He had not hitherto looked ahead to see precisely what would happen to Chatteris, to Miss Glendower, to the Buntings or any one when, as seemed highly probable, Chatteris was “got.” There were other dreams, there was another existence, an elsewhere—and Chatteris was to go there! So she said! But it came into Melville’s mind with a quite disproportionate force and vividness that once, long ago, he had seen a picture of a man and a mermaid, rushing downward through deep water.… Could it possibly be that sort of thing in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-nine? Conceivably, if she had said these things, did she mean them, and if she meant them, and this definite campaign of capture was in hand, what was an orderly, sane-living, well-dressed bachelor of the world to do?
Look on—until things ended in a catastrophe?
One figures his face almost aged. He appears to have hovered about the house on the Sandgate Riviera to a scandalous extent, failing always to get a sufficiently long and intimate tête-à-tête with the Sea Lady to settle once for all his doubts as to what really had been said and what he had dreamed or fancied in their talk. Never had he been so exceedingly disturbed as he was by the twist this talk had taken. Never had his habitual pose of humorous acquiescence in life been quite so difficult to keep up. He became positively absent-minded. “You know if it’s like that, it’s serious,” was the burden of his private mutterings. His condition was palpable even to Mrs. Bunting. But she misunderstood his nature. She said something. Finally, and quite abruptly, he set off to London in a state of frantic determination to get out of it all. The Sea Lady wished him good-bye in Mrs. Bunting’s presence as if there had never been anything unusual between them.
I suppose one may contrive to understand something of his disturbance. He had made quite considerable sacrifices to the world. He had, at great pains, found his place and his way in it, he had imagined he had really “got the hang of it,” as people say, and was having an interesting time. And then, you know, to encounter a voice, that subsequently insists upon haunting you with “There are better dreams”; to hear a tale that threatens complications, disasters, broken hearts, and not to have the faintest idea of the proper thing to do.
But I do not think he would have bolted from Sandgate until he had really got some more definite answer to the question, “What better dreams?” until he had surprised or forced some clearer illumination from the passive invalid, if Mrs. Bunting one morning had not very tactfully dropped a hint.
You know Mrs. Bunting, and you can imagine what she tactfully hinted. Just at that time, what with her own girls and the Glendower girls, her imagination was positively inflamed for matrimony; she was a matrimonial fanatic; she would have married anybody to anything just for the fun of doing it, and the idea of pairing off poor Melville to this mysterious immortal with a scaly tail seems to have appeared to her the most natural thing in the world.
Apropos of nothing whatever I fancy she remarked, “Your opportunity is now, Mr. Melville.”
“My opportunity!” cried Melville, trying madly not to understand in the face of her pink resolution.
“You’ve a monopoly now,” she cried. “But when we go back to London with her there will be ever so many people running after her.”
I fancy Melville said something about carrying the thing too far. He doesn’t remember what he did say. I don’t think he even knew at the time.