The Sea Lady Page 5

  CHAPTER THE FIFTH

  THE ABSENCE AND RETURN OF MR. HARRY CHATTERIS

  I

  These digressions about Parker and the journalists have certainly led meastray from the story a little. You will, however, understand that whilethe rising young journalist was still in pursuit of information, Hopeand Banghurst, and Parker merely a budding perfection, the carriage noteven thought of, things were already developing in that bright littleestablishment beneath the evergreen oaks on the Folkestone Riviera. Sosoon as the minds of the Buntings ceased to be altogether focused uponthis new and amazing social addition, they--of all people--had mostindisputably discovered, it became at first faintly and then veryclearly evident that their own simple pleasure in the possession of aguest so beautiful as Miss Waters, so solidly wealthy and--in amanner--so distinguished, was not entirely shared by the two youngladies who were to have been their principal guests for the season.

  This little rift was perceptible the very first time Mrs. Bunting had anopportunity of talking over her new arrangements with Miss Glendower.

  "And is she really going to stay with you all the summer?" said Adeline.

  "Surely, dear, you don't mind?"

  "It takes me a little by surprise."

  "She's asked me, my dear----"

  "I'm thinking of Harry. If the general election comes on inSeptember--and every one seems to think it will-- You promised youwould let us inundate you with electioneering."

  "But do you think she----"

  "She will be dreadfully in the way."

  She added after an interval, "She stops my working."

  "But, my dear!"

  "She's out of harmony," said Adeline.

  Mrs. Bunting looked out of her window at the tamarisk and the sea. "I'msure I wouldn't do anything to hurt Harry's prospects. You know howenthusiastic we all are. Randolph would do anything. But are you sureshe will be in the way?"

  "What else can she be?"

  "She might help even."

  "Oh, help!"

  "She might canvass. She's very attractive, you know, dear."

  "Not to me," said Miss Glendower. "I don't trust her."

  "But to some people. And as Harry says, at election times every one whocan do anything must be let do it. Cut them--do anything afterwards,but at the time--you know he talked of it when Mr. Fison and he werehere. If you left electioneering only to the really nice people----"

  "It was Mr. Fison said that, not Harry. And besides, she wouldn't help."

  "I think you misjudge her there, dear. She has been asking----"

  "To help?"

  "Yes, and all about it," said Mrs. Bunting, with a transient pink. "Shekeeps asking questions about why we are having the election and what itis all about, and why Harry is a candidate and all that. She wants to gointo it quite deeply. _I_ can't answer half the things she asks."

  "And that's why she keeps up those long conversations with Mr. Melville,I suppose, and why Fred goes about neglecting Mabel----"

  "My dear!" said Mrs. Bunting.

  "I wouldn't have her canvassing with us for anything," said MissGlendower. "She'd spoil everything. She is frivolous and satirical. Shelooks at you with incredulous eyes, she seems to blight all one'searnestness.... I don't think you quite understand, dear Mrs. Bunting,what this election and my studies mean to me--and Harry. She comesacross all that--like a contradiction."

  "Surely, my dear! I've never heard her contradict."

  "Oh, she doesn't contradict. But she-- There is something about her-- Onefeels that things that are most important and vital are nothing to her.Don't you feel it? She comes from another world to us."

  Mrs. Bunting remained judicial. Adeline dropped to a lower key again. "Ithink," she said, "anyhow, that we're taking her very easily. How do weknow what she is? Down there, out there, she may be anything. She mayhave had excellent reasons for coming to land----"

  "My dear!" cried Mrs. Bunting. "Is that charity?"

  "How do they live?"

  "If she hadn't lived nicely I'm sure she couldn't behave so nicely."

  "Besides--coming here! She had no invitation----"

  "I've invited her now," said Mrs. Bunting gently.

  "You could hardly help yourself. I only hope your kindness----"

  "It's not a kindness," said Mrs. Bunting, "it's a duty. If she wereonly half as charming as she is. You seem to forget"--her voicedropped--"what it is she comes for."

  "That's what I want to know."

