“I’ll make a carry,” thought Flavilla, beaching her canoe. Then, looking around her at the lonely stretch of sand flanked by woods, she realized at once that she need seek no farther for seclusion.
First of all, she dragged the canoe into the woods, then rapidly undressed and drew on the mermaid’s scaly suit, which fitted her to the throat as beautifully as her own skin.
It was rather difficult for her to navigate on land, as her legs were incased in a fish’s tail, but, seizing her comb and mirror, she managed to wriggle down to the water’s edge.
A few sun-warmed rocks jutted up some little distance from shore; with a final and vigorous wriggle Flavilla launched herself and struck out for the rocks, holding comb and mirror in either hand.
Fishtail and accessories impeded her, but she was the sort of swimmer who took no account of such trifles; and after a while she drew herself up from the sea, and, breathless, glittering, iridescent, flopped down upon a flat rock in the sunshine. From which she took a careful survey of the surroundings.
Certainly nobody could see her here. Nobody would interrupt her either, because the route of navigation lay far outside, to the north. All around were woods; the place was almost landlocked, save where, far away through the estuary, a blue and hazy horizon glimmered in the general direction of New England.
So, when she had recovered sufficient breath she let down the flashing, golden-brown hair, sat up on the rock, lifted her pretty nose skyward, and poured forth melody.
As she sang the tiresome old Teutonic ballad she combed away vigorously, and every now and then surveyed her features in the mirror.
Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten
Dass ich so traurig bin ——
she sang happily, studying her gestures with care and cheerfully flopping her tail.
She had a very lovely voice which had been expensively cultivated. One or two small birds listened attentively for a while, then started in to help her out.
On the veranda of his bungalow, not very far from Northport, stood a young man of pleasing aspect, knickerbockers, and unusually symmetrical legs. His hands reposed in his pockets, his eyes behind their eyeglasses were fixed dreamily upon the skies. Somebody over beyond that screen of woods was singing very beautifully, and he liked it — at first.
However, when the unseen singer had been singing the Lorelei for an hour, steadily, without intermission, an expression of surprise gradually developed into uneasy astonishment upon his clean-cut and unusually attractive features.
“That girl, whoever she is, can sing, all right,” he reflected, “but why on earth does she dope out the same old thing?”
He looked at the strip of woods, but could see nothing of the singer. He listened; she continued to sing the Lorelei.
“It can’t be a phonograph,” he reasoned. “No sane person could endure an hour of that fool song. No sane person would sing it for an hour, either.”
Disturbed, he picked up the marine glasses, slung them over his shoulder, walked up on the hill back of the bungalow, selected a promising tree, and climbed it.
Astride a lofty limb the lord of Northport gazed earnestly across the fringe of woods. Something sparkled out there, something moved, glittering on a half-submerged rock. He adjusted the marine glasses and squinted through them.
“Great James!” he faltered, dropping them; and almost followed the glasses to destruction on the ground below.
How he managed to get safely to earth he never knew. “Either I’m crazy,” he shouted aloud, “or there’s a — a mermaid out there, and I’m going to find out before they chase me to the funny house!”
There was a fat tub of a boat at his landing; he reached the shore in a series of long, distracted leaps, sprang aboard, cast off, thrust both oars deep into the water, and fairly hurled the boat forward, so that it alternately skipped, wallowed, scuttered, and scrambled, like a hen overboard.
“This is terrible,” he groaned. “If I didn’t see what I think I saw, I’ll eat my hat; if I did see what I’m sure I saw, I’m madder than the hatter who made it!”
Nearer and nearer, heard by him distinctly above the frantic splashing of his oars, her Lorelei song sounded perilously sweet and clear.
“Oh, bunch!” he moaned; “it’s horribly like the real thing; and here I come headlong, as they do in the story books — —”
He caught a crab that landed him in a graceful parabola in the bow, where he lay biting at the air to recover his breath. Then his boat’s nose plowed into the sandy neck of land; he clambered to his feet, jumped out, and ran headlong into the belt of trees which screened the singer. Speed and gait recalled the effortless grace of the kangaroo; when he encountered logs and gullies he rose grandly, sailing into space, landing with a series of soft bounces, which presently brought him to the other side of the woods.
And there, what he beheld, what he heard, almost paralyzed him. Weak- kneed, he passed a trembling hand over his incredulous eyes; with the courage of despair, he feebly pinched himself. Then for sixty sickening seconds he closed his eyes and pressed both hands over his ears. But when he took his hands away and opened his terrified eyes, the exquisitely seductive melody, wind blown from the water, thrilled him in every fiber; his wild gaze fell upon a distant, glittering shape — white-armed, golden- haired, fish-tailed, slender body glittering with silvery scales.
The low rippling wash of the tide across the pebbly shore was in his ears; the salt wind was in his throat. He saw the sun flash on golden comb and mirror, as her snowy fingers caressed the splendid masses of her hair; her song stole sweetly seaward as the wind veered.
A terrible calm descended upon him.
“This is interesting,” he said aloud.
