Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

He had returned from one of his voyages late in April, and had risen, when May-day arrived, ere the first peep of daylight, in the hope of again meeting Helen among the woods of the hill. Were he but to see her, barely see her, he could be happy, he thought, for months to come; and he knew she would be gathering May-dew this morning, with all her companions, on the green slopes of Drieminory. Morning rose upon him as he sauntered eastward along the edge of the bay; the stars sunk one by one into the blue; and on reaching a piece of rocky beach that stretches along the brow of the hill, the sun rose all red and glorious out of the Firth, and flung a broad pathway of flame across the waters to the shore. The rocks, the hill, the little wavelets which came toppling against the beach, were tinged with the orange light of morning; and yet, from the earliness of the hour, and the secluded character of the scene, a portion of terror might well have mingled with one’s quieter feelings of admiration when in the vicinity of a place so famous for the wild and the wonderful as the Dropping-Cave. But of the cave more anon. Darkness and solitude are twin sisters, and foster nearly the same emotions; but they failed this morning to awaken a single fear in the mind of the shipmaster, sailor as he was, and acquainted, too, with every story of the cave. He could think of only Helen Stuart.

An insulated pile of rock, roughened with moss and lichens, which stands out of the beach like an old ruinous castle, surmounted by hanging bartisans and broken turrets, conceals the cave itself, and the skerries abreast of it, from the traveller who approaches them from the west. It screened them this morning from the view of the shipmaster, as, stepping lightly along the rough stones, full of impossible wishes and imaginings, he heard the low notes of a song. He looked round to ascertain whether a boat might not be passing, or a shepherd seated on the hill; but he could see only a huge overgrown seal that had raised its head over the waves, and seemed listening to the music with its face towards the east. On turning, however, the edge of the cliff, he saw the musician, apparently a young girl, who seemed bathing among the cliffs, and who was now sitting half on the rock, half in the water, on one of the outer skerries, opposite the cave. Her long yellow hair fell in luxuriant profusion on her snowy shoulders, and as she raised herself higher on the cliff, the sun shone on the parts below her waist with such dazzling brightness, that the sailor raised his hands to his eyes, and a shifting speck of light, like the reflection of a mirror, went dancing over the shaded roughnesses of the opposite precipice. Her face was turned towards the cave, and the notes of her song seemed at times to be answered from it in a chorus, faint and low indeed, but which could not, he thought, be wholly produced by echo.

Reid was too well acquainted with the beliefs of the age not to know that he looked upon the mermaid. And were he less a lover than he was, he would have done nothing more. But, aware of her strange power over the destinies of men, he only thought that now or never was his opportunity for gaining the hand of Helen. “Would that there were some of my lads here to see fair play!” he muttered, as, creeping amid the crags, and availing himself of every brake that afforded the slightest cover, he stole towards the shelf on which the creature was seated. She turned round in the moment he had gained it; the last note of her song lengthened into a shriek; and with an expression of mingled terror and surprise, which clouded a set of the loveliest features, she attempted to fling herself into the water; but in the moment of the attempt, the brawny arms of the shipmaster were locked round her waist. Her arms clasped his shoulders in turn, and with a strength scarcely inferior to that exerted by the snake of India when struggling with the tiger, she strove to drag him to the edge of the rock; but though his iron sinews quivered under her grasp like the beams of his vessel when straining beneath a press of canvas, he thought of Helen Stuart, and bore her down by main force in the opposite direction. A fainter and a still fainter struggle ensued, and she then lay passive against the cliff. Never had Reid seen aught so beautiful—and he was convinced of it, lover as he was—as the half-fish half-woman creature that now lay prostrate before him.

