Quisanté
by Anthony Hope · English · Gutenberg #19752 · 545,607 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Quisanté
Author: Anthony Hope
Release date: November 11, 2006 [eBook #19752]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19752
Credits: Produced by David Clarke and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK QUISANTÉ ***
Produced by David Clarke and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
_Methuen's Colonial Library_
QUISANTÉ
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A Man of Mark
Mr. Witt's Widow
Father Stafford
A Change of Air
Half a Hero
The Prisoner of Zenda
The God in the Car
The Dolly Dialogues
Comedies of Courtship
The Chronicles of Count Antonio
The Heart of Princess Osra
Phroso
Simon Dale
Rupert of Hentzau
The King's Mirror
QUISANTÉ
BY
ANTHONY HOPE
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
LONDON
1900
_Colonial Library_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. DICK BENYON'S OUTSIDER 1
II. MOMENTS 16
III. SANDRO'S WAY 31
IV. HE'S COMING! 46
V. WHIMSY-WHAMSIES 65
VI. ON DUTY HILL 84
VII. ADVICE FROM AUNT MARIA 101
VIII. CONTRA MUNDUM 120
IX. LEAD US NOT-- 137
X. PRACTICAL POLITICS 155
XI. SEVENTY-SEVEN AND SUSY SINNETT 176
XII. A HIGHLY CORRECT ATTITUDE 196
XIII. NOT SUPERHUMAN 215
XIV. OPEN EYES 235
XV. A STRANGE IDEA 257
XVI. THE IRREVOCABLE 279
XVII. DONE FOR? 301
XVIII. FOR LACK OF LOVE? 321
XIX. DEATH DEFIED 339
XX. THE QUIET LIFE TO-MORROW 355
XXI. A RELICT 371
Transcriber's Note
The following sentence, found in Chapter IX., was originally printed
with the "three several" error and has not been changed:
That evening Quisanté brought home to dinner the gentleman whom
Dick Benyon called old Foster the maltster, and who had been
Mayor of Henstead three several times.
QUISANTÉ.
CHAPTER I.
DICK BENYON'S OUTSIDER.
A shrunken sallow old lady, dressed in rusty ill-shaped black and
adorned with an evidently false 'front' of fair hair, sat in a tiny
flat whose windows overlooked Hyde Park from south to north. She was
listening to a tall loose-built dark young man who walked restlessly
about the little room as he jerked out his thoughts and challenged the
expression of hers. She had known him since he was a baby, had brought
him up from childhood, had always served him, always believed in him,
never liked him, never offered her love nor conciliated his. His father
even, her only brother Raphael Quisanté, she had not loved; but she had
respected Raphael. Alexander--Sandro, as she alone of all the world
called him--she neither loved nor respected; him she only admired and
believed in. He knew his aunt's feelings well enough; she was his ally,
not his friend; kinship bound them, not affection; for his brain's sake
and their common blood she was his servant, his heart she left alone.
Thus aware of the truth, he felt no obligation towards her, not even
when, as now, he came to ask money of her; what else should she do with
her money, where else lay either her duty or her inclination? She did
not love him, but he was her one interest, the only tie that united her
with the living moving world and the alluring future years, more
precious to her since she could see so few of them.
"I don't mean to make myself uncomfortable," said Miss Quisanté. "How
much do you want?" He stopped and turned round quickly with a gleam of
eagerness in his eyes, as though he had a vision of much wealth. "No,
no," she added with a surly chuckle, "the least you'll take is the most
I'll give."
"I owe money."
"Who to?" she asked, setting her cap uncompromisingly straight. "Jews?"
"No. Dick Benyon."
"That money you'll never pay. I shan't consider that."
The young man's eyes rested on her in a long sombre glance; he seemed
annoyed but not indignant, like a lawyer whose formal plea is brushed
aside somewhat contemptuously by an impatient truth-loving judge.
"You've got five hundred a year or thereabouts," she went on, "and no
wife."
He threw himself into a chair; his face broke into a sudden smile,
curiously attractive, although neither sweet nor markedly sincere.
"Exactly," he said. "No wife. Well, shall I get one with five hundred a
year?" He laughed a little. "An election any fine day would leave me
penniless," he added.
"There's Dick Benyon," observed the old lady.
"They talk about that too much already," said Quisanté.
"Come, Sandro, you're not sensitive."
"And Lady Richard hates me. Besides if you want to impress fools, you
must respect their prejudices. Give me a thousand a year; for the
present, you know."
He asked nearly half the old lady's income; she sighed in relief. "Very
well, a thousand a year," she said. "Make a good show with it. Live
handsomely. It'll pay you to live handsomely."
A genuine unmistakable surprise showed itself on his face; now there was
even the indignation which a reference to non-payment of debts had
failed to elicit.
"I shall do something with it, you might know that," he said
resentfully.
"Something honest, I mean."
"What?"
"Well, something not criminal," she amended, chuckling again. "I'm sorry
to seem to know you so well," she added.
"Oh, we know one another pretty well," said he with a nod. "Never the
jam without the powder from you."
"But always the jam," said old Maria. "And you'll find the world a good
deal like your aunt, Sandro."
An odd half-cunning half-eager gleam shot across his eyes.
"A man finds the world what he makes it," he said. He rose, came and
stood over her, and went on, laughing. "But the devil makes an aunt once
and for all, and won't let one touch his handiwork."
"You can touch her savings, though!"
He blazed out into a sudden defiance. "Oh, refuse if you like. I can
manage without you. You're not essential to me."
She smiled, her thin lips setting in a wry curve. Now and then it seemed
hard that there could be no affection between her and the one being whom
the course of events plainly suggested for her love. But, as Sandro
said, they knew one another very well. In the result she felt entitled
to assume no airs of superiority; he had not been a dutiful or a
grateful nephew, she had not been a devoted or a patient aunt; as she
looked back, she was obliged to remember one or two occasions when he
had driven or betrayed her into a severity of which she did not
willingly think. This reflection dictated the words with which she met
his outburst.
"You can tell your story on Judgment Day and I'll tell mine," she said.
"Oh, neither of 'em will lose in the telling, I'll be bound. Meanwhile
let's be----"
"Friends?" he suggested with an obvious but not ill-natured sneer.
"Lord, no! Whatever you like! Banker and client, debtor and creditor,
actor and audience? Take your choice--and send me your bank's address."
He nodded slightly, as though he concluded a bargain, not at all as
though he acknowledged a favour. Yet he remarked in a ruminative tone,
"I shall be very glad of the money."
A moment's pause followed. Then Miss Quisanté observed reluctantly,
"The only thing I ever care to know about you is what you're planning,
Sandro. Don't I earn that by my thousand a year?"
"Well, here you are. I'm started, thanks to Dick Benyon and myself. I've
got my seat, I can go on now. But I'm an outsider still." He paused a
moment. "I feel that; Benyon feels it too. I want to obviate it a bit. I
mean to marry."
"An insider?" asked the old lady. She looked at him steadily. "Your
taste's too bad," she said; he was certainly dressed in a rather bizarre
way. "And your manners," she added. "She won't have you," she ended.
Quisanté took no notice and seemed not to hear; he stood quite still by
the window, staring over the park. "Besides she'll know what you want
her for."
He wheeled round suddenly and looked down at his aunt. His face was
softer, the cunningness had gone from his smile, his eyes seemed larger,
clearer, even (by a queer delusion of sight) better set and wider apart.
"Yes, I'll show her that," he said in a low voice, with a new richness
of tone.
Old Maria looked up at him with an air of surprise.
"You do want her for that? As a help, I mean?" she asked.
His lips just moved to answer "Yes." Aunt Maria's eyes did not leave his
face. She remembered that when he had come before to talk about
contesting the seat in Parliament he had now won, there had been a
moment (poised between long periods of calculation and elaborate
forecasts of personal advantage) in which his face had taken on the same
soft light, the same inspiration.
"You odd creature!" she murmured gently. "She's handsome, I suppose?"
"Superb--better than that."
"A swell?" asked old Maria scornfully.
"Yes," he nodded.
His aunt laughed. "A Queen among women?" was the form her last question
took.
"An Empress," said Alexander Quisanté, the more ornate title bursting
gorgeously from his lips.
"Just the woman for you then!" remarked Aunt Maria. A stranger would
have heard nothing in her tone save mockery. Quisanté heard more, or did
not hear that at all. He nodded again quite gravely, and turned back to
the window. There were two reasonable views of the matter; either the
lady was not what Quisanté declared her, or if she were she would have
nothing to do with Quisanté. But Aunt Maria reserved her opinion; she
was prepared to find neither of these alternatives correct.
For there was something remarkable about Sandro; the knowledge that had
been hers so long promised fair to become the world's discovery. Society
was travelling towards Aunt Maria's opinion, moved thereto not so much
by a signally successful election fight, nor even by a knack of
distracting attention from others and fixing it on himself, as by the
monstrous hold the young man had obtained and contrived to keep over
Dick Benyon. Dick was not a fool; here ended his likeness to Quisanté;
here surely ought to end his sympathy with that aspiring person? But
there was much more between them; society could see that for itself,
while doubters found no difficulty in overhearing Lady Richard's open
lamentations. "If Dick had known him at school or at Cambridge----" "If
he was somebody very distinguished----" "If he was even a gentleman----"
Eloquent beginnings of unfinished sentences flowed with expressive
freedom from Amy Benyon's pretty lips. "I don't want to think my husband
mad," she observed pathetically to Weston Marchmont, himself one of the
brightest hopes of that party which Dick Benyon was understood to
consider in need of a future leader. Was that leader to be Quisanté?
Manners, not genius, Amy declared to be the first essential. "And I
don't believe he's got genius," she added hopefully; that he had no
manners did not need demonstration to Marchmont, whose own were so
exquisite as to form a ready-make standard.
And it was not only Dick. Jimmy was as bad. Nobody valued Jimmy's
intellect, but every one had been prepared to repose securely on the
bedrock of his prejudices. He was as infatuated as his brother; Quisanté
had swept away the prejudices. The brethren were united in an effort to
foist their man into every circle and every position where he seemed to
be least wanted; to this end they devoted time, their social reputation,
enthusiasm, and, as old Maria knew, hard money. They were triple-armed
in confidence. Jimmy met remonstrances with a quiet shrug; Dick had one
answer, always the same, given in the same way--a confident assertion,
limited and followed, an instant later, by one obvious condition,
seemingly not necessary to express. "You'll see, if he lives," he
replied invariably when people asked him what there was after all in Mr.
Quisanté. Their friends could only wonder, asking plaintively what the
Duke thought of his brothers' proceedings. The Duke, however, made no
sign; making no sign ranked as a characteristic of the Duke's.
When Lady Richard discussed this situation with her friends the Gaston
girls, she gained hearty sympathy from Fanny, but from May no more than
a mocking half-sincere curiosity.
"Is it possible for a man to like both me and Mr. Quisanté?" Lady
Richard asked. "And after all Dick does like me very much."
"Likes both his wife and Mr. Quisanté! What a man for paradoxes!" May
murmured.
"Jimmy's worse if anything," the aggrieved wife went on. This remark was
levelled straight at Fanny; Jimmy being understood to like Fanny, a
parallel problem presented itself. Fanny recognized it but, not choosing
to acknowledge Jimmy's devotion, met it by referring to Marchmont's
openly professed inability to tolerate Quisanté.
"I always go by Mr. Marchmont's judgment in a thing like that," she
said. "He's infallible."
"There's no need of infallibility, my dear," observed Lady Richard
irritably. "Ordinary common sense is quite enough." She turned suddenly
on May. "You talked to him for nearly an hour the other night," she
said.
"Yes--how you could!" sighed Fanny.
"I couldn't help it. He talked to me."
"About those great schemes that he's filled poor dear Dick's head with?
Not that I doubt he's got plenty of schemes--of a sort you know."
"He didn't talk schemes," said Lady May. "He was worse than that."
"What did he do?" asked her sister.
"Flirted."
A sort of gasp broke from Lady Richard's lips; she gazed helplessly at
her friends. Fanny began to laugh. May preserved a meditative
seriousness; she seemed to be reviewing Quisanté's efforts in a judicial
spirit.
"Well?" said Lady Richard after the proper pause.
"Oh well, he was atrocious, of course," May admitted; her tone, however,
expressed a reluctant homage to truth rather than any resentment. "He
doesn't know how to do it in the least."
"He doesn't know how to do anything," Lady Richard declared.
"Most men are either elephantine or serpentine," said Fanny. "Which was
he, dear?"
"I don't think either."
"Porcine?" asked Lady Richard.
"No. I haven't got an animal for him. Well, yes, he was a little
weaselly perhaps. But----" She glanced at Lady Richard as she paused,
and then appeared to think that she would say no more; she frowned
slightly and then smiled.
"I like his cheek!" exclaimed Fanny with a simplicity that had survived
the schoolroom.
Lady Richard screwed her small straight features into wrinkles of
disgust and a shrug seemed to run all over her little trim
smartly-gowned figure; no presumption could astonish her in Quisanté.
"Why in the world did you listen to him, May?" Fanny went on.
"He interested me. And every now and then he was objectionable in rather
an original way."
With another shrug, inspired this time by her friend's mental vagaries,
Lady Richard diverged to another point.
"And that was where you were all the time Weston Marchmont was looking
for you?" she asked.
May began to laugh. "Somehow I'm generally somewhere else when Mr.
Marchmont looks for me," she said. "It isn't deliberate, really; I like
him very much, but when he comes near me, some perverse fate seems to
set my legs moving in the opposite direction."
"Well, Alexander Quisanté's a perverse fate, if you like," said Lady
Richard.
"It's curious how there are people one's like that towards. You're very
fond of them, but it seems quite certain that you'll never get much
nearer to them. Is it fate? Or is it that in the end there's a--a
solution of sympathy, a break somewhere, so that you stop just short of
finding them absolutely satisfying?"
Neither of her friends answered her. Lady Richard did not deal in
speculations; Fanny preferred not to discuss, even indirectly, her
sister's feelings towards Marchmont; they bred in her a mixture of
resentment and relief too complicated for public reference. It was
certainly true enough that he and May got no nearer to one another; if
the break referred to existed somewhere, its effect was very plain; how
could it display itself more strikingly than in making the lady prefer
Quisanté's weaselly flirtation to the accomplished and enviable homage
of Weston Marchmont? And preferred it she had, for one hour of life at
least. Fanny felt the anger which we suffer when another shows
indifference towards what we should consider great good fortune.
