CHAPTER I.

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THE MERMAID

"Lady, I fain would tell how evermore

Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor

Thee from myself, neither our love from God."

A Love Tale

by

L. DOUGALL

Author of Beggars All, What Necessity Knows, Etc.

New York

D. Appleton and Company

1895

Copyright, 1895,

by D. Appleton and Company.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER PAGE

I.--THE BENT TWIG 1

II.--THE SAD-EYED CHILD 4

III.--LOST IN THE SEA 11

IV.--A QUIET LIFE 19

V.--SEEN THROUGH BLEAR EYES 24

VI.--"FROM HOUR TO HOUR WE RIPE----" 34

VII.--"A SEA CHANGE" 41

VIII.--BELIEF IN THE IMPOSSIBLE 49

IX.--THE SEA-MAID'S MUSIC 56

X.--TOWED BY THE BEARD 65

XI.--YEARS OF DISCRETION 71

BOOK II.

I.--THE HAND THAT BECKONED 75

II.--THE ISLES OF ST. MAGDALEN 85

III.--BETWEEN THE SURF AND THE SAND 90

IV.--WHERE THE DEVIL LIVED 101

V.--DEVILRY 109

VI.--THE SEA-MAID 118

VII.--THE GRAVE LADY 122

VIII.--HOW THEY LIVED ON THE CLOUD 126

IX.--THE SICK AND THE DEAD 136

X.--A LIGHT-GIVING WORD 141

XI.--THE LADY'S HUSBAND 149

XII.--THE MAIDEN INVENTED 155

XIII.--WHITE BIRDS; WHITE SNOW; WHITE THOUGHTS 166

XIV.--THE MARRIAGE SCENE 173

BOOK III.

I.--HOW WE HUNTED THE SEALS 183

II.--ONCE MORE THE VISION 188

III.--"LOVE, I SPEAK TO THY FACE" 193

IV.--HOPE BORN OF SPRING 201

V.--TO THE HIGHER COURT 208

VI.--"THE NIGHT IS DARK" 216

VII.--THE WILD WAVES WHIST 227

VIII.--"GOD'S IN HIS HEAVEN" 236

IX.--"GOD'S PUPPETS, BEST AND WORST" 249

X.--"DEATH SHRIVE THY SOUL!" 254

XI.--THE RIDDLE OF LIFE 263

XII.--TO CALL A SPIRIT FROM THE VASTY DEEP 271

XIII.--THE EVENING AND THE MORNING 283

THE MERMAID.

_BOOK I._

CHAPTER I.

THE BENT TWIG.

Caius Simpson was the only son of a farmer who lived on the north-west

coast of Prince Edward's Island. The farmer was very well-to-do, for he

was a hard-working man, and his land produced richly. The father was a

man of good understanding, and the son had been born with brains; there

were traditions of education in the family, hence the name Caius; it was

no plan of the elder man that his son should also be a farmer. The boy

was first sent to learn in what was called an "Academy," a school in the

largest town of the island. Caius loved his books, and became a youthful

scholar. In the summer he did light work on the farm; the work was of a

quiet, monotonous sort, for his parents were no friends to frivolity or

excitement.

Caius was strictly brought up. The method of his training was that which

relies for strength of character chiefly upon the absence of temptation.

The father was under the impression that he could, without any laborious

effort and consideration, draw a line between good and evil, and keep

his son on one side of it. He was not austere--but his view of

righteousness was derived from puritan tradition.

A boy, if kindly treated, usually begins early to approve the only

teaching of which he has experience. As a youth, Caius heartily endorsed

his father's views, and felt superior to all who were more lax. He had

been born into that religious school which teaches that a man should

think for himself on every question, provided that he arrives at a

foregone conclusion. Caius, at the age of eighteen, had already done

much reasoning on certain subjects, and proved his work by observing

that his conclusions tallied with set models. As a result, he was, if

not a reasonable being, a reasoning and a moral one.

We have ceased to draw a distinction between Nature and the forces of

education. It is a great problem why Nature sets so many young people in

the world who are apparently unfitted for the battle of life, and

certainly have no power to excel in any direction. The subjective

religion which Caius had been taught had nourished within him great

store of noble sentiment and high desire, but it had deprived him of

that rounded knowledge of actual life which alone, it would appear,

teaches how to guide these forces into the more useful channels. Then as

to capacity, he had the fine sensibilities of a poet, the facile

introspection of the philosophical cast of mind, without the mental

power to write good verse or to be a philosopher. He had, at least in

youth, the conscience of a saint without the courage and endurance which

appear necessary to heroism. In mockery the quality of ambition was

bestowed upon him but not the requisites for success. Nature has been

working for millions of years to produce just such characters as Caius

Simpson, and, character being rather too costly a production to throw

away, no doubt she has a precise use for every one of them.

It is not the province of art to solve problems, but to depict them. It

is enough for the purpose of telling his story that a man has been

endowed with capacity to suffer and rejoice.

CHAPTER II.

THE SAD-EYED CHILD.

One evening in early summer Caius went a-fishing. He started to walk

several miles to an inlet where at high tide the sea-trout came within

reach of the line. The country road was of red clay, and, turning from

the more thickly-settled district, Caius followed it through a wide wood

of budding trees and out where it skirted the top of low red cliffs,

against which the sea was lapping. Then his way led him across a farm.

So far he had been walking indolently, happy enough, but here the shadow

of the pain of the world fell upon him.

This farm was a lonesome place close to the sea; there was no appearance

of prosperity about it. Caius knew that the farmer, Day by name, was a

churl, and was said to keep his family on short rations of happiness. As

Caius turned off the public road he was not thinking specially of the

bleak appearance of the particular piece of farmland he was crossing, or

of the reputation of the family who lived upon the increase of its

acres; but his attention was soon drawn to three children swinging on a

gate which hung loosely in the log fence not far from the house. The

eldest was an awkward-looking girl about twelve years of age; the second

was a little boy; the youngest was a round-limbed, blond baby of two or

three summers. The three stood upon the lowest bar of the gate, clinging

to the upper spars. The eldest leaned her elbows on the top and looked

over; the baby embraced the middle bar and looked through. They had set

the rickety gate swinging petulantly, and it latched and unlatched

itself with the sort of sound that the swaying of some dreary wind would

give it. The children seemed to swing there, not because they were

happy, but because they were miserable.

As Caius came with light step up the lane, fishing gear over his

shoulder, the children looked at him disconsolately, and when he

approached the gate the eldest stepped down and pulled it open for him.

"Anything the matter?" he asked, stopping his quick tread, and turning

when he had passed through.

The big girl did not answer, but she let go the gate, and when it jerked

forward the baby fell.

She did not fall far, nor was she hurt; but as Caius picked her up and

patted her cotton clothes to shake the dust out of them, it seemed to

him that he had never seen so sad a look in a baby's eyes. Large, dark,

dewy eyes they were, circled around with curly lashes, and they looked

up at him out of a wistful little face that was framed by a wreath of

yellow hair. Caius lifted the child, kissed her, put her down, and went

on his way. He only gave his action half a thought at the time, but all

his life afterwards he was sorry that he had let the baby go out of his

arms again, and thankful that he had given her that one kiss.

