The Mermaid | Page 3

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