The difficult piece of cliff had led them round a corner, and they were now facing a magnificent sweep of coast-line. Below them, fixed to a buoy that floated on the water, a bell was ringing incessantly, its clanging sound floating over the sea like the knell of a mermaid's funeral.
"It's to warn the vessels off the rocks," explained Mavis. "They can hear it in a fog when they can't see quite where they are." Merle and I always call it 'The Inchcape Bell.' Oh, you know the story?
'The worthy abbot of Aberbrothock
Had fixed that bell on the Inchcape rock.
On a buoy in the storm it floated and swung,
And over the waves its warning rung.'
Then the pirate, Sir Ralph the Rover, goes and cuts it off, just out of spite, and sails away. Years afterwards his ship comes back to Scotland, and there's a thick fog, and he's wrecked on the very Inchcape rock from which he stole the warning bell.
'Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair;
He cursed himself in his wild despair.
The waves poured in on every side,
And the vessel sank beneath the tide.'"
"Serve him right too! It was a sneaking rag to play!" commented Merle.
"The bell makes me think of an old hermitage," said Romola. "I expect to see a monk walking along, telling his beads. Who was St. Morval? Didn't he have a little chapel on the cliffs here?"
"Romola always thinks of the Middle Ages," laughed Beata. "That's because she poses so much for Dad's pictures. It sounds like a church bell under the sea to me. When we lived at Porthkeverne we were close to the lost land of Lyonesse, and there was a lovely story about a mermaid. They said she used to come and sit on a broad flat stone outside the church and listen to the singing; and the priest heard of it, so one day he came out and talked to her, and asked her if she wouldn't like to be baptized, and she said she'd think about it. So she swam away; but she came back again and again, and it was decided that she was to be baptized on Easter Sunday. But on Good Friday there was a terrible storm, and the waves came up and swallowed the whole of the village, so that when the poor mermaid arrived she found the church sunk under the sea, and the priest and all the people drowned. There was nobody to baptize her, and there never has been since, and she swims about the water weeping and singing any little bits of the service that she can remember. The fishermen said if anybody was at sea and heard her it was bad luck, and a sign he would certainly be drowned before long."
"I love the quaint old legends!" said Mavis. "I shall always think of your mermaid now, when I hear the bell. This is our way down to the cove. It's a most frightful scramble. Can you manage it?"
The girls went first over grass and gorse, then climbed down a tiny track so narrow and slippery they were obliged to sit and slide, and finally, with some difficulty, scrambled on to the grim rugged rocks beneath. They were on a kind of platform, covered with seaweed and little pools, and with deep swirling water below.