A sickening wave of terror swept him, but he straightened up, squaring his shoulders.
“I may as well face the fact,” he said, “that I, Henry Kingsbury, of Pebble Point, Northport, L.I., and recently in my right mind, am now, this very moment, looking at a — a mermaid in Long Island Sound!”
He shuddered; but he was sheer pluck all through. Teeth might chatter, knees smite together, marrow turn cold; nothing on earth or Long Island could entirely stampede Henry Kingsbury, of Pebble Point.
His clutch on his self-control in any real crisis never slipped; his mental steering-gear never gave way. Again his pallid lips moved in speech:
“The — thing — to — do,” he said very slowly and deliberately, “is to swim out and — and touch it. If it dissolves into nothing I’ll probably feel better — —”
He began to remove coat, collar, and shoes, forcing himself to talk calmly all the while.
“The thing to do,” he went on dully, “is to swim over there and get a look at it. Of course, it isn’t really there. As for drowning — it really doesn’t matter.... In the midst of life we are in Long Island.... And, if it is there — I c-c-can c-capture it for the B-B-Bronx — —”
Reason tottered; it revived, however, as he plunged into the s. w.[*] of Oyster Bay and struck out, silent as a sea otter for the shimmering shape on the ruddy rocks.
* Sparkling Waters or Sacred Waters.
Flavilla was rehearsing with all her might; her white throat swelled with the music she poured forth to the sky and sea; her pretty fingers played with the folds of burnished hair; her gilded hand-mirror flashed, she gently beat time with her tail.
So thoroughly, so earnestly, did she enter into the spirit of the siren she was representing that, at moments, she almost wished some fisherman might come into view — just to see whether he’d really go overboard after her.
However, audacious as her vagrant thoughts might be, she was entirely unprepared to see a human head, made sleek by sea water, emerge from the floating weeds almost at her feet.
“Goodness,” she said faintly, and attempted to rise. But her fish tail fettered her.
“Are you real!” gasped Kingsbury.
“Y-yes.... Are you?”
“Great James!” he ha
lf shouted, half sobbed, “are you human?”
“V-very. Are you?”
He clutched at the weedy rock and dragged himself up. For a moment he lay breathing fast, water dripping from his soaked clothing. Once he feebly touched the glittering fish tail that lay on the rock beside him. It quivered, but needle and thread had been at work there; he drew a deep breath and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again she was looking about for a likely place to launch herself into the bay; in fact, she had already started to glide toward the water; the scraping of the scales aroused him, and he sat up.
“I heard singing,” he said dreamily, “and I climbed a tree and saw — you! Do you blame me for trying to corroborate a thing like you?”
“You thought I was a real one?”
“I thought that I thought I saw a real one.”
She looked at him hopefully.
“Tell me, did my singing compel you to swim out here?”
“I don’t know what compelled me.”
“But — you were compelled?”
“I — it seems so — —”
“O-h!” Flushed, excited, laughing, she clasped her hands under her chin and gazed at him.
“To think,” she said softly, “that you believed me to be a real siren, and that my beauty and my singing actually did lure you to my rock! Isn’t it exciting?”
He looked at her, then turned red:
“Yes, it is,” he said.
Hands still clasped together tightly beneath her rounded chin, she surveyed him with intense interest. He was at a disadvantage; the sleek, half-drowned appearance which a man has who emerges from a swim does not exhibit him at his best.
But he had a deeper interest for Flavilla; her melody and loveliness had actually lured him across the water to the peril of her rocks; this human being, this man creature, seemed to be, in a sense, hers.
“Please fix your hair,” she said, handing him her comb and mirror.
“My hair?”
“Certainly. I want to look at you.”
He thought her request rather extraordinary, but he sat up and with the aid of the mirror, scraped away at his wet hair, parting it in the middle and combing it deftly into two gay little Mercury wings. Then, fishing in the soaked pockets of his knickerbockers, he produced a pair of smart pince-nez, which he put on, and then gazed up at her.
“Oh!” she said, with a quick, indrawn breath, “you are attractive!”
At that he turned becomingly scarlet.
Leaning on one lovely, bare arm, burnished hair clustering against her cheeks, she continued to survey him in delighted approval which sometimes made him squirm inwardly, sometimes almost intoxicated him.
“To think,” she murmured, “that I lured you out here!”
“I am thinking about it,” he said.
She laid her head on one side, inspecting him with frankest approval.
“I wonder,” she said, “what your name is. I am Flavilla Carr.”
“Not one of the Carr triplets!”
“Yes — but,” she added quickly, “I’m not married. Are you?”
“Oh, no, no, no!” he said hastily. “I’m Henry Kingsbury, of Pebble Point, Northport — —”
“Master and owner of the beautiful but uncertain Sappho? Oh, tell me, are you the man who has tipped over so many times in Long Island Sound? Because I — I adore a man who has the pluck to continue to capsize every day or two.”
“Then,” he said, “you can safely adore me, for I am that yachtsman who has fallen off the Sappho more times than the White Knight fell off his horse.”
