The Mermaid by Lily Dougall (portable ebook reader TXT) 📕

began to be touched with a fiery glow, when the soft dun brown of the sand-hills turned to gold, Caius, overcome with having walked and eaten much, and drunk deeply of the wine of the wild salt wind, fell into a heavy dreamless slumber, lying outstretched upon his bed of straw.


CHAPTER IV.

WHERE THE DEVIL LIVED.

Caius did not know how long he slept. He woke with a sudden start and a presentiment of evil. It was quite dark, as black as starlight night could be; for the foam of the waves hardly glimmered to sight, except here and there where some phosphorescent jelly was tossed among them like a blue death-light. What had wakened Caius was the sound of voices talking ahead of the cart, and the jerk of the cart as it was evidently being driven off the smooth beach on to a very rough and steep incline.

He sat up and strove to pierce the darkness by sight. They had come to no end of their journey. The long beach, with its walls of foam and of dune, stretched on without change. But upon this beach they were no longer travelling; the horse was headed, as it were, to the dune, and now began to climb its almost upright side.

With an imprecation he threw himself out of the cart at a bound into sand so soft that he sank up to the knees and stumbled against the upright side of the hill. The lower voice he had heard was silent instantly. O'Shea stopped the pony with a sharp word of interrogation.

"Where are you going?" shouted Caius. "What are you going to do?"

He need not have shouted, for the wind was swift to carry all sounds from his lips to O'Shea; but the latter's voice, as it came back to him, seemed to stagger against the force of the wind and almost to fail.

"Where are we going? Well, we're going roight up towards the sky at present, but in a minute we'll be going roight down towards the other place. If ye just keep on at that side of the cart ye'll get into a place where we'll have a bit of shelter and rest till the moon rises."

"What is the matter? What are you turning off the road for?" Caius shouted again, half dazed by his sleep and sudden awakening, and wholly angry at the disagreeable situation. He was cold, his limbs almost numb, and to his sleepy brain came the sudden remembrance of the round valleys in the dune of which he had heard, and the person who lived in them.

His voice was inadequately loud. The ebullition of his rage evidently amused O'Shea, for he laughed; and while Caius listened to his laughter and succeeding words, it seemed to him that some spirit, not diabolic, hovered near them in the air, for among the sounds of the rushing of the wind and of the sea came the soft sound of another sort of laughter, suppressed, but breaking forth, as if in spite of itself, with irresistible amusement; and although Caius felt that it was indulged at his own expense, yet he loved it, and would fain have joined in its persuasive merriment. While the poetical part of him listened, trying to catch this illusive sound, his more commonplace faculties were engaged by the answer of O'Shea:

"It's just as ye loike, Mr. Doctor. You can go on towards The Cloud by the beach if you've got cat's eyes, or if you can feel with your toes where the quicksands loy; but the pony and me are going to take shelter till the moon's up."

"Well, where are you going?" asked Caius. "Can't you tell me plainly? I never heard of a horse that could climb a wall."

"And if the little beast is good-natured enough to do it for ye, it's as shabby a trick as I know to keep him half-way up with the cart at his back. He's a cliver little pony, but he's not a floy; and I never knew that even a floy could stand on a wall with a cart and doctor's medicine bags a-hanging on to it. G'tup!"

This last sound was addressed to the pony, which in the darkness began once more its astonishing progress up the sand-hill.

The plea for mercy to the horse entered Caius' reason. The spirit-like laughter had in some mysterious way soothed his heart. He stood still, detaining O'Shea no longer, and dimly saw the horse and cart climb up above him. O'Shea climbed first, for his tones were heard caressing and coaxing the pony, which he led. Caius saw the cart, a black mass, disappear over the top of the hill, which was here not more than twenty feet high. When it was gone he could dimly descry a dark figure, which he supposed to be the boy, standing on the top, as if waiting to see what he would do; so, after holding short counsel with himself, he, too, began to stagger upward, marvelling more and more at the feat of the pony as he went, for though the precipice was not perpendicular, it had this added difficulty, that all its particles shifted as they were touched. There was, however, some solid substance underneath, for, catching at the sand grasses, clambering rather than walking, he soon found himself at the top, and would have fallen headlong if he had not perceived that there was no level space by seeing the boy already half-way down a descent, which, if it was unexpected, was less precipitous, and composed of firmer ground. He heard O'Shea and the cart a good way further on, and fancied he saw them moving. The boy, at least, just kept within his sight; and so he followed down into a hollow, where he felt crisp, low-growing herbage beneath his feet, and by looking up at the stars he could observe that its sandy walls rose all around him like a cup. On the side farthest from the sea the walls of the hollow rose so high that in the darkness they looked like a mountainous region.

