“I have been lonely without you, Carey,” said the old merman, “have you come to stay with me now, and to be my little maid as in the former days?”
“If you will have me, godfather,” said Carey, “I will remain with you here, and be as a daughter to you.”
So for nearly a year these two lived together in great contentment, but on New Year’s Eve Carey said to her godfather; “There is a longing within me to-night that will not be stayed; I must needs rise to the surface once again, and hear the midnight chimes from our little grey church on the cliffs.”
At these words the merman grew very sad. “I knew it would come sooner or later,” said he, “go, my child, since you must. You are free.”
Thus it was that when midnight drew on, Carey rose out of the waves hard by the familiar coast, and sitting down under the rock where first she had seen her godfather, she held her breath and listened.
All in a moment the bells burst forth, ringing in the new year; merrily they chimed, yet with an undertone of sadness for the year that was past; over sea and land they clashed and pealed, rushing, swelling, dying, and as Carey heard them her heart-strings nigh snapped with homesickness. Nevertheless when the golden tongued bells had fallen silent once more, she went back into the breaking seas.
At home in his cave the old merman sat and mused. “It were better to die at once and dissolve into foam,” said he to himself, “than to live on through the unnumbered years without her.” Yet even as he thought it, Carey entered, whom he had never hoped to see returning, and put her arms about his neck.
“So, Carey, you have come back to me after all,” he said wonderingly, “back from your own kind and the free upper air, away from the memories and the bells?”
“There are none left upon the shore to love me now,” she made answer, “my father is dead, and my mother has cast me out. I will remain here with you.”
At that the old merman rejoiced greatly, for he knew that he would now be lonely no longer. As for Carey, his goddaughter, she left off from her homesickness, and lived among the mer-folk as one of themselves.