VI

They seemed never to do anything but blow and sigh and rustle papers.They seemed never to do anything but blow and sigh and rustle papers.

Melville had taken upPunch—he was in that mood when a man takes up anything—and was reading, he did not know exactly what. Presently he sighed, looked up, and discovered Chatteris entering the room.

He was surprised to see Chatteris, startled and just faintly alarmed, and Chatteris it was evident was surprised and disconcerted to see him. Chatteris stood in as awkward an attitude as he was capableof, staring unfavourably, and for a moment or so he gave no sign of recognition. Then he nodded and came forward reluctantly. His every movement suggested the will without the wit to escape. “You here?” he said.

“What are you doing away from Hythe at this time?” asked Melville.

“I came here to write a letter,” said Chatteris.

He looked about him rather helplessly. Then he sat down beside Melville and demanded a cigarette. Suddenly he plunged into intimacy.

“It is doubtful whether I shall contest Hythe,” he remarked.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

He lit his cigarette.

“Would you?” he asked.

“Not a bit of it,” said Melville. “But then it’s not my line.”

“Is it mine?”

“Isn’t it a little late in the day to drop it?” said Melville. “You’ve been put up for it now. Every one’s at work. Miss Glendower——”

“I know,” said Chatteris.

“Well?”

“I don’t seem to want to go on.”

“My dear man!”

“It’s a bit of overwork perhaps. I’m off colour. Things have gone flat. That’s why I’m up here.”

He did a very absurd thing. He threw away a quarter-smoked cigarette and almost immediately demanded another.

“You’ve been a little immoderate with your statistics,” said Melville.

Chatteris said something that struck Melville as having somehow been said before. “Election, progress, good of humanity, public spirit. None of thesethings interest me really,” he said. “At least, not just now.”

Melville waited.

“One gets brought up in an atmosphere in which it’s always being whispered that one should go for a career. You learn it at your mother’s knee. They never give you time to find out what you really want, they keep on shoving you at that. They form your character. They rule your mind. They rush you into it.”

“They didn’t rush me,” said Melville.

“They rushed me, anyhow. And here I am!”

“You don’t want a career?”

“Well— Look what it is.”

“Oh! if you look at what things are!”

“First of all, the messing about to get into the House. These confounded parties mean nothing—absolutely nothing. They aren’t even decent factions. Youblither to damned committees of damned tradesmen whose sole idea for this world is to get overpaid for their self-respect; you whisper and hobnob with local solicitors and get yourself seen about with them; you ask about the charities and institutions, and lunch and chatter and chum with every conceivable form of human conceit and pushfulness and trickery——”

He broke off. “It isn’t as iftheywere up to anything! They’re working in their way, just as you are working in your way. It’s the same game with all of them. They chase a phantom gratification, they toil and quarrel and envy, night and day, in the perpetual attempt to persuade themselves in spite of everything that they are real and a success——”

He stopped and smoked.

Melville was spiteful. “Yes,” he admitted, “but I thoughtyourlittle movementwas to be something more than party politics and self-advancement——?”

He left his sentence interrogatively incomplete.

“The condition of the poor,” he said.

“Well?” said Chatteris, regarding him with a sort of stony admission in his blue eyes.

Melville dodged the look. “At Sandgate,” he said, “there was, you know, a certain atmosphere of belief——”

“I know,” said Chatteris for the second time.

“That’s the devil of it!” said Chatteris after a pause.

“If I don’t believe in the game I’m playing, if I’m left high and dry on this shoal, with the tide of belief gone past me, it isn’tmyplanning, anyhow. I know the decent thing I ought to do. I mean to do it; in the end I mean to do it; I’m talking in this way to relieve my mind.I’ve started the game and I must see it out; I’ve put my hand to the plough and I mustn’t go back. That’s why I came to London—to get it over with myself. It was running up against you, set me off. You caught me at the crisis.”

“Ah!” said Melville.

“But for all that, the thing is as I said—none of these things interest me really. It won’t alter the fact that I am committed to fight a phantom election about nothing in particular, for a party that’s been dead ten years. And if the ghosts win, go into the Parliament as a constituent spectre.… There it is—as a mental phenomenon!”

He reiterated his cardinal article. “The interest is dead,” he said, “the will has no soul.”

He became more critical. He bent a little closer to Melville’s ear. “It isn’t really that I don’t believe. When I say Idon’t believe in these things I go too far. I do. I know, the electioneering, the intriguing is a means to an end. There is work to be done, sound work, and important work. Only——”

Melville turned an eye on him over his cigarette end.

Chatteris met it, seemed for a moment to cling to it. He became absurdly confidential. He was evidently in the direst need of a confidential ear.

“I don’t want to do it. When I sit down to it, square myself down in the chair, you know, and say, now for the rest of my life this is IT—this is your life, Chatteris; there comes a sort of terror, Melville.”

“H’m,” said Melville, and turned away. Then he turned on Chatteris with the air of a family physician, and tapped his shoulder three times as he spoke. “You’ve had too much statistics, Chatteris,” he said.

He let that soak in. Then he turned about towards his interlocutor, and toyed with a club ash tray. “It’s every day has overtaken you,” he said. “You can’t see the wood for the trees. You forget the spacious design you are engaged upon, in the heavy details of the moment. You are like a painter who has been working hard upon something very small and exacting in a corner. You want to step back and look at the whole thing.”

