“It’s a different costume altogether,” said the Sea Lady, brushing away a crumb.
Just for a moment Mrs. Bunting regarded her visitor fixedly. She had, I fancy, in that moment, an indistinct, imperfect glimpse of pagan possibilities. But there, you know, was the Sea Lady in her wrapper, so palpably a lady, with herpretty hair brought up to date and such a frank innocence in her eyes, that Mrs. Bunting’s suspicions vanished as they came.
(But I am not so sure of Adeline.)
The remarkable thing is that the Buntings really carried out the programme Mrs. Bunting laid down. For a time at least they positively succeeded in converting the Sea Lady into a credible human invalid, in spite of the galaxy of witnesses to the lady’s landing and in spite of the severe internal dissensions that presently broke out. In spite, moreover, of the fact that one of the maids—they found out which only long after—told the whole story under vows to her very superior young man who told it next Sunday to a rising journalist who was sitting about on the Leas maturinga descriptive article. The rising journalist was incredulous. But he went about enquiring. In the end he thought it good enough to go upon. He found in several quarters a vague but sufficient rumour of a something; for the maid’s young man was a conversationalist when he had anything to say.
Finally the rising journalist went and sounded the people on the two chief Folkestone papers and found the thing had just got to them. They were inclined to pretend they hadn’t heard of it, after the fashion of local papers when confronted by the abnormal, but the atmosphere of enterprise that surrounded the rising journalist woke them up. He perceived he had done so and that he had no time to lose. So while they engaged in inventing representatives to enquire, he went off and telephoned to theDaily Gunfireand theNew Paper. When they answered he waspositive and earnest. He staked his reputation—the reputation of a rising journalist!
“I swear there’s something up,” he said. “Get in first—that’s all.”
He had some reputation, I say—and he had staked it. TheDaily Gunfirewas sceptical but precise, and theNew Papersprang a headline “A Mermaid at last!”
You might well have thought the thing was out after that, but it wasn’t. There are things one doesn’t believe even if they are printed in a halfpenny paper. To find the reporters hammering at their doors, so to speak, and fended off only for a time by a proposal that they should call again; to see their incredible secret glaringly in print, did indeed for a moment seem a hopeless exposure to both the Buntings and the Sea Lady. Already they could see the story spreading, could imagine the imminent rush of intimate enquiries, the tripod strides of a multitude of cameras,the crowds watching the windows, the horrors of a great publicity. All the Buntings and Mabel were aghast, simply aghast. Adeline was not so much aghast as excessively annoyed at this imminent and, so far as she was concerned, absolutely irrelevant publicity. “They will never dare—” she said, and “Consider how it affects Harry!” and at the earliest opportunity she retired to her own room. The others, with a certain disregard of her offence, sat around the Sea Lady’s couch—she had scarcely touched her breakfast—and canvassed the coming terror.
“They will put our photographs in the papers,” said the elder Miss Bunting.
“Well, they won’t put mine in,” said her sister. “It’s horrid. I shall go right off now and have it taken again.”
“They’ll interview the Ded!”
“No, no,” said Mr. Bunting terrified. “Your mother——”
“It’s your place, my dear,” said Mrs. Bunting.
“But the Ded—” said Fred.
“I couldn’t,” said Mr. Bunting.
“Well, some one’ll have to tell ’em anyhow,” said Mrs. Bunting. “You know, they will——”
“But it isn’t at all what I wanted,” wailed the Sea Lady, with theDaily Gunfirein her hand. “Can’t it be stopped?”
“You don’t know our journalists,” said Fred.
The tact of my cousin Melville saved the situation. He had dabbled in journalism and talked with literary fellows like myself. And literary fellows like myself are apt at times to be very free and outspoken about the press. He heard of the Buntings’ shrinking terror of publicity as soon as he arrived, a perfect clamour—an almost exultant clamour indeed, of shrinking terror, and he caught theSea Lady’s eye and took his line there and then.
“It’s not an occasion for sticking at trifles, Mrs. Bunting,” he said. “But I think we can save the situation all the same. You’re too hopeless. We must put our foot down at once; that’s all. Letmesee these reporter fellows and write to the London dailies. I think I can take a line that will settle them.”
“Eh?” said Fred.
“I can take a line that will stop it, trust me.”
“What, altogether?”
“Altogether.”
“How?” said Fred and Mrs. Bunting. “You’re not going to bribe them!”
“Bribe!” said Mr. Bunting. “We’re not in France. You can’t bribe a British paper.”
(A sort of subdued cheer went around from the assembled Buntings.)
“You leave it to me,” said Melville, in his element.
And with earnestly expressed but not very confident wishes for his success, they did.
He managed the thing admirably.
“What’s this about a mermaid?” he demanded of the local journalists when they returned. They travelled together for company, being, so to speak, emergency journalists, compositors in their milder moments, and unaccustomed to these higher aspects of journalism. “What’s this about a mermaid?” repeated my cousin, while they waived precedence dumbly one to another.
“I believe some one’s been letting you in,” said my cousin Melville. “Just imagine!—a mermaid!”
“That’s what we thought,” said the younger of the two emergency journalists. “We knew it was some sort of hoax, youknow. Only theNew Papergiving it a headline——”
“I’m amazed even Banghurst—” said my cousin Melville.
