around her was a golden cloud of sand;
it seemed to have been stirred up by her startled movement on seeing
him. For a moment she was still, resting thus close, and he could see
distinctly that around her white shoulders there was a coil of what
seemed like glistening rounded scales. He could not decide whether the
brightness in her eye was that of laughing ease or of startled
excitement. Then she turned and darted away from him, and having put
about forty feet between them, she turned and looked back with easy
defiance.

His eyes, fascinated by what was to him an awful thing, were trying to
penetrate the sparkling water and see the outlines of the form whose
clumsy skin seemed to hang in horrid folds, stretching its monstrous
bulk under the waves. His vision was broken by the sparkling splash
which the maiden deliberately made with her hands, as if divining his
curiosity and defying it. He felt the more sure that his senses did not
play him false because the arrangement of the human and fishy substance
of the apparition did not tally with any preconceived ideas he had of
mermaids.

Caius felt no loathing of the horrid form that seemed to be part of her.
He knew, as he had never known before, how much of coarseness there was
in himself. His hands and feet, as he looked down at them, seemed
clumsy, his ideas clumsy and gross to correspond. He knew enough to know
that he might, by the practice of exercises, have made his muscles and
brain the expression of his will, instead of the inert mass of flesh
that they now seemed to him to be. He might--yes, he might, if he had
his years to live over again, have made himself noble and strong; as it
was, he was mutely conscious of being a thing to be justly derided by
the laughing eyes that looked up at him from the water, a man to be
justly shunned and avoided by the being of the white arms and dimpled
face.

And he sat upon the rock looking, looking. It seemed useless to rise or
speak or smile; he remembered the mirth that his former efforts had
caused, and he was dumb and still.

Perhaps the sea-child found this treatment more uninteresting than that
attention he had lavished on her on the former occasion; perhaps she had
not so long to tarry. As he still watched her she turned again, and made
her way swift and straight toward the rocky point. Caius ran, following,
upon the shore, but after a minute he perceived that she could disappear
round the point before, either by swimming or wading, he could get near
her. He could not make his way around the point by the shore; his best
means of keeping her in sight was to climb the cliff, from which the
whole bay on the other side would be visible.

Like a man running a race for life, he leaped back to a place where it
was possible to climb, and, once on the top, made his way by main force
through a growth of low bushes until he could overlook the bay. But, lo!
when he came there no creature was visible in the sunny sea beneath or
on the shelving red bank which lay all plain to his view. Far and wide
he scanned the ocean, and long he stood and watched. He walked,
searching for anyone upon the bank, till he came to Day's barns, and by
that time he was convinced that the sea-maid had either vanished into
thin air or sunk down and remained beneath the surface of the sea.

The farm to which he had come was certainly the last place in which he
would have thought to look for news of the sportive sea-creature; and
yet, because it stood alone there in that part of the earth, he tarried
now to put some question to the owner, just as we look mechanically for
a lost object in drawers or cupboards in which we feel sure it cannot
be. Caius found Day in a small paddock behind one of the barns, tending
a mare and her baby foal. Day had of late turned his attention to
horses, and the farm had a bleaker look in consequence, because many of
its acres were left untilled.

Caius leaned his elbows on the fence of the paddock. "Hullo!"

Day turned round, asking without words what he wanted, in a very surly
way.

At the distance at which he stood, and without receiving any
encouragement, Caius found a difficulty in forming his question.

"You haven't seen anything odd in the sea about here, have you?"

"What sort of a thing?"

"I thought I saw a queer thing swimming in the water--did you?"

"No, I didn't."

It was evident that no spark of interest had been roused in the farmer
by the question. From that, more than anything else, Caius judged that
his words were true; but, because he was anxious to make assurance
doubly sure, he blundered into another form of the same inquiry:

"There isn't a young girl about this place, is there?"

Day's face grew indescribably dark. In an instant Caius remembered that,
if the man had any feeling about him, the question was the sorest he
could have asked--the child, who would now have been a girl, drowned,
her sister and brother exiled, and Day bound over by legal authority to
see to it that no defenceless person came in the way of the wife who had
killed her child! A moment more, and Day had merely turned his back,
going on with his work. Caius did not blame him; he respected the man
the more for the feeling he displayed.

Vexed with himself, and not finding how to end the interview, Caius
waited a minute, and then turned suddenly from the fence, without
knowing why he turned until he saw that the constraining force was the
presence of Day's wife, who stood at the end of the barn, out of sight
of her husband, but looking eagerly at Caius. She made a sign to him to
come. No doubt she had heard what had been said.

Caius went to her, drawn by the eagerness of her bright black eyes. Her
large form was slightly clad in a cotton gown; her abundant black hair
was fastened rather loosely about her head. Her high-boned cheeks were
thinner than of old, and her face wore a more excited expression;
otherwise, there was little difference in her. She had been sent from
the asylum as cured. Caius gave her a civil "Good-day."

"She has come back to me!" said the woman.

"Who?"

"My baby as you've put up the stone to. I've allers wanted to tell you I
liked that stone; but she isn't dead--she has come back to me!"

Now, although the return of the drowned child had been an idea often in
his mind of late, that he had merely toyed with it as a beautiful fancy
was proved by the fact that no sooner did the mother express the same
thought than Caius recognised that she was mad.

"She has come back to me!" The poor mother spoke in tones of exquisite
happiness. "She is grown a big girl; she has curls on her head, and she
wears a marriage-ring. Who is she married to?"

Caius could not answer.

The mother looked at him with curious steadfastness.

"I thought perhaps she was married to you," she said.

Surely the woman had seen what he had seen in the sea; but, question her
as he would, Caius could gain nothing more from her--no hint of time or
place, or any fact that at all added to his enlightenment. She only grew
frightened at his questions, and begged him in moving terms not to tell
Day that she had spoken to him--not to tell the people in the village
that her daughter had come back, or they would put her again in the
asylum. Truly, this last appeared to Cains a not unlikely consequence,
but it was not his business to bring it about. It was not for him, who
shared her delusion, to condemn her.

After that, Caius knew that either he was mad or what he had seen he had
seen, let the explanation be what it might--and he ceased to care much
about the explanation. He remembered the look of heart-satisfaction with
which Day's wife had told him that her child had returned. The beautiful
face looking from out the waves had no doubt wrought happiness in her;
and in him also it had wrought happiness, and that which was better. He
ceased to wrestle with the difference that the adventure had made in his
life, or to try to ignore it; he had learned to love someone far better
than himself, and that someone seemed so wholly at one with the nature
in which she ranged, and also with the best he could think concerning
nature, human or inanimate, that his love extended to all the world for
her sake.

CHAPTER X.

TOWED BY THE BEARD.

Every morning Caius still took his early way along the shore, but on all
these walks he found himself alone in possession of the strand and the
vast blue of sea and sky. It was disappointing, yet the place itself
exercised a greater and greater charm over him.

He abstained from fooling away his days by the sea. After his one
morning walk he refused himself the luxury of being there again, filling
his time with work. He felt that the lady of the lovely face would
despise him if he spent his time absurdly.

Thus some days passed; and then there came a night when he left a bed on
which he had tossed wakefully, and went in the hot August night to the
side of the sea when no one knew that he went or came.

The air was exceedingly warm. The harvest moon in the zenith was
flooding the world with unclouded light. The tide was ebbing, and
therefore there was in the channel that swift, dangerous current
sweeping out to sea of which he had once experienced the strength.
Caius, who associated his sea-visitant only with the sunlight and an
incoming tide, did not expect to see her now; frequent disappointment
had bred the absence of hope. He stood on the shore, looking at the
current in which he had so nearly perished as a boy. It was glittering
with white moon-rays. He thought of himself, of the check and twisting
which his motives and ideas had lately received, and as he thought how
slight a thing had done it, how mysterious and impossible a thing it
was, his mind became stunned, and he faced the breeze, and simply lived
in the sweetness of the hour, like an animal, conscious, not of itself,
but only of what is external, without past or future.

And now he heard a little crooning song from the waters--no words, no
tune that could be called a tune. It reminded him more of a baby's
toneless cooing of joy, and yet it had a rhythm to it, too, and both joy
and pathos in its cadence. Across the bright path of the moon's
reflection he saw her come. Her head and neck were crowned and garlanded
with shining weed, as if for a festival, and she stretched out her white
arms to him and beckoned to him and laughed. He heard her soft,
infant-like laughter.

To-night her beckoning was like a breeze to a leaf that is ready to
fall. Caius ceased to think; he only acted. He threw his cap and coat
and boots on the shore. The sea-child, gazing in surprise, began to
recede quickly. Caius ran into the water; he projected himself toward
the mermaid, and swam with all the speed of which he was capable.

The salt in his eyes at first obscured his vision. When he could look
about, the sea-child had gone out of the track of the moonlight, and,
taking advantage of the current, was moving rapidly out to sea.

He, too, swam with the current. He saw her curly head dark as a dog's in
the water; her face was turned from him, and there was evident movement
in her body. For the first time he thought he perceived that she was
swimming with arms and feet as a woman must swim.

As for Caius, he made all the effort that in him lay, and as she receded
past the line of the island right out into the moonlit sea, he swam
madly after, reckless of the fact that his swimming power gave him no
assurance of being able to return, reckless of everything except the one
welcome fact that he was gaining on the sea-child. A fear oppressed him
that perhaps this apparent effort of hers and her slow motion were only
a ruse to lead him on--that at any moment she might dart from him or
sink into her familiar depths. But this fear he did not heed as long as
she remained in sight, and--yes, across the surface of the warm moonlit
water he was slowly but surely gaining upon her.

On he swam, making strenuous effort at speed. He was growing exhausted
with the unaccustomed exercise; he knew that his strength would not hold
out much longer. He hardly knew what he hoped or dreamed would come to
pass when he overtook the sea-maiden, and yet he swam for dear love,
which was more to him than dear life, and, panting, he came close to
her.

The sea-maid turned about, and her face flashed suddenly upon him,
bright in the moonlight. She put out a glistening arm, perhaps in human
feebleness to ward him off, perhaps, in the strength of some unknown
means of defence, to warn him that at his peril he approached her.

Caius, reckless of everything, grasped the white wrist, and, stopping
his motion, knowing he could not lie mermaid-fashion with head reared in
the water, he turned on his back to float, still holding the small hand
in his. He held it, and retained his consciousness long enough to know
from that time forth that the hand had actually been in his--a living,
struggling hand, not cold, but warm. He felt, too, in that wonderful
power which we have in extreme moments of noting detail, that the hand
had a ring upon it--it was the left hand--and he thought it was a plain
gold ring, but it did not occur to him to think of a wedding-ring. Then
he knew that this dear hand that he had captured was working him woe,
for by it he was drawn beneath the water.

Even then he did not let go, but, still holding the hand, struck out to
regain the surface in one of those wild struggles to which inexpert
swimmers resort when they feel the deep receiving them into itself.

It would have been better for him if he had let go, for in that vehement
struggle he felt the evidence of the sea-maid's power. He
remembered--his last thought as he lost consciousness--that with the
fishy nature is sometimes given the power to stun an enemy by an
electric shock. Some shock came upon him with force, as if some cold
metal had struck him on the head. As his brain grew dull he heard the
water gurgling over him.

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