“No,” said Chatteris, “that isn’t quite it.”

Melville indicated that he knew better.

“I keep on, stepping back and looking at it,” said Chatteris. “Just lately I’ve scarcely done anything else. I’ll admit it’s a spacious and noble thing—political work done well—only— I admire it, but it doesn’t grip my imagination. That’s where the trouble comes in.”

“Whatdoesgrip your imagination?”asked Melville. He was absolutely certain the Sea Lady had been talking this paralysis into Chatteris, and he wanted to see just how far she had gone. “For example,” he tested, “are there—by any chance—other dreams?”

Chatteris gave no sign at the phrase. Melville dismissed his suspicion. “What do you mean—other dreams?” asked Chatteris.

“Is there conceivably another way—another sort of life—some other aspect——?”

“It’s out of the question,” said Chatteris. He added, rather remarkably, “Adeline’s awfully good.”

My cousin Melville acquiesced silently in Adeline’s goodness.

“All this, you know, is a mood. My life is made for me—and it’s a very good life. It’s better than I deserve.”

“Heaps,” said Melville.

“Much,” said Chatteris defiantly.

“Ever so much,” endorsed Melville.

“Let’s talk of other things,” said Chatteris. “It’s what even the street boys callmawbidnowadays to doubt for a moment the absolute final all-this-and-nothing-else-in-the-worldishness of whatever you happen to be doing.”

My cousin Melville, however, could think of no other sufficiently interesting topic. “You left them all right at Sandgate?” he asked, after a pause.

“Except little Bunting.”

“Seedy?”

“Been fishing.”

“Of course. Breezes and the spring tides.… And Miss Waters?”

Chatteris shot a suspicious glance at him. He affected the offhand style. “She’squite well,” he said. “Looks just as charming as ever.”

“She really means that canvassing?”

“She’s spoken of it again.”

“She’ll do a lot for you,” said Melville, and left a fine wide pause.

Chatteris assumed the tone of a man who gossips.

“Who is this Miss Waters?” he asked.

“A very charming person,” said Melville and said no more.

Chatteris waited and his pretence of airy gossip vanished. He became very much in earnest.

“Look here,” he said. “Who is this Miss Waters?”

“How shouldIknow?” prevaricated Melville.

“Well, you do know. And the others know. Who is she?”

Melville met his eyes. “Won’t they tell you?” he asked.

“That’s just it,” said Chatteris.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Why shouldn’t I know?”

“There’s a sort of promise to keep it dark.”

“Keepwhatdark?”

My cousin gestured.

“It can’t be anything wrong?” My cousin made no sign.

“She may have had experiences?”

My cousin reflected a moment on the possibilities of the deep-sea life. “She has had them,” he said.

“I don’t care, if she has.”

There came a pause.

“Look here, Melville,” said Chatteris, “I want to know this. Unless it’s a thing to be specially kept from me.… I don’t like being among a lot of people who treat me as an outsider. What is this something about Miss Waters?”

“What does Miss Glendower say?”

“Vague things. She doesn’t like her and she won’t say why. And Mrs. Buntinggoes about with discretion written all over her. And she herself looks at you— And that maid of hers looks— The thing’s worrying me.”

“Why don’t you ask the lady herself?”

“How can I, till I know what it is? Confound it! I’m askingyouplainly enough.”

“Well,” said Melville, and at the moment he had really decided to tell Chatteris. But he hung upon the manner of presentation. He thought in the moment to say, “The truth is, she is a mermaid.” Then as instantly he perceived how incredible this would be. He always suspected Chatteris of a capacity for being continental and romantic. The man might fly out at him for saying such a thing of a lady.

A dreadful doubt fell upon Melville. As you know, he had never seen that tailwith his own eyes. In these surroundings there came to him such an incredulity of the Sea Lady as he had not felt even when first Mrs. Bunting told him of her. All about him was an atmosphere of solid reality, such as one can breathe only in a first-class London club. Everywhere ponderous arm-chairs met the eye. There were massive tables in abundance and match-boxes of solid rock. The matches were of some specially large, heavy sort. On a ponderous elephant-legged green baize table near at hand were several copies of theTimes, the currentPunch, an inkpot of solid brass, and a paper weight of lead.There are other dreams!It seemed impossible. The breathing of an eminent person in a chair in the far corner became very distinct in that interval. It was heavy and resolute like the sound of a stone-mason’s saw. It insisted upon itself as the touchstone of reality.It seemed to say that at the first whisper of a thing so utterly improbable as a mermaid it would snort and choke.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Melville.

“Well, tell me—anyhow.”

My cousin looked at an empty chair beside him. It was evidently stuffed with the very best horse-hair that money could procure, stuffed with infinite skill and an almost religious care. It preached in the open invitation of its expanded arms that man does not live by bread alone—inasmuch as afterwards he needs a nap. An utterly dreamless chair!

Mermaids?

He felt that he was after all quite possibly the victim of a foolish delusion, hypnotised by Mrs. Bunting’s beliefs. Was there not some more plausible interpretation, some phrase that would lie out bridgeways from the plausible to the truth?

“It’s no good,” he groaned at last.

Chatteris had been watching him furtively.

“Oh, I don’t care a hang,” he said, and shied his second cigarette into the massively decorated fireplace. “It’s no affair of mine.”

Then quite abruptly he sprang to his feet and gesticulated with an ineffectual hand.