  "I'm sure in these days, with so much materialism about and suchwickedness everywhere, when everybody who has a soul seems trying tolose it, to find any one who hadn't a soul and who is trying to findone----"

  "But _is_ she trying to get one?"

  "Mr. Flange comes twice every week. He would come oftener, as you know,if there wasn't so much confirmation about."

  "And when he comes he sits and touches her hand if he can, and he talksin his lowest voice, and she sits and smiles--she almost laughs outrightat the things he says."

  "Because he has to win his way with her. Surely Mr. Flange may do whathe can to make religion attractive?"

  "I don't believe she believes she will get a soul. I don't believe shewants one a bit."

  She turned towards the door as if she had done.

  Mrs. Bunting's pink was now permanent. She had brought up a son and twodaughters, and besides she had brought down a husband to "My dear, howwas _I_ to know?" and when it was necessary to be firm--even withAdeline Glendower--she knew how to be firm just as well as anybody.

  "My dear," she began in her very firmest quiet manner, "I am positiveyou misjudge Miss Waters. Trivial she may be--on the surface at anyrate. Perhaps she laughs and makes fun a little. There are differentways of looking at things. But I am sure that at bottom she is just asserious, just as grave, as--any one. You judge her hastily. I am sure ifyou knew her better--as I do----"

  Mrs. Bunting left an eloquent pause.

  Miss Glendower had two little pink flushes in her cheeks. She turnedwith her hand on the door.

  "At any rate," she said, "I am sure that Harry will agree with me thatshe can be no help to our cause. We have our work to do and it issomething more than just vulgar electioneering. We have to develop andestablish ideas. Harry has views that are new and wide-reaching. We wantto put our whole strength into this work. Now especially. And herpresence----"

  She paused for a moment. "It is a digression. She divides things. Sheputs it all wrong. She has a way of concentrating attention aboutherself. She alters the values of things. She prevents my beingsingle-minded, she will prevent Harry being single-minded----"

  "I think, my dear, that you might trust my judgment a little," said Mrs.Bunting and paused.

  Miss Glendower opened her mouth and shut it again, without speaking. Itbecame evident finality was attained. Nothing remained to be said butthe regrettable.

  The door opened and closed smartly and Mrs. Bunting was alone.

  Within an hour they all met at the luncheon table and Adeline'sbehaviour to the Sea Lady and to Mrs. Bunting was as pleasant and alertas any highly earnest and intellectual young lady's could be. And allthat Mrs. Bunting said and did tended with what people call infinitetact--which really, you know, means a great deal more tact than iscomfortable--to develop and expose the more serious aspect of the SeaLady's mind. Mr. Bunting was unusually talkative and told them all abouta glorious project he had just heard of, to cut out the rather shrubbyand weedy front of the Leas and stick in something between a wine vaultand the Crystal Palace as a Winter Garden--which seemed to him a veryexcellent idea indeed.

  II

  It is time now to give some impression of the imminent Chatteris, whofor all his late appearance is really the chief human being in my cousinMelville's story. It happens that I met him with some frequency in myuniversity days and afterwards ever and again I came upon him. He wasrather a brilliant man at the university, smart without being vulgar andclever for all that. He was remarkably good-looking from
the very onsetof his manhood and without being in any way a showy spendthrift, wasquite magnificently extravagant. There was trouble in his last year,something hushed up about a girl or woman in London, but his family hadit all over with him, and his uncle, the Earl of Beechcroft, settledsome of his bills. Not all--for the family is commendably free fromsentimental excesses--but enough to make him comfortable again. Thefamily is not a rich one and it further abounds in an extraordinaryquantity of rather frowsy, loose-tongued aunts--I never knew a familyquite so rich in old aunts. But Chatteris was so good-looking,easy-mannered, and clever, that they seemed to agree almost withoutdiscussion to pull him through. They hunted about for something thatwould be really remunerative without being laborious or too commercial;and meanwhile--after the extraordinary craving of his aunt, LadyPoynting Mallow, to see him acting had been overcome by the unitedefforts of the more religious section of his aunts--Chatteris sethimself seriously to the higher journalism--that is to say, thejournalism that dines anywhere, gets political tips after dinner, and isalways acceptable--if only to avoid thirteen articles--in a half-crownreview. In addition, he wrote some very passable verse and edited JaneAusten for the only publisher who had not already reprinted the works ofthat classic lady.

