Part 5

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 of _Marcella_. 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 on heroines 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 imaginary _Marcella_. 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 resolution with 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.

_Marcella_ we 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 woman can 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 not _Marcella_, 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 in those 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 as _Marcella_ seems 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 his _debut_, 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 gone well 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, who remained 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, "There _is_ to 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 in the 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 the Sea 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.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

SYMPTOMATIC

I

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 under the 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.

My cousin slackened his pace a little and came up and joined them. The conversation hung at his approach. Chatteris sat back a little, but there seemed no resentment and he sought a topic for the three to discuss in the books Melville carried.

"Books?" he said.

"For Miss Glendower," said Melville.

"Oh!" said Chatteris.

"What are they about?" asked the Sea Lady.

"Land tenure," said Melville.

"That's hardly my subject," said the Sea Lady, and Chatteris joined in her smile as if he saw a jest.

There was a little pause.

"You are contesting Hythe?" said Melville.

"Fate points that way," said Chatteris.

"They threaten a dissolution for September."

"It will come in a month," said Chatteris, with the inimitable tone of one who knows.

"In that case we shall soon be busy."

"And _I_ may canvass," said the Sea Lady. "I never have----"

"Miss Waters," explained Chatteris, "has been telling me she means to help us." He met Melville's eye frankly.

"It's rough work, Miss Waters," said Melville.

"I don't mind that. It's fun. And I want to help. I really do want to help--Mr. Chatteris."

"You know, that's encouraging."

"I could go around with you in my bath chair?"

"It would be a picnic," said Chatteris.

"I mean to help anyhow," said the Sea Lady.

"You know the case for the plaintiff?" asked Melville.

She looked at him.

"You've got your arguments?"

"I shall ask them to vote for Mr. Chatteris, and afterwards when I see them I shall remember them and smile and wave my hand. What else is there?"

"Nothing," said Chatteris, and shut the lid on Melville. "I wish I had an argument as good."

"What sort of people are they here?" asked Melville. "Isn't there a smuggling interest to conciliate?"

"I haven't asked that," said Chatteris. "Smuggling is over and past, you know. Forty years ago. It always has been forty years ago. They trotted out the last of the smugglers,--interesting old man, full of reminiscences,--when there was a count of the Saxon Shore. He remembered smuggling--forty years ago. Really, I doubt if there ever was any smuggling. The existing coast guard is a sacrifice to a vain superstition."

"Why!" cried the Sea Lady. "Only about five weeks ago I saw quite near here----"

She stopped abruptly and caught Melville's eye. He grasped her difficulty.

"In a paper?" he suggested.

"Yes, in a paper," she said, seizing the rope he threw her.

"Well?" asked Chatteris.

"There is smuggling still," said the Sea Lady, with an air of some one who decides not to tell an anecdote that is suddenly found to be half forgotten.

"There's no doubt it happens," said Chatteris, missing it all. "But it doesn't appear in the electioneering. I certainly sha'n't agitate for a faster revenue cutter. However things may be in that respect, I take the line that they are very well as they are. That's my line, of course." And he looked out to sea. The eyes of Melville and the Sea Lady had an intimate moment.

"There, you know, is just a specimen of the sort of thing we do," said Chatteris. "Are you prepared to be as intricate as that?"

"Quite," said the Sea Lady.

My cousin was reminded of an anecdote.

The talk degenerated into anecdotes of canvassing, and ran shallow. My cousin was just gathering that Mrs. Bunting and Miss Bunting had been with the Sea Lady and had gone into the town to a shop, when they returned. Chatteris rose to greet them and explained--what had been by no means apparent before--that he was on his way to Adeline, and after a few further trivialities he and Melville went on together.

A brief silence fell between them.

"Who is that Miss Waters?" asked Chatteris.

"Friend of Mrs. Bunting," prevaricated Melville.

"So I gather.... She seems a very charming person."

"She is."

"She's interesting. Her illness seems to throw her up. It makes a passive thing of her, like a picture or something that's--imaginary. Imagined--anyhow. She sits there and smiles and responds. Her eyes--have something intimate. And yet----"

My cousin offered no assistance.

"Where did Mrs. Bunting find her."

My cousin had to gather himself together for a second or so.

"There's something," he said deliberately, "that Mrs. Bunting doesn't seem disposed----"

"What can it be?"

"It's bound to be all right," said Melville rather weakly.

"It's strange, too. Mrs. Bunting is usually so disposed----"

Melville left that to itself.

"That's what one feels," said Chatteris.

"What?"

"Mystery."

My cousin shares with me a profound detestation of that high mystic method of treating women. He likes women to be finite--and nice. In fact, he likes everything to be finite--and nice. So he merely grunted.

But Chatteris was not to be stopped by that. He passed to a critical note. "No doubt it's all illusion. All women are impressionists, a patch, a light. You get an effect. And that is all you are meant to get, I suppose. She gets an effect. But how--that's the mystery. It's not merely beauty. There's plenty of beauty in the world. But not of these effects. The eyes, I fancy."

He dwelt on that for a moment.

"There's really nothing in eyes, you know, Chatteris," said my cousin Melville, borrowing an alien argument and a tone of analytical cynicism from me. "Have you ever looked at eyes through a hole in a sheet?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Chatteris. "I don't mean the mere physical eye.... Perhaps it's the look of health--and the bath chair. A bold discord. You don't know what's the matter, Melville?"

"How?"

"I gather from Bunting it's a disablement--not a deformity."

"He ought to know."

