“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.