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THE MERMAID


         "Lady, I fain would tell how evermore
         Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor
     Thee from myself, neither our love from God."


A Love Tale

by

L. DOUGALL

Author of Beggars All, What Necessity Knows, Etc.







New York
D. Appleton and Company
1895
Copyright, 1895,
by D. Appleton and Company.




CONTENTS.


BOOK I.

CHAPTER                                           PAGE

    I.--THE BENT TWIG                                1

   II.--THE SAD-EYED CHILD                           4

  III.--LOST IN THE SEA                             11

   IV.--A QUIET LIFE                                19

    V.--SEEN THROUGH BLEAR EYES                     24

   VI.--"FROM HOUR TO HOUR WE RIPE----"             34

  VII.--"A SEA CHANGE"                              41

 VIII.--BELIEF IN THE IMPOSSIBLE                    49

   IX.--THE SEA-MAID'S MUSIC                        56

    X.--TOWED BY THE BEARD                          65

   XI.--YEARS OF DISCRETION                         71


BOOK II.

    I.--THE HAND THAT BECKONED                      75

   II.--THE ISLES OF ST. MAGDALEN                   85

  III.--BETWEEN THE SURF AND THE SAND               90

   IV.--WHERE THE DEVIL LIVED                      101

    V.--DEVILRY                                    109

   VI.--THE SEA-MAID                               118

  VII.--THE GRAVE LADY                             122

 VIII.--HOW THEY LIVED ON THE CLOUD                126

   IX.--THE SICK AND THE DEAD                      136

    X.--A LIGHT-GIVING WORD                        141

   XI.--THE LADY'S HUSBAND                         149

  XII.--THE MAIDEN INVENTED                        155

 XIII.--WHITE BIRDS; WHITE SNOW; WHITE THOUGHTS    166

  XIV.--THE MARRIAGE SCENE                         173


BOOK III.

    I.--HOW WE HUNTED THE SEALS                    183

   II.--ONCE MORE THE VISION                       188

  III.--"LOVE, I SPEAK TO THY FACE"                193

   IV.--HOPE BORN OF SPRING                        201

    V.--TO THE HIGHER COURT                        208

   VI.--"THE NIGHT IS DARK"                        216

  VII.--THE WILD WAVES WHIST                       227

 VIII.--"GOD'S IN HIS HEAVEN"                      236

   IX.--"GOD'S PUPPETS, BEST AND WORST"            249

    X.--"DEATH SHRIVE THY SOUL!"                   254

   XI.--THE RIDDLE OF LIFE                         263

  XII.--TO CALL A SPIRIT FROM THE VASTY DEEP       271

 XIII.--THE EVENING AND THE MORNING                283


THE MERMAID.




_BOOK I._




CHAPTER I.

THE BENT TWIG.


Caius Simpson was the only son of a farmer who lived on the north-west
coast of Prince Edward's Island. The farmer was very well-to-do, for he
was a hard-working man, and his land produced richly. The father was a
man of good understanding, and the son had been born with brains; there
were traditions of education in the family, hence the name Caius; it was
no plan of the elder man that his son should also be a farmer. The boy
was first sent to learn in what was called an "Academy," a school in the
largest town of the island. Caius loved his books, and became a youthful
scholar. In the summer he did light work on the farm; the work was of a
quiet, monotonous sort, for his parents were no friends to frivolity or
excitement.

Caius was strictly brought up. The method of his training was that which
relies for strength of character chiefly upon the absence of temptation.
The father was under the impression that he could, without any laborious
effort and consideration, draw a line between good and evil, and keep
his son on one side of it. He was not austere--but his view of
righteousness was derived from puritan tradition.

A boy, if kindly treated, usually begins early to approve the only
teaching of which he has experience. As a youth, Caius heartily endorsed
his father's views, and felt superior to all who were more lax. He had
been born into that religious school which teaches that a man should
think for himself on every question, provided that he arrives at a
foregone conclusion. Caius, at the age of eighteen, had already done
much reasoning on certain subjects, and proved his work by observing
that his conclusions tallied with set models. As a result, he was, if
not a reasonable being, a reasoning and a moral one.

We have ceased to draw a distinction between Nature and the forces of
education. It is a great problem why Nature sets so many young people in
the world who are apparently unfitted for the battle of life, and
certainly have no power to excel in any direction. The subjective
religion which Caius had been taught had nourished within him great
store of noble sentiment and high desire, but it had deprived him of
that rounded knowledge of actual life which alone, it would appear,
teaches how to guide these forces into the more useful channels. Then as
to capacity, he had the fine sensibilities of a poet, the facile
introspection of the philosophical cast of mind, without the mental
power to write good verse or to be a philosopher. He had, at least in
youth, the conscience of a saint without the courage and endurance which
appear necessary to heroism. In mockery the quality of ambition was
bestowed upon him but not the requisites for success. Nature has been
working for millions of years to produce just such characters as Caius
Simpson, and, character being rather too costly a production to throw
away, no doubt she has a precise use for every one of them.

It is not the province of art to solve problems, but to depict them. It
is enough for the purpose of telling his story that a man has been
endowed with capacity to suffer and rejoice.




CHAPTER II.

THE SAD-EYED CHILD.


One evening in early summer Caius went a-fishing. He started to walk
several miles to an inlet where at high tide the sea-trout came within
reach of the line. The country road was of red clay, and, turning from
the more thickly-settled district, Caius followed it through a wide wood
of budding trees and out where it skirted the top of low red cliffs,
against which the sea was lapping. Then his way led him across a farm.
So far he had been walking indolently, happy enough, but here the shadow
of the pain of the world fell upon him.

This farm was a lonesome place close to the sea; there was no appearance
of prosperity about it. Caius knew that the farmer, Day by name, was a
churl, and was said to keep his family on short rations of happiness. As
Caius turned off the public road he was not thinking specially of the
bleak appearance of the particular piece of farmland he was crossing, or
of the reputation of the family who lived upon the increase of its
acres; but his attention was soon drawn to three children swinging on a
gate which hung loosely in the log fence not far from the house. The
eldest was an awkward-looking girl about twelve years of age; the second
was a little boy; the youngest was a round-limbed, blond baby of two or
three summers. The three stood upon the lowest bar of the gate, clinging
to the upper spars. The eldest leaned her elbows on the top and looked
over; the baby embraced the middle bar and looked through. They had set
the rickety gate swinging petulantly, and it latched and unlatched
itself with the sort of sound that the swaying of some dreary wind would
give it. The children seemed to swing there, not because they were
happy, but because they were miserable.

As Caius came with light step up the lane, fishing gear over his
shoulder, the children looked at him disconsolately, and when he
approached the gate the eldest stepped down and pulled it open for him.

"Anything the matter?" he asked, stopping his quick tread, and turning
when he had passed through.

The big girl did not answer, but she let go the gate, and when it jerked
forward the baby fell.

She did not fall far, nor was she hurt; but as Caius picked her up and
patted her cotton clothes to shake the dust out of them, it seemed to
him that he had never seen so sad a look in a baby's eyes. Large, dark,
dewy eyes they were, circled around with curly lashes, and they looked
up at him out of a wistful little face that was framed by a wreath of
yellow hair. Caius lifted the child, kissed her, put her down, and went
on his way. He only gave his action half a thought at the time, but all
his life afterwards he was sorry that he had let the baby go out of his
arms again, and thankful that he had given her that one kiss.

His path now lay close by the house and on to the sea-cliff behind. The
house stood in front of him--four bare wooden walls, brown painted, and
without veranda or ornament; its barns, large and ugly, were close
beside it. Beyond, some stunted firs grew in a dip of the cliff, but on
the level ground the farmer had felled every tree. The homestead itself
was ugly; but the land was green, and the sea lay broad and blue, its
breast swelling to the evening sun. The air blew sweet over field and
cliff, add the music of the incoming tide was heard below the
pine-fringed bank. Caius, however, was not in the receptive mind which
appreciates outward things. His attention was not thoroughly aroused
from himself till the sound of harsh voices struck his ear.

Between the farmhouse and the barns, on a place worn bare by the feet of
men and animals, the farmer and his wife stood in hot dispute. The
woman, tall, gaunt, and ill-dressed, spoke fast, passion and misery in
all her attitude and in every tone and gesture. The man, chunky in
figure and churlish in demeanour, held a horsewhip in his hand,
answering his wife back word for word in language both profane and
violent.

It did not occur to Caius that the whip was in his hand otherwise than
by accident. The men in that part of the world were not in the habit of
beating their wives, but no sooner did he see the quarrel than his wrath
rose hot against the man. The woman being the weaker, he took for
granted that she was entirely in the right. He faltered in his walk,
and, hesitating, stood to look. His path was too far off for him to hear
the words that were poured forth in such torrents of passion. The boy's
strong sentiment prompted him to run and collar the man; his judgment
made him doubt whether it was a good thing to interfere between man and
wife; a certain latent cowardice in his heart made him afraid to venture
nearer. The sum of his emotions caused him to stop, go on a few paces,
and stop to look and listen again, his heart full of concern. In this
way he was drawing further away, when he saw the farmer step nearer his
wife and menace her with the whip; in an instant more he had struck her,
and Caius had run about twenty feet forward to interfere, and halted
again, because he was afraid to approach so angry and powerful a man.

Caius saw the woman clearly now, and how she received this attack. She
stood quite still at her full stature, ceasing to speak or to
gesticulate, folded her arms and looked at her husband. The look in her
hard, dark face, the pose of her gaunt figure, said more clearly than
any passionate words, "Hold, if you value your life! you have gone too
far; you have heaped up punishment enough for yourself already." The
husband understood this language, vaguely, it might be, but still he
understood enough to make him draw back, still growling and menacing
with the whip. Caius was too young to understand what the woman
expressed; he only knew strength and weakness as physical things; his
mind was surging with pity for the woman and revenge against the man;
yet even he gathered the knowledge that for the time the quarrel was
over, that interference was now needless. He walked on, looking back as
he went to see the farmer go away to his stables and the wife stalk
past him up toward the byre that was nearest the sea.

As Caius moved on, the only relief his mind could find at first was to
exercise his imagination in picturing how he could avenge the poor
woman. In fancy he saw himself holding Day by the throat, throwing him
down, belabouring him with words and blows, meting out punishment more
than adequate. All that he actually did, however, was to hold on his way
to the place of his fishing.

The path had led him to the edge of the cliff. Here he paused, looking
over the bank to see if he could get down and continue his walk along
the shore, but the soft sandy bluff here jutted so that he could not
even see at what level the tide lay. After spending some minutes in
scrambling half-way down and returning because he could descend no
further, he struck backwards some paces behind the farm buildings,
supposing the descent to be easier where bushes grew in the shallow
chine. In the top of the cliff there was a little dip, which formed an
excellent place for an outside cellar or root-house for such farm stores
as must be buried deep beneath the snow against the frost of winter. The
rough door of such a cellar appeared in the side of this small
declivity, and as Caius came round the back of the byre in sight of it,
he was surprised to see the farmer's wife holding the latch of its door
in her hand and looking vacantly into the dark interior. She looked up
and answered the young man's greeting with apathetic manner, apparently
quite indifferent to the scene she had just passed through.

Caius, his mind still in the rush of indignation on her behalf, stopped
at the sight of her, wondering what he could do or say to express the
wild pity that surged within him.

But the woman said, "The tide's late to-night," exactly as she might
have remarked with dry civility that it was fine weather.

"Yes," said Caius, "I suppose it will be."

She was looking into the cellar, not towards the edge of the bank.

"With a decent strong tide," she remarked, "you can hear the waves in
this cave."

Whereupon she walked slowly past him back toward her house. Caius took
the precaution to step after her round the end of the byre, just to see
that her husband was not lying in wait for her there. There was no one
to be seen but the children at a distance, still swinging on the gate,
and a labourer who was driving some cows from the field.

Caius slipped down on to the red shore, and found himself in a wide
semicircular bay, near the point which ended it on this side. He crept
round the bay inwards for half a mile, till he came to the mouth of the
creek to which he was bound. All the long spring evening he sat angling
for the speckled sea-trout, until the dusk fell and the blue water
turned gray, and he could no longer see the ruddy colour of the rock on
which he sat. All the long spring evening the trout rose to his fly one
by one, and were landed in his basket easily enough, and soft-throated
frogs piped to him from ponds in the fields behind, and the smell of
budding verdure from the land mingled with the breeze from the sea. But
Caius was not happy; he was brooding over the misery suggested by what
he had just seen, breathing his mind after its unusual rush of emotion,
and indulging its indignant melancholy. It did not occur to him to
wonder much why the object of his pity had made that quick errand to the
cellar in the chine, or why she had taken interest in the height of the
tide. He supposed her to be inwardly distracted by her misery. She had
the reputation of being a strange woman.




CHAPTER III.

LOST IN THE SEA.


There was no moon that night. When the darkness began to gather swiftly,
Caius swung his basket of fish and his tackle over his shoulder and
tramped homeward. His preference was to go round by the road and avoid
the Day farm; then he thought it might be his duty to go that way,
because it might chance that the woman needed protection as he passed.
It is much easier to give such protection in intention than in deed;
but, as it happened, the deed was not required. The farmstead was
perfectly still as he went by it again.

He went on half a mile, passing only such friendly persons as it was
natural he should meet on the public road. They were few. Caius walked
listening to the sea lapping below the low cliff near which the road
ran, and watching the bats that often circled in the dark-blue dusk
overhead. Thus going on, he gradually recognised a little group walking
in front of him. It was the woman, Mrs. Day, and her three children.
Holding a child by either hand, she tramped steadily forward. Something
in the way she walked, in the way the children walked--a dull,
mechanical action in their steps--perplexed Caius.

He stepped up beside them with a word of neighbourly greeting.

The woman did not answer for some moments; when she did, although her
words were ordinary, her voice seemed to Caius to come from out some far
distance whither her mind had wandered.

"Going to call on someone, I suppose, Mrs. Day?" said he, inwardly
anxious.

"Yes," she replied; "we're going to see a friend--the children and me."

Again it seemed that there was some long distance between her and the
young man who heard her.

"Come along and see my mother," he urged, with solicitude. "She always
has a prime welcome for visitors, mother has."

The words were hearty, but they excited no heartiness of response.

"We've another place to go to to-night," she said. "There'll be a
welcome for us, I reckon."

She would neither speak to him any more nor keep up with his pace upon
the road. He slackened speed, but she still shrank back, walking slower.
He found himself getting in advance, so he left her.

A hundred yards more he went on, and looked back to see her climbing the
log fence into the strip of common beside the sea.

His deliberation of mind was instantly gone. Something was wrong now. He
cast himself over the low log fence just where he was, and hastened back
along the edge of the cliff, impelled by unformulated fear.

It was dark, the dark grayness of a moonless night. The cliff here was
not more than twenty feet above the high tide, which surged and swept
deep at its base. The grass upon the top was short; young fir-trees
stood here and there. All this Caius saw. The woman he could not see at
first. Then, in a minute, he did see her--standing on the edge of the
bank, her form outlined against what light there was in sea and sky. He
saw her swing something from her. The thing she threw, whatever it was,
was whirled outwards, and then fell into the sea. With a splash, it
sank.

The young man's mind stood still with horror. The knowledge came to him
as he heard the splash that it was the little child she had flung away.
He threw off his basket and coat. Another moment, and he would have
jumped from the bank; but before he had jumped he heard the elder girl
groaning as if in desperate fear, and saw that mother and daughter were
grappled together, their figures swaying backwards and forwards in
convulsive struggle. He did not doubt that the mother was trying to
drown this child also. Another low wild groan from the girl, and Caius
flung himself upon them both. His strength released the girl, who drew
away a few paces; but the woman struggled terribly to get to her again.
Both the girl and little boy stood stupidly within reach.

"Run--run--to the road, and call for help!" gasped Caius to the
children, but they only stood still.

He was himself shouting with all his strength, and holding the desperate
woman upon the ground, where he had thrown her.

Every moment he was watching the dark water, where he thought he saw a
little heap of light clothes rise and sink again further off.

"Run with your brother out of the way, so that I can leave her," he
called to the girl. He tried with a frantic gesture to frighten them
into getting out of the mother's reach. He continued to shout for aid as
he held down the woman, who with the strength of insanity was struggling
to get hold of the children.

A man's voice gave answering shout. Caius saw someone climbing the
fence. He left the woman and jumped into the sea.

Down under the cold black water he groped about. He was not an expert
swimmer and diver. He had never been under water so long before, but so
strong had been his impulse to reach the child that he went a good way
on the bottom in the direction in which he had thought he saw the little
body floating. Then he knew that he came up empty-handed and was
swimming on the dark surface, hearing confused cries and imprecations
from the shore. He wanted to dive and seek again for the child below,
but he did not know how to do this without a place to leap from. He let
himself sink, but he was out of breath. He gasped and inhaled the water,
and then, for dear life's sake, he swam to keep his head above it.

The water had cooled his excitement; a feeling of utter helplessness and
misery came over him. So strong was his pity for the little sad-eyed
child that he was almost willing to die in seeking her; but all hope of
finding was forsaking him. He still swam in the direction in which he
thought the child drifted as she rose and sank. It did not occur to him
to be surprised that she had drifted so far until he realized that he
was out of hearing of the sounds from the shore. His own swimming, he
well knew, could never have taken him so far and fast. There was a
little sandy island lying about three hundred yards out. At first he
hoped to strike the shallows near it quickly, but found that the
current of the now receding tide was racing down the channel between the
island and the shore, out to the open sea. That little body was, no
doubt, being sucked outward in this rush of water--out to the wide water
where he could not find her. He told himself this when he found at what
a pace he was going, and knew that his best chance of ever returning was
to swim back again.

So he gave up seeking the little girl, and turned and swam as best he
could against the current, and recognised slowly that he was making no
headway, but by using all his strength could only hold his present place
abreast of the outer point of the island, and a good way from it. The
water was bitterly cold; it chilled him. He was far too much occupied in
fighting the current to think properly, but certain flashes of
intelligence came across his mind concerning the death he might be going
to die. His first clear thoughts were about a black object that was
coming near on the surface of the water. Then a shout reached him, and a
stronger swimmer than he pulled him to the island.

"Now, in the devil's name, Caius Simpson!" The deliverer was the man who
had come over the fence, and he shook himself as he spoke. His words
were an interrogation relating to all that had passed. He was a young
man, about the same age as Caius; the latter knew him well.

"The child, Jim!" shivered Caius hoarsely. "She threw it into the
water!"

"In there?" asked Jim, pointing to the flowing darkness from which they
had just scrambled. He shook his head as he spoke. "There's a sort of a
set the water's got round this here place----" He shook his head again;
he sat half dressed on the edge of the grass, peering into the tide, a
dark figure surrounded by darkness.

It seemed to Caius even then, just pulled out as he was from a sea too
strong for him, that there was something horribly bad and common in that
they two sat there taking breath, and did not plunge again into the
water to try, at least, to find the body of the child who a few minutes
before had lived and breathed so sweetly. Yet they did not move.

"Did someone else come to hold her?" Caius asked this in a hasty
whisper. They both spoke as if there was some need for haste.

"Noa. I tied her round with your fish-cord. If yo'd have done that, yo'
might have got the babby the same way I got yo'."

The heart of Caius sank. If only he had done this! Jim Hogan was not a
companion for whom he had any respect; he looked upon him as a person of
low taste and doubtful morals, but in this Jim had shown himself
superior.

"I guess we'd better go and look after them," said Jim. He waded in a
few paces. "Come along," he said.

As they waded round to the inner side of the island, Caius slowly took
off some of his wet clothes and tied them round his neck. Then they swam
back across the channel at its narrowest.

While the water was rushing past their faces, Caius was conscious of
nothing but the animal desire to be on the dry, warm shore again; but
when they touched the bottom and climbed the bank once more to the
place where he had seen the child cast away, he forgot all his fight
with the sea, and thought only with horror of the murder done--or was
there yet hope that by a miracle the child might be found somewhere
alive? It is hope always that causes panic. Caius was panic-stricken.

The woman lay, bound hand and foot, upon the grass.

"If I couldn't ha' tied her," said Jim patronizingly, "I'd a quietened
her by a knock on the head, and gone after the young un, if I'd been
yo'."

The other children had wandered away. They were not to be seen.

Jim knelt down in a business-like way to untie the woman, who seemed now
to be as much stunned by circumstances as if she had been knocked as
just suggested.

A minute more, and Caius found himself running like one mad in the
direction of home. He cared nothing about the mother or the elder
children, or about his own half-dressed condition. The one thought that
excited him was a hope that the sea might have somewhere cast the child
on the shore before she was quite dead.

Running like a savage under the budding trees of the wood and across his
father's fields, he leaped out of the darkness into the heat and
brightness of his mother's kitchen.

Gay rugs lay on the yellow painted floor; the stove glistened with
polish at its every corner. The lamp shone brightly, and in its light
Caius stood breathless, wet, half naked. The picture of his father
looking up from the newspaper, of his mother standing before him in
alarmed surprise, seemed photographed in pain upon his brain for
minutes before he could find utterance. The smell of an abundant supper
his mother had set out for him choked him.

When he had at last spoken--told of the blow Farmer Day had struck, of
his wife's deed, and commanded that all the men that could be collected
should turn out to seek for the child--he was astonished at finding sobs
in the tones of his words. He became oblivious for the moment of his
parents, and leaned his face against the wooden wall of the room in a
convulsion of nervous feeling that was weeping without tears.

It did not in the least surprise his parents that he should cry--he was
only a child in their eyes. While the father bestirred himself to get a
cart and lanterns and men, the mother soothed her son, or, rather, she
addressed to him such kindly attentions as she supposed were soothing to
him. She did not know that her attention to his physical comfort hardly
entered his consciousness.

Caius went out again that night with those who went to examine the spot,
and test the current, and search the dark shores. He went again, with a
party of neighbours, to the same place, in the first faint pink flush of
dawn, to seek up and down the sands and rocks left bare by the tide.
They did not find the body of the child.




CHAPTER IV.

A QUIET LIFE.


In the night, while the men were seeking the murdered child, there were
kindly women who went to the house of the farmer Day to tend his wife.
The elder children had been found asleep in a field, where, after
wandering a little while, they had succumbed to the influence of some
drug, which had evidently been given them by the mother to facilitate
her evil design. She herself, poor woman, had grown calm again, her
frenzy leaving her to a duller phase of madness. That she was mad no one
doubted. How long she might have been walking in the misleading paths of
wild fancy, whether her insane vagaries had been the cause or the result
of her husband's churlishness, no one knew. The husband was a taciturn
man, and appeared to sulk under the scrutiny of the neighbourhood. The
more charitable ascribed his demeanour to sorrow. The punishment his
wife had meted out for the blow he struck her had, without doubt, been
severe.

As for Caius Simpson, his mind was sore concerning the little girl. It
was as if his nature, in one part of it, had received a bruise that did
not heal. The child had pleased his fancy. All the sentiment in him
centred round the memory of the little girl, and idealized her
loveliness. The first warm weather of the year, the exquisite but
fugitive beauties of the spring, lent emphasis to his mood, and because
his home was not a soil congenial to the growth of any but the more
ordinary sentiments, he began at this time to seek in natural solitudes
a more fitting environment for his musings. More than once, in the days
that immediately followed, he sought by daylight the spot where, in the
darkness, he had seen the child thrown into the sea. It soon occurred to
him to make an epitaph for her, and carve it in the cliff over which she
was thrown. In the noon-day hours in which his father rested, he worked
at this task, and grew to feel at home in the place and its
surroundings.

The earth in this place, as in others, showed red, the colour of red
jasper, wherever its face was not covered by green grass or blue water.
Just here, where the mother had sought out a precipice under which the
tide lay deep, there was a natural water-wall of red sandstone, rubbed
and corrugated by the waves. This wall of rock extended but a little
way, and ended in a sharp jutting point.

The little island that stood out toward the open sea had sands of red
gold; level it was and covered with green bushes, its sandy beach
surrounding it like a ring.

On the other side of the jutting point a bluff of red clay and crumbling
rock continued round a wide bay. Where the rim of the blue water lay
thin on this beach there showed a purple band, shading upward into the
dark jasper red of damp earth in the lower cliff. The upper part of the
cliff was very dry, and the earth was pink, a bright earthen pink. This
ribbon of shaded reds lay all along the shore. The land above it was
level and green.

At the other horn of the bay a small town stood; its white houses, seen
through the trembling lens of evaporating water, glistened with almost
pearly brightness between the blue spaces of sky and water. All the
scene was drenched in sunlight in those spring days.

The town, Montrose by name, was fifteen miles away, counting miles by
the shore. The place where Caius was busy was unfrequented, for the land
near was not fertile, and a wooded tract intervened between it and the
better farms of the neighbourhood. The home of the lost child and one
other poor dwelling were the nearest houses, but they were not very
near.

Caius did not attempt to carve his inscription on the mutable sandstone.
It was quite possible to obtain a slab of hard building-stone and
material for cement, and after carting them himself rather secretly to
the place, he gradually hewed a deep recess for the tablet and cemented
it there, its face slanting upward to the blue sky for greater safety.
He knew even then that the soft rock would not hold it many years, but
it gave him a poetic pleasure to contemplate the ravages of time as he
worked, and to think that the dimpled child with the sunny hair and the
sad, beautiful eyes had only gone before, that his tablet would some
time be washed away by the same devouring sea, and that in the sea of
time he, too, would sink before many years and be forgotten.

The short elegy he wrote was a bad mixture of ancient and modern thought
as to substance, figures, and literary form, for the boy had just been
dipping into classics at school, while he was by habit of mind a
Puritan. His composition was one at which pagan god and Christian angel
must have smiled had they viewed it; but perhaps they would have wept
too, for it was the outcome of a heart very young and very earnest,
wholly untaught in that wisdom which counsels to evade the pains and
suck the pleasures of circumstance.

There were only two people who discovered what Caius was about, and came
to look on while his work was yet unfinished.

One was an old man who lived in the one poor cottage not far away and
did light work for Day the farmer. His name was Morrison--Neddy Morrison
he was called. He came more than once, creeping carefully near the edge
of the cliff with infirm step, and talking about the lost child, whom he
also had loved, about the fearful visitation of the mother's madness,
and, with Caius, condemning unsparingly the brutality, known and
supposed, of the now bereaved father. It was a consolation to them both
that Morrison could state that this youngest child was the only member
of his family for whom Day had ever shown affection.

The other visitor Caius had was Jim Hogan. He was a rough youth; he had
a very high, rounded forehead, so high that he would have almost seemed
bald if the hair, when it did at last begin, had not been exceedingly
thick, standing in a short red brush round his head. With the exception
of this peculiar forehead, Jim was an ordinary freckled, healthy young
man. He saw no sense at all in what Caius was doing. When he came he sat
himself down on the edge of the cliff, swung his heels, and jeered
unfeignedly.

When the work was finished it became noised that the tablet was to be
seen. The neighbours wondered not a little, and flocked to gaze and
admire. Caius himself had never told of its existence; he would have
rather no one had seen it; still, he was not insensible to the local
fame thus acquired. His father, it was true, had not much opinion of his
feat, but his mother, as mothers will, treasured all the admiring
remarks of the neighbours. All the women loved Caius from that day
forth, as being wondrously warm-hearted. Such sort of literary folk as
the community could boast dubbed him "The Canadian Burns," chiefly, it
seemed, because he had been seen to help his father at the ploughing.

In due course the wife of the farmer Day was tried for murder, and
pronounced insane. She had before been removed to an asylum: she now
remained there.




CHAPTER V.

SEEN THROUGH BLEAR EYES.


It was foreseen by the elder Simpson that his son would be a great man.
He looked forth over the world and decided on the kind of greatness. The
wide, busy world would not have known itself as seen in the mind of this
gray-haired countryman. The elder Simpson had never set foot off the
edge of his native island. His father before him had tilled the same
fertile acres, looked out upon the same level landscape--red and green,
when it was not white with snow. Neither of them had felt any desire to
see beyond the brink of that horizon; but ambition, quiet and sturdy,
had been in their hearts. The result of it was the bit of money in the
bank, the prosperous farm, and the firm intention of the present farmer
that his son should cut a figure in the world.

This stern man, as he trudged about at his labour, looked upon the
activities of city life with that same inward eye with which the maiden
looks forth upon her future; and as she, with nicety of preference,
selects the sort of lover she will have, so he selected the sort of
greatness which should befall his son. The stuff of this vision was, as
must always be, of such sort as had entered his mind in the course of
his limited experience. His grandfather had been an Englishman, and it
was known that one of the sons had been a notable physician in the city
of London: Caius must become a notable physician. His newspaper told him
of honours taken at the University of Montreal by young men of the
medical school; therefore, Caius was to study and take honours. It was
nothing to him that his neighbours did not send their sons so far
afield; he came of educated stock himself. The future of Caius was
prearranged, and Caius did not gainsay the arrangement.

That autumn the lad went away from home to a city which is, without
doubt, a very beautiful city, and joined the ranks of students in a
medical school which for size and thorough work is not to be despised.
He was not slow to drink in the new ideas which a first introduction to
modern science, and a new view of the relations of most things, brought
to his mind.

In the first years Caius came home for his summer vacations, and helped
his father upon the farm. The old man had money, but he had no habit of
spending it, and expenditure, like economy, is a practice to be
acquired. When Caius came the third time for the long summer holiday,
something happened.

He did not now often walk in the direction of the Day farm; there was no
necessity to take him there, only sentiment. He was by this time ashamed
of the emblazonment of his poetic effort upon the cliff. He was not
ashamed of the sentiment which had prompted it, but he was ashamed of
its exhibition. He still thought tenderly of the little child that was
lost, and once in a long while he visited the place where his tablet
was, as he would have visited a grave.

One summer evening he sauntered through the wood and down the road by
the sea on this errand. Before going to the shore, he stopped at the
cottage where the old labourer, Morrison, lived.

There was something to gossip about, for Day's wife had been sent from
the asylum as cured, and her husband had been permitted to take her home
again on condition that no young or weak person should remain in the
house with her. He had sent his two remaining children to be brought up
by a relative in the West. People said he could get more work out of his
wife than out of the children, and, furthermore, it saved his having to
pay for her board elsewhere. The woman had been at home almost a
twelvemonth, and Caius had some natural interest in questioning Morrison
as to her welfare and general demeanour. The strange gaunt creature had
for his imagination very much the fascination that a ghost would have
had. We care to hear all about a ghost, however trivial the details may
be, but we desire no personal contact. Caius had no wish to meet this
woman, for whom he felt repulsion, but he would have been interested to
hear Neddy Morrison describe her least action, for Neddy was almost the
only person who had constant access to her house.

Morrison, however, had very little to tell about Mrs. Day. She had come
home, and was living very much as she had lived before. The absence of
her children did not appear to make great difference in her dreary life.
The old labourer could not say that her husband treated her kindly or
unkindly. He was not willing to affirm that she was glad to be out of
the asylum, or that she was sorry. To the old man's imagination Mrs. Day
was not an interesting object; his interest had always been centred upon
the children. It was of them he talked chiefly now, telling of letters
that their father had received from them, and of the art by which he,
Morrison, had sometimes contrived to make the taciturn Day show him
their contents. The interest of passive benevolence which the young
medical student gave to Morrison's account of these children, who had
grown quite beyond the age when children are pretty and interesting,
would soon have been exhausted had the account been long; but it
happened that the old man had a more startling communication to make,
which cut short his gossip about his master's family.

He had been standing so far at the door of his little wooden house. His
old wife was moving at her household work within. Caius stood outside.
The house was a little back from the road in an open space; near it was
a pile of firewood, a saw-horse and chopping-block, with their
accompanying carpet of chips, and such pots, kettles, and household
utensils as Mrs. Morrison preferred to keep out of doors.

When old Morrison came to the more exciting part of his gossip, he poked
Caius in the breast, and indicated by a backward movement of his elbow
that the old wife's presence hampered his talk. Then he came out with an
artfully simulated interest in the weather, and, nudging Caius at
intervals, apparently to enforce silence on a topic concerning which the
young man as yet knew nothing, he wended his way with him along a path
through a thicket of young fir-trees which bordered the road.

The two men were going towards that part of the shore to which Caius was
bound. They reached the place where the child had been drowned before
the communication was made, and stood together, like a picture of the
personification of age and youth, upon the top of the grassy cliff.

"You'll not believe me," said the old man, with excitement obviously
growing within him, "but I tell you, young sir, I've sat jist here
behind those near bushes like, and watched the creatur for an hour at a
time."

"What was it you watched?" asked Caius, superior to the other's
excitement.

"I tell you, it was a girl in the sea; and more than that--she was half
a fish."

The mind of Caius was now entirely scornful.

"You don't believe me," said the old man, nudging him again.

But Caius was polite.

"Well, now"--good-humouredly--"what did you see?"

"I'll tell you jist what I saw." (The old man's excitement was growing.)
"You understand that from the top here you can see across the bay, and
across to the island and out to sea; but you can't see the shore under
the rocky point where it turns round the farm there into the bay, and
you can't see the other shore of the island for the bushes on it."

"In other words, you can see everything that's before your eyes, but you
can't see round a corner."

The old man had some perception that Caius was humorous. "You believe me
that far," he said, with a weak, excited cackle of a laugh. "Well, don't
go for to repeat what I'm going to tell you further, for I'll not have
my old woman frightened, and I'll not have Jim Hogan and the fellows he
gets round him belabouring the thing with stones."

"Heaven forbid!" A gleam of amusement flitted through the mind of Caius
at the thought of the sidelight this threw on Jim's character. For Jim
was not incapable of casting stones at even so rare a curiosity as a
mermaid.

"Now," said the old man, and he laughed again his weak, wheezy laugh,
"if _you_ told _me_, I'd not believe it; but I saw it as sure as I stand
here, and if this was my dying hour, sir, I'd say the same. The first
time it was one morning that I got up very early--I don't jist remember
the reason, but it was before sun-up, and I was walking along here, and
the tide was out, and between me and the island I saw what I thought was
a person swimming in the water, and I thought to myself, 'It's queer,
for there's no one about these parts that has a liking for the water.'
But when I was younger, at Pictou once, I saw the fine folks ducking
themselves in flannel sarks, at what they called a 'bathing-place,' so
the first thing I thought of was that it was something like that. And
then I stood here, jist about where you are now, and the woman in the
water she saw me--"

"Now, how do you know it was a woman?" asked Caius.

"Well, I didn't know for certain that day anything, for she was a good
way off, near the island, and she no sooner saw me than she turned and
made tracks for the back of the island where I couldn't see her. But I
tell you this, young sir, no woman or man either ever swam as she swam.
Have you seen a trout in a quiet pool wag its tail and go right
ahead--_how_, you didn't know; you only knew that 'twasn't in the one
place and 'twas in t'other?"

Caius nodded.

"Well," asked the old man with triumph in his voice, as one who capped
an argument, "did you ever see man or woman swim like that?"

"No," Caius admitted, "I never did--especially as to the wagging of the
tail."

"But she _hadn't_ a tail!" put in the old man eagerly, "for I saw her
the second day--that I'm coming to. She was more like a seal or walrus."

"But what became of her the first day?" asked Caius, with scientific
exactitude.

"Why, the end of her the first day was that she went behind the island.
Can you see behind the island? No." The old man giggled again at his own
logical way of putting things. "Well, no more could I see her; and home
I went, and I said nothink to nobody, for I wasn't going to have them
say I was doting."

"Yet it would be classical to dote upon a mermaid," Caius murmured. The
sight of the dim-eyed, decrepit old man before him gave exquisite humour
to the idea.

Morrison had already launched forth upon the story of the second day.

"Well, as I was telling you, I was that curious that next morning at
daybreak I comes here and squats behind those bushes, and a dreadful
fright I was in for fear my old woman would come and look for me and see
me squatting there." His old frame shook for a moment with the laugh he
gave to emphasize the situation, and he poked Caius with his finger.
"And I looked and I looked out on the gray water till I had the cramps."
Here he poked Caius again. "But I tell you, young sir, when I saw her
a-coming round from behind the bank, where I couldn't see jist where
she had come from, like as if she had come across the bay round this
point here, I thought no more of the cramps, but I jist sat on my heels,
looking with one eye to see that my old woman didn't come, and I watched
that 'ere thing, and it came as near as I could throw a stone, and I
tell you it was a girl with long hair, and it had scales, and an ugly
brown body, and swum about like a fish, jist moving, without making a
motion, from place to place for near an hour; and then it went back
round the head again, and I got up, and I was that stiff all day I could
hardly do my work. I was too old to do much at that game, but I went
again next morning, and once again I saw her; but she was far out, and
then I never saw her again. Now, what do you think of that?"

"I think"--after a moment's reflection--"that it's a very remarkable
story."

"But you don't believe it," said the old man, with an air of excited
certainty.

"I am certain of one thing; you couldn't have made it up."

"It's true, sir," said the old man. "As sure as I am standing here, as
sure as the tide goes in and out, as sure as I'll be a-dying before
long, what I tell you is true; but if I was you, I'd have more sense
than to believe it." He laughed again, and pressed Caius' arm with the
back of his hard, knotted hand. "That's how it is about sense and truth,
young sir--it's often like that."

This one gleam of philosophy came from the poor, commonplace mind as a
beautiful flash may come from a rough flint struck upon the roadside.
Caius pondered upon it afterwards, for he never saw Neddy Morrison
again. He did not happen to pass that place again that summer, and
during the winter the old man died.

