“Oh, lady, I think I am dying! I have lain here all night, torn and bleeding, and none of my race can live many hours on land.”
Half-terrified at the strange words, but still more pitiful, Hebe hastened out. The window opened on to a little balcony, and steps led down to the garden. She would almost have been too frightened to approach Chryssa—for though there were old legends of mer-folk about that coast, generations had passed since any had actually been seen—but for the sweet expression in the little mermaid’s face and eyes, dying though she seemed. This gave Hebe courage to go near her, and with the ointment and linen she quickly fetched, to bind up her cuts and bruises. Then Chryssa told her story in gasping words.
“If I could but live to take a rose to the Queen,” she said, “I would not mind dying; though, for one of my race, life should last for full five hundred years, and life is very beautiful.”
“Alas!” said the earth-maiden, “there are no roses in our garden, the soil does not suit them; and before I could procure one for you, you would die, I fear. But,”—and she made a great effort—“I will do for you what I had thought I could never do but a few minutes ago. I will give you my own rose—the first gift of my best beloved.” And with the words, she ran back to her chamber and returned, the red rose fresh and blooming in her hand.
She kissed it as she gave it to Chryssa.
“Carry healing in your fragrance,” she murmured. And, strange to say, as a breath of its perfume reached the mermaid, she herself in some magical way began to revive. Her eyes sparkled as she blessed Hebe for her generous sacrifice.
“I feel,” she said, “that the conditions are all fulfilled. My Queen will be saved.”
But Hebe’s eyes looked over the fields to where the waves were lapping the shore.
“The tide is coming in,” she said, “you will not now have so far to go. But I must help you. Clasp me firmly round the neck, and I will carry you to the nearest creek, where already you will find the ocean water, which is to you what this fresh, balmy air is to us.”
And little Chryssa did as she was told, and Hebe, lifting the light burden in her strong young arms, carried the daughter of the strange unknown race of the sea as tenderly as if she had been a fragile sister of her own. For, after all, there was the greatest of all bonds between them—love and self-sacrifice in their hearts.