His path now lay close by the house and on to the sea-cliff behind. The

house stood in front of him--four bare wooden walls, brown painted, and

without veranda or ornament; its barns, large and ugly, were close

beside it. Beyond, some stunted firs grew in a dip of the cliff, but on

the level ground the farmer had felled every tree. The homestead itself

was ugly; but the land was green, and the sea lay broad and blue, its

breast swelling to the evening sun. The air blew sweet over field and

cliff, add the music of the incoming tide was heard below the

pine-fringed bank. Caius, however, was not in the receptive mind which

appreciates outward things. His attention was not thoroughly aroused

from himself till the sound of harsh voices struck his ear.

Between the farmhouse and the barns, on a place worn bare by the feet of

men and animals, the farmer and his wife stood in hot dispute. The

woman, tall, gaunt, and ill-dressed, spoke fast, passion and misery in

all her attitude and in every tone and gesture. The man, chunky in

figure and churlish in demeanour, held a horsewhip in his hand,

answering his wife back word for word in language both profane and

violent.

It did not occur to Caius that the whip was in his hand otherwise than

by accident. The men in that part of the world were not in the habit of

beating their wives, but no sooner did he see the quarrel than his wrath

rose hot against the man. The woman being the weaker, he took for

granted that she was entirely in the right. He faltered in his walk,

and, hesitating, stood to look. His path was too far off for him to hear

the words that were poured forth in such torrents of passion. The boy's

strong sentiment prompted him to run and collar the man; his judgment

made him doubt whether it was a good thing to interfere between man and

wife; a certain latent cowardice in his heart made him afraid to venture

nearer. The sum of his emotions caused him to stop, go on a few paces,

and stop to look and listen again, his heart full of concern. In this

way he was drawing further away, when he saw the farmer step nearer his

wife and menace her with the whip; in an instant more he had struck her,

and Caius had run about twenty feet forward to interfere, and halted

again, because he was afraid to approach so angry and powerful a man.

Caius saw the woman clearly now, and how she received this attack. She

stood quite still at her full stature, ceasing to speak or to

gesticulate, folded her arms and looked at her husband. The look in her

hard, dark face, the pose of her gaunt figure, said more clearly than

any passionate words, "Hold, if you value your life! you have gone too

far; you have heaped up punishment enough for yourself already." The

husband understood this language, vaguely, it might be, but still he

understood enough to make him draw back, still growling and menacing

with the whip. Caius was too young to understand what the woman

expressed; he only knew strength and weakness as physical things; his

mind was surging with pity for the woman and revenge against the man;

yet even he gathered the knowledge that for the time the quarrel was

over, that interference was now needless. He walked on, looking back as

he went to see the farmer go away to his stables and the wife stalk

past him up toward the byre that was nearest the sea.

As Caius moved on, the only relief his mind could find at first was to

exercise his imagination in picturing how he could avenge the poor

woman. In fancy he saw himself holding Day by the throat, throwing him

down, belabouring him with words and blows, meting out punishment more

than adequate. All that he actually did, however, was to hold on his way

to the place of his fishing.

The path had led him to the edge of the cliff. Here he paused, looking

over the bank to see if he could get down and continue his walk along

the shore, but the soft sandy bluff here jutted so that he could not

even see at what level the tide lay. After spending some minutes in

scrambling half-way down and returning because he could descend no

further, he struck backwards some paces behind the farm buildings,

supposing the descent to be easier where bushes grew in the shallow

chine. In the top of the cliff there was a little dip, which formed an

excellent place for an outside cellar or root-house for such farm stores

as must be buried deep beneath the snow against the frost of winter. The

rough door of such a cellar appeared in the side of this small

declivity, and as Caius came round the back of the byre in sight of it,

he was surprised to see the farmer's wife holding the latch of its door

in her hand and looking vacantly into the dark interior. She looked up

and answered the young man's greeting with apathetic manner, apparently

quite indifferent to the scene she had just passed through.

Caius, his mind still in the rush of indignation on her behalf, stopped

at the sight of her, wondering what he could do or say to express the

wild pity that surged within him.

But the woman said, "The tide's late to-night," exactly as she might

have remarked with dry civility that it was fine weather.

"Yes," said Caius, "I suppose it will be."

She was looking into the cellar, not towards the edge of the bank.

"With a decent strong tide," she remarked, "you can hear the waves in

this cave."

Whereupon she walked slowly past him back toward her house. Caius took

the precaution to step after her round the end of the byre, just to see

that her husband was not lying in wait for her there. There was no one

to be seen but the children at a distance, still swinging on the gate,

and a labourer who was driving some cows from the field.

Caius slipped down on to the red shore, and found himself in a wide

semicircular bay, near the point which ended it on this side. He crept

round the bay inwards for half a mile, till he came to the mouth of the

creek to which he was bound. All the long spring evening he sat angling

for the speckled sea-trout, until the dusk fell and the blue water

turned gray, and he could no longer see the ruddy colour of the rock on

which he sat. All the long spring evening the trout rose to his fly one

by one, and were landed in his basket easily enough, and soft-throated

frogs piped to him from ponds in the fields behind, and the smell of

budding verdure from the land mingled with the breeze from the sea. But

Caius was not happy; he was brooding over the misery suggested by what

he had just seen, breathing his mind after its unusual rush of emotion,

and indulging its indignant melancholy. It did not occur to him to

wonder much why the object of his pity had made that quick errand to the

cellar in the chine, or why she had taken interest in the height of the

tide. He supposed her to be inwardly distracted by her misery. She had

the reputation of being a strange woman.

CHAPTER III.

LOST IN THE SEA.

There was no moon that night. When the darkness began to gather swiftly,

Caius swung his basket of fish and his tackle over his shoulder and

tramped homeward. His preference was to go round by the road and avoid

the Day farm; then he thought it might be his duty to go that way,

because it might chance that the woman needed protection as he passed.

It is much easier to give such protection in intention than in deed;

but, as it happened, the deed was not required. The farmstead was

perfectly still as he went by it again.

He went on half a mile, passing only such friendly persons as it was

natural he should meet on the public road. They were few. Caius walked

listening to the sea lapping below the low cliff near which the road

ran, and watching the bats that often circled in the dark-blue dusk

overhead. Thus going on, he gradually recognised a little group walking

in front of him. It was the woman, Mrs. Day, and her three children.

Holding a child by either hand, she tramped steadily forward. Something

in the way she walked, in the way the children walked--a dull,

mechanical action in their steps--perplexed Caius.

He stepped up beside them with a word of neighbourly greeting.

The woman did not answer for some moments; when she did, although her

words were ordinary, her voice seemed to Caius to come from out some far

distance whither her mind had wandered.

"Going to call on someone, I suppose, Mrs. Day?" said he, inwardly

anxious.

"Yes," she replied; "we're going to see a friend--the children and me."

Again it seemed that there was some long distance between her and the

young man who heard her.

"Come along and see my mother," he urged, with solicitude. "She always

has a prime welcome for visitors, mother has."

The words were hearty, but they excited no heartiness of response.

"We've another place to go to to-night," she said. "There'll be a

welcome for us, I reckon."

She would neither speak to him any more nor keep up with his pace upon

the road. He slackened speed, but she still shrank back, walking slower.

He found himself getting in advance, so he left her.

A hundred yards more he went on, and looked back to see her climbing the

log fence into the strip of common beside the sea.

His deliberation of mind was instantly gone. Something was wrong now. He

cast himself over the low log fence just where he was, and hastened back

along the edge of the cliff, impelled by unformulated fear.

