It is time now to give some impression of the imminent 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 remarkably good-looking from the very onset
of his manhood and without being in any way a showy spendthrift, was
quite magnificently extravagant. 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 commendably free from
sentimental excesses--but enough to make him comfortable again. The
family is not a rich one and it further abounds 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 remunerative without being laborious or too commercial;
and meanwhile--after the extraordinary craving of his aunt, Lady
Poynting Mallow, to see him acting had been overcome by the united
efforts of the more religious section of his aunts--Chatteris set
himself seriously to the higher journalism--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. 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 penetrating eye certain reservations and
indecisions. There was just that touch of refinement 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 gathering attention as always capable and
occasionally brilliant. His aunts declared he was ripening, that any
defect in vigour he displayed was the incompleteness of the process,
and decided he should go to America, where vigour and vigorous
opportunities abound, and there, I gather, he came upon something like
a failure. Something happened, indeed, quite a lot happened. He came
back unmarried--and _via_ the South Seas, 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
professed to interview, under the heading: