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

they are often the most successful who possess, not many talents, but the one talent of choosing well in friendship and in love.

Ah! but it is one thing to choose and another to obtain. Caius still felt that he dared not seek Josephine. Since Le Maitre's death something of the first blank horror of his own guilt had passed away, but still he knew that he was not innocent. Then, too, if he dared to woo her, what would be the result? That last admonition and warning that he had given her when she was about to leave the island with him clogged his hope when he sought to take courage. He knew that popular lore declared that, whether or not she acknowledged its righteousness, her woman's vanity would take arms against it.

Caius had written to Josephine a letter of common friendliness upon the occasion of her husband's death, and had received in return a brief sedate note that might, indeed, have been written by the ancient lady whom the quaint Italian handwriting learned in the country convent had at first figured to his imagination. He knew from this letter that Josephine did not suppose that blame attached to O'Shea. She spoke of her husband's death as an accident. Caius knew that she had accepted it as a deliverance from God. It was this attitude of hers which made the whole circumstance appear to him the more solemn.

So Caius waited through the lovely season in which summer hovers with warm sunshiny wings over a land of flowers before she settles down upon it to abide. He was unhappy. A shade, whose name was Failure, lived with him day by day, and spoke to him concerning the future as well as the past. Debating much in his mind what he might do, fearing to make his plight worse by doing anything, he grew timid at the very thought of addressing Josephine. Happily, there is something more merciful to a man than his own self--something which in his hour of need assists him, and that often very bountifully.


CHAPTER XII.

TO CALL A SPIRIT FROM THE VASTY DEEP.

It was when the first wild-flowers of the year had passed away, and scarlet columbine and meadow-rue waved lightly in the sunny glades of the woods, and all the world was green--the new and perfect green of June--that one afternoon Caius, at his father's door, met a visitor who was most rarely seen there. It was Farmer Day. He accosted Caius, perhaps a little sheepishly, but with an obvious desire to be civil, for he had a favour to ask which he evidently considered of greater magnitude than Caius did when he heard what it was. Day's wife was ill. The doctor of the locality had said more than once that she would not live many days, but she had gone on living some time, it appeared, since this had been first said. Day did not now call upon Caius as a medical man. His wife had taken a fancy to see him because of his remembered efforts to save her child. Day said apologetically that it was a woman's whim, but he would be obliged if Caius, at his convenience, would call upon her. It spoke much for the long peculiarity and dreariness of Day's domestic life that he evidently believed that this would be a disagreeable thing for Caius to do.

Day went on to the village. Caius strolled off through the warm woods and across the hot cliffs to make this visit.

The woman was not in bed. She was dying of consumption. The fever was flickering in her high-boned cheeks when she opened the door of the desolate farmhouse. She wore a brown calico gown; her abundant black hair was not yet streaked with gray. Caius could not see that she looked much older than she had done upon the evening, years ago, when he had first had reason to observe her closely. He remembered what Josephine had told him--that time had stood still with her since that night: it seemed true in more senses than one. A light of satisfaction showed itself in her dark face when, after a moment's inspection, she realized who he was.

"Come in," she said briefly.

Caius went in, and had reason to regret, as well on his own account as on hers, that she shut the door. To be out in the summer would have been longer life for her, and to have the summer shut out made him realize forcibly that he was alone in the desolate house with a woman whose madness gave her a weird seeming which was almost equivalent to ghostliness.

When one enters a house from which the public has long been excluded and which is the abode of a person of deranged mind, it is perhaps natural to expect, although unconsciously, that the interior arrangements should be very strange. Instead of this, the house, gloomy and sparsely furnished as it was, was clean and in order. It lacked everything to make it pleasant--air, sunshine, and any cheerful token of comfort; but it was only in this dreary negation that it failed; there was no positive fault to be found even with the atmosphere of the kitchen and bare lobby through which he was conducted, and he discovered, to his surprise, that he was to be entertained in a small parlour, which had a round polished centre table, on which lay the usual store of such things as are seen in such parlours all the world over--a Bible, a couple of albums, a woollen mat, and an ornament under a glass case.

Caius sat down, holding his hat in his hand, with an odd feeling that he was acting a part in behaving as if the circumstances were at all ordinary.

