The meeting of Miss Glendower and her affianced lover on his return from
Paris was one of those scenes in this story for which I have scarcely an
inkling of the true details. He came to Folkestone and stopped at the
Metropole, the Bunting house being full and the Metropole being the
nearest hotel to Sandgate; and he walked down in the afternoon and
asked for Adeline, which was pretty rather than correct. I gather that
they met in the drawing-room, and as Chatteris closed the door behind
him, I imagine there was something in the nature of a caress.
I must confess I envy the freedom of the novelist who can take you
behind such a locked door as this and give you all that such persons
say and do. But with the strongest will in the world to blend the
little scraps of fact I have into a continuous sequence of events, I
falter at this occasion. After all, I never saw Adeline at all until
after all these things were over, and what is she now? A rather tall, a
rather restless and active woman, very keen and obvious in public
affairs--with something gone out of her. Melville once saw a gleam of
that, but for the most part Melville never liked her; she had a wider
grasp of things than he, and he was a little afraid of her; she was in
some inexplicable way neither a pretty woman nor a "dear lady" nor a
_grande dame_ nor totally insignificant, and a heretic therefore in
Melville's scheme of things. He gives me small material for that
earlier Adeline. "She posed," he says; she was "political," and she was
always reading Mrs. Humphry Ward.
The last Melville regarded as the most heinous offence. It is not the
least of my cousin's weaknesses that he regards this great novelist as
an extremely corrupting influence for intelligent girls. She makes
them good and serious in the wrong way, he says. Adeline, he asserts,
was absolutely built on her. She was always attempting to be the
incarnation of _Marcella_. It was he who had perverted Mrs. Bunting's
mind to adopt this fancy. But I don't believe for a moment in this
idea of girls building themselves on heroines in fiction. These are
matters of elective affinity, and unless some bullying critic or
preacher sends us astray, we take each to our own novelist as the
souls in the Swedenborgian system take to their hells. Adeline took to
the imaginary _Marcella_. There was, Melville says, the strongest
likeness in their mental atmosphere. They had the same defects, a bias
for superiority--to use his expressive phrase--the same disposition
towards arrogant benevolence, that same obtuseness to little shades of
feeling that leads people to speak habitually of the "Lower Classes,"
and to think in the vein of that phrase. They certainly had the same
virtues, a conscious and conscientious integrity, a hard nobility
without one touch of magic, an industrious thoroughness. More than in
anything else, Adeline delighted in her novelist's thoroughness, her
freedom from impressionism, the patient resolution with which she
went into the corners and swept under the mat of every incident. And
it 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 have
clung to him. There would have been a moment of high emotion in which
thoughts--of the highest class--mingled with the natural ambition of two
people in the prime of life and power. Then she would have receded with
a quick movement and listened with her beautiful hand pensive against
her cheek, while Chatteris began to sum up the forces against him--to
speculate on the action of this group and that. Something infinitely
tender and maternal would have spoken in her, pledging her to the utmost
help that love and a woman can give. She would have produced in
Chatteris that exquisite mingled impression of grace, passion,
self-yielding, which in all its infinite variations and repetitions made
up for him the constant poem of her beauty.
But that is the dream and not the reality. So Adeline might have dreamt
of behaving, but--she was not _Marcella_, and only wanting to be, and
he was not only not Maxwell but he had no intention of being Maxwell
anyhow. If he had had an opportunity of becoming Maxwell he would
probably have rejected it with extreme incivility. So they met like two
unheroic human beings, with shy and clumsy movements and, I suppose,
fairly honest eyes. Something there was in the nature of a caress, I
believe, and then I incline to fancy she said "Well?" and I think
he must have answered, "It's all right." After that, and rather
allusively, with a backward jerk of the head at intervals as it were
towards the great personage, Chatteris must have told her particulars.
He must have told her that he was going to contest Hythe and that the
little difficulty with the Glasgow commission agent who wanted to run
the Radical ticket as a "Man of Kent" had been settled without injury
to the party (such as it is). Assuredly they talked politics, because
soon after, when they came into the garden side by side to where Mrs.
Bunting and the Sea Lady sat watching the girls play croquet, Adeline
was in full possession of all these facts. I fancy that for such a
couple as they were, such intimation of success, such earnest topics,
replaced, to a certain extent at any rate, the vain repetition of
vulgar 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 a
handsome couple?"