It was dark, the dark grayness of a moonless night. The cliff here was

not more than twenty feet above the high tide, which surged and swept

deep at its base. The grass upon the top was short; young fir-trees

stood here and there. All this Caius saw. The woman he could not see at

first. Then, in a minute, he did see her--standing on the edge of the

bank, her form outlined against what light there was in sea and sky. He

saw her swing something from her. The thing she threw, whatever it was,

was whirled outwards, and then fell into the sea. With a splash, it

sank.

The young man's mind stood still with horror. The knowledge came to him

as he heard the splash that it was the little child she had flung away.

He threw off his basket and coat. Another moment, and he would have

jumped from the bank; but before he had jumped he heard the elder girl

groaning as if in desperate fear, and saw that mother and daughter were

grappled together, their figures swaying backwards and forwards in

convulsive struggle. He did not doubt that the mother was trying to

drown this child also. Another low wild groan from the girl, and Caius

flung himself upon them both. His strength released the girl, who drew

away a few paces; but the woman struggled terribly to get to her again.

Both the girl and little boy stood stupidly within reach.

"Run--run--to the road, and call for help!" gasped Caius to the

children, but they only stood still.

He was himself shouting with all his strength, and holding the desperate

woman upon the ground, where he had thrown her.

Every moment he was watching the dark water, where he thought he saw a

little heap of light clothes rise and sink again further off.

"Run with your brother out of the way, so that I can leave her," he

called to the girl. He tried with a frantic gesture to frighten them

into getting out of the mother's reach. He continued to shout for aid as

he held down the woman, who with the strength of insanity was struggling

to get hold of the children.

A man's voice gave answering shout. Caius saw someone climbing the

fence. He left the woman and jumped into the sea.

Down under the cold black water he groped about. He was not an expert

swimmer and diver. He had never been under water so long before, but so

strong had been his impulse to reach the child that he went a good way

on the bottom in the direction in which he had thought he saw the little

body floating. Then he knew that he came up empty-handed and was

swimming on the dark surface, hearing confused cries and imprecations

from the shore. He wanted to dive and seek again for the child below,

but he did not know how to do this without a place to leap from. He let

himself sink, but he was out of breath. He gasped and inhaled the water,

and then, for dear life's sake, he swam to keep his head above it.

The water had cooled his excitement; a feeling of utter helplessness and

misery came over him. So strong was his pity for the little sad-eyed

child that he was almost willing to die in seeking her; but all hope of

finding was forsaking him. He still swam in the direction in which he

thought the child drifted as she rose and sank. It did not occur to him

to be surprised that she had drifted so far until he realized that he

was out of hearing of the sounds from the shore. His own swimming, he

well knew, could never have taken him so far and fast. There was a

little sandy island lying about three hundred yards out. At first he

hoped to strike the shallows near it quickly, but found that the

current of the now receding tide was racing down the channel between the

island and the shore, out to the open sea. That little body was, no

doubt, being sucked outward in this rush of water--out to the wide water

where he could not find her. He told himself this when he found at what

a pace he was going, and knew that his best chance of ever returning was

to swim back again.

So he gave up seeking the little girl, and turned and swam as best he

could against the current, and recognised slowly that he was making no

headway, but by using all his strength could only hold his present place

abreast of the outer point of the island, and a good way from it. The

water was bitterly cold; it chilled him. He was far too much occupied in

fighting the current to think properly, but certain flashes of

intelligence came across his mind concerning the death he might be going

to die. His first clear thoughts were about a black object that was

coming near on the surface of the water. Then a shout reached him, and a

stronger swimmer than he pulled him to the island.

"Now, in the devil's name, Caius Simpson!" The deliverer was the man who

had come over the fence, and he shook himself as he spoke. His words

were an interrogation relating to all that had passed. He was a young

man, about the same age as Caius; the latter knew him well.

"The child, Jim!" shivered Caius hoarsely. "She threw it into the

water!"

"In there?" asked Jim, pointing to the flowing darkness from which they

had just scrambled. He shook his head as he spoke. "There's a sort of a

set the water's got round this here place----" He shook his head again;

he sat half dressed on the edge of the grass, peering into the tide, a

dark figure surrounded by darkness.

It seemed to Caius even then, just pulled out as he was from a sea too

strong for him, that there was something horribly bad and common in that

they two sat there taking breath, and did not plunge again into the

water to try, at least, to find the body of the child who a few minutes

before had lived and breathed so sweetly. Yet they did not move.

"Did someone else come to hold her?" Caius asked this in a hasty

whisper. They both spoke as if there was some need for haste.

"Noa. I tied her round with your fish-cord. If yo'd have done that, yo'

might have got the babby the same way I got yo'."

The heart of Caius sank. If only he had done this! Jim Hogan was not a

companion for whom he had any respect; he looked upon him as a person of

low taste and doubtful morals, but in this Jim had shown himself

superior.

"I guess we'd better go and look after them," said Jim. He waded in a

few paces. "Come along," he said.

As they waded round to the inner side of the island, Caius slowly took

off some of his wet clothes and tied them round his neck. Then they swam

back across the channel at its narrowest.

While the water was rushing past their faces, Caius was conscious of

nothing but the animal desire to be on the dry, warm shore again; but

when they touched the bottom and climbed the bank once more to the

place where he had seen the child cast away, he forgot all his fight

with the sea, and thought only with horror of the murder done--or was

there yet hope that by a miracle the child might be found somewhere

alive? It is hope always that causes panic. Caius was panic-stricken.

The woman lay, bound hand and foot, upon the grass.

"If I couldn't ha' tied her," said Jim patronizingly, "I'd a quietened

her by a knock on the head, and gone after the young un, if I'd been

yo'."

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.

When his college had conferred upon him the degree of doctor of

medicine, he felt that he had climbed only on the lower rungs of the

ladder of knowledge. It was his father, not himself, who had chosen his

profession, and now that he had received the right to practise medicine

he experienced no desire to practise it; learning he loved truly, but

not that he might turn it into golden fees, and not that by it he might

assuage the sorrows of others; he loved it partly for its own sake,

perhaps chiefly so; but there was in his heart a long-enduring ambition,

which formed itself definitely into a desire for higher culture, and

hoped more indefinitely for future fame.

Caius resolved to go abroad and study at the medical schools of the Old

World. His professors applauded his resolve; his friends encouraged him

in it. It was to explain to his father the necessity for this course of

action, and wheedle the old man into approval and consent, that the

young doctor went home in the spring of the same year which gave him his

degree.

Caius had other sentiments in going home besides those which underlay

the motive which we have assigned. If as he travelled he at all regarded

the finery of all that he had acquired, it was that he might by it

delight the parents who loved him with such pride. Though not a fop, his

hand trembled on the last morning of his journey when he fastened a

necktie of the colour his mother loved best. He took an earlier train

than he could have been expected to take, and drove at furious rate

between the station and his home, in order that he might creep in by the

side door and greet his parents before they had thought of coming to

meet him. He had also taken no breakfast, that he might eat the more of

the manifold dainties which his mother had in readiness.

For three or four days he feasted hilariously upon these dainties until

he was ill. He also practised all the airs and graces of dandyism that

he could think of, because he knew that the old folks, with ill-judging

taste, admired them. When he had explained to them how great a man he

should be when he had been abroad, and how economical his life would be

in a foreign city, they had no greater desire than that he should go

abroad, and there wax as great as might be possible.