“Man, what with me?” she said, in a tone of voice which, though sweet as the song of a bird, had something so unnatural in it that it made his blood run cold. “Wishes three,” he replied, in the prescribed formula of the demonologist, and then proceeded to state them. His father, a sailor like himself, had been drowned many years before; and the first wish suggested to him by the circumstance was, that neither he himself nor any of his friends should perish by the sea. The second—for he feared lest Helen, so lady-looking a person, and an heiress to boot, might yet find herself the wife of a poor man—was, that he should be uninterruptedly fortunate in all his undertakings. The third wish he never communicated to any one except the mermaid, and yet no one ever failed to guess it. “Quit, and have,” replied the creature. Reid slackened his hold; and pressing her tail against the rock until it curled to her waist, and raising her hands, the palms pressed together, and the edge to her face, she sprang into the sea. The spray dashed to the sun; the white shoulders and silvery tail gleamed for a moment through the green depths of the water. A slight ripple splashed against the beach, and when it subsided, every trace of the mermaid had vanished. Reid wiped his brow, and ascending by one of the slopes of the hill towards the well-known resorts of his town’s-women—not the less inclined to hope from the result of his strange contest—he found Helen Stuart seated with one of her companions, a common acquaintance, on the grassy knoll over the Lover’s Leap. The charm, thought he, already begins to work.

He bowed to Helen, and addressed her companion. “The man of all the world,” said the latter, “whom we most wished to see. Helen has been telling me one of the strangest dreams; and it is not half an hour yet since we both thought we were going to see it realized; but you must assist us in reading it. She had just fallen asleep last night, when she found herself on the green slope covered with primroses and cuckoo-flowers, that lies, you know, to the west of the Dropping-Cave; and there she was employed, she thought, as we have been this morning, in gathering May-dew. But the grass and bushes seemed dry and parched, and she had gathered only a few drops, when, on hearing some one singing among the rocks beside the cave, she looked that way, and saw you sleeping on the beach, and the singer, a beautiful lady, watching beside you. She turned again to the bushes, but all was dry; and she was quite unhappy that she could get no dew, and unhappy, too, lest the strange lady should suffer you to sleep till you were covered by the tide; when suddenly you stood beside her, and began to assist her in shaking the bushes. She looked for the lady, and saw her far out among the skerries, floating on the water like a white sea-gull; and as she looked and wondered, she heard a shower of drops which you had shaken down, tinkling against the bottom of the pitcher. And only think of the prettiness of the fancy!—the drops were all drops of pure gold, and filled the pitcher to the brim. So far the dream. But this is not all. We both passed the green primrose slope just as the sun was rising, and—can you believe it?—we heard from among the rocks the identical song which Helen heard in her dream. It was like nothing else I ever listened to; and now here are you to fill our pitchers with gold, like the genie of a fairy tale.”

“And so you have really heard music from among the rocks?” said Reid. “Well, but I have more than heard it—I have seen and conversed with the musician; the strange unearthly lady of Helen’s dream. I have visited every quarter of the globe, and sailed over almost every ocean, but never saw the mermaid before.”

“Seen the mermaid!” exclaimed Helen.

“Seen and conversed with the mermaid!” said her companion; “Heaven forbid! The last time she appeared at the Dropping-Cave was only a few days before the terrible storm in which you lost your father. Take care you repeat not her words—for they thrive ill who carry tales from the other world to this.”

“But I am the creature’s master,” said the sailor, “and need not be so wary.”

He told his story; how he had first seen the mysterious creature sitting in the sea, and breathing exquisite music, as she combed down her long yellow tresses; how he had stolen warily among the crags, with a heart palpitating betwixt dread and eagerness; and how, after so fearful a struggle, she had lain passive against the cliff. Helen listened with feelings of wonder and admiration, dashed with terror; and in returning home, though the morning was far advanced, and the Dropping-Cave a great way below, she leaned for support and protection on the arm of the sailor—a freedom which no one would have remarked as over great at May-day next year, for the sailor had ere then become her husband. For nearly a century after, the family was a rising one; but it is now extinct. Helen, for the last seventy years, has been sleeping under a slab of blue marble within the broken walls of the Chapel of St. Regulus; her only daughter, the wife of Sir George Mackenzie of Cromarty, lies in one of the burying-grounds of Inverness, with a shield of I know not how many quarterings over her grave; and it is not yet twenty years since her grandson, the last of the family, died in London, bequeathing to one of his Cromarty relatives several small pieces of property, and a legacy of many thousand pounds.