“I — I do adore you!” she exclaimed impulsively.
“Of course, you d-d-don’t mean that,” he stammered, striving to smile.
“Yes — almost. Tell me, you — I know you are not like other men! You never have had anything to do with a Destyn-Carr machine, have you?”
“Never!”
“Neither have I.... And so you are not in love — are you?”
“No.”
“Neither am I. Oh, I am so glad that you and I have waited, and not become engaged to somebody by machinery.... I wonder whom you are destined for.”
“Nobody — by machinery.”
She clapped her hands. “Neither am I. It is too stupid, isn’t it? I don’t want to marry the man I ought to marry. I’d rather take chances with a man who attracts me and who is attracted by me.... There was, in the old days — before everybody married by machinery — something not altogether unworthy in being a siren, wasn’t there?... It’s perfectly delightful to think of your seeing me out here on the rocks, and then instantly plunging into the waves and tearing a foaming right of way to what might have been destruction!”
Her flushed, excited face between its clustering curls looked straight into his.
“It was destruction,” he said. His own voice sounded odd to him. “Utter destruction to my peace of mind,” he said again.
“You — don’t think that you love me, do you?” she asked. “That would be too — too perfect a climax.... Do you?” she asked curiously.
“I — think so.”
“Do — do you know it?” He gazed bravely at her: “Yes.”
She flung up both arms joyously, then laughed aloud:
“Oh, the wonder of it! It is too perfect, too beautiful! You really love me? Do you? Are you sure?”
“Yes.... Will you try to love me?”
“Well, you know that sirens don’t care for people.... I’ve already been engaged two or three times.... I don’t mind being engaged to you.”
“Couldn’t you care for me, Flavilla?”
“Why, yes. I do.... Please don’t touch me; I’d rather not. Of course, you know, I couldn’t really love you so quickly unless I’d been subjected to one of those Destyn-Carr machines. You know that, don’t you? But,” she added frankly, “I wouldn’t like to have you get away from me. I — I feel like a tender-hearted person in the street who is followed by a lost cat — —”
“What!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything unpleasant — truly I didn’t. You know how tenderly one feels when a poor stray cat comes trotting after one — —”
He got up, mad all through.
“Are you offended?” she asked sorrowfully. “When I didn’t mean anything except that my heart — which is rather impressionable — feels very warmly and tenderly toward the man who swam after me.... Won’t you understand, please? Listen, we have been engaged only a minute, and here already is our first quarrel. You can see for yourself what would happen if we ever married.”
“It wouldn’t be machine-made bliss, anyway,” he said.
That seemed to interest her; she inspected him earnestly.
“Also,” he added, “I thought you desired to take a sportsman’s chances?”
“I — do.”
“And I thought you didn’t want to marry the man you ought to marry.”
“That is — true.”
“Then you certainly ought not to marry me — but, will you?”
“How can I when I don’t — love you.”
“You don’t love me because you ought not to on such brief acquaintance.... But will you love me, Flavilla?”
She looked at him in silence, sitting very still, the bright hair veiling her cheeks, the fish’s tail curled up against her side.
“Will you?”
“I don’t know,” she said faintly.
“Try.”
“I — am.”
“Shall I help you?”
Evidently she had gazed at him long enough; her eyes fell; her white fingers picked at the seaweed pods. His arm closed around her; nothing stirred but her heart.
“Shall I help you to love me?” he breathed.
“No — I am — past help.” She raised her head.
“This is all so — so wrong,” she faltered, “that I think it must be right.... Do you truly love me?... Don’t kiss me if you do.... Now I believe you.... Lift me; I can’
t walk in this fish’s tail.... Now set me afloat, please.”
He lifted her, walked to the water’s edge, bent and placed her in the sea. In an instant she had darted from his arms out into the waves, flashing, turning like a silvery salmon.
“Are you coming?” she called back to him.
He did not stir. She swam in a circle and came up beside the rock. After a long, long silence, she lifted up both arms; he bent over. Then, very slowly, she drew him down into the water.
“I am quite sure,” she said, as they sat together at luncheon on the sandspit which divides Northport Bay from the s.w. of Oyster Bay, “that you and I are destined for much trouble when we marry; but I love you so dearly that I don’t care.”
“Neither do I,” he said; “will you have another sandwich?”
And, being young and healthy, she took it, and biting into it, smiled adorably at her lover.
AILSA PAIGE
CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
TO THE CONQUERORS
WHO WON IMMORTAL VICTORY
“Arm yourselves and be Valiant Men, and see that ye rise up in readiness against the Dawn, that ye may do Battle with These that are Assembled against us. . . .
“For it is better to die in Battle than live to behold the
Calamities of our own People. . . .”
“Lord, we took not the Land into Possession by our own Swords; neither was it our own Hands that helped us; but Thy Hand was a Buckler; and Thy right Arm a Shield, and the Light of Thy Countenance hath conquered forever.”
AND TO THE VANQUISHED WHO WON IMMORTALITY
“We are the fallen, who, with helpless faces
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 478