“You needn’t,” he said, and seemed to intend to say many regrettable things. Meanwhile until his intention ripened he sawed the air with his ineffectual hand. I fancy he ended by failing to find a thing sufficiently regrettable to express the pungency of the moment. He flung about and went towards the door.

“Don’t!” he said to the back of the newspaper of the breathing member.

“If you don’t want to,” he said to the respectful waiter at the door.

The hall-porter heard that he didn’t care—he was damned if he did!

“He might be one of these here guests,” said the hall-porter, greatly shocked. “That’s what comes of lettin’ ’em in so young.”

Melville overcame an impulse to follow him.

“Confound the fellow!” said he.

And then as the whole outburst came into focus, he said with still more emphasis, “Confound the fellow!”

He stood up and became aware that the member who had been asleep was now regarding him with malevolent eyes. He perceived it was a hard and invincible malevolence, and that no petty apologetics of demeanour could avail against it. He turned about and went towards the door.

The interview had done my cousin good. His misery and distress had lifted. He was presently bathed in a profound moral indignation, and that is the very antithesis of doubt and unhappiness. The more he thought it over, the more his indignation with Chatteris grew. That sudden unreasonable outbreak altered all the perspectives of the case. He wished very much that he could meet Chatteris again and discuss the whole matter from a new footing.

“Think of it!” He thought so vividly and so verbally that he was nearly talking to himself as he went along. It shaped itself into an outspoken discourse in his mind.

“Was there ever a more ungracious, ungrateful, unreasonable creature than this same Chatteris? He was the spoiled child of Fortune; things came to him, things were given to him, his very blundersbrought more to him than other men’s successes. Out of every thousand men, nine hundred and ninety-nine might well find food for envy in this way luck had served him. Many a one has toiled all his life and taken at last gratefully the merest fraction of all that had thrust itself upon this insatiable thankless young man. Even I,” thought my cousin, “might envy him—in several ways. And then, at the mere first onset of duty, nay!—at the mere first whisper of restraint, this insubordination, this protest and flight!

“Think!” urged my cousin, “of the common lot of men. Think of the many who suffer from hunger——”

(It was a painful Socialistic sort of line to take, but in his mood of moral indignation my cousin pursued it relentlessly.)

“Think of many who suffer from hunger, who lead lives of unremitting toil, who go fearful, who go squalid, and withalstrive, in a sort of dumb, resolute way, their utmost to do their duty, or at any rate what they think to be their duty. Think of the chaste poor women in the world! Think again of the many honest souls who aspire to the service of their kind, and are so hemmed about and preoccupied that they may not give it! And then this pitiful creature comes, with his mental gifts, his gifts of position and opportunity, the stimulus of great ideas, and afiancée, who is not only rich and beautiful—sheisbeautiful!—but also the best of all possible helpers for him. And he turns away. It isn’t good enough. It takes no hold upon his imagination, if you please. It isn’t beautiful enough for him, and that’s the plain truth of the matter. What does the manwant?What does he expect?…”

My cousin’s moral indignation took him the whole length of Piccadilly, andalong by Rotten Row, and along the flowery garden walks almost into Kensington High Street, and so around by the Serpentine to his home, and it gave him such an appetite for dinner as he had not had for many days. Life was bright for him all that evening, and he sat down at last, at two o’clock in the morning, before a needlessly lit, delightfully fusillading fire in his flat to smoke one sound cigar before he went to bed.

“No,” he said suddenly, “I am notmawbideither. I take the gifts the gods will give me. I try to make myself happy, and a few other people happy, too, to do a few little duties decently, and that is enough for me. I don’t look too deeply into things, and I don’t look too widely about things. A few old simple ideals——

“H’m.

“Chatteris is a dreamer, with an impossible, extravagant discontent. What doeshe dream of?… Three parts he is a dreamer and the fourth part—spoiled child.”

“Dreamer.…”

“Other dreams.…”

“What other dreams could she mean?”

My cousin fell into profound musings. Then he started, looked about him, saw the time by his Rathbone clock, got up suddenly and went to bed.

The crisis came about a week from that time—I say about because of Melville’s conscientious inexactness in these matters. And so far as the crisis goes, I seem to get Melville at his best. He was keenly interested, keenly observant, and his more than average memory took some excellent impressions. To my mind, at any rate, two at least of these people come out, fuller and more convincingly than anywhere else in this painfully disinterred story. He has given me here an Adeline I seem to believe in, and something much more like Chatteris than any of the broken fragments I have had to go upon, andamplify and fudge together so far. And for all such transient lucidities in this mysterious story, the reader no doubt will echo my Heaven be thanked!

Melville was called down to participate in the crisis at Sandgate by a telegram from Mrs. Bunting, and his first exponent of the situation was Fred Bunting.

“Come down. Urgent. Please,” was the irresistible message from Mrs. Bunting. My cousin took the early train and arrived at Sandgate in the forenoon.

He was told that Mrs. Bunting was upstairs with Miss Glendower and that she implored him to wait until she could leave her charge. “Miss Glendower not well, then?” said Melville. “No, sir, not at all well,” said the housemaid, evidently awaiting a further question. “Where are the others?” he asked casually. The three younger young ladies had gone to Hythe,said the housemaid, with a marked omission of the Sea Lady. Melville has an intense dislike of questioning servants on points at issue, so he asked nothing at all concerning Miss Waters. This general absence of people from the room of familiar occupation conveyed the same suggested warning of crisis as the telegram. The housemaid waited an instant longer and withdrew.

