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

he essayed to speak; he had not the right words; then, even without them, he broke the silence hurriedly:

"I think you are justified in coming with me; but if you do what you believe to be wrong--you will regret it. What does your heart say? Think!"

It was a feeble, stammered protest; he felt no dignity in it; he almost felt it to be the craven insult seen in it by O'Shea, who swore under his breath and glared at him.

Josephine gave only a long sobbing sigh, as one awakening from a dream. She looked at the boat again, and the men preparing it, and then at Caius--straight in his eyes she looked, as if searching his face for something more.

"Follow your own conscience, Josephine; it is truer than ours. I was wrong to let you be tempted," he said. "Forgive me!"

She looked again at the boat and at the sea, and then, in the stayed subdued manner that had become too habitual to her, she said to O'Shea:

"I will go home now. Dr. Simpson is right. I cannot go."

O'Shea was too clever a man to make an effort to hold what he knew to be lost; he let go her rein, and she rode up the path that led to the island road. When she was gone O'Shea turned upon Caius with a look of mingled scorn and loathing.

"Ye're afraid of Le Maitre coming after ye," he hissed; "or ye have a girl at home, and would foind it awkward to bring her and madam face to face; so ye give her up, the most angel woman that ever trod this earth, to be done to death by a beast, because ye're afraid for yer own skin. Bah! I had come to think better of ye."

With that he cut at the horse with a stick he had in his hand, and the creature, wholly unaccustomed to such pain and indignity, dashed along the shore, by chance turning homeward. Caius, carried perforce as upon the wings of the wind for half a mile, was thrown off upon the sand. He picked himself up, and with wet clothes and sore limbs walked to his little house, which he felt he could no longer look upon as a home.

He could hardly understand what he had done; he began to regret it. A man cannot see the forces at work upon his inmost self. He did not know that Josephine's soul had taken his by the hand and lifted it up--that his love for her had risen from earth to heaven when he feared the slightest wrong-doing for her more than all other misfortune.


CHAPTER IX.

"GOD'S PUPPETS, BEST AND WORST."

All that long day a hot sun beat down upon the sea and upon the ice in the bay; and the tide, with its gentle motion of flow and ebb, made visibly more stir among the cakes of floating ice, by which it was seen that they were smaller and lighter than before. The sun-rays were doing their work, not so much by direct touch upon the ice itself as by raising the temperature of all the flowing sea, and thus, when the sun went down and the night of frost set in, the melting of the ice did not cease.

Morning came, and revealed a long blue channel across the bay from its entrance to Harbour Island. The steamer from Souris had made this channel by knocking aside the light ice with her prow. She was built to travel in ice. She lay now, with funnel still smoking, in the harbour, a quarter of a mile from the small quay. The Gaspe schooner still lay without the bay, but there was a movement of unfurling sails among her masts, by which it was evident that her skipper hoped by the faint but favourable breeze that was blowing to bring her down the same blue highway.

It was upon this scene that Caius, wretched and sleepless, looked at early dawn. He had come out of his house and climbed the nearest knoll from which the bay could be seen, for his house and those near it looked on the open western sea. When he reached this knoll he found that O'Shea was there before him, examining the movements of the ship with his glass in the gray cold of the shivering morning. The two men stood together and held no communication.

Pretty soon O'Shea went hastily home again. Caius stood still to see the sun rise clear and golden. There were no clouds, no vapours, to catch its reflections and make a wondrous spectacle of its appearing. The blue horizon slowly dipped until the whole yellow disc beamed above it; ice and water glistened pleasantly; on the hills of all the sister isles there was sunshine and shade; and round about him, in the hilly field, each rock and bush cast a long shadow. Between them the sun struck the grass with such level rays that the very blades and clumps of blades cast their shadows also.

Caius had remained to watch if the breeze would strengthen with the sun's uprising, and he prayed the forces of heat and cold, and all things that preside over the currents of air, that it might not strengthen but languish and die.

What difference did it make, a few hours more or less? No difference, he knew, and yet all the fresh energy the new day brought him went forth in this desire that Josephine might have a few hours longer respite before she began the long weary course of life that stretched before her.