“It’s in theDaily Gunfireas well,” said the older of the two emergency journalists.
“What’s one more or less of these ha’penny fever rags?” cried my cousin with a ringing scorn. “Surely you’re not going to take your Folkestone news from mere London papers.”
“But how did the story come about?” began the older emergency journalist.
“That’s not my affair.”
The younger emergency journalist had an inspiration. He produced a note book from his breast pocket. “Perhaps, sir, you wouldn’t mind suggesting to us something we might say——”
My cousin Melville complied.
The rising young journalist who had first got wind of the business—who must not for a moment be confused with the two emergency journalists heretofore described—came to Banghurst next night in a state of strange exultation. “I’ve been through with it and I’ve seen her,” he panted. “I waited about outside and saw her taken into the carriage. I’ve talked to one of the maids—I got into the house under pretence of being a telephone man to see their telephone—I spotted the wire—and it’s a fact. A positive fact—she’s a mermaid with a tail—a proper mermaid’s tail. I’ve got here——”
He displayed sheets.
“Whaddyer talking about?” said Banghurst from his littered desk, eyeing the sheets with apprehensive animosity.
“The mermaid—there reallyisa mermaid. At Folkestone.”
Banghurst turned away from him and pawed at his pen tray. “Whad if there is!” he said after a pause.
“But it’s proved. That note you printed——”
“That note I printed was a mistake if there’s anything of that sort going, young man.” Banghurst remained an obstinate expansion of back.
“How?”
“We don’t deal in mermaids here.”
“But you’re not going to let it drop?”
“I am.”
“But there she is!”
“Let her be.” He turned on the rising young journalist, and his massive face was unusually massive and his voice fine and full and fruity. “Do you think we’re going to make our public believe anything simply because it’s true? They know perfectlywell what they are going to believe and what they aren’t going to believe, and they aren’t going to believe anything about mermaids—you bet your hat. I don’t care if the whole damned beach was littered with mermaids—not the whole damned beach! We’ve got our reputation to keep up. See?… Look here!—you don’t learn journalism as I hoped you’d do. It was you what brought in all that stuff about a discovery in chemistry——”
“It’s true.”
“Ugh!”
“I had it from a Fellow of the Royal Society——”
“Stuff that the public won’t believe aren’t facts.”“Stuff that the public won’t believe aren’t facts.”
“I don’t care if you had it from—anybody. Stuff that the public won’t believe aren’t facts. Being true only makes ’em worse. They buy our paper to swallow it and it’s got to go down easy. When I printed you that note and headline I thought you was up to a lark. I thoughtyou was on to a mixed bathing scandal or something of that sort—with juice in it. The sort of thing thatallunderstand. You know when you went down to Folkestone you were going to describe what Salisbury and all the rest of them wear upon the Leas. And start a discussion on the acclimatisation of the café. And all that. And then you get on to this (unprintable epithet) nonsense!”
“But Lord Salisbury—he doesn’t go to Folkestone.”
Banghurst shrugged his shoulders over a hopeless case. “What the deuce,” he said, addressing his inkpot in plaintive tones, “doesthatmatter?”
The young man reflected. He addressed Banghurst’s back after a pause. His voice had flattened a little. “I might go over this and do it up as a lark perhaps. Make it a comic dialogue sketch with a man who really believed in it—orsomething like that. It’s a beastly lot of copy to get slumped, you know.”
“Nohow,” said Banghurst. “Not in any shape. No! Why! They’d think it clever. They’d think you was making game of them. They hate things they think are clever!”
The young man made as if to reply, but Banghurst’s back expressed quite clearly that the interview was at an end.
“Nohow,” repeated Banghurst just when it seemed he had finished altogether.
“I may take it to theGunfirethen?”
Banghurst suggested an alternative.
“Very well,” said the young man, heated, “theGunfireit is.”
But in that he was reckoning without the editor of theGunfire.
It must have been quite soon after that, that I myself heard the first mention of the mermaid, little recking that at last it would fall to me to write her history. I was on one of my rare visits to London, and Micklethwaite was giving me lunch at the Penwiper Club, certainly one of the best dozen literary clubs in London. I noted the rising young journalist at a table near the door, lunching alone. All about him tables were vacant, though the other parts of the room were crowded. He sat with his face towards the door, and he kept looking up whenever any one came in, as if he expected some one who never came. Once distinctly I saw him beckon to a man, but the man did not respond.
“Look here, Micklethwaite,” I said, “why is everybody avoiding that manover there? I noticed just now in the smoking-room that he seemed to be trying to get into conversation with some one and that a kind of taboo——”
Micklethwaite stared over his fork. “Ra-ther,” he said.
“But what’s he done?”
“He’s a fool,” said Micklethwaite with his mouth full, evidently annoyed. “Ugh,” he said as soon as he was free to do so.
I waited a little while.
“What’s he done?” I ventured.
Micklethwaite did not answer for a moment and crammed things into his mouth vindictively, bread and all sorts of things. Then leaning towards me in a confidential manner he made indignant noises which I could not clearly distinguish as words.
“Oh!” I said, when he had done.
“Yes,” said Micklethwaite. He swallowedand then poured himself wine—splashing the tablecloth.
“He hadmefor an hour very nearly the other day.”