Caius thought at one time and another about this tale of the girl who
was half a fish. He thought many things; the one thing he never happened
to think was that it was true. It was clear to him that the old man
supposed he had seen the object he described, but it puzzled him to
understand how eyes, even though so dim with age, could have mistaken
any sea-creature for the mermaid he described; for the man had lived his
life by the sea, and even the unusual sight of a lonely white porpoise
hugging the shore, or of seal or small whale, or even a much rarer
sea-animal, would not have been at all likely to deceive him. It would
certainly have been very easy for any person in mischief or malice to
have played the hoax, but no locality in the wide world would have
seemed more unlikely to be the scene of such a game; for who performs
theatricals to amuse the lonely shore, or the ebbing tide, or the
sea-birds that poise in the air or pounce upon the fish when the sea is
gray at dawn? And certainly the deception of the old man could not have
been the object of the play, for it was but by chance that he saw it,
and it could matter to no one what he saw or thought or felt, for he was
one of the most insignificant of earth's sons. Then Caius would think of
that curious gleam of deeper insight the poor old mind had displayed in
the attempt to express, blunderingly as it might be, the fact that truth
exceeds our understanding, and yet that we are bound to walk by the
light of understanding. He came, upon the whole, to the conclusion that
some latent faculty of imagination, working in the old man's mind,
combining with the picturesque objects so familiar to his eyes, had
produced in him belief in this curious vision. It was one of those
things that seem to have no reason for coming to pass, no sufficient
cause and no result, for Caius never heard that Morrison had related the
tale to anyone but himself, nor was there any report in the village that
anyone else had seen an unusual object in the sea.




CHAPTER VI.

"FROM HOUR TO HOUR WE RIPE----"


The elder Simpson gradually learned to expend more money upon his son;
it was not that the latter was a spendthrift or that he took to any evil
courses--he simply became a gentleman and had uses for money of which
his father could not, unaided, have conceived. Caius was too virtuous to
desire to spend his father's hardly-gathered stores unnecessarily;
therefore, the last years of his college life in Montreal he did not
come home in summer, but found occupation in that city by which to make
a small income for himself.

In those two years he learned much of medical and surgical lore--this
was of course, for he was a student by nature; but other things that he
learned were, upon the whole, more noteworthy in the development of his
character. He became fastidious as to the fit of his coat and as to the
work of the laundress upon his shirt-fronts. He learned to sit in easy
attitude by gauzily-dressed damsels under sparkling gaslight, and to
curl his fair moustache between his now white fingers as he talked to
them, and yet to moderate the extent of the attention that he paid to
each, not wishing that it should be in excess of that which was due. He
learned to value himself as he was valued--as a rising man, one who
would do well not to throw himself away in marriage. He had a moustache
first, and at last he had a beard. He was a sober young man: as his
father's teaching had been strict, so he was now strict in his rule over
himself. He frequented religious services, going about listening to
popular preachers of all sorts, and critically commenting upon their
sermons to his friends. He was really a very religious and
well-intentioned man, all of which stood in his favour with the more
sober portion of society whose favour he courted. As his talents and
industry gained him grace in the eyes of the dons of his college, so his
good life and good understanding made him friends among the more worthy
of his companions. He was conceited and self-righteous, but not
obviously so.

When his college had conferred upon him the degree of doctor of
medicine, he felt that he had climbed only on the lower rungs of the
ladder of knowledge. It was his father, not himself, who had chosen his
profession, and now that he had received the right to practise medicine
he experienced no desire to practise it; learning he loved truly, but
not that he might turn it into golden fees, and not that by it he might
assuage the sorrows of others; he loved it partly for its own sake,
perhaps chiefly so; but there was in his heart a long-enduring ambition,
which formed itself definitely into a desire for higher culture, and
hoped more indefinitely for future fame.

Caius resolved to go abroad and study at the medical schools of the Old
World. His professors applauded his resolve; his friends encouraged him
in it. It was to explain to his father the necessity for this course of
action, and wheedle the old man into approval and consent, that the
young doctor went home in the spring of the same year which gave him his
degree.

Caius had other sentiments in going home besides those which underlay
the motive which we have assigned. If as he travelled he at all regarded
the finery of all that he had acquired, it was that he might by it
delight the parents who loved him with such pride. Though not a fop, his
hand trembled on the last morning of his journey when he fastened a
necktie of the colour his mother loved best. He took an earlier train
than he could have been expected to take, and drove at furious rate
between the station and his home, in order that he might creep in by the
side door and greet his parents before they had thought of coming to
meet him. He had also taken no breakfast, that he might eat the more of
the manifold dainties which his mother had in readiness.

For three or four days he feasted hilariously upon these dainties until
he was ill. He also practised all the airs and graces of dandyism that
he could think of, because he knew that the old folks, with ill-judging
taste, admired them. When he had explained to them how great a man he
should be when he had been abroad, and how economical his life would be
in a foreign city, they had no greater desire than that he should go
abroad, and there wax as great as might be possible.

One thing that consoled the mother in the heroism of her ambition was
that it was his plan first to spend the long tranquil summer by her
side. Another was that, because her son had set his whole affection upon
learning, it appeared he had no immediate intention of fixing his love
upon any more material maid. In her timid jealousy she loved to come
across this topic with him, not worldly-wise enough to know that the
answers which reassured her did not display the noblest side of his
heart.

"And there wasn't a girl among them all that you fancied, my lad?" With
spotless apron round her portly form she was serving the morning rasher
while Caius and his father sat at meat.

"I wouldn't say that, mother: I fancied them all." Caius spoke with
generous condescension towards the fair.

"Ay," said the father shrewdly, "there's safety in numbers."

"But there wasn't one was particular, Caius?" continued the dame with
gleeful insinuation, because she was assured that the answer was to be
negative. "A likely lad like you should marry; it's part of his duty."

Caius was dense enough not to see her true sentiment. The particular
smile that, in the classification of his facial expressions, belonged to
the subject of love and marriage, played upon his lips while he
explained that when a man got up in the world he could make a better
marriage than he could when comparatively poor and unknown.

Her woman's instinct assured her that the expression and the words arose
from a heart ignorant of the quality of love, and she regarded nothing
else.

The breakfast-room in which they sat had no feature that could render it
attractive to Caius. Although it was warm weather, the windows were
closely shut and never opened; such was the habit of the family, and
even his influence had not strength to break through a regulation which
to his parents appeared so wise and safe. The meadows outside were
brimful of flowers, but no flower found its way into this orderly room.
The furniture had that desolate sort of gaudiness which one sees in the
wares of cheap shops. Cleanliness and godliness were the most
conspicuous virtues exhibited, for the room was spotless, and the map of
Palestine and a large Bible were prominent objects.

The father and mother were in the habit of eating in the kitchen when
alone, and to the son's taste that room, decorated with shining
utensils, with its door open to earth and sky, was infinitely more
picturesque and cheery; but the mother had a stronger will than her son,
and she had ordained that his rise in the world should be marked by his
eating in the dining-room, where meals were served whenever they had
company. Caius observed also, with a pain to which his heart was
sensitive, that at these meals she treated him to her company manners
also, asking him in a clear, firm voice if he "chose bread" or if he
would "choose a little meat," an expression common in the country as an
elegant manner of pressing food upon visitors. It was not that he felt
himself unworthy of this mark of esteem, but that the bad taste and the
bad English grated upon his nerves.

She was a strong, comely woman, this housemother, portly in person and
large of face, with plentiful gray hair brushed smooth; from the face
the colour had faded, but the look of health and strong purpose
remained. The father, on the other hand, tended to leanness; his large
frame was beginning to be obviously bowed by toil; his hair and beard
were somewhat long, and had a way of twisting themselves as though blown
by the wind. When the light of the summer morning shone through the
panes of clean glass upon this family at breakfast, it was obvious that
the son was physically somewhat degenerate. Athletics had not then come
into fashion; Caius was less in stature than might have been expected
from such parents; and now, after his years of town life, he had an
appearance of being limp in sinew, nor was there the same strong will
and alert shrewdness written upon his features. He was a handsome
fellow, clear-eyed and intelligent, finer far, in the estimation of his
parents, than themselves; but that which rounded out the lines of his
figure was rather a tendency to plumpness than the development of
muscle, and the intelligence of his face suggested rather the power to
think than the power to utilize his thought.

After the first glad days of the home-coming, the lack of education and
taste, and the habits that this lack engendered, jarred more and more
upon Caius. He loved his parents too well to betray his just distress at
the narrow round of thought and feeling in which their minds
revolved--the dogmatism of ignorance on all points, whether of social
custom or of the sublime reaches of theology; but this distress became
magnified into irritation, partly because of this secrecy, partly
because his mind, wearied by study, had not its most wholesome balance.

Jim Hogan at this time made overtures of renewed friendship to Caius.
Jim was the same as of old--athletic, quick-witted, large and strong,
with his freckled face still innocent of hair; the red brush stood up
over his unnaturally high forehead in such fashion as to suggest to the
imaginative eye that wreath of flame that in some old pictures is
displayed round the heads of villains in the infernal regions. Jim was
now the acknowledged leader of the young men of that part who were not
above certain low and mischievous practices to which Caius did not dream
of condescending. Caius repulsed the offer of friendship extended to
him.

The households with which his parents were friendly made great
merrymakings over his return. Dancing was forbidden, but games in which
maidens might be caught and kissed were not. Caius was not diverted; he
had not the good-nature to be in sympathy with the sort of hilarity
which was exacted from him.




CHAPTER VII.

"A SEA CHANGE."


In the procession of the swift-winged hours there is for every man one
and another which is big with fate, in that they bring him peculiar
opportunity to lose his life, and by that means find it. Such an hour
came now to Caius. The losing and finding of life is accomplished in
many ways: the first proffer of this kind which Time makes to us is
commonly a draught of the wine of joy, and happy is he who loses the
remembrance of self therein.

The hour which was so fateful for Caius came flying with the light winds
of August, which breathed over the sunny harvest fields and under the
deep dark shade of woods of fir and beech, waving the gray moss that
hung from trunk and branch, tossing the emerald ferns that grew in the
moss at the roots, and out again into light to catch the silver down of
thistles that grew by the red roadside and rustle their purple bloom;
then on the cliff, just touching the blue sea with the slightest ripple,
and losing themselves where sky and ocean met in indistinguishable azure
fold.

Through the woods walked Caius, and onward to the shore. Neddy Morrison
was dead. The little child who was lost in the sea was almost forgotten.
Caius, thinking upon these things, thought also upon the transient
nature of all things, but he did not think profoundly or long. In his
earlier youth he had been a good deal given to meditation, a habit which
is frequently a mere sign of mental fallowness; now that his mind was
wearied with the accumulation of a little learning, it knew what work
meant, and did not work except when compelled. Caius walked upon the red
road bordered by fir hedges and weeds, amongst which blue and yellow
asters were beginning to blow, and the ashen seeds of the flame-flower
were seen, for its flame was blown out. Caius was walking for the sake
of walking and in pure idleness, but when he came near Farmer Day's land
he had no thought of passing it without pausing to rest his eyes for a
time upon the familiar details of that part of the shore.

He scrambled down the face of the cliff, for it was as yet some hours
before the tide would be full. A glance showed him that the stone of
baby Day's tablet yet held firm, cemented in the niche of the soft rock.
A glance was enough for an object for which he had little respect, and
he sat down with his back to it on one of the smaller rocks of the
beach. This was the only place on the shore where the sandstone was hard
enough to retain the form of rock, and the rock ended in the small,
sharp headland which, when he was down at the water's level, hid the
neighbouring bay entirely from his sight.

The incoming tide had no swift, unexpected current as the outgoing water
had. There was not much movement in the little channel upon which Caius
was keeping watch. The summer afternoon was all aglow upon shore and
sea. He had sat quite still for a good while, when, near the sunny
island, just at the point where he had been pulled ashore on the
adventurous night when he risked his life for the child, he suddenly
observed what appeared to be a curious animal in the water.

There was a glistening as of a scaly, brownish body, which lay near the
surface of the waves. Was it a porpoise that had ventured so near? Was
it a dog swimming? No, he knew well that neither the one nor the other
had any such habit as this lazy basking in sunny shallows. Then the head
that was lying backwards on the water turned towards him, and he saw a
human face--surely, surely it was human!--and a snow-white arm was
lifted out of the water as if to play awhile in the warm air.

The eyes of the wonderful thing were turned toward him, and it seemed to
chance to see him now for the first time, for there was a sudden
movement, no jerk or splash, but a fish-like dart toward the open sea.
Then came another turn of the head, as if to make sure that he was
indeed the man that he seemed, and then the sea-maid went under the
surface, and the ripples that she left behind subsided slowly, expanding
and fading, as ripples in calm waters do.

Caius stood up, watching the empty surface of the sea. If some
compelling fate had said to him, "There shalt thou stand and gaze," he
could not have stood more absolutely still, nor gazed more intently. The
spell lasted long: some three or four minutes he stood, watching the
place with almost unwinking eyes, like one turned to stone, and within
him his mind was searching, searching, to find out, if he might, what
thing this could possibly be.

He did not suppose that she would come back. Neddy Morrison had implied
that the condition of her appearing was that she should not know that
she was seen. It was three years since the old man had seen the same
apparition; how much might three years stand for in the life of a
mermaid? Then, when such questioning seemed most futile, and the spell
that held Caius was loosing its hold, there was a rippling of the calm
surface that gave him a wild, half-fearful hope.

As gently as it had disappeared the head rose again, not lying backward
now, but, with pretty turn of the white neck, holding itself erect. An
instant she was still, and then the perfect arm which he had seen before
was again raised in the air, and this time it beckoned to him. Once,
twice, thrice he saw the imperative beck of the little hand; then it
rested again upon the rippled surface, and the sea-maid waited, as
though secure of his obedience.

The man's startled ideas began to right themselves. Was it possible that
any woman could be bathing from the island, and have the audacity to ask
him to share her sport?

He tarried so long that the nymph, or whatever it might be, came nearer.
Some twelve feet or so of the water she swiftly glided through, as it
seemed, without twist or turn of her body or effort; then paused; then
came forward again, until she had rounded the island at its nearest
point, and half-way between it and his shore she stopped, and looked at
him steadily with a face that seemed to Caius singularly womanly and
sweet. Again she lifted a white hand and beckoned him to come across the
space of water that remained.

Caius stood doubtful upon his rock. After a minute he set his feet more
firmly upon it, and crossed his arms to indicate that he had no
intention of swimming the narrow sea in answer to the beckoning hand.
Yet his whole mind was thrown into confusion with the strangeness of it.
He thought he heard a woman's laughter come across to him with the
lapping waves, and his face flushed with the indignity this offered.

The mermaid left her distance, and by a series of short darts came
nearer still, till she stopped again about the width of a broad highroad
from the discomforted man. He knew now that it must be truly a mermaid,
for no creature but a fish could thus glide along the surface of the
water, and certainly the sleek, damp little head that lay so comfortably
on the ripple was the head of a laughing child or playful girl. A crown
of green seaweed was on the dripping curls; the arms playing idly upon
the surface were round, dimpled, and exquisitely white. The dark
brownish body he could hardly now see; it was foreshortened to his
sight, down slanting deep under the disturbed surface. If it had not
been for the indisputable evidence of his senses that this lovely sea
thing swam, not with arms or feet, but with some snake-like motion, he
might still have tried to persuade himself that some playful girl,
strange to the ways of the neighbourhood, was disporting herself at her
bath.

It was of no avail that his reason told him that he did not, could not,
believe that such a creature as a mermaid could exist. The big dark eyes
of the girlish face opened wide and looked at him, the dimpled mouth
smiled, and the little white hand came out from the water and beckoned
to him again.

He was suffering from no delirium; he had not lost his wits. He stamped
his foot to make sure that the rock was beneath him; he turned about on
it to rest his eyes from the water sparkles, and to recall all sober,
serious thought by gazing at the stable shore. His eye stayed on the
epitaph of the lost child. He remembered soberly all that he knew about
this dead child, and then a sudden flash of perception seemed to come to
him. This sweet water-nymph, on whom for the moment he had turned his
back, must be the baby's soul grown to a woman in the water. He turned
again, eager not to lose a moment of the maiden's presence, half fearful
that she had vanished, but she was there yet, lying still as before.

Of course, it was impossible that she should be the sea-wraith of the
lost child; but, then, it was wholly impossible that she should be, and
there she was, smiling at him, and Caius saw in the dark eyes a likeness
to the long-remembered eyes of the child, and thought he still read
there human wistfulness and sadness, in spite of the wet dimples and
light laughter that bespoke the soulless life of the sea-creature.

Caius stooped on the rock, putting his hand near the water as he might
have done had he been calling to a kitten or a baby.

"Come, my pretty one, come," he called softly in soothing tones.

The eyes of the water-nymph blinked at him through wet-fringed lids.

"Come near; I will not hurt you," urged Caius, helpless to do aught but
offer blandishment.

He patted the rock gently, as if to make it by that means more inviting.

"Come, love, come," he coaxed. He was used to speak in the same terms of
endearment to a colt of which he was fond; but when a look of undoubted
derision came over the face of the sea-maiden, he felt suddenly guilty
at having spoken thus to a woman.

He stood erect again, and his face burned. The sea-girl's face had
dimpled all over with fun. Colts and other animals cannot laugh at us,
else we might not be so peaceful in our assumption that they never
criticise. Caius before this had always supposed himself happy in his
little efforts to please children and animals; now he knew himself to be
a blundering idiot, and so far from feeling vexed with the laughing face
in the water, he wondered that any other creature had ever permitted his
clumsy caresses.

Having failed once, he now knew not what to do, but stood uncertain,
devouring the beauty of the sprite in the water as greedily as he might
with eyes that were not audacious, for in truth he had begun to feel
very shy.

"What is your name?" he asked, throwing his voice across the water.

The pretty creature raised a hand and pointed at some object behind him.
Caius, turning, knew it to be the epitaph. Yes, that was what his own
intelligence had told him was the only explanation.

Explanation? His reason revolted at the word. There was no explanation
of an impossibility. Yet that the mermaid was the lost child he had now
little doubt, except that he wholly doubted the evidence of his senses,
and that there was a mermaid.

He nodded to her that he understood her meaning about the name, and she
gave him a little wave of her hand as if to say good-bye, and began to
recede slowly, gliding backward, only her head seen above the disturbed
water.

"Don't go," called Caius, much urgency in his words.

But the slow receding motion continued, and no answer came but another
gentle wave of the hand.

The hand of Caius stole involuntarily to his lips, and he wafted a kiss
across the water. Then suddenly it seemed to him that the cliff had
eyes, and that it might be told of him at home and abroad that he was
making love to a phantom, and had lost his wits.

The sea-child only tossed her head a little higher out of the water, and
again he saw, or fancied he saw, mirth dancing in her eyes.

She beckoned to him and turned, moving away; then looked back and
beckoned, and darted forward again; and, doing this again and again, she
made straight for the open sea.

Caius cursed himself that he had not the courage to jump in and swim
after her at any cost. But then he could not swim so fast--certainly not
in his clothes. "There was something so wonderfully human about her
face," he mused to himself. His mind suggested, as was its wont, too
many reasonable objections to the prompt, headlong course which alone
would have availed anything.

While he stood in breathless uncertainty, the beckoning hand became lost
in the blur of sparkling ripples; the head, lower now, looked in the
water at a distance as like the muzzle of a seal or dog as like a human
head. By chance, as it seemed, a point of the island came between him
and the receding creature, and Caius found himself alone.




CHAPTER VIII.

BELIEF IN THE IMPOSSIBLE.


Caius clambered up the cliff and over the fence to the highroad. A man
with a cartload of corn was coming past. Caius looked at him and his
horse, and at the familiar stretch of road. It was a relief so to look.
On a small green hillock by the roadside thistles grew thickly; they
were in flower and seed at once, and in the sunshine the white down,
purple flowers, and silver-green leaves glistened--a little picture,
perfect in itself, of graceful lines and exquisite colour, having for
its background the hedge of stunted fir that bordered the other side of
the road. Caius feasted his eyes for a minute and then turned homeward,
walking for awhile beside the cart and talking to the carter, just to be
sure that there was nothing wild or strange about himself to attract the
man's attention. The cart raised no dust in the red clay of the road;
the monotonous creak of its wheels and the dull conversation of its
owner were delightful to Caius because they were so real and
commonplace.

Caius felt very guilty. He could not excuse himself to himself for the
fact that he had not only seen so wild a vision but now felt the
greatest reluctance to make known his strange adventure to anyone. He
could not precisely determine why this reluctance was guilty on his
part, but he had a feeling that, although a sensible man could not be
much blamed for seeing a mermaid if he did see one, such a man would
rouse the neighbourhood, and take no rest till the phenomenon was
investigated; or, if that proved impossible, till the subject was at
least thoroughly ventilated. The ideal man who acted thus would no doubt
be jeered at, but, secure in his own integrity, he could easily support
the jeers. Caius would willingly have changed places with this model
hero, but he could not bring himself to act the part. Even the reason of
this unwillingness he could not at once lay his hand upon, but he felt
about his mind far it, and knew that it circled round and round the
memory of the sea-maid's face.

That fresh oval face, surrounded with wet curls, crowned with its
fantastic wreath of glistening weed--it was not alone because of its
fresh girlish prettiness that he could not endure to make it the talk of
the country, but because, strange as it seemed to him to admit it, the
face was to him like the window of a lovely soul. It was true that she
had laughed and played; it was true that she was, or pretended to be,
half a fish; but, for all that, he would as soon have held up to
derision his mother, he would as soon have derided all that he held to
be most worthy in woman and all that he held to be beautiful and sacred
in ideal, as have done despite to the face that looked at him out of the
waves that afternoon. His memory held this face before him, held it
lovingly, reverently, and his lips shut firmly over the tale of wonder
he might have told.

At the gate of one of the fields a girl stood waiting for him. It was
his cousin Mabel, and when he saw her he knew that she must have come
to pay them a visit, and he knew too that she must have come because he
was at home. He was not attached to his cousin, who was an ordinary
young person, but hitherto he had always rather enjoyed her society,
because he knew that it was her private ambition to marry him. He did
not attribute affection to Mabel, only ambition; but that had pleased
his vanity. To-day he felt exceedingly sorry that she had come.

Mabel held the gate shut so that he could not pass.

"Where have you been?" asked she, pretending sternness.

"Just along by the shore." He noticed as he said it that Mabel's frock
had a dragged look about the waist, and that the seams were noticeable
because of its tightness. He remembered that her frocks had this
appearance frequently, and he wished they were not so ill-made.

"I shan't let you in," cried Mabel sportively, "till you tell me exactly
what you've been doing for this age."

"I have not been serving my age much," he said, with some weariness in
his tone.

"What?" said Mabel.

"You asked me what I had been doing for this age," said he. It was
miserably stupid to explain.

When Caius and Mabel had sauntered up through the warm fields to the
house, his mother met them in the front parlour with a fresh cap on. Her
cap, and her presence in that room, denoted that Mabel was company. She
immediately began to make sly remarks concerning Mabel's coming to them
while Caius was at home, about her going to meet him, and their homeward
walk together.

The mother was comparatively at ease about Mabel; she had little idea
that Caius would ever make love to her, so she could enjoy her
good-natured slyness to the full. What hurt Caius was that she did enjoy
it, that it was just her natural way never to see two young people of
opposite sex together without immediately thinking of the subject of
marriage, and sooner or later betraying her thought. Heretofore he had
been so accustomed to this cast of mind that, when it had tickled
neither his sense of humour nor his vanity, he had been indifferent to
it. To-night he knew it was vulgar; but he had no contempt for it,
because it was his mother who was betraying vulgarity. He felt sorry
that she should be like that--that all the men and women with whom she
was associated were like that. He felt sorry for Mabel, because she
enjoyed it, and consequently more tenderhearted towards her than he had
ever felt before.

He had not, however, a great many thoughts to give to this sorrow, for
he was thinking continually of the bright apparition of the afternoon.

When he went to his room to get ready for tea he fell into a muse,
looking over the fields and woods to the distant glimpse of blue water
he could see from his window. When he came down to the evening meal, he
found himself wondering foolishly upon what food the child lost in the
sea had fed while she grew so rapidly to a woman's stature. The present
meal was such as fell to the daily lot of that household. In homely blue
delft cups a dozen or more eggs were ranged beside high stacks of
buttered toast, rich and yellow. The butter, the jugs of yellow cream,
the huge platter heaped with wild raspberries--as each of these met his
eye he was wondering if the sea-maid ever ate such food, or if her diet
was more delicate.

"Am I going mad?" he thought to himself. The suspicion was depressing.

Three hours after, Caius sough his father as the old man was making his
nightly tour of the barns and stables. By way of easing his own sense of
responsibility he had decided to tell his father what he had seen, and
his telling was much like such confession of sins as many people make,
soothing their consciences by an effort that does not adequately reveal
the guilt to the listener.

Caius came up just as his father was locking the stable door.

"Look here, father; wait a minute. I have something to say. I saw a very
curious thing down at the shore to-day, but I don't want you to tell
mother, or Mabel, or the men."

The old man stood gravely expectant. The summer twilight just revealed
the outline of his thin figure and ragged hair and beard.

"It was in the water swimming about, making darts here and there like a
big trout. Its body was brown, and it looked as if it had horny balls
round its neck; and its head, you know, was like a human being's."

"I never heard tell of a fish like that, Caius. Was it a porpoise?"

"Well, I suppose I know what a porpoise is like."

"About how large was it?" said the elder man, abandoning the porpoise
theory.

"I should think about five or six feet long."

"As long as that? Did it look as if it could do any harm?"

"No; I should think it was harmless; but, father, I tell you its head
looked like a person's head."

"Was it a shark with a man stuck in its throat?"

"N--n--no." Not liking to deny this ingenious suggestion too promptly,
he feigned to consider it. "It wasn't a dead man's head; it was like a
live woman's head."

"I never heard of sharks coming near shore here, any way," added the old
man. "What distance was it off--half a mile?"

"It came between me and the little island off which we lost baby Day. It
lay half-way between the island and the shore."

The old man was not one to waste words. He did not remark that in that
case Caius must have seen the creature clearly, for it went without
saying.

"Pity you hadn't my gun," he said.

Caius inwardly shuddered, but because he wished to confide as far as he
might, he said outwardly: "I shouldn't have liked to shoot at it; its
face looked so awfully human, you know."

"Yes," assented the elder, who had a merciful heart "it's wonderful what
a look an animal has in its eyes sometimes." He was slowly shuffling
round to the next door with his keys. "Well, I'm sure, my lad, I don't
know what it could ha' been, unless 'twas some sort of a porpoise."

"We should be quite certain to know if there was any woman paying a
visit hereabout, shouldn't we? A woman couldn't possibly swim across the
bay."

"Woman!" The old man turned upon him sternly. "I thought you said it was
a fish."

"I said she _swam_ like a fish. She might have been a woman dressed in
a fish-skin, perhaps; but there isn't any woman here that could possibly
be acting like that--and old Morrison told me the same thing was about
the shore the summer before he died."

His father still looked at him sharply. "Well, the question is, whether
the thing you saw was a woman or a fish, for you must have seen it
pretty clear, and they aren't alike, as far as I know."

Caius receded from the glow of confidence. "It lay pretty much under the
water, and wasn't still long at a time."

The old man looked relieved, and in his relief began to joke. "I was
thinking you must have lost your wits, and thought you'd seen a
mermaid," he chuckled.

"I'd think it was a mermaid in a minute"--boldly--"if there were such
things."

Caius felt relieved when he had said this, but the old man had no very
distinct idea in his mind attached to the mythical word, so he let go
the thought easily.

"Was it a dog swimming?"

"No," said Caius, "it wasn't a dog."

"Well, I give it up. Next time you see it, you'd better come and fetch
the gun, and then you can take it to the musee up at your college, and
have it stuffed and put in a case, with a ticket to say you presented
it. That's all the use strange fish are that I know of."

When Caius reflected on this conversation, he knew that he had been a
hypocrite.




CHAPTER IX.

THE SEA-MAID'S MUSIC.


At dawn Caius was upon the shore again, but he saw nothing but a red
sunrise and a gray sea, merging into the blue and green and gold of the
ordinary day. He got back to breakfast without the fact of his matutinal
walk being known to the family.

He managed also in the afternoon to loiter for half an hour on the same
bit of shore at the same hour as the day before without anyone being the
wiser, but he saw no mermaid. He fully intended to spend to-morrow by
the sea, but he had made this effort to appear to skip to-day to avoid
awaking curiosity.

He had a horse and buggy; that afternoon he was friendly, and made many
calls. Wherever he went he directed the conversation into such channels
as would make it certain that he would hear if anyone else had seen the
mermaid, or had seen the face of a strange woman by sea or land. Of one
or two female visitors to the neighbourhood within a radius of twenty
miles he did hear, but when he came to investigate each case, he found
that the visit was known to everyone, and the status, lineage and habits
of the visitors all of the same humdrum sort.

He decided in his own mind that ten miles was the utmost length that a
woman could possibly swim, but he talked boldly of great swimming feats
he had seen in his college life, and opined that a good swimmer might
even cross the bay from Montrose or from the little port of Stanhope in
the other direction; and when he saw the incredulity of his listeners,
he knew that no one had accomplished either journey, for the water was
overlooked by a hundred houses at either place, and many a small vessel
ploughed the waves.

When he went to sleep that night Caius was sure that the vision of the
mermaid was all his own, shared only by old Morrison, who lay in his
grave. It was perhaps this partnership with the dead that gave the
matter its most incredible and unreal aspect. Three years before this
lady of the sea had frequented this spot; none but the dead man and
himself had been permitted to see her.

"Well, when all's said and done," said Caius to himself, rolling upon a
sleepless bed, "it's a very extraordinary thing."

Next morning he hired a boat, the nearest that was to be had; he got it
a mile and a half further up the shore. It was a clumsy thing, but he
rowed it past the mouth of the creek where he used to fish, all along
the water front of Day's farm, past the little point that was the
beginning of the rocky part of the shore, and then he drew the boat up
upon the little island. He hid it perfectly among the grass and weeds.
Over all the limited surface, among the pine shrubs and flowering weeds,
he searched to see if hiding-place for the nymph could be found. Two
colts were pastured on the isle. He found no cave or hut. When he had
finished his search, he sat and waited and watched till the sun set over
the sea; but to-day there was no smiling face rearing itself from the
blue water, no little hand beckoning him away.

"What a fool I was not to go where she beckoned!" mused Caius. "Where?
Anywhere into the heart of the ocean, out of this dull, sordid life into
the land of dreams."

For it must all have been a dream--a sweet, fantastic dream, imposed
upon his senses by some influence, outward or inward; but it seemed to
him that at the hour when he seemed to see the maid it might have been
given him to enter the world of dreams, and go on in some existence
which was a truer reality than the one in which he now was. In a
deliberate way he thought that perhaps, if the truth were known, he, Dr.
Caius Simpson, was going a little mad; but as he sat by the softly
lapping sea he did not regret this madness: what he did regret was that
he must go home and--talk to Mabel.

He rowed his boat back with feelings of blank disappointment. He could
not give another day to idleness upon the shore. It was impossible that
such an important person as himself could spend long afternoons and
evenings thus without everyone's knowledge. He had a feeling, too, born,
as many calculations are, of pure surmise, that he would have seen the
mermaid again that afternoon, when he had made such elaborate
arrangements to meet her, if Fate had destined them to meet again at
all. No; he must give her up. He must forget the hallucination that had
worked so madly on his brain.

Nevertheless, he did not deny himself the pleasure of walking very
frequently to the spot, and this often, in the early hours before
breakfast, a time which he could dispose of as he would without comment.
As he walked the beach in the beauty of the early day, he realized that
some new region of life had been opened to him, that he was feeling his
way into new mysteries of beatified thought and feeling.

A week passed; he was again upon the shore opposite the island at the
sunrise hour. He sat on the rock which seemed like a home to his
restless spirit, so associated it was with the first thoughts of those
new visions of beauty which were becoming dear to him.

He heard a soft splashing sound in the water, and, looking about him,
suddenly saw the sea-child's face lifted out of the water not more than
four or five yards from him. All around her was a golden cloud of sand;
it seemed to have been stirred up by her startled movement on seeing
him. For a moment she was still, resting thus close, and he could see
distinctly that around her white shoulders there was a coil of what
seemed like glistening rounded scales. He could not decide whether the
brightness in her eye was that of laughing ease or of startled
excitement. Then she turned and darted away from him, and having put
about forty feet between them, she turned and looked back with easy
defiance.

His eyes, fascinated by what was to him an awful thing, were trying to
penetrate the sparkling water and see the outlines of the form whose
clumsy skin seemed to hang in horrid folds, stretching its monstrous
bulk under the waves. His vision was broken by the sparkling splash
which the maiden deliberately made with her hands, as if divining his
curiosity and defying it. He felt the more sure that his senses did not
play him false because the arrangement of the human and fishy substance
of the apparition did not tally with any preconceived ideas he had of
mermaids.

Caius felt no loathing of the horrid form that seemed to be part of her.
He knew, as he had never known before, how much of coarseness there was
in himself. His hands and feet, as he looked down at them, seemed
clumsy, his ideas clumsy and gross to correspond. He knew enough to know
that he might, by the practice of exercises, have made his muscles and
brain the expression of his will, instead of the inert mass of flesh
that they now seemed to him to be. He might--yes, he might, if he had
his years to live over again, have made himself noble and strong; as it
was, he was mutely conscious of being a thing to be justly derided by
the laughing eyes that looked up at him from the water, a man to be
justly shunned and avoided by the being of the white arms and dimpled
face.

And he sat upon the rock looking, looking. It seemed useless to rise or
speak or smile; he remembered the mirth that his former efforts had
caused, and he was dumb and still.

Perhaps the sea-child found this treatment more uninteresting than that
attention he had lavished on her on the former occasion; perhaps she had
not so long to tarry. As he still watched her she turned again, and made
her way swift and straight toward the rocky point. Caius ran, following,
upon the shore, but after a minute he perceived that she could disappear
round the point before, either by swimming or wading, he could get near
her. He could not make his way around the point by the shore; his best
means of keeping her in sight was to climb the cliff, from which the
whole bay on the other side would be visible.

Like a man running a race for life, he leaped back to a place where it
was possible to climb, and, once on the top, made his way by main force
through a growth of low bushes until he could overlook the bay. But, lo!
when he came there no creature was visible in the sunny sea beneath or
on the shelving red bank which lay all plain to his view. Far and wide
he scanned the ocean, and long he stood and watched. He walked,
searching for anyone upon the bank, till he came to Day's barns, and by
that time he was convinced that the sea-maid had either vanished into
thin air or sunk down and remained beneath the surface of the sea.

The farm to which he had come was certainly the last place in which he
would have thought to look for news of the sportive sea-creature; and
yet, because it stood alone there in that part of the earth, he tarried
now to put some question to the owner, just as we look mechanically for
a lost object in drawers or cupboards in which we feel sure it cannot
be. Caius found Day in a small paddock behind one of the barns, tending
a mare and her baby foal. Day had of late turned his attention to
horses, and the farm had a bleaker look in consequence, because many of
its acres were left untilled.

Caius leaned his elbows on the fence of the paddock. "Hullo!"

Day turned round, asking without words what he wanted, in a very surly
way.

At the distance at which he stood, and without receiving any
encouragement, Caius found a difficulty in forming his question.

"You haven't seen anything odd in the sea about here, have you?"

"What sort of a thing?"

"I thought I saw a queer thing swimming in the water--did you?"

"No, I didn't."

It was evident that no spark of interest had been roused in the farmer
by the question. From that, more than anything else, Caius judged that
his words were true; but, because he was anxious to make assurance
doubly sure, he blundered into another form of the same inquiry:

"There isn't a young girl about this place, is there?"

Day's face grew indescribably dark. In an instant Caius remembered that,
if the man had any feeling about him, the question was the sorest he
could have asked--the child, who would now have been a girl, drowned,
her sister and brother exiled, and Day bound over by legal authority to
see to it that no defenceless person came in the way of the wife who had
killed her child! A moment more, and Day had merely turned his back,
going on with his work. Caius did not blame him; he respected the man
the more for the feeling he displayed.

Vexed with himself, and not finding how to end the interview, Caius
waited a minute, and then turned suddenly from the fence, without
knowing why he turned until he saw that the constraining force was the
presence of Day's wife, who stood at the end of the barn, out of sight
of her husband, but looking eagerly at Caius. She made a sign to him to
come. No doubt she had heard what had been said.

Caius went to her, drawn by the eagerness of her bright black eyes. Her
large form was slightly clad in a cotton gown; her abundant black hair
was fastened rather loosely about her head. Her high-boned cheeks were
thinner than of old, and her face wore a more excited expression;
otherwise, there was little difference in her. She had been sent from
the asylum as cured. Caius gave her a civil "Good-day."

"She has come back to me!" said the woman.

"Who?"

"My baby as you've put up the stone to. I've allers wanted to tell you I
liked that stone; but she isn't dead--she has come back to me!"

Now, although the return of the drowned child had been an idea often in
his mind of late, that he had merely toyed with it as a beautiful fancy
was proved by the fact that no sooner did the mother express the same
thought than Caius recognised that she was mad.

"She has come back to me!" The poor mother spoke in tones of exquisite
happiness. "She is grown a big girl; she has curls on her head, and she
wears a marriage-ring. Who is she married to?"

Caius could not answer.

The mother looked at him with curious steadfastness.

"I thought perhaps she was married to you," she said.

Surely the woman had seen what he had seen in the sea; but, question her
as he would, Caius could gain nothing more from her--no hint of time or
place, or any fact that at all added to his enlightenment. She only grew
frightened at his questions, and begged him in moving terms not to tell
Day that she had spoken to him--not to tell the people in the village
that her daughter had come back, or they would put her again in the
asylum. Truly, this last appeared to Cains a not unlikely consequence,
but it was not his business to bring it about. It was not for him, who
shared her delusion, to condemn her.

After that, Caius knew that either he was mad or what he had seen he had
seen, let the explanation be what it might--and he ceased to care much
about the explanation. He remembered the look of heart-satisfaction with
which Day's wife had told him that her child had returned. The beautiful
face looking from out the waves had no doubt wrought happiness in her;
and in him also it had wrought happiness, and that which was better. He
ceased to wrestle with the difference that the adventure had made in his
life, or to try to ignore it; he had learned to love someone far better
than himself, and that someone seemed so wholly at one with the nature
in which she ranged, and also with the best he could think concerning
nature, human or inanimate, that his love extended to all the world for
her sake.




CHAPTER X.

TOWED BY THE BEARD.


Every morning Caius still took his early way along the shore, but on all
these walks he found himself alone in possession of the strand and the
vast blue of sea and sky. It was disappointing, yet the place itself
exercised a greater and greater charm over him.

