The Mermaid | Page 4

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.