“Yes?” I said.
“Silly fool,” said Micklethwaite.
I was afraid it was all over, but luckily he gave me an opening again after gulping down his wine.
“He leads you on to argue,” he said.
“That——?”
“That he can’t prove it.”
“Yes?”
“And then he shows you he can. Just showing off how damned ingenious he is.”
I was a little confused. “Prove what?” I asked.
“Haven’t I been telling you?” said Micklethwaite, growing very red. “About this confounded mermaid of his at Folkestone.”
“He says there is one?”
“Yes, he does,” said Micklethwaite, going purple and staring at me very hard. He seemed to ask mutely whether I of all people proposed to turn on him and back up this infamous scoundrel. I thought for a moment he would have apoplexy, but happily he remembered his duty as my host. So he turned very suddenly on a meditative waiter for not removing our plates.
“Had any golf lately?” I said to Micklethwaite, when the plates and the remains of the waiter had gone away. Golf always does Micklethwaite good except when he is actually playing. Then, I am told— If I were Mrs. Bunting I should break off and raise my eyebrows and both hands at this point, to indicate how golf acts on Micklethwaite when he is playing.
I turned my mind to feigning an interestin golf—a game that in truth I despise and hate as I despise and hate nothing else in this world. Imagine a great fat creature like Micklethwaite, a creature who ought to wear a turban and a long black robe to hide his grossness, whacking a little white ball for miles and miles with a perfect surgery of instruments, whacking it either with a babyish solemnity or a childish rage as luck may have decided, whacking away while his country goes to the devil, and incidentally training an innocent-eyed little boy to swear and be a tip-hunting loafer. That’s golf! However, I controlled my all too facile sneer and talked of golf and the relative merits of golf links as I might talk to a child about buns or distract a puppy with the whisper of “rats,” and when at last I could look at the rising young journalist again our lunch had come to an end.
I saw that he was talking with agreater air of freedom than it is usual to display to club waiters, to the man who held his coat. The man looked incredulous but respectful, and was answering shortly but politely.
When we went out this little conversation was still going on. The waiter was holding the rising young journalist’s soft felt hat and the rising young journalist was fumbling in his coat pocket with a thick mass of papers.
“It’s tremendous. I’ve got most of it here,” he was saying as we went by. “I don’t know if you’d care——”
“I get very little time for reading, sir,” the waiter was replying.
So far I have been very full, I know, and verisimilitude has been my watchword rather than the true affidavit style. But if I have made it clear to the reader just how the Sea Lady landed and just how it was possible for her to land and become a member of human society without any considerable excitement on the part of that society, such poor pains as I have taken to tint and shadow and embellish the facts at my disposal will not have been taken in vain. She positively and quietly settled down with the Buntings. Within a fortnight she had really settled down so thoroughly that, save for her exceptionalbeauty and charm and the occasional faint touches of something a little indefinable in her smile, she had become a quite passable and credible human being. She was a cripple, indeed, and her lower limb was most pathetically swathed and put in a sort of case, but it was quite generally understood—I am afraid at Mrs. Bunting’s initiative—that presentlythey—Mrs. Bunting said “they,” which was certainly almost as far or even a little farther than legitimate prevarication may go—would be as well as ever.
She positively and quietly settled down with the Buntings.She positively and quietly settled down with the Buntings.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Bunting, “she will never be able tobicycleagain——”
That was the sort of glamour she threw about it.
In Parker it is indisputable that the Sea Lady found—or at least had found for her by Mrs. Bunting—a treasure ofthe richest sort. Parker was still fallaciously young, but she had been maid to a lady from India who had been in a “case” and had experienced and overcome cross-examination. She had also been deceived by a young man, whom she had fancied greatly, only to find him walking out with another—contrary to her inflexible sense of correctness—in the presence of which all other things are altogether vain. Life she had resolved should have no further surprises for her. She looked out on its (largely improper) pageant with an expression of alert impartiality in her hazel eyes, calm, doing her specific duty, and entirely declining to participate further. She always kept her elbows down by her side and her hands always just in contact, and it was impossible for the most powerful imagination to conceive her under any circumstances as being anything but absolutely straight and clean and neat. Andher voice was always under all circumstances low and wonderfully distinct—just to an infinitesimal degree indeed “mincing.”
Mrs. Bunting had been a little nervous when it came to the point. It was Mrs. Bunting of course who engaged her, because the Sea Lady was so entirely without experience. But certainly Mrs. Bunting’s nervousness was thrown away.
“You understand,” said Mrs. Bunting, taking a plunge at it, “that—that she is an invalid.”
“Ididn’t, Mem,” replied Parker respectfully, and evidently quite willing to understand anything as part of her duty in this world.
“In fact,” said Mrs. Bunting, rubbing the edge of the tablecloth daintily with her gloved finger and watching the operation with interest, “as a matter of fact, she has a mermaid’s tail.”
“Mermaid’s tail! Indeed, Mem! And is it painful at all?”
“Oh, dear, no, it involves no inconvenience—nothing. Except—you understand, there is a need of—discretion.”
“Of course, Mem,” said Parker, as who should say, “there always is.”
“We particularly don’t want the servants——”
“The lower servants— No, Mem.”