But indifference was not truly May's attitude towards Marchmont. Nobody,
she honestly thought, could be indifferent to him, to his handsomeness,
his grace and refinement, the fine temper of his mind, his indubitable
superiority of intellect; in everything he was immeasurably above the
ordinary run of her acquaintance, the well-groomed inconsiderables of
whom she knew such a number. Being accustomed to look this world in the
face unblinkingly, she did not hesitate to add that he possessed great
wealth and the prospect of a high career. He was all, and indeed rather
more, than she, widowed Lady Attlebridge's slenderly dowered daughter,
had any reason to expect. She wanted to expect no more, if possible
really to regard this opportunity as greater luck than she had a right
to anticipate. The dissatisfaction which she sought to explain by
talking of a solution of sympathy was very obstinate, but justice set
the responsibility down to her account, not to his; analysing her
temperament, without excusing it, she found a spirit of adventure and
experiment--or should she say of restlessness and levity?--which
Marchmont did not minister to nor yet assuage. The only pleasure that
lay in this discovery came from the fact that it was so opposed to the
general idea about her. For it was her lot to be exalted into a type of
the splendid calm patrician maiden. In that sort of vein her friends
spoke of her when they were not very intimate, in that sort of language
she saw herself described in gushing paragraphs that chronicled the
doings of her class. Stately, gracious, even queenly, were epithets
which were not spared her; it would have been refreshing to find some
Diogenes of a journalist who would have called her, in round set terms,
discontented, mutinous, scornful of the ideal she represented, a very
hot-bed of the faults the beauty of whose absence was declared in her
dignified demeanour. Now what May looked, that Fanny was; but poor
Fanny, being slight of build, small in feature, and gay in manner, got
no credit for her exalted virtues and could not be pressed into service
as the type of them. For certainly types must look typical. May's
comfort in these circumstances was that Marchmont's perfect breeding and
instinctive avoidance of display, of absurdity, even of betraying any
heat of emotion, saved her from the usual troubles which an unsatisfied
lover entails on his mistress. He looked for her no doubt, but with no
greater visible perturbation than if she had been his handkerchief.
An evening or two later Dick Benyon took her in to dinner. Entirely in
concession to him--for the subject had passed from her own thoughts--she
asked, "Well, how's your genius going on?" Before the meal was over she
regretted her question. It opened the doors to Dick's confused eloquence
and vague laudations of his _protégé_; putting Dick on his defence, it
involved an infinite discussion of Quisanté. She was told how Dick had
picked him up at Naples, gone to Pompeii with him, travelled home with
him, brought him and Jimmy together, and how the three had become
friends. "And if I'm a fool, my brother's not," said Dick. May knew that
Jimmy would shelter himself under a plea couched in identical language.
From this point Dick became less expansive, for at this point his own
benefactions and services had begun. She could not get much out of him,
but she found herself trying to worm out all she could. Dick had no
objection to saying that he had induced Quisanté to go in for politics,
and had "squared" the influential persons who distributed (so far as a
free electorate might prove docile) seats in Parliament. Rumour and Aunt
Maria would have supplemented his statement by telling of substantial
aid given by the Benyon brothers. May, interested against her wish and
irritated at her interest, yet not content, like Dick's wife, to shrug
away Dick's aberrations, turned on him with a sudden, "But why, why? Why
do you like him?"
"Like him!" repeated Dick half-interrogatively. He did not seem sure
that his companion had chosen the right, or at any rate the best, word
to describe his feelings. In response she amended her question.
"Well, I mean, what do you see in him?"
Here was another fatal question, for Dick saw everything in him. Hastily
cutting across the eulogies, she demanded particulars--who was he, where
did he come from, and so forth. On these heads Dick's account was
scanty; Quisanté's father had grown wine in Spain; and Quisanté himself
had an old aunt in London.
"Not much of a genealogy," she suggested. Dick was absurd enough to
quote "_Je suis un ancêtre_." "Oh, if you're as silly as that!" she
exclaimed with an annoyed laugh.
"He's the man we want."
"You and Jimmy?"
"The country," Dick explained gravely. He had plenty of humour for other
subjects, but Quisanté, it seemed, was too sacred. "Look here," he went
on. "Come and meet him again. Amy's going out of town next week and
we'll have a little party for him."
"That happens best when Amy's away?"
"Well, women are so----"
"Yes, I know. I'm a woman. I won't come."
Dick looked at her not sourly but sadly, and turned to his other
neighbour. May was left to sit in silence for five minutes; then a pause
in Dick's talk gave her time to touch him lightly on the arm and to say
when he turned, "Yes, I will, and thank you."
But she said nothing about the weaselly flirtation.
CHAPTER II.
MOMENTS.
At the little dinner which Lady Richard's absence rendered more easy
there were only the Benyon brothers (a wag had recently suggested that
they should convert themselves into Quisanté Limited), Mrs. Gellatly,
Morewood the painter, and the honoured guest. Morewood was there because
he was painting a kit-cat of Quisanté for the host (Heaven knew in what
corner Lady Richard would suffer it to hang), and Mrs. Gellatly because
she had expressed a desire to meet Lady May Gaston. Quisanté greeted May
with an elaborate air of remembrance; his handshake was so ornate as to
persuade her that she must always hate him, and that Dick Benyon was as
foolish as his wife thought him. This mood lasted half through dinner;
the worst of Quisanté was uppermost, and the exhibition depressed the
others. The brothers were apologetic, Mrs. Gellatly gallantly suave; her
much-lined, still pretty face worked in laborious smiles at every
loudness and every awkwardness. Morewood was so savage that an abrupt
conclusion of the entertainment threatened to be necessary. May, who had
previously decided that Mr. Quisanté would be much better in company,
was travelling to the conclusion that he was not nearly so trying when
alone; to be weaselly is not so bad as to be inconsiderate and
ostentatious.
Just then came the change which transformed the party. Somebody
mentioned Mahomet; Morewood, with his love of a paradox, launched on an
indiscriminate championship of the Prophet. Next to believing in nobody,
it was best, he said, to believe in Mahomet; there, he maintained, you
got most out of your religion and gave least to it; and he defended the
criterion with his usual uncompromising aggressiveness. Then Quisanté
put his arms on the table, interrupted Morewood without apology, and
began to talk. May thought that she would not have known how good the
talk was--for it came so easily--had she not seen how soon Morewood
became a listener, or even a foil, ready and content to put his
questions not as puzzles but as provocatives. Yet Morewood was
proverbially conceited, and he was fully a dozen years Quisanté's
senior. She stole a look round; the brothers were open-mouthed, Mrs.
Gellatly looked almost frightened. Next her eyes scanned Quisanté's
face; he was not weaselly now, nor ostentatious. His subject filled him
and lit him up; she did not know that he looked as he had when he spoke
to old Maria of his Empress among women, but she knew that he looked as
if nothing mentally small, nothing morally mean, nothing that was not in
some way or other, for good or evil, big and spacious could ever come
near him from without or proceed out from him.
She was immensely startled when, in a pause, her host whispered in her
ear, "One of his moments!" The phrase was to become very familiar to her
on the lips of others, even more in her own thoughts. "His moments!" It
implied a sort of intermittent inspiration, as though he were some
ancient prophet or mediæval fanatic through whose mouth Heaven spoke
sometimes, leaving him for the rest to his own low and carnal nature.
The phrase meant at once a plenitude of inspiration and a rarity of it.
Not days, nor hours, but moments were seemingly what his friends valued
him for, what his believers attached their faith to, what must (if
anything could) outweigh all that piled the scales so full against him.
An intense curiosity then and there assailed her; she must know more of
the man; she must launch a boat on this unexplored ocean--for the
Benyons had not navigated it, they only stood gaping on the beach. Here
was scope for that unruly spirit of hers which Marchmont's culture and
Marchmont's fascination could neither minister to nor assuage.
She was gazing intently at Quisanté when she became conscious of Mrs.
Gellatly's eyes on her. Mrs. Gellatly looked frightened still;
accustomed tactfully to screen awkwardness, she was rather at a loss in
the face of naked energy. She sought to share her alarm with May Gaston,
but May was like a climber fronted by a mountain range.
"You may be right and you may be wrong," said Morewood. "At least I
don't know anybody who can settle the quarrel between facts and dreams."
"There isn't any quarrel."
"There's a little stiffness anyhow," urged Morewood, still unwontedly
docile.
"They'd get on better if they saw more of one another," suggested May
timidly. It was her first intervention. She felt its insignificance. She
would not have complained if Quisanté had followed Morewood's example
and taken no notice of it. He stopped, turned to her with exaggerated
deference, and greeted her obvious little carrying out of the metaphor
as though it were a heaven-sent light. Somehow in doing this he seemed
to fall all in an instant from lofty heights to depths almost beyond
eyesight. While he complimented her elaborately, Morewood turned away in
open impatience. Another topic was started, the conversation was killed;
or, to put it as she put it to herself, that moment of Quisanté's was
ended. Did his moments always end like that? Did they fade before a
breath, like the frailest flower? Did the contemptible always follow in
a flash on the entrancing?
Presently she found a chance for a whisper to Morewood.
"How are you painting him?" she asked.
"You must come and see," he replied, with a rather sour grin.
"So I will, but tell me now. You know the difference, I mean?"
"Oh, and do you already? Well, I shall do him making himself agreeable
to a lady."
"For heaven's sake don't!" she whispered, half-laughing yet not without
seriousness. The man was a malicious creature and might well caricature
what he was bound to idealise to the extreme limit of nature's
sufferance. Such a trick would be hardly honest to Dick Benyon, but
Morewood would plead his art with unashamed effrontery, and, if more
were needed, tell Dick to take his cheque to the deuce and go with it
himself.
The rest of the party was, to put it bluntly, a pleasant little
gathering in no way remarkable and rather spoilt by the presence of one
person who was not quite a gentleman. May struggled hard against the
mercilessness of the judgment contained in the last words; for it ought
to have proved quite final as regarded Alexander Quisanté. As a fact it
would not leave her mind, it established an absolutely sure footing in
her convictions; and yet it did not seem quite final in regard to
Quisanté. Perhaps Dick Benyon would maintain the proud level of his
remark about the genealogy, and remind her that somebody settled
Napoleon's claims by the same verdict. But one did not meet Napoleon at
little dinners, nor think of him with no countervailing achievements to
his name.
Her mind was so full of the man that when she joined her mother at a
party later in the evening, she had an absurd anticipation that
everybody would talk to her about him. Nobody did; that evening an
Arctic explorer and a new fortune-teller divided the attention of the
polite; men came and discussed one or other of these subjects with her
until she was weary. For once then, on Marchmont making an appearance
near her, her legs did not carry her in the opposite direction; she
awaited and even invited his approach; at least he would spare her the
fashionable gossip, and she thought he might tell her something about
Quisanté. In two words he told her, if not anything about Quisanté,
still everything that he himself thought of Quisanté.
"I met Mr. Quisanté at dinner," she said.
"That fellow!" exclaimed Marchmont.
The tone was full of weariness and contempt; it qualified the man as
unspeakable and dismissed him as intolerable. Was Marchmont infallible,
as Fanny had said? At least he represented, in its finest and most
authoritative form, the opinion of her own circle, the unhesitating
judgment against which she must set herself if she became Quisanté's
champion. It would be much easier, and probably much more sensible, to
fall into line and acquiesce in the condemnation; then it would matter
nothing whether the vulgar did or did not elect to admire Dick Benyon's
peculiar friend. Yet a protest stirred within her; only her sense of the
ludicrous prevented her from adopting Dick's word and asking Marchmont
if he had ever seen the fellow in one of his "moments." But it would be
absurd to catch up the phrase like that, and it was by no means certain
that even the moments would appeal to Marchmont.
Looking round, she perceived that a little space in the crowded room had
been left vacant about them; nobody came up to her, no woman, in passing
by, signalled to Marchmont; the constant give-and-take of companions was
suspended in their favour. In fine, people supposed that they wanted to
talk to one another; it would not be guessed that one of the pair wished
Quisanté to be the topic.
"He's got some brains," Marchmont went on, "though of rather a flashy
sort, I think. Dick Benyon's been caught by them. But a more impossible
person I never met. You don't like him?"
"Yes, I do," she answered defiantly. "At least I do every now and then."
"Pray make the occasions as rare as possible," he urged in his low lazy
voice, with his pleasant smile and a confidential look in his handsome
eyes. "And don't let them coincide with my presence."
"Really he won't hurt you; you're too particular."
"No, he won't hurt me, but I should feel rather as though he were
hurting you."
"What do you mean?"
"By being near you, certainly by being anything in the least like a
friend of yours."
"He'd defile me?" she asked, laughing.
"Yes," said he seriously; the next moment he smiled and shrugged his
shoulders; he did not withdraw his seriousness but he apologised for it.
"Oh, I'd better get under a glass-case at once," she exclaimed, laughing
again impatiently.
"Yes, and lock it, and----"
"Give you the key?"
He laughed as he said, "The most artistic emotions have some selfishness
in them, I admit it."
"It would make a little variety if I sent a duplicate to Mr. Quisanté!"
Here he would not follow her in her banter. He grew grave and even
frowned, but all he said was, "Really there are limits, you know." It
was her own verdict, expressed more tersely, more completely, and more
finally. There were limits, and Alexander Quisanté was beyond them; the
barrier they raised could not be surmounted; he could not fly over it
even on the wings of his moments.
"You above everybody oughtn't to know such people," Marchmont went on.
Now he was thinking of the type she was supposed to represent; that was
the fashion in which it was appropriate to talk to the type.
"I'm not in the very least like that really," she assured him. "If you
knew me better you'd find that out very soon."
"I'm willing to risk it."
Flirtation for flirtation--and this conversation was becoming one--there
could be no comparison between Marchmont's and Quisanté's; the one was
delightful, the other odious; the one combined charm with dignity; the
other was a mixture of cringing and presumption. May put the contrast no
less strongly than this as she yielded to the impulse of the minute and
gave the lie to Marchmont's ideal of her by her reckless acceptance of
the immediate delights he offered. The ideal would no doubt cause him to
put a great deal of meaning into her acceptance; whether such meaning
were one she would be prepared to indorse her mood did not allow her to
consider. She showed him very marked favour that evening, and in his
company contrived to forget entirely the puzzle of Quisanté and his
moments, and the possible relation of those moments to the limits about
which her companion was so decisive.
At last, however, they were interrupted. The interruption came from Dick
Benyon, who had looked in somewhere else and arrived now at the tail of
the evening. Far too eager and engrossed in his great theme to care
whether his appearance were welcome, he dashed up to May, crying out
even before he reached her, "Well, what do you say about him now? Wasn't
he splendid?"
Clearly Dick forgot his earlier apologetic period; for him the moment
was the evening. A cool question from Marchmont, the cooler perhaps for
annoyance, forced Dick into explanations, and he sketched in his summary
fashion the incident which had aroused his enthusiasm and made him look
so confidently for a response from May. Marchmont was unreservedly and
almost scornfully antagonistic.
"Oh, you're too cultivated to live," cried Dick. "Now isn't he too
elegant, May?"
"I'm not the least elegant," said Marchmont, with quiet confidence. "But
I'm--well, I'm what Quisanté isn't. So are you, Dick."
"Suppose we are, and by Jove, isn't he what we aren't? I'm primitive, I
suppose. I think hands and brains are better than manners."
"I'll agree, but I don't like his hands or his brains either."
"He'll mount high."
"As high as Haman. I shouldn't be the least surprised to see it."
"Well, I'm not going to give him up because he doesn't shake hands at
the latest fashionable angle."
"All right, Dick. And I'm not going to take him up because he's a dab at
rodomontade."
"And you neither of you need fight about him," May put in, laughing.
They joined in her laugh, each excusing himself by good-natured abuse of
the other.
There was no question of a quarrel, but the divergence was complete,
striking, and even startling. To one all was black, to the other all
white; to one all tin, to the other all gold. Was there no possibility
of compromise? As she sat between the two, May thought that a
discriminating view of Quisanté ought to be attainable, not an
oscillation from disgust to admiration, but a well-balanced stable
judgment which should allow full value to merits and to defects, and sum
up the man as a whole. Something of the sort she tried to suggest;
neither disputant would hear of it, and Marchmont went off with an
unyielding assertion that the man was a cad, no more and no less than a
cad. Dick looked after him with a well-satisfied air; May fancied that
opposition and the failure of others to understand intensified his
satisfaction in his own discovery. But he grew mournful as he said to
her,
"I shan't have a chance with you now. You'll go with Marchmont of
course. And I did want you to like him."
