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

dark eyes on Caius as she spoke. "I was going to ask you, after I was dead and couldn't look for her any more, if you'd keep on looking for her in the sea till you found her. But I wish you'd go now and see if you couldn't fetch her before I die."

"Yes, I will go," answered Caius suddenly.

The strong determination of his quick assent seemed to surprise even her in whose mind there could be no rational cause for surprise.

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes, I mean it. I will go, Mrs. Day."

A moment more she paused, as if for time for full belief in his promise to dawn upon her, and then, instead of letting him go, she rose up quickly with mysterious looks and gestures. Her words were whispered:

"Come, then, and I'll show you the way. Come; you mustn't tell Day. Day doesn't know anything about it." She had led him back to the door of the house and gone out before him. "Come, I'll show you the way. Hush! don't talk, or someone might hear us. Walk close to the barn, and no one will see. I never showed anyone before but her when she came to me wearing the gold ring. What are you so slow for? Come, I'll show you the way to look for her."

Impelled by curiosity and the fear of increasing her excitement if he refused, Caius followed her down the side of the open yard in which he had once seen her stand in fierce quarrel with her husband. It had seemed a dreary place then, when the three children swung on the gate and neither the shadow of death nor madness hung over it; it seemed far more desolate now, in spite of the bright summer sunlight. The barns and stable, as they swiftly passed them, looked much neglected, and there was not about the whole farmstead another man or woman to be seen. As the mad woman went swiftly in front of him, Caius remembered, perhaps for the first time in all these years, that after her husband had struck her upon that night, she had gone up to the cowshed that was nearest the sea, and that afterwards he had met her at the door of the root-house that was in the bank of the chine. It was thither she went now, opening the door of the cowshed and leading him through it to a door at the other end, and down a path to this cellar cut in the bank.

The cellar had apparently been very little used. The path to it was well beaten, but Caius observed that it ran past the cellar down the chine to a landing where Day now kept a flat-bottomed boat. They stood on this path before the heavy door of the cellar. Rust had eaten into the iron latch and the padlock that secured it, but the woman produced a key and opened the ring of the lock and took him into a chamber about twelve feet square, in which props of decaying beams held up the earth of the walls and roof. The place was cold, smelling strongly of damp earth and decaying roots; but, so far, there was nothing remarkable to be seen; just such a cellar was used on his father's farm to keep stores of potatoes and turnips in when the frost of winter made its way through all the wooden barns. In three corners remains of such root stores were lying; in the fourth, the corner behind the door, nearest the sea, some boards were laid on the floor, and on them flower-pots containing stalks of withered plants and bulbs that had never sprouted.

"They're mine," she said. "Day dursn't touch them;" and saying this, she fell to work with eager feverishness, removing the pots and boards. When she had done so, it was revealed that the earth under the boards had broken through into another cellar or cave, in which some light could be seen.

"I always heard the sea when I was in this place, and one day I broke through this hole. The man that first had the farm made it, I s'pose, to pitch his seaweed into from the shore."

She let her long figure down through the hole easily enough, for there were places to set the feet on, and landed on a heap of earth and dried weed. When Caius had dropped down into this second chamber, he saw that it had evidently been used for just the purpose she had mentioned. The seaweed gathered from the beach after storms was in common use for enriching the fields, and someone in a past generation had apparently dug this cave in the soft rock and clay of the cliff; it was at a height above the sea-line at which the seaweed could be conveniently pitched into it from a cart on the shore below. Some three or four feet of dry rotten seaweed formed its carpet. The aperture towards the sea was almost entirely overgrown with such grass and weeds as grew on the bluff. It was evident that in the original cutting there had been an opening also sideways into the chine, which had caved in and been grown over. The cellar above had, no doubt, been made by someone who was not aware of the existence of this former place.

To Caius the secret chamber was enchanted ground. He stepped to its window, framed in waving grasses, and saw the high tide lapping just a little way below. It was into this place of safety that Josephine had crept when she had disappeared from his view before he could mount the cliff to see whither she went. She had often stood where he now stood, half afraid, half audacious, in that curious dress of hers, before she summoned up courage to slip into the sea for daylight or moonlight wanderings.