He abstained from fooling away his days by the sea. After his one
morning walk he refused himself the luxury of being there again, filling
his time with work. He felt that the lady of the lovely face would
despise him if he spent his time absurdly.

Thus some days passed; and then there came a night when he left a bed on
which he had tossed wakefully, and went in the hot August night to the
side of the sea when no one knew that he went or came.

The air was exceedingly warm. The harvest moon in the zenith was
flooding the world with unclouded light. The tide was ebbing, and
therefore there was in the channel that swift, dangerous current
sweeping out to sea of which he had once experienced the strength.
Caius, who associated his sea-visitant only with the sunlight and an
incoming tide, did not expect to see her now; frequent disappointment
had bred the absence of hope. He stood on the shore, looking at the
current in which he had so nearly perished as a boy. It was glittering
with white moon-rays. He thought of himself, of the check and twisting
which his motives and ideas had lately received, and as he thought how
slight a thing had done it, how mysterious and impossible a thing it
was, his mind became stunned, and he faced the breeze, and simply lived
in the sweetness of the hour, like an animal, conscious, not of itself,
but only of what is external, without past or future.

And now he heard a little crooning song from the waters--no words, no
tune that could be called a tune. It reminded him more of a baby's
toneless cooing of joy, and yet it had a rhythm to it, too, and both joy
and pathos in its cadence. Across the bright path of the moon's
reflection he saw her come. Her head and neck were crowned and garlanded
with shining weed, as if for a festival, and she stretched out her white
arms to him and beckoned to him and laughed. He heard her soft,
infant-like laughter.

To-night her beckoning was like a breeze to a leaf that is ready to
fall. Caius ceased to think; he only acted. He threw his cap and coat
and boots on the shore. The sea-child, gazing in surprise, began to
recede quickly. Caius ran into the water; he projected himself toward
the mermaid, and swam with all the speed of which he was capable.

The salt in his eyes at first obscured his vision. When he could look
about, the sea-child had gone out of the track of the moonlight, and,
taking advantage of the current, was moving rapidly out to sea.

He, too, swam with the current. He saw her curly head dark as a dog's in
the water; her face was turned from him, and there was evident movement
in her body. For the first time he thought he perceived that she was
swimming with arms and feet as a woman must swim.

As for Caius, he made all the effort that in him lay, and as she receded
past the line of the island right out into the moonlit sea, he swam
madly after, reckless of the fact that his swimming power gave him no
assurance of being able to return, reckless of everything except the one
welcome fact that he was gaining on the sea-child. A fear oppressed him
that perhaps this apparent effort of hers and her slow motion were only
a ruse to lead him on--that at any moment she might dart from him or
sink into her familiar depths. But this fear he did not heed as long as
she remained in sight, and--yes, across the surface of the warm moonlit
water he was slowly but surely gaining upon her.

On he swam, making strenuous effort at speed. He was growing exhausted
with the unaccustomed exercise; he knew that his strength would not hold
out much longer. He hardly knew what he hoped or dreamed would come to
pass when he overtook the sea-maiden, and yet he swam for dear love,
which was more to him than dear life, and, panting, he came close to
her.

The sea-maid turned about, and her face flashed suddenly upon him,
bright in the moonlight. She put out a glistening arm, perhaps in human
feebleness to ward him off, perhaps, in the strength of some unknown
means of defence, to warn him that at his peril he approached her.

Caius, reckless of everything, grasped the white wrist, and, stopping
his motion, knowing he could not lie mermaid-fashion with head reared in
the water, he turned on his back to float, still holding the small hand
in his. He held it, and retained his consciousness long enough to know
from that time forth that the hand had actually been in his--a living,
struggling hand, not cold, but warm. He felt, too, in that wonderful
power which we have in extreme moments of noting detail, that the hand
had a ring upon it--it was the left hand--and he thought it was a plain
gold ring, but it did not occur to him to think of a wedding-ring. Then
he knew that this dear hand that he had captured was working him woe,
for by it he was drawn beneath the water.

Even then he did not let go, but, still holding the hand, struck out to
regain the surface in one of those wild struggles to which inexpert
swimmers resort when they feel the deep receiving them into itself.

It would have been better for him if he had let go, for in that vehement
struggle he felt the evidence of the sea-maid's power. He
remembered--his last thought as he lost consciousness--that with the
fishy nature is sometimes given the power to stun an enemy by an
electric shock. Some shock came upon him with force, as if some cold
metal had struck him on the head. As his brain grew dull he heard the
water gurgling over him.

How long he remained stunned he did not know. He felt the water rushing
about his head again; he felt that he had been drowned, and he knew,
too--in that foolish way in which the half-awakened brain knows the
supposed certainties of dreams--that the white hand he had essayed to
hold had grasped his beard firmly under his chin, and that thus holding
his head above the surface of the water, she was towing him away to
unknown regions.

Then he seemed to know nothing again; and again he opened his eyes, to
find himself lying on a beach in the moonlight, and the sea-maid's face
was bending over his. He saw it distinctly, all tender human solicitude
written on the moonlit lineaments. As his eyes opened more her face
receded. She was gone, and he gazed vacantly at the sky; then, realizing
his consciousness more clearly, he sat up suddenly to see where she had
gone.

It seemed to him that, like a kind enchantress, she had transformed
herself to break his passion. Yes, he saw her, as he had so often
curiously longed to see her, moving over the dry shore--she was going
back to her sea. But it was a strange, monstrous thing he saw. From her
gleaming neck down to the ground was dank, shapeless form. So a walrus
or huge seal might appear, could it totter about erect upon low,
fin-like feet. There was no grace of shape, no tapering tail, no shiny
scales, only an appearance of horrid quivering on the skin, that here
and there seemed glossy in the moonlight.

He saw her make her way toilsomely, awkwardly over the shingle of the
beach; and when she reached the shining water, it was at first so
shallow that she seemed to wade in it like a land-animal, then, when the
water was deep enough to rise up well around her, she turned to him once
more a quick glance over her shoulder. Such relief came with the sight
of her face, after this monstrous vision, that he saw the face flash on
him as a sword might flash out of darkness when light catches its blade.
Then she was gone, and he saw the form of her head in the water while
she swam swiftly across the silver track of the moonbeams and out into
the darkness beyond.

Caius looked around him with senses still drowsy and head aching sorely.
He was in no fairy region that might be the home of mermaids, but on the
bit of beach from which he had launched himself into the water. His
coat and hat lay near him, and just above the spot where he lay was the
rude epitaph of baby Day, carved by his own boyish hand so long ago.

Caius put his hand to his head, and found it badly bruised on one side.
His heart was bruised, too, partly by the sight of the monstrous body of
the lovely sea-child, partly by the fresh experience of his own weakness
and incapacity.

It was long before he dragged himself home. It seemed to him to be days
before he recovered from the weariness of that secret adventure, and he
bore the mark of the bruise on his head for many a day. The mermaid he
never saw again.




CHAPTER XI.

YEARS OF DISCRETION.


Caius Simpson took ship and crossed the sea. The influence of the
beautiful face remained with him. That which had come to him was the new
birth of mind (not spirit), which by the grace of God comes to many an
individual, but is more clearly recognised and recorded when it comes in
the life of nations--the opening of the inward eye to the meaning and
joy of all things that the outward senses have heretofore perceived as
not perceiving them. The art of the Old World claimed him as her own, as
beauty on land and sea had already done. The enjoyment of music and
pictures became all-important to him, at first because he searched in
them for the soul he had seen in the sea-maid's eyes.

Caius was of noble birth, because by inheritance and training he was the
slave of righteousness. For this reason he could not neglect his work,
although it had not a first place in his heart. As he was industrious,
he did not fail in it; because it was not the thing he loved best, he
did not markedly succeed. It was too late to change his profession, and
he found in himself no such decided aptitude for anything else as should
make him know that this or that would have been preferable; but he knew
now that the genius of the physician was not his, that to do his work
because it was duty, and to attain the respectable success which
circumstance, rather than mental pre-eminence, gives, was all that he
could hope. This saddened him; all his ambition revived under the
smarting consciousness of inferiority to his more talented companions.
The pleasures of his life came to him through his receptive faculties,
and in the consciousness of having seen the wider vision, and being in
consequence a nobler man. But all this, which was so much to him for a
year or two, grew to be a less strong sensation than that of
disappointment in the fact that he could only so meagrely fulfil his
father's ideal and his own. There came a sense of dishonesty, too, in
having used the old man's money chiefly in acquiring those mental graces
which his father could neither comprehend nor value.

Three years passed. Gradually the memory of his love for the sea-maid
had grown indistinct; and, more or less unconscious that this love had
been the door to the more wealthy gardens of his mind, he inclined to
despise it now as he despised the elegy he had written for the child who
was drowned. It was his own passion he was inclined to forget and
despise; the sea-maid herself was remembered, and respected, and
wondered at, and disbelieved in, and believed in, as of old, but that
which remains in the mind, never spoken of, never used as a cause of
activity of either thought or action, recedes into the latent rather
than the active portion of the memory.

Once, just once, in the first year of his foreign life, he had told to a
friend the history of that, his one and only love-story. The result had
not been satisfactory. His companion was quite sure that Caius had been
the subject of an artful trick, and he did not fail to suggest that the
woman had wanted modesty. Nothing, he observed, was more common than for
men who were in love to attribute mental and physical charms to women
who were in reality vulgar and blatant. Caius, feeling that he could
advance no argument, refused to discuss the subject; it was months
before he had the same liking for this friend, and it was a sign that
what the other called "the sea-myth" was losing its power over him when
he returned to this friendship.

Caius did not make many friends. It was not his nature to do so, and
though constant to the few that he had, he did not keep up any very
lively intercourse. It was partly because of this notable failure in
social duty that, when he at last decided that the work of preparation
must be considered at an end, and the active work of life begun, no
opening immediately revealed itself to his inquiring gaze. Two vacant
positions in his native country he heard of and coveted, and before he
returned he gathered such testimonials as he could, and sent them in
advance, offering himself as a candidate. When he landed in Canada he
went at once to his first college to beg in person that the influence of
his former teachers might be used on his behalf. The three years that
had passed without correspondence had made a difference in the attitude
of those who could help him; many of his friends also were dispersed,
gone from the place. He waited in Montreal until he heard that he was
not the accepted candidate for the better of the two positions, and that
the other post would not be filled till the early spring.

Caius went home again. He observed that his parents looked older. The
leaves were gone from the trees, the days were short, and the earth was
cold. The sea between the little island and the red sandstone cliff was
utterly lonely. Caius walked by its side sometimes, but there was no
mermaid there.




_BOOK II._




CHAPTER I.

THE HAND THAT BECKONED.


It was evening. Caius was watering his father's horses. Between the
barns and the house the space was grass; a log fence divided it, and
against this stood a huge wooden pump and a heavy log hollowed out for a
trough. House and barns were white; the house was large, but the barns
were many times larger. If it had not been that their sloping roofs of
various heights and sizes formed a progression of angles not unpleasant
to the eye, the buildings would have been very ugly; but they had also a
generous and cleanly aspect which was attractive.

Caius brought the horses to the trough in pairs, each with a hempen
halter. They were lightly-built, well-conditioned beasts, but their days
of labour had wrought in them more of gentleness than of fire. As they
drank now, the breeze played with their manes and forelocks, brushing
them about their drooping necks and meek faces. Caius pumped the water
for them, and watched them meditatively the while. There was a fire low
down in the western sky; over the purple of the leafless woods and the
bleak acres of bare red earth its light glanced, not warming them, but
showing forth their coldness, as firelight glancing through a
window-pane glows cold upon the garden snows. The big butter-nut-tree
that stood up high and strong over the pump rattled its twigs in the
air, as bare bones might rattle.

It was while he was still at the watering that the elder Simpson drove
up to the house door in his gig. He had been to the post-office. This
was not an event that happened every day, so that the letter which he
now handed Caius might as well as not have been retarded a day or two in
its delivery. Caius took it, leading the horses to their stalls, and he
examined it by the light of the stable lantern.

The writing, the appearance of the envelope and post-mark, were all
quite unfamiliar. The writing was the fine Italian hand common to ladies
of a former generation, and was, in Caius' mind, connected only with the
idea of elderly women. He opened the letter, therefore, with the less
curiosity. Inside he found several pages of the same fine writing, and
he read it with his arm round the neck of one of the horses. The
lantern, which he had hung on a nail in the stall, sent down dim
candlelight upon the pair.

When Caius had read the letter, he turned it over and over curiously,
and began to read it again, more out of sheer surprise than from any
relish for its contents. It was written by one Madame Josephine Le
Maître, and came from a place which, although not very far from his own
home, was almost as unknown to him as the most remote foreign part. It
came from one of the Magdalen Islands, that lie some eighty miles'
journey by sea to the north of his native shore. The writer stated that
she knew few men upon the mainland--in which she seemed to include the
larger island of Prince Edward--that Caius Simpson was the only medical
man of whom she had any personal knowledge who was at that time
unemployed. She stated, also, that upon the island where she lived there
were some hundreds of fisher-folk, and that a very deadly disease, that
she supposed to be diphtheria, was among them. The only doctor in the
whole group refused to come to them, because he feared to take back the
infection to the other islands. Indeed, so great was the dread of this
infection, that no helpful person would come to their aid except an
English priest, and he was able only to make a short weekly visit. It
was some months now since the disease had first appeared, and it was
increasing rather than diminishing.

"Come," said the letter, "and do what you can to save the lives of these
poor people--their need of you is very great; but do not come if you are
not willing to risk your life, for you will risk it. Do not come if you
are not willing to be cut off from the world all the months the ice lies
in the gulf, for at that time we have no communication with the world.
You are a good man; you go to church, and believe in the Divine Christ,
who was also a physician. It is because of this that I dare to ask you.
There is a schooner that will be lying in the harbour of Souris for two
or three weeks after the time that you receive this letter. Then she
will come here upon her last winter trip. I have arranged with the
captain to bring you to us if you can come."

After that the name of the schooner and its captain was given, a list
also of some of the things that he would need to bring with him. It was
stated that upon the island he would receive lodging and food, and that
there were a few women, not unskilled in nursing, who would carry out
his instructions with regard to the sick.

Caius folded the letter after the second reading, finished his work with
the horses, and walked with his lantern through the now darkening air to
the house. Just for a few seconds he stopped in the cold air, and looked
about him at the dark land and the starry sky.

"I have now neither the belief nor the enthusiasm she attributes to me,"
said Caius.

When he got into the bright room he blinked for a moment at the light by
which his father was reading.

The elder man took the letter in his hard, knotted hand, and read it
because he was desired to do so. When finished, he cast it upon the
table, returning to his newspaper.

"Hoots!" said he; "the woman's mad!" And then meditatively, after he had
finished his newspaper paragraph: "What dealings have you ever had with
her?"

"I never had any dealings with her."

"When you get a letter from a strange woman"--the father spoke with some
heat--"the best thing that you can do with it is to put it in the fire."

Now, Caius knew that his father had, as a usual thing, that kindly and
simple way of looking at the actions of his fellow-men which is
refinement, so that it was evident that the contents of the letter were
hateful. That was to be expected. The point that aroused the son's
curiosity was to know how far the father recognised an obligation
imposed by the letter. The letter would be hateful just in so far as it
was considered worthy of attention.

"I suppose," said the young man dubiously, "that we can easily find out
at Souris whether the statements in the letter are true or not?"

The father continued to read his paper.

The lamp upon the unpolished walnut table had no shade or globe upon it,
and it glared with all the brilliancy of clean glass, and much wick and
oil. The dining-room was orderly as ever. The map of Palestine, the old
Bible, and some newly-acquired commentaries, obtruded themselves
painfully as ornaments. There was no nook or corner in which anything
could hide in shadow; there were no shutters on the windows, for there
was no one to pass by, unless it might be some good or evil spirit that
floated upon the dark air.

Mr. Simpson continued to read his paper without heeding his son. The
mother's voice chiding the maid in the next room was the only sound that
broke the silence.

"I'll write to that merchant you used to know at Souris, father," Caius
spoke in a business-like voice. "He will be able to find out from all
the vessels that come in to what extent there is disease on the
Magdalens."

The exciting cause in Caius of this remark was his father's indifference
and opposition, and the desire to probe it.

"You'll do nothing of the sort." Simpson's answer was very testy. "What
call have you to interfere with the Magdalens?" His anger rose from a
cause perhaps more explicable to an onlooker than to himself.

In the course of years there had grown in the mind of Caius much
prejudice against the form and measure of his parents' religion. He
would have throttled another who dared to criticise them, yet he
himself took a certain pleasure in an opportunity that made criticism
pertinent rather than impertinent. It was not that he prided himself on
knowing or doing better, he was not naturally a theorist, nor didactic;
but education had awakened his mind, not only to difficulties in the
path of faith, but to a higher standard of altruism than was exacted by
old-fashioned orthodoxy.

"I think I'd better write to Souris, sir; the letter is to me, you see,
and I should not feel quite justified in taking no steps to investigate
the matter."

How easy the hackneyed phrase "taking steps" sounded to Caius! but
experience breeds strong instincts. The elder man felt the importance of
this first decision, and struck out against it as an omen of ill.

"In my opinion you'll do well to let the matter lie where it is. How
will you look making inquiries about sick folk as if you had a great
fortune to spend upon philanthropy, when it turns out that you have
none? If you'd not spent all my money on your own schooling, perhaps
you'd have some to play the fine gentleman with now, and send a hospital
and its staff on this same schooner." (This was the first reproach of
his son's extravagance which had ever passed his lips; it betokened
passion indeed.) "If you write you can't do less than send a case of
medicines, and who is to pay for them, I'd like to know? I'm pretty well
cleared out. They're a hardened lot of wreckers on those islands--I've
heard that told of them many a time. No doubt their own filth and bad
living has brought disease upon them, if there's truth in the tale; and
as to this strange woman, giving no testimony or certificate of her
respectability, it's a queer thing if she's to begin and teach you
religion and duty. It's a bold and impudent letter, and I suppose you've
enough sense left, with all your new fangles, to see that you can't do
all she asks. What do you think you can do? If you think I'm going to
pay for charity boxes to be sent to people I've no opinion of, when all
the missionary subscriptions will be due come the new year, you think
great nonsense, that's all." He brought his large hard hand down on the
table, so that the board rang and the lamp quaked; then he settled his
rounded shoulders stubbornly, and again unfurled the newspaper.

This strong declaration of wrath, and the reproaches concerning the
money, were a relief to Caius. A relief from what? Had he contemplated
for a moment taking his life in his hand and obeying the unexpected
appeal? Yet he felt no answering anger in return for the rebuke; he only
found himself comfortably admitting that if his father put it on the
score of expense he certainly had no right to give time or money that
did not belong to him. It was due to his parents that all his occupation
should henceforth be remunerative.

He put the letter away in his pocket, but, perhaps because he laid it
next his heart, the next day its cry awoke within him again, and would
not be silenced.

Christianity was identified in his mind with an exclusive way of life,
to him no longer good or true; but what of those stirring principles of
Socialism that were abroad in the world, flaunting themselves as
superior to Christianity? He was a child of the age, and dared not deny
its highest precepts. Who would go to these people if he did not go? As
to his father, he had coaxed him before for his own advantage; he could
coax him now for theirs if he would. He was sufficiently educated to
know that it was more glorious to die, even unrenowned, upon such a
mission, than to live in the prosperity that belongs to ordinary
covetousness, that should it be his duty to obey this call, no other
duty remained for him in its neglect.

His personal desire in the matter was neither more nor less noble than
are the average feelings of well-meaning people towards such enterprise.
He would have been glad to find an excellent excuse to think no more of
this mission--very glad indeed to have a more attractive opening for
work set before him; but, on the other hand, the thought of movement and
of fresh scenes was more attractive than staying where he was. Then, it
would be such a virtuous thing to do and to have done; his own
conscience and everyone who heard of the action must applaud it. And he
did not think so much of the applause of others as of the real
worthiness of the deed. Then, again, if he came back safely in the
spring, he hoped by that time the offer of some good post would be
waiting for him; and it would be more dignified to return from such an
excellent work to find it waiting, than to sit at home humbly longing
for its advent.

Caius went to Souris and questioned the merchants, talked to the
captains of the vessels in the port, saw the schooner upon which Madame
Le Maître had engaged his passage. What seemed to him most strange in
the working out of this bit of his life's story, was that all that the
letter said appeared to be true. The small island called Cloud Island,
where the pestilence was, and to which he had been invited, was not one
at which larger ships or schooners could land, so that it was only from
the harbour of another island that the seamen got their news. On all
hands it was known that there was bad disease upon Cloud Island, that no
doctor was there, and that there was one lady, a Madame Le Maître, a
person of some property, who was devoting herself to nursing the sick.
When Caius asked who she was, and where she came from, one person said
one thing and one another. Some of the men told him that she was old,
some of them affirmed that she was young, and this, not because there
was supposed to be any mystery concerning her, but because no one seemed
to have taken sufficient interest in her existence to obtain accurate
information.

When Caius re-entered the gate of his father's farm he had decided to
risk the adventure, and obey the letter in all points precisely.

"Would you let it be said that in all these parts there was no one to
act the man but a woman?" he said to his father.

To his mother he described the sufferings that this disease would work,
all the details of its pains, and how little children and mothers and
wives would be the chief sufferers, dying in helpless pain, or being
bereft of those they loved best.

As he talked, the heart of the good woman rose up within her and blessed
her son, acknowledging, in spite of her natural desires, that he was in
this more truly the great man than she had fancied him in her wildest
dreams of opulence and renown. She credited him with far purer motives
than he knew himself to possess.

A father's rule over his own money is a very modified thing, the very
fact of true fatherhood making him only a partner with his child. Caius
was under the impression that his father could have refused him the
necessary outfit of medical stores for this expedition, but that was not
the way old Simpson looked at it.

"If he must, he must," he said to his wife angrily, gloomily, for his
own opinion in the matter had changed little; but to Caius he gave his
consent, and all the money he needed, and did not, except at first,
express his disapproval, so that Caius took the less pains to argue the
matter with him.

It was only at the last, when Caius had fairly set out on his journey,
and, having said good-bye, looked back to see his father stand at the
gate of his own fields, that the attitude of the stalwart form and gray
head gave him his first real insight into the pain the parting had
cost--into the strong, sad disapproval which in the father's mind lay
behind the nominal consent. Caius saw it then, or, at least, he saw
enough of it to feel a sharp pang of regret and self-reproach. He felt
himself to be an unworthy son, and to have wronged the best of fathers.
Whether he was doing right or wrong in proceeding upon his mission he
did not know. So in this mind he set sail.




CHAPTER II.

THE ISLES OF ST. MAGDALEN.


The schooner went out into the night and sailed for the north star. The
wind was strong that filled her sails; the ocean turbulent, black and
cold, with the glittering white of moonlight on the upper sides of the
waves. The little cabin in the forecastle was so hot and dirty that to
Caius, for the first half of the night, it seemed preferable almost to
perish of cold upon the deck rather than rock in a narrow bunk below.
The deck was a steep inclined plane, steady, but swept constantly with
waves, as an incoming tide sweeps a beach. Caius was compelled to crouch
by what support he could find, and, lying thus, he was glad to cover
himself up to the chin with an unused sail, peeping forth at the gale
and the moonlight as a child peeps from the coverings of its cot.

With the small hours of the night came a cold so intense that he was
driven to sleep in the cabin where reigned the small iron stove that
brewed the skipper's odorous pot. After he had slept a good way into the
next day, he came up again to find the gale still strong and the
prospect coloured now with green of wave and snow of foam, blue of sky
and snow of winged cloud. The favourable force was still pushing them
onward toward the invisible north star.

It was on the evening of that day that they saw the islands; five or six
hilly isles lay in a half-circle. The schooner entered this bay from the
east. Before they came near the purple hills they had sighted a fleet of
island fishing boats, and now, as night approached, all these made also
for the same harbour. The wind bore them all in, they cutting the water
before them, gliding round the point of the sand-bar, making their way
up the channel of the bay in the lessening light, a chain of gigantic
sea-birds with white or ruddy wings.

All around the bay the islands lay, their hills a soft red purple in the
light of a clear November evening. In the blue sky above there were
layers of vapour like thin gray gossamers, on which the rosy light
shone. The waters of the bay were calmer than the sea outside, yet they
were still broken by foam; across the foam the boats went sweeping,
until in the shadow of the isles and the fast-descending night they each
furled their sails and stopped their journey. It was in the western side
of the bay that the vessels lay, for the gale was from the west, and
here they found shelter; but night had descended suddenly, and Caius
could only see the black form of the nearest island, and the twinkling
lights that showed where houses were collected on its shore. They waited
there till the moon rose large and white, touching the island hills
again into visible existence. It was over one small rocky island that
she rose; this was the one that stood sentry at the entrance of the bay,
and on either side of it there were moon-lit paths that stretched far
out into the gulf. On the nearer island could be seen long sand reaches,
and dark rounded hills, and in a hollow of the hills the clustered
lights. When the moonlight was bright the master of the schooner lowered
a boat and set Caius and his traps ashore, telling him that some day
when the gale was over he could make his way to the island of Cloud. The
skipper said that the gale might blow one day, or two, or three, or
more, but it could not blow always, and in the meantime there was
entertainment to be had for those who could pay for it on the nearer
isle.

When Caius stood upon the beach with his portmanteaus beside him, some
half a dozen men clustered round; in their thick garments and mufflers
they looked outlandish enough. They spoke English, and after much
talking they bore his things to a small house on the hillside. He heard
the wind clamour against the wooden walls of this domicile as he stood
in its porch before the door was opened. The wind shouted and laughed
and shook the house, and whistled and sighed as it rushed away. Below
him, nearer the shore, lay the village, its white house-walls lit by the
moonlight, and beyond he could see the ships in the glittering bay.

When the door opened such a feast of warmth and comfort appeared to his
eyes that he did not soon forget it, for he had expected nothing but the
necessaries of life. Bright decoration of home-made rugs and ornaments
was on all sides, and a table was laid.

They were four spinsters of Irish descent who kept this small inn, and
all that good housewifery could do to make it comfortable was done. The
table was heaped with such dainties as could be concocted from the
homely products of the island; large red cranberries cooked in syrup
gave colour to the repast. Soon a broiled chicken was set before Caius,
and steaming coffee rich with cream.

To these old maids Caius was obliged to relate wherefore he had come and
whither he was bound. He told his story with a feeling of self-conscious
awkwardness, because, put it in as cursory a manner as he would, he felt
the heroism of his errand must appear; nor was he with this present
audience mistaken. The wrinkled maidens, with their warm Irish hearts,
were overcome with the thought that so much youth and beauty and
masculine charm, in the person of the young man before them, should be
sacrificed, and, as it seemed to them, foolishly.

The inhabitants of Cloud Island, said these ladies, were a worthless
set; and in proof of it they related to him how the girls of The Cloud
were not too nice in their notions to marry with the shipwrecked sailors
from foreign boats, a thing they assured him that was never done on
their own island. Italian, or German, or Norwegian, or whoever the man
might be, if he had good looks, a girl at The Cloud would take him!

And would not they themselves, Caius asked, in such a case, take pity on
a stranger who had need of a wife?

Whereat they assured him that it was safer to marry a native islander,
and that no self-respecting woman could marry with a man who was not
English, or Irish, or Scotch, or French. It was of these four latter
nationalities that the native population of the islands was composed.

But the ladies told him worse tales than these, for they said the devil
was a frequent visitor at Cloud Island, and at times he went out with
the fishers in their boats, choosing now one, now another, for a
companion; and whenever he went, there was a wonderful catch of fish;
but the devil must have his full share, which he ate raw and without
cleaning--a thing which no Christian could do. He lived in the round
valleys of the sand-dune that led to The Cloud. It was a convenient
hiding-place, because when you were in one valley you could not see into
the next, and the devil always leaped into the one that you were not in.
As to the pestilence, it was sent as a judgment because the people had
these impious dealings with the Evil One; but the devil could put an end
to it if he would.

It was strange to see the four gray-haired sisters as they sat in a row
against the wall and told him in chiming sentences these tales with full
belief.

"And what sort of a disease is it?" asked Caius, curious to hear more.

"It's the sore throat and the choke, sir," said the eldest sister, "and
a very bad disease it is, for if it doesn't stop at the throat, it flies
direct to the stomach, sir, and then you can't breathe."

Caius pondered this description for a few moments, and then he formed a
question which was to the point.

"And where," said he, "is the stomach?"

At which she tapped her chest, and told him it was there.

He had eaten somewhat greedily, and when he found that the linen of his
bed was snow-white and the bed itself of the softest feathers, he lay
down with great contentment. Not even the jar and rush of the wind as it
constantly assaulted the house, nor the bright moonlight against the
curtainless window, kept him awake for a moment. He slept a dreamless
sleep.




CHAPTER III.

BETWEEN THE SURF AND THE SAND.


Next day the wind had grown stronger; the same clear skies prevailed,
with the keen western gale, for the west wind in these quarters is
seldom humid, and at that season it was frosty and very dry, coming as
it did over the already snow-covered plains of Gaspé and Quebec. It
seemed strange to Caius to look out at the glorious sunshine and be told
that not a boat would stir abroad that day, and that it would be
impossible for even a cart to drive to the Cloud Island.

He knew so little of the place to which he had come that when the
spinsters spoke of driving to another island it seemed to him that they
spoke as wildly as when they told of the pranks of the Evil One. He
learned soon that these islands were connected by long sand ridges, and
that when the tide was down it was possible to drive upon the damp beach
from one to another; but this was not possible, they told him, in a
western gale, for the wind beat up the tide so that one could not tell
how far it would descend or how soon it would return. There was risk of
being caught by the waves under the hills of the dune, which a horse
could not climb, and, they added, he had already been told who it was
who lived in the sand hollows.

In the face of the sunny morning, Caius could not forbear expressing his
incredulity of the diabolical legend, and his hostesses did not take the
trouble to argue the point, for it is to be noted that people seldom
argue on behalf of the items of faith they hold most firmly. The
spinsters merely remarked that there were a strange number of wrecks on
the sand-bar that led to The Cloud, and that, go where he would in the
village, he would get no sand-pilot to take him across while the tide
was beaten up by the wind, and a pilot he must have, or he would sink in
the quicksands and never be seen again.

Caius walked, with the merry wind for a playfellow, down through long
rows of fish-sheds, and heard what the men had to say with regard to his
journey. He heard exactly what the women had told him, for no one would
venture upon the dune that day.

Then, still in company with the madcap wind, he walked up on the nearer
hills, and saw that this island was narrow, lying between blue fields of
sea, both bay and ocean filled with wave crests, ever moving. The outer
sea beat upon the sandy beach with a roar and volume of surf such as he
had never seen before, for under the water the sand-bank stretched out a
mile but a little below the sea's level, and the breakers, rolling in,
retarded by it and labouring to make their accustomed course, came on
like wild beasts that were chafed into greater anger at each bound, so
that with ever-increasing fury they roared and plunged until they
touched the verge.

From the hills he saw that the fish-sheds which stood along the village
street could only be a camping place for the fishers at the season of
work, for all along the inner sides of the hills there were small
farm-houses, large enough and fine enough to make good dwellings. The
island was less savage than he had supposed. Indignation rose within him
that people apparently so well-to-do should let their neighbours die
without extending a helping hand. He would have been glad to go and
bully some owner of a horse and cart into taking him the last stage of
his journey without further delay; but he did not do this, he only
roamed upon the hills enjoying the fair prospect of the sea and the
sister isles, and went back to his inn about two o'clock. There he
feasted again upon the luxurious provision that the spinsters had been
making for the appetite that the new air had given him. He ate roast
duck, stuffed with a paste of large island mushrooms, preserved since
their season, and tarts of bake-apple berries, and cranberries, and the
small dark mokok berry--three kinds of tart he ate, with fresh cream
upon them, and the spinster innkeepers applauded his feat. They stood
around and rejoiced at his eating, and again they told him in chorus
that he must not go to the other island where the people were sick.

It was just then that a great knock came at the front door; the loudness
of the wind had silenced the approaching footsteps. A square-built,
smooth-faced man, well wrapped in a coat of ox fur, came into the house,
asking for Caius Simpson by name. His face was one which it was
impossible to see without remarking the lines of subtle intelligence
displayed in its leathery wrinkles. The eyes were light blue, very
quick, almost merry--and yet not quite, for if there was humour in them,
it was of the kind that takes its pleasures quietly; there was no
proneness to laughter in the hard-set face.

When Caius heard his own name spoken, he knew that something unexpected
had happened, for no one upon the island had asked his name, and he had
not given it.

The stranger, who, from his accent, appeared to be a Canadian of Irish
parentage, said, in a few curt words, that he had a cart outside, and
was going to drive at once to Cloud Island, that he wished to take the
young doctor with him; for death, he observed, was not sitting idle
eating his dinner at The Cloud, and if anyone was coming to do battle
with him it would be as well to come quickly.

The sarcasm nettled Caius, first, because he felt himself to be caught
napping; secondly, because he knew he was innocent.

The elder of the spinsters had got behind the stranger, and she
intimated by signs and movements of the lips that the stranger was
unknown, and therefore mysterious, and not to be trusted; and so quickly
was this pantomime performed that it was done before Caius had time to
speak, although he was under the impression that he rose with alacrity
to explain to the newcomer that he would go with him at once.

The warning that the old maid gave resulted at least in some cautious
questioning. Caius asked the stranger who he was, and if he had come
from The Cloud that day.

As to who he was, the man replied that his name was John O'Shea, and he
was the man who worked the land of Madame Le Maître. "One does not go
and come from Cloud Island in one day at this season," said he. "'Tis
three days ago since I came. I've been waiting up at the parson's for
the schooner. To-day we're going back together, ye and me."

He was sparing of language. He shut his mouth over the short sentences
he had said, and that influence which always makes it more or less
difficult for one man to oppose the will of another caused Caius to make
his questions as few as possible.

Was it safe, he asked, to drive to Cloud Island that day?

The other looked at him from head to foot. "Not safe," he said, "for
women and childer; but for men"--the word was lingered upon for a
moment--"yes, safe enough."

The innkeepers were too mindful of their manners as yet to disturb the
colloquy with open interruption; but with every other sort of
interruption they did disturb it, explaining by despairing gestures and
direful shakings of the head that, should Caius go with this gentleman,
he would be driving into the very jaws of death.

Nevertheless, after O'Shea's last words Caius had assented to the
expedition, although he was uncertain whether the assent was wise or
not. He had the dissatisfaction of feeling that he had been ruled,
dared, like a vain schoolboy, into the hasty consent.

"Now, if you are servant to Madame Le Maître at The Cloud, how is it
that you've never been seen on this island?" It was the liveliest of the
sisters who could no longer keep silence.

While Caius was packing his traps he was under the impression that
O'Shea had replied that, in the first place, he had not lived long at
The Cloud, and, in the second, visitors from The Cloud had not been so
particularly welcome at the other islands. His remarks on the last
subject were delivered with brief sarcasm. After he had started on the
journey Caius wondered that he had not remembered more particularly the
gist of an answer which it concerned him to hear.

At the time, however, he hastened to strap together those of his bundles
which had been opened, and, under the direction of O'Shea, to clothe
himself in as many garments as possible, O'Shea arguing haste for the
sake of the tide, which, he said, had already begun to ebb, and there
was not an hour to be lost.

The women broke forth once more, this time into open expostulation and
warning. To them O'Shea vouchsafed no further word, but with an annoying
assumption that the doctor's courage would quail under their warnings,
he encouraged him.

"There's a mere boy, a slim lad, on my cart now," he said, "that's going
with us; he's no more froightened than a gull is froightened of the
sea."

Caius showed his valour by marching out of the door, a bag in either
hand.

No snow had as yet fallen on the islands. The grass that was before the
inn door was long and of that dry green hue that did not suggest
verdure, for all the juices had gone back into the ground. It was swept
into silver sheens by the wind, and as they crossed it to reach the road
where the cart stood, the wind came against them all with staggering
force. The four ladies came out in spite of the icy blast, and attended
them to the cart, and stood to watch them as they wended their way up
the rugged road that led over a hill.

The cart was a small-sized wooden one--a shallow box on wheels; no
springs, no paint, had been used in its making. Some straw had been
spread on the bottom, and on this Caius was directed to recline. His
bags also were placed beside him. O'Shea himself sat on the front of the
cart, his legs dangling, and the boy, who was "no more froightened of
the journey than a sea-gull is of the sea," perched himself upon one
corner of the back and looked out backwards, so that his face was turned
from Caius, who only knew that he was a slim lad because he had been
told so; a long gray blanket-coat with capuchin drawn over the head and
far over the face covered him completely.

Caius opposed his will to the reclining attitude which had been
suggested to him, and preferred to sit upon the flat bottom with the
desire to keep erect; and he did sit thus for awhile, like a porcelain
mandarin with nodding head, for, although the hardy pony went slowly,
the jolting of the cart on the rough, frozen road was greater than it is
easy for one accustomed to ordinary vehicles to imagine.

Up the hill they went, past woods of stunted birch and fir, past upland
fields, from which the crops had long been gathered. They were making
direct for the southern side of the island. While they ascended there
was still some shelter between them and the fiercest blast of the gale,
and they could still look down at the homely inn below, at the village
of fishers' sheds and the dancing waters of the bay. He had only passed
one night there, and yet Caius looked at this prospect almost fondly. It
seemed familiar in comparison with the strange region into which he was
going.

When the ridge was gained and the descent began, the wind broke upon
them with all its force. He looked below and saw the road winding for a
mile or more among the farms and groves of the slope, and then out
across a flat bit of shrub-covered land; beyond that was the sand,
stretching here, it seemed, in a tract of some square miles. The surf
was dimly seen like a cloud at its edge.