"Mr. Marchmont doesn't control my opinions."
They were very old friends; Dick allowed himself a significant smile.
"I know what you mean," she said, smiling. "But it's nonsense. Besides,
look at yourself and Amy! She hates him, and yet you----"
"Oh, she's only half-serious, and Marchmont's in deadly earnest under
that deuced languid manner of his. I tell you what, he's a very limited
fellow, after all."
May laughed; the limits were being turned to a new use now.
"Awfully clever and well-read, but shut up inside a sort of compartment
of life. Don't you know what I mean? He's always ridden first-class, and
he won't believe there's anybody worth knowing in the thirds."
"You think he's like that?" she asked thoughtfully.
"You can see it for yourself. There's no better fellow, no better
friend, but, hang it, an oyster's got a broader mind."
"I like broad minds."
"Then you'll like Quis----"
"Absolutely you shan't mention that name again. Find mother for me and
tell her to tell me that it's time to go home."
Going home brought with it a discovery. May was considered to have
invited the world to take notice of her preference for Marchmont. This
fact was first conveyed to her by Lady Attlebridge's gently affectionate
and congratulatory air; at this May was little more than amused.
Evidence of greater significance lay in Fanny's demeanour; she came into
her sister's room and talked for a while; before leaving, but after the
ordinary kiss of goodnight, she came back suddenly and kissed her again;
she said nothing, but the embrace was emphatic and eloquent. It seemed
to the recipient to be forgiving also; it meant "I want you to be happy,
don't imagine I think of anything else." If Fanny kissed her like that,
it was because Fanny supposed that she had made up her mind to marry
Weston Marchmont. She was fully conscious that the inference was not a
strange one to draw from her conduct that evening. But now the mood of
impulse was entirely gone; she considered the matter in a cool spirit,
and her talk with Dick Benyon assumed unlooked-for importance in her
deliberations. To marry Marchmont was a step entirely in harmony with
the ideal which her family and the world had of her, which Marchmont
himself most thoroughly and undoubtingly believed in. If she were really
what she was supposed to be, the match would satisfy her as well as it
would everybody else. But if she were quite different in her heart? In
that case it might indeed be urged that no marriage would or could
permanently satisfy her or the whole of her nature. This was likely
enough; to see how often something of that kind happened it was,
unfortunately, only necessary to run over ten or a dozen names which
offered themselves promptly enough from the list of her acquaintance.
Still to marry knowing you would not be satisfied was to drop below the
common fate of marrying knowing that you might not be; it gave up the
golden chance; it abandoned illusion just where illusion seemed most
necessary.
Oh for life, for the movement of life! It is perhaps hard to realise how
often that cry breaks from the hearts of women. No doubt the aspiration
it expresses is rather apt to end in antics, not edifying to the
onlooker, hardly (it may be supposed) comforting to the performer. But
the antics are one thing, the aspiration another, and they have the
aspiration strongest who condemn and shun the antics. The matter may be
stated very simply, at least if the form in which it presented itself to
May Gaston in her twenty-third year be allowed to suffice. Most girls
are bred in a cage, most girls expect to escape therefrom by marriage,
most girls find that they have only walked into another cage. She had
nothing to say, so far as her own case went, against the comfort either
of the old or of the new cage; they were both indeed luxurious. But
cages they were and such she knew them to be. Doubtless there must be
limits, not only to the tolerance of Weston Marchmont and of society,
but to everything else except infinity. But there are great expanses,
wide spaces, short of infinity. When she walked out of her first cage,
the one which her mother's careful fingers had kept locked on her, she
would like not to walk into another, but to escape into some park or
forest, not boundless, yet so large as to leave room for exploring, for
the finding of new things, for speculation, for doubt, excitement,
uncertainty, even for the presence of apprehension and the possibility
of danger. As she surveyed the manner in which she was expected to pass
her life, the manner in which she was supposed (she faced now the common
interpretation of her conduct this evening) already to have elected to
pass it, she felt as a speculator feels towards Consols, as a gambler
towards threepenny whist. It seemed as though nothing could be good
which did not also hold within it the potency of being very bad, as
though certainty damned and chance alone had lures to offer. She would
have liked to take life in her hand--however precious a thing, what use
is it if you hoard it?--and see what she could make of it, what usury
its free loan to fate and fortune would earn. She might lose it; youth
made light of the risk. She might crawl back in sad plight; the Prodigal
Son did not think of that when he set out. She found herself wishing she
had nothing, that she might be free to start on the search for anything.
Like Quisanté? Why, yes, just like Quisanté. Like that strange,
intolerable, vulgar, attractive, intermittently inspired creature, who
presented himself at life's roulette-table, not less various in his own
person than were the varying turns he courted, unaccountable as chance,
baffling as fate, changeable as luck. Indeed he was like life itself, a
thing you loved and hated, grew weary of and embraced, shrank from and
pursued. To see him then was in a way to look on at life, to be in
contact with him was to feel the throb of its movement. In her midnight
musings the man seemed somehow to cease to be odious because he ceased
to be individual, to be no longer incomprehensible because he was no
longer apart, because he became to her less himself and more the
expression and impersonation of an instinct that in her own blood ran
riot and held festivity.
"I'm having moments, like Mr. Quisanté himself!" she said with a sudden
laugh.
CHAPTER III.
SANDRO'S WAY.
First to the City, then to the doctor, then to the House, then to the
dinner of the Imperial League; this was Quisanté's programme for the
second Wednesday in April. It promised a busy day. But of the doctor and
the House he made light; the first was a formality, the second held out
no prospect of excitement; the City and the dinner were the real things.
They were connected with and must be made to promote the two aims which
he had taken for his with perfect confidence. He wanted money and he
wanted position; he saw no reason why he should not attain both in the
fullest measure. Recent events had filled him with a sure and certain
hope. Not allowing for the value of the good manners which he lacked, he
failed to see that he excited any hostility or any distaste. Unless a
man were downright rude to him, he counted him an adherent; this streak
of a not unpleasing simplicity ran across his varied nature. He was far
from being alive to his disadvantages; every hour assured him of his
superiority. Most especially he counted on the aid and favour of women;
the future might prove him right or wrong in his expectation; but he
relied for its realisation not on the power which he did possess but on
an accomplishment of manner and an insinuating fascination which he most
absolutely lacked. The ultra-civility which repelled May Gaston was less
a device than an exhibition; he embarked on it more because he thought
he did it well than (as she supposed) from a desire to curry favour. He
was ill-bred, but he was not mean; he was a vaunter but not a coward; he
demanded adherence and did not beg alms. This was the attitude of his
mind, but unhappily it was often apparently contradicted by the cringing
of his body and the wheedling of his tongue. In attempting smoothness he
fell into oiliness; where he aimed at polished brilliance, the result
was blazing varnish. Had he known what to pray for, he would have
supplicated heaven that he might meet eyes able to see the man beneath
the ape. Such eyes, dimly penetrating with an unexpected vision, he had
won to his side in the Benyon brothers; the rest of the world still
stuck on the outside surface. But the brothers could only shield him,
they could not change him; they might promote his fortunes, they could
not cure his vices. He did not know that he had any vices; the first
stage of amendment was still to come.
He had a cousin in the City, a stock-jobber, who made and lost large
sums of money as fortune smiled or frowned. Quisanté had the first five
hundred of Aunt Maria's thousand pounds in his pocket and told his
kinsman to use it for him.
"A spec?" asked Mr. Josiah Mandeville. "Isn't that rather rough on Aunt
Maria?"
Quisanté looked surprised. "She gave it me, I haven't stolen it," he
said with a laugh.
"She gave it you to live on, to keep up your position, I suppose."
"I don't think she made any conditions. And if I can make money, I'll
give it back to her."
"Oh, you know best, I suppose," said Mandeville. "Only if I lose it?"
"Losing money's no worse than spending it." And then he mentioned a
certain venture in which the money might usefully be employed.
"How did you hear of that?" asked Mandeville with a stare; for his
cousin had laid his finger on a secret, on the very secret which
Mandeville had just decided not to reveal to him, kinsman though he was.
"I forget; somebody said something about it that made me think it would
be a good thing." Quisanté's tone was vaguely puzzled; he often knew
things when he could give no account of his knowledge.
"Well, you aren't far wrong. You'll take a small profit, I suppose?
Shall I use my discretion?"
"No," smiled Quisanté. "I shan't take a small profit, and I'll use mine.
But keep me well informed and you shan't be a loser."
Mr. Mandeville laughed. "One might think you had a million," he
observed. "Or are you proposing to tip me a fiver?" The thought of his
own thousands filled his tone with scorn; he did not do his speculating
with Aunt Maria's money.
"If you're too proud, I can take my business somewhere else--and the
name of the concern too," said Quisanté, lighting a cigar. Cousin
Mandeville's stare had not escaped his notice.
Mandeville hesitated; he was very much annoyed; he liked his money, if
not himself, to be respected. But business is business, to say nothing
of blood being thicker than water.
"Oh, well, I'll do it for you," he agreed with lofty benevolence.
Quisanté laughed. He would have covered his own retreat with much the
same device.
The riches then were on the way; Quisanté had a far-seeing eye, and Aunt
Maria's five hundred was to imagination already prolific of thousands. A
hansom carried him up to Harley Street; he had been there three months
before and had been told to come again in three weeks. The punishment
for his neglect was a severe verdict. "No liquor, no tobacco, and three
months' immediate and complete rest." Quisanté laughed--very much as he
had at his kinsman in the City. Both doctor and stock-jobber showed such
a curious ignorance of the conditions under which his life had to be
lived and of his reasons for caring to live it.
"What's the matter then?" he asked.
The doctor became very technical, though not quite unreserved; the heart
and the stomach were in some unholy conspiracy; this was as much as
Quisanté really understood.
"And if I don't do as you say?" he asked. The doctor smiled and shrugged
his shoulders. "I shan't outlive Methuselah anyhow, I suppose?"
"The present conditions of your life are very wearing," said the doctor.
Quisanté looked at him thoughtfully.
"But if you'd live wisely, there's no reason why you shouldn't preserve
good health till an advanced age."
Aunt Maria's five hundred, invested in Consols, would bring in twelve
pounds ten shillings or thereabouts every year for ever.
"Thank you," said Quisanté, rising and producing the fee. But he paused
before going and said meditatively, "I should really like to be able to
follow your advice, you know." His brow clouded in discontent; the one
serious handicap he recognised was this arbitrary unfortunate doom of a
body unequal to the necessary strain of an active life. "Anyhow I'm good
for a little while?" he asked.
"Dear me, you're in no sort of immediate danger, Mr. Quisanté, or I
should be more imperative. Only pray give yourself a chance."
On his way from Harley Street to the House, and again from the House to
his own rooms in Pall Mall, his mind was busy with the speech that he
was to make at the dinner. He had only to respond to the toast of the
guests; few words and simple would be expected. He was thus the more
resolved on a great effort; the surprise that the mere attempt at an
oration would arouse should pave the way for the astonishment his
triumph must create. He had no rival in the programme; the Chairman was
Dick Benyon, the great gun an eminent Colonial Statesman who relied for
fame on his deeds rather than his words. With his curiously minute
calculation of chances Quisanté had discovered that there was no social
occasion of great attraction to carry off his audience after dinner;
they would stay and listen if he were worth listening to; the ladies in
the gallery would stay too, if at the outset he could strike a note that
would touch their hearts. This was his first really good chance, the
first opening for such a _coup_ as he loved. His eyes were bright as he
opened an atlas and verified with precision the exact position of the
Colonial Statesman's Colony; he had known it before of course--roughly.
Lady Richard had much affection in her nature and with it a fine spice
of malice. The two ingredients combined to bring her to the gallery; she
wished to please Dick, and she wished to be in a position to annoy him
by deriding Quisanté. So there she sat looking down on the men through a
haze of cigar-smoke which afflicted the ladies' noses and threatened
seriously to affect their gowns.
"They might give up their tobacco for one night," muttered a girl near
her.
"They'd much rather give us up, my dear," retorted a dowager who felt
that she would be considered a small sacrifice and was not unwilling to
make others think the same about themselves.
By Lady Richard's side sat May Gaston. The time is happily gone by when
any one is allowed even to assume indifference about the Empire, yet it
may be doubted whether interest in the Empire had the chief share in
moving her to accept Lady Richard's invitation. Nor did she want to hear
Dick Benyon, nor the Colonial Statesman; quite openly she desired and
expressed her desire to see what Quisanté would make of it.
"How absurd!" said Lady Richard crossly. "Besides he's only got a few
words to say."
May smiled and glanced along the row of ladies. About ten places from
her was a funny little old woman with an absurd false front of fair hair
and a black silk gown cut in ancient fashion; her features showed vivid
disgust at the atmosphere and she made frequent use of a large bottle of
smelling-salts. Next to her, on the other side, was Mrs. Gellatly, who
nodded and smiled effusively at May.
"Who's the funny old woman?" May asked.
Lady Richard looked round and made a constrained bow; the old lady
smiled a little and sniffed the bottle again.
"Oh, she's an aunt of the man's; come to hear him, I suppose. Oh, Dick's
getting up."
Amid polite attention and encouraging "Hear, hears" Dick made his way
through a few appropriate sentences which his hearty sincerity redeemed
from insignificance. The Colonial Statesman had a well-founded idea that
the zeal of his audience outstripped its knowledge, and set himself to
improve the latter rather than to inflame the former. His reward was a
somewhat frigid reception. May noticed that old Miss Quisanté was
dozing, and Lady Richard said that she wished she was at home in bed:
Quisanté himself had assumed a smile of anticipation when the Statesman
rose and preserved it unimpaired through the long course of the speech.
The audience as a whole grew a little restless; while the next speaker
addressed them, one or two men rose and slipped away unobtrusively. A
quick frown and a sudden jerk of Quisanté's head betrayed his fear that
more would go before he could lay his grip on them.
"Why doesn't this man stop?" whispered May.
"I suppose, my dear, he thinks he may as well put Mr. Quisanté off as
long as possible," Lady Richard answered flippantly.
Amid yawns, the laying down of burnt-out cigars, and glances at watches,
Quisanté rose to make his reply. Aunt Maria was wide-awake now, looking
down at her nephew with her sour smile; Lady Richard leant back
resignedly. Quisanté pressed back his heavy smooth black hair, opened
his wide thin-lipped mouth, and began with a courteous commonplace
reference to those who shared with himself the honour of being guests
that night. Ordinary as the frame-work was, there was a touch of
originality in what he said; one or two men who had meant to go struck
matches and lit fresh cigars. Dick Benyon looked up at the gallery and
nodded to his wife. Then Quisanté seemed suddenly to increase his
stature by an inch or two and to let loose his arms; his voice was still
not loud, but every syllable fell with incisive distinctness on his
listener's ears. An old Member of Parliament whispered to an elderly
barrister, "He can speak anyhow," and got an assenting nod for answer.
