Part 8

"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 she _cannot_ be.' They'd be all tremendously down 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. "Nobody asked 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.

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

But Fred had gone.

Instead, Mrs. Bunting appeared.

II

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 can _not_ imagine," 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 I had been deceived, and I stood it as long as I could. I _had_ to 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. "_You_ know, 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. Does _he_ know----"

"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 what _is_ everything?"

"That _she_ had 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 was _tete-a-tete_, 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 was _I_ to 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 and more 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 the _status quo ante_.

As for Chatteris!--Melville shook his head at the cheese, and answered Mrs. Bunting abstractedly.

III

"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.... He _did_ care 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 catching at 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. "For _all_ women-- 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 had always 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 rang in 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 that deliberate attempt at clearness which was one of her antipathetic qualities for Melville--"what is there that she has, that she offers, that _I_----?"

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.

"What _is_ the 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 I seem 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.

"There _is_ a 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, _he_ doesn't plead it in defence--he has 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 of birds, 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 in the 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 that _he_----"

"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----"

"_What_ way?"

"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, and looked 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 him _that_."

"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 he will 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 in some 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.

IV

After this interview it was right and proper that Melville should have gone at once to Chatteris, but the course of events in the world does occasionally display a lamentable disregard for what is right and proper. Points of view were destined to crowd upon him that day--for the most part entirely unsympathetic points of view. He found Mrs. Bunting in the company of a boldly trimmed bonnet in the hall, waiting, it became clear, to intercept him.