  His verse, like himself, was shapely and handsome, and, like hisface, it suggested to the penetrating eye certain reservations andindecisions. There was just that touch of refinement that is weaknessin the public man. But as yet he was not a public man; he was known tobe energetic and his work was gathering attention as always capable andoccasionally brilliant. His aunts declared he was ripening, that anydefect in vigour he displayed was the incompleteness of the process,and decided he should go to America, where vigour and vigorousopportunities abound, and there, I gather, he came upon something likea failure. Something happened, indeed, quite a lot happened. He cameback unmarried--and _via_ the South Seas, Australasia and India. AndLady Poynting Mallow publicly told him he was a fool, when he got back.

  What happened in America, even if one does not consult contemporaryAmerican papers, is still very difficult to determine. There appear tohave been the daughter of a millionaire and something like an engagementin the story. According to the _New York Yell_, one of the smartest,crispest, and altogether most representative papers in America, therewas also the daughter of some one else, whom the _Yell_ interviewed, orprofessed to interview, under the heading:

  AN ARISTOCRATIC BRITISHER

  TRIFLES WITH

  A PURE AMERICAN GIRL

  INTERVIEW WITH THE VICTIM

  OF HIS

  HEARTLESS LEVITY

  But this some one else was, I am inclined to think in spite of herexcellently executed portrait, merely a brilliant stroke of modernjournalism, the _Yell_ having got wind of the sudden retreat ofChatteris and inventing a reason in preference to discovering one.Wensleydale tells me the true impetus to bolt was the merest trifle. Thedaughter of the millionaire, being a bright and spirited girl, hadundergone interviewing on the subject of her approaching marriage, onmarriage in general, on social questions of various sorts, and on therelations of the British and American peoples, and he seems to havefound the thing in his morning paper. It took him suddenly and he losthis head. And once he started, he seems to have lacked the power of mindto turn about and come back. The affair was a mess, the family paid somemore of his bills and shirked others, and Chatteris turned up in Londonagain after a time, with somewhat diminished glory and a series ofletters on Imperial Affairs, each headed with the quotation: "What dothey know of England who only England know?"

  Of course people of England learnt nothing of the real circumstances ofthe case, but it was fairly obvious that he had gone to America and comeback empty-handed.

  And that was how, in the course of some years, he came to AdelineGlendower, of whose special gifts as his helper and inspiration you havealready heard from Mrs. Bunting. When he became engaged to her, thefamily, which had long craved to forgive him--Lady Poynting Mallow as amatter of fact had done so--brightened wonderfully. And afterconsiderable obscure activities he declared himself a philanthropicLiberal with open spaces in his platform, and in a position, and readyas a beginning, to try the quality of the conservative South.

  He was away making certain decisive arrangements, in Paris andelsewhere, at the time of the landing of the Sea Lady. Before the matterwas finally settled it was necessary that something should be said to acertain great public character, and then he was to return and tellAdeline. And every one was expecting him daily, including, it is nowindisputable, the Sea Lady.

  III

  The meeting of Miss Glendower and her affianced lover on his return fromParis was one of those scenes in this story for which I have scarcely aninkling of the true details. He came to Folkestone and stopped at theMetropole, the Bunting house being full and the Metropole being thenearest hotel to Sandgate; and he walked down in the afternoon andasked for Adeline, which was pretty rather than correct. I gather thatthey met in the drawing-room, and as Chatteris closed the door behindhim, I imagine there was something in the nature of a caress.