And he was looking as he had when he spoke of his Empress among women,
as he had when he declared that the Spirit of God could not live and
move in the grave-clothes of dead prophets. He was far away from the
guests now, and he was far away from himself; it was another moment; he
was possessed again. Dick looked up with a radiant triumphant smile, but
his wife was frowning, and May Gaston sat with a face like a mask.
"By Jove!" murmured the elderly barrister.
The whole speech was short; perhaps it had been meant to be longer, but
suddenly Quisanté's pale face turned paler still, he caught his hand to
his side, he stopped for a moment, and stumbled over his words; than he
recovered and, with his hand still on his side, raised his voice again.
But the logical mind of the elderly barrister seemed to detect a lacuna
in the reasoning; the speaker had skipped something and flown straight
to his peroration. He gave it now in tones firm but slower than before,
with a pause here and there, yet in the end summoning his forces to a
last flood of impassioned words. Then he sat down, not straight, but
falling just a little on one side and making a clutch at his neighbour's
shoulder; and while they cheered he sat quite still with closed eyes and
opened lips. "Has he fainted?" ran in a hushed whisper round the room;
Dick Benyon sprang from his chair, a waiter was hurried off for brandy,
and Lady Richard observed in her delicately scornful tones, "How
extremely theatrical!"
"Theatrical!" said May in a low indignant voice.
"You don't suppose he's really fainting, my dear, do you? Oh, I've seen
him do the same sort of thing once before!"
An impulse carried May's eyes towards Miss Quisanté; the old lady was
smiling composedly and sniffing her bottle. Her demeanour was in strong
contrast to Mrs. Gellatly's almost tearful excitement.
"He couldn't, he couldn't!" May moaned in horror.
If the untrue suspicion entertained by Lady Richard and possibly shared
by Miss Quisanté (the old lady's face was a riddle) spread at all to
anybody else, the fault lay entirely at the sufferer's own door. He knew
too well how real the attack had been; when the ladies mingled with the
men to take tea and coffee, he was still suffering from its after-effects.
But he treated the occurrence in so hopelessly wrong a way; he minced and
smirked over it; he would not own to a straightforward physical illness,
but preferred to hint at and even take credit for an exaggerated
sensibility, as though he enhanced his own eloquence by pointing to the
extraordinary exhaustion it produced. He must needs bring the frailty of
his body to the front, not as an apology, but as an added claim to
interest and a new title by which to win soft words, admiring looks, and
sympathetic pressings from pretty hands. Who could blame Lady Richard for
murmuring, "There, my dear, now you see!"? Who could wonder that Aunt
Maria looked cynically indifferent? Was it strange that a good many
people, without going to the length of declaring that the orator had
suffered nothing at all, yet were inclined to think that he knew better
than to waste, and quite well how to improve, the opportunity that a
trifling fatigue or a passing touch of faintness gave him? "Knows how to
fetch the women, doesn't he?" said somebody with a laugh. To be accused
of that knowledge is not a passport to the admiration of men.
Before May Gaston came near Quisanté himself, Jimmy Benyon seized on her
and introduced her to Aunt Maria. In reply to politely expressed phrases
of concern the old lady's shrewd eyes twinkled.
"Sandro'll soon come round, if they let him alone," she said.
The words were consistent with either view of the occurrence, but the
tone inclined them to the side of uncharitableness.
"Is he liable to such attacks?" May asked.
"He's always been rather sickly," Miss Quisanté admitted grudgingly.
"He's had a splendid triumph to-night. He was magnificent."
"Sandro makes the most of a chance."
May was surprised to find herself attracted to the dry old woman. Such an
absence of feeling in regard to one who was her only relative and the
hero of the evening might more naturally have aroused dislike; but Aunt
Maria's coolness was funnily touched both by resignation and by humour;
she mourned that things were as they were, but did not object to laughing
at them. When immaculate Jimmy, a splendid type of the handsome dandified
man about town, began to be enthusiastic over Quisanté, she looked up at
him with a sneering kindly smile, seeming to ask, "How in the world do
you come to be mixed up with Sandro?" When May expressed the hope that he
would be more careful of himself Aunt Maria's smile said, "If you knew as
much about him as I do, you'd take it quietly. It's Sandro's way." Yet
side by side with all this was the utter absence of any surprise at his
exhibition of power or at the triumph he had won; these she seemed to
take as the merest matter of course. She knew Quisanté better than any
living being knew him, and this was her attitude towards him. When they
bade one another good-bye, May said that she was sure her mother would
like to call on Miss Quisanté. "Come yourself," said the old lady
abruptly; she at least showed no oiliness, no violence of varnish; they
were not in the family, it seemed.
The crowd grew thinner, but the diminished publicity brought no
improvement to Quisanté's manner. He was with Lady Richard and the
brothers now--May noticed that nephew and aunt had been content to
exchange careless nods--and Lady Richard made him nearly his worst. He
knew that she did not like him, but refused to accept the defeat; he
plied her more and more freely with the airs and affectations that
rendered him odious to her; he could not help thinking that by enough
attention, enough deference, and enough of being interesting he must in
the end conciliate her favour. When May joined the group, his manner
appealed from her friend to her, bidding Lady Richard notice how much
more responsive May was and how pleasant he was to those who were
pleasant to him. May would have despised him utterly at that instant but
for two things: she remembered his moments, and she perceived that all
the time he was suffering and mastering severe, perhaps poignant, pain.
But again, when she asked him how he was, he smirked and flourished, till
Lady Richard turned away in disgust and even the brothers looked a little
puzzled and distressed as they followed her to the buffet and ministered
to her wants.
"Sit down," said May, in a tone almost sharp. "No, sit at once, never
mind whether I'm sitting or not."
He obeyed her with an overdone gesture of protest, but his face showed
relief. She got a chair for herself and sat down by him.
"You spoke splendidly," she said, and hurried on, "No, no, don't thank
me, don't tell me that you especially wished to please me, or that my
approbation is your reward, or anything about beauty or bright eyes, or
anything in the very least like that. It's all odious and I wonder why
you--a man like you--should think it necessary to do it."
Quisanté looked startled; he had been leaning back in apparent
exhaustion, but now he sat up straight and prepared to speak, a
conciliatory smile on his lips.
"No, don't sit up, lean back. Don't talk, don't smile, don't be agreeable."
She had begun to laugh at herself by now, but the laughter did not stop
her. "You were ill, you were very ill, you looked almost dead, and you
battled with it splendidly, and beat it splendidly, and went on and won.
And then you must--Oh, why do you?"
"Why do I do what?" he asked, quietly enough now, with a new look of
puzzle and bewilderment in his eyes, although his set smile had not
disappeared.
"Why, go on as if there'd been nothing much really the matter, as if
you'd had the vapours or the flutters, or something women have, or used
to have when they were even sillier than they are." She laughed again,
adding, "Really I was expecting Dick Benyon to propose to cut your
stay-laces."
The Benyons were coming back; if she had more to say, there was no time
for it; yet she managed a whisper as she shook hands with him, her
gesture still forbidding him to rise. Her face, a little flushed with
colour, bent down towards his and her voice was eager as she whispered,
"Good-night. Be simple, be yourself; it's worth while."
Then courage failed and she hurried off with a confused nervous farewell
to her friends. Her breath came quick as she lay back in the brougham
and closed her eyes.
Quisanté was tired and ill; he was unusually quiet in his parting talk
with Lady Richard. Even she was sorry for him; and when pity entered
little Lady Richard's heart it drove out all other emotions however
strong, and routed all resolutions however well-founded.
"You look dead-beat, you do indeed," she said. She turned to her
husband. "Dick, Mr. Quisanté must come and spend a few quiet days with
us in the country. Something'll happen to him, if he doesn't."
Dick could hardly believe his ears, and was full of delighted gratitude;
hitherto Lady Richard had been resolute that their country house at
least should be sacred from Quisanté's feet. He took his wife's hand and
pressed it as he joyfully seconded her invitation. Some of Quisanté's
effusive politeness displayed itself again, but still he was subdued,
and Lady Richard, full of her impulse of compassion, escaped without
realising fully the enormity of the step into which it had tempted her.
CHAPTER IV.
HE'S COMING!
Dick Benyon was a man of plentiful ideas, but he found great difficulty
in conveying them to others and even in expressing them to himself.
Jimmy, his faithful disciple, could not help him here, and indeed was too
much ashamed of harbouring such things as ideas to be of any service as
an apostle. All the ideas were not Dick's own; in the case of the
Imperial League, for example, he merely floated on the top of the
flood-tide of opinion, and even the Crusade, his other and dearer
pre-occupation, was the fruit of the Dean of St. Neot's brain as much as
or even more than of his own. The Dean never got the credit of having
ideas at all, first because he did not look like it, being short, stout,
ruddy, and apparently very fond of his dinner, secondly because he never
talked of his ideas to women. Mrs. Baxter did not care about ideas and
possibly the Dean generalised rashly. More probably, perhaps, he had
contracted a prejudice against talking confidentially to women from
observing the ways of some of his brethren; he had dropped remarks which
favoured this explanation. Anyhow he lost not only the soil most fruitful
for propagation, but also the surest road to a reputation. Of the idea of
the Crusade he was particularly careful to talk to men only; women, he
felt sure, would tell him it was superb, and his wish was to be
confronted with its difficulties and its absurdities, to overcome this
initial opposition only with a struggle, and to enlist his antagonist as
a fellow-warrior; he had especial belief in the persuasiveness of
converts. Unluckily, however, as a rule only the first part of the
programme passed into fact; he got the absurdities and difficulties
pointed out freely enough, the conversions hung fire. Dick Benyon was
almost the sole instance of the triumphant carrying-out of the whole
scheme; but though Dick could believe and work, and could make Jimmy
believe and nearly make Jimmy work, he could not preach himself nor make
Jimmy preach in tones commanding enough to engage the respect and
attention of the world. Who could then? Dick had answered "Weston
Marchmont;" the Dean shook his head confidently but wistfully; he would
have liked but did not expect to find a convert there.
Weston Marchmont made, as might be expected, the Great Refusal, although
not in the impressive or striking manner which such a phrase may seem to
imply. Twisting his claret glass in his long thin fingers, he observed
with low-voiced suavity that in ecclesiastical matters, as doubtless in
most others, he was behind the times; he was a loyal Establishment man
and had every intention of remaining such, and for his own part he found
it possible to reconcile the ultimate postulates of faith with the
ultimate truths of science. As soon as ultimates came on the scene, the
Dean felt that the game was up; the Crusade depended on an appeal to
classes which must be reached, if they could be reached at all, by
something far short of ultimates. Ultimates were for the few; one reason,
among others, why Marchmont fondly affected them. Marchmont proceeded to
remark that in his doubtless out-of-date view the best thing was to
preserve the traditions and the traditional limits of Church work and
Church influence. He did not say in so many words that the Church was a
good servant but a bad master, yet Dick and the Dean gathered that this
was his opinion, and that he would look with apprehension on any movement
directed to bringing ecclesiastical pressure to bear on secular affairs.
In all this he assumed politely that the Crusade could succeed, but the
lift of his brows which accompanied the concession was very eloquent.
"Then," he ended apologetically, "there's the danger of vulgarity. One
puts up with that in politics, but I confess I shrink from it in
religion."
"What appeals to everybody is not necessarily vulgar," said the Dean.
"Not necessarily," Marchmont agreed, with the emphasis on the second
word. "But," he added, "it's almost of necessity untrue, and after all
religion has to do with truth." He was getting near his ultimates again.
There was a pause; then Marchmont laughed and said jokingly,
"You'll have to go to the Radicals, Dick. They're the dogmatic party
nowadays, and they'll be just as ready to manage your soul for you as
they are your property."
"That's just what I don't mean to do," said Dick obstinately. But he
looked a little uncomfortable. It was important to preserve the attitude
that fighting the Radicals was no part of the scheme of the Crusade.
Marchmont smiled at the Dean across the table.
"I love the Church, Mr. Dean," he said, "but I'm afraid of the churchmen."
"Much what I feel about politics and politicians."
"Then if churchmen are politicians too----?" Marchmont suggested; the
Dean's laughter admitted a verbal defeat. But when Marchmont had gone he
shook his head over him again, saying, "He'll not be great; he's much too
sane."
"He's too scrupulous," said Dick. The Dean protested with a smile. "I
mean too fastidious," Dick added, correcting himself.
"Yes, yes, too fastidious," agreed the Dean contentedly. "And when I said
sane perhaps I rather meant cautious, unimaginative, and cold." Both felt
the happier for the withdrawal of their hastily chosen epithets.
This conversation had occurred in the early days of Dick's acquaintance
with Alexander Quisanté, when, although already much taken with the man,
he had a clearer view of what he was than enthusiasm allowed later on.
Rejecting Marchmont, or rather acquiescing in Marchmont's refusal, on the
ground of his excessive caution, his want of imagination, and his
fastidiousness, he had hesitated to sound Quisanté in regard to the great
project. It seemed to him impossible to regard his new friend as an ideal
leader for this purpose; one reason is enough to indicate--the ideal
leader should be absolutely unselfish by nature. By nature Quisanté was
very far from that, and his circumstances were not such as to enable him
to overcome the bent of his disposition; whatever else he was or might
become, he would be self-seeking too, and it would be impossible ever to
make him steadily and deliberately forgetful of himself.
But as time went on, another way opened before Dick's eyes and was
cautiously and tentatively hinted at to his confidant, the Dean. The
Dean, having seen a little and heard much of Quisanté, was inclined to be
encouraging. There were in him possibilities not to be found in
Marchmont. He was not fastidious, he would not trouble himself or other
people about ultimates, above all he could be fired with imagination.
Once that was achieved, he would speak and seem as though he were all
that the ideal leader ought to be, as though inspiration filled him; he
would express what Dick could only feel and the Dean do no more than
adumbrate; nay, in time, as he grew zealous in the cause, his
self-interest and personal ambition would be conquered, or at least would
be so blended and fused with the nobility of the cause as to lose any
grossness or meanness which might be thought to characterise them in an
uncompounded condition. All this might be achieved if only the great idea
could be made to seem great enough and the potentialities which lay in
its realisation invested with enough pomp and dignity. After all was not
such a blend of things personal and things beyond and higher than the
personal as much as could reasonably be expected from human beings, and
adequate to the needs of a work-a-day world?
"I don't want to be a bishop, but I do mean to stick to my deanery
through thick and thin," said the Dean, smiling. Dick understood him to
mean that allowance must be made for the personal element, and that a man
might serve a cause very usefully without being prepared to go quite as
far as the stake, or even the workhouse, for it; if this were not so,
there would be less competition for places in State and Church.