It was not long that he sat up to see the view. The pony began to run
down the hill; the very straw in the bottom of the cart danced. Caius
cast his arms about his possessions, fearing that, heavy though they
were, they would be thrown out upon the roadside, and he lay holding
them. The wind swept over; he could hear it whistling against the speed
of the cart; he felt it like a knife against his cheeks as he lay. He
saw the boy brace himself, the lithe, strong muscles of his back,
apparent only by the result of their action, swayed balancing against
the jolting, while, with thickly-gloved hands, he grasped the wooden
ledge on which he sat. In front O'Shea was like an image carved of the
same wood as the cart, so firmly he held to it. Well, such hours pass.
After a while they came out upon the soft, dry sand beyond the scrubby
flat, and the horse, with impeded footsteps, trudged slowly.

The sand was so dry, driven by the wind, that the horse and cart sank in
it as in driven snow. The motion, though slow, was luxurious compared to
what had been. O'Shea and the boy had sprung off the cart, and were
marching beside it. Caius clambered out, too, to walk beside them.

"Ye moight have stayed in, Mr. Doctor," said O'Shea. "The pony is more
than equal to carrying ye."

Again Caius felt that O'Shea derided him. He hardly knew why the man's
words always gave him this impression, for his manner was civil enough,
and there was no particular reason for derision apparent; for, although
O'Shea's figure had broadened out under the weight of years, he was not
a taller man than Caius, and the latter was probably the stronger of the
two. When Caius glanced later at the other's face, it appeared to him
that he derived his impression from the deep, ray-like wrinkles that
were like star-fish round the man's eyes; but if so, it must have been
that something in the quality of the voice reflected the expression of
the face, for they were not in such plight as would enable them to
observe one another's faces much. The icy wind bore with it a burden of
sparkling sand, so that they were often forced to muffle their faces,
walking with heads bowed.

Since Caius would walk, O'Shea ordered the boy back into the cart, and
the two men ploughed on through the sand beside the horse, whose every
hair was turned by the wind, which now struck them sideways, and whose
rugged mane and forelock were streaming horizontally, besprinkled with
sand. The novelty of the situation, the beauty of the sand-wreaths, the
intoxication of the air, the vivid brilliancy of the sun and the sky,
delighted Caius. The blue of heaven rounded the sandscape to their
present sight, a dome of blue flame over a plain whose colour was like
that of an autumn leaf become sear. Caius, in his exhilaration, remarked
upon the strangeness of the place, but either the prospect was too
common to O'Shea to excite his interest, or the enterprise he meditated
burdened his mind; he gave few words in answer, and soon they, too,
relapsed into the silence that the boy and the pony had all the time
observed.

An hour's walk, and another sound rang in their ears beside the
whistling of the wind, low at first and fitful, louder and louder, till
the roar of the surf was deafening. Then they came to the brink and
heard all the notes of which the chords of its more distant music had
been composed, the gasping sob of the under tow, the rush of the lifting
wave as it upreared itself high, the silken break of its foam, the crash
of drums with which it fell, the dash of wave against wave, and the cry
of the foremost waves that bemoaned themselves prostrate upon the beach.

The cart, with its little company, turned into the narrow strip of dark
damp sand that the tide had already left bare. Here the footing was much
firmer, and the wind struck them obliquely. The hardy pony broke into
its natural pace, a moderate trot. In spite of this pace, the progress
they made was not very swift, and it was already four by the clock.
O'Shea climbed to his place on the front of the cart; the boy sprang
down and ran to warm himself, clapping his gloved hands as he ran. It
was not long before Caius clambered into his straw seat again, and,
sitting, watched the wonder of the waves. So level was the beach, so
high was the surf, that from the low cart it seemed that gigantic
monsters were constantly arising from the sea; and just as the fear of
them overshadowed the fascinated mind, they melted away again into
nothingness. As he looked at the waves he saw that their water, mixed
with sand, was a yellowish brown, and dark almost to black when the
curling top yawned before the downfall; but so fast did each wave break
one upon the other that glossy water was only seen in glimpses, and
boiling fields of foam and high crests of foam were the main substance
of all that was to be seen for a hundred yards from the shore.

Proceeding thus, they soon came to what was actually the end of the
island, and were on the narrow ridge of sand-dunes which extended a
distance of some twenty miles to the next island. The sand-hills rising
sheer from the shore, fifty, sixty, or a hundred feet in height,
bordered their road on the right. To avoid the soft dry sand of their
base the pony often trotted in the shallow flow of the foam, which even
yet now and then crept over all the damp beach to the high-water mark.
The wind was like spur and lash; the horse fled before it. Eyes and ears
grew accustomed even to the threatening of the sea-monsters. The sun of
the November afternoon sank nearer and nearer the level of sand and
foam; they could not see the ocean beyond the foam. When it grew large
and ruddy in the level atmosphere, and some flakes of red, red gold
appeared round it, lying where the edge of the sea must be, like the
Islands of the Blessed, when the crests of the breakers near and far
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 of them, a cape
of rock was seen jutting across the beach, its rocky headland stretching
far into the sea. Caius believed that the end of their journey was near;
he looked eagerly at the new land, and saw that there were houses upon
the top of the cliff. It seemed unnecessary even to ask if this was
their destination. Secure in his belief, he willingly got off the cart
at the base of the cliff, and trudged behind it, while O'Shea drove up a
track in the sand which had the similitude of a road; rough, soft,
precipitous as it was, it still bore tracks of wheels and feet, where
too far inland to be washed by the waves. The sight of them was like the
sight of shore to one who has been long at sea. They went up to the back
of the cliff, and came upon its high grassy top; the road led through
where small houses were thickly clustered on either side. Caius looked
for candle, or fire, or human being, and saw none, and they had not
travelled far along the street of this lifeless village when he saw that
the road led on down the other side of the headland, and that the beach
and the dune stretched ahead of them exactly as they stretched behind.

"Is this a village of the dead?" he asked O'Shea.

The man O'Shea seemed to have in him some freak of perverseness which
made it hard for him to answer the simplest question. It was almost by
force that Caius got from him the explanation that the village was only
used during certain fishing seasons, and abandoned during the
winter--unless, indeed, its houses were broken into by shipwrecked
sailors, whose lives depended upon finding means of warmth.

The cart descended from the cliff by the same sandy road, and the pony
again trotted upon the beach; its trot was deceptive, for it had the
appearance of making more way than it did. On they went--on, on, over
this wonderful burnished highroad which the sea and the moonlight had
laid for their travel. Behind and before, look as they would, they could
see only the weird white hills of sand, treeless, almost shadowless now,
the seahorses foaming and plunging in endless line, and between them the
road, whose apparent narrowing in the far perspective was but an emblem
of the truth that the waves were encroaching upon it inch by inch.




CHAPTER V.

DEVILRY.


When the cart and its little company had travelled for almost another
hour, a dark object in the midst of the line of foam caught their sight.
It was the boy who first saw it, and he suddenly leaned forward,
clutching O'Shea's arm as if in fear.

The man looked steadily.

"She's come in since we passed here before."

The boy apparently said something, although Caius could not catch the
voice.

"No," said O'Shea; "there's cargo aboard of her yit, but the men are off
of her."

It was a black ship that, sailless and with masts pitifully aslant, was
fixed on the sand among the surf, and the movement of the water made her
appear to labour forward as if in dying throes making effort to reach
the shore.

The boy seemed to scan the prospect before him now far more eagerly than
before; but the wreck, which was, as O'Shea said, deserted, seemed to be
the only external object in all that gleaming waste. They passed on,
drawing up for a minute near her at the boy's instigation, and scanning
her decks narrowly as they were washed by the waves, but there was no
sign of life. Before they had gone further Caius caught sight of the
dark outline of another wreck; but this one was evidently of some weeks'
standing, for the masts were gone and the hulk half broken through.
There was still another further out. The mere repetition of the sad
story had effect to make the scene seem more desolate. It seemed as if
the sands on which they trod must be strewed with the bleached skeletons
of sailors, and as if they embedded newly-buried corpses in their
breast. The sandhills here were higher than they had been before, and
there were openings between them as if passages led into the interior
valleys, so that Caius supposed that here in storms or in flood-tides
the waves might enter into the heart of the dune.

They had not travelled far beyond the first and nearest wreck, when the
monotony of their journey was broken by a sudden strange excitement
which seized on them all, and which Caius, although he felt it, did not
at once understand.

The pony was jerked back by the reins which O'Shea held, then turned
staggering inland, and lashed forward by the whip, used for the first
time that day. Caius, jerked against the side of the cart, lifted up a
bruised head, gazing in wonder to see nothing in the path; but he saw
that the boy had sprung lightly from the cart, and was standing higher
up on the sand, his whole attitude betraying alarm as he gazed
searchingly at the ground.

In a moment the pony reared and plunged, and then uttered a cry almost
human in its fear. Then came the sensation of sinking, sinking with the
very earth itself. O'Shea had jumped from the cart and cut the traces.
Caius was springing out, and felt his spring guided by a hand upon his
arm. He could not have believed that the boy had so much strength, yet,
with a motion too quick for explaining words, he was guided to a certain
part of the sand, pushed aside like a child to be safe, while the boy
with his next agile movement tugged at the portmanteaus that contained
the medical stores, and flung them at Caius' feet.

It was a quicksand. The pony cried again--cried to them for help. Caius
next found himself with O'Shea holding the creature's head, and aiding
its mad plunging, even while his own feet sank deeper and deeper. There
was a moment when they all three plunged forward together, and then the
pony threw itself upon its side, by some wild effort extricating its
feet, and Caius, prone upon the quivering head, rolled himself and
dragged it forward. Then he felt strong hands lifting him and the horse
together.

What seemed strangest to Caius, when he could look about and think, was
that he had now four companions--the boy, O'Shea, and two other men,
coated and muffled--and that the four were all talking together eagerly
in a language of which he did not understand a word.

He shook the wet sand from his clothes; his legs and arms were wet. The
pony stood in an entrance to a gap in the sand-hills, quivering and
gasping, but safe, albeit with one leg hurt. The cart had sunk down till
its flat bottom lay on the top of the quicksand, and there appeared to
float, for it sunk no further. A white cloud that had winged its way up
from the south-west now drifted over the moon, and became black except
at its edges. The world grew much darker, and it seemed colder, if that
were possible.

It soon occurred to Caius that the two men now added to their party had
either met O'Shea by appointment, or had been lying in wait for the
cart, knowing that the quicksand was also waiting to engulf it. It
appeared to him that their motives must be evil, and he was not slow to
suspect O'Shea of being in some plot with them. He had, of course, money
upon him, enough certainly to attract the cupidity of men who could
seldom handle money, and the medical stores were also convertible into
money. It struck him now how rash he had been to come upon this lonely
drive without any assurance of O'Shea's respectability.

These thoughts came to him because he almost immediately perceived that
he was the subject of conversation. It seemed odd to stand so near them
and not understand a word they said. He heard enough now to know the
language they were speaking was the patois that, in those parts, is the
descendant of the Jersey French. These men, then, were Acadians--the boy
also, for he gabbled freely to them. Either they had sinister designs on
him, or he was an obstruction to some purpose that they wished to
accomplish. This was evident now from their tones and gestures. They
were talking most vehemently about him, especially the boy and O'Shea,
and it was evident that these two disagreed, or at least could not for
some time agree, as to what was to be his fate.

Caius was defenceless, for so peaceful was the country to which he was
accustomed that he carried no weapon. He took his present danger little
to heart. There was a strange buoyancy--born, no doubt, of the bracing
wind--in his spirit. If they were going to kill him--well, he would die
hard; and a man can but die once. A laugh arose from the men; it
sounded to him as strange a sound, for the time and place, as the almost
human cry of the horse a few minutes before. Then O'Shea came towards
him with menacing gestures. The two men went back into the gap of the
sand-hills from whence they must have come.

"Look here," said O'Shea roughly, "do ye value your life?"

"Certainly."

Caius folded his arms, and made this answer with well-bred contempt.

"And ye shall have your life, but on one condition. Take out of your
bags what's needed for dealing with the sick this noight, for there's a
dying man ye must visit before ye sleep, and the condition is that ye
walk on to The Cloud by yourself on this beach without once looking
behoind ye. Moind what I say! Ye shall go free--yerself, yer money, and
yer midicines--if ye walk from here to the second house that is a
loighthouse without once turning yer head or looking behoind ye." He
pointed to the bags with a gesture of rude authority. "Take out what ye
need, and begone!"

"I shall do nothing of the sort," replied Caius, his arms still folded.

The boy had come near enough to hear what was said, but he did not
interfere.

"And why not?" asked O'Shea, a jeer in his tones.

"Because I would not trust one of you not to kill me as soon as my back
was turned."

"And if your back isn't turned, and that pretty quick, too, ye'll not
live many hours."

"I prefer to die looking death in the face; but it'll be hard for the
man who attempts to touch me."

"Oh! ye think ye'll foight for it, do ye?" asked O'Shea lightly; "but
ye're mistaken there--the death ye shall doie will admit of no foighting
on your part."

"There is something more in all this business than I understand." Apart
from the question whether he should die or live, Caius was puzzled to
understand why his enemies had themselves fallen foul of the quicksand,
or what connection the accident could have with the attack upon his
life. "There is more in this than I understand," he repeated loudly.

"Just so," replied O'Shea, imperturbable; "there is more than ye can
understand, and I offer ye a free passage to a safe place. Haven't ye
wits enough about ye to take it and be thankful?"

"I will not turn my back." Caius reiterated his defiance.

"And ye'll stroike out with yer fist at whatever comes to harm ye? Will
ye hit in the face of the frost and the wind if ye're left here to
perish by cold, with your clothes wet as they are? or perhaps ye'll come
to blows with the quicksand if half a dozen of us should throw ye in
there."

"There are not half a dozen of you," he replied scornfully.

"Come and see." O'Shea did not offer to touch him, but he began to walk
towards the opening in the dune, and dragged Caius after him by mere
force of words. "Come and see for yourself. What are ye afraid of, man?
Come! if ye want to look death in the face, come and see what it is
ye've got to look at."

Caius followed reluctantly, keeping his own distance. O'Shea passed the
shivering pony, and went into the opening of the dune, which was now all
in shadow because of the black cloud in the sky. Inside was a small
valley. Its sand-banks might have been made of bleached bones, they
looked so gray and dead. Just within the opening was an unexpected
sight--a row of hooded and muffled figures stood upright in the sand.
There was something appalling in the sight to Caius. Each man was placed
at exactly the same distance from his fellow; they seemed to stand with
heads bowed, and hands clasped in front of their breasts; faces and
hands, like their forms, were hooded and muffled. Caius did not think,
or analyze his emotion. No doubt the regular file of the men, suggesting
discipline which has such terrible force for weal or woe, and their
attitudes, suggesting motives and thoughts of which he could form not
the faintest explanation, were the two elements which made the scene
fearful to him.

O'Shea stopped a few paces from the nearest figure, and Caius stopped a
few paces nearer the opening of the dune.

"Ye see these men?" said O'Shea.

Caius did not answer.

O'Shea raised his voice:

"I say before them what I have said, that if ye'll swear here before
heaven, as a man of honour, that ye'll walk from here to the loighthouse
on The Cloud--which ye shall find in the straight loine of the
beach--without once turning yer head or looking behoind ye, neither man
nor beast nor devil shall do ye any hurt, and yer properties shall be
returned to ye when a cart can be got to take them. Will ye swear?"

Caius made no answer. He was looking intently. As soon as the tones of
O'Shea's voice were carried away by the bluster of the wind, as far as
the human beings there were concerned there was perfect stillness; the
surf and the wind might have been sweeping the dunes alone.

"And if I will not swear?" asked Caius, in a voice that was loud enough
to reach to the last man in the long single rank.

O'Shea stepped nearer him, and, as if in pretence of wiping his face
with his gloved hand, he sent him a hissing whisper that gave a sudden
change of friendliness and confidence to his voice, "Don't be a fool!
swear it."

"Are these men, or are they corpses?" asked Caius.

The stillness of the forms before him became an almost unendurable
spectacle.

He had no sooner spoken than O'Shea appealed to the men, shouting words
in the queer guttural French. And Caius saw the first man slowly raise
his hand as if in an attitude of oath-taking, and the second man did
likewise. O'Shea turned round and faced him, speaking hastily. The
shadow of the cloud was sending dark shudderings of lighter and darker
shades across the sand hollow, and these seemed almost like a visible
body of the wind that with searching blast drifted loose sand upon them
all. With the sweep of the shadow and the wind, Caius saw the movement
of the lifted hand go down the line.

"I lay my loife upon it," said O'Shea, "that if ye'll say on yer honour
as a man, and as a gintleman, that ye'll not look behoind ye, ye shall
go scot-free. It's a simple thing enough; what harm's there in it?"

The boy had come near behind Caius. He said one soft word, "Promise!" or
else Caius imagined he said it. Caius knew at least what the boy wished
him to do.

The pony moved nearer, shivering with cold, and Caius realized that the
condition of wet and cold in which they were need not be prolonged.

"I promise," he shouted angrily, "and I'll keep the promise, whatever
infernal reason there may be for it; but if I'm attacked from
behind----" He added threats loud and violent, for he was very angry.

Before he had finished speaking--the thought might have been brought by
some movement in the shadow of the cloud, and by the sound of the wind,
or by his heated brain--but the thought came to him that O'Shea, under
his big fur-coat, had indulged in strange, harsh laughter.

Caius cared nothing. He had made his decision; he had given his word; he
had no thought now but to take what of his traps he could carry and be
gone on his journey.




CHAPTER VI.

THE SEA-MAID.


Caius understood that he had still three miles of the level beach to
tread. At first he hardly felt the sand under his feet, they were so
dead with cold. The spray from the roaring tide struck his face
sideways. He had time now to watch each variation, each in and out of
the dune, and he looked at them eagerly, as the only change that was
afforded to the monotony. Then for the first time he learned how
completely a man is shut out from all one half of the world by the
simple command not to look behind him, and all the unseen half of his
world became rife, in his thought, with mysterious creatures and their
works. At first he felt that he was courting certain death by keeping
the word he had given; in the clap of the waves he seemed to hear the
pistol-shot that was to be his doom, or the knife-like breath of the
wind seemed the dagger in the hand of a following murderer. But as he
went on and no evil fate befell, his fear died, and only curiosity
remained--a curiosity so lively that it fixed eagerly upon the stretch
of the surf behind him, upon his own footsteps left on the soft sand,
upon the sand-hills that he had passed, although they were almost the
same as the sand-hills that were before. It would have been a positive
joy to him to turn and look at any of these things. While his mind
dwelt upon it, he almost grudged each advancing step, because it put
more of the interesting world into the region from which he was shut out
as wholly as if a wall of separation sprang up between the behind and
before.

By an effort of will he turned his thought from this desire, or from
considering what the mysterious something could be that it was
all-important for him not to see, or who it was that in this desolate
place would spy upon him if he broke his vow.

When his activity had set the blood again coursing warmly in his veins,
all that was paltry and depressing passed from his mind and heart, as a
mist is rolled away by the wind. The sweet, wild air, that in those
regions is an elixir of life to the stranger, making him young if he be
old, and if he be young making him feel as demigods felt in days of
yore, for a day and a night had been doing its work upon him. Mere life
and motion became to him a delight such as he had never felt before; and
when the moon came out again from the other side of the cloud, the sight
of her beams upon surf and sand was like a rare wild joy. He was glad
that no one interfered with his pleasure, that he was, as far as he
knew, alone with the clouds that were winging their way among moonbeams
in the violet sky, and with the waves and the wind with which he held
companionship.

He had gone a mile, it might be more; he heard a step behind him. In
vain he tried to convince himself that some noise natural to the lonely
beach deceived him. In the high tide of life that the bracing air had
brought him, his senses were acute and true. He knew that he heard this
step: it was light, like a child's; it was nimble, like a fawn's;
sometimes it was very near him. He was not in the least afraid; but do
what he would, his mind could form no idea of what creature it might be
who thus attended him. No dark or fearful picture crossed his mind just
then; all its images were good.

The fleet of white clouds that were sailing in the sky rang glad changes
upon the beauty of the moonlit scene. Half a mile or more Caius walked
listening to the footstep; then he came on a wrecked boat buried in the
sand, its rim laid bare by the tide. Caius struck his foot and fell upon
it.

Striking his head, stunned for a moment, then springing up again, in the
motion of falling or rising, he knew not how, he saw the beach behind
him--the waves that were now nearing the foot of the dune, the track
between with his footsteps upon it, and, standing in this track, alert
to fly if need be, the figure of a girl. Her dress was all blown by the
wind, her curling hair was like a twining garland round her face, and
her face--ah! that face: he knew it as well as, far better than he knew
his own; its oval curves, its dimpled sweetness, its laughing eyes. Just
for such brief seconds of time as were necessary for perfect recognition
he saw it; and then, impelled by his former purpose--no time now for a
new volition--he got himself up and walked on, with his eyes in front as
before.

He thought the sea-maid did not know that he had seen her, for her
footsteps came on after his own. Or, if she knew, she trusted him not to
turn. That was well; she might trust him. Never in his life had Caius
felt less temptation to do the thing that he held to be false. He knew
now, for he had seen the whole line of the beach, that there was
nothing there for him to fear, nothing that could give any adequate
reason to any man to compel him to walk as he now walked. That did not
matter; he had given his word. In the physical exaltation of the hour
the best of him was uppermost. Like the angels, who walk in heavenly
paths, he had no desire to be a thing that could stoop from moral
rectitude. The knowledge that his old love of the sea was his companion
only enhanced the strength of his vow, only made all that the strength
of vows mean more dear to him; and the moonlit shore was more beautiful,
and life, each moment that he was then living, more absolutely good.

So they went on, and he did not try to think where the sea-maid had come
from, or whether the gray flapping dress and the girlish step were but
the phantom guise that she could don for the hour, or whether, if he
should turn and pursue her, she would drop from her upright height into
the scaly folds that he had once seen, and plunge into the waves, or
whether _that_ had been the masquerade, and she a true woman of the
land. He did not know or care. Come what come might, his spirit walked
the beach that night with the beautiful spirit that the face of the
sea-maid interpreted to him.




CHAPTER VII.

THE GRAVE LADY.


The hills of Cloud Island were a fair sight to see in the moonlight.
When the traveller came close to them, the beach ended obviously in a
sandy road which led up on the island. There was a small white wooden
house near the beach; there was candlelight within, but Caius took no
notice of it. The next building was a lighthouse, which stood three
hundred yards farther on. The light looking seaward was not visible. He
passed the distance swiftly, and no sooner were his feet level with the
wall of the square wooden tower, than he turned about on the soft sandy
road and faced the wind that had been racing with him, and looked. The
scene was all as he might have expected to see it; but there was no
living creature in sight. He stood in the gale, bare-headed, looking,
looking; he had no desire to enter the house. The sea-maid was not in
sight, truly; but as long as he stood alone in the moonlight scene, he
felt that her presence was with him. Then he remembered the dying man of
whom he had been told, who lay in such need of his ministrations. The
thought came with no binding sense of duty such as he had felt
concerning the keeping of his vow. He would have scorned to do a
dishonourable thing in the face of the uplifting charm of the nature
around him, and, more especially, in the presence of his love; but what
had nature and this, her beautiful child, to do with the tending of
disease and death? Better let the man die; better remain himself in the
wholesome outside. He felt that he would put himself at variance with
the companions of the last glorious hour if he attended to the dictates
of this dolorous duty. Yet, because of a dull habit of duty he had, he
turned in a minute, and went into the house where he had been told he
would receive guidance for the rest of his journey.

He had no sooner knocked at the substantial door on the ground-floor of
the lighthouse than it was opened by a sallow-faced, kindly-looking old
woman. She admitted him, as if he were an expected comer, into a large
square room, in which a lamp and a fire were burning. The room was
exquisitely neat and clean, as if the inspector of lighthouses might be
looked for at any moment. The woman, who was French, spoke a little
English, and her French was of a sort which Caius could understand and
answer. She placed a chair for him by the heated stove, asked where Mr.
O'Shea and the cart had tarried, listened with great interest to a brief
account of the accident in the quicksand, and, without more delay,
poured out hot strong coffee, which Caius drank out of a large bowl.

"Are you alone in the house?" asked Caius. The impression was strong
upon him that he was in a place where the people bore a dangerous or
mysterious character. A woman to be alone, with open doors, must either
be in league with those from whom danger might be feared, or must
possess mysterious powers of self-defence.

The woman assured him that she was alone, and perfectly safe. She gave a
kindly and careful glance at the traveller's boots, which had been wet,
and brought him another pair. It was evident she knew who Caius was, and
wherefore he had come to the island, and that her careful entertainment
of him was prearranged. It was arranged, too, that she should pass him
on to the patient for whom his skill was chiefly desired that night as
quickly as possible. She gave him only reasonable time to be warmed and
fed, telling him the while what a good man this was who had lately been
taken so very ill, what an excellent husband and father, how important
his life was to the welfare of the community.

"For," said she, "he is truly rather rich and very intelligent; so much
so that some would even say that he was the friend of Madame Le Maître."
Her voice had a crescendo of vehemence up to this last name.

Caius had his marching orders once more. His hostess went out with him
to the moonlit road to point his way. She showed him where the road
divided, and which path to take, and said that he must then pass three
houses and enter the fourth. She begged him, with courteous authority,
to hasten.

The houses were a good way apart. After half an hour's fast walking,
Caius came to the appointed place. The house was large, of
light-coloured wood, shingled all over roof and sides, and the light and
shades in the lapping of the shingles gave the soft effect almost as of
feathers in the lesser light of night. It stood in a large compound of
undulating grassy ground.

The whole lower floor of this house was one room. In the middle of it,
on a small pallet bedstead, lay the sick man. Beside him was a woman
dressed in gray homespun, apparently his wife, and another woman who
wore a dress not unlike that of a nun, a white cap being bandaged
closely round her forehead, cheeks and chin. The nun-like dress gave her
great dignity. She seemed to Caius a strong-featured woman of large
stature, apparently in early middle age. He was a good deal surprised
when he found that this was Madame Le Maître. He had had no definite
notion of her, but this certainly did not fulfil his idea.

It was but the work of a short time to do all that could be done that
night for the sick man, to leave the remedies that were to be used. It
was now midnight. The hot stove in the room, causing reaction from the
strongly-stimulating air, made him again feel heavy with sleep. The
nun-like lady, who had as yet said almost nothing to him, now touched
him on the shoulder and beckoned him to follow her. She led him out into
the night again, round the house and into a barn, in either side of
which were tremendous bins of hay.

"Your house," she said, "is a long way from here, and you are very
tired. In the house here there is the infection." Here she pointed him
to the hay, and, giving him a warm blanket, bade him good-night.

Caius shut the door, and found that the place was lit by dusky rays of
moonlight that came through chinks in its walls. He climbed the ladder
that reached to the top of the hay, and rolled himself and his blanket
warmly in it. The barn was not cold. The airiness of the walls was a
relief to him after the infected room. Never had couch felt more
luxurious.




CHAPTER VIII.

HOW THEY LIVED ON THE CLOUD.


When the chinks of moonlight had been replaced by brighter chinks of
sunlight, the new doctor who had come so gallantly to the aid of the
sufferers on Cloud Island opened his eyes upon his first day there.

He heard some slight sounds, and looked over the edge of his bed to see
a little table set forth in the broad passage between the two stores of
hay. A slip of a girl, of about fourteen years of age, was arranging
dishes upon it. When Caius scrambled down, she informed him, with
childish timidity of mien, that Madame Le Maître had said that he was to
have his breakfast there before he went in to see "father." The child
spoke French, but Caius spoke English because it relieved his mind to do
so.

"Upon my word!" he said, "Madame Le Maître keeps everything running in
very good order, and takes prodigious care of us all."

"Oh, oui, monsieur," replied the child sagely, judging from his look of
amusement and the name he had repeated that this was the proper answer.

The breakfast, which was already there, consisted of fish, delicately
baked, and coffee. The young doctor felt exceedingly odd, sitting in the
cart-track of a barn and devouring these viands from a breakfast-table
that was tolerably well set out with the usual number of dishes and
condiments. The big double door was closed to keep out the cold wind,
but plenty of air and numerous sunbeams managed to come in. The sunbeams
were golden bars of dust, crossing and interlacing in the twilight of
the windowless walls. The slip of a girl in her short frock remained,
perhaps from curiosity, perhaps because she had been bidden to do so,
but she made herself as little obvious as possible, standing up against
one corner near the door and shyly twisting some bits of hay in her
hands. Caius, who was enjoying himself, discovered a new source of
amusement in pretending to forget her presence and then looking at her
quickly, for he always found the glance of her big gray eyes was being
withdrawn from his own face, and child-like confusion ensued.

When he had eaten enough, he set to his proper work with haste and
diligence. He made the girl tell him how many children there were, and
find them all for him, so that in a trice he had them standing in a row
in the sunlight outside the barn, with their little tongues all out,
that the state of their health might be properly inspected. Then he went
in to his patient of the night before.

The disease was diphtheria. It was a severe case; but the man had been
healthy, and Caius approved the arrangements that Madame Le Maître had
made to give him plenty of air and nourishment.

The wife was alone with her husband this morning, and when Caius had
done all that was necessary, and given her directions for the proper
protection of herself and the children, she told him that her eldest
girl would go with him to the house of Madame Le Maître. That lady,
said she simply, would tell him where he was to go next, and all he was
to do upon the island.

"Upon my word!" said Caius again to himself, "it seems I am to be taken
care of and instructed, truly."

He had a sense of being patronized; but his spirits were high--nothing
depressed him; and, remembering the alarming incident of the night
before, he felt that the lady's protection might not be unnecessary.

When he got to the front of the house, for the first time in the morning
light, he saw that the establishment was of ample size, but kept with no
care for a tasteful appearance. There was no path of any sort leading
from the gate in the light paling to the door; all was a thick carpet of
grass, covering the unlevelled ground. The grass was waving madly in the
wind, which coursed freely over undulating fields that here displayed no
shrubs or trees of any sort. Caius wondered if the wind always blew on
these islands; it was blowing now with the same zest as the day before;
the sun poured down with brilliancy upon everything, and the sea, seen
in glimpses, was blue and tempestuous. Truly, it seemed a land which the
sun and the moon and the wind had elected to bless with lavish
self-giving.

When Caius opened the gate of the whitewashed paling, the girl who was
to be his guide came round from the back of the house after him, and on
her track came a sudden rush of all the other children, who, with curls
and garments flying in the wind and delightful bursts of sudden
laughter, came to stand in a row again with their tongues outstretched
at Caius' retreating form.

The girl could only talk French, and she talked very little of that,
giving him "yes" or "no" demurely, as they went up the road which ran
inland through the island hills, keeping about midway between sea and
sea. Caius saw that the houses and small farms on either side resembled
those which he had seen on the other island. Small and rough many of
them were; but their whitewashed walls, the strong sunshine, and the
large space of grass or pine shrubs that was about each, gave them an
appearance of cleanliness. There was no sign of the want or squalor that
he had expected; indeed, so prosperous did many of the houses look, that
he himself began to have an injured feeling, thinking that he had been
brought to befriend people who might very well have befriended
themselves.

It was when they came out at a dip in the hills near the outer sea again
that the girl stopped, and pointing Caius to a house within sight, went
back. This house in the main resembled the other larger houses of the
island; but pine and birch trees were beginning to grow high about it,
and on entering its enclosure Caius trod upon a gravel path, and noticed
banks of earth that in the summer time had held flowers. In front of the
white veranda two powerful mastiffs were lying in the sun. These lions
were not chained; they were looking for him before he appeared, but did
not take the trouble to rise at the sight of him; only a low and ominous
rumble, as of thunder beneath the earth, greeted his approach, and gave
Caius the strong impression that, if need was, they would arise to some
purpose.

A young girl opened the door. She was fresh and pretty-looking, but of
plebeian figure and countenance. Her dress was again gray homespun,
hanging full and short about her ankles. Her manner was different from
that of those people he had been lately meeting, for it had that gentle
reserve and formality that bespeaks training. She ushered him into a
good-sized room, where three other girls like herself were engaged in
sewing. Sitting at a table with a book, from which she had apparently
been reading to them, was the woman in the nun-like dress whom he had
met before. The walls of the room were of unpainted pinewood, planed to
a satin finish, and adorned with festoons of gray moss such as hangs
from forest boughs. This was tied with knots of red bittersweet berries;
the feathers of sea-birds were also displayed on the walls, and chains
of their delicate-coloured eggs were hanging there. Caius had not
stepped across the threshold before he began to suspect that he had
passed from the region of the real into the ideal.

"She is a romantic-minded woman," he said to himself. "I wonder if she
has much sense, after all?"

Then the woman whom he was thus inwardly criticising rose and came
across the room to meet him. Her perfect gravity, her dignity of
bearing, and her gracious greeting, impressed him in spite of himself.
Pictures that one finds in history and fiction of lady abbesses rose
before his mind; it was thus that he classified her. His opinion as to
the conscious romance of her life altered, for the woman before him was
very real, and he knew in a moment that she had seen and suffered much.
Her eyes were full of suffering and of solicitude; but it did not seem
to him that the suffering and solicitude were in any way connected with
a personal need, for there was also peace upon her face.

The room did not contain much furniture. When Caius sat down, and the
lady had resumed her seat, he found, as is apt to be the way in empty
rooms, that the chairs were near the wall, and that he, sitting facing
her, had left nearly the room's width between them. The sewing maidens
looked at them with large eyes, and listened to everything that was
said; and although they were silent, except for the sound of their
stitching, it was so evident that their thoughts must form a running
commentary that it gave Caius an odd feeling of acting in company with a
dramatic chorus. The lady in front of him had no such feeling; there was
nothing more evident about her than that she did not think of how she
appeared or how she was observed.

"You are very good to have come." She spoke with a slight French accent,
whether natural or acquired he could not tell. Then she left that
subject, and began at once to tell the story of the plague upon the
island--when it began, what efforts she and a few others had made to
arrest it, the carelessness and obstinacy with which the greater part of
the people had fostered it, its progress. This was the substance of what
she said; but she did not speak of the best efforts as being her own,
nor did she call the people stupid and obstinate. She only said:

"They would not have their houses properly cleaned out; they would not
wash or burn garments that were infected; they would not use
disinfectants, even when we could procure them; they will not yet. You
may say that in this wind-swept country there can be nothing in nature
to foster such a disease, nothing in the way the houses are built; but
the disease came here on a ship, and it is in the houses of the people
that it lingers. They will not isolate the sick; they will not----"

She stopped as if at a loss for a word. She had been speaking in a
voice whose music was the strain of compassion.

"In fact," said Caius, with some impatience, "they are a set of fools,
and worse, for they won't take a telling. Your duty is surely done. They
do not deserve that you should risk your life nursing them; they simply
deserve to be left to suffer."

She looked at him for a minute, as if earnestly trying to master a view
of the case new to her.

"Yes," speaking slowly. He saw that her hands, which were clasped in her
lap, pressed themselves more closely together--"yes, that is what they
deserve; but, you see, they are very ignorant. They do not see the
importance of these precautions; they have not believed me; they will
not believe you. They think quite honestly and truly that they will get
on well enough in doing their own way."

"Pig-headed!" commented Caius. Then, perceiving that he had not quite
carried her judgment along with his: "You yourself, madam, have admitted
that they do not deserve that either you or I should sacrifice our lives
to them."

"Ah, no," she replied, trouble of thought again in her eyes; "they do
not deserve that. But what do we deserve--you and I?"

There was no studied effect in the question. She was like one trying to
think more clearly by expressing her thought aloud.

"Madam," replied he, the smile of gallantry upon his lips, "I have no
doubt that you deserve the richest blessings of earth and heaven. For
myself----" He shrugged his shoulders, just about to say conventionally,
flippantly, that he was a sad, worthless fellow, but in some way her
sincerity made him sincere, and he finished: "I do not know that I have
done anything to forfeit them."

He supposed, as soon as he had said the words, that she would have a
theological objection to this view, and oppose it by rote; but there was
nothing of disapproval in her mien; there was even a gleam of greater
kindliness for him in her eye, and she said, not in answer, but as
making a remark by the way:

"That is just as I supposed when I asked you to come. You are like the
young ruler, who could not have been conceited because our Lord felt
greatly attracted to him."

Before this Caius had had a pleasing consciousness, regarding himself as
an interesting stranger talking to a handsome and interested woman. Now
he had wit enough to perceive that her interest in him never dipped to
the level of ordinary social relationships. He felt a sense of
remoteness, and did not even blush, though knowing certainly that
satire, although it was not in her mind, was sneering at him from behind
the circumstance.

The lady went right on, almost without pause, taking up the thread of
her argument: "But when the angels whisper to us that the best blessings
of earth and heaven are humility and faith and the sort of love that
does not seek its own, do we get up at once and spend our time learning
these things? or do we just go on as before, and think our own way good
enough? 'We are fools and worse, and will not take a telling.'" A smile
broke upon her lip now for the first time as she looked at him.
"'Pig-headed!'" she said.

Caius had seen that smile before. It passed instantly, and she sat
before him with grave, unruffled demeanour; but all his thoughts and
feelings seemed a-whirl. He could not collect his mind; he could not
remember what she had said exactly; he could not think what to answer;
indeed, he could not think at all. There had been a likeness to his
phantastic lady-love of the sea; then it was gone again; but it left him
with all his thoughts confounded. At length--because he felt that he
must look like a fool indeed--he spoke, stammering the first thing that
occurred to him:

"The patient that I have seen did not appear to be in a house that was
ill-ventilated or--or--that is, he was isolated from the rest of the
family."

He perceived that the lady had not the slightest knowledge of what it
was that had really confused him. He knew that in her eyes, in the eyes
of the maidens, it must appear that her home-thrust had gone to his
heart, that he had changed the subject because too weak to be able to
answer her. He was mortified at this, but he could not retrace his steps
in the conversation, for she had already answered him.

The household he had already visited, she said, with a few others, had
helped her by following sanitary rules; and then she went on talking
about what those rules were, what could and could not be done in the
circumstances of the families affected.

As she talked on, Caius knew that the thing he had thought must be false
and foolish. This woman and that other maiden were not the same in
thought, or character, or deed, or aspect. Furthermore, what experience
he had made him feel certain that the woman who had known him in that
relationship could not be so indifferent to his recognition, so
indifferent to all that was in him to which her beauty appealed, as
this woman was, and of this woman's indifference he felt convinced.

