THE ABSENCE AND RETURN OF MR. HARRY¹ CHATTERIS I
These digressions about Parker and the journalists have certainly led me astray from the story a little. You will, however, understand that while the rising young journalist was still in pursuit of information, Hope and Banghurst, and Parker merely a budding perfection, the carriage not even thought of, things were already developing in that bright little establishment beneath the evergreen² oaks on the Folkestone Riviera. So soon as the minds of the Buntings ceased to be altogether focused upon this new and amazing social addition, they—of all people—had most[102] indisputably discovered, it became at first faintly and then very clearly evident that their own simple pleasure in the possession of a guest so beautiful as Miss Waters, so solidly wealthy and—in a manner—so distinguished³, was not entirely⁴ shared by the two young ladies who were to have been their principal guests for the season.
 
This little rift⁵ was perceptible the very first time Mrs. Bunting had an opportunity 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 in September—and every one seems to think it will —You promised you would let us inundate⁶ you with electioneering.”[103]
 
“But do you think she——”
 
“She will be dreadfully in the way.”
 
She added after an interval⁷, “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’m sure I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Harry’s prospects⁸. You know how enthusiastic we all are. Randolph would do anything. But are you sure she will be in the way?”
 
“What else can she be?”
 
“She might help even.”
 
“Oh, help!”
 
“She might canvass⁹. 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 who can[104] 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 were here. 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. “She keeps asking questions about why we are having the election and what it is all about, and why Harry is a candidate and all that. She wants to go into 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——”[105]
 
“My dear!” said Mrs. Bunting.
 
“I wouldn’t have her canvassing¹¹ with us for anything,” said Miss Glendower. “She’d spoil everything. She is frivolous¹² and satirical. She looks at you with incredulous eyes, she seems to blight¹³ all one’s earnestness.… I don’t think you quite understand, dear Mrs. Bunting, what this election and my studies mean to me—and Harry. She comes across 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— One feels 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 judicial¹⁴. Adeline dropped to a lower key again. “I think,” she said, “anyhow, that we’re taking[106] her very easily. How do we know what she is? Down there, out there, she may be anything. She may have 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 were only half as charming as she is. You seem to forget”—her voice dropped—“what it is she comes for.”
 
“That’s what I want to know.”
 
“I’m sure in these days, with so much[107] materialism¹⁵ about and such wickedness everywhere, when everybody who has a soul seems trying to lose it, to find any one who hadn’t a soul and who is trying to find one——”
 
“But is she trying to get one?”
 
“Mr. Flange¹⁶ comes twice every week. He would come oftener, as you know, if there wasn’t so much confirmation¹⁷ about.”
 
“And when he comes he sits and touches her hand if he can, and he talks in his lowest voice, and she sits and smiles—she almost laughs outright¹⁸ at the things he says.”
 
“Because he has to win his way with her. Surely Mr. Flange may do what he can to make religion attractive?”
 
“I don’t believe she believes she will get a soul. I don’t believe she wants one a bit.”
 
She turned towards the door as if she had done.[108]
 
Mrs. Bunting’s pink was now permanent. She had brought up a son and two daughters, and besides she had brought down a husband to “My dear, how was I to know?” and when it was necessary to be firm—even with Adeline Glendower—she knew how to be firm just as well as anybody.
 
“My dear,” she began in her very firmest quiet manner, “I am positive you misjudge Miss Waters. Trivial she may be—on the surface at any rate. Perhaps she laughs and makes fun a little. There are different ways of looking at things. But I am sure that at bottom she is just as serious, just as grave, as—any one. You judge her hastily. I am sure if you knew her better—as I do——”
 
Mrs. Bunting left an eloquent¹⁹ pause.
 
Miss Glendower had two little pink flushes in her cheeks. She turned with her hand on the door.[109]
 
“At any rate,” she said, “I am sure that Harry will agree with me that she can be no help to our cause. We have our work to do and it is something more than just vulgar electioneering. We have to develop and establish ideas. Harry has views that are new and wide-reaching. We want to put our whole strength into this work. Now especially. And her presence——”
 
She paused for a moment. “It is a digression. She divides things. She puts it all wrong. She has a way of concentrating attention about herself. She alters the values of things. She prevents my being single-minded, she will prevent Harry being single-minded——”
 
“I think, my dear, that you might trust my judgment²⁰ a little,” said Mrs. Bunting and paused.
 
Miss Glendower opened her mouth and shut it again, without speaking. It became[110] evident finality was attained²¹. Nothing remained to be said but the regrettable.
 
The door opened and closed smartly and Mrs. Bunting was alone.
 