“You understand?” and Mrs. Bunting looked up again and regarded Parker calmly.
“Precisely, Mem!” said Parker, with a face unmoved, and so they came to the question of terms. “It all passed offmostsatisfactorily,” said Mrs. Bunting, taking a deep breath at the mere memory of that moment. And it is clear that Parker was quite of her opinion.
She was not only discreet but really clever and handy. From the very outsetshe grasped the situation, unostentatiously but very firmly. It was Parker who contrived the sort of violin case for It, and who made the tea gown extension that covered the case’s arid contours. It was Parker who suggested an invalid’s chair for use indoors and in the garden, and a carrying chair for the staircase. Hitherto Fred Bunting had been on hand, at last even in excessive abundance, whenever the Sea Lady lay in need of masculine arms. But Parker made it clear at once that that was not at all in accordance with her ideas, and so earned the lifelong gratitude of Mabel Glendower. And Parker too spoke out for drives, and suggested with an air of rightness that left nothing else to be done, the hire of a carriage and pair for the season—to the equal delight of the Buntings and the Sea Lady. It was Parker who dictated the daily drive up to the eastern end of the Leas and theSea Lady’s transfer, and the manner of the Sea Lady’s transfer, to the bath chair in which she promenaded the Leas. There seemed to be nowhere that it was pleasant and proper for the Sea Lady to go that Parker did not swiftly and correctly indicate it and the way to get to it, and there seems to have been nothing that it was really undesirable the Sea Lady should do and anywhere that it was really undesirable that she should go, that Parker did not at once invisibly but effectively interpose a bar. It was Parker who released the Sea Lady from being a sort of private and peculiar property in the Bunting household and carried her off to a becoming position in the world, when the crisis came. In little things as in great she failed not. It was she who made it luminous that the Sea Lady’s card plate was not yet engraved and printed (“Miss Doris Thalassia Waters” was the pleasantand appropriate name with which the Sea Lady came primed), and who replaced the box of the presumably dank and drowned and dripping “Tom” by a jewel case, a dressing bag and the first of the Sea Lady’s trunks.
On a thousand little occasions this Parker showed a sense of propriety that was penetratingly fine. For example, in the shop one day when “things” of an intimate sort were being purchased, she suddenly intervened.
“There are stockings, Mem,” she said in a discreet undertone, behind, but not too vulgarly behind, a fluttering straight hand.
“Stockings!” cried Mrs. Bunting. “But——!”
“I think, Mem, she should have stockings,” said Parker, quietly but very firmly.
And come to think of it, whyshouldan unavoidable deficiency in a lady excuseone that can be avoided? It’s there we touch the very quintessence and central principle of the proper life.
But Mrs. Bunting, you know, would never have seen it like that.
Let me add here, regretfully but with infinite respect, one other thing about Parker, and then she shall drop into her proper place.
I must confess, with a slight tinge of humiliation, that I pursued this young woman to her present situation at Highton Towers—maid she is to that eminent religious and social propagandist, the Lady Jane Glanville. There were certain details of which I stood in need, certain scenes and conversations of which my passion for verisimilitude had scarcely a crumb to go upon. And from first to last, what shemust have seen and learnt and inferred would amount practically to everything.
I put this to her frankly. She made no pretence of not understanding me nor of ignorance of certain hidden things. When I had finished she regarded me with a level regard.
“I couldn’t think of it, sir,” she said. “It wouldn’t be at all according to my ideas.”
“But!—It surely couldn’t possibly hurt you now to tell me.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t, sir.”
“It couldn’t hurt anyone.”
“It isn’t that, sir.”
“I should see you didn’t lose by it, you know.”
She looked at me politely, having said what she intended to say.
And, in spite of what became at last very fine and handsome inducements, that remained the inflexible Parker’s reply.Even after I had come to an end with my finesse and attempted to bribe her in the grossest manner, she displayed nothing but a becoming respect for my impregnable social superiority.
“I couldn’t think of it, sir,” she repeated. “It wouldn’t be at all according to my ideas.”
And if in the end you should find this story to any extent vague or incomplete, I trust you will remember how the inflexible severity of Parker’s ideas stood in my way.
These digressions about Parker and the journalists have certainly led me astray from the story a little. You will, however, understand that while the rising young journalist was still in pursuit of information, Hope and Banghurst, and Parker merely a budding perfection, the carriage not even thought of, things were already developing in that bright little establishment beneath the evergreen oaks on the Folkestone Riviera. So soon as the minds of the Buntings ceased to be altogether focused upon this new and amazing social addition, they—of all people—had mostindisputably discovered, it became at first faintly and then very clearly evident that their own simple pleasure in the possession of a guest so beautiful as Miss Waters, so solidly wealthy and—in a manner—so distinguished, was not entirely shared by the two young ladies who were to have been their principal guests for the season.
This little rift was perceptible the very first time Mrs. Bunting had an opportunity of talking over her new arrangements with Miss Glendower.
“And is she really going to stay with you all the summer?” said Adeline.
“Surely, dear, you don’t mind?”
“It takes me a little by surprise.”
“She’s asked me, my dear——”
“I’m thinking of Harry. If the general election comes on in September—and every one seems to think it will —You promised you would let us inundate you with electioneering.”
“But do you think she——”
“She will be dreadfully in the way.”