The provision made for the board and lodging of the new doctor was
explained to him. It was not considered safe for him to live with any of
the families of the island. A very small wooden building, originally
built as a stable, but never used, had been hastily remodelled into a
house for him. It was some way further down the winding road, within
sight of the house of Madame Le Maître.

Caius was taken to this new abode, and found that it contained two
rooms, furnished with the necessities and many of the comforts of life.
The stove was good; abundance of fuel was stacked near the house; simple
cooking utensils hung in the outer room; adjoining it, or rather, in a
bit of the same building set apart, was a small stable, in which a very
good horse was standing. The horse was for his use. If he could be his
own bed-maker, cook, and groom, it was evident that he would lack for
nothing. A man whom Madame Le Maître sent showed Caius his quarters, and
delivered to him the key; he also said that Madame Le Maître would be
ready in an hour to ride over the island with him and introduce him to
all the houses in which there was illness.

Caius was left for the hour to look over his establishment and make
friends with his horse. It was all very surprising.




CHAPTER IX.

THE SICK AND THE DEAD.


The bit of road that lay between Madame Le Maître's house and the house
allotted to Caius led, winding down a hill, through a stunted fir-wood.
The small firs held out gnarled and knotty branches towards the road;
their needles were a dark rich green.

Down this road Caius saw the lady come riding. Her horse was a beautiful
beast, hardly more than a colt, of light make and chestnut colour. She
herself was not becomingly attired; she wore just the same loose black
dress that she had worn in the house, and over the white cap a black
hood and cloak were muffled. No doubt in ancient times, before carriages
were in use, ladies rode in such feminine wrappings; but the taste of
Caius had been formed upon other models. He mounted his own horse and
joined her on the road without remark. He had found no saddle, only a
blanket with girths, and upon this he supposed he looked quite as
awkward as she did. The lady led, and they rode on across the island.

Caius knew that now it was the right time to tell Madame Le Maître what
had occurred the night before, and the ill-usage he had suffered. As she
appeared to be the most important person on the island, it was right
that she should know of the mysterious band of bandits upon the
beach--if, indeed, she did not already know; perhaps it was by power of
these she reigned. He found himself able to conjecture almost anything.

When he had quickened his horse and come beside her for the purpose of
relating his adventure, she began to speak to him at once. She told him
what number of cases of illness were then on her list--six in all. She
told him the number who had already died; and then they came past the
cemetery upon the hillside, and she pointed out the new-made graves. It
appeared that, although at that time there was an abatement in the
number of cases, diphtheria had already made sad ravages among the
little population; and as the winter would cause the people to shut up
their houses more and more closely, it was certain to increase rather
than to diminish. Then Madame Le Maître told him of one case, and of
another, in which the family bereavement seemed particularly sad. The
stories she told had great detail, but they were not tedious. Caius
listened, and forgot that her voice was musical or that her hood and
cloak were ugly; he only thought of the actors in the short sad idylls
of the island that she put before him.

When they entered the first house, he discovered that she herself had
been in the habit of visiting each of the sick every day as nurse, and,
as far as her simple skill could go, as doctor too. In this house it was
a little child that lay ill, and as soon as Caius saw it he ceased to
hope for its recovery. They used the new remedies that he had brought
with him, and when he looked round for someone who could continue to
apply them, he found that the mother was already dead, and the father
took no charge of the child--he was not there. A half-grown boy of about
fifteen was its only nurse, and he was not deft or wise, although love,
or a rude sense of conscience, had kept him from deserting his post.

"When we have visited the others, I will come back and remain," said
Madame Le Maître.

So they rode on down the hill and along the shingled beach that edged a
lagoon. Here the sea lapped softly and they were sheltered from the
wind. Here, too, they saw the other islands lying in the crescent they
composed, and they saw the waves of the bay break on the sand-bank that
was the other arm of the lagoon. Still Caius did not tell about his
adventure of the night before. The lady looked preoccupied, as if she
was thinking about the Angel of Death that was hovering over the cottage
they had left.

The next house was a large one, and here two children were ill. They
were well cared for, for two of the young girls whom he had seen in
Madame Le Maître's house were there for the time to nurse them.

They took one of these damsels with them when they went on. She was
willing to walk, but Caius set her upon his horse and led it; in this
way they made quicker progress. Up a hill they went, and over fields,
and in a small house upon a windy slope they found the mother of a
family lying very ill. Here, after Caius had said all that there was to
say, and Madame Le Maître, with skilful hands, had done all that she
could do in a short time, they left the young girl.

At the next and last house of their round, where the day before one
child had been ill, they now found three tossing and crying with pain
and fever. When it was time for them to go, Caius saw his companion
silently wring her hands at the thought of leaving them, for the mother,
worn out and very ignorant, was the only nurse. It did not seem that it
could be helped. Caius went out to his horse, and Madame Le Maître to
hers, but he saw her stand beside it as if too absent in mind to spring
to its back; her face was looking up into the blue above.

"You are greatly troubled," said Caius.

"Oh yes," her voice was low, but it came like the sound of a cry. "I do
not know what to do. All these months I have begged and entreated the
people to keep away from those houses where there was illness. It was
their only hope. And now that they begin to understand that, I cannot
bring the healthy to nurse the sick, even if they were willing to come.
They will take no precautions as we do. It is not safe; I have tried
it."

She did not look at Caius, she was looking at the blue that hung over
the sea which lay beneath them, but the weariness of a long long effort
was in her tone.

"Could we not manage to bring them all to one house that would serve as
a hospital?"

"Now that you have come, perhaps we can," she said, "but at present----"
She looked helplessly at the door of the house they had left.

"At present I will nurse these children," Caius said. "I do not need to
see the others again until evening."

He tied his horse in a shed, and nursed the children until the moon was
bright. Then, when he had left them as well as might be for the night,
he set out to return on his former track by memory. The island was very
peaceful; on field or hill or shore he met no one, except here and there
a plodding fisherman, who gave him "Good-evening" without apparently
knowing or caring who he was. The horse they knew, no doubt, that was
enough.

He made the same round as before, beginning at the other end. At the
house where the woman was ill the girl who was nursing her remained. At
the next house the young girl, who was dressed for the road, ingenuously
claimed his protection for her homeward way.

"I will go with you, monsieur, it will be more safe for me."

So he put her on his horse, but they did not talk to one another.

At the third house they found Madame Le Maître weeping passionately over
a dead baby, and the lout of a boy weeping with her. It surprised Caius
to feel suddenly that he could almost have wept, too, and yet he
believed that the child was better dead.

Someone had been out into the winter fields and gathered the small white
everlasting flowers that were still waving there, and twined them in the
curls of the baby's hair, and strewed them upon the meagre gray sheet
that covered it.

When they rode down to the village they were all quite silent. Caius
felt as if he had lived a long time upon this island. His brain was full
of plans for a hospital and for disinfecting the furniture of the
houses.

He visited the good man in whose barn he had slept the preceding night.
He went to his little house and fed himself and his horse. He discovered
his portmanteaus that O'Shea had promised to deliver, and found that
their contents had not been tampered with; but even this did not bring
his mind back with great interest to the events of the former night. He
was thinking of other things, and yet he hardly knew of what he was
thinking.




CHAPTER X.

A LIGHT-GIVING WORD.


The next morning, before Caius went out, he wrote a short statement of
all that had occurred beside the quicksand. The motive that prompted him
to do this was the feeling that it would be difficult for him to make
the statement to Madame Le Maître verbally. He began to realize that it
was not easy for him to choose the topics of conversation when they were
together.

She did not ride with him next day, as now he knew the road, but in the
course of the morning he saw her at the house where the three children
were ill, and she came out into the keen air with him to ask some
questions, and no doubt for the necessary refreshment of leaving the
close house, for she walked a little way on the dry, frozen grass.

Heavy as was the material of her cloak and hood, the strong wind toyed
with its outer parts as with muslin, but it could not lift the
closely-tied folds that surrounded her face and heavily draped her
figure. Caius stood with her on the frozen slope. Beneath them they
could see the whole stretch of the shining sand-dune that led to the
next island, the calm lagoon and the rough water in the bay beyond. It
did not seem a likely place for outlaws to hide in; the sun poured down
on every hill and hollow of the sand.

Caius explained then that his portmanteaus, with the stores, had arrived
safely; but that he had reason to think that the man O'Shea was not
trusty, that, either out of malice or fear of the companions among whom
he found himself, he had threatened his, Dr. Simpson's, life in the most
unwarrantable manner. He then presented the statement which he had drawn
up, and commended it to her attention.

Madame Le Maître had listened to his words without obvious interest; in
fact, he doubted if she had got her mind off the sick children before
she opened the paper. He would have liked to go away now, leaving the
paper with her, but she did not give him that opportunity.

"Ah! this is----" Then, more understandingly, "This is an account you
have written of your journey hither?"

Caius intimated that it was merely a complaint against O'Shea. Yet he
felt sure, while she was reading it, that, if she had any liveliness of
fancy, she must be interested in its contents, and if she had proper
appreciation, she must know that he had expressed himself well. When she
had finished, however, instead of coveting the possession of the
document, she gently gave it back to him.

"I am sorry," she said sincerely, "that you were put to inconvenience.
It was so kind of you to come, that I had hoped to make your journey as
comfortable as possible; but the sands are very treacherous, not because
the quicksands are large or deep, but because they shift in stormy
weather, sometimes appearing in one place, and sometimes in another. It
has been explained"--she was looking at him now, quite interested in
what she was saying--"by men who have visited these islands, that this
is to be accounted for by the beds of gypsum that lie under the sand,
for under some conditions the gypsum will dissolve."

The explanation concerning the gypsum was certainly interesting, but the
nature of the quicksand was not the point which Caius had brought
forward.

"It is this fact, that one cannot tell where the sand will be soft, that
makes it necessary to have a guide in travelling over the beach. The
people here become accustomed to the appearance of the soft places, but
it seems that O'Shea must have been deceived by the moonlight."

"I do not blame him for the accident," said Caius, "but for what
happened afterwards."

Her slight French accent gave to each of her words a quaint, distinct
form of its own. "O'Shea is--he is what you might call _funny_ in his
way of looking at things." She paused a moment, as if entirely conscious
of the inadequacy of the explanation. "I do not think," she continued,
as if in perplexity, "that I can explain this matter any more; but if
you will talk to O'Shea----"

"Madam," burst out Caius, "can it be that there is a large band of
lawless men who have their haunts so near this island, and you do not
know of it? That," he added, with emphatic reproach, "is impossible."

"I never heard of any such band of men."

Madame Le Maître spoke gently, and the dignity of her gentleness was
such that Caius was ashamed of his vehemence and his reproach. What he
wondered at, what he chafed at, was, that she showed no wonder
concerning an incident which her last statement made all the more
remarkable. She began to turn to go towards the house, and the mind of
Caius hit upon the one weak point in her own acknowledged view of the
matter.

"You have said that it is not safe for a stranger to walk upon the sands
without a guide; if you doubt my statement that these men threatened my
life, it yet remains that I was left to finish my journey alone. I do
not believe that there was danger myself. I do not believe that a man
would sink over his head in these holes; but according to their belief
and yours, madam----"

He stopped, for she had turned round with a distinct flash of
disapproval in her eyes.

"I do not doubt your statement." She paused, and he knew that his
accusation had been rude. "It would not occur to me"--there was still
the slight quaintness of one unaccustomed to English--"that you could do
anything unworthy of a gentleman." Another pause, and Caius knew that he
was bound over to keep the peace. "I think O'Shea got himself into
trouble, and that he did the best he could for you; but O'Shea lives not
far from your own house. He is not my servant, except that he rents my
husband's land." She paused again.

Caius would have urged that he had understood otherwise, or that
hitherto he had not found O'Shea either civil or communicative; but it
appeared that the lady had something more to say after her emphasis of
pause, and when she said it Caius bid her good-day without making
further excuse or justification. She said:

"I did not understand from O'Shea that he allowed you to walk on the
sands without some one who would have warned you if there had been
danger."

When Caius was riding on his way, he experienced something of that
feeling of exaltation that he had felt in the presence of his
inexplicable lady-love. Had he not proof at least now that she was no
dream or phantasy, and more than that, that she inhabited the same small
land with him? These people knew her; nay (his mind worked quickly), was
it not evident that she had been the link of connection between them and
himself? She knew him, then--his home, his circumstances, his address.
(His horse was going now where and how it would; the man's mind was
confounded by the questions that came upon it pell-mell, none waiting
for an answer.) In that other time when she had lived in the sea, and he
had seen her from the desolate bit of coast, who was she? Where had she
really lived? In what way could she have gained her information
concerning him? What could have tempted her to play the part of a fishy
thing? He remembered the monstrous skin that had covered her; he
remembered her motion in the water. Then he thought of her in the gray
homespun dress, such as a maid might trip her garden in, as he had seen
her travelling between the surf and the dune in the winter blast. Well,
he lived in an enchanted land; he had to deal with men and women of no
ordinary stuff and make, but they acknowledged their connection with
her. He was sure that she must be near him. The explanation must
come--of that, burning with curiosity as he was, he recked little. A
meeting must come; all his pulses tingled with the thought. It was a
thought of such a high sort of bliss to him that it seemed to wrap and
enfold his other thoughts; and when he remembered again to guide his
horse--all that day as he went about his work--he lived in it and worked
in it.

He went that evening to visit O'Shea, who lived in a good-sized house
half a mile or so from his own. From this interview, and from the clue
which Madame Le Maître had given, he began strongly to suspect that, for
some reason unknown, O'Shea's threatenings were to be remembered more in
the light of a practical joke than as serious. As to where the men had
come from who had played their part, as to where the boy had gone to, or
whether the boy and the lady were one--on these heads he got no light.
The farmer affected stupidity--affected not to understand his questions,
or answered them with such whimsical information on the wrong point that
little was revealed. Yet Caius did not quarrel with O'Shea. Was it not
possible that he, rude, whimsical man that he was, might have influence
with the sea-maid of the laughing face?

Next morning Caius received a formal message--the compliments of Madame
Le Maître, and she would be glad if he would call upon her before he
went elsewhere. He passed again between the growling mastiffs, and found
the lady with her maidens engaged in the simple household tasks that
were necessary before they went to their work of mercy. Madame Le Maître
stood as she spoke to him:

"When I wrote to you I said that if you came to us you would have no
chance of returning until the spring. I find that that is not true. Our
winter has held off so long that another vessel from the mainland has
called--you can see her lying in the bay. She will be returning to
Picton to-morrow. I think it right to tell you this; not that we do not
need you now as much as we did at first; not but that my hope and
courage would falter if you went; but now that you have seen the need
for yourself, how great or how little it is, just as you may think, you
ought to reconsider, and decide whether you will stay or not."

Caius spoke hastily:

"I will stay."

"Think! it is for four months of snow and ice, and you will receive no
letters, see no one that you could call a friend."

"I will stay."

"You have already taught me much; with the skill that you have imparted
and the stores that you have brought, which I will pay for, we should be
much better off than if you had not come. We should still feel only
gratitude to you."

"I have no thought of leaving."

"Remember, you think now that you have come that it is only a handful of
people that you can benefit, and they will not comprehend the sacrifice
that you have made, or be very grateful."

"Yes, I think that," replied Caius, admitting her insight. "At the same
time, I will remain."

She sighed, and her sigh was explained by her next words:

"Yet you do not remain for love of the work or the people."

Caius felt that his steady assertion that he would remain had perhaps
appeared to vaunt a heroism that was not true. He supposed that she had
seen his selfishness of motive, and that it was her time now to let him
see that she had not much admiration for him, so that he might make his
choice without bias.

"It is true that I do not love the people, but I will pass the winter
here."

If the lady had had the hard thought of him that he attributed to her,
there was no further sign of it, for she thanked him now with a
gratitude so great that silent tears trembled in her eyes.




CHAPTER XI.

THE LADY'S HUSBAND.


It was impossible but that Caius should take a keen interest in his
medical work. It was the first time that he had stood alone to fight
disease, and the weight of the responsibility added zest to his care of
each particular case. It was, however, natural to him to be more
interested in the general weal than in the individual, more interested
in a theoretical problem than in its practical working. His mind was
concerned now as to where and how the contagion hid itself, reappearing
as it had done, again and again in unlikely places; for there could be
assuredly no home for it in air, or sea, or land. Nor could drains be at
fault, for there were none. Next to this, the subject most constantly in
his mind was the plan of the hospital.

Madame Le Maître had said to him: "I have tried to persuade the people
to bring their sick to beds in my house, where we would nurse them, but
they will 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 Maître 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 Maître.

If he had never known and loved the lady of the sea, he thought that his
desire to please Madame Le Maître 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 Maître, 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 Maître 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 Maître?"

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 Maître?"

"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 Maître 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 Gaspé 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 Maître 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 Maître 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 Maître 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 Maître 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 Maître 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 Maître 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 the brief
minute in which, to his own confounding, he had seen the face of the
sea-maid in the lady's own face, and a phantom doubt came to him as to
whether she were not herself the sea-maid, disfigured and made aged by
the wrappings she wore. He did not, however, believe this. He had every
reason to refuse the belief; and if he had had no other, this woman's
character was enough, it appeared to him, to give the lie to the
thought. A more intelligent view concerning that fleeting likeness was
that the two women were nearly related to one another, the younger in
charge of the elder; and that the younger, who had for some purpose or
prank played about in the waters near his home, must have lived in some
house there, must have means of communication with the place, and must
have acquainted Madame Le Maître with his position when the need of a
physician arose. What was so dissatisfying to him was that all this was
the merest conjecture, that the lady whom he loved was a person whom he
had been obliged to invent in order to explain the appearances that had
so charmed him. He had not a shadow of proof of her existence.

The ice became strong, and bridged over the bay that lay within the
crescent of islands. All the islands, with their dunes, were covered
with snow; the gales which had beaten up the surf lessened in force; and
on the long snow-covered beaches there was only a fringe of white
breakers upon the edge of a sea that was almost calm.

The first visitor of any importance who came across the bay was the
English clergyman. Nearly all the people on Cloud Island were
Protestants, in so far as they had any religion. They were not a pious
people, but it seemed that this priest had been exceedingly faithful to
them in their trouble, and when he had been obliged to close the church
for fear of the contagion, had visited them regularly, except in those
few weeks between the seasons when the road by the beach had been almost
impassable.

Caius was first aware of the advent of this welcome visitor by a great
thumping at his door one morning before he had started on his daily
round. On opening it, he saw a hardy little man in a fur coat, who held
out his hand to him in enthusiastic greeting.

"Well, now, this is what I call being a good boy--a very good boy--to
come here to look after these poor folk."

Caius disclaimed the virtue which he did not feel.

"Motives! I don't care anything about motives. The point is to do the
right thing. I'm a good boy to come and visit them; you're a good boy to
come and cure them. They are not a very grateful lot, I'm sorry to say,
but we have nothing to do with that; we're put here to look after them,
and what we feel about it, or what they feel about it, is not the
question."

He had come into Caius' room, stamping the snow off his big boots. He
was a spare, elderly man, with gray hair and bright eyes. His horse and
sleigh stood without the door, and the horse jingled its bells
continually.

Here was a friend! Caius decided at once to question this man concerning
Madame Le Maître, and--that other lady in whose existence he believed.

"The main thing that you want on these islands is nerve," said the
clergyman. "It would be no good at all now"--argumentatively--"for the
Bishop to send a man here who hadn't nerve. You never know where you'll
meet a quicksand, or a hole in the ice. Chubby and I nearly went under
this morning and never were seen again. Some of these fellows had been
cutting a hole, and--well, we just saw it in time. It would have been
the end of us, I can tell you; but then, you see, if you are being a
good boy and doing what you're told, that does not matter so much."

It appeared that Chubby was the clergyman's pony. In a short time Caius
had heard of various other adventures which she and her master had
shared together. He was interested to know if any of them would throw
any light upon the remarkable conduct of O'Shea and his friends; but
they did not.

"The men about here," he said--"I can't make anything out of them--are
they lawless?"

"You see"--in explanatory tone--"if you take a man and expose him to the
sea and the wind for half his life, you'll find that he is pretty much
asleep the other half. He may walk about with his eyes open, but his
brain's pretty much asleep; he's just equal to lounging and smoking.
There are just two things these men can do--fish, and gather the stuff
from wrecks. They'll make from eight dollars a day at the fishing, and
from sixteen to twenty when a wreck's in. They can afford to be idle the
rest of the time, and they are gloriously idle."

"Do they ever gather in bands to rob wrecked ships, or for other
unlawful purposes?"

"Oh no, not in the least! Oh no, nothing of the kind! They'll steal from
a wreck, of course, if they get the chance; but on the sly, not by
violence. Their worst sin is independence and self-righteousness. You
can't teach the children anything in the schools, for instance, for the
parents won't have them punished; they are quite sure that their
children never do anything wrong. That comes of living so far out of the
world, and getting their living so easily. I can tell you, Utopia has a
bad effect on character."

Caius let the matter go for that time; he had the prospect of seeing the
clergyman often.

Another week, when the clergyman had come to the island and Caius met
him by chance, they had the opportunity of walking up a long snowy hill
together, leading their horses. Caius asked him then about Madame Le
Maître and O'Shea, and heard a plain consecutive tale of their lives and
of their coming to the island, which denuded the subject of all unknown
elements and appeared to rob it of special interest.

Captain Le Maître, it appeared, had a life-long lease of the property on
Cloud Island, and also some property on the mainland south of Gaspé
Basin; but the land was worth little except by tillage, and, being a
seaman, he neglected it. His father had had the land before him.
Pembroke, the clergyman, had seen his father. He had never happened to
see the son, who would now be between forty and fifty years of age; but
when Madame Le Maître had come to look after the farm on Cloud Island,
she had made herself known to him as in charge of her husband's affairs.
She found that she could not get the land worked by the islanders, and
had induced O'Shea, who it seemed was an old farm hand of her own
father's, to settle upon this farm, which was a richer one than the one
he had had upon the mainland. The soil of the islands, Pembroke said,
was in reality exceedingly rich, but in no case had it ever been
properly worked, and he was in hopes that now Madame Le Maître might
produce a model farm, which would be of vast good in showing the
islanders how much they lost by their indifferent manner of treating
their land.

"Why did she come to the islands?"

"Conscientiousness, I think. The land here was neglected; the people
here certainly present a field white to harvest to anyone who has the
missionary spirit."

"Is she--is she very devout?" asked Caius.

"Well, yes, in her own way she is--mind, I say in her own way. I
couldn't tell you, now, whether she is Protestant or Papist; I don't
believe she knows herself."

"He that sitteth between two stools----" suggested Caius, chiefly for
want of something to say.

"Well, no, I wouldn't say that. Bless you! the truest hearts on God's
earth don't trouble about religious opinions; they have got the
essential oil expressed out of them, and that's all they want."

To Caius this subject of the lady's religion appeared a matter in which
he had no need to take interest, but the other went on:

"She was brought up in a convent, you know--a country convent somewhere
on the Gaspé coast, and, from what she tells me, the nuns had the good
policy to make her happy. She tells me that where the convent gardens
abutted on the sea, she and her fellows used to be allowed to fish and
row about. You see, her mother had been a Catholic, and the father,
being an old miser, had money, so I suppose the sisters thought they
could make a nun of her; and very likely they would have done, for she
is just that sort, but the father stopped that little game by making her
marry before he died."

"I always had an idea that the people on the coast up there were all
poor and quite uneducated."

"Well, yes, for the most part they are pretty much what you would see on
these islands; but our Bishop tells me that, here and there, there are
excellent private houses, and the priests' houses and the convents are
tolerably well off. But, to tell you the truth, I think this lady's
father had some education, and his going to that part of the country may
be accounted for by what she told me once about her mother. Her mother
was a dancer, a ballet-dancer, a very estimable and pious woman, her
daughter says, and I have no doubt it is true; but an educated man who
makes that sort of marriage, you know, may prefer to live out of the
world."

Caius was becoming interested.

"If she has inherited her mother's strength and lightness, that explains
how she gets on her horse. By Jove! I never saw a woman jump on a horse
without help as she does."

"Just so; she has marvellous strength and endurance, and the best proof
of that, is the work she is doing nowadays. Why, with the exception of
three days that she came to see my wife, and would have died if she
hadn't, she has worked night and day among these sick people for the
last six months. She came to see my wife pretty much half dead, but the
drive on the sand and a short rest pretty well set her up again."

Pembroke drifted off here into discourse about the affairs of his
parish, which comprised all the Protestant inhabitants of the island.
His voice went on in the cheerful, jerky, matter-of-fact tone in which
he always talked. Caius did not pay much heed, except that admiration
for the sweet spirit of the man and for the pluck and hardihood with
which he carried on his work, grew in him in spite of his heedlessness,
for there was nothing that Pembroke suspected less than that he himself
was a hero.

"Pretty tough work you have of it," said Caius at last; "if it was only
christening and marrying and burying them all, you would have more than
enough to do, with the distances so great."

"Oh, bless you! my boy, yes; it's the distance and the weather; but what
are we here for but to do our work? Life isn't long, any way, but I'll
tell you what it is--a man needs to know the place to know what he can
do and what he can't. Now, the Bishop comes over for a week in summer--I
don't know a finer man than our Bishop anywhere; he doesn't give himself
much rest, and that's a fact; but they've sent him out from England,
and what does he know about these islands? He said to me that he wanted
me to have morning service every Sunday, as I have it at Harbour Island,
and service every Sunday afternoon here on The Cloud."

"He might as well have suggested that you had morning service on the
Magdalens, afternoon service in Newfoundland, and evening service in
Labrador."

"Exactly, just as possible, my boy; but they had the diphtheria here, so
I couldn't bring him over, even in fair weather, to see how he liked the
journey."

All this time Caius was cudgelling his brains to know how to bring the
talk back to Madame Le Maître, and he ended by breaking in with an
abrupt inquiry as to how old she was.

A slight change came over Pembroke's demeanour. It seemed to Caius that
his confidential tone lapsed into one of suspicious reserve.

"Not very old"--dryly.

Caius perceived that he was being suspected of taking an undue interest
in the benefactress of the island. The idea, when it came from another,
surprised him.

"Look here! I don't take much interest in Madame Le Maître, except that
she seems a saint and I'd like to please her; but what I want to know is
this--there is a girl who is a sister, or niece, or daughter, or some
other relation of hers, who is on these islands. Who is she, and where
is she?"

"Do you mean any of the girls she has in her house? She took them from
families upon the island only for the sake of training them."

"I don't mean any of those girls!"--this with emphasis.

"I don't know who you mean."

Caius turned and faced him. Do what he would, he could not hide his
excited interest.

"You surely must know. It is impossible that there should be a girl,
young, beautiful and refined, living somewhere about here, and you not
know."

"I should say so--quite impossible."

"Then, be kind enough to tell me who she is. I have an important reason
for asking."

"My dear boy, I would tell you with all the pleasure in the world if I
knew."

"I have seen her." Caius spoke in a solemn voice.

The priest looked at him with evident interest and curiosity. "Well,
where was she, and who was she?"

"You must know: you are in Madame Le Maître's confidence; you travel
from door to door, day in and day out; you know everybody and everything
upon these islands."

"I assure you," said the priest, "that I never heard of such a person."




CHAPTER XIII.

WHITE BIRDS; WHITE SNOW; WHITE THOUGHTS.


By degrees Caius was obliged to give up his last lingering belief in the
existence of the lady he loved. It was a curious position to be in, for
he loved her none the less. Two months of work and thought for the
diseased people had slipped away, and by the mere lapse of time, as well
as by every other proof, he had come to know that there was no maiden in
any way connected with Madame Le Maître who answered to the visions he
had seen, or who might be wooed by the man who had ceased to care for
all other women for her sweet sake.

After Caius had arrived the epidemic had become worse, as it had been
prophesied it would, when the people began to exclude the winter air
from their houses. In almost every family upon the little isle there was
a victim, and Caius, under the compelling force of the orders which
Madame Le Maître never gave and the wishes she never expressed, became
nurse as well as doctor, using what skill he had in every possible
office for the sick, working early and late, and many a time the night
through. It was not a time to prattle of the sea-maid to either Madame
Le Maître or O'Shea, who both of them worked at his side in the battle
against death, and were, Caius verily believed, more heroic and
successful combatants than himself. Some solution concerning his
lady-love there must be, and Caius neither forgot nor gave up his
intention of probing the lives of these two to discover what he wished;
but the foreboding that the discovery would work him no weal made it the
easier to lay the matter aside and wait. They were all bound in the same
icy prison; he could afford patience.

The question of the hospital had been solved in this way. Madame Le
Maître had taken O'Shea and his wife and children to live with her, and
such patients as could be persuaded or forced into hospital were taken
to his house and nursed there. Then, also, as the disease became more
prevalent, people who had thus far refused all sanitary measures, in
dire fear opened their doors, and allowed Caius and O'Shea to enter with
whitewash brushes and other means of disinfection.

Caius was successful in this, that, in proportion to the number of
people who were taken ill, the death-rate was only one third of what it
had been before he came. He and his fellow-workers were successful also
in a more radical way, for about the end of January it was suddenly
observed among them that there were no new cases of illness. The ill and
the weak gradually recovered. In a few more weeks the Angels of Death
and Disease retired from the field, and the island was not depopulated.
Whether another outbreak might or might not occur they could not tell;
but knowing the thoroughness of the work which they had done, they were
ready to hope that the victory was complete. Gradually their work
ceased, for there was no one in all the happy island who needed nursing
or medical attendance. Caius found then how wonderfully free the place
was from all those ailments which ordinarily beset humanity.

This was in the middle of February, when the days were growing long, and
even the evening was bright and light upon the islands of snow and the
sea of ice.

It appeared to Caius that Madame Le Maître had grown years older during
the pestilence. Deep lines of weariness had come in her face, and her
eyes were heavy with want of sleep and sympathetic tears. Again and
again he had feared that the disease would attack her, and, indeed, he
knew that it had only been the constant riding about the island hills in
the wonderful air that had kept the little band of workers in health. As
it was, O'Shea had lost a child, and three of the girls in the house of
Madame Le Maître had been ill. Now that the strain was over, Caius
feared prostration that would be worse than the disease itself for the
lady who had kept up so bravely through it all; but, ever feeling an
impossibility in her presence of speaking freely of anything that
concerned herself, he had hardly been able to express the solicitude he
felt before it was relieved by the welcome news that she had travelled
across the bay to pay a visit to Pembroke's wife.

She had gone without either telling Caius of her intention or bidding
him good-bye, and, glad as he was, he felt that he had not deserved this
discourtesy at her hands. Indeed, looking back now, he felt disposed to
resent the indifference with which she had treated him from first to
last. Not as the people's doctor. In that capacity she had been eager
for his services, and grateful to him with a speechless, reverent
gratitude that he felt to be much more than his due; but as a man, as a
companion, as a friend, she had been simply unconscious of his
existence. When she had said to him at the beginning, "You will be
lonely; there is no one on the island to whom you can speak as a
friend," he perceived now that she had excluded herself as well as the
absent world from his companionship. It seemed to him that it had never
once occurred to her that it was in her power to alter this.

Truly, if it had not been for Pembroke, the clergyman, Caius would never
have had a companionable word; and he had found that there were limits
to the interest he could take in Pembroke, that the stock of likings and
disliking that they had in common was not great. Then, too, since the
day on which he had questioned him so vehemently about the relatives of
Madame Le Maître, he fancied that the clergyman had treated him with
apprehensive reserve.

At the time when he had little or nothing to do, and when Madame Le
Maître had left Cloud Island, Caius would have been glad enough to go
and explore the other islands, or to luxuriate again in the cookery of
the old maids at the inn at which he had first been housed. Two
considerations kept him from this holiday-taking. In the first place, in
fear of a case of illness he did not like to leave the island while its
benefactress was away; and, secondly, it was reported that all visitors
from The Cloud were ruthlessly shut out from the houses upon the other
islands, because of the unreasoning terror which had grown concerning
the disease. Whether he, who carried money in his pocket, would be shut
out from these neighbouring islands also, he did not care to inquire. He
felt too angry with the way the inhabitants behaved to have any dealings
with them.

The only means of amusement that remained to Caius in these days were
his horse and a gun that O'Shea lent him. With his lunch in his pocket,
he rode upon the ice as far as he might go and return the same day. He
followed the roads that led by the shores of the other islands; or,
where the wind had swept all depth of snow from the ice, he took a path
according to his own fancy on the untrodden whiteness.

Colonies of Arctic gulls harboured on the island, and the herring gulls
remained through the winter; these, where he could get near their rocks
upon the ice, he at first took delight in shooting; but he soon lost the
zest for this sport, for the birds gave themselves to his gun too
easily. He was capable of deriving pleasure from them other than in
their slaughter, and often he rode under their rocky homes, noting how
dark their white plumage looked against their white resting-places,
where groups of them huddled together upon the icy battlements and
snowdrift towers of the castles that the frost had built them. He would
ride by slowly, and shoot his gun in the air to see them rise and wheel
upward, appearing snow-white against the blue firmament; and watched
them sink again, growing dark as they alighted among the snow and ice.
His warning that he himself must be nearing home was to see the return
of such members of the bird-colony as had been out for the deep-sea
fishing. When he saw them come from afar, flying high, often with their
wings dyed pink in the sunset rays, he knew that his horse must gallop
homeward, or darkness might come and hide such cracks and fissures in
the ice as were dangerous.

The haunts of the birds which he chiefly loved were on the side of the
islands turned to the open sea, for at this time ice had formed on all
sides, and stretched without a break for a mile or so into the open.
There was a joy in riding upon this that made riding upon the bay tame
and uninteresting; for not only was the seaward shore of island and dune
wilder, but the ice here might at any time break from the shore or
divide itself up into large islands, and when the wind blew he fancied
he heard the waves heaving beneath it, and the excitement which comes
with danger, which, by some law of mysterious nature, is one of the
keenest forms of pleasure, would animate his horse and himself as they
flew over it.

His horse was not one of the native ponies; it was a well-bred,
delicately-shaped beast, accustomed to be made a friend of by its rider,
and giving sympathetic response to all his moods. The horse belonged to
Madame Le Maître, and was similar to the one she rode. This, together
with many other things, proved to Caius that the lady who lived so
frugally had command of a certain supply of money, for it could not be
an easy or cheap thing to transport good horses to these islands.

Whatever he did, however his thoughts might be occupied, it was never
long before they veered round to the subject that was rapidly becoming
the one subject of absorbing interest to him. Before he realized what he
did, his mind was confirmed in its habit; at morn, and at noontime, and
at night, he found himself thinking of Madame Le Maître. The lady he was
in love with was the youthful, adventurous maiden who, it seemed, did
not exist; the lady that he was always thinking of was the grave,
subdued, self-sacrificing woman who in some way, he knew not how,
carried the mystery of the other's existence within herself. His mind
was full of almost nothing but questions concerning her, for, admire and
respect her as he might, he thought there was nothing in him that
responded with anything like love to her grave demeanour and burdened
spirit.




CHAPTER XIV.

THE MARRIAGE SCENE.


By riding across the small lagoon that lay beside Cloud Island to the
inward side of the bay, and then eastward some twelve miles toward an
island that was little frequented, the last of the chain on this horn of
the crescent, one came under the highest and boldest façade of cliffs
that was to be found in all that group. It was here that Caius chanced
to wander one calm mild day in early March, mild because the thermometer
stood at less than 30° below the freezing point, and a light vault of
pearly cloud shut in the earth from the heaven, and seemed, by way of
contrast with other days, to keep it warm. He had ridden far, following
out of aimless curiosity the track that had been beaten on the side of
the bay to this farthest island. It was a new road for him; he had never
attempted it before; and no sooner had he got within good sight of the
land, than his interest was wholly attracted by the cliffs, which,
shelving somewhat outward at the top, and having all their sides very
steep and smooth, were, except for a few crevices of ice, or an outward
hanging icicle, or here and there a fringe of icicles, entirely free
from snow and ice. He rode up under them wonderingly, pleased to feast
his eyes upon the natural colour of rock and earth, and eager, with
what knowledge of geology he had, to read the story they told.

This story, as far as the history of the earth was concerned, was soon
told; the cliffs were of gray carboniferous limestone. Caius became
interested in the beauty of their colouring. Blue and red clay had
washed down upon them in streaks and patches; where certain faults in
the rock occurred, and bars of iron-yielding stone were seen, the rust
had washed down also, so that upon flat facets and concave and convex
surfaces a great variety of colour and tint, and light and shade, was
produced.

He could not proceed immediately at the base of the cliffs, for in their
shelter the snow had drifted deep. He was soon obliged to keep to the
beaten track, which here ran about a quarter of a mile distant from the
rock. Walking his horse, and looking up as he went, his attention was
arrested by perceiving that a whitish stain on a smooth dark facet of
the rock assumed the appearance of a white angel in the act of alighting
from aërial flight. The picture grew so distinct that he could not take
his eyes from it, even after he had gone past, until he was quite weary
of looking back or of trying to keep his restive horse from dancing
forward. When, at last, however, he turned his eyes from the majestic
figure with the white wings, his fancy caught at certain lines and
patches of rust which portrayed a horse of gigantic size galloping upon
a forward part of the cliff. The second picture brought him to a
standstill, and he examined the whole face of the hill, realizing that
he was in the presence of a picture-gallery which Nature, it seemed, had
painted all for her own delight. He thought himself the discoverer; he
felt at once both a loneliness and elation at finding himself in that
frozen solitude, gazing with fascinated eyes at one portion of the rock
after another where he saw, or fancied he saw, sketches of this and that
which ravished his sense of beauty both in colour and form.

In his excitement to see what would come next, he did not check the
stepping of his horse, but only kept it to a gentle pace. Thus he came
where the road turned round with the rounding cliff, and here for a bit
he saw no picture upon the rock; but still he looked intently, hoping
that the panorama was not ended, and only just noticed that there was
another horse beside his own within the lonely scene. In some places
here the snow was drifted high near the track; in others, both the road
and the adjoining tracts of ice were swept by the wind almost bare of
snow. He soon became aware that the horse he had espied was not upon the
road. Then, aroused to curiosity, he turned out of his path and rode
through shallow snow till he came close to it.