He stood for a moment in the drawing-room and then walked out upon the veranda. He perceived a richly caparisoned figure advancing towards him. It was Fred Bunting. He had been taking advantage of the general desertion of home to bathe from the house. He was wearing an umbrageous white cotton hat and a striped blanket, and a more aggressively manly pipe than any fully adult male would ever dream of smoking, hung from the corner of his mouth.

“Hello!” he said. “The mater sent for you?”

Melville admitted the truth of this theory.

“There’s ructions,” said Fred, and removed the pipe. The act offered conversation.

“Where’s Miss Waters?”

“Gone.”

“Back?”

“Lord, no! Catch her! She’s gone to Lummidge’s Hotel. With her maid. Took a suite.”

“Why——”

“The mater made a row with her.”

“Whatever for?”

“Harry.”

My cousin stared at the situation.

“It broke out,” said Fred.

“What broke out?”

“The row. Harry’s gone daft on her, Addy says.”

“On Miss Waters?”

“Rather. Mooney. Didn’t care for his electioneering—didn’t care for his ordinary nourishment. Loose ends. Didn’t mention it to Adeline, but she began to see it. Asked questions. Next day, went off. London. She asked what was up. Three days’ silence. Then—wrote to her.”

Fred intensified all this by raising his eyebrows, pulling down the corners of his mouth and nodding portentously. “Eh?” he said, and then to make things clearer: “Wrote a letter.”

“He didn’t write to her about Miss Waters?”

“Don’t know what he wrote about. Don’t suppose he mentioned her name, but I dare say he made it clear enough. All I know is that everything in the house felt like elastic pulled tighter than it ought to be for two whole days—everybody in asort of complicated twist—and then there was a snap. All that time Addy was writing letters to him and tearing ’em up, and no one could quite make it out. Everyone looked blue except the Sea Lady. She kept her own lovely pink. And at the end of that time the mater began asking things, Adeline chucked writing, gave the mater half a hint, mater took it all in in an instant and the thing burst.”

“Miss Glendower didn’t——?”

“No, the mater did. Put it pretty straight too—as the mater can.…Shedidn’t deny it. Said she couldn’t help herself, and that he was as much hers as Adeline’s. Iheardthat,” said Fred shamelessly. “Pretty thick, eh?—considering he’s engaged. And the mater gave it her pretty straight. Said, ‘I’ve been very much deceived in you, Miss Waters—very much indeed.’ I heard her.…”

“And then?”

“Asked her to go. Said she’d requited us ill for taking her up when nobody but a fisherman would have looked at her.”

“She said that?”

“Well, words to that effect.”

“And Miss Waters went?”

“In a first-class cab, maid and boxes in another, all complete. Perfect lady.… Couldn’t have believed if I hadn’t seen it—the tail, I mean.”

“And Miss Glendower?”

“Addy? Oh, she’s been going it. Comes downstairs and does the pale-faced heroine and goes upstairs and does the broken-hearted part.Iknow. It’s all very well. You never had sisters. You know——”

Fred held his pipe elaborately out of the way and protruded his face to a confidential nearness.

“I believe they half like it,” said Fred,in a confidential half whisper. “Such a go, you know. Mabel pretty near as bad. And the girls. All making the very most they can of it. Me! I think Chatteris was the only man alive to hear ’em.Icouldn’t get up emotion as they do, if my feet were being flayed. Cheerful home, eh? For holidays.”

“Where’s—the principal gentleman?” asked Melville a little grimly. “In London?”

“Unprincipled gentleman, I call him,” said Fred. “He’s stopping down here at the Métropole. Stuck.”

“Down here? Stuck?”

“Rather. Stuck and set about.”

My cousin tried for sidelights. “What’s his attitude?” he asked.

“Slump,” said Fred with intensity.

“This little blow-off has rather astonished him,” he explained. “When he wrote to say that the election didn’t interesthim for a bit, but he hoped to pull around——”

“You said you didn’t know what he wrote.”

“I do that much,” said Fred. “He no more thought they’d have spotted that it meant Miss Waters than a baby. But women are so thundering sharp, you know. They’re born spotters. How it’ll all end——”

“But why has he come to the Métropole?”

“Middle of the stage, I suppose,” said Fred.

“What’s his attitude?”

“Says he’s going to see Adeline and explain everything—and doesn’t do it.… Puts it off. And Adeline, as far as I can gather, says that if he doesn’t come down soon, she’s hanged if she’ll see him, much as her heart may be broken, and all that, if she doesn’t. You know.”

“Naturally,” said Melville, rather inconsecutively. “And he doesn’t?”

“Doesn’t stir.”

“Does he see—the other lady?”

“We don’t know. We can’t watch him. But if he does he’s clever——”

“Why?”

“There’s about a hundred blessed relatives of his in the place—came like crows for a corpse. I never saw such a lot. Talk about a man of good old family—it’s decaying! I never saw such a high old family in my life. Aunts they are chiefly.”

“Aunts?”