Caius had packed up all his belongings. There was nothing for him to do but drive along the dune with his luggage, as he had driven four months before, and take the steamer that night to Souris. The cart that took him would no doubt bring back Le Maitre. Caius had not yet hired a cart; he had not the least idea whether O'Shea intended to drive him and bring back his enemy or not. That would, no doubt, be Josephine's desire. Caius had not seen Josephine or spoken to O'Shea; it mattered nothing to him what arrangement they would or would not make for him.

As he still stood watching to see if the breeze would round and fill the sails which the Gaspe schooner had set, O'Shea came back and called from the foot of the knoll. Caius turned; he bore the man no ill will. Josephine's horse had not been injured by the accident of yesterday, and his own fall was a matter of complete indifference.

"I'm thinking, as ye packed yer bags, ye'll be going for the steamer."

O'Shea spoke with that indefinable insult in his tone which had always characterized it in the days of their first intercourse, but, apart from that, his manner was crisp and cool as the morning air; not a shade of discouragement was visible.

"I am going for the steamer," said Caius, and waited to hear what offer of conveyance was to be made him.

"Well, I'm thinking," said O'Shea, "that I'll just take the boat across the bay, and bring back the captain from Harbour Island; but as his honour might prefer the cart, I'll send the cart round by the dune. There's no saying but, having been in tropical parts, he may be a bit scared of the ice. Howsomever, knowing that he's in that haste to meet his bride, and would, no doubt, grudge so much as a day spent between here and there on the sand, I'll jist give him his chice; being who he is, and a foine gintleman, he has his right to it. As for you"--the tone instantly slipped into insolent indifference--"ye can go by one or the other with yer bags."

It was not clear to Caius that O'Shea had any intention of himself escorting Le Maitre if he chose to go by the sand. This inclined him to suppose that he had no fixed plan to injure him. What right had he to suppose such plan had been formed? The man before him wore no look of desperate passion. In the pleasant weather even the dune was not an unfrequented place, and the bay was overlooked on all sides. Caius could not decide whether his suspicion of O'Shea had been just or a monstrous injustice. He felt such suspicion to be morbid, and he said nothing. The futility of asking a question that would not be answered, the difficulty of interference, and his extreme dislike of incurring from O'Shea farther insult, were enough to produce his silence. Behind that lay the fact that he would be almost glad if the murder was done. Josephine's faith had inspired in him such love for her as had made him save her from doing what she thought wrong at any cost; but the inspiration did not extend to this. It appeared to him the lesser evil of the two.

"I will go with the boat," said Caius. "It is the quicker way."

He felt that for some reason this pleased O'Shea, who began at once to hurry off to get the luggage, but as he went he only remarked grimly:

"They say as it's the longest way round that is the shortest way home. If you're tipped in the ice, Mr. Doctor, ye'll foind that true, I'm thinking."

Caius found that O'Shea's boat, a heavy flat-bottomed thing, was already half launched upon the beach, furnished with stout boat-hooks for pushing among the ice, as well as her oars and sailing gear. He was glad to find that such speedy departure was to be his. He had no thought of saying good-bye to Josephine.


CHAPTER X.

"DEATH SHRIVE THY SOUL!"

It was an immense relief to stand in the boat with the boat-hook, whose use demanded all the skill and nerve which Caius had at command. For the most part they could only propel the boat by pushing or pulling the bits of ice that surrounded it with their poles. It was a very different sort of travel from that which they had experienced together when they had carried their boat over islands of ice and launched it in the great gaps between them. The ice which they had to do with now would not have borne their weight; nor was there much clear space for rowing between the fragments. O'Shea pushed the boat boldly on, and they made their journey with comparative ease until, when they came near the channel made by the steamship, they found the ice lying more closely, and the difficulty of their progress increased.

Work as they would, they were getting on but slowly. The light wind blew past their faces, and the Gaspe schooner was seen to sail up the path which the steamer had made across the bay.

"The wind's in the very chink that makes her able to take the channel. I'm thinking she'll be getting in before us."

O'Shea spoke with the gay indifference of one who had staked nothing on the hope of getting to the harbour first; but Caius wondered if this short cut would have been undertaken without strong reason.

A short period of hard exertion, of pushing and pulling the bits of ice, followed, and then:

"I'm thinking we'll make the channel, any way, before she comes by, and then we'll just hail her, and the happy bridegroom can come off if he's so moinded, being in the hurry that he is. 'Tain't many bridegrooms that makes all the haste he has to jine the lady."

Caius said nothing; the subject was too