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

not. It is because they are angry to think that the sick from different families would be put together and treated alike. They have great notions of the differences between themselves, and they cannot realize the danger, or believe that this plan would avert it; but now that you have come, no doubt you will be able to explain to them more clearly. Perhaps they will listen to you, because you are a man and a doctor. Also, what I have said will have had time to work. You may reap where I have sown."

She had looked upon him encouragingly, and Caius had felt encouraged; but when he began to talk to the people, both courage and patience quickly ebbed. He could not countenance the plan of bringing the sick into the house where Madame Le Maitre and the young girls lived. He wanted the men who were idle in the winter time to build a temporary shed of pine-wood, which would have been easy enough, but the men laughed at him. The only reason that Caius did not give them back scorn for scorn and anger for their lazy indifference was the reason that formed his third and greatest interest in his work; this was his desire to please Madame Le Maitre.

If he had never known and loved the lady of the sea, he thought that his desire to please Madame Le Maitre would have been almost the same. She exercised over him an inexplicable influence, and he would have felt almost superstitious at being under this spell if he had not observed that everyone who came much in contact with her, and who was able to appreciate her, was ruled also, and that, not by any claim of authority she put forth, but just because it seemed to happen so. She was more unconscious of this influence than anyone. Those under her rule comprised one or two of the better men of the island, many of the poor women, the girls in her house, and O'Shea. With regard to himself, Caius knew that her influence, if not augmented, was supplemented, by his belief that in pleasing her he was making his best appeal to the favour of the woman he loved.

He never from the first day forgot his love in his work. His business was to do all that he could to serve Madame Le Maitre, whose heart was in the healing of the people, but his business also was to find out the answer to the riddle in which his own heart was bound up. The first step in this, obviously, was to know more about Madame Le Maitre and O'Shea. The lady he dared not question; the man he questioned with persistency and with what art he could command.

It was one night, not a week after his advent, that he had so far come to terms with O'Shea that he sat by the stove in the latter's house, and did what he could to keep up conversation with little aid from his host.

O'Shea sat on one wooden chair, with his stockinged feet crossed upon another, and his legs forming a bridge between. He was smoking, and in the lamplight his smooth, queer face looked like a brown apple that had begun to shrivel--just begun, for O'Shea was not old, and only a little wrinkled.

His wife came often into the room, and stood looking with interest at Caius. She was a fair woman, with a broad tranquil face and much light hair that was brushed smoothly.

Caius talked of the weather, for the snow was falling. Then, after awhile:

"By the way, O'Shea, _who_ is Madame Le Maitre?"

The other had not spoken for a long time; now he took his clay pipe out of his mouth, and answered promptly:

"An angel from heaven."

"Ah, yes; that, of course."

Caius stroked his moustache with the action habitual to drawing-room gallantry; then, instead of persisting, he formed his question a little differently:

"Who is Mr. Le Maitre?"

"Sea-captain," said O'Shea.

"Oh! then _where_ is he?"

"Don't know."

"Isn't that rather strange, that his wife should be here, and that you should not know where the husband is?"

"I can't see the ships on the other side of the world."

"Where did he go to?"

"Well, when he last sailed"--deliberately--"he went to Newcastle. His ship is what they call a tramp; it don't belong to any loine. So at Newcastle she was hired to go to Africy. Like enough, there she got cargo for some place else."

"Oh! a very long voyage."

"She carries steam; the longest voyage comes to an end quick enough in these days."

"Has Madame Le Maitre always lived on this island? Was she married here?"

"She came here a year this October past. She came from a place near the Pierced Rock, south of Gaspe Basin. I lived there myself. I came here because the skipper had good land here that she said I could farm."

Caius meditated on this.

"Then, you have known her ever since she was a child?"

"Saw her married."

"What does her husband look like?"

"Well"--a long pause of consideration--"like a man."

"What sort of a man?"

"Neither like you nor me."

"I never noticed that we were alike."

"You trim your beard, I haven't any; the skipper, he's hairy."

Caius conceived a great disgust for the captain. He felt pretty well convinced also that he was no favourite with O'Shea. He would have liked much to ask if Madame Le Maitre liked her husband, but if his own refinement had not forbidden, he had a wholesome idea that O'Shea, if roused, would be a dangerous enemy.