One thing that consoled the mother in the heroism of her ambition was

that it was his plan first to spend the long tranquil summer by her

side. Another was that, because her son had set his whole affection upon

learning, it appeared he had no immediate intention of fixing his love

upon any more material maid. In her timid jealousy she loved to come

across this topic with him, not worldly-wise enough to know that the

answers which reassured her did not display the noblest side of his

heart.

"And there wasn't a girl among them all that you fancied, my lad?" With

spotless apron round her portly form she was serving the morning rasher

while Caius and his father sat at meat.

"I wouldn't say that, mother: I fancied them all." Caius spoke with

generous condescension towards the fair.

"Ay," said the father shrewdly, "there's safety in numbers."

"But there wasn't one was particular, Caius?" continued the dame with

gleeful insinuation, because she was assured that the answer was to be

negative. "A likely lad like you should marry; it's part of his duty."

Caius was dense enough not to see her true sentiment. The particular

smile that, in the classification of his facial expressions, belonged to

the subject of love and marriage, played upon his lips while he

explained that when a man got up in the world he could make a better

marriage than he could when comparatively poor and unknown.

Her woman's instinct assured her that the expression and the words arose

from a heart ignorant of the quality of love, and she regarded nothing

else.

The breakfast-room in which they sat had no feature that could render it

attractive to Caius. Although it was warm weather, the windows were

closely shut and never opened; such was the habit of the family, and

even his influence had not strength to break through a regulation which

to his parents appeared so wise and safe. The meadows outside were

brimful of flowers, but no flower found its way into this orderly room.

The furniture had that desolate sort of gaudiness which one sees in the

wares of cheap shops. Cleanliness and godliness were the most

conspicuous virtues exhibited, for the room was spotless, and the map of

Palestine and a large Bible were prominent objects.

The father and mother were in the habit of eating in the kitchen when

alone, and to the son's taste that room, decorated with shining

utensils, with its door open to earth and sky, was infinitely more

picturesque and cheery; but the mother had a stronger will than her son,

and she had ordained that his rise in the world should be marked by his

eating in the dining-room, where meals were served whenever they had

company. Caius observed also, with a pain to which his heart was

sensitive, that at these meals she treated him to her company manners

also, asking him in a clear, firm voice if he "chose bread" or if he

would "choose a little meat," an expression common in the country as an

elegant manner of pressing food upon visitors. It was not that he felt

himself unworthy of this mark of esteem, but that the bad taste and the

bad English grated upon his nerves.

She was a strong, comely woman, this housemother, portly in person and

large of face, with plentiful gray hair brushed smooth; from the face

the colour had faded, but the look of health and strong purpose

remained. The father, on the other hand, tended to leanness; his large

frame was beginning to be obviously bowed by toil; his hair and beard

were somewhat long, and had a way of twisting themselves as though blown

by the wind. When the light of the summer morning shone through the

panes of clean glass upon this family at breakfast, it was obvious that

the son was physically somewhat degenerate. Athletics had not then come

into fashion; Caius was less in stature than might have been expected

from such parents; and now, after his years of town life, he had an

appearance of being limp in sinew, nor was there the same strong will

and alert shrewdness written upon his features. He was a handsome

fellow, clear-eyed and intelligent, finer far, in the estimation of his

parents, than themselves; but that which rounded out the lines of his

figure was rather a tendency to plumpness than the development of

muscle, and the intelligence of his face suggested rather the power to

think than the power to utilize his thought.

After the first glad days of the home-coming, the lack of education and

taste, and the habits that this lack engendered, jarred more and more

upon Caius. He loved his parents too well to betray his just distress at

the narrow round of thought and feeling in which their minds

revolved--the dogmatism of ignorance on all points, whether of social

custom or of the sublime reaches of theology; but this distress became

magnified into irritation, partly because of this secrecy, partly

because his mind, wearied by study, had not its most wholesome balance.

Jim Hogan at this time made overtures of renewed friendship to Caius.

Jim was the same as of old--athletic, quick-witted, large and strong,

with his freckled face still innocent of hair; the red brush stood up

over his unnaturally high forehead in such fashion as to suggest to the

imaginative eye that wreath of flame that in some old pictures is

displayed round the heads of villains in the infernal regions. Jim was

now the acknowledged leader of the young men of that part who were not

above certain low and mischievous practices to which Caius did not dream

of condescending. Caius repulsed the offer of friendship extended to

him.

The households with which his parents were friendly made great

merrymakings over his return. Dancing was forbidden, but games in which

maidens might be caught and kissed were not. Caius was not diverted; he

had not the good-nature to be in sympathy with the sort of hilarity

which was exacted from him.

CHAPTER VII.

"A SEA CHANGE."

In the procession of the swift-winged hours there is for every man one

and another which is big with fate, in that they bring him peculiar

opportunity to lose his life, and by that means find it. Such an hour

came now to Caius. The losing and finding of life is accomplished in

many ways: the first proffer of this kind which Time makes to us is

commonly a draught of the wine of joy, and happy is he who loses the

remembrance of self therein.

The hour which was so fateful for Caius came flying with the light winds

of August, which breathed over the sunny harvest fields and under the

deep dark shade of woods of fir and beech, waving the gray moss that

hung from trunk and branch, tossing the emerald ferns that grew in the

moss at the roots, and out again into light to catch the silver down of

thistles that grew by the red roadside and rustle their purple bloom;

then on the cliff, just touching the blue sea with the slightest ripple,

and losing themselves where sky and ocean met in indistinguishable azure

fold.

Through the woods walked Caius, and onward to the shore. Neddy Morrison

was dead. The little child who was lost in the sea was almost forgotten.

Caius, thinking upon these things, thought also upon the transient

nature of all things, but he did not think profoundly or long. In his

earlier youth he had been a good deal given to meditation, a habit which

is frequently a mere sign of mental fallowness; now that his mind was

wearied with the accumulation of a little learning, it knew what work

meant, and did not work except when compelled. Caius walked upon the red

road bordered by fir hedges and weeds, amongst which blue and yellow

asters were beginning to blow, and the ashen seeds of the flame-flower

were seen, for its flame was blown out. Caius was walking for the sake

of walking and in pure idleness, but when he came near Farmer Day's land

he had no thought of passing it without pausing to rest his eyes for a

time upon the familiar details of that part of the shore.

He scrambled down the face of the cliff, for it was as yet some hours

before the tide would be full. A glance showed him that the stone of

baby Day's tablet yet held firm, cemented in the niche of the soft rock.

A glance was enough for an object for which he had little respect, and

he sat down with his back to it on one of the smaller rocks of the

beach. This was the only place on the shore where the sandstone was hard

enough to retain the form of rock, and the rock ended in the small,

sharp headland which, when he was down at the water's level, hid the

neighbouring bay entirely from his sight.

The incoming tide had no swift, unexpected current as the outgoing water

had. There was not much movement in the little channel upon which Caius

was keeping watch. The summer afternoon was all aglow upon shore and

sea. He had sat quite still for a good while, when, near the sunny

island, just at the point where he had been pulled ashore on the

adventurous night when he risked his life for the child, he suddenly

observed what appeared to be a curious animal in the water.

There was a glistening as of a scaly, brownish body, which lay near the

surface of the waves. Was it a porpoise that had ventured so near? Was

it a dog swimming? No, he knew well that neither the one nor the other

had any such habit as this lazy basking in sunny shallows. Then the head

that was lying backwards on the water turned towards him, and he saw a

human face--surely, surely it was human!--and a snow-white arm was

lifted out of the water as if to play awhile in the warm air.