Such great schemes for causing right ideas to prevail in things spiritual
and temporal and for placing the right men in the right positions to
ensure this important result are material here only so far as they
influence the career or illustrate the character of individuals. The
Crusade did not perhaps do as much towards altering the face of the
world, or even of this island, as it was intended to, but it had a
considerable, if temporary, effect on current politics, and it appeared
to Quisanté to be at once a fine conception and a notable opportunity;
between these two aspects he did not, as Dick Benyon had foreseen, draw
any very rigid line. To make the Church again a power with the masses;
this done, to persuade the masses to use their power under the leadership
of the Church; this done, to harmonise unimpaired liberty of conscience
with a whole-hearted devotion to truth, and to devote both to ends which
should unite the maximum of zeal for the Community with the minimum of
political innovation, were aims which, if they were nothing else, might
at least claim to be worthy to exercise the intellect of superior men and
to inspire the eloquence of orators. That a set of people on the other
side was professing to do the same things, with totally different and
utterly wrong notions of the results to be obtained, afforded the whet of
antagonism, and let in dialectic and partisanship as a seasoning to
relieve the high severity of the main topic. Quisanté's personal
relations with the Church had never been intimate; he was perhaps the
better able to lay hold of its romantic and picturesque aspect. The Dean,
for instance, was hampered and at times discouraged by a knowledge of
details. Dick Benyon had to struggle against the family point of view as
regarded the family livings. Quisanté came almost as a stranger, ready to
be impressed, to take what suited him, to form the desired opinion and no
other; if a legal metaphor may be allowed, to master what was in his
brief, to use that to the full, and to know nothing to the contrary. The
Empire was very well, but it was a crowded field; the new subject had
advantages all its own and especial allurements.
Yet Miss Quisanté laughed, as a man's relatives often will although the
rest of the world is unimpeachably grave. For any person engaged in
getting a complete view of Alexander Quisanté it was well to turn from
Dick Benyon to Aunt Maria. So May Gaston found when she took the old
woman at her word and went to see her, unaccompanied by Lady Attlebridge.
She listened awhile to her caustic talk and then charged her roundly with
not doing justice to her nephew.
"Sandro's caught you too, has he?" was her hostess's immediate retort.
"No, he hasn't caught me, as you call it, Miss Quisanté," said May,
smiling. "I dislike a great deal in him." She paused before adding,
"What's more, I've told him so."
"He'll be very pleased at that."
"He didn't seem to be."
"I didn't say he was pleased, I said he would be," remarked Aunt Maria
placidly. "No doubt you vexed him at the time, but when he's thought it
over, he'll be flattered at your showing so much interest in him."
"I shouldn't like him to take it like that," said May thoughtfully.
"It's the true way to take it, though."
"Well then, I suppose it is. Except that there's no reason why my
interest should flatter anybody." She determined on an offensive movement
against the sharp confident old lady. "All his faults are merely faults
of bringing up. You brought him up; why didn't you bring him up better?"
Miss Quisanté looked at her for several moments.
"I didn't bring him up well, that's true enough," she said. "But, my
dear, don't you run off with the idea that there's nothing wrong with
Sandro except his manners."
"That's exactly the idea I have about him," May persisted defiantly.
"Ah!" sighed Aunt Maria resignedly. "Probably you'll never know him well
enough to find out your mistake."
Warnings pique curiosity as often as they arouse prudence.
"I intend to know him much better if he'll let me," said May.
"Oh, he'll let you." The old lady's gaze was very intent; she had by now
made up her mind that this must be Sandro's Empress. Had she been
omnipotent, she would at that moment have decreed that Sandro should
never see his Empress again; she was quite clear that he and his Empress
would not be good for one another. "I begin to hear them talking about
him," she went on with a chuckle. "He's coming into fashion, he's to be
the new man for a while. You London people love a new man just as you do
a new craze. You're fine talkers too. I like your buzz. It's a great hum,
hum, buzz, buzz. It turns some men's heads, but it only sharpens others'
wits; it won't turn Sandro's head."
"I'm glad you allow him some virtues."
"Oh, if it's a virtue to look so straight forward to where you mean to
get that nothing will turn your head away from it."
"That's twisting your own words, Miss Quisanté. I don't think he's that
sort of man at all; he isn't the least your--your iron adventurer. He's
full of emotion, of feeling, of--well, almost of poetry. Oh, not always
good poetry, I know. But how funny that I should be defending him and you
attacking him; it would be much more natural the other way round."
"I don't see that. I know him better than you do. Now he's to champion
the Church--or some such nonsense! What's Sandro got to do with your
Church? What does he care about it?"
"He cared about his subject the other evening; you must admit that."
"Oh, his subject! Yes, he cares about it while it's his subject."
May laughed. "I want to take just one liberty, Miss Quisanté," she said.
"May I? I want to tell you that I think you're a great deal more than
half wrong about your nephew."
"Even if I am, I'm right enough for practical purposes with the other
part," said the obstinate old woman. She leant forward and spoke with a
sudden bitter emphasis. "It's not all outside, he's wrong inside too."
"It's too bad of you, oh, it really is," cried May indignantly. "You who
ought to stand up for him and be his greatest friend!"
"Oh, yes, I see! I've overshot my mark. I'm a blunderer."
"Your mark? What mark? Why do you want to tell me about him at all?"
"I don't," said Miss Quisanté, folding her hands in her lap and assuming
an air of resolute reticence. But her eyes dwelt now with an imperfectly
disguised kindness on the tall fair girl who pleaded for justice and saw
no justice in the answers that she got. But the more Aunt Maria inclined
to like May Gaston, the more determined was she not to palter with truth,
the more determined to have no hand in giving the girl a false idea of
Sandro. So far as lay in her power, Sandro's Empress should know the
whole truth about Sandro.
The buzz of London, to which Miss Quisanté referred as beginning to sound
her nephew's name, revealed to the ear three tolerably distinct notes.
There were the people who laughed and said the thing was no affair of
theirs; this section was of course the largest, embracing all the
naturally indifferent as well as the solid mass of the opposite political
party. There were the people who were angry at Dick Benyon's interference
and at his _protégé's_ impudence; in the ranks of these were most of
Dick's political comrades, together with their wives and daughters. Here
the resentment was at the idea that there was any vacancy, actual or
prospective, which could not be filled perfectly well without the
intrusion of such a person as Quisanté. Thirdly there was the small but
gradually growing group which inclined to think that there was something
in Dick's notions and a good deal in his friend's head. A reinforcement
came no doubt from the persons who were naturally prone to love the new
and took up Quisanté as a welcome change, as something odd, with a
flavour of the unknown and just a dash of the mystery-man about him.
The Quisanté-ites had undoubtedly something to say for themselves and
something to show for their faith. Handicapped as he was by his
sensational success at the Imperial League dinner, with its theatrical
and faintly suspicious climax, Quisanté had begun well in the House. He
broke away from his mentor's advice; Dick had been for more sensation,
for storming the House; Quisanté rejected the idea and made a quiet,
almost hesitating, entry on the scene. He displayed here a peculiarity
which soon came to be remarked in him; on public occasions and in regard
to public audiences he possessed a tact and a power of understanding the
feelings of his company which entirely and even conspicuously failed him
in private life. The House did not like being stormed, especially on the
strength of an outside reputation; he addressed it modestly, bringing
into play, however, resources with which he had not been credited--a
touch of humour and a pretty turn of sarcasm. He knew his facts too, and
disposed of contradictions with a Blue-book and a smile. The
hypercritical were not silenced; Marchmont still found the smile oily,
and his friends traced the humour to districts which they supposed to lie
somewhere east of the London Hospital; but they were bound to admit
sorrowfully that, although all this was true, it might not, under
democratic institutions, prove fatal to a career.
Dick Benyon was enthusiastic; he told his friend that he had scored
absolutely off his own bat and that there was and could be no more
question of help or obligation. He was rather surprised by a display of
feeling on Quisanté's part which seemed to indicate almost an excess of
gratitude; but Quisanté felt his foot on the ladder, and the wells of
emotion were full to overflowing. Dick escaped in considerable
embarrassment, telling himself that remarkable men could not be expected
to behave just like other men, like his sort of man, but wishing they
would. None the less he praised what he hardly liked, and the reputation
of being a good friend was added to Quisanté's credentials. Lastly, but
far from least in importance, a story went the rounds that a very great
veteran, who had taken a keen interest in Weston Marchmont, and
designated him for high place in a future not remote, had recently warned
him, in apparent jest indeed but with unmistakable significance, that it
would not do to take things too easily, or let a rival obtain too long a
start. There was nobody of whom the Statesman could be supposed to be
thinking, except the dark horse that Dick Benyon had brought into the
betting--Alexander Quisanté! Such predictions from such quarters have no
small power of self-verification; they predispose lesser men to a
fatalistic acquiescence which smoothes the way of the prophecy.
Marchmont, scorning the rival, was inclined to despise the dangers of the
contest, but his supineness may have been in part due to the occupation
of his mind by another interest. He had come to the conclusion that he
wanted May Gaston for his wife and that she would accept his proposal. A
few days before the Easter holidays began he betook himself to Lady
Attlebridge's with the intention of settling the matter there and then.
The purpose of his coming seemed to be divined; he was shown direct to
May's own room, and found her there alone. She had been reading a letter
and laid it down on a table by her; Marchmont could not help his eye
catching the large printed address at the head of the sheet of paper,
"Ashwood." Ashwood was Dick Benyon's country place. A moment later May
explained the letter.
"I've had a wail from Amy Benyon," she said. "She wants me to go to them
for Easter and comfort her. Look what she writes: "You must come, dear. I
must be helped through, I must have a refuge. How in the world I ever did
such a thing I don't know! But I did and I can't help it now. He's
coming! So you must come. We expect the Baxters and Mr. Morewood. But I
want _you_.""
"What has she done? Who's coming?" asked Marchmont.
"Mr. Quisanté."
He paused for a moment before he said, "You won't go, I suppose?"
"I must go if Amy wants me as much as that. Besides--well, perhaps it'll
be interesting."
A chill fell on Marchmont, and its influence spread to his companion.
Here at least he had hoped to be rid of Quisanté, to find a place where
the man could not be met, and people to whom the man was as a friend
impossible. May read his thoughts, but her purpose wavered. She liked him
very much; that hot rebellious fit, which made her impatient of his
limits, was not on her now. He had found her in a more reasonable normal
mood, when his advantages pleaded hard for him, and the limits seemed
figments of a disorderly transient fancy. Thus he had come happily, and
success had been in the mood to kiss his standards.
"I wonder you can endure the man in the same house with you," he said.
She made no answer except to smile, and he spoke no more of Quisanté. To
him it seemed that his enemy passed then and there from thought, as his
name disappeared from the conversation. But his own words had raised
difficulties and turned the smooth path rough. They had renewed something
of the rebellious fit and given fresh life to the disorderly fancies.
They had roused her ready apprehensive pride, her swift resentment at the
idea of having her friends or her associates chosen for her. She would
have said most sincerely then that Marchmont was far more to her in her
heart than Quisanté was or could be, but neither from Marchmont nor from
any man would she take orders to drop Quisanté. While he opened his tale
of love, her fingers played with the invitation to Ashwood and her eyes
rested on Lady Richard's despairing declaration of the inevitable--"He's
coming!"
He almost won her; his soft "Can you love me?" went very near her heart.
She wanted to answer "Yes" and felt sure that it would be in reality a
true response, and that happiness would wait on and reward the decisive
word. But she was held back by an unconquerable indecision, a refusal (as
it seemed) of her whole being to be committed to the pledge. She had not
resented the confidence of his wooing--she had given him some cause to be
confident; she pitied and even hated the distress into which her doubt
threw him. Yet she could do no more than say "I don't know yet." He moved
away from her.
"You'd better go away and leave me altogether," she said.
"I won't do that. I can't."
"I can say nothing else--I don't know yet. You must give me time."
"Ah, you mean 'yes'!" His voice grew assured again and joyful.
She weighed the words in which she answered him.
"No. If I meant yes, I'd say it. I wouldn't shilly-shally. I simply don't
know yet."
He left her and paced the length of the room, frowning. Her hesitation
puzzled him; he failed to trace its origin and fretted against a barrier
that he felt but could not see. She sat silent, looking at him in a
distressed fashion and restlessly fingering Lady Richard's invitation.
She was no less troubled than he and almost as puzzled; for the feeling
that held her back even while she wanted to go forward was vague,
formless, empty of anything definite enough to lay hold of and bring
forward as the plea that justified her wavering.
"I ought to say no, since I can't say yes. This isn't fair to you," she
murmured.
He protested that anything was better than no, and his protest was
manifestly eager and sincere; but a touch of resentment could not be kept
out of his voice. She should have a reason to give him, something he
could combat, disprove, or ridicule; she gave him no opening, he could
not answer an objection that she would not formulate. He pressed this on
her and she made no attempt to defend herself, merely repeating that she
could not say yes now.
"I've lost you, I suppose, and no doubt I shall be very sorry," she said.
At that he came up to her again.
"You haven't lost me and you never will," he said. "I'll come to you
again before long. I think you're strange to-day, not quite yourself, not
quite the old May. It's as if something had got between us. Well, I'll
wait till it gets out of the way again."
Not so much his words as his voice and his eyes told her of a love deeper
in him and stronger than she had given him credit for; he lived so much
in repression and exercised so careful a guard over any display of
feeling. She liked the repression no less than the feeling and was again
drawn towards him.
"I wish I could," she murmured. "Honestly, I wish I could."
He pressed her no more; if he had, she might possibly at last have given
a reluctant assent. That he would not have, even had it been in his power
to gain it.
"I'll come back--after the holidays," he said.
She looked up and met his glance.
"Yes, after the holidays," she repeated absently.
"You go to Ashwood?"
There was a pause before she answered. It came into her mind suddenly
that it would have been strange to go to Ashwood as Weston Marchmont's
promised wife. Why she could not quite tell; perhaps because such a
position would set her very much outside of all that was being thought
and talked of there, indeed in a quasi-antagonism to it. Anyhow the
position would make her feel quite differently towards it all.
"Yes," she answered at last, and mustered a laugh as she added, "I'm not
so particular as you, you know. And Amy wants me."
"I wish you always did what people want you to," said he, smiling.
Their parting was in this lighter vein, although on his side still tender
and on hers penitent. In both was a consciousness of not understanding,
of being somehow apart, of an inexplicable difficulty in taking one
another's point of view. The solution of sympathy, the break that May had
talked of, made itself apparent again. In spite of self-reproaches, her
strongest feeling, when she was left alone, was of joy that her freedom
still was hers.
CHAPTER V.
WHIMSY-WHAMSIES.
At Ashwood the sun was sinking after a bright April afternoon. Mrs.
Baxter sat in a chair on the lawn and discoursed wisdom to May Gaston and
Morewood. The rest of the party had gone for a walk to the top of what
Lady Richard called "Duty Hill"; it was the excursion obligatory on all
guests.
"The real reason," remarked Mrs. Baxter, who was making a garment--she
was under spiritual contract to make two a month--"why the Dean hasn't
risen higher is because he always has some whimsy-whamsy in his head."
"What are they? I never have 'em," said Morewood, relighting his pipe.
"You never have anything else," said Mrs. Baxter in a brief but
sufficient aside. "And, my dear," she continued to May, "what you want in
a bishop is reliability."
"The only thing I want in a bishop is absence," grunted Morewood.
"Reliability?" murmured May, half assenting, half questioning.
"Yes, my dear," said Mrs. Baxter, biting her thread. "Reliability. I
shall finish this petticoat to-morrow unless I have to drive with Lady
Richard. You don't want him to be original, or to do much, except his
confirmations and so on, of course; but you do want to be sure that he
won't fly out at something or somebody. Dan got a reputation for not
being quite reliable. I don't know how, because I haven't time to go into
his notions. But there it was. Somebody told the Prime Minister and he
crossed out Dan's name and put in John Wentworth's."
Morewood yawned obtrusively. "What a shame!" May murmured at random.
"It's just the same with a husband," Mrs. Baxter observed.
"Only it's rather more difficult to scratch out his name and put in John
Wentworth's," Morewood suggested.
