“The wicked slut let her go!” he bellowed. “She was mine! Mine! You have no right! This is my grandchild! Mine!”
His face was terrible, dark red and purple, with the veins on his temples standing out like exposed tree roots. Then he seemed to realize what he had done and fell quiet. In silence and in shame he let them walk him back to the town, with the young man carrying Pitiable on his back.
Though there were magistrates in the town, there was so seldom any wrongdoing among the People that it was the custom to let them deal with their own. After some debate the men took Probity to the Minister and told him what they had seen, and he sent for three of the elders to decide what to do. They heard the men’s story, gave them the money Probity had promised them, thanked them and sent them away. They then questioned Probity.
Probity did not know how to lie. He said what he had seen, and insisted that Pitiable had seen the sea-child too. Pitiable, still dazed, unable to think of anything except how he would beat her when he had her home, stuck despairingly to her story. She said that she had been looking at the pool when Probity had climbed up beside her and looked too and become very excited and told her to wait down on the shore and let no one else near while he went for help.
At this Probity started to shout and his face went purple again and he tried to rush at Pitiable, but the elders restrained him, and then a spasm shook him and he had to clutch at a chair and sit down. Even so, but for his story about the sea-child, the elders might have sent Pitiable home with him. She was, after all, his granddaughter. But a man who says he has seen a creature with a human body and a shining fish tail cannot be of sound mind, so they decided that in case there should be worse scandal among the People than there already was, Pitiable had best be kept out of his way, at least until a doctor had examined him.
Pitiable spent the night at the Minister’s house, not with his own children but sleeping in the attic with the two servants. First, though, the Minister’s wife, for whom cleanliness was very close indeed to godliness, insisted that the child must be bathed. That was how the servants came to see the welts on Pitiable’s back and sides. Her torn knees they put down to her fall on the beach when Probity had struck her. The elder servant, a kind, sensible woman, told the Minister. She told him too that if the child received much more such handling, she would die, and her blood would be not only on her grandfather’s hands.
The elders did not like it, but were forced to agree. A home would have to be found for the child. As a servant, naturally—she was young, but Mercy Hooke had trained her well. So on the second day after the business on the Scaurs, a Miss Lyall, a very respectable spinster with money of her own, came to inspect Pitiable Nasmith. She asked for a private room and the Minister lent her his study.
Pitiable was brought in and Miss Lyall looked her up and down. Not until they door closed and they were alone did she smile. She was short and fat with bulgy eyes and two large hairy moles on the side of her chin, but her smile was pleasant. She put her head to one side and pursed her lips and, almost too quietly to hear, started to hum. Pitiable’s mouth fell open. With an effort she closed it and joined the music. At once Miss Lyall nodded and cut her short.
“I thought it must be so,” she said softly. “As soon as I heard that story about the sea-child.”
“But you know the song too!” whispered Pitiable, still amazed.
“You are not the only descendant of Charity Goodrich, my dear. My mother taught me her story, and the song, and said I must pass them on to my own daughters, but I was too plain for any sensible man to marry for myself, and too sensible to let any man marry me for my money, so I have no daughters to teach them to. Not even you, since you already know them. All the same, you shall be my daughter from now on and we shall sing the song together and tell each other the story. It will be amusing, after all these years, to see how well the accounts tally.”
She smiled, and Pitiable, for the first time for many, many days, smiled too.
THE SEA-KING’S SON
There was a young woman named Jenny who was the only child of her parents. Her parents were not wealthy as the world counts wealth, but they had a good farm and were mindful and thorough farmers; and since they had but the one child, they could afford to give her a good deal. So she had pretty clothes and kind but clever governesses and as many dogs and cats and ponies and songbirds as she wanted. She grew up knowing that she was much loved, and so she had a happy childhood; but the self-consciousness of adolescence made her shy and solemn. And she found, as some adolescents do, that she was less and less interested in the kinds of things her old friends were now most interested in, and so they drifted apart. Now she preferred to go for long solitary walks with her dogs, or riding on the fine thoroughbred mare her parents had bought her when she outgrew the last of the ponies. Her mother had to forbid her to stay in the kitchen through the harvest feast, where she would have gone on bottling plums and cherries from their orchards with her mother and the two serving-women till all the dancing was over; and at the next fair her mother sent her on a series of errands to all the stalls where the young people would be working for their parents. But Jenny only spoke to them as much as she had to, and came away again.
Her parents had hoped that she would outgrow her shyness, as she had grown into it, but by the time she was eighteen, they had begun to fear that this would not happen. They worried, because they wanted her to find a husband, that she might be as happy with him as they had been with each other; and they hoped to leave their farm in their daughter’s hands, to be cared for by her and her husband as lovingly as they had cared for it, and given on to her children in the proper time. They worried that even a young man who would suit her well would not notice her, for she made herself unnoticeable; and they feared that it was only they who knew that, when she smiled, her face lit up with gentleness and humour and intelligence.
They decided that they would take her to the city for a season, and that perhaps so drastic a change in her usual way of life might bring her to herself. They had relatives in the city, and this could be done without discomfort. They told her of their plan, and she would have protested, but they told her that they were her parents, and they knew best.
But because of her knowledge that she was to go away, she carried herself with more of an air during the next weeks—it was an air of tension, but it made her eyes sparkle and her back straight. She looked around her at her familiar circumstances with more attention than she had done for years, as if this trip to the city were going to change her life forever. And she knew well enough that her parents hoped that it would, that they hoped to find her an acceptable suitor: and what could change her life more thoroughly than marriage?
They were going to the city a little after the final harvest fair of the year, when the farm could be left to look after itself for a while, with none but the hired workers to keep an eye on it; and when, as well, the best parties in the city were held, after the heat of the summer was over. The letters were written, and the relatives had pronounced themselves delighted to have Jenny for a season and her parents for as much as they felt they could stay of it. Her parents permitted themselves to feel hopeful; even the possibility that Jenny would fall in love with some city boy who loathed the very idea of farming seemed worth the risk.
But things did not turn out as Jenny’s parents had planned. For at the harvest fair she caught the eye of a young man.