The woman also sat down, but not as if for ease. She drew one of the big cheap albums towards her, and began vigorously searching in it from the beginning, as if it were a book of strange characters in which she wished to find a particular passage. She fixed her eyes upon each small cheap photograph in turn, as if trying hard to remember who it represented, and whether it was, or was not, the one she wanted. Caius looked on amazed.

At length, about the middle of the book, she came to a portrait at which she stopped, and with a look of cunning took out another which was hidden under it, and thrust it at Caius.

"It's for you," she said; "it's mine, and I'm going to die, and it's you I'll give it to."

She looked and spoke as if the proffered gift was a thing more precious than the rarest gem.

Caius took it, and saw that it was a picture of a baby girl, about three years old. He had not the slightest doubt who the child was; he stood by the window and examined it long and eagerly. The sun, unaided by the deceptive shading of the more skilled photographer, had imprinted the little face clearly. Caius saw the curls, and the big sad eyes with their long lashes, and all the baby features and limbs, his memory aiding to make the portrait perfect. His eager look was for the purpose of discovering whether or not his imagination had played him false; but it was true what he had thought--the little one was like Josephine.

"I shall be glad to have it," he said--"very glad."

"I had it taken at Montrose," said the poor mother; and, strange to say, she said it in a commonplace way, just as any woman might speak of procuring her child's likeness. "Day, he was angry; he said it was waste of money; that's why I give it to you." A fierce cunning look flitted again across her face for a moment. "Don't let him see it," she whispered. "Day, he is a bad father; he don't care for the children or me. That's why I've put her in the water."

She made this last statement concerning her husband and child with a nonchalant air, like one too much accustomed to the facts to be distressed at them.

For a few minutes it seemed that she relapsed into a state of dulness, neither thought nor feeling stirring within her. Caius, supposing that she had nothing more to say, still watched her intently, because the evidences of disease were interesting to him. When he least expected it, she awoke again into eagerness; she put her elbows on the table and leaned towards him.

"There's something I want you to do," she whispered. "I can't do it any more. I'm dying. Since I began dying, I can't get into the water to look for her. My baby is in the water, you know; I put her in. She isn't dead, but she's there, only I can't find her. Day told me that once you got into the water to look for her too, but you gave it up too easy, and no one else has ever so much as got in to help me find her."

The last part of the speech was spoken in a dreary monotone. She stopped with a heart-broken sigh that expressed hopeless loneliness in this mad quest.

"The baby is dead," he said gently.

She answered him with eager, excited voice:

"No, she isn't; that's where you are wrong. You put it on the stone that she was dead. When I came out of th' asylum I went to look at the stone, and I laughed. But I liked you to make the stone; that's why I like you, because nobody else put up a stone for her."

Caius laid a cool hand on the feverish one she was now brandishing at him.

"You are dying, you say"--pityingly. "It is better for you to think that your baby is dead, for when you die you will go to her."

The woman laughed, not harshly, but happily.

"She isn't dead. She came back to me once. She was grown a big girl, and had a wedding-ring on her hand. Who do you think she was married to? I thought perhaps it was you."

The repetition of this old question came from her lips so suddenly that Caius dropped her hand and stepped back a pace. He felt his heart beating. Was it a good omen? There have been cases where a half-crazed brain has been known, by chance or otherwise, to foretell the future. The question that was now for the second time repeated to him seemed to his hope like an instance of this second sight, only half understood by the eye that saw it.

"It was not your little daughter that came back, Mrs. Day. It was her cousin, who is very like her, and she came to help you when you were ill, and to be a daughter to you."

She looked at him darkly, as if the saner powers of her mind were struggling to understand; but in a minute the monomania had again possession of her.

"She had beautiful hair," she said; "I stroked it with my hand; it curled just as it used to do. Do you think I don't know my own child? But she had grown quite big, and her ring was made of gold. I would like to see her again now before I die."

Very wistfully she spoke of the beauty and kindness of the girl whose visit had cheered her. The poor crazed heart was full of longing for the one presence that could give her any comfort this side of death.

"I thought I'd never see her again." She fixed her