May laughed. "But anyhow the Dean's a good husband, isn't he, Mrs.
Baxter?"
"Oh, yes, my dear. The same men very seldom fly out over notions and over
women."
Morewood raised himself to a sitting posture and observed solemnly,
"The whole history of science, art, and literature contradicts that last
observation."
Mrs. Baxter looked at him for a brief moment and went on with the
petticoat. May interpreted her look.
"So much the worse for the whole history!" she laughed. But a moment
later she went on, "I think I rather like whimsy-whamsies, though."
"I should think you did," said Morewood.
"A man ought to have a few," May suggested.
"A sort of trimming to the leg of mutton? Only take care the mutton's
there!"
"Oh, not the mustard without the beef!" cried May.
"Now there's Canon Grinling," said Mrs. Baxter. "That's the man I
admire."
"Pray tell us about him," urged Morewood.
"He's content to preach in his turn and work his parish."
"How much better than working his head!"
"And he'll be a bishop--at least."
"Is there anything worse?" growled Morewood disconsolately.
Mrs. Baxter never became angry with him; she turned a fresh side of the
petticoat, smiled sedately, and went on with her work.
"We had whimsy-whamsies last night, hadn't we?" asked May.
"I went to bed," said Morewood.
"But Jenkins in the next parish, who has eight children, must take up
with the Salvation Army. So there's an end of him," continued Mrs.
Baxter. "Not that I pity him--only her."
"They talked till two. I sat up, looking plainer and plainer every
minute."
"Who was talking?"
"Oh, the Dean and Dick." She paused and added, "And later on Mr.
Quisanté."
"Quisanté grows more and more anomalous every day. It's monstrous of a
man to defy one's power of judgment as he does."
"Does he defy yours?"
"Absolutely. And I hate it."
"I rather like it. You know so well what most people are like in
half-an-hour."
"I'm splendidly forward," remarked Mrs. Baxter, "This isn't an April one.
I've done them, and this is my first May."
It was impossible not to applaud and sympathise, for it was no later than
the 27th of April. The friendly task performed, Morewood went on,
"You're friends again, aren't you?"
"Well, partly. He spoke to me last night for almost the first time."
"What was the quarrel?"
"I told him his manners were bad; and he proved how right I was by
getting into a temper." She was silent a moment. Morewood saw her smile
and then frown in apparent vexation. Then she looked down at him suddenly
and said, "But then--if you'd heard him last night!"
"There it is again!" said Morewood. "That's what annoys me so. In common
with most of mankind, I like to be able to label a man and put him in his
compartment."
"That's just what you can't do with Mr. Quisanté."
A loud merry boyish laugh sounded from the shrubbery behind him. Then
Lady Richard came out, attended by young Fred Wentworth, son of that John
whose name had been put in when the Dean's was scratched out owing to a
suspicion of whimsy-whamsies. Fred was a lively fellow, whose trinity of
occupations consisted of shooting, polo, and flirting; they are set down
in his own order of merit; by profession he was a soldier, and just now
he adored Lady Richard hopelessly; he was tall, handsome, and no more
steady than the sons of ordinary men.
"We gave them the slip beautifully, didn't we?" he was asking in
exultation. "Think they're still on the top of the hill, jawing, Lady
Richard?"
"I don't mind how long they stay there," she answered, as she came across
to the group on the lawn, a dainty youthful little figure, in her white
frock and straw hat. "And how have you three been amusing yourselves?"
she inquired. "I declare my head aches, Fred," she complained. "Now is
the Church to swallow the State, or the other way round, or are they to
swallow one another, or what?"
"Such a fine day too!" observed Mrs. Baxter. Morewood burst into a laugh.
"To waste it on whimsy-whamsies!" cried May, joining in his mirth.
She looked so handsome in her merriment that Fred's eyes dwelt on her for
a moment, a new notion showing in their pleasant expanse of blue
simplicity. But loyalty's the thing--and a pleasant thing too when Lady
Richard stood for it. Besides May Gaston was rather serious as a rule and
given to asking questions; she might be able to flirt though; she just
might--if there had happened to be anybody for her to flirt with; he
pitied her a little because there was not.
"Mrs. Baxter," said Morewood suddenly, "have you ever thought what would
happen if you stopped making petticoats?" She did not answer. "It
illustrates," he went on, "the absurd importance we attach to ourselves.
The race would get itself clothed somehow, even as Church and State will
go on, although they fail to settle that question of the swallowing on
the top of the hill."
May alone was listening. "Don't you think it all makes any difference?"
she asked in a low voice.
"Not enough to stop enjoying one's self about, or to take any risks for."
"I disbelieve you with my whole heart and soul; and, what's more, you
don't believe yourself," she said. "To take risks is what we were given
life for, I believe."
"Whimsy-whamsies!" he jeered, jerking his thumb warningly towards Mrs.
Baxter.
To May it seemed curious how an utter absence of speculation and an
honest engrossment in everyday cares, hopes, and duties appeared to
produce an attitude of mind similar in many ways to that caused by an
extensive survey of thought and a careful detachment of spirit from the
pursuits of the vulgar. The expression was different; the man who was now
so much in her thoughts, Weston Marchmont, would not have denounced
whimsy-whamsies. He would have claimed an open mind and protested that he
was ready to entertain every notion on its merits. But temper and taste
led to the same end as ignorance and simplicity; the philosopher and the
housewife met on a common ground of disapproval and disdain. Mrs. Baxter
kept her house and made petticoats. Marchmont read his books, mixed with
his world, and did his share in his obvious duty of governing the
country. Misty dreams, great cloudy visions, vague ideals, were forsworn
of both; they were all whimsy-whamsies, the hardly excusable occupation
of an idle day in the country. Was such a coincidence of opinion
conclusive? Perhaps. But then, as she had hinted to Morewood, what of
life? Was it not conclusive as to the merits of that also? Suddenly Fred
Wentworth's voice broke across her meditation.
"If you asked me what I wanted," he said in a tone of great seriousness,
"upon my honour I don't know what I should say, except another pony." He
paused and added, "A real good 'un, you know, Lady Richard."
You might trust in God in an almost Quietist fashion (nothing less was at
the bottom of Mrs. Baxter's homely serenity), you might exhaust
philosophy and the researches of the wise, or you might merely be in
excellent health and spirits. Any of these three seemed enough to exclude
that painful reaching out to dim unlikely possibilities which must in her
mind henceforward be nicknamed whimsy-whamsies. But to May's temper the
question about life came up again. She swayed between the opposing sides,
as she had swayed between yes and no when Marchmont challenged her with
his love.
Lady Richard's verdict about Quisanté--she gave it with an air of
laboured reasonableness--was that he proved worse on the whole than even
she had anticipated. This pessimistic view was due in part to the
constant and wearing difficulty of getting Fred Wentworth to be civil to
him; yet May Gaston was half-inclined to fall in with it. The attitude of
offence which he had at first maintained towards her was marked by
peevishness, not by dignity, and when it was relaxed his old excessive
politeness revived in full force. He had few 'moments' either; and the
one reported to her with enthusiasm by Dick Benyon took place on Duty
Hill while she was gossiping on the lawn. Disappointed in the
half-conscious anticipation which had brought her to Ashwood, she began
to veer towards the obvious, towards safety, and towards Weston
Marchmont. He had allowed himself one letter, not urging her, but very
gracefully and feelingly expressed. As she walked through the village,
the telegraph-office tempted her; her life could be settled for sixpence,
and there would be no need of further thought or trouble. She was again
held back by a rather impalpable influence, by a vague unwillingness to
cut herself off (as she would by such a step) from the mental stir which,
beneath the apparent quiet of country-house life, permeated Ashwood. The
stir was there, though it defied definition; it was not due to Dick or
the Dean, though they shared in it; it was the mark of Quisanté's
presence, the atmosphere he carried with him. She recognised this with a
mixture of feelings; she was ashamed to dwell on his small faults in face
of such a thing; she was afraid to find how strong his attraction grew in
spite of the intolerable drawbacks. Wavering again, she could not decide
whether his faults were fatal defects or trifling foibles.
She saw that the Dean shared her doubts and her puzzle. He had a little
trick, an involuntary and unconscious shake of the head which indicated,
as her study of it told her, not a mere difference of opinion, but a sort
of moral distaste for what was said; it reminded her of a dog shaking his
coat to get rid of a splash of dirty water. She came to watch for it when
Alexander Quisanté was talking, and to find that it agreed wonderfully
well with the invisible movements of her own mind; it came when the man
was petty, or facetious on untimely occasions, or when he betrayed
blindness to the finer shades of right and wrong. But for all this the
Dean did not give up Quisanté; for all this he and Dick Benyon clung to
their scheme and to the man who was to carry it out. In her urgent desire
for guidance she took the Dean for a walk and tried to draw out his
innermost opinions. He showed some surprise at her interest.
"He's the last man I should have thought you'd care to know about, Lady
May," he said.
"That can be only because you think me stupid," she retorted, smiling.
"No! But I thought you'd be stopped _in limine_--on the threshold, you
know."
"I see the threshold; and, yes, I don't like it. But tell me about the
house too."
"I've not seen it all," smiled the Dean. "Well, to drop our metaphor, I
think Mr. Quisanté has a wonderfully acute intellect."
"Oh, yes, yes."
"And hardly a wonderfully, but a rather noticeably, blunt conscience.
Many men have, you'll say, I know. But most of the men we meet have
substitutes."
"Substitutes for conscience?" May laughed reprovingly at her companion.
"Taste, tradition, the rules of society, what young men call 'good
form.'"
"Ah, yes. And he hasn't?"
"His bringing up hasn't given them to him. He might learn them."
"Who from?"
"One would have hoped from our host, but I see no signs of it." The Dean
paused, shaking his head "A woman might teach him." He paused again
before adding with emphasis, "But I should be very sorry for her."
"Why?" The brief question was asked with averted eyes.
"Because the only woman who could do it must be the sort of woman
who--whose teeth would be set on edge by him every day till the
process--the quite uncertain process--was complete."
"Yes, she'd have to be that," murmured May Gaston.
"On the whole I think she'd have an unhappy life, and very likely fail.
But I also think that it would be the only way." His round face broke
again into its cheerful smile. "We shall have to make the best of him as
he is, Lady May," he ended. "Heaven forbid that I should encourage any
woman to the task!"
"I certainly don't think you seem likely to," she said with a laugh. "It
seems to come to this: his manners are bad and his morals are worse."
"Yes, I think so."
"But, as Dick Benyon would say, so were Napoleon's."
"Exactly, and, as we know, Napoleon's wife was not to be envied."
May Gaston was silent for a moment; then she said meditatively, "Oh,
don't you think so?", and fell again into a long silence. The Dean did
not break it; his thoughts had wandered from the hypothetical lady who
was to redeem Quisanté to the realities of the great Crusade.
There seemed to May something a little inhuman in the Dean's attitude,
and indeed in the way in which everybody at Ashwood regarded Quisanté.
Not even Dick Benyon was altogether free from this reproach, in spite of
his enthusiasm and his resulting blindness to Quisanté's lesser, but not
less galling, faults. Not even to Dick was he a real friend; none of them
took him or offered to take him into their inner lives, or allowed him to
share their deepest sympathies. Perhaps this was only to treat him as he
deserved to be treated; if he asked nothing but a mutual usefulness and
accommodation, that they should use him and he should rise by serving
them, neither party was deceived and neither had any cause to complain.
But if after all the man was like most men, if his chilly childhood and
his lonely youth had left him with any desire for unreserved
companionship, for true friendship, or for love, then to acquiesce in his
bad manners and his worse morals, to be content (as the Dean said) to
make the best of him--out of him would have been a more sincere form of
expression--as he was, seemed in some sort cruelty; it was like growing
rich out of the skill of your craftsmen and yet taking no interest in
their happiness or welfare. It was to use him only as a means, and to be
content in turn to be to him only a means; such a relative position
excluded true human intercourse, and, it appeared to May, must intensify
the faults from which it arose. Even here, in this house, Quisanté was
almost a stranger; the rest were easy with one another, their presence
was natural and came of itself; he alone was there for a purpose, came
from outside, and required to be accounted for. If the talk with the Dean
confirmed apprehensions already existing, on the other hand it raised a
new force of sympathy and a fresh impulse to kindness. But the sympathy
and the apprehensions could make no treaty; fierce war waged between
them.
That night the turn of events served Quisanté. He seemed ill and tired,
yet he had flashes of brilliancy. Again it was made plain that, all said
and done, his was the master mind there; even Lady Richard had to listen
and Fred Wentworth to wonder unwillingly where the fellow got his
notions. After dinner he talked to them, and they gave him all their ears
until he chose to cease and sank back wearied in his chair. But then came
the contrast. The Dean went to the library, Lady Richard strolled out of
doors with Fred, Mrs. Baxter withdrew into seclusion with a novel and a
petticoat, Dick Benyon asked May to walk in the garden with him, and when
she refused went off to play billiards with Morewood. May had pleaded
letters to write and sat down to the task. The man who a little while ago
had been the centre of attention was left alone. He wandered about idly
for a few moments, then dropped into a chair, seeming too tired to read,
looking fretful, listless, solitary and sad. She watched him furtively
for some time from behind the tall sides of the old-fashioned escritoire;
he sat very still, stretched out, frowning, pale. Suddenly she rose and
crossed the room.
"It's too much trouble to write letters," she said. "Are you inclined for
a stroll, Mr. Quisanté?"
He sprang up, a sudden gleam darting into his eyes. She was afraid he
would make some ornate speech, but perhaps he was startled into
simplicity, perhaps only at a loss; he stammered out no more than
"Thanks, very much," and followed her through the doorway on to the
gravel-walk. For a little while she did not speak, then she said,
"It's good of you to be friends with me again. I was very impertinent
that night after your speech. I don't know what made me do it."
He did not answer, and she turned to find his eyes fixed intently on her
face.
"We are friends again, aren't we?" she asked rather nervously; she knew
that she risked a renewal of the flirtation, and if it were again what it
had been her friendship could scarcely survive the trial. "I shouldn't
have said it," she went on, "if I hadn't--I mean, if your speech hadn't
seemed so great to me. But you forgive me, don't you?"
"Oh yes, Lady May. I know pretty well what you think of me." His lips
shut obstinately for a moment. "But I shall go my way and do my work all
the same--good manners or bad, you know."
"Those are very bad ones," she said, with a little laugh. Then she grew
grave and went on imploringly, "Don't take it like that. You talk as if
we--I don't mean myself, I mean all of us--were enemies, people you had
to fight and beat. Don't think of us like that. We want to be your
friends, indeed we do."
"For whom are you speaking?" he asked in a low hard voice.
She glanced at him. Had he divined the thought which the Dean's talk had
put into her head? Did he feel himself a mere tool, always an outsider,
in the end friendless? If he discerned this truth, no words of hers could
throw his keen-scented mind off the track. She fell back on simple
honesty, on the strength of a personal assurance and a personal appeal.
"At any rate I speak for myself," she said. "I can answer for myself. I
want to be friends."
"In spite of my manners?" He was bitter and defiant still.
"They grow worse every minute; and your morals are no better, I'm told."
"I daresay not," said Quisanté with a short laugh.
"Oh, say you won't be friends, if you don't want to! Be simple. There, I
say it again. Be simple."
