The Sea Lady Part 24

"Yes, and then she whispers, 'There are better dreams!'"

The girl regarded him in frank perplexity.

"She hints of these vague better dreams, she whispers of a way----"

"_What_ way?"

"I do not know what way. But it is something--something that tears at the very fabric of this daily life."

"You mean----?"

"She is a mermaid, she is a thing of dreams and desires, a siren, a whisper and a seduction. She will lure him with her----"

He stopped.

"Where?" she whispered.

"Into the deeps."

"The deeps?"

They hung upon a long pause. Melville sought vagueness with infinite solicitude, and could not find it. He blurted out at last: "There can be but one way out of this dream we are all dreaming, you know."

"And that way?"

"That way--" began Melville and dared not say it.

"You mean," she said, with a pale face, half awakened to a new thought, "the way is----?"

Melville s.h.i.+rked the word. He met her eyes and nodded weakly.

"But how--?" she asked.

"At any rate"--he said hastily, seeking some palliative phrase--"at any rate, if she gets him, this little world of yours-- There will be no coming back for him, you know."

"No coming back?" she said.

"No coming back," said Melville.

"But are you sure?" she doubted.

"Sure?"

"That it is so?"

"That desire is desire, and the deep the deep--yes."

"I never thought--" she began and stopped.

"Mr. Melville," she said, "you know I don't understand. I thought--I scarcely know what I thought. I thought he was trivial and foolish to let his thoughts go wandering. I agreed--I see your point--as to the difference in our effect upon him. But this--this suggestion that for him she may be something determining and final-- After all, she----"

"She is nothing," he said. "She is the hand that takes hold of him, the shape that stands for things unseen."

"What things unseen?"

My cousin shrugged his shoulders. "Something we never find in life," he said. "Something we are always seeking."

"But what?" she asked.

Melville made no reply. She scrutinised his face for a time, and then looked out at the sunlight again.

"Do you want him back?" he said.

"I don't know."

"Do you want him back?"

"I feel as if I had never wanted him before."

"And now?"

"Yes.... But--if he will not come back?"

"He will not come back," said Melville, "for the work."

"I know."

"He will not come back for his self-respect--or any of those things."

"No."

"Those things, you know, are only fainter dreams. All the palace you have made for him is a dream. But----"

"Yes?"

"He might come back--" he said, and looked at her and stopped. He tells me he had some vague intention of startling her, rousing her, wounding her to some display of romantic force, some insurgence of pa.s.sion, that might yet win Chatteris back, and then in that moment, and like a blow, it came to him how foolish such a fancy had been. There she stood impenetrably herself, limitedly intelligent, well-meaning, imitative, and powerless. Her pose, her face, suggested nothing but a clear and reasonable objection to all that had come to her, a critical antagonism, a steady opposition. And then, amazingly, she changed. She looked up, and suddenly held out both her hands, and there was something in her eyes that he had never seen before.

Melville took her hands mechanically, and for a second or so they stood looking with a sort of discovery into each other's eyes.

"Tell him," she said, with an astounding perfection of simplicity, "to come back to me. There can be no other thing than what I am. Tell him to come back to me!"

"And----?"

"Tell him _that_."

"Forgiveness?"

"No! Tell him I want him. If he will not come for that he will not come at all. If he will not come back for that"--she halted for a moment--"I do not want him. No! I do not want him. He is not mine and he may go."