The eyes of the wonderful thing were turned toward him, and it seemed to

chance to see him now for the first time, for there was a sudden

movement, no jerk or splash, but a fish-like dart toward the open sea.

Then came another turn of the head, as if to make sure that he was

indeed the man that he seemed, and then the sea-maid went under the

surface, and the ripples that she left behind subsided slowly, expanding

and fading, as ripples in calm waters do.

Caius stood up, watching the empty surface of the sea. If some

compelling fate had said to him, "There shalt thou stand and gaze," he

could not have stood more absolutely still, nor gazed more intently. The

spell lasted long: some three or four minutes he stood, watching the

place with almost unwinking eyes, like one turned to stone, and within

him his mind was searching, searching, to find out, if he might, what

thing this could possibly be.

He did not suppose that she would come back. Neddy Morrison had implied

that the condition of her appearing was that she should not know that

she was seen. It was three years since the old man had seen the same

apparition; how much might three years stand for in the life of a

mermaid? Then, when such questioning seemed most futile, and the spell

that held Caius was loosing its hold, there was a rippling of the calm

surface that gave him a wild, half-fearful hope.

As gently as it had disappeared the head rose again, not lying backward

now, but, with pretty turn of the white neck, holding itself erect. An

instant she was still, and then the perfect arm which he had seen before

was again raised in the air, and this time it beckoned to him. Once,

twice, thrice he saw the imperative beck of the little hand; then it

rested again upon the rippled surface, and the sea-maid waited, as

though secure of his obedience.

The man's startled ideas began to right themselves. Was it possible that

any woman could be bathing from the island, and have the audacity to ask

him to share her sport?

He tarried so long that the nymph, or whatever it might be, came nearer.

Some twelve feet or so of the water she swiftly glided through, as it

seemed, without twist or turn of her body or effort; then paused; then

came forward again, until she had rounded the island at its nearest

point, and half-way between it and his shore she stopped, and looked at

him steadily with a face that seemed to Caius singularly womanly and

sweet. Again she lifted a white hand and beckoned him to come across the

space of water that remained.

Caius stood doubtful upon his rock. After a minute he set his feet more

firmly upon it, and crossed his arms to indicate that he had no

intention of swimming the narrow sea in answer to the beckoning hand.

Yet his whole mind was thrown into confusion with the strangeness of it.

He thought he heard a woman's laughter come across to him with the

lapping waves, and his face flushed with the indignity this offered.

The mermaid left her distance, and by a series of short darts came

nearer still, till she stopped again about the width of a broad highroad

from the discomforted man. He knew now that it must be truly a mermaid,

for no creature but a fish could thus glide along the surface of the

water, and certainly the sleek, damp little head that lay so comfortably

on the ripple was the head of a laughing child or playful girl. A crown

of green seaweed was on the dripping curls; the arms playing idly upon

the surface were round, dimpled, and exquisitely white. The dark

brownish body he could hardly now see; it was foreshortened to his

sight, down slanting deep under the disturbed surface. If it had not

been for the indisputable evidence of his senses that this lovely sea

thing swam, not with arms or feet, but with some snake-like motion, he

might still have tried to persuade himself that some playful girl,

strange to the ways of the neighbourhood, was disporting herself at her

bath.

It was of no avail that his reason told him that he did not, could not,

believe that such a creature as a mermaid could exist. The big dark eyes

of the girlish face opened wide and looked at him, the dimpled mouth

smiled, and the little white hand came out from the water and beckoned

to him again.

He was suffering from no delirium; he had not lost his wits. He stamped

his foot to make sure that the rock was beneath him; he turned about on

it to rest his eyes from the water sparkles, and to recall all sober,

serious thought by gazing at the stable shore. His eye stayed on the

epitaph of the lost child. He remembered soberly all that he knew about

this dead child, and then a sudden flash of perception seemed to come to

him. This sweet water-nymph, on whom for the moment he had turned his

back, must be the baby's soul grown to a woman in the water. He turned

again, eager not to lose a moment of the maiden's presence, half fearful

that she had vanished, but she was there yet, lying still as before.

Of course, it was impossible that she should be the sea-wraith of the

lost child; but, then, it was wholly impossible that she should be, and

there she was, smiling at him, and Caius saw in the dark eyes a likeness

to the long-remembered eyes of the child, and thought he still read

there human wistfulness and sadness, in spite of the wet dimples and

light laughter that bespoke the soulless life of the sea-creature.

Caius stooped on the rock, putting his hand near the water as he might

have done had he been calling to a kitten or a baby.

"Come, my pretty one, come," he called softly in soothing tones.

The eyes of the water-nymph blinked at him through wet-fringed lids.

"Come near; I will not hurt you," urged Caius, helpless to do aught but

offer blandishment.

He patted the rock gently, as if to make it by that means more inviting.

"Come, love, come," he coaxed. He was used to speak in the same terms of

endearment to a colt of which he was fond; but when a look of undoubted

derision came over the face of the sea-maiden, he felt suddenly guilty

at having spoken thus to a woman.

He stood erect again, and his face burned. The sea-girl's face had

dimpled all over with fun. Colts and other animals cannot laugh at us,

else we might not be so peaceful in our assumption that they never

criticise. Caius before this had always supposed himself happy in his

little efforts to please children and animals; now he knew himself to be

a blundering idiot, and so far from feeling vexed with the laughing face

in the water, he wondered that any other creature had ever permitted his

clumsy caresses.

Having failed once, he now knew not what to do, but stood uncertain,

devouring the beauty of the sprite in the water as greedily as he might

with eyes that were not audacious, for in truth he had begun to feel

very shy.

"What is your name?" he asked, throwing his voice across the water.

The pretty creature raised a hand and pointed at some object behind him.

Caius, turning, knew it to be the epitaph. Yes, that was what his own

intelligence had told him was the only explanation.

Explanation? His reason revolted at the word. There was no explanation

of an impossibility. Yet that the mermaid was the lost child he had now

little doubt, except that he wholly doubted the evidence of his senses,

and that there was a mermaid.

He nodded to her that he understood her meaning about the name, and she

gave him a little wave of her hand as if to say good-bye, and began to

recede slowly, gliding backward, only her head seen above the disturbed

water.

"Don't go," called Caius, much urgency in his words.

But the slow receding motion continued, and no answer came but another

gentle wave of the hand.

The hand of Caius stole involuntarily to his lips, and he wafted a kiss

across the water. Then suddenly it seemed to him that the cliff had

eyes, and that it might be told of him at home and abroad that he was

making love to a phantom, and had lost his wits.

The sea-child only tossed her head a little higher out of the water, and

again he saw, or fancied he saw, mirth dancing in her eyes.

She beckoned to him and turned, moving away; then looked back and

beckoned, and darted forward again; and, doing this again and again, she

made straight for the open sea.

Caius cursed himself that he had not the courage to jump in and swim

after her at any cost. But then he could not swim so fast--certainly not

in his clothes. "There was something so wonderfully human about her

face," he mused to himself. His mind suggested, as was its wont, too

many reasonable objections to the prompt, headlong course which alone

would have availed anything.

While he stood in breathless uncertainty, the beckoning hand became lost

in the blur of sparkling ripples; the head, lower now, looked in the

water at a distance as like the muzzle of a seal or dog as like a human

head. By chance, as it seemed, a point of the island came between him

and the receding creature, and Caius found himself alone.

CHAPTER VIII.

BELIEF IN THE IMPOSSIBLE.