But the Sea Lady made no reply, and leaned back, scrutinising their
advance. Certainly they made a handsome pair. Coming out of the veranda
into the blaze of the sun and across the trim lawn towards the shadow of
the ilex trees, they were lit, as it were, with a more glorious
limelight, and displayed like actors on a stage more spacious than the
stage of any theatre. The figure of Chatteris must have come out tall
and fair and broad, a little sunburnt, and I gather even then a little
preoccupied, as indeed he always seemed to be in those latter days. And
beside him Adeline, glancing now up at him and now towards the audience
under the trees, dark and a little flushed, rather tall--though not so
tall as _Marcella_ seems to have been--and, you know, without any
instructions from any novel-writer in the world, glad.
Chatteris did not discover that there was any one but Buntings under the
tree until he was close at hand. Then the abrupt discovery of this
stranger seems to have checked whatever he was prepared to say for his
_debut_, and Adeline took the centre of the stage. Mrs. Bunting was
standing up, and all the croquet players--except Mabel, who was
winning--converged on Chatteris with cries of welcome. Mabel remained in
the midst of what I understand is called a tea-party, loudly demanding
that they should see her "play it out." No doubt if everything had gone
well she would have given a most edifying exhibition of what croquet can
sometimes be.
Adeline swam forward to Mrs. Bunting and cried with a note of triumph in
her voice: "It is all settled. Everything is settled. He has won them
all 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 indeed
what there was to find there then. For a moment they faced riddles, and
then the Sea Lady turned her eyes with a long deferred scrutiny to the
man's face, which she probably saw now closely for the first time. One
wonders 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 meeting
of their eyes. Just for a moment she held his regard, and then it
shifted enquiringly to Mrs. Bunting.
That lady intervened effusively with an "Oh! I forgot," and introduced
them. I think they went through that without another meeting of the
foils of their regard.
"You back?" said Fred to Chatteris, touching his arm, and Chatteris
confirmed this happy guess.
The Bunting girls seemed to welcome Adeline's enviable situation rather
than Chatteris as an individual. And Mabel's voice could be heard
approaching. "Oughtn't they to see me play it out, Mr. Chatteris?"
"Hullo, Harry, my boy!" cried Mr. Bunting, who was cultivating a bluff
manner. "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 own
proper 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 dramatic
announcement. 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 other
actors have forgotten their parts. Then every one woke up to this, as it
were, and they went off in a volley. "So it's really all settled," said
Mrs. Bunting; and Betty Bunting said, "There _is_ to be an election
then!" and Nettie said, "What fun!" Mr. Bunting remarked with a knowing
air, "So you saw him then?" and Fred flung "Hooray!" into the tangle of
sounds.
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 voice
and utter politics. "They are getting sense," he said. "They are
learning that a party must have men, men of birth and training. Money
and the mob--they've tried to keep things going by playing to fads and
class jealousies. And the Irish. And they've had their lesson. How?
Why,--we've stood aside. We've left 'em to faddists and fomenters--and
the Irish. And here they are! It's a revolution in the party. We've let
it down. Now we must pick it up again."
He made a gesture with his fat little hand, one of those fat pink little
hands that appear to have neither flesh nor bones inside them but only
sawdust or horse-hair. Mrs. Bunting leaned back in her chair and smiled
at 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 great
issue?" she asked. "I don't quite understand."
Mr. Bunting spread himself to explain to her. "This," he said to begin
with. Adeline listened with a mingling of interest and impatience,
attempting ever and again to suppress him and to involve Chatteris by a
tactful interposition. But Chatteris appeared disinclined to be
involved. He seemed indeed quite interested in Mr. Bunting's view of the
case.
Presently the croquet quartette went back--at Mabel's suggestion--to
their game, and the others continued their political talk. It became
more personal at last, dealing soon quite specifically with all that
Chatteris 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 vast
purposes. "This election is merely the opening of a door," she said.
When Chatteris made modest disavowals she smiled with a proud and happy
consciousness of what she meant to make of him.
And Mrs. Bunting supplied footnotes to make it all clear to the Sea
Lady. "He's so modest," she said at one point, and Chatteris pretended
not to hear and went rather pink. Ever and again he attempted to deflect
the talk towards the Sea Lady and away from himself, but he was
hampered by his ignorance of her position.
And the Sea Lady said scarcely anything but watched Chatteris and
Adeline, and more particularly Chatteris in relation to Adeline.