“Aunts. Say, they’ve rallied round him. How they got hold of it I don’t know. Like vultures. Unless the mater— But they’re here. They’re all at him—using their influence with him, threatening to cut off legacies and all that. There’s one old girl at Bate’s, Lady Poynting Mallow—least bit horsey, but about as all right asany of ’em—who’s been down here twice. Seems a trifle disappointed in Adeline. And there’s two aunts at Wampach’s—you know the sort that stop at Wampach’s—regular hothouse flowers—a watering-potful of real icy cold water would kill both of ’em. And there’s one come over from the Continent, short hair, short skirts—regular terror—she’s at the Pavilion. They’re all chasing round saying, ‘Where is this woman-fish sort of thing? Let me peek!’”

“Does that constitute the hundred relatives?”

“Practically. The Wampachers are sending for a Bishop who used to be his schoolmaster——”

“No stone unturned, eh?”

“None.”

“And has he found out yet——”

“That she’s a mermaid? I don’t believe he has. The pater went up to tellhim. Of course, he was a bit out of breath and embarrassed. And Chatteris cut him down. ‘At least let me hear nothing against her,’ he said. And the pater took that and came away. Good old pater. Eh?”

“And the aunts?”

“They’re taking it in. Mainly they grasp the fact that he’s going to jilt Adeline, just as he jilted the American girl. The mermaid side they seem to boggle at. Old people like that don’t take to a new idea all at once. The Wampach ones are shocked—but curious. They don’t believe for a moment she really is a mermaid, but they want to know all about it. And the one down at the Pavilion simply said, ‘Bosh! How can she breathe under water? Tell me that, Mrs. Bunting. She’s some sort of person you have picked up, I don’t know how, but mermaid shecannotbe.’ They’d be all tremendouslydown on the mater, I think, for picking her up, if it wasn’t that they can’t do without her help to bring Addy round again. Pretty mess all round, eh?”

“I suppose the aunts will tell him?”

“What?”

“About the tail.”

“I suppose they will.”

“And what then?”

“Heaven knows! Just as likely they won’t.”

My cousin meditated on the veranda tiles for a space.

“It amuses me,” said Fred Bunting.

“Look here,” said my cousin Melville, “what am I supposed to do? Why have I been asked to come?”

“I don’t know. Stir it up a bit, I expect. Everybody do a bit—like the Christmas pudding.”

“But—” said Melville.

“I’ve been bathing,” said Fred. “Nobodyasked me to take a hand and I didn’t. It won’t be a good pudding without me, but there you are! There’s only one thing I can see to do——”

“It might be the right thing. What is it?”

“Punch Chatteris’s head.”

“I don’t see how that would help matters.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t help matters,” said Fred, adding with an air of conclusiveness, “There it is!” Then adjusting the folds of his blanket to a greater dignity, and replacing his long extinct large pipe between his teeth, he went on his way. The tail of his blanket followed him reluctantly through the door. His bare feet padded across the hall and became inaudible on the carpet of the stairs.

Adjusting the folds of his blanket to a greater dignity.Adjusting the folds of his blanket to a greater dignity.

“Fred!” said Melville, going doorward with a sudden afterthought for fuller particulars.

But Fred had gone.

Instead, Mrs. Bunting appeared.

She appeared with traces of recent emotion. “I telegraphed,” she said. “We are in dreadful trouble.”

“Miss Waters, I gather——”

“She’s gone.”

She went towards the bell and stopped. “They’ll get luncheon as usual,” she said. “You will be wanting your luncheon.”

She came towards him with rising hands. “You cannotimagine,” she said. “That poor child!”

“You must tell me,” said Melville.

“I simply do not know what to do. I don’t know where to turn.” She came nearer to him. She protested. “All that I did, Mr. Melville, I did for the best. I saw there was trouble. I could see that Ihad been deceived, and I stood it as long as I could. Ihadto speak at last.”

My cousin by leading questions and interrogative silences developed her story a little.

“And every one,” she said, “blames me. Every one.”

“Everybody blames everybody who does anything, in affairs of this sort,” said Melville. “You mustn’t mind that.”

“I’ll try not to,” she said bravely. “Youknow, Mr. Melville——”

He laid his hand on her shoulder for a moment. “Yes,” he said very impressively, and I think Mrs. Bunting felt better.

“We all look to you,” she said. “I don’t know what I should do without you.”

“That’s it,” said Melville. “How do things stand? What am I to do?”

“Go to him,” said Mrs. Bunting, “and put it all right.”

“But suppose—” began Melville doubtfully.

“Go to her. Make her see what it would mean for him and all of us.”

He tried to get more definite instructions. “Don’t make difficulties,” implored Mrs. Bunting. “Think of that poor girl upstairs. Think of us all.”

“Exactly,” said Melville, thinking of Chatteris and staring despondently out of the window.

“Bunting, I gather——”

“It is you or no one,” said Mrs. Bunting, sailing over his unspoken words. “Fred is too young, and Randolph—! He’s not diplomatic. He—he hectors.”

“Does he?” exclaimed Melville.

“You should see him abroad. Often—many times I have had to interfere.… No, it is you. You know Harry so well. He trusts you. You can say things to him—no one else could say.”

“That reminds me. Doesheknow——”

“We don’t know. How can we know? We know he is infatuated, that is all. He is up there in Folkestone, and she is in Folkestone, and they may be meeting——”

My cousin sought counsel with himself.

“Say you will go?” said Mrs. Bunting, with a hand upon his arm.

“I’ll go,” said Melville, “but I don’t see what I can do!”