Caius clambered up the cliff and over the fence to the highroad. A man

with a cartload of corn was coming past. Caius looked at him and his

horse, and at the familiar stretch of road. It was a relief so to look.

On a small green hillock by the roadside thistles grew thickly; they

were in flower and seed at once, and in the sunshine the white down,

purple flowers, and silver-green leaves glistened--a little picture,

perfect in itself, of graceful lines and exquisite colour, having for

its background the hedge of stunted fir that bordered the other side of

the road. Caius feasted his eyes for a minute and then turned homeward,

walking for awhile beside the cart and talking to the carter, just to be

sure that there was nothing wild or strange about himself to attract the

man's attention. The cart raised no dust in the red clay of the road;

the monotonous creak of its wheels and the dull conversation of its

owner were delightful to Caius because they were so real and

commonplace.

Caius felt very guilty. He could not excuse himself to himself for the

fact that he had not only seen so wild a vision but now felt the

greatest reluctance to make known his strange adventure to anyone. He

could not precisely determine why this reluctance was guilty on his

part, but he had a feeling that, although a sensible man could not be

much blamed for seeing a mermaid if he did see one, such a man would

rouse the neighbourhood, and take no rest till the phenomenon was

investigated; or, if that proved impossible, till the subject was at

least thoroughly ventilated. The ideal man who acted thus would no doubt

be jeered at, but, secure in his own integrity, he could easily support

the jeers. Caius would willingly have changed places with this model

hero, but he could not bring himself to act the part. Even the reason of

this unwillingness he could not at once lay his hand upon, but he felt

about his mind far it, and knew that it circled round and round the

memory of the sea-maid's face.

That fresh oval face, surrounded with wet curls, crowned with its

fantastic wreath of glistening weed--it was not alone because of its

fresh girlish prettiness that he could not endure to make it the talk of

the country, but because, strange as it seemed to him to admit it, the

face was to him like the window of a lovely soul. It was true that she

had laughed and played; it was true that she was, or pretended to be,

half a fish; but, for all that, he would as soon have held up to

derision his mother, he would as soon have derided all that he held to

be most worthy in woman and all that he held to be beautiful and sacred

in ideal, as have done despite to the face that looked at him out of the

waves that afternoon. His memory held this face before him, held it

lovingly, reverently, and his lips shut firmly over the tale of wonder

he might have told.

At the gate of one of the fields a girl stood waiting for him. It was

his cousin Mabel, and when he saw her he knew that she must have come

to pay them a visit, and he knew too that she must have come because he

was at home. He was not attached to his cousin, who was an ordinary

young person, but hitherto he had always rather enjoyed her society,

because he knew that it was her private ambition to marry him. He did

not attribute affection to Mabel, only ambition; but that had pleased

his vanity. To-day he felt exceedingly sorry that she had come.

Mabel held the gate shut so that he could not pass.

"Where have you been?" asked she, pretending sternness.

"Just along by the shore." He noticed as he said it that Mabel's frock

had a dragged look about the waist, and that the seams were noticeable

because of its tightness. He remembered that her frocks had this

appearance frequently, and he wished they were not so ill-made.

"I shan't let you in," cried Mabel sportively, "till you tell me exactly

what you've been doing for this age."

"I have not been serving my age much," he said, with some weariness in

his tone.

"What?" said Mabel.

"You asked me what I had been doing for this age," said he. It was

miserably stupid to explain.

When Caius and Mabel had sauntered up through the warm fields to the

house, his mother met them in the front parlour with a fresh cap on. Her

cap, and her presence in that room, denoted that Mabel was company. She

immediately began to make sly remarks concerning Mabel's coming to them

while Caius was at home, about her going to meet him, and their homeward

walk together.

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.

How long he remained stunned he did not know. He felt the water rushing

about his head again; he felt that he had been drowned, and he knew,

too--in that foolish way in which the half-awakened brain knows the

supposed certainties of dreams--that the white hand he had essayed to

hold had grasped his beard firmly under his chin, and that thus holding

his head above the surface of the water, she was towing him away to

unknown regions.

Then he seemed to know nothing again; and again he opened his eyes, to

find himself lying on a beach in the moonlight, and the sea-maid's face

was bending over his. He saw it distinctly, all tender human solicitude

written on the moonlit lineaments. As his eyes opened more her face

receded. She was gone, and he gazed vacantly at the sky; then, realizing

his consciousness more clearly, he sat up suddenly to see where she had

gone.

It seemed to him that, like a kind enchantress, she had transformed

herself to break his passion. Yes, he saw her, as he had so often

curiously longed to see her, moving over the dry shore--she was going

back to her sea. But it was a strange, monstrous thing he saw. From her

gleaming neck down to the ground was dank, shapeless form. So a walrus

or huge seal might appear, could it totter about erect upon low,

fin-like feet. There was no grace of shape, no tapering tail, no shiny

scales, only an appearance of horrid quivering on the skin, that here

and there seemed glossy in the moonlight.

He saw her make her way toilsomely, awkwardly over the shingle of the

beach; and when she reached the shining water, it was at first so

shallow that she seemed to wade in it like a land-animal, then, when the

water was deep enough to rise up well around her, she turned to him once

more a quick glance over her shoulder. Such relief came with the sight

of her face, after this monstrous vision, that he saw the face flash on

him as a sword might flash out of darkness when light catches its blade.

Then she was gone, and he saw the form of her head in the water while

she swam swiftly across the silver track of the moonbeams and out into

the darkness beyond.

Caius looked around him with senses still drowsy and head aching sorely.

He was in no fairy region that might be the home of mermaids, but on the

bit of beach from which he had launched himself into the water. His

coat and hat lay near him, and just above the spot where he lay was the

rude epitaph of baby Day, carved by his own boyish hand so long ago.

Caius put his hand to his head, and found it badly bruised on one side.

His heart was bruised, too, partly by the sight of the monstrous body of

the lovely sea-child, partly by the fresh experience of his own weakness

and incapacity.

It was long before he dragged himself home. It seemed to him to be days

before he recovered from the weariness of that secret adventure, and he

bore the mark of the bruise on his head for many a day. The mermaid he

never saw again.

CHAPTER XI.

YEARS OF DISCRETION.

Caius Simpson took ship and crossed the sea. The influence of the

beautiful face remained with him. That which had come to him was the new

birth of mind (not spirit), which by the grace of God comes to many an

individual, but is more clearly recognised and recorded when it comes in

the life of nations--the opening of the inward eye to the meaning and

joy of all things that the outward senses have heretofore perceived as

not perceiving them. The art of the Old World claimed him as her own, as

beauty on land and sea had already done. The enjoyment of music and

pictures became all-important to him, at first because he searched in

them for the soul he had seen in the sea-maid's eyes.

Caius was of noble birth, because by inheritance and training he was the

slave of righteousness. For this reason he could not neglect his work,

although it had not a first place in his heart. As he was industrious,

he did not fail in it; because it was not the thing he loved best, he

did not markedly succeed. It was too late to change his profession, and

he found in himself no such decided aptitude for anything else as should

make him know that this or that would have been preferable; but he knew

now that the genius of the physician was not his, that to do his work

because it was duty, and to attain the respectable success which

circumstance, rather than mental pre-eminence, gives, was all that he

could hope. This saddened him; all his ambition revived under the

smarting consciousness of inferiority to his more talented companions.

