III
The way in which the Sea Lady talked to Mrs. Bunting on that memorable morning, when she lay all wet and still visibly fishy on the couch in Mrs. Bunting’s dressing-room, I am also able to give with some little fulness, because Mrs. Bunting repeated it all several times, acting the more dramatic speeches in it, to my cousin Melville in several of those good long talks that both of them in those happy days—and particularly Mrs. Bunting—always enjoyed so much. And with her very first speech, it seems, the Sea Lady took her line straight to Mrs. Bunting’s generous managing heart. She sat up on the couch, drew the antimacassar modestly over her deformity, and sometimes looking sweetly down and sometimes openly and trustfully into Mrs. Bunting’s face, and speaking in a soft clear grammatical manner that stamped her at once as no mere mermaid but a finished fine Sea Lady, she “made a clean breast of it,” as Mrs. Bunting said, and “fully and frankly” placed herself in Mrs. Bunting’s hands.
“Mrs. Bunting,” said Mrs. Bunting to my cousin Melville, in a dramatic rendering of the Sea Lady’s manner, “do permit me to apologise for this intrusion, for I know it is an intrusion. But indeed it has almost been forced upon me, and if you will only listen to my story, Mrs. Bunting, I think you will find—well, if not a complete excuse for me—for I can understand how exacting your standards must be—at any rate some excuse for what I have done—for what I must call, Mrs. Bunting, my deceitful conduct towards you. Deceitful it was, Mrs. Bunting, for I never had cramp— But then, Mrs. Bunting”—and here Mrs. Bunting would insert a long impressive pause—“I never had a mother!”
“And then and there,” said Mrs. Bunting, when she told the story to my cousin Melville, “the poor child burst into tears and confessed she had been born ages and ages ago in some dreadful miraculous way in some terrible place near Cyprus, and had no more right to a surname— Well, there—!” said Mrs. Bunting, telling the story to my cousin Melville and making the characteristic gesture with which she always passed over and disowned any indelicacy to which her thoughts might have tended. “And all the while speaking with such a nice accent and moving in such a ladylike way!”
“Of course,” said my cousin Melville, “there are classes of people in whom one excuses— One must weigh——”
“Precisely,” said Mrs. Bunting. “And you see it seems she deliberately chose me as the very sort of person she had always wanted to appeal to. It wasn’t as if she came to us haphazard—she picked us out. She had been swimming round the coast watching people day after day, she said, for quite a long time, and she said when she saw my face, watching the girls bathe—you know how funny girls are,” said Mrs. Bunting, with a little deprecatory laugh, and all the while with a moisture of emotion in her kindly eyes. “She took quite a violent fancy to me from the very first.”
“I can quite believe that, at any rate,” said my cousin Melville with unction. I know he did, although he always leaves it out of the story when he tells it to me. But then he forgets that I have had the occasional privilege of making a third party in these good long talks.
“You know it’s most extraordinary and exactly like the German story,” said Mrs. Bunting. “Oom—what is it?”
“Undine?”
“Exactly—yes. And it really seems these poor creatures are Immortal, Mr. Melville—at least within limits—creatures born of the elements and resolved into the elements again—and just as it is in the story—there’s always a something—they have no Souls! No Souls at all! Nothing! And the poor child feels it. She feels it dreadfully. But in order to get souls, Mr. Melville, you know they have to come into the world of men. At least so they believe down there. And so she has come to Folkestone. To get a soul. Of course that’s her great object, Mr. Melville, but she’s not at all fanatical or silly about it. Any more than we are. Of course we—people who feel deeply——”