And Mrs. Bunting clasped his hand in both of her own plump shapely hands and said she knew all along that he would, and that for coming down so promptly to her telegram she would be grateful to him so long as she had a breath to draw, and then she added, as if it were part of the same remark, that he must want his luncheon.

He accepted the luncheon proposition in an incidental manner and reverted to the question in hand.

“Do you know what his attitude——”

“He has written only to Addy.”

“It isn’t as if he had brought about this crisis?”

“It was Addy. He went away and something in his manner made her write and ask him the reason why. So soon as she had his letter saying he wanted to rest from politics for a little, that somehow he didn’t seem to find the interest in life he thought it deserved, she divined everything——”

“Everything? Yes, but just whatiseverything?”

“Thatshehad led him on.”

“Miss Waters?”

“Yes.”

My cousin reflected. So that was what they considered to be everything! “I wish I knew just where he stood,” he said at last, and followed Mrs. Bunting luncheonward. In the course of that meal,which wastête-à-tête, it became almost unsatisfactorily evident what a great relief Melville’s consent to interview Chatteris was to Mrs. Bunting. Indeed, she seemed to consider herself relieved from the greater portion of her responsibility in the matter, since Melville was bearing her burden. She sketched out her defence against the accusations that had no doubt been levelled at her, explicitly and implicitly.

“How wasIto know?” she asked, and she told over again the story of that memorable landing, but with new, extenuating details. It was Adeline herself who had cried first, “She must be saved!” Mrs. Bunting made a special point of that. “And what else was there for me to do?” she asked.

And as she talked, the problem before my cousin assumed graver and yet graver proportions. He perceived more andmore clearly the complexity of the situation with which he was entrusted. In the first place it was not at all clear that Miss Glendower was willing to receive back her lover except upon terms, and the Sea Lady, he was quite sure, did not mean to release him from any grip she had upon him. They were preparing to treat an elemental struggle as if it were an individual case. It grew more and more evident to him how entirely Mrs. Bunting overlooked the essentially abnormal nature of the Sea Lady, how absolutely she regarded the business as a mere every-day vacillation, a commonplace outbreak of that jilting spirit which dwells, covered deep, perhaps, but never entirely eradicated, in the heart of man; and how confidently she expected him, with a little tactful remonstrance and pressure, to restore thestatus quo ante.

As for Chatteris!—Melville shook hishead at the cheese, and answered Mrs. Bunting abstractedly.

“She wants to speak to you,” said Mrs. Bunting, and Melville with a certain trepidation went upstairs. He went up to the big landing with the seats, to save Adeline the trouble of coming down. She appeared dressed in a black and violet tea gown with much lace, and her dark hair was done with a simple carefulness that suited it. She was pale, and her eyes showed traces of tears, but she had a certain dignity that differed from her usual bearing in being quite unconscious.

She gave him a limp hand and spoke in an exhausted voice.

“You know—all?” she asked.

“All the outline, anyhow.”

“Why has he done this to me?”

Melville looked profoundly sympathetic through a pause.

“I feel,” she said, “that it isn’t coarseness.”

“Certainly not,” said Melville.

“It is some mystery of the imagination that I cannot understand. I should have thought—his career at any rate—would have appealed.…” She shook her head and regarded a pot of ferns fixedly for a space.

“He has written to you?” asked Melville.

“Three times,” she said, looking up.

Melville hesitated to ask the extent of that correspondence, but she left no need for that.

“I had to ask him,” she said. “He kept it all from me, and I had to force it from him before he would tell.”

“Tell!” said Melville, “what?”

“What he felt for her and what he felt for me.”

“But did he——?”

“He has made it clearer. But still even now. No, I don’t understand.”

She turned slowly and watched Melville’s face as she spoke: “You know, Mr. Melville, that this has been an enormous shock to me. I suppose I never really knew him. I suppose I—idealised him. I thought he cared for—our work at any rate.… Hedidcare for our work. He believed in it. Surely he believed in it.”

“He does,” said Melville.

“And then— But how can he?”

“He is—he is a man with rather a strong imagination.”

“Or a weak will?”

“Relatively—yes.”

“It is so strange,” she sighed. “It is so inconsistent. It is like a child catchingat a new toy. Do you know, Mr. Melville”—she hesitated—“all this has made me feel old. I feel very much older, very much wiser than he is. I cannot help it. I am afraid it is for all women … to feel that sometimes.”

She reflected profoundly. “Forallwomen— The child, man! I see now just what Sarah Grand meant by that.”

She smiled a wan smile. “I feel just as if he had been a naughty child. And I—I worshipped him, Mr. Melville,” she said, and her voice quivered.

My cousin coughed and turned about to stare hard out of the window. He was, he perceived, much more shockingly inadequate even than he had expected to be.

“If I thought she could make him happy!” she said presently, leaving a hiatus of generous self-sacrifice.

“The case is—complicated,” said Melville.

Her voice went on, clear and a little high, resigned, impenetrably assured.

“But she would not. All his better side, all his serious side— She would miss it and ruin it all.”

“Does he—” began Melville and repented of the temerity of his question.

“Yes?” she said.

“Does he—ask to be released?”

“No.… He wants to come back to me.”

“And you——”

“He doesn’t come.”

“But do you—do you want him back?”

“How can I say, Mr. Melville? He does not say certainly even that he wants to come back.”