Lady Richard's merry laugh rang through the garden, and a brusque "Damn
it!" of Morewood's floated out from the open window of the billiard-room.
There was an odd contrast to this cheerful levity in the man's pale drawn
face as he looked into May Gaston's eyes.
"Do you really mean what you say?" he asked. "Or are you only trying to
be kind, to put me at my ease?"
"It's nobody's fault but your own that you're not always at your ease,"
she replied. The rest she let pass; when she asked him to walk with her
she had only been trying to be kind, and she had been fearful of what her
kindness might entail on her. But things went well; he was not flirting
and he was not acting; his manners, if still bad, were just now at least
not borrowed, they were home-grown.
"I am at my ease," he told her. "At least, I was till----" He hesitated,
and then went on slowly, "Don't you suppose I've been thinking about what
you said?"
"I hope not; it wasn't worth it."
"It was. But how can I change?" His voice had a touch of despair as well
as of defiance. "I don't see what you mean; I don't feel what you mean.
Yes, and you talk of morals too. Well, don't I know that every now and
then I--I don't see those either?" He paused. "A man must get on as well
as he can with what he's got," he resumed. "If he's only got one eye, he
must learn to be sharper than other men in looking round."
They walked on in silence for some way. His pride and his recognition of
his defects, his defiance and his pleading for himself, combined to touch
her heart, and she could not at the moment speak to him more about them.
And to find all that so near the surface, so eager for utterance, ready
to break out at the least encouragement, at the first sign of sympathy!
For it had not come home to her yet that another might have spoken to him
as she had, but found no response and opened the gates to no confidence;
she had not guessed what Aunt Maria had about the Empress among women.
"You're ill too," she said.
"No, not for me," he answered. "I'm pretty well for me."
"Are you never really well?"
"My body's not much better than the other things. But I must use that
too, as long as it'll last." There was no appeal for pity in his voice;
defiance was still uppermost. May felt that she must not let him see that
she pitied him, either for his bad body, or his bad manners, or his bad
morals, or his want of friends. He thought he had as much to give as to
receive. She smiled for a moment. But swift came the question--Was he
wrong? But whether he were in fact right or wrong, it was harder to deal
with him on the basis of this equality than to stoop to him in the mere
friendliness of compassion. The compassion touched him only, to accept
the equality was to make admissions about herself.
He was very silent and quiet; this might be due to illness or fatigue.
But he was also curiously free from tricks, simple, not exhibiting
himself. These were the signs of one of his moments; but what brought
about a moment now? A moment needed a great subject, a spur to his
imagination, an appeal to his deep emotions, a theme, an ideal. The
moments had not seemed to May things that would enter into or have any
concern with private life and intimate talks; they belonged to Dick
Benyon's dark horse, not to the mere man Alexander Quisanté. Or had she a
little misunderstood the mere man? The thought crossed her mind that,
even if she adopted this conclusion and contrived to come to a better
understanding of him, it would be impossible to make the rest of the
world, of the world in which she lived and to which she clung, see
anything of what she saw. They would laugh if her new position were a
passing whim; they would be scornful and angry if it were anything more.
Suddenly Quisanté spoke. What he said was not free from consciousness of
self, from that perpetual presence of self to self which is common enough
in men of great ability and ambition, and yet never ceases to be a flaw;
but he said it soberly enough; there were no flourishes.
"You can't be half-friends with me," he said. "I must be taken as I am,
good and bad. You must let me alone, or take me for better for worse."
May smiled at the phrase he had happened on and its familiar
associations--surely so out of place here. But she followed his meaning
and appreciated his seriousness. She could answer him neither by an only
half-sincere assurance that she was ready to be entire friends, nor yet
by a joking evasion of his point.
"Yes, I see: I expect that is so," she said in a troubled voice; it was
so very hard to take him for worse, and it was rather hard to resolve to
make no effort at taking him for better. She forced a laugh, as she said,
"I'll think about it, Mr. Quisanté."
As she spoke, she raised her eyes to his; a low, hardly audible
exclamation escaped her lips before she was conscious of it. If ever a
man spoke plainly without words what was in his soul, Quisanté spoke it
then. She could not miss the meaning of his eyes; all unprepared as she
was, it came home to her in a minute with a shock of wonder that forbade
either pain or pleasure and seemed to leave her numb. Now she saw how
truly she, no less than the others, had treated him as an outsider, as a
tool, as something to be used, not as one of their own world. For she had
never thought of his falling in love with her, and had never considered
him in that point of view at all. Yet he had, and here lay the reason why
he flirted no more, and why he would have her sympathy only on even
terms. Here also, it seemed, was the reason why his tricks were
forgotten, why he was simple and direct; here was the incitement to
imagination, the ideal, the passion that had power to fire and purge his
soul.
"We must go in," she whispered in a shaking voice. "We must go in, Mr.
Quisanté."
CHAPTER VI.
ON DUTY HILL.
Another week had gone by, and, although nothing very palpable had
happened, there was a sort of vague scare in the house-party. It touched
everybody, affecting them in different ways according to their characters,
but raising in all an indignant protest against a fact hardly credible
and a danger scarcely to be named. Not even Mrs. Baxter, entrenched in
placidity and petticoats, quite escaped its influence; even Morewood's
cynical humour hesitated to play on a situation so unexpected, possibly
so serious. Lady Richard's alarm was the most outspoken, and her dismay
the most clamorous; yet perhaps in Dick Benyon himself was the strongest
fear. For if that did happen which seemed to be happening beneath the
incredulous gaze of their eyes, who but he was responsible, to whose
account save his could the result be laid? He had brought the man into
the circle, into the house, into the knowledge of his friends; but for
him Quisanté might have been carving a career far away, or have given up
any idea of one at all.
More than this, Dick, seeking approval and sympathy, had looked round for
open and intelligent souls who would share his interest, his hopes, and
his enthusiasm, and on no soul had he spent more pains or built higher
anticipations than May Gaston's. She was to sympathise, to share the
hopes and to understand the enthusiasm. Had he not asked her to dinner,
had he not brought her to the Imperial League banquet, had he not incited
Lady Richard to have her at Ashwood? And now she spread this scare
through the house; she outran the limits--all the reasonable limits--of
interest, she did far more than ever he had asked of her, she cast
reflections on his judgment by pushing it to extremes whither it had
never been meant to stretch. She had been bidden to watch Alexander
Quisanté, to admire his great moments, to see a future for him, and to
applaud the discerning eye which had seen that future first. But who had
bidden her make a friend of the man, take him into the inner circle,
treat him as one who belonged to the group of her intimates, to the
company of her equals and of those with whom she had grown up? Almost
passionately Dick disclaimed the responsibility for this; with no less
heat his wife forced it on him; relentlessly the course of events seemed
to charge him with it.
What would happen he did not know; none of them at Ashwood professed to
know; they refused to forecast the worst. But what had actually happened
was that Quisanté was undoubtedly in love with May Gaston, and that May
Gaston was no less certainly wrapped up in Quisanté. The difference of
terms was fondly clung to; and indeed she showed no signs of love as love
is generally understood; she displayed only an open preference for his
society and an engrossed interest in him. It was bad enough; who could
tell when it might become worse? "I will buy with you, sell with you,
talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with
you, drink with you, nor pray with you." Allowing for difference of times
and customs, that had been the attitude of all towards Quisanté; a
caste-feeling, almost a race-feeling, dictated it and kept it alive and
strong under all superficial alliance and outward friendliness. But May
had seen the barrier only to throw it down in a passion of scorn for its
narrowness and an impulse of indignation at its cruelty. If she had gone
so far, he was bold who dared to say that she would not go farther, or
would set a limit to her advance on the path that the rest of them had
never trodden.
"At any rate it shan't happen here," said Lady Richard. "I should never
be able to look her mother in the face again."
"It won't happen anywhere," Dick protested. "But you can't turn him out,
you know."
"I can't unless I absolutely literally do. He won't see that he isn't
wanted."
"No; and he may be excused if he thinks he is--by May Gaston at all
events."
The subject was one to be discussed between husbands and wives, Dick and
Lady Richard, Mrs. Baxter and the Dean, rather than in any more public
fashion, but the unexpressed thought pervaded every conversation, and was
strongest when the presence of the persons concerned forbade even
indirect reference. Once or twice Morewood broke into open comment to
Lady Richard; he puzzled her rather, and did not console her at all.
"I know why you object and how silly your grounds are," he said. "It's
snobbery in you, you know. Now in me it's good sound sense. Because in
the first place, if I were ten years younger, and ten times richer, and
rather more of a man, I should like to marry her myself; and in the
second place I'm not sure Quisanté hasn't forged, or isn't about to
forge, a cheque for a million."
"Don't talk about it," shuddered little Lady Richard. "She can't care for
him, she can't, you know."
"Certainly not, in the sentimental sense that you women attach to that
very weak form of expression."
"And I'm sure there's nothing else to tempt her."
"You'll be laying down what does and doesn't tempt me next."
"I've known her since she was a child."
"There's nothing that produces so many false judgments of people."
Lady Richard was far too prostrate to accept any challenge.
"You do hate it as much as I do, don't you?" she implored.
"Quite," said he with restrained intensity. "But if you ask me, I think
she'll do it."
A pause followed. "Fred Wentworth must have been waiting ever so long for
me," Lady Richard murmured apologetically, though an apology to Morewood
could not soothe Fred. Her thoughts were busy, and a resolve was forming
in her mind. "I shall ask Mrs. Baxter to speak to her," she announced at
last.
"That'll be amusing if it's nothing else. I should like to be there."
Mrs. Baxter was by no means unwilling to help. She was mother to a large
family and had seen all her children creditably married; such matters lay
well within the sphere of legitimate feminine activity as she conceived
it. Of course the Dean told her she had better leave the thing alone, but
it was evident that this was no more than a disclaimer of responsibility
in case her efforts did more harm than good.
Mrs. Baxter advanced on approved and traditional lines. She slid into the
special topic from a general survey of matrimonial desirability; May did
not shy, but seemed ready to listen. Mrs. Baxter ignored the possibility
of any serious purpose on May's side and pointed out with motherly
gentleness that her impulsive interest in Quisanté might possibly be
misunderstood by him and give rise to an idea absolutely remote from any
which it was May's intention to arouse. Then she would give pain;
wouldn't it be better gradually, not roughly or rudely but by slow
degrees, to diminish the time she spent with Quisanté and the attention
she bestowed on him? Mrs. Baxter's remonstrance, if somewhat
conventional, yet was artistic in its way.
But May Gaston laughed; it was all very familiar, sounded very old, and
was ludicrously wide of the mark. She had not been careless, she had not
suffered from the dangerous stupidity of ultra-maidenly blindness, she
knew quite well how Quisanté felt. Accordingly she would not acquiesce in
Mrs. Baxter's diplomatic ignoring of the only material point--how she
felt herself. Of course if all Mrs. Baxter meant to convey was her own
disapproval of the idea,--well, she conveyed so much. But then nobody
needed to be told of that; it was quite obvious and it was not important;
it was an insignificant atom in the great inevitable mass of disapproval
which any marked liking for Quisanté (May shrank from even thinking of
stronger terms) must arouse. She had far too much understanding of the
disapproval and far too much sympathy with it to underrate the probable
extent and depth of it; to a half of herself she was with it, heart and
soul; to a half of herself the impulse that drove her towards Quisanté
was something hardly rational and wholly repulsive. What purpose, then,
did Mrs. Baxter's traditional motherliness serve?
There was one person with whom she wished to talk, who might, she
thought, help her to understand herself and thus to guide her steps. For
every day it became more and more obvious that the matter would have to
be faced and ended one way or the other. Quisanté was not patient, and he
would not be dealt with by way of favour. And she herself was in a
turmoil and a contradiction of feeling which she summed up antithetically
by declaring that she disliked him more every hour he was there and
missed him more every hour he was not; or, to adopt the Dean's metaphor,
his presence set her teeth on edge and his absence made her feel as if
she had nothing to eat. Morewood might help her; he would at least
understand something of how she felt, if she could summon up courage to
talk to him; they were old friends.
One afternoon Quisanté had been sitting with them on the lawn and, going
off to walk with Dick, left them alone together. Quisanté had not been in
a happy vein; he had been trying to be light and flippant, and gossiping
about people; here, where good taste makes the whole difference between
what is acceptable and what is odious, was not the field for him.
Morewood had growled and May had flinched several times. She sat looking
after Quisanté with troubled puzzled eyes.
"How funnily people are mixed!" she murmured, more to herself than her
companion. Then she turned to him and said with a laugh, "How you hate
him, don't you?"
"By all the nature of things you ought to hate him much more."
"Yes," she agreed. "But do you think that's the only way to look at
people, any more than it is at books? You like or dislike a novel,
perhaps; but you don't like or dislike--oh, what shall I say? Gibbon's
Roman Empire. There you admire or don't admire; or rather you study or
neglect; because, if you study, you must admire. Don't think me learned;
it's only an illustration."
"Gibbon's a duty," said Morewood, "but I'm not clear that Alexander
Quisanté is."
"Oh, no; exactly the opposite; for me at least."
"Is he then a curriculum?"
"He's partly a curriculum, and partly--I don't know--a taste for strong
drink perhaps." She laughed reluctantly, adding, "I'm being absurd, I
know."
"In talk or in conduct?"
"Both, Mr. Morewood. I can only see him in metaphors. I once thought of
him as a mountain range; that's fine-sounding and dignified, isn't it?
But now I'm humbler in my fancies; I think of him as a forest--as the
bush, you know, full of wretched underwood that you keep tumbling over,
but with splendid trees (I don't know whether there are in the bush,
really) and every now and then a beautiful open space or a stately
vista."
"From all this riot of your fancy," said Morewood grimly, "one only thing
emerges quite plainly."
"Does even one thing?"
"Yes. That you think about Quisanté a mighty lot."
"Oh, yes. Of course I do, a mighty lot," she admitted, laughing. "But you
aren't very much more useful than Mrs. Baxter, who told me that my
innocent heedlessness might give Mr. Quisanté pain. I oughtn't to have
told you that, but it was rather funny. I'm sure she's said it to all the
Baxter girls in turn, and about all the girls that all the Baxter boys
were ever in love with."
"Possibly Mrs. Baxter only perceives the wretched underwood."
"Inevitably," said May.
"For heaven's sake don't drift into thinking that you're the only person
who can understand him. Once think that about anybody and you're his
slave."
"Perhaps I'm the only person who takes the trouble. I don't claim genius,
only diligence."
"Well, you're very diligent," Morewood grunted.
She sat looking straight in front of her for a few moments in silence,
while Morewood admired the curve of her chin and the moulding of her
throat.
"I feel," she said in a low voice and slowly, "as if I must see what
becomes of him and as if it ought to be seen at close quarters."
Then Morewood spoke with deliberate plainness.
"You know better than I do that he's not of your class; I mean in
himself, not merely where he happens to come from. And for my part I'm
not sure that he's an honest man, and I don't think he's a high-minded
one."
"Do you believe people are bound to be always just what they are now?"
she asked.
"Thinking you can improve them is the one thing more dangerous to
yourself than thinking you've a special gift for understanding them. To
be quite plain, both generally end in love-affairs and, what's more,
unhappy love-affairs."
"Oh, I'm not in love with Mr. Quisanté. You're going back to your narrow
loving-hating theory."