The horse was standing quite still, and its rider was standing beside
it, one arm embracing its neck, and with head leaning back against the
creature's glossy shoulder. The person thus standing was Madame Le
Maître, and she was looking up steadfastly at the cliffs, of which this
point in the road displayed a new expanse.

So silently had the horse of Caius moved in the muffling snow that,
coming up on the other side, he was able to look at the lady for one
full moment before she saw him, and in that moment and the next he saw
that the sight of him robbed her face of the peace which had been
written there. She was wrapped as usual in her fur-lined cloak and
hood. She looked to him inquiringly, with perhaps just a touch of
indignant displeasure in her expression, waiting for him to explain, as
if he had come on purpose to interrupt her.

"I am sorry. I had no idea you were here, or I would not have come."

The next moment he marvelled at himself as to how he had known that this
was the right thing to say; for it did not sound polite.

Her displeasure was appeased.

"You have found my pictures, then," she said simply.

"Only this hour, and by chance."

By this time he was wondering by what road she had got there. If she had
ridden alone across the bay from Harbour Island, where the Pembrokes
lived, she had done a bold thing for a woman, and one, moreover, which,
in the state of health in which he had seen her last, would have been
impossible to her.

Madame Le Maître had begun to move slowly, as one who wakes from a happy
dream. He perceived that she was making preparations to mount.

"I cannot understand it," he cried; "how can these pictures come just by
chance? I have heard of the Picture Rocks on Lake Superior, for
instance, but I never conceived of anything so distinct, so lovely, as
these that I have seen."

"The angels make them," said Madame Le Maître. She paused again (though
her bridle had been gathered in her hand ready for the mount), and
looked up again at the rock.

Caius was not unheedful of the force of that soft but absolute
assertion, but he must needs speak, if he spoke at all, from his own
point of view, not hers.

"I suppose," he said, "that the truth is there is something upon the
rock that strikes us as a resemblance, and our imagination furnishes the
detail that perfects the picture."

"In that case would you not see one thing and I another?"

Now for the first time his eyes followed hers, and on the gray rock
immediately opposite he suddenly perceived a picture, without definite
edge it is true, but in composition more complete than anything he had
seen before. What had formerly delighted him had been, as it were, mere
sketches of one thing or another scattered in different places, but here
there was a large group of figures, painted for the most part in varied
tints of gray, and blue, and pink.

In the foreground of this picture a young man and young woman, radiant
both in face and apparel, stood before a figure draped in priestly
garments of sober gray. Behind them, in a vista, which seemed to be
filled with an atmosphere of light and joy, a band of figures were
dancing in gay procession, every line of the limbs and of the light
draperies suggesting motion and glee. How did he know that some of these
were men, and some were women? He had never seen such dresses as they
wore, which seemed to be composed of tunics and gossamer veils of blue
and red. Yet he did know quite distinctly which were men and which were
women, and he knew that it was a marriage scene. The bride wore a wreath
of flowers; the bridegroom carried a sheaf or garland of fruit or grain,
which seemed to be a part of the ceremony. Caius thought he was about
to offer it to the priest.

For some minutes the two looked up at the rock quite silently. Now the
lady answered his last remark:

"What is it you see?"

"You know it best; tell me what it is."

"It is a wedding. Don't you see the wedding dance?"

He had not got down from his horse; he had a feeling that if he had
alighted she would have mounted. He tried now, leaning forward, to tell
her how clearly he had seen the meaning, if so it might be called, of
the natural fresco, and to find some words adequately to express his
appreciation of its beauty. He knew that he had not expressed himself
well, but she did not seem dissatisfied at the tribute he paid to a
thing which she evidently regarded with personal love.

"Do you think," she said, "that it will alter soon, or become defaced?
It has been just the same for a year. It might, you know, become defaced
any day, and then no one would have seen it but ourselves. The
islanders, you know, do not notice it."

"Ah, yes," said Caius; "beauty is made up of two parts--the objects seen
and the understanding eye. We only know how much we are indebted to
training and education when we find out to what extent the natural eye
is blind."

This remark did not seem to interest her. He felt that it jarred
somehow, and that she was wishing him away.

"But why," he asked, "should angels paint a marriage? They neither
marry----" He stopped, feeling that she might think him flippant if he
quoted the text.

"Because it is the best thing to paint," she said.

"How the best?"

"Well, just the best human thing: everyone knows that."

"Has her marriage been so gloriously happy?" said Caius to himself as
the soft assurance of her tones reached his ears, and for some reason or
other he felt desolate, as a soul might upon whom the door of paradise
swung shut. Then irritably he said: "_I_ don't know it. Most marriages
seem to me----" He stopped, but she had understood.

"But if this picture crumbles to pieces, that does not alter the fact
that the angels made it lovely." (Her slight accent, because it made the
pronunciation of each word more careful, gave her speech a quaint
suggestion of instruction that perhaps she did not intend.) "The idea is
painted on our hearts in just the same way; it is the best thing we can
think of, except God."

"Yet," urged Caius, "even if it is the best from our point of view, you
will allow that it is written that it is not a heavenly institution. The
angels should try to teach us to look at something higher."

"The words do not mean that. I don't believe there is anything higher
for us. I don't believe people are not married in heaven."

With sweet unreason she set aside authority when it clashed with her
opinion. To Caius she had never been so attractive as now, when, for the
first time to him, she was proving herself of kin to ordinary folk; and
yet, so curiously false are our notions of sainthood that she seemed to
him the less devout because she proved to be more loving.

"You see"--she spoke and paused--"you see, when I was at school in a
convent I had a friend. I was perfectly happy when I was with her and
she with me; it was a marriage. When we went in the garden or on the
sea, we were only happy when we were with each other. That is how I
learned early that it is only perfect to be two. Ah, when one knows what
it is to be lonely, one learns that that is true; but many people are
not given grace to be lonely--they are sufficient to themselves. They
say it is enough to worship God; it is a lie. He cannot be pleased; it
is selfish even to be content to worship God alone."

"The kind of marriage you think of, that perhaps may be made in heaven."
Caius was feeling again that she was remote from him, and yet the hint
of passionate loneliness in tone and words remained a new revelation of
her life. "Is not religion enough?" He asked this only out of curiosity.

"It is not true religion if we are content to be alone with God; it is
not the religion of the holy Christ; it is a fancy, a delusion, a
mistake. Have you not read about St. John? Ah, I do not say that it is
not often right to live alone, just as it may be right to be ill or
starving. That is because the world has gone wrong; and to be content,
it is to blaspheme; it is like saying that what is wrong is God's ideal
for us, and will last for ever."

Caius was realizing that as she talked she was thinking only of the
theme, not at all of him; he had enough refinement in him to perceive
this quite clearly. It was the first time that she had spoken of her
religion to him, and her little sermon, which he felt to be too wholly
unreasonable to appeal to his mind, was yet too wholly womanly to repel
his heart.

Some dreamy consciousness seemed to come to her now that she had tarried
longer than she wished, and perhaps that her subject had not been one
that she cared to discuss with him. She turned and put her hand on the
pommel, and sprang into the saddle. He had often seen her make that
light, wonderful spring that seated her as if by magic on her horse's
back, but in her last weeks of nursing the sick folk she had not been
strong enough to do it. He saw now how much stronger she looked. The
weeks of rest had made her a different woman; there was a fresh colour
in her cheek, and the tired lines were all gone. She looked younger by
years than when he saw her last--younger, too, than when he had first
seen her, for even then she was weary. If he could only have seen the
line of her chin, or the height of her brow, or the way her hair turned
back from her temples, he thought that he might not have reckoned the
time when he had first seen her in the sick-room at Cloud Island as
their first meeting.

"You are going on?" said Madame Le Maître.

"Unless I can be of service to you by turning with you."

He knew by the time of day that he must turn shortly; but he had no hope
that she wanted him to go with her.

"You can do me more service," she said, and she gave him a little smile
that was like the ghost of the sea-maid's smile, "by letting me go home
alone."

He rode on, and when he looked back he saw that her horse was galloping
and casting up a little cloud of light snow behind it, so that, riding
as it were upon a small white cloud, she disappeared round the turn of
the cliffs.

Caius found no more pictures that day that he felt to be worthy of much
attention. He went back to the festive scene of the marriage, and moving
his horse nearer and further from it, he found that only from the point
where the lady had taken her stand was it to be distinctly seen. Twenty
yards from the right line of vision, he might have passed it, and never
known the beauty that the streaks and stains could assume.

When he went home he amused himself by seeking on the road for the track
of the other horse, and when he found that it turned to Cloud Island he
was happier. The place, at least, would not be so lonely when the lady
was at home.




_BOOK III._




CHAPTER I.

HOW HE HUNTED THE SEALS.


At this time on the top of the hills the fishermen were to be seen
loitering most of the day, looking to see if the seals were coming, for
at this season the seals, unwary creatures, come near the islands upon
the ice, and in the white world their dark forms can be descried a long
distance off. There was promise of an easy beginning to seal-fishing
this year, for the ice had not yet broken from the shore on the seaward
side of the island, and there would not at first be need of boats.

Caius, who had only seen the fishermen hanging about their doors in lazy
idleness, was quite unprepared for the excitement and vigour that they
displayed when this first prey of the year was seen to approach.

It was the morning after Madame Le Maître had returned to her home that
Caius, standing near his own door, was wondering within himself if he
might treat her like an ordinary lady and give her a formal call of
welcome. He had not decided the point when he heard sounds as of a mob
rushing, and, looking up the road that came curving down the hill
through the pine thicket, he saw the rout appear--men, women and
children, capped and coated in rough furs, their cheeks scarlet with the
frost and exercise, their eyes sparkling with delight. Singly down the
hill, and in groups, they came, hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm, some driving
in wooden sleighs, some of them beating such implements of tinware as
might be used for drums, some of them shouting words in that queer
Acadian French he could not understand, and all of them laughing.

He could not conceive what had happened; the place that was usually so
lonely, the people that had been so lazy and dull--everything within
sight seemed transformed into some mad scene of carnival. The crowd
swept past him, greeting him only with shouts and smiles and grimaces.
He knew from the number that all the people from that end of the island
were upon the road to the other end, and running after with hasty
curiosity, he went far enough to see that the news of their advent had
preceded them, and that from every side road or wayside house the people
came out to join in the riotous march.

Getting further forward upon the road, Caius now saw what he could not
see from his own door, a great beacon fire lit upon the hill where the
men had been watching. Its flame and smoke leaped up from the white hill
into the blue heaven. It was the seal-hunting, then, to which all the
island was going forth. Caius, now that he understood the tumult,
experienced almost the same excitement. He ran back, donned clothes
suitable for the hunt across the ice, and, mounting his horse, rode
after the people. They were all bound for the end of the island on which
the lighthouse stood, for a number of fish-sheds, used for cooking and
sleeping in the fishing season, were built on the western shore not far
from the light; and from the direction in which the seals had appeared,
these were the sheds most convenient for the present purpose.

By the time Caius reached the sheds, the greater number of the fishermen
were already far out upon the ice. In boots and caps of the coarse gray
seal-skin, with guns or clubs and knives in their hands, they had a wild
and murderous aspect as they marched forward in little bands. The gait,
the very figure, of each man seemed changed; the slouch of idleness had
given place to the keen manner of the hunter. On shore the sheds, which
all winter had been empty and lonely, surrounded only by curling drifts,
had become the scene of most vigorous work. The women, with snow-shovels
and brooms, were clearing away the snow around them, opening the doors,
lighting fires in the small stoves inside, opening bags and hampers
which contained provision of food and implements for skinning the seals.
The task that these women were performing was one for the strength of
men; but as they worked now their merriment was loud. All their children
stood about them, shouting at play or at such work as was allotted to
them. Some four or five of the women, with Amazonian strength, were
hauling from one shed a huge kettle, in which it was evidently meant to
try the fat from certain portions of the seal.

Caius held his horse still upon the edge of the ice, too well diverted
with the activity on the shore to leave it at once. Behind the animated
scene and the row of gray snow-thatched sheds, the shore rose white and
lonely. Except for the foot-tracks on the road by which they had come,
and the peak of the lighthouse within sight, it would have seemed that a
colony had suddenly sprung to life in an uninhabited Arctic region.

It was from this slope above the sheds that Caius now heard himself
hailed by loud shouting, and, looking up, he saw that O'Shea had come
there to overlook the scene below. Some women stood around him. Caius
supposed that Madame Le Maître was there.

O'Shea made a trumpet of his hands and shouted that Caius must not take
his horse upon the ice that day, for the beast would be frightened and
do himself harm.

Caius was affronted. The horse was not his, truly, but he believed he
knew how to take care of it, yet, as it belonged to a woman, he could
not risk disobeying this uncivil prohibition. Although he was accustomed
to the rude authority which O'Shea assumed whenever he wished to be
disagreeable, Caius had only learned to take it with an outward
appearance of indifference--his mind within him always chafed; this time
the affront to his vanity was worse because he believed that Madame Le
Maître had prompted, or certainly permitted, the insult. It did not
soothe him to think that, with a woman's nervousness, she might have
more regard for his safety than that of the horse. The brightness died
out of the beautiful day, and in a lofty mood of ill-used indifference
he assured himself that a gentleman could take little interest in such
barbarous sport as seal-hunting. At any rate, it would go on for many a
day. He certainly had not the slightest intention of dismounting at
O'Shea's command in order to go to the hunt.

Caius held his horse as quiet as he could for some ten minutes, feigning
an immense interest in the occupation of the women; then leisurely
curvetted about, and set his horse at a light trot along the ice close
by the shore.

He rode hastily past the only place where he could have ascended the
bank, and after that he had no means of going home until he had rounded
the island and returned by the lagoon. The distance up to the end was
seven miles. Caius rode on under the lonely cliffs where the gulls
wintered, and threading his way upon smooth places on the ice, came, in
the course of not much more than an hour, up to the end of the cliffs,
crossed the neck of the sand-bar, and followed the inward shore till he
got back to the first road.

Now, on this end of the island very few families lived. Caius had only
been upon the road he was about to traverse once or twice. The reason it
was so little built upon was that the land here belonged entirely to the
farm of Madame Le Maître, which stretched in a narrow strip for a couple
of miles from O'Shea's dwelling to the end of the island. The only point
of interest which this district had for Caius was a cottage which had
been built in a very sheltered nook for the accommodation of two women,
whose business it was to care for the poultry which was kept here. Caius
had been told that he might always stop at this lodge for a drink of
milk or beer or such a lunch as it could afford, and being thirsty by
reason of hard riding and ill-temper, he now tried to find the path that
led to it.




CHAPTER II.

ONCE MORE THE VISION.


When Caius turned up the farm road, which was entirely sheltered between
gentle slopes, the bright March sun felt almost hot upon his cheek. The
snow road under his horse's hoofs was full of moisture, and the snowy
slopes glistened with a coating of wet. He felt for the first time that
the spring of the year had come.

He was not quite certain where lay the cottage of which he was in quest;
and, by turning up a wrong path, he came to the back of its hen-houses.
At first he only saw the blank wall of a cowshed and two wooden
structures like old-fashioned dovecotes, connected by a high fence in
which there was no gate. Up to this fence he rode to look over it,
hoping to speak to the people he heard within; but it was too high for
him to see over. Passing on, he brought his head level with a small
window that was let into the wall of one of the hen-houses. The window
had glass in it which was not at all clean, but a fragment of it was
broken, and through this Caius looked, intending to see if there was any
gate into the yard which he could reach from the path he was on.

Through the small room of deserted hen-roosts, through the door which
was wide open on the other side, he saw the sunny space of the yard
beyond. All the fowls were gathered in an open place that had been
shovelled between heaps of hard-packed snow. There were the bright tufts
of cocks' tails and the glossy backs of hens brown and yellow; there
were white ducks, and ducks that were green and black, and great gray
geese of slender make that were evidently descended from the wild goose
of the region. On the snow-heaps pigeons were standing--flitting and
constantly alighting--with all the soft dove-colours in their dress. In
front of the large feathered party was a young woman who stood, basin in
hand, scattering corn, now on one side, now on another, with fitful
caprice. She made game of the work of feeding them, coquettishly
pretending to throw the boon where she did not throw it, laughing the
while and talking to the birds, as if she and they led the same life and
talked the same language. Caius could not hear what she said, but he
felt assured that the birds could understand.

For some few minutes Caius looked at this scene; he did not know how
long he looked; his heart within him was face to face with a pain that
was quite new in his life, and was so great that he could not at first
understand it, but only felt that in comparison all smaller issues of
life faded and became as nothing.

Beyond the youthful figure of the corn-giver Caius saw another woman. It
was the wife of O'Shea, and in a moment her steadfast, quiet face looked
up into his, and he knew that she saw him and did not tell of his
presence; but, as her eyes looked long and mutely into his, it seemed to
him that this silent woman understood something of the pain he felt.
Then, very quietly, he turned his horse and rode back by the path that
he had come.

The woman he had seen was the wife of the sea-captain Le Maître. He said
it to himself as if to be assured that the self within him had not in
some way died, but could still speak and understand. He knew that he had
seen the wife of this man, because the old cloak and hood, which he knew
so well, had only been cast off, and were still hanging to the skirts
below the girlish waist, and the white cap, too, had been thrown aside
upon the snow--he had seen it. As for the girl herself, he had loved her
so long that it seemed strange to him that he had never known until now
how much he loved her. Her face had been his one thought, his one
standard of womanly beauty, for so many years that he was amazed to find
that he had never known before how beautiful she was. A moment since and
he had seen the March sunshine upon all the light, soft rings of curling
hair that covered her head, and he had seen her laughter, and the oval
turn of the dimpled chin, and within the face he had seen what he knew
now he had always seen, but never before so clearly--the soul that was
strong to suffer as well as strong to enjoy.

By the narrow farm-path which his horse was treading Caius came to the
road he had left, and, turning homeward, could not help coming in front
of the little cottage whose back wall he had so lately visited. He had
no thought but of passing as quickly as might be, but he saw O'Shea's
wife standing before the door, looking for him with her quiet, eager
eyes. She came out a few steps, and Caius, hardly stopping, stooped his
head to hear what she had to say.

"I won't tell her," said the woman; then she pleaded: "Let her be, poor
thing! Let her be happy while she can."

She had slipped back into the house; Caius had gone on; and then he knew
that he had this new word to puzzle over. For why should he be supposed
to molest the happy hours of the woman he loved, and what could be the
sorrow that dogged her life, if her happy hours were supposed to be rare
and precious? O'Shea's wife he had observed before this to be a faithful
and trusted friend of her mistress; no doubt she spoke then with the
authority of knowledge and love.

Caius went home, and put away his horse, and entered his small house.
Everything was changed to him; a knowledge that he had vaguely dreaded
had come, but with a grief that he had never dreamed of. For he had
fancied that if it should turn out that his lady-love and Madame Le
Maître were one, his would only be the disappointment of having loved a
shadow, a character of his own creating, and that the woman herself he
would not love; but now that was not what had befallen him.

All the place was deserted; not a house had shown a sign of life as he
passed. All the world had gone after the seals. This, no doubt, was the
reason why the two women who had not cared for the hunting had taken
that day for a holiday. Caius stood at his window and looked out on the
sea of ice for a little while. He was alone in the whole locality, but
he would not be less alone when the people returned. They had their
interests, their hopes and fears; he had nothing in common with any of
them; he was alone with his pain, and his pain was just this, that he
was alone. Then he looked out further and further into the world from
which he had come, into the world to which he must go back, and there
also he saw himself to be alone. He could not endure the thought of
sharing the motions of his heart and brain with anyone but the one woman
from whom he was wholly separated. Time might make a difference; he was
forced to remember that it is commonly said that time and absence abate
all such attachments. He did not judge that time would make much
difference to him, but in this he might be mistaken.

A man who has depth in him seldom broods over real trouble--not at
first, at least. By this test may often be known the real from the
fanciful woe. Caius, knew, or his instincts knew, that his only chance
of breasting the current was, not to think of its strength, but to keep
on swimming. He took his horse's bits and the harness that had been
given him for his little sleigh, cleaning and burnishing everything with
the utmost care, and at the same time with despatch. He had some
chemical work that had been lying aside for weeks waiting to be done,
and this afternoon he did it. He had it on his mind to utilize some of
his leisure by writing long letters that he might post when it was
possible for him to go home; to-night he wrote two of them.

While he was writing he heard the people coming in twos and threes along
the road back to their houses for the night. He supposed that O'Shea had
got home with the girls he had been escorting, and that his wife had
come home, and that Madame Le Maître had come back to her house and
taken up again her regular routine of life.




CHAPTER III.

"LOVE, I SPEAK TO THY FACE."


Caius thought a good deal about the words that O'Shea's wife had said to
him. He did not know exactly what she meant, nor could he guess at all
from what point of view concerning himself she had spoken; but the
general drift of her meaning appeared to be that he ought not to let
Madame Le Maître know where and how he had seen her the day before. In
spite of this, he knew that he could neither be true to himself, nor to
the woman he was forced to meet daily, if he made any disguise of the
recognition which had occurred. He was in no hurry to meet her; he hoped
little or nothing from the interview, but dreaded it. Next day he went
without his horse out to where the men were killing the seals upon the
edge of the ice.

The warm March sun, and the March winds that agitated the open sea, were
doing their work. To-day there was water appearing in places upon the
ice where it joined the shore, and when Caius was out with a large band
of men upon the extreme edge of the solid ice, a large fragment broke
loose. There were some hundred seals upon this bit of ice, which were
being butchered one by one in barbarous fashion, and so busy were the
men with their work that they merely looked at the widening passage of
gray water and continued to kill the beasts that they had hedged round
in a murderous ring. It was the duty of those on the shore to bring
boats if they were needed. The fragment on which they were could not
float far because the sea outside was full of loose ice, and, as it
happened, when the dusk fell the chasm of water between them and the
shore was not too broad to be jumped easily, for the ice, having first
moved seaward, now moved landward with the tide.

For two or three days Caius lent a hand at killing and skinning the
gentle-eyed animals. It was not that he did not feel some disgust at the
work; but it meant bread to the men he was with, and he might as well
help them. It was an experience, and, above all, it was distraction.
When the women had seen him at work they welcomed him with demonstrative
joy to the hot meals which they prepared twice a day for the hunters.
Caius was not quite sure what composed the soups and stews of which he
partook, but they tasted good enough.

When he had had enough of the seal-hunt it took him all the next day to
cleanse the clothes he had worn from the smell of the fat, and he felt
himself to be effeminate in the fastidiousness that made him do it.

During all these days the houses and roads of the island were almost
completely deserted, except that Caius supposed that, after the first
holiday, the maids who lived with Madame Le Maître were kept to their
usual household tasks, and that their mistress worked with them.

At last, one day when Caius was coming from a house on one of the hills
which he had visited because there was in it a little mortal very new to
this world, he saw Madame Le Maître riding up the snowy road that he
was descending. He felt glad, at the first sight of her, that he was no
longer a youth but had fully come to man's estate, and had attained to
that command of nerve and conquest over a beating heart that is the
normal heritage of manhood. This thought came to him because he was so
vividly reminded of the hour in which he had once before sought an
interview with this lady--even holding her hand in his--and of his
ignominious repulse. In spite of the sadness of his heart, a smile
crossed his face, but it was gone before he met her. He had quite given
up wondering now about that seafaring episode, and accepted it only as a
fact. It did not matter to him why or how she had played her part; it
was enough that she had done it, and all that she did was right in his
eyes.

The lady's horse was walking slowly up the heavy hill; the reins she
hardly held, letting them loose upon its neck. It was evident that with
her there was no difference since the time she had last seen Caius; it
appeared that she did not even purpose stopping her horse. Caius stopped
it gently, laying his hand upon its neck.

"What is it?" she asked, with evident curiosity, for the face that he
turned to her made her aware that there was something new in her quiet
life.

It was not easy to find his words; he did not care much to do so
quickly. "I could not go on," he said, "without letting you know----" He
stopped.

She did not answer him with any quick impatient question. She looked at
the snowy hill in front of her. "Well?" she said.

"The other day, you know," he said, "I rode by the back of your poultry
farm, and--I saw you when you were feeding the birds."

"Yes?" she said; she was still looking gravely enough at the snow. The
communication so far did not affect her much.

"Then, when I saw you, I knew that I had seen you before--in the sea--at
home."

A red flush had mantled her face. There was perhaps an air of offence,
for he saw that she held her head higher, and knew what the turn of the
neck would be in spite of the clumsy hood; but what surprised him most
was that she did not express any surprise or dismay.

"I did not suppose," she said, in her own gentle, distant way, "that if
you had a good memory for that--foolish play, you would not know me
again." Her manner added: "I have attempted no concealment."

"I did not know you in that dress you wear"--there was hatred for the
dress in his tone as he mentioned it--"so I supposed that you did not
expect me to know who you were."

She did not reply, leaving the burden of finding the next words upon
him. It would seem that she did not think there was more to say; and
this, her supreme indifference to his recognition or non-recognition,
half maddened him. He suddenly saw his case in a new aspect--she was a
cruel woman, and he had much with which to reproach her.

"'That foolish play,' as you call it----" he had begun angrily, but a
certain sympathy for her, new-born out of his own trouble, stopped him,
and he went on, only reproach in his tone: "It was a sad play for me,
because my heart has never been my own since. I could not find out who
you were then, or where you hid yourself; I do not know now, but----"
He stopped; he did not wish to offend her; he looked at the glossy neck
of the horse he was holding. "I was young and very foolish, but I loved
you."

The sound of his own low sad tones was still in his ears when he also
heard the low music of irrepressible laughter, and, looking up, he saw
that the recollection which a few minutes before had made him smile had
now entirely overcome the lady's gravity. She was blushing, she was
trying not to laugh; but in spite of herself she did laugh more and more
heartily, and although her merriment was inopportune, he could not help
joining in it to some extent. It was so cheerful to see the
laughter-loving self appear within the grave face, to be beside her, and
to have partnership in her mirth. So they looked in each other's eyes,
and they both laughed, and after that they felt better.

"And yet," said he, "it was a frolic that has worked sorrow for me."

"Come," said she, lifting her reins, "you will regret if you go on
talking this way."

She would have gone on quite lightly and contentedly, and left him there
as if he had said nothing of love, as if their words had been the mere
reminiscence of a past that had no result in the present, as if his
heart was not breaking; but a fierce sense of this injustice made him
keep his hold of her bridle. She could weep over the pains of the poor
and the death of their children. She should not go unmindful that his
happiness was wrecked.

"Do you still take me for the young muff that I used to be, that you pay
no heed to what I say? I would scorn to meet you every day while I must
remain here and conceal from you the fact which, such is my weakness,
is the only fact in life for me just now. My heart is breaking because I
have found that the woman I love is wholly out of my reach. Can you not
give that a passing thought of pity? I have told you now; when we meet,
you will know that it is not as indifferent acquaintances, but
as--enemies if you will, for you, a happy married woman--will count me
your enemy! Yet I have not harmed you, and the truth is better at all
costs."

She was giving him her full attention now, her lips a little parted as
if with surprise, question plainly written upon her face. He could not
understand how the cap and hood had ever concealed her from him. Her
chief beauty lay, perhaps, in the brow, in the shape of the face, and in
its wreath of hair--or at least in the charm that these gave to the
strong character of the features; but now that he knew her, he knew her
face wholly, and his mind filled in what was lacking; he could perceive
no lack. He looked at her, his eyes full of admiration, puzzled the
while at her evident surprise.

"But surely," she said, "you cannot be so foolish--you, a man now--to
think that the fancy you took to a pretty face, for it could have been
nothing more, was of any importance."

"Such fancies make or mar the lives of men."

"Of unprincipled fools, yes--of men who care for appearance more than
sympathy. But you are not such a man! It is not as if we had been
friends; it is not as if we had ever spoken. It is wicked to call such a
foolish fancy by the name of love; it is desecration."

While she was speaking, her words revealed to Caius, with swift
analysis, a distinction that he had not made before. He knew now that
before he came to this island, before he had gone through the three
months of toil and suffering with Josephine Le Maître, it would truly
have been foolish to think of his sentiment concerning her as more than
a tender ideal. Now, that which had surprised him into a strength of
love almost too great to be in keeping with his character, was the unity
of two beings whom he had believed to be distinct--the playmate and the
saint.

"Whether the liking we take to a beautiful face be base or noble
depends, madame, upon the face; and no man could see yours without being
a better man for the sight. But think: when I saw the face that had been
enshrined for years in my memory yesterday, was it the face of a woman
whom I did not know--with whom I had never spoken?" He was not looking
at her as he spoke. He added, and his heart was revealed in the tone:
"_You_ do not know what it is to be shut out from all that is good on
earth."

There came no answer; in a moment he lifted his eyes to see what
response she gave, and he was astonished to detect a look upon her face
that would have become an angel who had received some fresh beatitude.
It was plain that now she saw and believed the truth of his love; it
appeared, too, that she felt it to be a blessing. He could not
understand this, but she wasted no words in explanation. When her eyes
met his, the joy in her face passed into pity for a minute; she looked
at him quietly and frankly; then she said:

"Love is good in itself, and suffering is good, and God is good. I
think," she added very simply, as a child might have done, "that you
are good, too. Do not fear or be discouraged."

Then, with her own hand, she gently disengaged his from the bridle and
rode up the hill on her errand of mercy.




CHAPTER IV.

HOPE BORN OF SPRING.


"Love is good; suffering is good; God is good"--that was what she had
answered him when he had said that for her sake he was shut out from all
that was good on earth. His heart did not rebel so bitterly against this
answer as it would have done if he had not felt assured that she spoke
of what she had experienced, and that his present experience was in some
sort a comradeship with her. Then, again, there was the inexplicable
fact that the knowledge of the way in which he regarded her had given
her pleasure; that was a great consolation to him, although he did not
gather from it any hope for the future. Her whole manner indicated that
she was, as he supposed her to be, entirely out of his reach, not only
by the barrier of circumstance, but by her own deliberate preference;
and yet he was certain that she was glad that he loved her. What did
that mean? He had so seen her life that he knew she was incapable of
vanity or selfish satisfaction; when she was glad it was because it was
right to be glad. Caius could not unravel this, and yet, deep within
him, he knew that there was consistency in it. Had she not said that
love in itself was good? it must be good, then, both to the giver and
receiver. He felt a certain awe at finding his own poor love embraced
in such a doctrine; he felt for the first time how gross and selfish,
how unworthy, it was.

It was now the end of March; the snow was melting; the ice was breaking;
it might be three or four weeks before ships could sail in the gulf, but
it would not be longer. There was no sign of further outbreak of
diphtheria upon the island. Caius felt the time of his going home to be
near; he was not glad to think of leaving his prison of ice. Two
distinct efforts were made at this time to entertain him.

O'Shea made an expedition to the island of the picture rocks, and, in
rough kindliness, insisted upon taking Caius with him, not to see the
rocks--O'Shea thought little of them. They had an exciting journey,
rowing between the ice-floes in the bay, carrying their boat over one
ice fragment and then another, launching it each time into a sea of
dangers. They spent a couple of days entertained by the chief man of
this island, and came back again at the same delightful jeopardy of
their lives.

After this Mr. Pembroke took Caius home with him, driving again over the
sand-dune, upon which, now that the drifts had almost melted, a road
could be made. All winter the dunes had been absolutely deserted,
impassable by reason of the depth of snow. It would seem that even the
devil himself must have left their valleys at this time, or have
hibernated. The chief interest to Caius in this expedition was to seek
the hollow where he had seen, or thought he had seen, the band of
mysterious men to which O'Shea introduced him; but so changed was the
appearance of the sand by reason of the streams and rivulets of melting
snow, and so monotonous was the dune, that he grew confused, and could
not in the least tell where the place had been. He paid a visit to
Pembroke's house, and to the inn kept by the old maids, and then went
back to his own little wooden domicile with renewed contentment in its
quaint appointments, in its solitude, but above all in its nearness to
that other house in which the five women lived guarded by the mastiffs.

Caius knew well enough that these plans for his amusement had been
instigated by Madame Le Maître. She was keeping out of his way, except
that now and then he met her upon the roads and exchanged with her a
friendly greeting.

The only satisfaction that Caius sought for himself at this time was an
occasional visit to O'Shea's house. All winter there had been growing
upon him a liking for the man's wife, although the words that he
exchanged with her were at all times few. Now the feeling that he and
she were friends had received a distinct increase. It was a long time
since Caius had put to anyone the questions which his mind was
constantly asking concerning Madame Le Maître. Apart from any thought of
talking about the object of their mutual regard, it was a comfort to him
to be in the presence of O'Shea's wife. He felt sure that she understood
her mistress better than anyone else did, and he also suspected her of a
lively sympathy with himself, although it was not probable that she knew
more concerning his relation to Josephine Le Maître than merely the fact
that it would be hard for any man to see so much grace and beauty and
remain insensible. Caius sat by this woman's hearth, and whittled tops
and boats for her children on the sunny doorstep when the days grew
warm at noon, and did not expect any guerdon for doing it except the
rest that he found in the proximity and occupation. Reward came to him,
however. The woman eyed him with more and more kindliness, and at length
she spoke.

It was one day towards the end of the month, when the last film of snow
had evaporated from many a field and slope, and the vivid green of grass
appeared for the first time to gladden the eyes, although many an
ice-wreath and snowy hollow still lay between. On such a day the sight
of a folded head of saxifrage from which the pearls are just breaking
makes the heart of man bound with a pleasure that has certainly no
rational cause which is adequate.

Caius came up from the western shore, where he had been watching a
distant ship that passed on the other side of the nearer ice-floes, and
which said, by no other signal than that of her white sails, that winter
was gone. The sea, whose rivers and lakes among the ice had of late
looked so turbid by reason of frozen particles in the water, was clear
now to reflect once more the blue above it, and the ice-cakes were very
white in the sunshine. Caius turned his back upon this, and came up a
stony path where large patches of the hill were green; and by chance he
came upon O'Shea's wife, who was laying out linen to bleach at some
distance from her own house. Close to her Caius saw the ledge of rock on
which the first flowers of the year were budding, and straightway fell
in love with them. Knowing that their plants would flourish indoors as
well as out, he stooped to lift the large cakes of moss in which their
roots were set. The woman, who wore a small pink shawl tied over her
head and shoulders, came near to where he was stooping, and made no
preface, but said:

"He's dead, sir; or if he isn't, and if he should come back, O'Shea will
kill him!"

Caius did not need to ask of whom she spoke.

"Why?" he asked. "Why should O'Shea want to kill him?"

"It would kill her, sir, if he came back to her. She couldn't abide him
no ways, and O'Shea says it's as good one murder should be done as
another, and if he was hung for it he wouldn't mind. O'Shea's the sort
of man that would keep his word. He'd just feel it was a kind of
interesting thing to do, and he worships her to that extent. But I feel
sure, sir, that Le Maître is dead. God would not be so unkind as to have
me and the children bereft in that way."

Her simple belief in her husband's power to settle the matter was
shocking to Caius, because he felt that she probably knew her husband
perfectly.

"But why," said he again, "would it kill her if he came back?"

"Well, what sort of a decent man is it that would have stayed away from
her all these years, poor lamb? Why, sir, she wasn't but a child at the
convent when her father had them married, and she back to school, and he
away to his ship, and never come to see her since."

Caius turned as he knelt upon the grass, and, holding the emerald moss
and saxifrage plants in his hand, looked up at her. "He went away two
years ago," he said, repeating defiantly what he believed he had heard.

"He went away six year ago," corrected she; "but it's two years now
since aught was heard of him, and his ship went down, sir, coming back
from Afriky--that we know; but word came that the crew were saved, but
never a word from him, nor a word of him, since."

"Did she"--his throat would hardly frame the words--a nervous spasm
impeded them; yet he could not but ask--"did she care for him?"

"Oh well, sir, as to that, he was a beautiful-looking man, and she but a
child; but when she came to herself she wrote and asked him never to
come back; she told me so; and he never did."

"Well, that at least was civil of him." Caius spoke in full earnest.

"No, sir; he's not civil; he's a beast of a man. There's no sort of low
trick that he hasn't done, only it can't be proved against him; for he's
the sort of beast that is a snake; he only married madame for the money
he'll get with her. It was when _she_ learned that that she wrote to him
not to come back; but he never sent an honest word to say whether he'd
stay away or not. She knows what he is, sir, for folks that he'd cheated
and lied to come to her to complain. Young as she is, there's white
threads in her hair, just to think that he might come back at any time.
It's making an old woman of her since she's come of an age to think; and
she the merriest, blithest creature that ever was. When she first came
out of the convent, to see her dance and sing was a sight to make old
eyes young."

"Yes," said Caius eagerly, "I know it was--I am sure it was."

"Oh, but you never saw her, sir, till the shadow had come on her."

"Do you know when it was I first saw her?" said Caius, looking down at
the grass.

"She told me 'twas when she went to Prince Edward's Land, the time she
went to see the wife of her father's brother. 'Twas the one time that
O'Shea let her out of his sight; but no one knew where she was, so if
the Captain had come at that time he couldn't have found her without
coming to O'Shea first. And the other time that O'Shea let her go was
the first winter she came here, for he knew no one could come at the
islands for the snow, and we followed by the first ship in spring."

"Couldn't she get a separation?"

"O'Shea says the law is that way made that she couldn't."

"If she changed her name and went away somewhere----" Caius spoke
thoughtfully.

"And that's what O'Shea has been at her to do, for at least it would
give her peace; but she says, no, she'll do what's open and honest, and
God will take care of her. And I'm sure I hope He will. But it's hard,
sir, to see a young thing, so happy by nature as her, taking comfort in
nothing but prayers and hymns and good works, so young as she is; it's
enough to make the angels themselves have tears in their eyes to see
it."

At this the woman was wiping her own eyes; and, making soft sniffing
sounds of uncultivated grief, she went back to her work of strewing wet
garments upon the grass.

Caius felt that O'Shea's wife had read the mind of the angels aright.




CHAPTER V.

TO THE HIGHER COURT.