My cousin Melville looked perplexed. He lived on the superficies of emotion, and these complexities in matters he hadalways assumed were simple, put him out.

“There are times,” she said, “when it seems to me that my love for him is altogether dead.… Think of the disillusionment—the shock—the discovery of such weakness.”

My cousin lifted his eyebrows and shook his head in agreement.

“His feet—to find his feet were of clay!”

There came a pause.

“It seems as if I have never loved him. And then—and then I think of all the things that still might be.”

Her voice made him look up, and he saw that her mouth was set hard and tears were running down her cheeks.

It occurred to my cousin, he says, that he would touch her hand in a sympathetic manner, and then it occurred to him that he wouldn’t. Her words rangin his thoughts for a space, and then he said somewhat tardily, “He may still be all those things.”

“I suppose he may,” she said slowly and without colour. The weeping moment had passed.

“What is she?” she changed abruptly. “What is this being, who has come between him and all the realities of life? What is there about her—? And why should I have to compete with her, because he—because he doesn’t know his own mind?”

“For a man,” said Melville, “to know his own mind is—to have exhausted one of the chief interests in life. After that—! A cultivated extinct volcano—if ever it was a volcano.”

He reflected egotistically for a space. Then with a secret start he came back to consider her.

“What is there,” she said, with thatdeliberate attempt at clearness which was one of her antipathetic qualities for Melville—“what is there that she has, that she offers, thatI——?”

Melville winced at this deliberate proposal of appalling comparisons. All the catlike quality in his soul came to his aid. He began to edge away, and walk obliquely and generally to shirk the issue. “My dear Miss Glendower,” he said, and tried to make that seem an adequate reply.

“Whatisthe difference?” she insisted.

“There are impalpable things,” waived Melville. “They are above reason and beyond describing.”

“But you,” she urged, “you take an attitude, you must have an impression. Why don’t you— Don’t you see, Mr. Melville, this is very”—her voice caught for a moment—“very vital for me. It isn’t kind of you, if you have impressions— I’m sorry, Mr. Melville, if Iseem to be trying to get too much from you. I—I want to know.”

It came into Melville’s head for a moment that this girl had something in her, perhaps, that was just a little beyond his former judgments.

“I must admit, I have a sort of impression,” he said.

“You are a man; you know him; you know all sorts of things—all sorts of ways of looking at things, I don’t know. If you could go so far—as to be frank.”

“Well,” said Melville and stopped.

She hung over him as it were, as a tense silence.

“Thereisa difference,” he admitted, and still went unhelped.

“How can I put it? I think in certain ways you contrast with her, in a way that makes things easier for her. He has—I know the thing sounds like cant, only you know,hedoesn’t plead it in defence—hehas a temperament, to which she sometimes appeals more than you do.”

“Yes, I know, but how?”

“Well——”

“Tell me.”

“You are austere. You are restrained. Life—for a man like Chatteris—is schooling. He has something—something perhaps more worth having than most of us have—but I think at times—it makes life harder for him than it is for a lot of us. Life comes at him, with limitations and regulations. He knows his duty well enough. And you— You mustn’t mind what I say too much, Miss Glendower—I may be wrong.”

“Go on,” she said, “go on.”

“You are too much—the agent general of his duty.”

“But surely!—what else——?”

“I talked to him in London and then I thought he was quite in the wrong.Since that I’ve thought all sorts of things—even that you might be in the wrong. In certain minor things.”

“Don’t mind my vanity now,” she cried. “Tell me.”

“You see you have defined things—very clearly. You have made it clear to him what you expect him to be, and what you expect him to do. It is like having built a house in which he is to live. For him, to go to her is like going out of a house, a very fine and dignified house, I admit, into something larger, something adventurous and incalculable. She is—she has an air of being—natural. She is as lax and lawless as the sunset, she is as free and familiar as the wind. She doesn’t—if I may put it in this way—she doesn’t love and respect him when he is this, and disapprove of him highly when he is that; she takes him altogether. She has the quality of the open sky, of the flight ofbirds, of deep tangled places, she has the quality of the high sea. That I think is what she is for him, she is the Great Outside. You—you have the quality——”

He hesitated.

“Go on,” she insisted. “Let us get the meaning.”

“Of an edifice.… I don’t sympathise with him,” said Melville. “I am a tame cat and I should scratch and mew at the door directly I got outside of things. I don’t want to go out. The thought scares me. But he is different.”

“Yes,” she said, “he is different.”

For a time it seemed that Melville’s interpretation had hold of her. She stood thoughtful. Slowly other aspects of the thing came into his mind.

“Of course,” she said, thinking as she looked at him. “Yes. Yes. That is the impression. That is the quality. But in reality— There are other things inthe world beside effects and impressions. After all, that is—an analogy. It is pleasant to go out of houses and dwellings into the open air, but most of us, nearly all of us must live in houses.”

“Decidedly,” said Melville.

“He cannot— What can he do with her? How can he live with her? What life could they have in common?”

“It’s a case of attraction,” said Melville, “and not of plans.”

“After all,” she said, “he must come back—if I let him come back. He may spoil everything now; he may lose his election and be forced to start again, lower and less hopefully; he may tear his heart to pieces——”

She stopped at a sob.

“Miss Glendower,” said Melville abruptly.

“I don’t think you quite understand.”

“Understand what?”

“You think he cannot marry this—this being who has come among us?”

