“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.