I was fishing, on a day of chill calm, in a dinghy off the flat coast.
The stillness of the morning had tempted me some distance from the
village where I was staying. Presently a sense of bad sport and
healthy famine “plumped” in me, so to speak, for luncheon, and I
looked about for a spot picturesque enough to add a zest to
sandwiches, whisky, and tobacco. Close by, a little creek or estuary
ran up into a mere, between which and the sea lay a cluster of low
sand-hills; and thither I pulled. The spot, when I reached it, was
calm, chill desolation manifest—lifeless water and lifeless sand,
with no traffic between them but the dead interchange of salt. Low
sedges, at first, and behind them low woods were mirrored in the water
at a distance, with an interval between me and them of sheeted glass;
and right across this shining pool ran a dim, half-drowned
causeway—the sea-path, it appeared, to and from a lonely house which
I could just distinguish squatting among trees. It was Tryphena’s
home.
Now, paddling dispiritedly, I turned a cold dune, and saw a mermaid
before me. At least, that was my instant impression. The creature sat
coiled on the strand, combing her hair—that was certain, for I saw
the gold-green tresses of it whisked by her action into rainbow
threads. It appeared as certain that her upper half was flesh and her
lower fish; and it was only on my nearer approach that this latter
resolved itself into a pale green skirt, roped, owing to her posture,
about her limbs, and the hem fanned out at her feet into a tail fin.
Thus also her bosom, which had appeared naked, became a bodice, as
near to her flesh in colour and texture as a smock is to a
lady’s-smock, which some call a cuckoo-flower.
It was plain enough now; yet the illusion for the moment had quite
startled me.
As I came near, she paused in her strange business to canvass me. It
was Tryphena herself, as after-inquiry informed me. I have never seen
so lovely a creature. Her eyes, as they regarded me passing, were
something to haunt a dream: so great in tragedy—not fathomless, but
all in motion near their surfaces, it seemed, with green and rooted
sorrows. They were the eyes, I thought, of an Undine late-humanized,
late awakened to the rapturous and troubled knowledge of the woman’s
burden. Her forehead was most fair, and the glistening thatch divided
on it like a golden cloud revealing the face of a wondering angel.
I passed, and a sand-heap stole my vision foot by foot. The vision was
gone when I returned. I have reason to believe it was vouchsafed me
within a few months of the coming of the ghost-child.
On the morning succeeding the night of the day on which Jason and
Tryphena were to have been married, the girl came down from her
bedroom with an extraordinary expression of still rapture on her face.
After breakfast she took the old man into her confidence. She was
childish still; her manner quite youthfully thrilling; but now there
was a new-born wonder in it that hovered on the pink of shame.
“Father! I have been under the deep waters and found him. He came to
me last night in my dreams—so sobbing, so impassioned—to assure me
that he had never really ceased to love me, though he had near broken
his own heart pretending it. Poor boy! poor ghost! What could I do but
take him to my arms? And all night he lay there, blest and forgiven,
till in the morning he melted away with a sigh that woke me; and it
seemed to me that I came up dripping from the sea.”
“My boy! He has come back!” chuckled the old man. “What have you done
with him, Tryphena?”
“I will hold him tighter the next time,” she said.
But the spirit of Jason visited her dreams no more.
That was in March. In the Christmas following, when the mere was
locked in stillness, and the wan reflection of snow mingled on the
ceiling with the red dance of firelight, one morning the old man came
hurrying and panting to Tryphena’s door.
“Tryphena! Come down quickly! My boy, my Jason, has come back! It was
a lie that they told us about his being lost at sea!”
Her heart leapt like a candle-flame! What new delusion of the old
man’s was this? She hurried over her dressing and descended. A
garrulous old voice mingled with a childish treble in the
breakfast-room. Hardly breathing, she turned the handle of the door,
and saw Jason before her.
But it was Jason, the prattling babe of her first knowledge; Jason,
the flaxen-headed, apple-cheeked cherub of the nursery; Jason, the
confiding, the merry, the loving, before pride had come to warp his
innocence. She fell on her knees to the child, and with a burst of
ecstasy caught him to her heart.
She asked no question of the old man as to when or whence this
apparition had come, or why he was here. For some reason she dared
not. She accepted him as some waif, whom an accidental likeness had
made glorious to their hungering hearts. As for the father, he was
utterly satisfied and content. He had heard a knock at the door, he
said, and had opened it and found this. The child was naked, and his
pink, wet body glazed with ice. Yet he seemed insensible to the
killing cold. It was Jason—that was enough. There is no date nor time
for imbecility. Its phantoms spring from the clash of ancient
memories. This was just as actually his child as—more so, in fact,
than—the grown young figure which, for all its manhood, had dissolved
into the mist of waters. He was more familiar with, more confident of
it, after all. It had come back to be unquestioningly dependent on
him; and that was likest the real Jason, flesh of his flesh.
“Who are you, darling?” said Tryphena.
“I am Jason,” answered the child.
She wept, and fondled him rapturously.
“And who am I?” she asked. “If you are Jason, you must know what to
call me.”
“I know,” he said; “but I mustn’t, unless you ask me.”
“I won’t,” she answered, with a burst of weeping. “It is Christmas
Day, dearest, when the miracle of a little child was wrought. I will
ask you nothing but to stay and bless our desolate home.”
He nodded, laughing.
“I will stay, until you ask me.”
They found some little old robes of the baby Jason, put away in
lavender, and dressed him in them. All day he laughed and prattled;
yet it was strange that, talk as he might, he never once referred to
matters familiar to the childhood of the lost sailor.
In the early afternoon he asked to be taken out—seawards, that was
his wish. Tryphena clothed him warmly, and, taking his little hand,
led him away. They left the old man sleeping peacefully. He was never
to wake again.
As they crossed the narrow causeway, snow, thick and silent, began to
fall. Tryphena was not afraid, for herself or the child. A rapture
upheld her; a sense of some compelling happiness, which she knew
before long must take shape on her lips.
They reached the seaward dunes—mere ghosts of foothold in that smoke
of flakes. The lap of vast waters seemed all around them, hollow and
mysterious. The sound flooded Tryphena’s ears, drowning her senses.
She cried out, and stopped.
“Before they go,” she screamed—“before they go, tell me what you were
to call me!”
The child sprang a little distance, and stood facing her. Already his
lower limbs seemed dissolving in the mists.
“I was to call you ‘mother’!” he cried, with a smile and toss of his
hand.
Even as he spoke, his pretty features wavered and vanished. The snow
broke into him, or he became part with it. Where he had been, a gleam
of iridescent dust seemed to show one moment before it sank and was
extinguished in the falling cloud. Then there was only the snow,
heaping an eternal chaos with nothingness.
Tryphena made this confession, on a Christmas Eve night, to one who
was a believer in dreams. The next morning she was seen to cross the
causeway, and thereafter was never seen again. But she left the
sweetest memory behind her, for human charity, and an elf-like gift of
loveliness.