She added after an interval, “She stops my working.”
“But, my dear!”
“She’s out of harmony,” said Adeline.
Mrs. Bunting looked out of her window at the tamarisk and the sea. “I’m sure I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Harry’s prospects. You know how enthusiastic we all are. Randolph would do anything. But are you sure she will be in the way?”
“What else can she be?”
“She might help even.”
“Oh, help!”
“She might canvass. She’s very attractive, you know, dear.”
“Not to me,” said Miss Glendower. “I don’t trust her.”
“But to some people. And as Harry says, at election times every one who cando anything must be let do it. Cut them—do anything afterwards, but at the time—you know he talked of it when Mr. Fison and he were here. If you left electioneering only to the really nice people——”
“It was Mr. Fison said that, not Harry. And besides, she wouldn’t help.”
“I think you misjudge her there, dear. She has been asking——”
“To help?”
“Yes, and all about it,” said Mrs. Bunting, with a transient pink. “She keeps asking questions about why we are having the election and what it is all about, and why Harry is a candidate and all that. She wants to go into it quite deeply.Ican’t answer half the things she asks.”
“And that’s why she keeps up those long conversations with Mr. Melville, I suppose, and why Fred goes about neglecting Mabel——”
“My dear!” said Mrs. Bunting.
“I wouldn’t have her canvassing with us for anything,” said Miss Glendower. “She’d spoil everything. She is frivolous and satirical. She looks at you with incredulous eyes, she seems to blight all one’s earnestness.… I don’t think you quite understand, dear Mrs. Bunting, what this election and my studies mean to me—and Harry. She comes across all that—like a contradiction.”
“Surely, my dear! I’ve never heard her contradict.”
“Oh, she doesn’t contradict. But she— There is something about her— One feels that things that are most important and vital are nothing to her. Don’t you feel it? She comes from another world to us.”
Mrs. Bunting remained judicial. Adeline dropped to a lower key again. “I think,” she said, “anyhow, that we’re takingher very easily. How do we know what she is? Down there, out there, she may be anything. She may have had excellent reasons for coming to land——”
“My dear!” cried Mrs. Bunting. “Is that charity?”
“How do they live?”
“If she hadn’t lived nicely I’m sure she couldn’t behave so nicely.”
“Besides—coming here! She had no invitation——”
“I’ve invited her now,” said Mrs. Bunting gently.
“You could hardly help yourself. I only hope your kindness——”
“It’s not a kindness,” said Mrs. Bunting, “it’s a duty. If she were only half as charming as she is. You seem to forget”—her voice dropped—“what it is she comes for.”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“I’m sure in these days, with so muchmaterialism about and such wickedness everywhere, when everybody who has a soul seems trying to lose it, to find any one who hadn’t a soul and who is trying to find one——”
“Butisshe trying to get one?”
“Mr. Flange comes twice every week. He would come oftener, as you know, if there wasn’t so much confirmation about.”
“And when he comes he sits and touches her hand if he can, and he talks in his lowest voice, and she sits and smiles—she almost laughs outright at the things he says.”
“Because he has to win his way with her. Surely Mr. Flange may do what he can to make religion attractive?”
“I don’t believe she believes she will get a soul. I don’t believe she wants one a bit.”
She turned towards the door as if she had done.
Mrs. Bunting’s pink was now permanent. She had brought up a son and two daughters, and besides she had brought down a husband to “My dear, how wasIto know?” and when it was necessary to be firm—even with Adeline Glendower—she knew how to be firm just as well as anybody.
“My dear,” she began in her very firmest quiet manner, “I am positive you misjudge Miss Waters. Trivial she may be—on the surface at any rate. Perhaps she laughs and makes fun a little. There are different ways of looking at things. But I am sure that at bottom she is just as serious, just as grave, as—any one. You judge her hastily. I am sure if you knew her better—as I do——”
Mrs. Bunting left an eloquent pause.
Miss Glendower had two little pink flushes in her cheeks. She turned with her hand on the door.
“At any rate,” she said, “I am sure that Harry will agree with me that she can be no help to our cause. We have our work to do and it is something more than just vulgar electioneering. We have to develop and establish ideas. Harry has views that are new and wide-reaching. We want to put our whole strength into this work. Now especially. And her presence——”
She paused for a moment. “It is a digression. She divides things. She puts it all wrong. She has a way of concentrating attention about herself. She alters the values of things. She prevents my being single-minded, she will prevent Harry being single-minded——”
“I think, my dear, that you might trust my judgment a little,” said Mrs. Bunting and paused.
Miss Glendower opened her mouth and shut it again, without speaking. It becameevident finality was attained. Nothing remained to be said but the regrettable.
The door opened and closed smartly and Mrs. Bunting was alone.
Within an hour they all met at the luncheon table and Adeline’s behaviour to the Sea Lady and to Mrs. Bunting was as pleasant and alert as any highly earnest and intellectual young lady’s could be. And all that Mrs. Bunting said and did tended with what people call infinite tact—which really, you know, means a great deal more tact than is comfortable—to develop and expose the more serious aspect of the Sea Lady’s mind. Mr. Bunting was unusually talkative and told them all about a glorious project he had just heard of, to cut out the rather shrubby and weedy front of the Leas and stick in something between a wine vault and the Crystal Palace as a Winter Garden—which seemed to him a very excellent idea indeed.