If Caius, as he went his way carrying the moss and budding flowers,
could have felt convinced with O'Shea's wife that Le Maître was dead, he
would have been a much happier man. He could not admit the woman's
logic. Still, he was far happier than he had been an hour before. Le
Maître might be dead. Josephine did not love Le Maître. He felt that
now, at least, he understood her life.

Having the flowers, the very first darlings of the spring, in his hand,
he went, in the impulse of the new sympathy, and knocked at her house
door. He carried his burden of moss, earth, moisture, and little gray
scaly insects that, having been disturbed, crawled in and out of it,
boldly into the room, whose walls were still decorated with the faded
garlands of the previous autumn.

"Let me talk to you," said Caius.

The lady and the one young girl who happened to be with her had
bestirred themselves to receive his gift. Making a platter serve as the
rock-ledge from which the living things had been disturbed, they set
them in the window to grow and unfold the more quickly. They had brought
him a bowl also in which to wash his hands, and then it was that he
looked at the lady of the house and made his request.

He hardly thought she would grant it; he felt almost breathless with his
own hardihood when he saw her dismiss the girl and sit before him to
hear what he might have to say. He knew then that had he asked her to
talk to him he would have translated the desire of his heart far better.

"O'Shea's wife has been talking to me," he said.

"About me?"

"I hope you will forgive us. I think she could not help speaking, and I
could not help listening."

"What did she say?"

It was the absolutely childlike directness of her thoughts and words
that always seemed to Caius to be the thing that put the greatest
distance between them.

"I could not tell you what she said; I would not dare to repeat it to
you, and perhaps she would not wish you to know; but you know she is
loyal to you, and what I can tell you is, that I understand better now
what your life is--what it has been."

Then he held out his hands with an impulsive gesture towards her. The
large table was between them; it was only a gesture, and he let his
hands lie on the table. "Let me be your friend; you may trust me," he
said. "I am only a very ordinary man; but still, the best friendship I
have I offer. You need not be afraid of me."

"I am not afraid of you." She said it with perfect tranquillity.

He did not like her answer.

"Are we friends, then?" he asked, and tried to smile, though he felt
that some unruly nerve was painting the heaviness of his heart in his
face.

"How do you mean it? O'Shea and his wife are my friends, each of them in
a very different way----" She was going on, but he interrupted:

"They are your friends because they would die to serve you; but have you
never had friends who were your equals in education and intelligence?"
He was speaking hastily, using random words to suggest that more could
be had out of such a relation than faithful service.

"Are you my equal in intelligence and education?" she asked appositely,
laughter in her eyes.

He had time just for a momentary flash of self-wonder that he should so
love a woman who, when she did not keep him at some far distance,
laughed at him openly. He stammered a moment, then smiled, for he could
not help it.

"I would not care to claim that for myself," he said.

"Rather," she suggested, "let us frankly admit that you are the superior
in both."

He was sitting at the table, his elbows upon it, and now he covered his
face with his hands, half in real, half in mock, despair:

"What can I do or say?" he groaned. "What have I done that you will not
answer the honest meaning you can understand in spite of my clumsy
words?"

Then he had to look at her because she did not answer, and when he saw
that she was still ready to laugh, he laughed, too.

"Have you never ceased to despise me because I could not swim? I can
swim now, I assure you. I have studied the art. I could even show you a
prize that I took in a race, if that would win your respect."

"I am glad you took the prize."

"I have not yet learned the magic with which mermaids move."

"No, and you have not heard any excuse for the boldness of that play
yet. And I was almost the cause of your death. Ah! how frightened I was
that night--of you and for you! And again when I went to see Mr.
Pembroke before the snow came, and the storm came on and I was obliged
to travel with you in O'Shea's great-coat--that again cannot seem nice
to you when you think of it. Why do you like what appears so strange?
You came here to do a noble work, and you have done it nobly. Why not go
home now, and be rid of such a suspicious character as I have shown
myself to be? Wherever you go, our prayers and our blessings will follow
you."

Caius looked down at the common deal board. There were dents and marks
upon it that spoke of constant household work. At length he said:

"There is one reason for going that would seem to me enough: if you will
tell me that you neither want nor need my companionship or help in any
way; but if you cannot tell me that----"

"Want," she said very sadly. "Ah, do you think I have no heart, no mind
that likes to talk its thoughts, no sympathies? I think that if
_anyone_--man, woman, or child--were to come to me from out the big
world, where people have such thoughts and feelings as I have, and offer
to talk to me, I could not do anything else than desire their
companionship. Do you think that I am hard-hearted? I am so lonely that
the affection even of a dog or a bird would be a temptation to me, if it
was a thing that I dared not accept, because it would make me weaker to
live the life that is right. That is the way we must tell what is right
or wrong."

In spite of himself, he gathered comfort from the fact that, pausing
here, without adequate reason that was apparent, she took for granted
that the friendship he offered would be a source of weakness to her.

She never stooped to try to appear reasonable. As she had been speaking,
a new look had been coming out of the habitual calmness of her face, and
now, in the pause, the calm went suddenly, and there was a flash of fire
in her eyes that he had never seen there before:

"If I were starving, would you come and offer me bread that you knew I
ought not to eat? It would be cruel." She rose up suddenly, and he stood
before her. "It is cruel of you to tantalize me with thoughts of
happiness because you know I must want it so much. I could not live and
not want it. Go! you are doing a cowardly thing. You are doing what the
devil did when our Lord was in the wilderness. But He did not need the
bread He was asked to take, and I do not need your friendship. Go!"

She held out the hand--the hand that had so often beckoned to him in
play--and pointed him to the door. He knew that he was standing before a
woman who had been irritated by inward pain into a sudden gust of anger,
and now, for the first time, he was not afraid of her. In losing her
self-control she had lost her control of him.

"Josephine," he cried, "tell me about this man, Le Maître! He has no
right over you. Why do you think he is not dead? At least, tell me what
you know."

It seemed that, in the confusion of conflicting emotions, she hardly
wondered why he had not obeyed her.

"Oh, he is not dead!" She spoke with bitterness. "I have no reason to
suppose so. He only leaves me in suspense that he may make me the more
miserable." And then, as if realizing what she had said, she lifted her
head again proudly. "But remember it is nothing to you whether he is
alive or dead."

"Nothing to me to know that you would be freed from this horrible
slavery! It is not of my own gain, but of yours, I am thinking."

He knew that what he had said was not wholly true, yet, in the heat of
the moment, he knew that to embody in words the best that might be was
to give himself the best chance of realizing it; and he did not believe
now that her fierce assertion of indifference for him was true either,
but his best self applauded her for it. For a minute he could not tell
what Josephine would do next. She stood looking at him helplessly; it
seemed as though her subsiding anger had left a fear of herself in its
place. But what he dreaded most was that her composure should return.

"Do not be angry with me," he said; "I ask because it is right that I
should know. Can you not get rid of this bond of marriage?"

"Do you think," she asked, "that the good God and the Holy Virgin would
desire me to put myself--my life--all that is sacred--into courts and
newspapers? Do you think the holy Mother of God--looking down upon me,
her child--wants me to get out of trouble in _that_ way?" Josephine had
asked the question first in distress; then, with a face of peerless
scorn, she seemed to put some horrid scene from before her with her
hand. "The dear God would rather I would drown myself," she said; "it
would at least be"--she hesitated for a word, as if at a loss in her
English--"at least be cleaner."

She had no sooner finished that speech than the scorn died out of her
face:

"Ah, no," she cried repentant; "the men and women who are driven to seek
such redress--I--I truly pity them--but for me--it would not be any use
even if it were right. O'Shea says it would be no use, and he knows. I
don't think I would do it if I could; but I could not if I would."

"Surely he is dead," pleaded Caius. "How can you live if you do not
believe that?"

She came a little nearer to him, making the explanation with child-like
earnestness:

"You see, I have talked to God and to the holy Mother about this. I know
they have heard my prayers and seen my tears, and will do what is good
for me. I ask God always that Le Maître may not come back to me, so now
I know that if" (a gasping sigh retarded for a moment the breath that
came and went in her gentle bosom) "if he does come back it will be
God's will. Who am I that I should know best? Shall I choose to be what
you call a 'missionary' to the poor and sick--and refuse God's will? God
can put an end to my marriage if He will; until He does, I will do my
duty to my husband: I will till the land that he left idle; I will
honour the name he gave me. I dare not do anything except what is very,
very right, because I have appealed to the Court of Heaven. You asked
me just now if I did not want and need friendship; it does not matter
at all what I want, and whatever God does not give me you may be sure I
do not need."

He knew that the peace he dreaded had come back to her. She had gone
back to the memory of her strength. Now he obeyed the command she had
given before, and went out.




CHAPTER VI.

"THE NIGHT IS DARK."


Caius went home to his house. Inconsistency is the hall-mark of real in
distinction from unreal life. A note of happy music was sounding in his
heart. The bright spring evening seemed all full of joy. He saw a flock
of gannets stringing out in long line against the red evening sky, and
knew that all the feathered population of the rocks was returning to its
summer home. Something more than the mere joy of the season was making
him glad; he hardly knew what it was, for it appeared to him that
circumstances were untoward.

It was in vain that he reasoned that there was no cause for joy in the
belief that Josephine took delight in his society; that delight would
only make her lot the harder, and make for him the greater grievance. He
might as well have reasoned with himself that there was no cause for joy
in the fact of the spring; he was so created that such things made up
the bliss of life to him.

Caius did not himself think that Josephine owed any duty to La Maître;
he could only hope, and try to believe, that the man was dead. Reason,
common-sense, appeared to him to do away with what slight moral or
religious obligation was involved in such a marriage; yet he was quite
sure of one thing--that this young wife, left without friend or
protector, would have been upon a very much lower level if she had
thought in the manner as he did. He knew now that from the first day he
had seen her the charm of her face had been that he read in it a
character that was not only wholly different to, but nobler than, his
own. He reflected now that he should not love her at all if she took a
stand less high in its sweet unreasonableness, and his reason for this
was simply that, had she done otherwise, she would not have been
Josephine.

The thought that Josephine was what she was intoxicated him; all the
next day time and eternity seemed glorious to him. The islands were
still ringed with the pearly ring of ice-floes, and for one brief spring
day, for this lover, it was enough to be yet imprisoned in the same bit
of green earth with his lady, to think of all the noble things she had
said and done, and, by her influence, to see new vistas opening into
eternity in which they two walked together. There was even some
self-gratulation that he had attained to faith in Heaven. He was one of
those people who always suppose that they would be glad to have faith if
they could. It was not faith, however, that had come to him, only a
refining and quickening of his imagination.

Quick upon the heels of these high dreams came their test, for life is
not a dream.

Between the Magdalen Islands and the mainland, besides the many stray
schooners that came and went, there were two lines of regular
communication--one was by a sailing vessel which carried freight
regularly to and from the port of Gaspé; the other was by a small
packet steamer that once a week came from Nova Scotia and Prince
Edward's Island, and returned by the same route. It was by this steamer,
on her first appearance, that Caius ought reasonably to return to his
home. She would come as soon as the ice diminished; she would bring him
news, withheld for four months, of how his parents had fared in his
absence. Caius had not yet decided that he would go home by the first
trip; the thought of leaving, when it forced itself upon him, was very
painful. This steamer was the first arrival expected, and the islanders,
eager for variety and mails, looked excitedly to see the ice melt or be
drifted away. Caius looked at the ice ring with more intense longing,
but his longing was that it should remain. His wishes, like prayers,
besought the cold winds and frosty nights to conserve it for him.

It so happened that the Gaspé schooner arrived before the southern
packet, and lay outside of the ice, waiting until she could make her way
through. So welcome was the sight that the islanders gathered upon the
shores of the bay just for the pleasure of looking at her as she lay
without the harbour. Caius looked at her, too, and with comparative
indifference, for he rejoiced that he was still in prison.

Upon that day the night fell just as it falls upon all days; but at
midnight Caius had a visitor. O'Shea came to him in the darkness.

Caius was awakened from sound sleep by a muffled thumping at his door
that was calculated to disturb him without carrying sharp sound into the
surrounding air. His first idea was that some drunken fellow had
blundered against his wall by mistake. As the sounds continued and the
full strangeness of the event, in that lonely place, entered his waking
brain, he arose with a certain trepidation akin to that which one feels
at the thought of supernatural visitors, a feeling that was perhaps the
result of some influence from the spirit of the man outside the door;
for when he opened it, and held his candle to O'Shea's face, he saw a
look there that made him know certainly that something was wrong.

O'Shea came in and shut the door behind him, and went into the inner
room and sat down on the foot of the bed. Caius followed, holding the
candle, and inspected him again.

"Sit down, man." O'Shea made an impatient gesture at the light. "Get
into bed, if ye will; there's no hurry that I know of."

Caius stood still, looking at the farmer, and such nervousness had come
upon him that he was almost trembling with fear, without the slightest
notion as yet of what he feared.

"In the name of Heaven----" he began.

"Yes, Heaven!" O'Shea spoke with hard, meditative inquiry. "It's Heaven
she trusts in. What's Heaven going to do for her, I'd loike to know?"

"What is it?" The question now was hoarse and breathless.

"Well, I'll tell you what it is if ye'll give me time"--the tone was
sarcastic--"and you needn't spoil yer beauty by catching yer death of
cold. 'Tain't nicessary, that I know of. There's things that are
nicessary; there's things that will be nicessary in the next few days;
but that ain't."

For the first time Caius did not resent the caustic manner. Its
sharpness was turned now towards an impending fate, and to Caius O'Shea
had come as to a friend in need. Mechanically he sat in the middle of
the small bed, and huddled its blankets about him. The burly farmer, in
fur coat and cap, sat in wooden-like stillness; but Caius was like a man
in a fever, restless in his suspense. The candle, which he had put upon
the floor, cast up a yellow light on all the scant furniture, on the two
men as they thus talked to each other, with pale, tense faces, and threw
distorted shadows high up on the wooden walls.

Perhaps it was a relief to O'Shea to torture Caius some time with this
suspense. At last he said: "He's in the schooner."

"Le Maître? How do you know?"

"Well, I'll tell ye how I know. I told ye there was no hurry."

If he was long now in speaking, Caius did not know it. Upon his brain
crowded thoughts and imaginations: wild plans for saving the woman he
loved; wild, unholy desires of revenge; and a wild vision of misery in
the background as yet--a foreboding that the end might be submission to
the worst pains of impotent despair.

O'Shea had taken out a piece of paper, but did not open it.

"'Tain't an hour back I got this. The skipper of the schooner and me
know each other. He's been bound over by me to let me know if that man
ever set foot in his ship to come to this place, and he's managed to get
a lad off his ship in the noight, and across the ice, and he brought me
this. Le Maître, he's drunk, lyin' in his bunk; that's the way he's
preparing to come ashore. It may be one day, it may be two, afore the
schooner can get in. Le Maître he won't get off it till it's in th'
harbour. I guess that's about all there is to tell." O'Shea added this
with grim abstinence from fiercer comment.

"Does she know?" Caius' throat hardly gave voice to the words.

"No, she don't; and I don't know who is to tell her. I can't. I can do
most things." He looked up round the walls and ceiling, as if hunting in
his mind for other things he could not do. "I'll not do that. 'Tain't in
my line. My wife is adown on her knees, mixing up prayers and crying at
a great rate; and says I to her, 'You've been a-praying about this some
years back; I'd loike to know what good it's done. Get up and tell
madame the news;' and says she that she couldn't, and she says that in
the morning you're to tell her." O'Shea set his face in grim defiance of
any sentiment of pity for Caius that might have suggested itself.

Caius said nothing; but in a minute, grasping at the one straw of hope
which he saw, "What are you going to do?" he asked.

O'Shea smoothed out the letter he held.

"Well, you needn't speak so quick; it's just that there I thought we
might have our considerations upon. I'm not above asking advoice of a
gintleman of the world like yerself; I'm not above giving advoice,
neither."

He sat looking vacantly before him with a grim smile upon his face.
Caius saw that his mind was made up.

"What are you going to do?" he asked again.

At the same moment came the sharp consciousness upon him that he himself
was a murderer, that he wanted to have Le Maître murdered, that his
question meant that he was eager to be made privy to the plot, willing
to abet it. Yet he did not feel wicked at all; before his eyes was the
face of Josephine lying asleep, unconscious and peaceful. He felt that
he fought in a cause in which a saint might fight.

"What I may or may not do," said O'Shea, "is neither here nor there just
now. The first thing is, what you're going to do. The schooner's out
there to the north-east; the boat that's been used for the sealing is
over here to the south-west; now, there ain't no sinse, that I know of,
in being uncomfortable when it can be helped, or in putting ourselves
about for a brute of a man who ain't worth it. It's plain enough what's
the easy thing to do. To-morrow morning ye'll make out that ye can't
abide no longer staying in this dull hole, and offer the skipper of one
of them sealing-boats fifty dollars to have the boat across the ice and
take you to Souris. Then ye will go up and talk plain common-sinse to
madame, and tell her to put on her man's top-coat she's worn before, and
skip out of this dirty fellow's clutches. There ain't nothing like being
scared out of their wits for making women reasonable--it's about the
only time they have their sinses, so far as I know."

"If she won't come, what then?" Caius demanded hastily.

"My woife says that if ye're not more of a fool than we take ye for,
she'll go."

There was something in the mechanical repetition of what his wife had
said that made Caius suspect.

"You don't think she'll go?"

O'Shea did not answer.

"That is what you'll do, any way," he said; "and ye'll do it the best
way ye know how."

He sat upon the bed some time longer, wrapped in grim reserve. The
candle guttered, flared, burned itself out. The two men were together in
the dark. Caius believed that if the first expedient failed, and he felt
it could not but fail, murder was their only resource against what
seemed to them intolerable evil.

O'Shea got up.

"Perhaps ye think the gintleman that is coming has redeeming features
about him?" A fine edge of sarcasm was in his tone. "Well, he hain't.
Before we lost sight of him, I got word concarning him from one part of
the world and another. If I haven't got the law of him, it's because
he's too much of a sneak. He wasn't anything but a handsome sort of
beast to begin with; and, what with drinking and the life he's led, he's
grown into a sort of thing that had better go on all fours like
Nebuchadnezzar than come nigh decent people on his hind-legs. Why has he
let her alone all these years?" The speech was grimly dramatic. "Why,
just because, first place, I believe another woman had the upper hand of
him; second place, when he married madame it was the land and money her
father had to leave her that made him make that bargain. He hadn't that
in him that would make him care for a white slip of a girl as she was
then, and, any way, he knew that the girl and the money would keep till
he was sick of roving. It's as nasty a trick as could be that he's
served her, playing dead dog all these years, and coming to catch her
unawares. I tell ye the main thing he has on his mind is revenge for the
letters she wrote him when she first got word of his tricks, and then,
too, he's coming back to carouse on her money and the money she's made
on his father's land, that he niver looked to himself."

O'Shea stalked through the small dark rooms and went out, closing the
outer door gently behind him. Caius sat still, wrapped in his blankets.
He bowed his head upon his knees. The darkness was only the physical
part of the blackness that closed over his spirit. There was only one
light in this blackness--that was Josephine's face. Calm he saw it,
touched with the look of devotion or mercy; laughing and dimpled he saw
it, a thing at one with the sunshine and all the joy of earth; and then
he saw it change, and grow pale with fear, and repulsion, and disgust.
Around this one face, that carried light with it, there were horrid
shapes and sounds in the blackness of his mind. He had been a good man;
he had preferred good to evil: had it all been a farce? Was the thing
that he was being driven to do now a thing of satanic prompting, and he
himself corrupt--all the goodness which he had thought to be himself
only an organism, fair outside, that rotted inwardly? Or was this fear
the result of false teaching, the prompting of an artificial conscience,
and was the thing he wished to do the wholesome and natural course to
take--right in the sight of such Deity as might be beyond the curtain of
the unknown, the Force who had set the natural laws of being in motion?
Caius did not know. While his judgment was in suspense he was beset by
horrible fears--the fear that he might be driven to do a villainous
deed, the greater fear that he should not accomplish it, the awful fear,
rising above all else in his mind, of seeing Josephine overtaken by the
horrible fate which menaced her, and he himself still alive to feel her
misery and his own.

No, rather than that he would himself kill the man. It was not the part
that had been assigned to him, but if she would not save herself it
would be the noblest thing to do. Was he to allow O'Shea, with a wife
and children, to involve himself in such dire trouble, when he, who had
no one dependent upon him, could do the deed, and take what consequences
might be? He felt a glow of moral worth like that which he had felt when
he decided upon his mission to the island--greater, for in that his
motives had been mixed and sordid, and in this his only object was to
save lives that were of more worth than his own. Should he kill the man,
he would hardly escape death, and even if he did, he could never look
Josephine in the face again.

Why not? Why, if this deed were so good, could he not, after the doing
of it, go back to her and read gratitude in her eyes? Because
Josephine's standard of right and wrong was different from his. What was
her standard? His mind cried out an impatient answer. "She believes it
is better to suffer than to be happy." He did not believe that; he would
settle this matter by his own light, and, by freeing her and saving her
faithful friends, be cut off from her for ever.

It would be an easy thing to do, to go up to the man and put a knife in
his heart, or shoot him like a dog!

His whole being revolted from the thought; when the deed came before his
eyes, it seemed to him that only in some dark feverish imagination could
he have dreamed of acting it out, that of course in plain common-sense,
that daylight of the mind, he could not will to do this.

Then he thought again of the misery of the suffering wife, and he
believed that, foreign as it was to his whole habit of life, he could do
this, even this, to save her.

Then again came over him the sickening dread that the old rules of right
and wrong that he had been taught were the right guides after all, and
that Josephine was right, and that he must submit.

The very thought of submission made his soul rise up in a mad tempest of
anger against such a moral law, against all who taught it, against the
God who was supposed to ordain it; and so strong was the tempest of this
wrath, and so weak was he, perplexed, wretched, that he would have been
glad even at the same moment to have appealed to the God of his fathers,
with whom he was quarrelling, for counsel and help. His quarrel was too
fierce for that. His quarrel with God made trust, made mere belief even,
impossible, and he was aware that it was not new, that this was only the
culminating hour of a long rebellion.




CHAPTER VII.

THE WILD WAVES WHIST.


Next morning, when Caius walked forth into the glory of the April
sunshine, he felt himself to be a poor, wretched man. There was not a
fisherman upon the island, lazy, selfish as they were, and despised in
his eyes, that did not appear to him to be a better man than he. All the
force of training and habit made the thing that he was going to do
appear despicable; but all the force of training and habit was not
strong enough to make his judgment clear or direct his will.

The muddy road was beginning to steam in the sunshine; the thin shining
ice of night that coated its puddles was melting away. In the green
strip by the roadside he saw the yellow-tufted head of a dandelion just
level with the grass. The thicket of stunted firs on either side smelt
sweet, and beyond them he saw the ice-field that dazzled his eyes, and
the blue sea that sparkled. From this side he could not see the bay and
the ship of fate lying at anchor, but he noticed with relief that the
ice was not much less.

There was no use in thinking or feeling; he must go on and do what was
to be done. So he told himself. He shut his heart against the influence
of the happy earth; he felt like a guest bidden by fate, who knew not
whether the feast were to be for bridal or funeral. That he was not a
strong man was shown in this--that having hoped and feared, dreamed and
suffered, struggling to see a plain path where no path was, for half the
night, he now felt that his power of thought and feeling had burned out,
that he could only act his part, without caring much what its results
might be.

It was eight o'clock. He had groomed his horse, and tidied his house,
and bathed, and breakfasted. He did not think it seemly to intrude upon
the lady before this hour, and now he ascended her steps and knocked at
her door. The dogs thumped their tails on the wooden veranda; it was
only of late they had learned this welcome for him. Would they give it
now, he wondered, if they could see his heart? As he stood there waiting
for a minute, he felt that it would be good, if possible, to have laid
his dilemma fairly before the canine sense and heart, and to have let
the dogs rise and tear him or let him pass, as they judged best. It was
a foolish fancy.

It was O'Shea's wife who opened the door; her face was disfigured by
crying.

"You have told her?" demanded Caius, with relief.

The woman shook her head.

"It was the fine morning that tempted her out, sir," she said. "She sent
down to me, saying how she had taken a cup of milk and gone to ride on
the beach, and I was to come up and look after the girls. But look here,
sir"--eagerly--"it's a good thing, I'm thinking, for her spirits are
high when she rides in fine weather, and she's more ready for games and
plays, and thinking of pleasure. She's gone on the west shore, round by
the light, for O'Shea he looked at the tracks. Do you get your horse
and ride after, where you see her tracks in the sand."

Caius went. He mounted his horse and rode down upon the western shore.
He found the track, and galloped upon it. The tide was low; the ice was
far from shore; the highway, smoothed by the waves, was firm and good.
Caius galloped to the end of the island where the light was, where the
sealing vessels lay round the base of the lighthouse, and out upon the
dune, and still the print of her horse's feet went on in front of him.
It was not the first time that he and she had been upon the dune
together.

A mile, two miles, three; he rode at an easy pace, for now he knew that
he could not miss the rider before him. He watched the surf break gently
on the broad shallow reach of sand-ridges that lay between him and the
floating ice. And when he had ridden so far he was not the same man as
when he mounted his horse, or at least, his own soul, of which man has
hardly permanent possession, had returned to him. He could now see, over
the low mists of his own moods, all the issues of Josephine's case--all,
at least, that were revealed to him; for souls are of different stature,
and it is as the head is high or low that the battlefield is truly
discerned.

Long before he met her he saw Josephine. She had apparently gone as far
as she thought wise, and was amusing herself by making her horse set his
feet in the cold surf. It was a game with the horse and the wavelets
that she was playing. Each time he danced back and sunned himself he had
to go in again; and when he stood, his hind-feet on the sand and his
fore-feet reared over the foam, by way of going where she wished and
keeping himself dry, Caius could see her gestures so well that it
seemed to him he heard the tones of playful remonstrance with which she
argued the case.

When she perceived that Caius intended to come up to her, she rode to
meet him. Her white cap had been taken off and stuffed into the breast
of her dress; the hood surrounded her face loosely, but did not hide it;
her eyes were sparkling with pleasure--the pure animal pleasure of life
and motion, the sensuous pleasure in the beauty and the music of the
waves; other pleasures there might be, but these were certain, and
predominated.

"Why did you come?"

She asked the question as a happy child might ask of its playmate--no
hint of danger.

To Caius it was a physical impossibility to answer this question with
the truth just then.

"Is not springtime an answer?" he asked, then added: "I am going away
to-day. I came for one last ride."

She looked at him for a few moments, evidently supposing that he
intended to go to Harbour Island to wait there for his ship. If that
were so, it seemed that she felt no further responsibility about her
conduct to him. His heart sank to see that her joy in the spring and the
morning was such that the thought of parting did not apparently grieve
her much.

In a moment more her eyes flashed at him with the laughter at his
expense which he knew so well; she tried not to laugh as she spoke, but
could not help it.

"I have been visiting the band of men who were going to murder you the
night you came. Would you like to see them?"

"If you will take care of me."

As she turned and rode before him he heard her laughing.

"There," she said, stopping and pointing to the ground--"there is the
place where the quicksand was. I have not gone over it this morning.
Sometimes they last from one season to another; sometimes they change
themselves in a few days. I was dreadfully frightened when we began to
sink, but it was you who saved the pony."

"Don't," said Caius--"don't attempt to make the best of me. I would
rather be laughed at." He spoke lightly, without feeling, and that
seemed to please her.

"I think," she said candidly, "we behaved very badly; but it was
O'Shea's fault--I only enjoyed it. And I don't see what else we could
have done, because those two French sailors had to watch if anyone came
to steal from the wreck, and they were going to help us so far as to go
to the sheds on the cliff for boards to get up the cart; but O'Shea
could not have stayed all night with the bags unless I had left him my
coat as well as his own."

"You might have trusted me," said Caius. Still he spoke with no
sensibility; she grew more at her ease.

"O'Shea wouldn't; and I couldn't control O'Shea. And then we had to meet
so often, that I could not bear that you should know I had worn a man's
coat. I had to do it, for I couldn't drive home any other way." Here a
pause, and her mind wandered to another recollection. "Those men we met
brought us word that one of my friends was so ill; I had to hurry to
him. In my heart I thought you would not respect me because I had worn a
man's coat; and because---- Yes, it was very naughty of me indeed to
behave as I did in the water that summer. Even then I did try to get
O'Shea to let me walk with you, but he wouldn't."

She had been slowly riding through a deep, soft sand-drift that was
heaped at the mouth of the hollow, and when they had got through the
opening, Caius saw the ribs of one side of an enormous wreck protruding
from the sand, about six feet in height. A small hardy weed had grown
upon their heads in tufts; withered and sear with the winter, it still
hung there. The ribs bent over a little, as the men he had seen had
bent.

"The cloud-shadows and the moonlight were very confusing," remarked
Josephine; "and then O'Shea made the two sailors stand in the same way,
and they were real. I never knew a man like O'Shea for thinking of
things that are half serious and half funny. I never knew him yet fail
to find a way to do the thing he wanted to do; and it's always a way
that makes me laugh."

If Josephine would not come away with him, would O'Shea find a way of
killing Le Maître? and would it be a way to make her laugh? With the
awful weight of the tidings he brought upon his heart, all that he said
or did before he told them seemed artificial.

"I thought"--half mechanically--"that I saw them all hold up their
hands."

"Did you?" she asked. "The first two did; O'Shea told them to hold up
their hands."

"There is something you said a minute ago that I want to answer," he
said.

She thought he had left the subject of his illusion because it mortified
him.

"You said"--he began now to feel emotion as he spoke--"that you thought
I should not respect you. I want to tell you that I respected you as I
respect my mother, even when you were only a mermaid. I saw you when I
fell that night as we walked on this beach. If you had worn a boy's
coat, or a fishskin, always, I had sense enough to see that it was a
saint at play. Have you read all the odd stories about the saints and
the Virgin--how they appear and vanish, and wear odd clothes, and play
beneficent tricks with people? It was like that to me. I don't know how
to say it, but I think when good people play, they have to be very, very
good, or they don't really enjoy it. I don't know how to explain it, but
the moderate sort of goodness spoils everything."

Caius, when he had said this, felt that it was something he had never
thought before; and, whatever it might mean, he felt instinctively that
it meant a great deal more than he knew. He felt a little shabby at
having expressed it from her religious point of view, in which he had no
part; but his excuse was that there was in his mind at least the doubt
that she might be right, and, whether or not, his mission just then was
to gain her confidence. He brushed scruples aside for the end in view.

"I am glad you said that," she said. "I am not good, but I should like
to be. It wasn't becoming to play a mermaid, but I didn't think of that
then. I didn't know many things then that I know now. You see, my
uncle's wife drowned her little child; and afterwards, when she was ill,
I went to take care of her, and we could not let anyone know, because
the police would have interfered for fear she would drown me. But she is
quite harmless, poor thing! It is only that time stopped for her when
the child was drowned, and she thinks its little body is in the water
yet, if we could only find it. I found she had made that dress you call
a fishskin with floats on it for herself, and she used to get into the
sea, from the opening of an old cellar, at night, and push herself about
with a pole. It was the beautiful wild thing that only a mad person with
nice thoughts could do. But when she was ill, I played with it, for I
had nothing else to do; it was desecration."

"I thought you were like the child that was lost. I think you are like
her."

"She thought so, too; she used to think sometimes that I was her little
daughter grown up. It was very strange, living with her; I almost think
I might have gone mad, too, if I hadn't played with you."

It was very strange, Caius thought, that on this day of all days she
should be willing to talk to him about herself, should be willing to
laugh and chat and be happy with him. The one day that he dare not
listen long, that he must disturb her peace, was the only time that she
had seemed to wish to make a friend of him.

"When you lived so near us," he asked, "did you ever come across the
woods and see my father's house? Did you see my father and mother? I
think you would like them if you did."

"Oh, no," she said lightly; "I only knew who you were because my aunt
talked about you; she never forgot what you had done for the child."

"Do not turn your horse yet." He allowed himself to be urgent now. "I
have something to say to you which must be said. I am going home; I do
not want to wait for the steamer; I want to bribe one of those sealing
vessels to start with me to-day. I have come to ask you if you will not
come with me to see my mother. You do not know what it is to have a
mother. Mothers are very good; mine is. You would like to be with her, I
know; you would have the calm of feeling taken care of, instead of
standing alone in the world."

He said all this without letting his tone betray that that
double-thoughted mind of his was telling him that this was doubtful,
that his mother might be slow to believe in Josephine, and that he was
not sure whether Josephine would be attracted by her.

Josephine looked at him with round-eyed surprise; then, apparently
conjecturing that the invitation was purely kind, purely stupid, she
thanked him, and declined it graciously.

"Is there no folly with which you would not easily credit me?" He smiled
faintly in his reproach. "Do you think I do not know what I am saying? I
have been awake all night thinking what I could do for you." For a
moment he looked at her helplessly, hoping that some hint of the truth
would come of itself; then, turning away his face, he said hoarsely: "Le
Maître is on the Gaspé schooner. O'Shea has had the news. He is lying
drunk in his berth."

He did not turn until he heard a slight sound. Then he saw that she had
slipped down from her horse, perhaps because she was afraid of falling
from it. Her face was quite white; there was a drawn look of abject
terror upon it; but she only put her horse's rein in his hand, and
pointed to the mouth of the little valley.

"Let me be alone a little while," she whispered.

So Caius rode out upon the beach, leading her horse; and there he held
both restive animals as still as might be, and waited.




CHAPTER VIII.

"GOD'S IN HIS HEAVEN."


Caius wondered how long he ought to wait if she did not come out to him.
He wondered if she would die of misery there alone in the sand-dune, or
if she would go mad, and meet him in some fantastic humour, all the
intelligence scorched out of her poor brain by the cruel words he had
said. He had a notion that she had wanted to say her prayers, and,
although he did not believe in an answering Heaven, he did believe that
prayers would comfort her, and he hoped that that was why she asked to
be left.

When he thought of the terror in her eyes, he felt sanguine that she
would come with him. Now that he had seen her distress, it seemed to him
worse than any notion he had preconceived of it. It was right that she
should go with him. When she had once done that, he would stand between
her and this man always. That would be enough; if she should never care
for him, if he had nothing more than that, he would be satisfied, and
the world might think what it would. If she would not go with him--well,
then he would kill Le Maître. His mind was made up; there was nothing
left of hesitation or scruple. He looked at the broad sea and the
sunlight and the sky, and made his vow with clenched teeth. He laughed
at the words which had scared him the night before--the names of the
crimes which were his alternatives; they were made righteousness to him
by the sight of fear in a woman's face.

It is one form of weakness to lay too much stress upon the emotion of
another, just as it is weak to take too much heed of our own emotions;
but Caius thought the sympathy that carried all before it was strength.

After awhile, waiting became intolerable. Leading both horses, he walked
cautiously back to a point where he could see Josephine. She was sitting
upon the sandy bank near where he had left her. He took his cap in his
hand, and went with the horses, standing reverently before her. He felt
sure now that she had been saying her prayers, because, although her
face was still very pallid, she was composed and able to speak. He
wished now she had not prayed.

"You are very kind to me." Her voice trembled, but she gave him a little
smile. "I cannot pretend that I am not distressed; it would be false,
and falsehood is not right. You are very, very kind, and I thank
you----"

She broke off, as if she had been going to say something more but had
wearily forgotten what it was.

"Oh, do not say that!" His voice was like one pleading to be spared a
blow. "I love you. There is no greater joy to me on earth than to serve
you."

"Hush," she said; "don't say that. I am very sorry for you, but sorrow
must come to us all in some way."

"Don't, don't!" he cried--"don't tell me that suffering is good. It is
not good; it is an evil. It is right to shun evil; it is the only
right. The other is a horrid fable--a lie concocted by priests and
devils!"

"Suppose you loved someone--me, for instance--and I was dead, and you
knew quite certainly that by dying you would come to where I was--would
you call death good or evil?"

He demurred. He did not want to admit belief in anything connected with
the doctrine of submission.

"I said 'suppose,'" she said.

"I would go through far more than death to come near you."

"Suffering is just a gate, like death. We go through it to get the
things we really want most."

"I don't believe in a religion that calls suffering better than
happiness; but I know you do."

"No, I don't," she said, "and God does not; and people who talk as if He
did not want us to seek happiness--even our own happiness--are making to
themselves a graven image. I will tell you how I think about it, because
I have been alone a great deal and been always very much afraid, and
that has made me think a great deal, and you have been very kind, for
you risked your life for my poor people, and now you would risk
something more than that to help me. Will you listen while I try to tell
you?"

Caius signified his assent. He was losing all his hope. He was thinking
that when she had done talking he would go and get ready to do murder;
but he listened.

"You see," she began, "the greatest happiness is love. Love is greedy to
get as well as to give. It is all nonsense talking about love that gives
and asks for no return. We only put up with that when we cannot get the
other, and why? Why should we think it the grandest thing to give what
we would scorn to take? You, for instance--you would rather have a
person you loved do nothing for you, yet enjoy you, always demanding
your affection and presence, than that he or she should be endlessly
generous, and indifferent to what you give in return."

"Yes." He blushed as he said it.

"Well then, it is cant to speak as if the love that asks for no return
is the noblest. Now listen. I have something very solemn to say, because
it is only by the greatest things that we learn what the little ought to
be. When God came to earth to live for awhile, it was for the sake of
His happiness and ours; He loved us in the way that I have been saying;
He was not content only to bless us, He wanted us to enjoy Him. He
wanted that happiness from us; and He wanted us to expect it from Him
and from each other; and if we had answered, all would have been like
the first marriage feast, where they had the very best wine, and such
lots of it. But, you see, we couldn't answer; we had no souls. We were
just like the men on Cloud Island who laughed at you when you wanted
them to build a hospital. The little self or soul that we had was of
that sort that we couldn't even love each other very much with it, and
not Him at all. So there was only one way, and that was for us to grow
out of these stupid little souls, and get good big ones, that can enjoy
God, and enjoy each other, and enjoy everything perfectly." She looked
up over the yellow sand-hills into the deep sunny sky, and drew a long
breath of the April air involuntarily. "Oh," she said, "a good, big,
perfect soul could enjoy so much."