“How could he?”

“No—he couldn’t. You think his imagination has wandered away from you—to something impossible. That generally, in an aimless way, he has cut himself up for nothing, and made an inordinate fool of himself, and that it’s simply a business of putting everything back into place again.”

He paused and she said nothing. But her face was attentive. “What you do not understand,” he went on, “what no one seems to understand, is that she comes——”

“Out of the sea.”

“Out of some other world. She comes, whispering that this life is a phantom life, unreal, flimsy, limited, casting upon everything a spell of disillusionment——”

“So thathe——”

“Yes, and then she whispers, ‘There are better dreams!’”

The girl regarded him in frank perplexity.

“She hints of these vague better dreams, she whispers of a way——”

“Whatway?”

“I do not know what way. But it is something—something that tears at the very fabric of this daily life.”

“You mean——?”

“She is a mermaid, she is a thing of dreams and desires, a siren, a whisper and a seduction. She will lure him with her——”

He stopped.

“Where?” she whispered.

“Into the deeps.”

“The deeps?”

They hung upon a long pause. Melville sought vagueness with infinite solicitude,and could not find it. He blurted out at last: “There can be but one way out of this dream we are all dreaming, you know.”

“And that way?”

“That way—” began Melville and dared not say it.

“You mean,” she said, with a pale face, half awakened to a new thought, “the way is——?”

Melville shirked the word. He met her eyes and nodded weakly.

“But how—?” she asked.

“At any rate”—he said hastily, seeking some palliative phrase—“at any rate, if she gets him, this little world of yours— There will be no coming back for him, you know.”

“No coming back?” she said.

“No coming back,” said Melville.

“But are you sure?” she doubted.

“Sure?”

“That it is so?”

“That desire is desire, and the deep the deep—yes.”

“I never thought—” she began and stopped.

“Mr. Melville,” she said, “you know I don’t understand. I thought—I scarcely know what I thought. I thought he was trivial and foolish to let his thoughts go wandering. I agreed—I see your point—as to the difference in our effect upon him. But this—this suggestion that for him she may be something determining and final— After all, she——”

“She is nothing,” he said. “She is the hand that takes hold of him, the shape that stands for things unseen.”

“What things unseen?”

My cousin shrugged his shoulders. “Something we never find in life,” he said. “Something we are always seeking.”

“But what?” she asked.

Melville made no reply. She scrutinised his face for a time, and then looked out at the sunlight again.

“Do you want him back?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want him back?”

“I feel as if I had never wanted him before.”

“And now?”

“Yes.… But—if he will not come back?”

“He will not come back,” said Melville, “for the work.”

“I know.”

“He will not come back for his self-respect—or any of those things.”

“No.”

“Those things, you know, are only fainter dreams. All the palace you have made for him is a dream. But——”

“Yes?”

“He might come back—” he said, andlooked at her and stopped. He tells me he had some vague intention of startling her, rousing her, wounding her to some display of romantic force, some insurgence of passion, that might yet win Chatteris back, and then in that moment, and like a blow, it came to him how foolish such a fancy had been. There she stood impenetrably herself, limitedly intelligent, well-meaning, imitative, and powerless. Her pose, her face, suggested nothing but a clear and reasonable objection to all that had come to her, a critical antagonism, a steady opposition. And then, amazingly, she changed. She looked up, and suddenly held out both her hands, and there was something in her eyes that he had never seen before.

Melville took her hands mechanically, and for a second or so they stood looking with a sort of discovery into each other’s eyes.

“Tell him,” she said, with an astounding perfection of simplicity, “to come back to me. There can be no other thing than what I am. Tell him to come back to me!”

“And——?”

“Tell himthat.”

“Forgiveness?”

“No! Tell him I want him. If he will not come for that he will not come at all. If he will not come back for that”—she halted for a moment—“I do not want him. No! I do not want him. He is not mine and he may go.”

His passive hold of her hands became a pressure. Then they dropped apart again.

“You are very good to help us,” she said as he turned to go.

He looked at her. “You are very good to help me,” she said, and then: “Tell him whatever you like if only hewill come back to me!… No! Tell him what I have said.” He saw she had something more to say, and stopped. “You know, Mr. Melville, all this is like a book newly opened to me. Are you sure——?”

“Sure?”

“Sure of what you say—sure of what she is to him—sure that if he goes on he will—” She stopped.

He nodded.

“It means—” she said and stopped again.

“No adventure, no incident, but a going out from all that this life has to offer.”

“You mean,” she insisted, “you mean——?”

“Death,” said Melville starkly, and for a space both stood without a word.

She winced, and remained looking into his eyes. Then she spoke again.

“Mr. Melville, tell him to come back to me.”

“And——?”

“Tell him to come back to me, or”—a sudden note of passion rang in her voice—“if I have no hold upon him, let him go his way.”

“But—” said Melville.

“I know,” she cried, with her face set, “I know. But if he is mine he will come to me, and if he is not— Let him dream his dream.”

Her clenched hand tightened as she spoke. He saw in her face she would say no more, that she wanted urgently to leave it there. He turned again towards the staircase. He glanced at her and went down.

As he looked up from the bend of the stairs she was still standing in the light.

He was moved to proclaim himself insome manner her adherent, but he could think of nothing better than: “Whatever I can do I will.” And so, after a curious pause, he departed, rather stumblingly, from her sight.

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