The Mermaid | Page 7

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