"I'm not so sure of that. You don't happen to know the nature of her disablement?"

"I can't tell at all," said Melville in a speculative tone. It struck him he was getting to prevaricate better.

The subject seemed exhausted. They spoke of a common friend whom the sight of the Metropole suggested. Then they did not talk at all for a time, until the stir and interest of the band stand was passed. Then Chatteris threw out a thought.

"Complex business--feminine motives," he remarked.

"How?"

"This canvassing. _She_ can't be interested in philanthropic Liberalism."

"There's a difference in the type. And besides, it's a personal matter."

"Not necessarily, is it? Surely there's not such an intellectual gap between the sexes! If _you_ can get interested----"

"Oh, I know."

"Besides, it's not a question of principles. It's the fun of electioneering."

"Fun!"

"There's no knowing what won't interest the feminine mind," said Melville, and added, "or what will."

Chatteris did not answer.

"It's the district visiting instinct, I suppose," said Melville. "They all have it. It's the canvassing. All women like to go into houses that don't belong to them."

"Very likely," said Chatteris shortly, and failing a reply from Melville, he gave way to secret meditations, it would seem still of a fairly agreeable sort.

The twelve o'clock gun thudded from Shornecliffe Camp.

"By Jove!" said Chatteris, and quickened his steps.

* * * * *

They found Adeline busy amidst her papers. As they entered she pointed reproachfully, yet with the protrusion of a certain Marcella-like undertone of sweetness, at the clock. The apologies of Chatteris were effusive and winning, and involved no mention of the Sea Lady on the Leas.

Melville delivered his books and left them already wading deeply into the details of the district organisation that the local Liberal organiser had submitted.

II

A little while after the return of Chatteris, my cousin Melville and the Sea Lady were under the ilex at the end of the sea garden and--disregarding Parker (as every one was accustomed to do), who was in a garden chair doing some afternoon work at a proper distance--there was nobody with them at all. Fred and the girls were out cycling--Fred had gone with them at the Sea Lady's request--and Miss Glendower and Mrs. Bunting were at Hythe calling diplomatically on some rather horrid local people who might be serviceable to Harry in his electioneering.

Mr. Bunting was out fishing. He was not fond of fishing, but he was in many respects an exceptionally resolute little man, and he had taken to fishing every day in the afternoon after luncheon in order to break himself of what Mrs. Bunting called his "ridiculous habit" of getting sea-sick whenever he went out in a boat. He said that if fishing from a boat with pieces of mussels for bait after luncheon would not break the habit nothing would, and certainly it seemed at times as if it were going to break everything that was in him. But the habit escaped. This, however, is a digression.

These two, I say, were sitting in the ample shade under the evergreen oak, and Melville, I imagine, was in those fine faintly patterned flannels that in the year 1899 combined correctness with ease. He was no doubt looking at the shaded face of the Sea Lady, framed in a frame of sunlit yellow-green lawn and black-green ilex leaves--at least so my impulse for verisimilitude conceives it--and she at first was pensive and downcast that afternoon and afterwards she was interested and looked into his eyes. Either she must have suggested that he might smoke or else he asked. Anyhow, his cigarettes were produced. She looked at them with an arrested gesture, and he hung for a moment, doubtful, on her gesture.

"I suppose _you_--" he said.

"I never learned."

He glanced at Parker and then met the Sea Lady's regard.

"It's one of the things I came for," she said.

He took the only course.

She accepted a cigarette and examined it thoughtfully. "Down there," she said, "it's just one of the things-- You will understand we get nothing but saturated tobacco. Some of the mermen-- There's something they have picked up from the sailors. Quids, I think they call it. But that's too horrid for words!"

She dismissed the unpleasant topic by a movement, and lapsed into thought.

My cousin clicked his match-box.

She had a momentary doubt and glanced towards the house. "Mrs. Bunting?" she asked. Several times, I understand, she asked the same thing.

"She wouldn't mind--" said Melville, and stopped.

"She won't think it improper," he amplified, "if nobody else thinks it improper."

"There's nobody else," said the Sea Lady, glancing at Parker, and my cousin lit the match.

My cousin has an indirect habit of mind. With all general and all personal things his desperation to get at them obliquely amounts almost to a passion; he could no more go straight to a crisis than a cat could to a stranger. He came off at a tangent now as he was sitting forward and scrutinising her first very creditable efforts to draw. "I just wonder," he said, "exactly what it was you _did_ come for."

She smiled at him over a little jet of smoke. "Why, this," she said.

"And hairdressing?"

"And dressing."

She smiled again after a momentary hesitation. "And all this sort of thing," she said, as if she felt she had answered him perhaps a little below his deserts. Her gesture indicated the house and the lawn and--my cousin Melville wondered just exactly how much else.

"Am I doing it right?" asked the Sea Lady.

"Beautifully," said my cousin with a faint sigh in his voice. "What do you think of it?"

"It was worth coming for," said the Sea Lady, smiling into his eyes.

"But did you really just come----?"

She filled in his gap. "To see what life was like on land here?... Isn't that enough?"

Melville's cigarette had failed to light. He regarded its blighted career pensively.

"Life," he said, "isn't all--this sort of thing."

"This sort of thing?"

"Sunlight. Cigarette smoking. Talk. Looking nice."

"But it's made up----"

"Not altogether."

"For example?"

"Oh, _you_ know."

"What?"

"You know," said Melville, and would not look at her.

"I decline to know," she said after a little pause.

"Besides--" he said.

"Yes?"