Within an hour they all met at the luncheon²² table and Adeline’s behaviour to the Sea Lady and to Mrs. Bunting was as pleasant and alert as any highly earnest and intellectual young lady’s could be. And all that Mrs. Bunting said and did tended with what people call infinite tact²³—which really, you know, means a great deal more tact than is comfortable—to develop and expose the more serious aspect of the Sea Lady’s mind. Mr. Bunting was unusually talkative and told them all about a glorious project he had just heard of, to cut out the rather shrubby²⁴ and weedy front of the Leas and stick in something between a wine vault²⁵ and the Crystal Palace as a Winter Garden—which seemed to him a very excellent idea indeed.[111]
 
II
It is time now to give some impression of the imminent²⁶ Chatteris, who for all his late appearance is really the chief human being in my cousin Melville’s story. It happens that I met him with some frequency in my university days and afterwards ever and again I came upon him. He was rather a brilliant man at the university, smart without being vulgar and clever for all that. He was remarkably²⁷ good-looking from the very onset²⁸ of his manhood and without being in any way a showy spendthrift, was quite magnificently extravagant²⁹. There was trouble in his last year, something hushed up about a girl or woman in London, but his family had it all over with him, and his uncle, the Earl of Beechcroft, settled some of his bills. Not all—for the family is commendably³⁰ free from sentimental³¹ excesses—but[112] enough to make him comfortable again. The family is not a rich one and it further abounds³³ in an extraordinary quantity of rather frowsy, loose-tongued aunts—I never knew a family quite so rich in old aunts. But Chatteris was so good-looking, easy-mannered, and clever, that they seemed to agree almost without discussion to pull him through. They hunted about for something that would be really remunerative³⁴ without being laborious³⁵ or too commercial; and meanwhile—after the extraordinary craving³⁶ of his aunt, Lady Poynting Mallow, to see him acting³⁷ had been overcome by the united efforts of the more religious section of his aunts—Chatteris set himself seriously to the higher journalism³⁸—that is to say, the journalism that dines anywhere, gets political tips after dinner, and is always acceptable—if only to avoid thirteen articles—in a half-crown review.[113] In addition, he wrote some very passable verse and edited Jane Austen for the only publisher who had not already reprinted the works of that classic lady.
 
His verse, like himself, was shapely and handsome, and, like his face, it suggested to the penetrating³⁹ eye certain reservations and indecisions. There was just that touch of refinement⁴⁰ that is weakness in the public man. But as yet he was not a public man; he was known to be energetic and his work was gathering⁴¹ attention as always capable and occasionally brilliant. His aunts declared he was ripening⁴², that any defect in vigour⁴³ he displayed was the incompleteness of the process, and decided⁴⁴ he should go to America, where vigour and vigorous opportunities abound³², and there, I gather, he came upon something like a failure. Something happened, indeed, quite a lot happened. He came back unmarried—and viâ the South Seas,[114] Australasia and India. And Lady Poynting Mallow publicly told him he was a fool, when he got back.
 
What happened in America, even if one does not consult contemporary American papers, is still very difficult to determine. There appear to have been the daughter of a millionaire and something like an engagement in the story. According to the New York Yell, one of the smartest, crispest, and altogether most representative papers in America, there was also the daughter of some one else, whom the Yell interviewed, or professed⁴⁵ to interview, under the heading:
 
AN ARISTOCRATIC BRITISHER
TRIFLES WITH
A PURE AMERICAN GIRL
INTERVIEW WITH THE VICTIM
OF HIS
HEARTLESS LEVITY⁴⁶
 
[115]
 
But this some one else was, I am inclined to think in spite of her excellently executed portrait, merely a brilliant stroke of modern journalism, the Yell having got wind of the sudden retreat of Chatteris and inventing a reason in preference to discovering one. Wensleydale tells me the true impetus⁴⁷ to bolt was the merest trifle. The daughter of the millionaire, being a bright and spirited girl, had undergone interviewing on the subject of her approaching marriage, on marriage in general, on social questions of various sorts, and on the relations of the British and American peoples, and he seems to have found the thing in his morning paper. It took him suddenly and he lost his head. And once he started, he seems to have lacked the power of mind to turn about and come back. The affair was a mess, the family paid some more of his bills and shirked others, and Chatteris turned up in[116] London again after a time, with somewhat diminished glory and a series of letters on Imperial Affairs, each headed with the quotation⁴⁸: “What do they know of England who only England know?”
 
Of course people of England learnt nothing of the real circumstances of the case, but it was fairly obvious that he had gone to America and come back empty-handed.
 
And that was how, in the course of some years, he came to Adeline Glendower, of whose special gifts as his helper and inspiration you have already heard from Mrs. Bunting. When he became engaged to her, the family, which had long craved⁴⁹ to forgive him—Lady Poynting Mallow as a matter of fact had done so—brightened wonderfully. And after considerable obscure activities he declared himself a philanthropic Liberal with open spaces in his platform, and in a position,[117] and ready as a beginning, to try the quality of the conservative South.
 
He was away making certain decisive arrangements, in Paris and elsewhere, at the time of the landing of the Sea Lady. Before the matter was finally settled it was necessary that something should be............