"I don't understand why, if she is married, she wears the dress of a religious order."

"Never saw a nun dressed jist like her. Guess if you went about kissing and embracing these women ye would find it an advantage to be pretty well covered up; but"--here a long time of puffing at the pipe--"it's an advantage for more than women not to see too much of an angel."

"Has she any relations, anyone of her own family? Where do they live?"

There was no answer.

"I suppose you knew her people?"

O'Shea sprang up and opened the house door, and the snow drove in as he held it.

"I thought," he said, "I heard a body knocking."

"No one knocked," said Caius impatiently.

"I heard someone." He stood looking very suspiciously out, and so good was his acting, if it was acting, that Caius, who came and looked over his shoulder, had a superstitious feeling when he saw the blank, untrodden snow stretching wide and white into the glimmering night. He remembered that the one relative he believed the lady to have had appeared to him in strange places and vanished strangely.

"You didn't hear a knock; you were dreaming." Caius began to button on his coat.

"I wasn't even asleep." O'Shea gave a last suspicious look to the outside.

"O'Shea," said Caius, "has--has Madame Le Maitre a daughter?"

The farmer turned round to him in astonishment. "Bless my heart alive, no!"

The snow was only two or three inches deep when Caius walked home; it was light as plucked swan's-down about his feet. Everywhere it was falling slowly in small dry flakes. There was little wind to make eddies in it. The waning moon had not yet risen, but the landscape, by reason of its whiteness, glimmered just visible to the sight.


CHAPTER XII.

THE MAIDEN INVENTED.

The fishing-boats and small schooners were dragged high up on the beach. The ice formed upon the bay that lay in the midst of the islands. The carpet of snow grew more and more thick upon field and hill, and where the dwarf firwoods grew so close that it could not pass between their branches, it draped them, fold above fold, until one only saw the green here and there standing out from the white garment.

In these days a small wooden sleigh was given to Caius, to which he might harness his horse, and in which he might sit snug among oxskins if he preferred that sort of travelling to riding. Madame Le Maitre still rode, and Caius discarded his sleigh and rode also. Missing the warmth of the skins, he was soon compelled by the cold to copy Robinson Crusoe and make himself breeches and leggings of the hides.

In these first weeks one hope was always before his eyes. In every new house which he entered, at every turn of the roads, which began to be familiar to him, he hoped to see the maiden who had followed him upon the beach. He dreamed of her by night; he not only hoped, he expected to see her each day. It was of course conceivable that she might have returned to some other island of the group; but Caius did not believe this, because he felt convinced she must be under the protection of his friends; and also, since he had arrived the weather had been such that it would have been an event known to all the fishermen if another party had made a journey along the sands. When the snow came the sands were impassable. As soon as the ice on the bay would bear, there would be coming and going, no doubt; but until then Caius had the restful security that she was near him, and that it could not be many days before he saw her. The only flaw in his conclusion was that the fact did not bear it out; he did not see her.

At length it became clear that the maiden was hiding herself. Caius ceased to hope that he would meet her by chance, because he knew he would already have done so if it were not willed otherwise. Then his mind grew restless again, and impatient; he could not even imagine where she could lie hidden, or what possible reason there could be for a life of uncomfortable concealment.

Caius had not allowed either O'Shea or Madame Le Maitre to suspect that in his stumble he had involuntarily seen his companion on the midnight journey. He did not think that the sea-maid herself knew that he had seen her there. He might have been tempted now to believe that the vision was some bright illusion, if its reality had not been proved by the fact that Madame Le Maitre knew that he had a companion, and that O'Shea had staked much that he should not take that long moonlight walk by her side.

Since the day on which he had become sure that the sea-maid had such close and real connection with human beings that he met every day, he had ceased to have those strange and uncomfortable ideas about her, which, in half his moods, relegated her into the region of freaks practised upon mortals by the denizens of the unseen, or, still farther, into the region of dreams that have no reality. However, now that she had retired again into hiding, this assurance of his was small comfort.

He would have resolutely inquired of Madame Le Maitre who it was who had been sent to warn him of danger if need be upon the beach, but that the lady was not one to allow herself willingly to be questioned, and in exciting her displeasure he might lose the only chance of gaining what he sought. Then, too, with the thought of accosting the lady upon this subject there always arose in his mind the remembrance of