We both sat and peered over the undercut rim of the bluff. Fifty feet below us was the sea, deep, still, emerald green, transparent and quivering with waves of pale green light, down into misty recesses where its depth rendered it opaque. Up through the floating foliage of the seaweed, goldfish were swimming idly, big ones in the grand style, tremendously decorative, and thoroughly conscious, I thought, of the stunning effect of their gold in the green water. I was fascinated by them. I stretched myself flat, face downward, and pulled myself to the rim and studied them. A damnable thought was swimming up to me out of submarine caverns of “the unplumbed salt estranging sea.”
At first my thought had no shape. It merely stirred in dark obscurity, like an irritated squid or devilfish. Then it emerged—with a golden head, like a mermaid’s. I am not ordinarily fanciful or figurative. I dislike fanciful people. But I have somehow got to convey the idea that, as I watched those goldfish, the wires in my mind became crossed and tangled and, for a moment, made some sort of horrid imaginative connection between goldfish and mermaids and the enchantingly girlish figure and golden head of the woman whose gray eyes I felt but could not see, playing over my prostrate body and working some charm at the back of my neck. Cornelia had everything—yes, everything: the virtues and the graces, and a beauty and blitheness which often seemed enough in themselves, they made one so immediately, unmistakably glad to be alive within their radius. But wouldn’t she have profited—as Arnold once remarked of the ladies of the English aristocracy, whom Cornelia admires so much—wouldn’t she have profited by “a shade more of soul”? Was there much—inside, under those golden scales? Wasn’t she pretty near the surface? And was that her fault or her misadventure?
“Do you find them interesting?” asked Cornelia.
“Yes,” I replied, continuing my study.
In spite of her nearly grown children, there was something virginal in Cornelia. Something curiously undeveloped; was it, perhaps, her heart? That would be like a mermaiden. She was no Circe, I mused, guilefully weaving subtle spells. She was an otherwise mature woman who had somehow remained essentially innocent and child-hearted, singing still to herself, in her “secret garden,” the songs of seventeen. She herself did not know, she could not know, what strains of richer harmony had been lost to her ears—and to mine, because we had never emerged from the walled garden, had not dared to venture together into the “dark forest” of experience. She herself was an undeveloped theme, a divine fragment of melody, which the winds hummed and the sea sang, and which hovered all days and all nights in the tenebrous deeps of my enchanted heart.
“Look up now,” said Cornelia softly.
I wriggled back from the verge of the bluff, and sat up, and looked up.
While I had been lying there in prone contemplation of the goldfish, the awaited sunset had arrived, and with a magnificence of splendor unparalleled in my memory. The sun itself was not visible. But the dull gray curtain, which, as we were descending the mesa, hung from the zenith to the sea, had vanished before the passionate resurgency of light. Overhead, extending from north to south, stretched a vast skyland of royal purple, its lower edge, or shore, tinged with deep rose color, where the waves of light beat against it. Near the “shore” was a bright clear crystalline tract, without any cloud; but elsewhere, farther out in that celestial sea, gleamed, glowed, burned an immense archipelago of golden islands. It looked like Polynesia transfigured with fire and praising God on the Day of Judgment.
It took my breath away. I gazed spellbound, like the spellbound color in the sky, to which Cornelia had called my attention just as it reached its brief period of seeming fixed and changeless and eternal. I turned to her. She was quietly watching my response to her sunset. Our eyes met; and for an instant they clinched. Then her lids drooped, and she said:—
“You were so good to come!”