It is time now to give some impression of the imminent Chatteris, who for all his late appearance is really the chief human being in my cousin Melville’s story. It happens that I met him with some frequency in my university days and afterwards ever and again I came upon him. He was rather a brilliant man at the university, smart without being vulgar and clever for all that. He was remarkably good-looking from the very onset of his manhood and without being in any way a showy spendthrift, was quite magnificently extravagant. There was trouble in his last year, something hushed up about a girl or woman in London, but his family had it all over with him, and his uncle, the Earl of Beechcroft, settled some of his bills. Not all—for the family is commendably free from sentimental excesses—butenough to make him comfortable again. The family is not a rich one and it further abounds in an extraordinary quantity of rather frowsy, loose-tongued aunts—I never knew a family quite so rich in old aunts. But Chatteris was so good-looking, easy-mannered, and clever, that they seemed to agree almost without discussion to pull him through. They hunted about for something that would be really remunerative without being laborious or too commercial; and meanwhile—after the extraordinary craving of his aunt, Lady Poynting Mallow, to see him acting had been overcome by the united efforts of the more religious section of his aunts—Chatteris set himself seriously to the higher journalism—that is to say, the journalism that dines anywhere, gets political tips after dinner, and is always acceptable—if only to avoid thirteen articles—in a half-crown review.In addition, he wrote some very passable verse and edited Jane Austen for the only publisher who had not already reprinted the works of that classic lady.
His verse, like himself, was shapely and handsome, and, like his face, it suggested to the penetrating eye certain reservations and indecisions. There was just that touch of refinement that is weakness in the public man. But as yet he was not a public man; he was known to be energetic and his work was gathering attention as always capable and occasionally brilliant. His aunts declared he was ripening, that any defect in vigour he displayed was the incompleteness of the process, and decided he should go to America, where vigour and vigorous opportunities abound, and there, I gather, he came upon something like a failure. Something happened, indeed, quite a lot happened. He came back unmarried—andviâthe South Seas,Australasia and India. And Lady Poynting Mallow publicly told him he was a fool, when he got back.
What happened in America, even if one does not consult contemporary American papers, is still very difficult to determine. There appear to have been the daughter of a millionaire and something like an engagement in the story. According to theNew York Yell, one of the smartest, crispest, and altogether most representative papers in America, there was also the daughter of some one else, whom theYellinterviewed, or professed to interview, under the heading:
AN ARISTOCRATIC BRITISHERTRIFLES WITHA PURE AMERICAN GIRLINTERVIEW WITH THE VICTIMOF HISHEARTLESS LEVITY
But this some one else was, I am inclined to think in spite of her excellently executed portrait, merely a brilliant stroke of modern journalism, theYellhaving got wind of the sudden retreat of Chatteris and inventing a reason in preference to discovering one. Wensleydale tells me the true impetus to bolt was the merest trifle. The daughter of the millionaire, being a bright and spirited girl, had undergone interviewing on the subject of her approaching marriage, on marriage in general, on social questions of various sorts, and on the relations of the British and American peoples, and he seems to have found the thing in his morning paper. It took him suddenly and he lost his head. And once he started, he seems to have lacked the power of mind to turn about and come back. The affair was a mess, the family paid some more of his bills and shirked others, and Chatteris turned up inLondon again after a time, with somewhat diminished glory and a series of letters on Imperial Affairs, each headed with the quotation: “What do they know of England who only England know?”
Of course people of England learnt nothing of the real circumstances of the case, but it was fairly obvious that he had gone to America and come back empty-handed.
And that was how, in the course of some years, he came to Adeline Glendower, of whose special gifts as his helper and inspiration you have already heard from Mrs. Bunting. When he became engaged to her, the family, which had long craved to forgive him—Lady Poynting Mallow as a matter of fact had done so—brightened wonderfully. And after considerable obscure activities he declared himself a philanthropic Liberal with open spaces in his platform, and in a position,and ready as a beginning, to try the quality of the conservative South.
He was away making certain decisive arrangements, in Paris and elsewhere, at the time of the landing of the Sea Lady. Before the matter was finally settled it was necessary that something should be said to a certain great public character, and then he was to return and tell Adeline. And every one was expecting him daily, including, it is now indisputable, the Sea Lady.
The meeting of Miss Glendower and her affianced lover on his return from Paris was one of those scenes in this story for which I have scarcely an inkling of the true details. He came to Folkestone and stopped at the Métropole, the Bunting house being full and the Métropole being the nearest hotel to Sandgate; and hewalked down in the afternoon and asked for Adeline, which was pretty rather than correct. I gather that they met in the drawing-room, and as Chatteris closed the door behind him, I imagine there was something in the nature of a caress.
I must confess I envy the freedom of the novelist who can take you behind such a locked door as this and give you all that such persons say and do. But with the strongest will in the world to blend the little scraps of fact I have into a continuous sequence of events, I falter at this occasion. After all, I never saw Adeline at all until after all these things were over, and what is she now? A rather tall, a rather restless and active woman, very keen and obvious in public affairs—with something gone out of her. Melville once saw a gleam of that, but for the most part Melville never liked her; she had a wider grasp of things than he, and he was a littleafraid of her; she was in some inexplicable way neither a pretty woman nor a “dear lady” nor agrande damenor totally insignificant, and a heretic therefore in Melville’s scheme of things. He gives me small material for that earlier Adeline. “She posed,” he says; she was “political,” and she was always reading Mrs. Humphry Ward.
