‘The Mermaid’s curse is already working,’ moaned Tristram Bird, and he fled through the lane leading to Padstow as if a death-hound was after him.
When he reached Place House he met a little crowd of Padstow maids going out flower-gathering.
‘Whither away so fast, Tristram Bird?’ asked a little maid. ‘You aren’t driving a teem of snails this time, ’tis plain to see. Where hast thou been?’
‘Need you ask?’ said a pert young girl. ‘He has been away shooting something to startle the maids of Padstow with! What strange new creature did you shoot, Tristram Bird?’
‘A wonderful creature with eyes like blue fire,’ returned the unhappy youth, looking away over St. Minver dunes towards the Tors—’a sweet, soft creature with beautiful hair, every wire of which was a sunbeam of gold, and her face was the loveliest I ever beheld. It clean bewitched me.’
‘A beautiful maid like that, and yet you shot her?’ cried all the young maids of Padstow Town.
‘Yes, I shot her, to my undoing and the undoing of our fair haven,’ groaned Tristram Bird; and he told them all about it—where he had seen the beautiful Mermaid, of his bewitchment from the moment he saw her face of haunting charm looking up at him from the Mermaid’s Glass, and of the curse she uttered ere she fell back dead into the pool.
All the smiles went out of the bright faces of the Padstow maids, as he told his tale.
‘What a pity, Tristram Bird, you should have been so foolish as to shoot a Mermaid!’ they said; and they did not go and pick flowers as they had intended, but went back to their homes instead, and Tristram Bird went on to Higher St. Saviour’s, where he lived in a little house overlooking Padstow Town nestling like a bird in its nest.
A fearful gale blew on the night of the day Tristram Bird shot the Mermaid, and all the next day, too, and the next night; and through the awful howling of the gale was heard the bellowing of the wind-tormented sea.