They had gone down out of the reach of the gale; and although light airs still blew about them, here the lull was so great that it seemed like going out of winter into a softer clime.

When Caius came up with the cart he found that the traces had already been unfastened and the pony set loose to graze.

"Is there anything for him to eat?" asked Caius curiously, glad also to establish some friendly interchange of thought.

"One doesn't travel on these sands," said O'Shea, "with a horse that can't feed itself on the things that grow in the sand. It's the first necessary quality for a horse in these parts."

"What sort of things grow here?" asked Caius, pawing the ground with his foot.

He could not quite get over the inward impression that the mountainous-looking region of the dune over against them was towered with infernal palaces, so weird was the place.

O'Shea's voice came out of the darkness; his form was hardly to be seen.

"Sit yourself down, Mr. Doctor, and have some bread and cheese--that is, if ye've sufficiently forgotten the poies of the old maids. The things that grow here are good enough to sit on, and that's all we want of them, not being ponies."

The answer was once more an insult in its allusion to the pies (Caius was again hungry), and in its refusal of simple information; but the tone was more cheerful, and O'Shea had relaxed from his extreme brevity. Caius sat down, and felt almost convivial when he found that a parcel of bread and cheese and a huge bottle of cold tea were to be shared between them. Either the food was perfect of its kind or his appetite good sauce, for never had anything tasted sweeter than the meal. They all three squatted in the darkness round the contents of the ample parcel, and if they said little it was because they ate much.

Caius found by the light of a match that his watch told it was the hour of seven; they had been at hard travel for more than four hours, and had come to a bit of the beach which could not be traversed without more light. In another hour the moon would be up and the horse rested.

When the meal was finished, each rested in his own way. O'Shea laid himself flat upon his back, with a blanket over his feet. The boy slipped away, and was not seen until the waving grass on the tops of the highest dunes became a fringe of silver. Until then Caius paced the valley, coming occasionally in contact with the browsing pony; but neither his walk nor meditation was interrupted by more formidable presence.

"Ay--ee--ho--ee--ho!" It was a rallying call, a shrill cry, from O'Shea. It broke the silence the instant that the moon's first ray had touched the dune. The man must have been lying looking at the highest head, for when Caius heard the unexpected sound he looked round more than once before he discovered its cause, and then knew that while he had been walking the whole heaven and earth had become lighter by imperceptible degrees. As he watched now, the momentary brightening was very perceptible. The heights and shadows of the sand-hills stood out to sight; he could see the line where the low herbage stopped and the waving bent began. In the sky the stars faded in a pallid gulf of violet light. The mystery of the place was less, its beauty a thousandfold greater: and the beauty was still of the dream-exciting kind that made him long to climb all its hills and seek in all its hollows, for there are some scenes that, by their very contour, suggest more than they display, and in which the human mind cannot rid itself of the notion that the physical aspect is not all that there is to be seen. But whatever the charm of the place, now that light had revealed it Caius must leave it.

The party put themselves in line of march once more. The boy had gone on up where the wall of the dell was lowest, and Caius tramped beside O'Shea, who led the pony.

Once up from the hollow, their eyes were dazzled at first with the flash of the moonlight upon the water. From the top of the sand ridge they could see the sea out beyond the surf--a measureless purple waste on which far breakers rose and blossomed for a moment like a hedge of whitethorn in May, and sank again with a glint of black in the shadow of the next uprising.

They went down once more where they could see nothing but the surf and the sand-hills. The boy had walked far on; they saw his coated and cowled figure swaying with the motion of his walk on the shining beach in front. The tide was at its lowest. What the fishermen had said of it was true: with the wind beating it up it had gone down but a third of its rightful distance; and now the strip that it had to traverse to be full again seemed alarmingly narrow, for a great part of their journey was still to be made. The two men got up on the cart; the boy leaped up when they reached him, before O'Shea could bring it to full stop for him, and on they went. Even the pony seemed to realize that there was need of haste.

They had travelled about two miles more when, in front