The last Melville regarded as the most heinous offence. It is not the least of my cousin’s weaknesses that he regards this great novelist as an extremely corrupting influence for intelligent girls. She makes them good and serious in the wrong way, he says. Adeline, he asserts, was absolutely built on her. She was always attempting to be the incarnation ofMarcella. It was he who had perverted Mrs. Bunting’s mind to adopt this fancy. But I don’t believe for a moment in this idea of girls building themselves onheroines in fiction. These are matters of elective affinity, and unless some bullying critic or preacher sends us astray, we take each to our own novelist as the souls in the Swedenborgian system take to their hells. Adeline took to the imaginaryMarcella. There was, Melville says, the strongest likeness in their mental atmosphere. They had the same defects, a bias for superiority—to use his expressive phrase—the same disposition towards arrogant benevolence, that same obtuseness to little shades of feeling that leads people to speak habitually of the “Lower Classes,” and to think in the vein of that phrase. They certainly had the same virtues, a conscious and conscientious integrity, a hard nobility without one touch of magic, an industrious thoroughness. More than in anything else, Adeline delighted in her novelist’s thoroughness, her freedom from impressionism, the patient resolutionwith which she went into the corners and swept under the mat of every incident. And it would be easy to argue from that, that Adeline behaved as Mrs. Ward’s most characteristic heroine behaved, on an analogous occasion.
Marcellawe know—at least after her heart was changed—would have clung to him. There would have been a moment of high emotion in which thoughts—of the highest class—mingled with the natural ambition of two people in the prime of life and power. Then she would have receded with a quick movement and listened with her beautiful hand pensive against her cheek, while Chatteris began to sum up the forces against him—to speculate on the action of this group and that. Something infinitely tender and maternal would have spoken in her, pledging her to the utmost help that love and a womancan give. She would have produced in Chatteris that exquisite mingled impression of grace, passion, self-yielding, which in all its infinite variations and repetitions made up for him the constant poem of her beauty.
But that is the dream and not the reality. So Adeline might have dreamt of behaving, but—she was notMarcella, and only wanting to be, and he was not only not Maxwell but he had no intention of being Maxwell anyhow. If he had had an opportunity of becoming Maxwell he would probably have rejected it with extreme incivility. So they met like two unheroic human beings, with shy and clumsy movements and, I suppose, fairly honest eyes. Something there was in the nature of a caress, I believe, and then I incline to fancy she said “Well?” and I think he must have answered, “It’s all right.” After that, and rather allusively,with a backward jerk of the head at intervals as it were towards the great personage, Chatteris must have told her particulars. He must have told her that he was going to contest Hythe and that the little difficulty with the Glasgow commission agent who wanted to run the Radical ticket as a “Man of Kent” had been settled without injury to the party (such as it is). Assuredly they talked politics, because soon after, when they came into the garden side by side to where Mrs. Bunting and the Sea Lady sat watching the girls play croquet, Adeline was in full possession of all these facts. I fancy that for such a couple as they were, such intimation of success, such earnest topics, replaced, to a certain extent at any rate, the vain repetition of vulgar endearments.
The Sea Lady appears to have been the first to see them. “Here he is,” she said abruptly.
“Whom?” said Mrs. Bunting, glancing up at eyes that were suddenly eager, and then following their glance towards Chatteris.
“Your other son,” said the Sea Lady, jesting unheeded.
“It’s Harry and Adeline!” cried Mrs. Bunting. “Don’t they make a handsome couple?”
But the Sea Lady made no reply, and leaned back, scrutinising their advance. Certainly they made a handsome pair. Coming out of the veranda into the blaze of the sun and across the trim lawn towards the shadow of the ilex trees, they were lit, as it were, with a more glorious limelight, and displayed like actors on a stage more spacious than the stage of any theatre. The figure of Chatteris must have come out tall and fair and broad, a little sunburnt, and I gather even then a little preoccupied, as indeed he always seemed to be inthose latter days. And beside him Adeline, glancing now up at him and now towards the audience under the trees, dark and a little flushed, rather tall—though not so tall asMarcellaseems to have been—and, you know, without any instructions from any novel-writer in the world, glad.
Chatteris did not discover that there was any one but Buntings under the tree until he was close at hand. Then the abrupt discovery of this stranger seems to have checked whatever he was prepared to say for hisdébut, and Adeline took the centre of the stage. Mrs. Bunting was standing up, and all the croquet players—except Mabel, who was winning—converged on Chatteris with cries of welcome. Mabel remained in the midst of what I understand is called a tea-party, loudly demanding that they should see her “play it out.” No doubt if everything had gonewell she would have given a most edifying exhibition of what croquet can sometimes be.
Adeline swam forward to Mrs. Bunting and cried with a note of triumph in her voice: “It is all settled. Everything is settled. He has won them all and he is to contest Hythe.”
Quite involuntarily her eyes must have met the Sea Lady’s.