The pleasures of his life came to him through his receptive faculties,

and in the consciousness of having seen the wider vision, and being in

consequence a nobler man. But all this, which was so much to him for a

year or two, grew to be a less strong sensation than that of

disappointment in the fact that he could only so meagrely fulfil his

father's ideal and his own. There came a sense of dishonesty, too, in

having used the old man's money chiefly in acquiring those mental graces

which his father could neither comprehend nor value.

Three years passed. Gradually the memory of his love for the sea-maid

had grown indistinct; and, more or less unconscious that this love had

been the door to the more wealthy gardens of his mind, he inclined to

despise it now as he despised the elegy he had written for the child who

was drowned. It was his own passion he was inclined to forget and

despise; the sea-maid herself was remembered, and respected, and

wondered at, and disbelieved in, and believed in, as of old, but that

which remains in the mind, never spoken of, never used as a cause of

activity of either thought or action, recedes into the latent rather

than the active portion of the memory.

Once, just once, in the first year of his foreign life, he had told to a

friend the history of that, his one and only love-story. The result had

not been satisfactory. His companion was quite sure that Caius had been

the subject of an artful trick, and he did not fail to suggest that the

woman had wanted modesty. Nothing, he observed, was more common than for

men who were in love to attribute mental and physical charms to women

who were in reality vulgar and blatant. Caius, feeling that he could

advance no argument, refused to discuss the subject; it was months

before he had the same liking for this friend, and it was a sign that

what the other called "the sea-myth" was losing its power over him when

he returned to this friendship.

Caius did not make many friends. It was not his nature to do so, and

though constant to the few that he had, he did not keep up any very

lively intercourse. It was partly because of this notable failure in

social duty that, when he at last decided that the work of preparation

must be considered at an end, and the active work of life begun, no

opening immediately revealed itself to his inquiring gaze. Two vacant

positions in his native country he heard of and coveted, and before he

returned he gathered such testimonials as he could, and sent them in

advance, offering himself as a candidate. When he landed in Canada he

went at once to his first college to beg in person that the influence of

his former teachers might be used on his behalf. The three years that

had passed without correspondence had made a difference in the attitude

of those who could help him; many of his friends also were dispersed,

gone from the place. He waited in Montreal until he heard that he was

not the accepted candidate for the better of the two positions, and that

the other post would not be filled till the early spring.

Caius went home again. He observed that his parents looked older. The

leaves were gone from the trees, the days were short, and the earth was

cold. The sea between the little island and the red sandstone cliff was

utterly lonely. Caius walked by its side sometimes, but there was no

mermaid there.

_BOOK II._

CHAPTER I.

THE HAND THAT BECKONED.

It was evening. Caius was watering his father's horses. Between the

barns and the house the space was grass; a log fence divided it, and

against this stood a huge wooden pump and a heavy log hollowed out for a

trough. House and barns were white; the house was large, but the barns

were many times larger. If it had not been that their sloping roofs of

various heights and sizes formed a progression of angles not unpleasant

to the eye, the buildings would have been very ugly; but they had also a

generous and cleanly aspect which was attractive.

Caius brought the horses to the trough in pairs, each with a hempen

halter. They were lightly-built, well-conditioned beasts, but their days

of labour had wrought in them more of gentleness than of fire. As they

drank now, the breeze played with their manes and forelocks, brushing

them about their drooping necks and meek faces. Caius pumped the water

for them, and watched them meditatively the while. There was a fire low

down in the western sky; over the purple of the leafless woods and the

bleak acres of bare red earth its light glanced, not warming them, but

showing forth their coldness, as firelight glancing through a

window-pane glows cold upon the garden snows. The big butter-nut-tree

that stood up high and strong over the pump rattled its twigs in the

air, as bare bones might rattle.

It was while he was still at the watering that the elder Simpson drove

up to the house door in his gig. He had been to the post-office. This

was not an event that happened every day, so that the letter which he

now handed Caius might as well as not have been retarded a day or two in

its delivery. Caius took it, leading the horses to their stalls, and he

examined it by the light of the stable lantern.

The writing, the appearance of the envelope and post-mark, were all

quite unfamiliar. The writing was the fine Italian hand common to ladies

of a former generation, and was, in Caius' mind, connected only with the

idea of elderly women. He opened the letter, therefore, with the less

curiosity. Inside he found several pages of the same fine writing, and

he read it with his arm round the neck of one of the horses. The

lantern, which he had hung on a nail in the stall, sent down dim

candlelight upon the pair.

When Caius had read the letter, he turned it over and over curiously,

and began to read it again, more out of sheer surprise than from any

relish for its contents. It was written by one Madame Josephine Le

Maître, and came from a place which, although not very far from his own

home, was almost as unknown to him as the most remote foreign part. It

came from one of the Magdalen Islands, that lie some eighty miles'

journey by sea to the north of his native shore. The writer stated that

she knew few men upon the mainland--in which she seemed to include the

larger island of Prince Edward--that Caius Simpson was the only medical

man of whom she had any personal knowledge who was at that time

unemployed. She stated, also, that upon the island where she lived there

were some hundreds of fisher-folk, and that a very deadly disease, that

she supposed to be diphtheria, was among them. The only doctor in the

whole group refused to come to them, because he feared to take back the

infection to the other islands. Indeed, so great was the dread of this

infection, that no helpful person would come to their aid except an

English priest, and he was able only to make a short weekly visit. It

was some months now since the disease had first appeared, and it was

increasing rather than diminishing.

"Come," said the letter, "and do what you can to save the lives of these

poor people--their need of you is very great; but do not come if you are

not willing to risk your life, for you will risk it. Do not come if you

are not willing to be cut off from the world all the months the ice lies

in the gulf, for at that time we have no communication with the world.

You are a good man; you go to church, and believe in the Divine Christ,

who was also a physician. It is because of this that I dare to ask you.

There is a schooner that will be lying in the harbour of Souris for two

or three weeks after the time that you receive this letter. Then she

will come here upon her last winter trip. I have arranged with the

captain to bring you to us if you can come."

After that the name of the schooner and its captain was given, a list

also of some of the things that he would need to bring with him. It was

stated that upon the island he would receive lodging and food, and that

there were a few women, not unskilled in nursing, who would carry out

his instructions with regard to the sick.

Caius folded the letter after the second reading, finished his work with

the horses, and walked with his lantern through the now darkening air to

the house. Just for a few seconds he stopped in the cold air, and looked

about him at the dark land and the starry sky.

"I have now neither the belief nor the enthusiasm she attributes to me,"

said Caius.

When he got into the bright room he blinked for a moment at the light by

which his father was reading.

The elder man took the letter in his hard, knotted hand, and read it

because he was desired to do so. When finished, he cast it upon the

table, returning to his newspaper.

"Hoots!" said he; "the woman's mad!" And then meditatively, after he had

finished his newspaper paragraph: "What dealings have you ever had with

her?"

"I never had any dealings with her."

"When you get a letter from a strange woman"--the father spoke with some

heat--"the best thing that you can do with it is to put it in the fire."

Now, Caius knew that his father had, as a usual thing, that kindly and

simple way of looking at the actions of his fellow-men which is

refinement, so that it was evident that the contents of the letter were

hateful. That was to be expected. The point that aroused the son's

curiosity was to know how far the father recognised an obligation

imposed by the letter. The letter would be hateful just in so far as it

was considered worthy of attention.

"I suppose," said the young man dubiously, "that we can easily find out

at Souris whether the statements in the letter are true or not?"

The father continued to read his paper.