  I must confess I envy the freedom of the novelist who can take youbehind such a locked door as this and give you all that such personssay and do. But with the strongest will in the world to blend thelittle scraps of fact I have into a continuous sequence of events, Ifalter at this occasion. After all, I never saw Adeline at all untilafter all these things were over, and what is she now? A rather tall, arather restless and active woman, very keen and obvious in publicaffairs--with something gone out of her. Melville once saw a gleam ofthat, but for the most part Melville never liked her; she had a widergrasp of things than he, and he was a little afraid of her; she was insome inexplicable way neither a pretty woman nor a "dear lady" nor a_grande dame_ nor totally insignificant, and a heretic therefore inMelville's scheme of things. He gives me small material for thatearlier Adeline. "She posed," he says; she was "political," and she wasalways reading Mrs. Humphry Ward.

  The last Melville regarded as the most heinous offence. It is not theleast of my cousin's weaknesses that he regards this great novelist asan extremely corrupting influence for intelligent girls. She makesthem good and serious in the wrong way, he says. Adeline, he asserts,was absolutely built on her. She was always attempting to be theincarnation of _Marcella_. It was he who had perverted Mrs. Bunting'smind to adopt this fancy. But I don't believe for a moment in thisidea of girls building themselves on heroines in fiction. These arematters of elective affinity, and unless some bullying critic orpreacher sends us astray, we take each to our own novelist as thesouls in the Swedenborgian system take to their hells. Adeline took tothe imaginary _Marcella_. There was, Melville says, the strongestlikeness in their mental atmosphere. They had the same defects, a biasfor superiority--to use his expressive phrase--the same dispositiontowards arrogant benevolence, that same obtuseness to little shades offeeling that leads people to speak habitually of the "Lower Classes,"and to think in the vein of that phrase. They certainly had the samevirtues, a conscious and conscientious integrity, a hard nobilitywithout one touch of magic, an industrious thoroughness. More than inanything else, Adeline delighted in her novelist's thoroughness, herfreedom from impressionism, the patient resolution with which shewent into the corners and swept under the mat of every incident. Andit 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 haveclung to him. There would have been a moment of high emotion in whichthoughts--of the highest class--mingled with the natural ambition of twopeople in the prime of life and power. Then she would have receded witha quick movement and listened with her beautiful hand pensive againsther cheek, while Chatteris began to sum up the forces against him--tospeculate on the action of this group and that. Something infinite
lytender and maternal would have spoken in her, pledging her to the utmosthelp that love and a woman can give. She would have produced inChatteris that exquisite mingled impression of grace, passion,self-yielding, which in all its infinite variations and repetitions madeup for him the constant poem of her beauty.

  But that is the dream and not the reality. So Adeline might have dreamtof behaving, but--she was not _Marcella_, and only wanting to be, andhe was not only not Maxwell but he had no intention of being Maxwellanyhow. If he had had an opportunity of becoming Maxwell he wouldprobably have rejected it with extreme incivility. So they met like twounheroic human beings, with shy and clumsy movements and, I suppose,fairly honest eyes. Something there was in the nature of a caress, Ibelieve, and then I incline to fancy she said "Well?" and I thinkhe must have answered, "It's all right." After that, and ratherallusively, with a backward jerk of the head at intervals as it weretowards the great personage, Chatteris must have told her particulars.He must have told her that he was going to contest Hythe and that thelittle difficulty with the Glasgow commission agent who wanted to runthe Radical ticket as a "Man of Kent" had been settled without injuryto the party (such as it is). Assuredly they talked politics, becausesoon after, when they came into the garden side by side to where Mrs.Bunting and the Sea Lady sat watching the girls play croquet, Adelinewas in full possession of all these facts. I fancy that for such acouple as they were, such intimation of success, such earnest topics,replaced, to a certain extent at any rate, the vain repetition ofvulgar 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 ahandsome couple?"

  But the Sea Lady made no reply, and leaned back, scrutinising theiradvance. Certainly they made a handsome pair. Coming out of the verandainto the blaze of the sun and across the trim lawn towards the shadow ofthe ilex trees, they were lit, as it were, with a more gloriouslimelight, and displayed like actors on a stage more spacious than thestage of any theatre. The figure of Chatteris must have come out talland fair and broad, a little sunburnt, and I gather even then a littlepreoccupied, as indeed he always seemed to be in those latter days. Andbeside him Adeline, glancing now up at him and now towards the audienceunder the trees, dark and a little flushed, rather tall--though not sotall as _Marcella_ seems to have been--and, you know, without anyinstructions from any novel-writer in the world, glad.

