The Mermaid | Page 6

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