The lamp upon the unpolished walnut table had no shade or globe upon it,

and it glared with all the brilliancy of clean glass, and much wick and

oil. The dining-room was orderly as ever. The map of Palestine, the old

Bible, and some newly-acquired commentaries, obtruded themselves

painfully as ornaments. There was no nook or corner in which anything

could hide in shadow; there were no shutters on the windows, for there

was no one to pass by, unless it might be some good or evil spirit that

floated upon the dark air.

Mr. Simpson continued to read his paper without heeding his son. The

mother's voice chiding the maid in the next room was the only sound that

broke the silence.

"I'll write to that merchant you used to know at Souris, father," Caius

spoke in a business-like voice. "He will be able to find out from all

the vessels that come in to what extent there is disease on the

Magdalens."

The exciting cause in Caius of this remark was his father's indifference

and opposition, and the desire to probe it.

"You'll do nothing of the sort." Simpson's answer was very testy. "What

call have you to interfere with the Magdalens?" His anger rose from a

cause perhaps more explicable to an onlooker than to himself.

In the course of years there had grown in the mind of Caius much

prejudice against the form and measure of his parents' religion. He

would have throttled another who dared to criticise them, yet he

himself took a certain pleasure in an opportunity that made criticism

pertinent rather than impertinent. It was not that he prided himself on

knowing or doing better, he was not naturally a theorist, nor didactic;

but education had awakened his mind, not only to difficulties in the

path of faith, but to a higher standard of altruism than was exacted by

old-fashioned orthodoxy.

"I think I'd better write to Souris, sir; the letter is to me, you see,

and I should not feel quite justified in taking no steps to investigate

the matter."

How easy the hackneyed phrase "taking steps" sounded to Caius! but

experience breeds strong instincts. The elder man felt the importance of

this first decision, and struck out against it as an omen of ill.

"In my opinion you'll do well to let the matter lie where it is. How

will you look making inquiries about sick folk as if you had a great

fortune to spend upon philanthropy, when it turns out that you have

none? If you'd not spent all my money on your own schooling, perhaps

you'd have some to play the fine gentleman with now, and send a hospital

and its staff on this same schooner." (This was the first reproach of

his son's extravagance which had ever passed his lips; it betokened

passion indeed.) "If you write you can't do less than send a case of

medicines, and who is to pay for them, I'd like to know? I'm pretty well

cleared out. They're a hardened lot of wreckers on those islands--I've

heard that told of them many a time. No doubt their own filth and bad

living has brought disease upon them, if there's truth in the tale; and

as to this strange woman, giving no testimony or certificate of her

respectability, it's a queer thing if she's to begin and teach you

religion and duty. It's a bold and impudent letter, and I suppose you've

enough sense left, with all your new fangles, to see that you can't do

all she asks. What do you think you can do? If you think I'm going to

pay for charity boxes to be sent to people I've no opinion of, when all

the missionary subscriptions will be due come the new year, you think

great nonsense, that's all." He brought his large hard hand down on the

table, so that the board rang and the lamp quaked; then he settled his

rounded shoulders stubbornly, and again unfurled the newspaper.

This strong declaration of wrath, and the reproaches concerning the

money, were a relief to Caius. A relief from what? Had he contemplated

for a moment taking his life in his hand and obeying the unexpected

appeal? Yet he felt no answering anger in return for the rebuke; he only

found himself comfortably admitting that if his father put it on the

score of expense he certainly had no right to give time or money that

did not belong to him. It was due to his parents that all his occupation

should henceforth be remunerative.

He put the letter away in his pocket, but, perhaps because he laid it

next his heart, the next day its cry awoke within him again, and would

not be silenced.

Christianity was identified in his mind with an exclusive way of life,

to him no longer good or true; but what of those stirring principles of

Socialism that were abroad in the world, flaunting themselves as

superior to Christianity? He was a child of the age, and dared not deny

its highest precepts. Who would go to these people if he did not go? As

to his father, he had coaxed him before for his own advantage; he could

coax him now for theirs if he would. He was sufficiently educated to

know that it was more glorious to die, even unrenowned, upon such a

mission, than to live in the prosperity that belongs to ordinary

covetousness, that should it be his duty to obey this call, no other

duty remained for him in its neglect.

His personal desire in the matter was neither more nor less noble than

are the average feelings of well-meaning people towards such enterprise.

He would have been glad to find an excellent excuse to think no more of

this mission--very glad indeed to have a more attractive opening for

work set before him; but, on the other hand, the thought of movement and

of fresh scenes was more attractive than staying where he was. Then, it

would be such a virtuous thing to do and to have done; his own

conscience and everyone who heard of the action must applaud it. And he

did not think so much of the applause of others as of the real

worthiness of the deed. Then, again, if he came back safely in the

spring, he hoped by that time the offer of some good post would be

waiting for him; and it would be more dignified to return from such an

excellent work to find it waiting, than to sit at home humbly longing

for its advent.

Caius went to Souris and questioned the merchants, talked to the

captains of the vessels in the port, saw the schooner upon which Madame

Le Maître had engaged his passage. What seemed to him most strange in

the working out of this bit of his life's story, was that all that the

letter said appeared to be true. The small island called Cloud Island,

where the pestilence was, and to which he had been invited, was not one

at which larger ships or schooners could land, so that it was only from

the harbour of another island that the seamen got their news. On all

hands it was known that there was bad disease upon Cloud Island, that no

doctor was there, and that there was one lady, a Madame Le Maître, a

person of some property, who was devoting herself to nursing the sick.

When Caius asked who she was, and where she came from, one person said

one thing and one another. Some of the men told him that she was old,

some of them affirmed that she was young, and this, not because there

was supposed to be any mystery concerning her, but because no one seemed

to have taken sufficient interest in her existence to obtain accurate

information.

When Caius re-entered the gate of his father's farm he had decided to

risk the adventure, and obey the letter in all points precisely.

"Would you let it be said that in all these parts there was no one to

act the man but a woman?" he said to his father.

To his mother he described the sufferings that this disease would work,

all the details of its pains, and how little children and mothers and

wives would be the chief sufferers, dying in helpless pain, or being

bereft of those they loved best.

As he talked, the heart of the good woman rose up within her and blessed

her son, acknowledging, in spite of her natural desires, that he was in

this more truly the great man than she had fancied him in her wildest

dreams of opulence and renown. She credited him with far purer motives

than he knew himself to possess.

A father's rule over his own money is a very modified thing, the very

fact of true fatherhood making him only a partner with his child. Caius

was under the impression that his father could have refused him the

necessary outfit of medical stores for this expedition, but that was not

the way old Simpson looked at it.

"If he must, he must," he said to his wife angrily, gloomily, for his

own opinion in the matter had changed little; but to Caius he gave his

consent, and all the money he needed, and did not, except at first,

express his disapproval, so that Caius took the less pains to argue the

matter with him.

It was only at the last, when Caius had fairly set out on his journey,

and, having said good-bye, looked back to see his father stand at the

gate of his own fields, that the attitude of the stalwart form and gray

head gave him his first real insight into the pain the parting had

cost--into the strong, sad disapproval which in the father's mind lay

behind the nominal consent. Caius saw it then, or, at least, he saw

enough of it to feel a sharp pang of regret and self-reproach. He felt

himself to be an unworthy son, and to have wronged the best of fathers.

Whether he was doing right or wrong in proceeding upon his mission he

did not know. So in this mind he set sail.