  Chatteris did not discover that there was any one but Buntings under thetree until he was close at hand. Then the abrupt discovery of thisstranger seems to have checked whatever he was prepared to say for his_debut_, and Adeline took the centre of the stage. Mrs. Bunting wasstanding up, and all the croquet players--except Mabel, who waswinning--converged on Chatteris with cries of welcome. Mabel remained inthe midst of what I understand is called a tea-party, loudly demandingthat they should see her "play it out." No doubt if everything had gonewell she would have given a most edifying exhibition of what croquet cansometimes be.

  Adeline swam forward to Mrs. Bunting and cried with a note of triumph inher voice: "It is all settled. Everything is settled. He has won themall 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 indeedwhat there was to find there then. For a moment they faced riddles, andthen the Sea Lady turned her eyes with a long deferred scrutiny to theman's face, which she probably saw now closely for the first time. Onewonders 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 meetingof their eyes. Just for a moment she held his regard, and then itshifted enquiringly to Mrs. Bunting.

  That lady intervened effusively with an "Oh! I forgot," and introducedthem. I think they went through that without another meeting of thefoils of their regard.

  "You back?" said Fred to Chatteris, touching his arm, and Chatterisconfirmed this happy guess.

  The Bunting girls seemed to welcome Adeline's enviable situation ratherthan Chatteris as an individual. And Mabel's voice could be heardapproaching. "Oughtn't they to see me play it out, Mr. Chatteris?"

  "Hullo, Harry, my boy!" cried Mr. Bunting, who was cultivating a bluffmanner. "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 ownproper 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 dramaticannouncement. 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 otheractors have forgotten their parts. Then every one woke up to this, as itwere, and they went off in a volley. "So it's really all settled," saidMrs. Bunting; and Betty Bunting said, "There _is_ to be an electionthen!" and Nettie said, "What fun!" Mr. Bunting remarked with a knowingair, "So you saw him then?" and Fred flung "Hooray!" into the tangle ofsounds.

  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 voiceand utter politics. "They are getting sense," he said. "They arelearning that a party must have men, men of birth and training. Moneyand the mob--they've tried to keep things going by playing to fads andclass jealousies. And the Irish. And they've had their lesson. How?Why,--we've stood aside. We've left 'em to faddists and fomenters--andthe Irish. And here they are! It's a revolution in the party. We've letit down. Now we must pick it up again."

  He made a gesture with his fat little hand, one of those fat pink littlehands that appear to have neither flesh nor bones inside them but onlysawdust or horse-hair. Mrs. Bunting leaned back in her chair and smiledat 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 greatissue?" she asked. "I don't quite understand."

  Mr. Bunting spread himself to explain to her. "This," he said to beginwith. Adeline listened with a mingling of interest and impatience,attempting ever and again to suppress him and to involve Chatteris by atactful interposition. But Chatteris appeared disinclined to beinvolved. He seemed indeed quite interested in Mr. Bunting's view of thecase.

  Presently the croquet quartette went back--at Mabel's suggestion--totheir game, and the others continued their political talk. It becamemore personal at last, dealing soon quite specifically with all thatChatteris 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 vastpurposes. "This election is merely the opening of a door," she said.When Chatteris made modest disavowals she smiled with a proud and happyconsciousness of what she meant to make of him.

  And Mrs. Bunting supplied footnotes to make it all clear to the SeaLady. "He's so modest," she said at one point, and Chatteris pretendednot to hear and went rather pink. Ever and again he attempted to deflectthe talk towards the Sea Lady and away from himself, but he washampered by his ignorance of her position.

  And the Sea Lady said scarcely anything but watched Chatteris andAdeline, and more particularly Chatteris in relation to Adeline.