The Mermaid | Page 6

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