It seemed as if she thought she had said it all and finished the
subject.

"Well," said Caius, interested in spite of himself, "if God wanted to
make us happy, He could have given us that kind of soul."

"Ah, no! We don't know why things have to grow, but they must;
everything grows--_you_ know that. For some reason, that is the best
way; so there was just one way for those souls to grow in us, and He
showed us how. It is by doing what is quite perfectly right, and bearing
all the suffering that comes because of it, and doing all the giving
side of love, because here we can't get much. Pain is not good in
itself; it is a gate. Our souls are growing all through the gate of the
suffering, and when we get to the other side of it, we shall find we
have won them. God wants us to be greedy for happiness; but we must find
it by going through the gate He went through to show us the way."

Caius stood before her holding the horses; even they had been still
while she was speaking, as if listening to the music of her voice. Caius
felt the misery of a wavering will and conflicting thoughts.

"If I thought," he said, "that God cared about happiness--just simple
happiness--it would make religion seem so much more sensible; but I'm
afraid I don't believe in living after death, or that He cares----"

What she said was wholly unreasonable. She put out her hand and took
his, as if the hand-clasp were a compact.

"Trust God and see," she said.

There was in her white face such a look of glorious hope, that Caius,
half carried away by its inspiration, still quailed before her. After
he had wrung her hand, he found himself brushing his sleeve across his
eyes. As he thought that he had lost her, thought of all that she would
have to endure, of the murder he still longed to commit, and felt all
the agony of indecision again, and suspected that after this he would
scruple to commit it--when all this came upon him, he turned and leaned
against one of the horses, sobbing, conscious in a vague way that he did
not wish to stop himself, but only craved her pity.

Josephine comforted him. She did not apparently try to, she did not do
or say anything to the purpose; but she evinced such consternation at
the sight of his tears, that stronger thoughts came. He put aside his
trouble, and helped her to mount her horse.

They rode along the beach slowly together. She was content to go slowly.
She looked physically too exhausted to ride fast. Even yet probably,
within her heart, the conflict was going forward that had only been well
begun in her brief solitude of the sand valley.

Caius looked at her from time to time with feelings of fierce
indignation and dejection. The indignation was against Le Maître, the
dejection was wholly upon his own account; for he felt that his plan of
help had failed, and that where he had hoped to give strength and
comfort, he had only, in utter weakness, exacted pity. Caius had one
virtue in these days: he did not admire anything that he did, and he did
not even think much about the self he scorned. With regard to Josephine,
he felt that if her philosophy of life were true it was not for him to
presume to pity her. So vividly had she brought her conception of the
use of life before him that it was stamped upon his mind in a brief
series of pictures, clear, indelible; and the last picture was one of
which he could not think clearly, but it produced in him an idea of the
after-life which he had not before.

Then he thought again of the cloud under which Josephine was entering.
Her decision would in all probability cut down her bright, useful life
to a few short years of struggle and shame and sorrow. At last he spoke:

"But why do you think it right to sacrifice yourself to this man? It
does not seem to me right."

He knew then what clearness of thought she had, for she looked with
almost horror in her face.

"Sacrifice myself for Le Maître! Oh no! I should have no right to do
that; but to the ideal right, to God--yes. If I withheld anything from
God, how could I win my soul?"

"But how do you know God requires this?"

"Ah! I told you before. Why will you not understand? I have prayed. I
know God has taken this thing in his own hand."

Caius said no more. Josephine's way of looking at this thing might not
be true; that was not what he was considering just then. He knew that it
was intensely true for her, would remain true for her until the event of
death proved it true or false. This was the factor in the present
problem that was the enemy to his scheme. Then, furthermore, whether it
were true or false, he knew that there was in his mind the doubt, and
that doubt would remain with him, and it would prevent him from killing
Le Maître; it would even prevent him from abetting O'Shea, and he
supposed that that abetting would be necessary. Here was cause enough
for dejection--that the whole miserable progress of events which he
feared most should take place. And why? Because a woman held a glorious
faith which might turn out to be delusion, and because he, a man, had
not strength to believe for certain that it was a delusion.

It raised no flicker of renewed hope in Caius to meet O'Shea at the turn
of the shore where the boats of the seal fishery were drawn up. O'Shea
had a brisk look of energy that made it evident that he was still bent
upon accomplishing his design. He stopped in front of the lady's horse,
and said something to her which Caius did not hear.

"Have ye arranged that little picnic over to Prince Edward's," he called
to Caius.

Caius looked at Josephine. O'Shea's mere presence had put much of the
spiritual aspect of the case to flight, and he suddenly smarted under
the realization that he had never put the question to her since she had
known her danger--never put the request to her strongly at all.

"Come," said Josephine; "I am going home. I am going to send all my
girls to their own homes and get the house ready for my husband."

O'Shea, with imperturbable countenance, pushed off his hat and scratched
his head.

"I was thinking," he remarked casually, "that I'd jist send Mammy along
with ye to Prince Edward." (Mammy was what he always called his wife.)
"I am thinking he'll be real glad to see her, for she's a real
respectable woman."

"Who?" asked Josephine, puzzled.

"Prince Edward, that owns the island," said O'Shea. "And she's that down
in the mouth, it's no comfort for me to have her; and she can take the
baby and welcome. It's a fair sea." He looked to the south as he spoke.
"I'd risk both her and the brat on it; and Skipper Pierre is getting
ready to take the boat across the ice."

Caius saw that resolution had fled from Josephine. She too looked at the
calm blue southern sea, and agonized longing came into her eyes. It
seemed to Caius too cruel, too horribly cruel, that she should be
tortured by this temptation. Because he knew that to her it could be
nothing but temptation, he sat silent when O'Shea, seeing that the
lady's gaze was afar, signed to him for aid; and because he hoped that
she might yield he was silent, and did not come to rescue her from the
tormentor.

O'Shea gave him a look of undisguised scorn; but since he would not woo,
it appeared that this man was able to do some wooing for him.

"Of course," remarked O'Shea, "I see difficulties. If the doctor here
was a young man of parts, I'd easier put ye and Mammy in his care; but
old Skipper Pierre is no milksop."

Josephine looked, first alert, as if suspecting an ill-bred joke, and
then, as O'Shea appeared to be speaking to her quite seriously,
forgetting that Caius might overhear, there came upon her face a look of
gentle severity.

"That is not what I think of the doctor; I would trust him more quickly
than anyone else, except you, O'Shea."

The words brought to Caius a pang, but he hardly noticed it in watching
the other two, for the lady, when she had spoken, looked off again with
longing at the sea, and O'Shea, whose rough heart melted under the
trustful affection of the exception she made, for a moment turned away
his head. Caius saw in him the man whom he had only once seen before,
and that was when his child had died. It was but a few moments; the easy
quizzical manner sat upon him again.

"Oh, well, he hasn't got much to him one way or the other, but----" this
in low, confidential tones.

Caius could not hear her reply; he saw that she interrupted, earnestly
vindicating him. He drew his horse back a pace or two; he would not
overhear her argument on his behalf, nor would he trust O'Shea so far as
to leave them alone together.

The cleverness with which O'Shea drove her into a glow of enthusiasm for
Caius was a revelation of power which the latter at the moment could
only regard curiously, so torn was his heart in respect to the issue of
the trial. He was so near that their looks told him what he could not
hear, and he saw Josephine's face glow with the warmth of regard which
grew under the other's sneers. Then he saw O'Shea visibly cast that
subject away as if it was of no importance; he went near to her,
speaking low, but with the look of one who brought the worst news, and
Caius knew, without question, that he was pouring into her ears all the
evil he had ever heard of Le Maître, all the detail of his present
drunken condition. Caius did not move; he did not know whether the scene
before him represented Satan with powerful grasp upon a soul that would
otherwise have passed into some more heavenly region, or whether it was
a wise and good man trying to save a woman from her own fanatical
folly. The latter seemed to be the case when he looked about him at the
beach, at the boats, at the lighthouse on the cliff above, with a
clothes-line near it, spread with flapping garments. When he looked, not
outward, but inward, and saw Josephine's vision of life, he believed he
ought to go forward and beat off the serpent from the dove.

The colloquy was not very long. Then O'Shea led Josephine's horse nearer
to Caius.

"Madame and my wife will go with ye," he said. "I've told the men to get
the boat out."

"I did not say that," moaned Josephine.

Her face was buried in her hands, and Caius remembered how those pretty
white hands had at one time beckoned to him, and at another had angrily
waved him away. Now they were held helplessly before a white face that
was convulsed with fear and shame and self-abandonment.

"There ain't no particular hurry," remarked O'Shea soothingly; "but
Mammy has packed up all in the houses that needs to go, and she'll bring
warm clothes and all by the time the boat's out, so there's no call for
madame to go back. It would be awful unkind to the girls to set them
crying; and"--this to Caius--"ye jist go and put up yer things as quick
as ye can."

His words were accompanied by the sound of the fishermen putting rollers
under the small schooner that had been selected. The old skipper,
Pierre, had begun to call out his orders. Josephine took her hands from
her face suddenly, and looked towards the busy men with such eager
hungry desire for the freedom they were preparing for her that it seemed
to Caius that at that moment his own heart broke, for he saw that
Josephine was not convinced but that she had yielded. He knew that
Mammy's presence on the journey made no real difference in its guilt
from Josephine's standpoint; her duty to her God was to remain at her
post. She had flinched from it out of mere cowardice--it was a fall.
Caius knew that he had no choice but to help her back to her better
self, that he would be a bastard if he did not do it.

Three times 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 Maître 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 Gaspé 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 Maître. 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 Gaspé 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 Maître 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 Gaspé 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 horrible.

"Ye and yer bags could jist go on board the ship before the loving
husband came off; ye'd make the harbour that way as easy, and I'm
thinking the ice on the other side of the bay is that thick ye'd be
scared and want me to sit back in my boat and yelp for help, like a
froightened puppy dog, instead of making the way through."

Cains thought that O'Shea might be trying to dare him to remain in the
boat. He inclined to believe that O'Shea could not alone enter into
conflict with a strong unscrupulous man in such a boat, in such a sea,
with hope of success. At any rate, when O'Shea, presuming on his
friendship with the skipper, had accomplished no less a thing than
bringing the sailing vessel to a standstill, Caius was prepared to board
her at once.

The little boat was still among the ice, but upon the verge of clear
water. The schooner, already near, was drifting nearer. O'Shea was
shouting to the men on her deck. The skipper stood there looking over
her side; he was a short stout man, of cheery aspect. Several sailors,
and one or two other men who might be passengers, had come to the side
also. Beside the skipper stood a big man with a brown beard; his very
way of standing still seemed to suggest habitual sluggishness of mind or
manner; yet his appearance at this distance was fine. Caius discovered
that this was Le Maître; he was surprised, he had supposed that he would
be thin and dark.

"It's Captain Le Maître I've come for; it's his wife that's wanting to
see him," O'Shea shouted.

"He's here!"

The skipper gave the information cheerfully, and Le Maître made a slight
sign showing that it was correct.

"I'll just take him back, then, in the boat with me now, for it's easy
enough getting this way, but there's holes in the sand that makes
drivin' unpleasant. Howsomever, I can't say which is the best passage.
This city gentleman I've got with me now thinks he's lost his life
siveral times already since he got into this boat."

He pointed to Caius as he ended his invitation to Le Maître. The men on
the schooner all grinned. It was O'Shea's manner, as well as his words,
that produced their derision.

Caius was wondering what would happen if Le Maître refused to come in
the boat. Suspicion said that O'Shea would cause the boat to be towed
ashore, and would then take the Captain home by the quicksands. Would
O'Shea make him drunk, and then cast him headfirst into the swallowing
sand? It seemed preposterous to be harbouring such thought against the
cheerful and most respectable farmer at his side. What foundation had he
for it? None but the hearing of an idle boast that the man had made one
day to his wife, and that she in simplicity had taken for earnest.

Le Maître signified that he would go with O'Shea. Indeed, looked at from
a short distance, the passage through the ice did not look so difficult
as it had proved.

O'Shea and Caius parted without word or glance of farewell. Caius
clambered over the side of the schooner; the one thought in his mind was
to get a nearer view of Le Maître.

This man was still standing sleepily. He did not bear closer inspection
well. His clothes were dirty, especially about the front of vest and
coat; there was everything to suggest an entire lack of neatness in
personal habits; more than that, the face at the time bore unmistakable
signs that enough alcohol had been drunk to benumb, although not to
stupefy, his faculties: the eye was bloodshot; the face, weather-beaten
as it was, was flabby. In spite of all this, Caius had expected a more
villainous-looking person, and so great was his loathing that he would
rather have seen him in a more obnoxious light. The man had a certain
dignity of bearing; his face had that unfurrowed look that means a low
moral sense, for there is no evidence of conflict. His eyes were too
near each other; this last was, perhaps, the only sign by which Nature
from the outset had marred a really excellent piece of manly proportion.

Caius made these observations involuntarily. As Le Maître stepped here
and there in a dull way while a chest that belonged to him was being
lowered into the boat, Caius could not help realizing that his
preconceived notions of the man as a monster had been exaggerated; he
was a common man, fallen into low habits, and fixed in them by middle
age.

Le Maître got into the boat in seaman-like fashion. He was perfectly at
home there, and dull as his eye looked, he tacitly assumed command. He
took O'Shea's pole from him, stepped to the prow, and began to turn the
boat, without regarding the fact that O'Shea was still holding hasty
conversation with the men on the schooner concerning the public events
of the winter months--the news they had brought from the mainland.

Everything had been done in the greatest haste; it was not twelve
minutes after the schooner had been brought to a stand when her sails
were again turned to catch the breeze. The reason for this haste was to
prevent more sideways drifting, for the schooner was drifting with the
wind against the floating ice amongst which O'Shea's boat was lying. The
wind blew very softly; her speed when sailing had not been great, and
the drifting motion was the most gentle possible.

Caius had not taken his eyes from the boat. He was watching the strength
with which Le Maître was turning her and starting her for Cloud Island.
He was watching O'Shea, who, still giving back chaff and sarcasm to the
men on the schooner, was forced to turn and pick up the smaller pole
which Caius had relinquished; he seemed to be interested only in his
talk, and to begin to help in the management of the boat mechanically.
The skipper was swearing at his men and shouting to O'Shea with
alternate breath. The sails of the schooner had hardly yet swelled with
the breeze when O'Shea, bearing with all his might against a bit of ice,
because of a slip of his pole, fell heavily on the side of his own boat,
tipping her suddenly over on a bit of ice that sunk with her weight. Le
Maître, at the prow, in the violent upsetting, was seen to fall headlong
between two bits of ice into the sea.

"By----! Did you ever see anything like that?" The skipper of the
schooner had run to the nearest point, which was beside Caius.

Then followed instantly a volley of commands, some of which related to
throwing ropes to the small boat, some concerning the movement of the
schooner, for at this moment her whole side pressed against all the bits
of ice, pushing them closer and closer together.

The boat had not sunk; she had partially filled with water that had
flowed over the ice on which she had upset; but when the weight of Le
Maître was removed and O'Shea had regained his balance, the ice rose
again, righting the boat and almost instantly tipping her toward the
other side, for the schooner had by this time caused a jam. It was not
such a jam as must of necessity injure the boat, which was heavily
built; but the fact that she was now half full of water and that there
was only one man to manage her, made his situation precarious. The
danger of O'Shea, however, was hardly noticed by the men on the
schooner, because of the horrible fact that the closing of the bits of
ice together made it improbable that Le Maître could rise again.

For a moment there was an eager looking at every space of blue water
that was left. If the drowning man could swim, he would surely make for
such an aperture.

"Put your pole down to him where he went in!" The men on the schooner
shouted this to O'Shea.

"Put the rope round your waist!" This last was yelled by the skipper,
perceiving that O'Shea himself was by no means safe.

A rope that had been thrown had a noose, through which O'Shea dashed his
arms; then, seizing the pole, he struck the butt-end between the blocks
of ice where Le Maître had fallen.

It seemed to Caius that the pole swayed in his hands, as if he were
wrenching it from a hand that had gripped it strongly below; but it
might have been only the grinding of the ice.

O'Shea thrust the pole with sudden vehemence further down, as if in a
frantic effort to bring it better within reach of Le Maître if he were
there; or, as Caius thought, it might have been that, feeling where the
man was, he stunned him with the blow.

Standing in a boat that was tipping and grinding among the ice, O'Shea
appeared to be exercising marvellous force and dexterity in thus using
the pole at all.

The wind was now propelling the schooner forward, and her pressure on
the ice ceased. O'Shea threw off the noose of the rope wildly, and
looked to the men on the vessel, as if quite uncertain what to do next.

It was a difficult matter for anyone to decide. To leave him there was
manifestly impossible; but if the schooner again veered round, the
jamming of the ice over the head of La Maître would again occur. The men
on the schooner, not under good discipline, were all shouting and
talking.

"He's dead by now, wherever he is." The skipper made this quiet
parenthesis either to himself or to Caius. Then he shouted aloud: "Work
your boat through to us!"

O'Shea began poling vigorously. The ice was again floating loosely, and
it was but the work of a few minutes to push his heavy boat into the
open water that was in the wake of the schooner. There was a pause, like
a pause in a funeral service, when O'Shea, standing ankle-deep in the
water which his boat held, and the men huddled together upon the
schooner's deck, turned to look at all the places in which it seemed
possible that the body of Le Maître might again be seen. They looked and
looked until they were tired with looking. The body had, no doubt,
floated up under some cake of ice, and from thence would speedily sink
to a bier of sand at the bottom of the bay.

"By----! I never saw anything like that." It was the remark which began
and ended the episode with the skipper. Then he raised his voice, and
shouted to O'Shea: "It's no sort of use your staying here! Make the rope
fast to your boat, and come up on deck!"

But this O'Shea would not do. He replied that he would remain, and look
about among the ice a bit longer, and that, any way, it would be twice
as far to take his boat home from Harbour Island as from the place where
he now was. The schooner towed his boat until he had baled the water out
and got hold of his oars. The ice had floated so far apart that it
seemed easy for the boat to go back through it.

During this time excited pithy gossip had been going on concerning the
accident.

"You did all a man could do," shouted the captain to O'Shea consolingly,
and remarked to those about him: "There wasn't no love lost between
them, but O'Shea did all he could. O'Shea might as easy as not have gone
over himself, holding the pole under water that time."

The fussy little captain, as far as Caius could judge, was not acting a
part. The sailors were French; they could talk some English; and they
spoke in both languages a great deal.

"His lady won't be much troubled, I dare say, from all I hear." The
captain was becoming easy and good-natured again. He said to Caius: "You
are acquainted with her?"

"She will be shocked," said Caius.

He felt as he spoke that he himself was suffering from shock--so much so
that he was hardly able to think consecutively about what had occurred.

"They won't have an inquest without the body," shouted the captain to
O'Shea. Then to those about him he remarked: "He was as decent and
good-natured a fellow as I'd want to see."

The pronoun referred to Le Maître. The remark was perhaps prompted by
natural pity, but it was so instantly agreed to by all on the vessel
that the chorus had the air of propitiating the spirit of the dead.




CHAPTER XI.

THE RIDDLE OF LIFE.


The schooner slowly moved along, and lay not far from the steamship. The
steamship did not start for Souris until the afternoon. Caius was put on
shore there to await the hour of embarking. In his own mind he was
questioning whether he would embark with the steamer or return to Cloud
Island; but he naturally did not make this problem known to those around
him.

The skipper and several men of the schooner came ashore with Caius.
There was a great bustle as soon as they reached the small wharf because
of what they had to tell. It was apparent from all that was told, and
all the replies that were made, that no shadow of suspicion was to fall
upon O'Shea. Why should it? He had, as it seemed, no personal grudge
against Le Maître, whose death had been evidently an accident.

A man who bore an office akin to that of magistrate for the islands came
down from a house near the harbour, and the story was repeated to him.
When Caius had listened to the evidence given before this official
personage, hearing the tale again that he had already heard many times
in a few minutes, and told what he himself had seen, he began to wonder
how he could still harbour in his mind the belief in O'Shea's guilt. He
found, too, that none of these people knew enough about Josephine to see
any special interest attaching to the story, except the fact that her
husband, returning from a long voyage, had been drowned almost within
sight of her house. "Ah, poor lady! poor lady!" they said; and thus
saying, and shaking their heads, they dispersed to eat their dinners.

Caius procured the bundle of letters which had come for him by this
first mail of the year. He sauntered along the beach, soon getting out
of sight and hearing of the little community, who were not given to
walking upon a beach that was not in this case a highroad to any place.
He was on the shingle of the bay, and he soon found a nook under a high
black cliff where the sun beat down right warmly. He had not opened his
letters; his mind did not yet admit of old interests.

The days were not long passed in which men who continued to be good
husbands and fathers and staunch friends killed their enemies, when
necessary, with a good conscience. Had O'Shea a good conscience now?
Would he continue to be in all respects the man he had been, and the
staunch friend of Josephine? In his heart Caius believed that Le Maître
was murdered; but he had no evidence to prove it--nothing whatever but
what O'Shea's wife had said to him that day she was hanging out her
linen, and such talk occurs in many a household, and nothing comes of
it.

Now Josephine was free. "What a blessing!" He used the common idiom to
himself, and then wondered at it. Could one man's crime be another man's
blessing? He found himself, out of love for Josephine, wondering
concerning the matter from the point of view of the religious theory of
life. Perhaps this was Heaven's way of answering Josephine's appeal, and
saving her; or perhaps human souls are so knit together that O'Shea, by
the sin, had not blessed, but hindered her from blessing. It was a weary
round of questions, which Caius was not wise enough to answer. Another
more practical question pressed.

Did he dare to return now to Cloud Island, and watch over Josephine in
the shock which she must sustain, and find out if she would discover the
truth concerning O'Shea? After a good while he answered the question:
No; he did not dare to return, knowing what he did and his own cowardly
share in it. He could not face Josephine, and, lonely as she was, she
did not need him; she had her prayers, her angels, her heaven.

Perhaps Time, the proverbial healer of all wounds, would wash the sense
of guilt from his soul, and then he could come back and speak to
Josephine concerning this new freedom of hers. Then he remembered that
some say that for the wound of guilt Time no healing art. Could he find,
then, other shrift? He did not know. He longed for it sorely, because he
longed to feel fit to return to Josephine. But, after all, what had he
done of which he was ashamed? What was his guilt? Had he felt any
emotion that it was not natural to feel? Had he done anything wrong?
Again he did not know. He sat with head bowed, and felt in dull misery
that O'Shea was a better man than he--more useful and brave, and not
more guilty.

He opened his letters, and found that in his absence no worse mishap had
occurred at home than that his father had been laid up some time with a
bad leg, and that both father and mother had allowed themselves to
worry and fret lest ill should have befallen their son.

Caius embarked on the little steamship that afternoon, and the next noon
found him at home.

The person who met him on the threshold of his father's house was Jim
Hogan. Jim grinned.

"Since you've taken to charities abroad," he said, "I thought I'd begin
at home."

Jim's method of beginning at home was not in the literal sense of the
proverb. It turned out that he had been neighbouring to some purpose.
Old Simpson could not move himself about indoors or attend to his work
without, and Jim, who had not before this attached himself by regular
employment, had by some freak of good-nature given his services day by
day until Caius should return, and had become an indispensable member of
the household.

"He's not a very respectable young man," said the mother apologetically
to her son, while she was still wiping her tears of joy; "but it's just
wonderful what patience he's had in his own larky way with your father,
when, though I say it who shouldn't, your father's been as difficult to
manage as a crying baby, and Jim, he just makes his jokes when anyone
else would have been affronted, and there's father laughing in spite of
himself sometimes. So I don't know how it is, but we've just had him to
stop on, for he's took to the farm wonderful."

An hour after, when alone with his father, Simpson said to him:

"Your mother, you know, was timorous at night when I couldn't help
myself; and then she'd begin crying, as women will, saying as she knew
you were dead, and that, any way, it was lonesome without you. So when
I saw that it comforted her a bit to have someone to cook for, I
encouraged the fellow. I told him he'd nothing to look for from me, for
his father is richer than I am nowadays; but he's just the sort to like
vagary."

Jim went home, and Caius began a simple round of home duties. His father
needed much attendance; the farm servants needed direction. Caius soon
found out, without being told, that neither in one capacity nor the
other did he fulfil the old man's pleasure nearly so well as the
rough-and-ready Jim. Even his mother hardly let a day pass without
innocently alluding to some prank of Jim's that had amused her. She
would have been very angry if anyone had told her that she did not find
her son as good a companion. Caius did not tell her so, but he was
perfectly aware of it.

Caius had not been long at home when his cousin Mabel came to visit
them. This time his mother made no sly remarks concerning Mabel's reason
for timing her visit, because it seemed that Mabel had paid a long and
comforting visit while he had been at the Magdalen Islands. Mabel did
not treat Caius now with the unconscious flattery of blind admiration,
neither did she talk to him about Jim; but her silence whenever Jim's
name was mentioned was eloquent.

Caius summed all this up in his own mind. He and Jim had commenced life
as lads together. The one had trodden the path of virtue and laudable
ambition; the other had just amused himself, and that in many
reprehensible ways; and now, when the ripe age of manhood was attained
in that state of life to which--as the Catechism would have it--it had
pleased God to call them, it was Jim who was the useful and honoured
man, not Caius.

It was clear that all the months and years of his absence had enabled
his parents to do very well without their son. They did not know it, but
in all the smaller things that make up the most of life, his interests
had ceased to be their interests. Caius had the courage to realize that
even at home he was not much wanted. If, when Jim married Mabel, he
would settle down with the old folks, they would be perfectly happy.

On his return, Caius had learned that the post for which he had applied
in the autumn had not been awarded to him. He knew that he must go as
soon as possible to find out a good place in which to begin his
professional life, but at present the state of his father's bad leg was
so critical, and the medical skill of the neighbourhood so poor, that he
was forced to wait.

All this time there was one main thought in his mind, to which all
others were subordinate. He saw his situation quite clearly; he had no
doubts about it. If Josephine would come to him and be his wife, he
would be happy and prosperous. Josephine had the power to make him twice
the man he was without her. It was not only that his happiness was bound
up in her; it was not only that Josephine had money and could manage it
well, although he was not at all above thinking of that; it was not even
that she would help and encourage and console him as no one else would.
There was that subtle something, more often the fruit of what is called
friendship than of love, by which Josephine's presence increased all his
strong faculties and subdued his faults. Caius knew this with the
unerring knowledge of instinct. He tried to reason about it, too: even
a dull king reigns well if he have but the wit to choose good ministers;
and among men, each ruling his small kingdom, 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 Maître'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 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 Gaspé Basin. She's on the Magdalens now. I understood that
you had had dealings with her."

"Yes; I was just about to suggest--I was going to say----"

"I wrote to her. She is coming," said Day.




CHAPTER XIII.

THE EVENING AND THE MORNING.


Josephine had come. All night and all the next day she had been by her
aunt's bedside; for Day's wife lay helpless now, and death was very
near. This much Caius knew, having kept himself informed by
communication with the village doctor, and twenty-four hours after
Josephine's arrival he walked over to the Day farm, hoping that, as the
cool of the evening might relax the strain in the sick-room, she would
be able to speak to him for a few minutes.

When he got to the dreary house he met its owner, who had just finished
his evening work. The two men sat on wooden chairs outside the door and
watched the dusk gathering on sea and land, and although they did not
talk much, each felt glad of the other's companionship.

It was nine years since Caius had first made up his mind that Day was a
monster of brutality and wickedness; now he could not think himself back
into the state of mind that could have formed such a judgment When Caius
had condemned Day, he had been a religions youth who thought well of
himself; now his old religious habits and beliefs had dropped off, but
he did not think well of himself or harshly of his neighbour. In those
days he had felt sufficient for life; now all his feeling was summed up
in the desire that was scarcely a hope, that some heavenly power, holy
and strong, would come to his aid.

It is when the whole good of life hangs in a trembling balance that
people become like children, and feel the need of the motherly powers of
Heaven. Caius sat with Day for two hours, and Josephine did not come
down to speak to him. He was glad to know that Day's evening passed the
more easily because he sat there with him; he was glad of that when he
was glad of nothing that concerned himself.

Day and Caius did not talk about death or sorrow, or anything like that.
All the remarks that they interchanged turned upon the horses Day was
rearing and their pastures. Day told that he had found the grass on the
little island rich.

"I remember finding two of your colts there one day when I explored it.
It was four years ago," said Caius dreamily.

Day took no interest in this lapse of time.

"It's an untidy bit of land," he said, "and I can't clear it. 'Tisn't
mine; but no one heeds the colts grazing."

"Do you swim them across?" asked Caius, half in polite interest, half
because his memory was wandering upon the water.

"They got so sharp at swimming, I had to raise the fence on the top of
the cliff," said Day.

The evening wore away.

In the morning Caius, smitten with the fever of hope and fear, rose up
at dawn, and, as in a former time he had been wont to do, ran to the
seashore by the nearest path and walked beside the edge of the waves.
He turned, as he had always done, towards the little island and the Day
Farm.

How well he knew every outward curve and indentation of the soft red
shelving bank! how well he knew the colouring of the cool scene in the
rising day, the iridescent light upon the lapping waves, the glistening
of the jasper red of the damp beach, and the earthen pinks of the upper
cliffs! The sea birds with low pathetic note called out to him
concerning their memories of the first dawn in which he had walked there
searching for the body of the dead baby. Then the cool tints of dawn
passed into the golden sunrise, and the birds went on calling to him
concerning the many times in which he had trodden this path as a lover
whose mistress had seemed so strange a denizen of this same wide sea.

Caius did not think with scorn now of this old puzzle and bewilderment,
but remembered it fondly, and went and sat beneath baby Day's epitaph,
on the very rock from which he had first seen Josephine. It was very
early in the morning; the sun had risen bright and warm. At that season
even this desolate bit of shore wag garlanded above with the most lovely
green; the little island was green as an emerald.

Caius did not intend to keep his present place long. The rocky point
where the red cliff ended hid any portion of the Day farm from his view,
and as soon as the morning was far enough advanced he intended to go and
see how the owner and his household had fared during the night.

In the meantime he waited, and while he waited Fate came to him
smiling.

Once or twice as he sat he heard the sound of horse's feet passing on
the cliff above him. He knew that Day's horses were there, for they were
pastured alternately upon the cliff and upon the richer herbage of the
little island. He supposed by the sounds that they were catching one of
them for use on the farm. The sounds went further away, for he did not
hear the tread of hoofs again. He had forgotten them; his face had
dropped upon his hands; he was looking at nothing, except that, beneath
the screen of his fingers, he could see the red pebbles at his feet.
Something very like a prayer was in his heart; it had no form; it was
not a thing of which his intellect could take cognizance. Just then he
heard a cry of fear and a sound as if of something dashing into the
water. The sounds came from behind the rocky point. Caius knew the voice
that cried and he rose up wildly, but staggered, baffled by his old
difficulty, that the path thither lay only through deep water or round
above the cliff.

Then he saw a horse swimming round the red rocks, and on its back a
woman sat, not at ease--evidently distressed and frightened by the
course the animal was taking. To Caius the situation became clear.
Josephine had thought to refresh herself after her night's vigil by
taking an early ride, and the young half-broken horse, finding himself
at large, was making for the delicacies which he knew were to be found
on the island pasture. Josephine did not know why her steed had put out
to sea, or whither he was going. She turned round, and, seeing Caius,
held out her hand, imploring his aid.

Caius thanked Heaven at that moment It was true that Josephine kept her
seat upon the horse perfectly, and it was true that, unless the animal
intended to lie down and roll when he got into the deep grass of the
island, he had probably no malicious intention in going there. That did
not matter. Josephine was terrified by finding herself in the sea and
she had cried to him for aid. A quick run, a short swim, and Caius waded
up on the island sands. The colt had a much longer distance to swim, and
Caius waited to lay his hand on the bridle.

For a minute or two there was a chase among the shallow, rippling waves,
but a horse sinking in heavy sand is not hard to catch. Josephine sat
passive, having enough to do, perhaps, merely to keep her seat. When at
length Caius stood on the island grass with the bridle in his hand, she
slipped down without a word and stood beside him.

Caius let the dripping animal go, and he went, plunging with delight
among the flowering weeds and bushes. Caius himself was dripping also,
but, then, he could answer for his own movements that he would not come
too near the lady.

Josephine no longer wore her loose black working dress; this morning she
was clad in an old habit of green cloth. It was faded with weather, and
too long in the skirt for the fashion then in vogue, but Caius did not
know that; he only saw that the lower part of the skirt was wet, and
that, as she stood at her own graceful height upon the grass, the wet
cloth twisted about her feet and lay beside them in a rounded fold, so
that she looked just now more like the pictures of the fabled sea-maids
than she had ever done when she had floated in the water.

The first thing Josephine did was to look up in his face and laugh; it
was her own merry peal of low laughter that reminded him always of a
child laughing, not more for fun than for mere happiness. It bridged for
him all the sad anxieties and weary hours that had passed since he had
heard her laugh before; and, furthermore, he knew, without another
moment's doubt, that Josephine, knowing him as she did, would never have
looked up to him like that unless she loved him. It was not that she was
thinking of love just then--that was not what was in her face; but it
was clear that she was conscious of no shadow of difference between them
such as would have been there if his love had been doomed to
disappointment. She looked to him to join in her laughter with perfect
comradeship.

"Why did the horse come here?" asked Josephine.

Caius explained the motives of the colt as far as he understood them;
and she told how she had persuaded her uncle to let her ride it, and all
that she had thought and felt when it had run away with her down the
chine and into the water. It was not at all what he could have believed
beforehand, that when he met Josephine they would talk with perfect
contentment of the affairs of the passing hour; and yet so it was.

With graver faces they talked of the dying woman, with whom Josephine
had passed the night. It was not a case in which death was sad; it was
life, not death, that was sad for the wandering brain. But Josephine
could tell how in those last nights the poor mother had found peace in
the presence of her supposed child.

"She curls my hair round her thin fingers and seems so happy," said
Josephine.

She did not say that the thin hands had fingered her wedding-ring; but
Caius thought of it, and that brought him back the remembrance of
something that had to be said that must be said then, or every moment
would become a sin of weak delay.

"I want to tell you," he began--"I know I must tell you--I don't know
exactly why, but I must--I am sorry to say anything to remind you--to
distress you--but I hated Le Maître! Looking back, it seems to me that
the only reason I did not kill him was that I was too much of a coward."

Josephine looked off upon the sea. The wearied pained look that she used
to wear when the people were ill about her, or that she had worn when
she heard Le Maître was returning, came back to her face, so that she
seemed not at all the girl who had been laughing with him a minute
before, but a saint, whose image he could have worshipped. And yet he
saw then, more clearly than he had ever seen, that the charm, the
perfect consistency of her character, lay in the fact that the childlike
joy was never far off from the woman's strength and patience, and that a
womanly heart always underlay the merriest laughter.

They stood silent for a long time. It is in silence that God's creation
grows.

At length Josephine spoke slowly:

"Yes, we are often very, very wicked; but I think when we are so much
ashamed that we have to tell about it--I think it means that we will
never do it again."

"I am not good enough to love you," said Caius brokenly.

"Ah! do not say that"--she turned her face away from him--"remember the
last time you spoke to me upon the end of the dune."

Caius went back to the shore to get the boat that lay at the foot of the
chine. The colt was allowed to enjoy his paradise of island flowers in
peace.


THE END.




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_AN AMERICAN GIRL IN LONDON._ With 80 Illustrations by F. H. TOWNSEND.
12mo. Paper, 75 cents; cloth, $1.50.

"One of the most naïve and entertaining books of the season."--_New York
Observer._

"So sprightly a book as this, on life in London as observed by an
American, has never before been written."--_Philadelphia Bulletin._

"Overrunning with cleverness and good-will."--_New York Commercial
Advertiser._


_THE SIMPLE ADVENTURES OF A MEM-SAHIB._ With 37 Illustrations by F. H.
TOWNSEND. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

"It is like traveling without leaving one's armchair to read it. Miss
Duncan has the descriptive and narrative gift in large measure, and she
brings vividly before us the street scenes, the interiors, the
bewilderingly queer natives, the gayeties of the English
colony."--_Philadelphia Telegraph._

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New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.

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ADA CAMBRIDGE'S NOVELS.


_MY GUARDIAN._ 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

"A story which will, from first to last, enlist the sympathies of the
reader by its simplicity of style and fresh, genuine feeling.... The
author is _au fait_ at the delineation of character."--_Boston
Transcript._

"The _dénouement_ is all that the most ardent romance-reader could
desire."--_Chicago Evening Journal._


_THE THREE MISS KINGS._ 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

"An exceedingly strong novel. It is an Australian story, teeming with a
certain calmness of emotional power that finds expression in a continual
outflow of living thought and feeling."--_Boston Times._

"The story is told with great brilliancy, the character and society
sketching is very charming, while delightful incidents and happy
surprises abound. It is a triple love-story, pure in tone, and of very
high literary merit."--_Chicago Herald._


_NOT ALL IN VAIN._ 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

"A worthy companion to the best of the author's former efforts, and in
some respects superior to any of them."--_Detroit Free Press._

"Its surprises are as unexpected as Frank Stockton's, but they are the
surprises that are met with so commonly in human experience.... A better
story has not been published in many moons."--_Philadelphia Inquirer._


_A MARRIAGE CEREMONY._ 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

"'A Marriage Ceremony' is highly original in conception, its action
graceful though rapid, and its characters speaking with that life and
sprightliness that have made their author rank as a peer of
delineators."--_Baltimore American._

"This story by Ada Cambridge is one of her best, and to say that is to
at once award it high praise."--_Boston Advertiser._

"It is a pleasure to read this novel."--_London Athenæum._


_A LITTLE MINX._ 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

"A thoroughly charming new novel, which is just the finest bit of work
its author has yet accomplished."--_Baltimore American._

"The character of the heroine is especially cleverly drawn."--_New York
Commercial Advertiser._

The Press on Ada Cambridge's Books.

"Many of the types of character introduced would not have disgraced
George Eliot."--Vanity Fair.

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New York: D. Appleton & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.





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