Part 15 (2/2)

”We've got perhaps a little more serious than--” he said doubtfully, and then, ”What you have been saying--did you exactly mean----?”

The rustle of Mrs. Bunting's advance became audible, and Parker moved and coughed.

He was quite sure they had been ”more serious than----”

”Another time perhaps----”

Had all these things really been said, or was he under some fantastic hallucination?

He had a sudden thought. ”Where's your cigarette?” he asked.

But her cigarette had ended long ago.

”And what have you been talking about so long?” sang Mrs. Bunting, with an almost motherly hand on the back of Melville's chair.

”Oh!” said Melville, at a loss for once, and suddenly rising from his chair to face her, and then to the Sea Lady with an artificially easy smile, ”What _have_ we been talking about?”

”All sorts of things, I dare say,” said Mrs. Bunting, in what might almost be called an arch manner. And she honoured Melville with a special smile--one of those smiles that are morally almost winks.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The waiter retires amazed.]

My cousin caught all the archness full in the face, and for four seconds he stared at Mrs. Bunting in amazement. He wanted breath. Then they all laughed together, and Mrs. Bunting sat down pleasantly and remarked, quite audibly to herself, ”As if I couldn't guess.”

IV

I gather that after this talk Melville fell into an extraordinary net of doubting. In the first place, and what was most distressing, he doubted whether this conversation could possibly have happened at all, and if it had whether his memory had not played him some trick in modifying and intensifying the import of it all. My cousin occasionally dreams conversations of so sober and probable a sort as to mingle quite perplexingly with his real experiences. Was this one of these occasions?

He found himself taking up and scrutinising, as it were, first this remembered sentence and then that. Had she really said this thing and quite in this way? His memory of their conversation was never quite the same for two days together. Had she really and deliberately foreshadowed for Chatteris some obscure and mystical submergence?

What intensified and complicated his doubts most, was the Sea Lady's subsequent serene freedom from allusion to anything that might or might not have pa.s.sed. She behaved just as she had always behaved; neither an added intimacy nor that distance that follows indiscreet confidences appeared in her manner.

And amidst this crop of questions arose presently quite a new set of doubts, as if he were not already sufficiently equipped. The Sea Lady alleged she had come to the world that lives on land, for Chatteris.

And then----?

He had not hitherto looked ahead to see precisely what would happen to Chatteris, to Miss Glendower, to the Buntings or any one when, as seemed highly probable, Chatteris was ”got.” There were other dreams, there was another existence, an elsewhere--and Chatteris was to go there! So she said! But it came into Melville's mind with a quite disproportionate force and vividness that once, long ago, he had seen a picture of a man and a mermaid, rus.h.i.+ng downward through deep water.... Could it possibly be that sort of thing in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-nine?

Conceivably, if she had said these things, did she mean them, and if she meant them, and this definite campaign of capture was in hand, what was an orderly, sane-living, well-dressed bachelor of the world to do?

Look on--until things ended in a catastrophe?

One figures his face almost aged. He appears to have hovered about the house on the Sandgate Riviera to a scandalous extent, failing always to get a sufficiently long and intimate tete-a-tete with the Sea Lady to settle once for all his doubts as to what really had been said and what he had dreamed or fancied in their talk. Never had he been so exceedingly disturbed as he was by the twist this talk had taken. Never had his habitual pose of humorous acquiescence in life been quite so difficult to keep up. He became positively absent-minded. ”You know if it's like that, it's serious,” was the burden of his private mutterings.

His condition was palpable even to Mrs. Bunting. But she misunderstood his nature. She said something. Finally, and quite abruptly, he set off to London in a state of frantic determination to get out of it all. The Sea Lady wished him good-bye in Mrs. Bunting's presence as if there had never been anything unusual between them.

I suppose one may contrive to understand something of his disturbance.

He had made quite considerable sacrifices to the world. He had, at great pains, found his place and his way in it, he had imagined he had really ”got the hang of it,” as people say, and was having an interesting time.

And then, you know, to encounter a voice, that subsequently insists upon haunting you with ”_There are better dreams_”; to hear a tale that threatens complications, disasters, broken hearts, and not to have the faintest idea of the proper thing to do.

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