It is of course quite impossible to say what she found there—or indeed what there was to find there then. For a moment they faced riddles, and then the Sea Lady turned her eyes with a long deferred scrutiny to the man’s face, which she probably saw now closely for the first time. One wonders whether it is just possible that there may have been something, if it were no more than a gleam of surprise and enquiry, in that meeting of their eyes. Just for a moment she held his regard,and then it shifted enquiringly to Mrs. Bunting.
That lady intervened effusively with an “Oh! I forgot,” and introduced them. I think they went through that without another meeting of the foils of their regard.
“You back?” said Fred to Chatteris, touching his arm, and Chatteris confirmed this happy guess.
The Bunting girls seemed to welcome Adeline’s enviable situation rather than Chatteris as an individual. And Mabel’s voice could be heard approaching. “Oughtn’t they to see me play it out, Mr. Chatteris?”
“Hullo, Harry, my boy!” cried Mr. Bunting, who was cultivating a bluff manner. “How’s Paris?”
“How’s the fishing?” said Harry.
And so they came into a vague circle about this lively person who had “won them all”—except Parker, of course, whoremained in her own proper place and was, I am certain, never to be won by anybody.
There was a handing and shifting of garden chairs.
No one seemed to take the slightest notice of Adeline’s dramatic announcement. The Buntings were not good at thinking of things to say. She stood in the midst of the group like a leading lady when the other actors have forgotten their parts. Then every one woke up to this, as it were, and they went off in a volley. “So it’s really all settled,” said Mrs. Bunting; and Betty Bunting said, “Thereisto be an election then!” and Nettie said, “What fun!” Mr. Bunting remarked with a knowing air, “So you saw him then?” and Fred flung “Hooray!” into the tangle of sounds.
The Sea Lady of course said nothing.
“We’ll give ’em a jolly good fight for it, anyhow,” said Mr. Bunting.
“Well, I hope we shall do that,” said Chatteris.
“We shall do more than that,” said Adeline.
“Oh, yes!” said Betty Bunting, “we shall.”
“I knew they would let him,” said Adeline.
“If they had any sense,” said Mr. Bunting.
Then came a pause, and Mr. Bunting was emboldened to lift up his voice and utter politics. “They are getting sense,” he said. “They are learning that a party must have men, men of birth and training. Money and the mob—they’ve tried to keep things going by playing to fads and class jealousies. And the Irish. And they’ve had their lesson. How? Why,—we’ve stood aside. We’ve left ’em to faddists and fomenters—and the Irish. And here they are! It’s a revolution inthe party. We’ve let it down. Now we must pick it up again.”
He made a gesture with his fat little hand, one of those fat pink little hands that appear to have neither flesh nor bones inside them but only sawdust or horse-hair. Mrs. Bunting leaned back in her chair and smiled at him indulgently.
“It is no common election,” said Mr. Bunting. “It is a great issue.”
The Sea Lady had been regarding him thoughtfully. “What is a great issue?” she asked. “I don’t quite understand.”
Mr. Bunting spread himself to explain to her. “This,” he said to begin with. Adeline listened with a mingling of interest and impatience, attempting ever and again to suppress him and to involve Chatteris by a tactful interposition. But Chatteris appeared disinclined to be involved. He seemed indeed quite interested in Mr. Bunting’s view of the case.
Presently the croquet quartette went back—at Mabel’s suggestion—to their game, and the others continued their political talk. It became more personal at last, dealing soon quite specifically with all that Chatteris was doing and more particularly all that Chatteris was to do. Mrs. Bunting suddenly suppressed Mr. Bunting as he was offering advice, and Adeline took the burden of the talk again. She indicated vast purposes. “This election is merely the opening of a door,” she said. When Chatteris made modest disavowals she smiled with a proud and happy consciousness of what she meant to make of him.
And Mrs. Bunting supplied footnotes to make it all clear to the Sea Lady. “He’s so modest,” she said at one point, and Chatteris pretended not to hear and went rather pink. Ever and again he attempted to deflect the talk towards theSea Lady and away from himself, but he was hampered by his ignorance of her position.
And the Sea Lady said scarcely anything but watched Chatteris and Adeline, and more particularly Chatteris in relation to Adeline.
My cousin Melville is never very clear about his dates. Now this is greatly to be regretted, because it would be very illuminating indeed if one could tell just how many days elapsed before he came upon Chatteris in intimate conversation with the Sea Lady. He was going along the front of the Leas with some books from the Public Library that Miss Glendower had suddenly wished to consult, and which she, with that entire ignorance of his lack of admiration for her which was part of her want of charm for him, had bidden him bring her. It was in one of those sheltered paths just underthe brow which give such a pleasant and characteristic charm to Folkestone, that he came upon a little group about the Sea Lady’s bath chair. Chatteris was seated in one of the wooden seats that are embedded in the bank, and was leaning forward and looking into the Sea Lady’s face; and she was speaking with a smile that struck Melville even at the time as being a little special in its quality—and she seems to have been capable of many charming smiles. Parker was a little distance away, where a sort of bastion projects and gives a wide view of the pier and harbour and the coast of France, regarding it all with a qualified disfavour, and the bath chairman was crumpled up against the bank lost in that wistful melancholy that the constant perambulation of broken humanity necessarily engenders.