“I had cramp,” said the Sea Lady, with her lips against Fred’s cheek and one eye on Mrs. Bunting. “I am sure it was cramp.… I’ve got it still.”
“I don’t see anybody—” began Mrs. Bunting.
“Please carry me in,” said the Sea Lady, closing her eyes as if she were ill—though her cheek was flushed and warm. “Carry me in.”
“Where?” gasped Fred.
“Carry me into the house,” she whispered to him.
“Which house?”
Mrs. Bunting came nearer.
“Your house,” said the Sea Lady, and shut her eyes for good and became oblivious to all further remarks.
“She— But I don’t understand—” said Mrs. Bunting, addressing everybody.…
And then it was they saw it. Nettie, the younger Miss Bunting, saw it first. She pointed, she says, before she could find words to speak. Then they all saw it! Miss Glendower, I believe, was the person who was last to see it. At any rate it would have been like her if she had been.
“Mother,” said Nettie, giving words to the general horror. “Mother! She has a tail!”
And then the three maids and Mabel Glendower screamed one after the other. “Look!” they cried. “A tail!”
“Of all—” said Mrs. Bunting, and words failed her.
“Oh!” said Miss Glendower, and put her hand to her heart.
And then one of the maids gave it a name. “It’s a mermaid!” screamed the maid, and then everyone screamed, “It’s a mermaid.”
Except the mermaid herself; she remained quite passive, pretending to be insensible partly on Fred’s shoulder and altogether in his arms.
II
That, you know, is the tableau so far as I have been able to piece it together again. You must imagine this little knot of people upon the beach, and Mr. Bunting, I figure, a little apart, just wading out of the water and very wet and incredulous and half drowned. And the neighbour’s ladder was drifting quietly out to sea.
Of course it was one of those positions that have an air of being conspicuous.
Indeed it was conspicuous. It was some way below high water and the group stood out perhaps thirty yards down the beach. Nobody, as Mrs. Bunting told my cousin Melville, knew a bit what to do and they all had even an exaggerated share of the national hatred of being seen in a puzzle. The mermaid seemed content to remain a beautiful problem clinging to Fred, and by all accounts she was a reasonable burthen for a man. It seems that the very large family of people who were stopping at the house called Koot Hoomi had appeared in force, and they were all staring and gesticulating. They were just the sort of people the Buntings did not want to know—tradespeople very probably. Presently one of the men—the particularly vulgar man who used to shoot at the gulls—began putting down their ladder as if he intended to offer advice, and Mrs. Bunting also became aware of the black glare of the field glasses of a still more horrid man to the west.
Moreover the popular author who lived next door, an irascible dark square-headed little man in spectacles, suddenly turned up and began bawling from his inaccessible wall top something foolish about his ladder. Nobody thought of his silly ladder or took any trouble about it, naturally. He was quite stupidly excited. To judge by his tone and gestures he was using dreadful language and seemed disposed every moment to jump down to the beach and come to them.
And then to crown the situation, over the westward groin appeared Low Excursionists!
First of all their heads came, and then their remarks. Then they began to clamber the breakwater with joyful shouts.
“Pip, Pip,” said the Low Excursionists as they climbed—it was the year of “pip, pip”—and, “What HO she bumps!” and then less generally, “What’s up ’ere?”
And the voices of other Low Excursionists still invisible answered, “Pip, Pip.”
It was evidently a large party.
“Anything wrong?” shouted one of the Low Excursionists at a venture.
“My dear!” said Mrs. Bunting to Mabel, “what are we to do?” And in her description of the affair to my cousin Melville she used always to make that the clou of the story. “My DEAR! What ARE we to do?”
I believe that in her desperation she even glanced at the water. But of course to have put the mermaid back then would have involved the most terrible explanations.…
It was evident there was only one thing to be done. Mrs. Bunting said as much. “The only thing,” said she, “is to carry her indoors.”
And carry her indoors they did!…
One can figure the little procession. In front Fred, wet and astonished but still clinging and clung to, and altogether too out of breath for words. And in his arms the Sea Lady. She had a beautiful figure, I understand, until that horrible tail began (and the fin of it, Mrs. Bunting told my cousin in a whispered confidence, went up and down and with pointed corners for all the world like a mackerel’s). It flopped and dripped along the path—I imagine. She was wearing a very nice and very long-skirted dress of red material trimmed with coarse white lace, and she had, Mabel told me, a gilet, though that would scarcely show as they went up the garden. And that Phrygian cap hid all her golden hair and showed the white, low, level forehead over her sea-blue eyes. From all that followed, I imagine her at the moment scanning the veranda and windows of the house with a certain eagerness of scrutiny.
Behind this staggering group of two I believe Mrs. Bunting came. Then Mr. Bunting. Dreadfully wet and broken down Mr. Bunting must have been by then, and from one or two things I have noticed since, I can’t help imagining him as pursuing his wife with, “Of course, my dear, I couldn’t tell, you know!”
And then, in a dismayed yet curious bunch, the girls in their wraps of towelling and the maids carrying the ropes and things and, as if inadvertently, as became them, most of Mr. and Fred Bunting’s clothes.
And then Miss Glendower, for once at least in no sort of pose whatever, clutching “Sir George Tressady” and perplexed and disturbed beyond measure.
And then, as it were pursuing them all, “Pip, pip,” and the hat and raised eyebrows of a Low Excursionist still anxious to know “What’s up?” from the garden end.
So it was, or at least in some such way, and to the accompaniment of the wildest ravings about some ladder or other heard all too distinctly over the garden wall—(“Overdressed Snobbs take my rare old English adjective ladder…!”)—that they carried the Sea Lady (who appeared serenely insensible to everything) up through the house and laid her down upon the couch in Mrs. Bunting’s room.
And just as Miss Glendower was suggesting that the very best thing they could do would be to send for a doctor, the Sea Lady with a beautiful naturalness sighed and came to.