“Why,” said Effie, “do you think we’ll soon go?”
“I cannot tell you,” replied the old lady, and her stocking wires clicked faster and faster. “We folks who live for years and years in the midst of the sea, have warnings of coming events that shore folks could never understand. But the house won’t seem the same, Effie, when you and Leonard are gone away—heigho!”
“Well,” said Effie, “I’ll be so sorry to go, and yet so glad.”
“Tell us a story,” said Leonard, “and change the subject. Hush! what was that?”
A wild and mournful scream it was, and sounded close under the window.
“That is a cry we often hear,” said the old lighthouse keeper, “always before a storm, sometimes before a wreck. It’s a bird, I suppose, or maybe a mermaid. Do I believe in them? I do. I’ll tell you a strange dream I had once upon a time, though I don’t think it could have been a dream.”
Old Grindlay’s Dream.
“It was far away in the Greenland seas I was, sailing northwards towards Spitzbergen. I was second mate of the bonnie barque Scotia’s Queen. Well, one dark night we were ploughing away on a bit of a beam wind, doing maybe about an eight knots, maybe not so much. There was very little ice about, and as I had eight hours in that night, I went early to my bunk, and was soon fast asleep. It must have been well on to two bells in the middle watch—the spectioneer’s—when I awoke all of a sudden like. I don’t know, no more than Adam, what I could have been thinking about, but I crept out of my bunk in the state-room, where also the doctor and steward slept, and up on deck I went. I wondered to myself more than once if I really was in a dream. But there were sails and rigging, and the stars all shining, and the ship bobbing and curtseying to the dark waters, that went swishing and lapping alongside of her, and all awfully real for a dream. I could hear the men talking round the fo’c’s’le, and smell their tobacco, too.
“Well, Leonard, I went to the weatherside, and leant over to calculate, sailor fashion, our rate of speed, when I noticed something like a square dark shadow on the water at the gangway. There was nothing above to cause so strange a shadow, but while I was yet wondering a face appeared in the middle of it, the face of a lovely woman. I saw it as plain as I see dear wee Effie’s at this present moment. The long yellow hair was floating on the top of the water, and a fair hand beckoned me, and a sweet voice said, ‘Come.’ I thought of nothing but how to save the life of what I took to be a drowning woman. I sprang over at once, though I never could swim a stroke, and down I sank like lead. There was a surging roar of water in my ears, and I remembered nothing more till I found myself at the bottom of the sea, with a strange green light from a window in a rock a kind of dazzling my eyes. The woman’s face and long yellow hair were close beside me, and the fair arms were round me.
“I tried to pray, but I was speechless. Then the rock in front seemed to open of its own accord, and next minute I was inside. But oh! what a gorgeous hall—what a home of delight! There were other mermaids there—ay, scores of them. There was light and warmth all around us, that appeared to come from the precious stones of which the walls were built, and the glittering pillars that supported the roof.