He turned round to hear the gaunt woman beside him again talking excitedly. Upon a bit of rusty iron that still held its place on the wall hung what he had taken to be a heap of sacking. She took this down now and displayed it with a cunning look.

"I made it myself," she said, "it holds one up wonderful in the water; but now I've been a-dying so long the buoys have burst."

Caius pityingly took the garment from her. Her mad grief, and another woman's madcap pleasure, made it a sacred thing. His extreme curiosity found satisfaction in discovering that the coarse foundation was covered with a curious broidery of such small floats as might, with untiring industry, be collected in a farmhouse: corks and small pieces of wood with holes bored through them were fastened at regular intervals, not without some attempt at pattern, and between them the bladders of smaller animals, prepared as fishermen prepare them for their nets. Larger specimens of the same kind were concealed inside the neck of the huge sack, but on the outside everything was comparatively small, and it seemed as if the hands that had worked it so elaborately had been directed by a brain in which familiarity with patchwork, and other homely forms of the sewing-woman's art, had been confused with an adequate idea of the rough use for which the garment was needed. Some knowledge of the skill with which fishermen prepare their floats had also evidently been hers, for the whole outside of the garment was smeared or painted with a brownish substance that had preserved it to a wonderful extent from the ravages of moisture and salt. It was torn now, or, rather, it seemed that it had been cut from top to bottom; but, besides this one great rent, it was in a rotten condition, ready to fall to pieces, and, as the dying woman had said, many of the air-blown floats had burst.

Caius was wondering whether the occasion on which this curious bathing-dress had been torn was that in which he, by pursuing Josephine, had forced her to cease pushing herself about in shallow water and take to more ordinary swimming. He looked around and saw the one other implement which had been necessary to complete the strange outfit; it, too, was a thing of ordinary appearance and use: a long pole or poker, with a handle at one end and a small flat bar at the other, a thing used for arranging the fire in the deep brick ovens that were still in use at the older farmsteads. It was about six feet long. The woman, seeing his attention directed to it, took it eagerly and showed how it might be used, drawing him with her to the aperture over the shore and pointing out eagerly the landmarks by which she knew how far the shallow water extended at certain times of the tide. Her topographical knowledge of all the sea's bed within about a mile of the high-water mark was extraordinarily minute, and Caius listened to the information she poured upon him, only now beginning to realize that she expected him to wear the dress, and take the iron pole, and slip from the old cellar into the tide when it rose high enough, and from thence bring back the girl with the soft curls and the golden ring. It was one of those moments in which laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality was that to his companion it was intensely real.

"You said you would go." Some perception of his hesitation must have come to her; her words were strong with insistence and wistful with reproach. "You said you would go and fetch her in to me before I die."

Then Caius put back the dress she held on the rusty peg where it had hung for so long.

"I am a man," he said. "I can swim without life-preservers. I will go and try to bring the girl back to you. But not now, not from here; it will take me a week to go and come, for I know that she lives far away in the middle of the deep gulf. Come back to the house and take care of yourself, so that you may live until she comes. You may trust me. I will certainly bring her to you if she's alive and if she can come."

With these promises and protestations he prevailed upon the poor woman to return with him to her lonely home.

Caius had not got far on his road home, when he met Day coming from the village. Caius was full of his determination to go for Josephine by the next trip of the small steamer. His excuse was valid; he could paint the interview from which he had just come so that Josephine would be moved by it, would welcome his interference, and come again to nurse her uncle's wife. Thus thinking, he had hurried along, but when he met Day his knight-errantry received a check.

"Your wife ought not to be alone," he said to Day.

"No; that's true!" the farmer replied drearily; "but it isn't everybody she'll have in the house with her."

"Your son and daughter are too far away to be sent for?"

"Yes"--briefly--"they are in the west."

Caius paused a moment, thinking next to introduce the subject which had set all his pulses bounding. Because it was momentous to him, he hesitated, and while he hesitated the other spoke.

"There is one relation I've got, the daughter of a brother of mine who died up by