"Hum. I'm inclined to think that nature shares my narrowness."
If May got small comfort from this conversation, Morewood got less, and
the rest of the party, judging from what he let drop about his
impressions of May's state of mind, none at all. Lady Richard was of
opinion that a crisis approached and re-echoed her cry, "Not here
anyhow!" But Quisanté's demeanour at once confirmed her fears and ignored
her protest. He had many faults and weaknesses, but he was not the man to
shrink from a big stake and a great throw. His confidence in his powers
was the higher owing to his blindness to his defects. May Gaston had
indeed opened his eyes to some degree, but here again, as she showed him
continued favour, he found good excuse for dwelling on the interest which
inspired rather than on the frankness which characterised her utterance.
She had bidden him be himself; then to her that was a thing worth being.
As he believed himself able to conquer all external obstacles in his
path, so he vaguely supposed that he could overcome and obliterate
anything there might be wrong in himself, or at any rate that he could so
outweigh it by a more prodigal display of his gifts as to reduce it to
utter insignificance; try as he might to see him self as she saw him, he
could not fully understand the gravity of her objections. And anyhow,
grave as she thought them, she was his friend; at the cost of defying,
perhaps of losing, her friends, she elected to be his friend.
To the appeal of this generosity his emotions responded passionately; now
he worshipped his Empress among women for more than her grace, her
stateliness, or her beauty; he loved her for her courage and her loyalty.
There seemed nothing that he would not do for her; it did not, however,
occur to him that perhaps the one thing he could do for her was to leave
her. But short of this self-sacrifice--and to that even he might have
risen had anyone pointed him the way--he was in just that state of
exalted feeling which made him at his best, cured him of his tricks for
the time being, and gave him the simplicity whose absence marred his
ordinary hours. He always rose to the occasion, Dick Benyon maintained;
and to this great occasion he came marvellously near to rising. This is
not to say that he was altogether in the temper of a hero of romance. He
loved the lady, but he loved the victory too, the report of it, the
_éclat_, the talk it would make.
The tendency of events might seem to justify his growing hopes and almost
to excuse confidence, but May's mood, had he seen it fully, would have
rebuked him. She hung doubtful. She had succeeded, by the help of her
far-fetched metaphors, in describing to Morewood the nature of the
attraction which Quisanté exercised over her and of the force which drew
her on; but to Morewood she had said nothing of the opposing influences.
She had sent no letter to Marchmont, she had not yet refused to become
his wife. Although she recognised the unfairness of this treatment of him
she could not compel her hand to the writing of the letter; for Marchmont
came to personify to her all that she lost, that at least she risked, if
she yielded to her new impulse. Thus the hold which her liking for him,
their old acquaintance, and all the obvious advantages gave him was
further strengthened. Leaving on one side his position and the excellence
of the match, things which now seemed to her less important, and coming
to the more intimate and personal aspect of the matter, she realised with
a pang how much Marchmont pleased her; he never offended her taste or
jarred on her feelings; she would be absolutely safe with him, he would
gratify almost every mood and satisfy almost every aspiration.
Dealing very plainly with herself, formulating the question that she
could not put to Morewood, she asked whether she would not rather go as a
wife to Marchmont than to any other man she had met, whether Quisanté or
another. She had been, perhaps still was, more nearly in love with Weston
Marchmont than with anybody else. But the "almosts" were obstinate; the
nearly had never become the quite; she did not tell herself that it never
could; on the contrary she recognised (though here she was inclined to
shirk the probe) that if she married another, she might well awake to
find herself loving Marchmont; she knew that she would not like Marchmont
to love another woman. So far she carried her inquiry: then she grew in a
way sick and disgusted with this exposure of her inmost feelings. She
would not proceed to ask why precisely she could not say yes to Marchmont
without being sensible of a loss greater than the gain. All she knew was
that she would not think of becoming Quisanté's wife if that were not the
only way of getting all she wanted from Quisanté. The wifehood she looked
on as a means to something else, to what she could hardly say; in itself
she did not desire it.
Lady Richard's prayer was answered--no thanks to herself or her hints, no
thanks either to Mrs. Baxter's motherly remonstrance or to Morewood's
blunt speech. It was May herself who sent Quisanté away. A thrill of
relief ran round the table when he announced at dinner that if Lady
Richard would excuse him he would leave by the early train. Excuse him!
She would have hired a balloon to take him if he had declared a
preference for that form of locomotion. But she expressed the proper
regret and the proper interest in the reason (the pretext she called it
in her own mind) for his departure. It appeared that a very large and
important Meeting was to be held at Manchester; two Cabinet ministers
were to be there; Quisanté was invited to be the third speaker. He
explained that he felt it would be a mistake to refuse the invitation,
and the acceptance of it entailed a quiet day or two in London with his
Blue-books and his papers. As he put it, the whole thing sounded like an
excuse; Lady Richard hoped that it covered a retreat and that the retreat
was after a decisive repulse from May Gaston. Even Dick was half inclined
to share this opinion; for although he knew how a chance of shining with,
and perhaps of outshining, such luminaries as were to adorn the
Manchester platform would appeal to his friend, he did not think that for
its sake Quisanté would abandon any prospect of success in his suit. In
fact the impression was general, and the relief proportionate. The Dean
beamed and Mrs. Baxter purred; Morewood was good-natured, and Fred
Wentworth was lightened of a burden of bewilderment which had pressed
heavily on his youthful mind. Quisanté was treated with a marked access
of cordiality, and May was petted like a child who has displayed a strong
inclination to be naughty, but has at last made up its mind to be good,
and thereby saved those responsible for its moral welfare from the
disagreeable necessity of showing displeasure and exercising discipline.
She smiled to herself at the effusive affection with which Lady Richard
bade her good-night.
For these people did not know the history, and had not been present at
the interview between May and Quisanté on Duty Hill when the sun was
sinking and the air was still. They did not know that it was by her
command that he went and that his going rather strengthened than relaxed
the bond there was between them. Always there stood out in her memory the
scene on the hill, how he faced her there and told her that, great as the
chance was and imperative as the call, yet he would not go; he could not
leave her, he said, and then and there poured out his love for her. When
he made love, he was not as when he flirted. Passion purged him; he was
strong, direct, and simple; he was consumed then by what he felt and had
no time to spoil the effect by asking what impression he made on others.
Here was the thing that Marchmont could not give her, the great moment,
the thrill, the sense of a power in the man which she had not measured,
might spend her life in seeking to measure, and yet never to the end know
in its fulness. But she answered not a word to his love-making, she
neither accepted nor refused it; as often as he paused an instant and
again when he came to the end, she had nothing to say or would say
nothing except, "You must go."
"You're the only person in the world for whose sake I would hesitate
about going."
She smiled. "That's not at all to your credit," she said; but she was not
ill pleased.
He came a step nearer to her and said, still soberly, still quietly,
"I'll go away from here to-morrow."
"Yes, to the meeting," she said, looking up at him brightly from her seat
on the wooden bench on the hill-top.
"Away from here," he repeated. "But not to the meeting unless you send
me." Then he stood quite still opposite to her for a minute. "Because
unless you care for me to do it, I don't care to do it," he went on.
A long silence followed as she sat there, looking past him down into the
rich valley that spread from the foot of the hill. The fascination was
strong on her, the fear was strong on her too; but for the moment the
repulsion was forgotten. For he had risen to the occasion, as Dick Benyon
maintained that he always did; not a word too much, not an entreaty too
extravagant, not an epithet too florid had found passage from his lips.
His instinct of the way to treat a great and important situation had
saved him and brought him triumphantly through all the perils. He did not
ignore what he was, he did not disguise his knowledge of his powers;
knowing what they were and the value of his offering, he laid them all at
her feet and asked in return no more than her leave and her command to
use them.
She raised her eyes to his pale eager face.
"I send you then," she said. "And now walk with me down the hill and tell
me what you'll say at Manchester."
That night, before she went to bed, she wrote to Weston Marchmont;
"Dear Friend,--I will not wait to see you again. I can't do what you
wish. Everything else I could do for you, and everything else that
you wish I wish for you. But I can't do that."
Alas for the renewed peace of Lady Richard's mind, alas for the returning
quiet of Dick Benyon's conscience! Quisanté made his preparations for
going with his eyes all agleam, murmuring again and again, "She sends me;
she shall see what I'm worth." For one of his great moments had come in
the nick of time and done a work that he himself, low as he might now and
again fall, could hardly quite undo.
CHAPTER VII.
ADVICE FROM AUNT MARIA.
The two Cabinet Ministers brought back from Manchester different accounts
of Quisanté's speech and its effects. One said it was frothy rhetoric
heard in puzzled lethargy, the other that it was genuine eloquence
received with the hush of profound attention, but hailed at the end with
rapturous enthusiasm. This was a typical case of the division of opinion
which began to prevail about Quisanté, and was not disposed of by
observing that the unfavourable Minister belonged to that "old gang"
which it was Quisanté's mission to shake up or shake out. Rich in merits,
his speeches were nevertheless faulty to a critical ear; the ornate was
apt to turn to the gaudy, the dignified to the pompous. To the critical,
defects outweigh merits; but the mass of people, not being critical, fix
on the fine things, contentedly and perhaps not unwisely ignoring the
blemishes. So the speech was a great popular success, and Alexander
Quisanté conceived that he had more than justified his reputation and had
ornamented his Lady's colours with the laurel of victory. He wrote to her
to say that he was staying a few days in Lancashire and had arranged to
speak at one or two other places. "If I do at all well," he wrote, "it is
because I forget my audience and think that I speak only to you and to
earn the praise of your eyes."
"Oh, dear, why does he talk like that?" said May Gaston with a sigh and a
smile. "Forget his audience! The praise of my eyes!" She read the
compliment over again almost despairingly. "Yet he doesn't really think
me an idiot," she ended. She had made up her mind to forgive him his
habit of playing to the gallery, but he need not treat her as though she
sat there. She felt able to understand the dumb and bewildered reproach
which fronted her in her sister Fanny's face, but found spoken expression
only in the news that Fanny had had a letter from Lady Richard.
The next day she went to see Miss Quisanté; the paying of this visit had
been in her mind from the first moment she left Ashwood. In the little
flat's narrow passage she had to squeeze by a short, stout, dark man,
dressed with much elaboration; Miss Quisanté explained afterwards that he
was a sort of cousin of her own and Sandro's.
"His name is Mandeville," she said. "His father's was Isaacs. You knew we
had Jewish relations?"
"I thought it not improbable."
"I suppose we've got some of the blood, and some of it's a very good
thing," pursued Aunt Maria. "This man's a stock-jobber; he came to talk
to me about my money, but he let out a thing or two about Sandro."
"About Mr. Quisanté?"
"Yes. Well, I'm not surprised; I never am surprised at Sandro. Only if he
speculates with my money I shan't give it him."
May listened and heard how Quisanté had embarked the five hundred pounds
given him to support his new position in a hazardous, although not
unpromising, speculation. Whether he would win or lose was still
uncertain; Mandeville had hopes.
"And I don't know that it's exactly dishonest," said Aunt Maria
meditatively. "But that's just like Sandro. He's always doing things that
you can't be quite sure about--whether they're straight or not, you know.
He was just the same as a boy."
May had a sense of treachery in listening, but how should she not listen?
Morewood's opinion came into her memory. Miss Quisanté was confirming it
out of her full acquaintance with its subject.
"I gave him the money, it was his own, I've got nothing to show," said
Miss Quisanté with her vinegary little smile.
"Perhaps he--he misunderstood what you meant; I mean, that you intended
the money for any special purpose."
"That's exactly what he'll say," remarked Aunt Maria with a triumphant
nod.
"But if it's true----"
"I shan't know whether it's true or not. That's where Sandro's cleverness
comes in."
It was hard to realise that the old lady talked of the man whom her
hearer had seen on Duty Hill.
"I'm sure you don't do him justice." The plea sounded weak even to its
utterer.
"To an ounce," said Aunt Maria emphatically. May laughed. "I lived with
him for twelve years, and I'm not a fool any more than he is. If you ask
him about me, you'll get the truth, and you get it when you ask me about
him. After twelve years I ought to know."
"You've read his speech?" May asked. "Isn't it magnificent, parts of it
anyhow?"
"Very few men have a brain like Sandro's."
"There I agree with you, Miss Quisanté." But May's face was troubled as
she added, a moment later, "He ought to give you back your money,
though."
"He will, if he makes a lot out of it, and he'll give me a nice present
too. Then he'll feel that he's acted quite properly all through. And if
he loses it--well, as I say, he's got his case, and I can't prove
anything."
"Men like him are often careless about money affairs. It's only that, I
expect."
"Careless! Sandro careless! Oh, dear me, no." and for once Miss Quisanté
laughed heartily. The beads on her cap shook as her dumpy little form
swayed gently with mirth; she looked impishly delighted at such a
misconception of her nephew's character. May felt very foolish, but could
not help laughing herself.
"Well, I won't plead his cause any more," she said. "Only I believe
you're prejudiced." She paused, and then, looking the old woman in the
face, added, "I ought to tell you that he and I have become great
friends."
Miss Quisanté had stopped laughing; now she made a gesture which seemed
to indicate that she washed her hands of any responsibility. But she
appeared fretful and disturbed.
"I'm immensely impressed by him; and I think these faults you talk so
much about are only superficial. They can't really belong to his nature
when so much that's fine does." Her voice shook a little as she implored
a merciful judgment from the relentless old lady. Aunt Maria's shrewd
eyes grew softer.
"I used to say that to myself for ever so long," she said. "I catch
myself saying it now and then even now."
"You're disappointed at not--not getting on better with him, and it makes
you bitter."
"And you? You get on very well with him?"
"I don't think I'm blind about him. I see what you mean and what a lot of
people feel. If there is a pit, I've walked into it open-eyed."
"He's in love with you, of course?"
A denial was hardly worth while and quite useless. "You must ask him
that, Miss Quisanté," May replied. Aunt Maria nodded and gazed at her
long and steadily.
"Yes, you're his Empress among women," she said at last with a little
sneer. "Sandro has a phrase for everything and everybody. And are you in
love with him?"
May had wanted to come to close quarters and was glad that Aunt Maria
gave her a lead. But she did not return a direct answer to the question.
"You wouldn't be encouraging, if I were thinking of becoming his wife."
"It would be very extraordinary that you should."
"I've no particular desire to be ordinary," said May, smiling.
Miss Quisanté leant forward suddenly and held up a short forefinger.
"My dear, you'd be very unhappy," she said. Then she leant back again and
received in complete stillness May's meditative gaze.
"In a good many ways perhaps I should," said May at last with a sigh, and
her brow puckered with wrinkles. "Yes, I suppose so," she sighed again.
"But I know what it is. You've let yourself get interested in Sandro;
you've let him lay hold of you." May nodded. "And it would seem rather
dull now to lose him?" Again May nodded, laughing a little. Aunt Maria
understood her feelings very well, it seemed. "I should be dull too if I
lost him." The old lady folded her hands in her lap. "There is that about
Sandro," she said with a touch of pride in her voice. "I don't like him;
well, you've gathered that perhaps; but if anything happened to him, I
should feel I might as well lie down and die. Of course I've got nobody
else belonging to me; you're not like that." Again the forefinger was
raised in admonition, and Miss Quisanté gave a piece of practical advice.
"Marry a nice man of your own sort, my dear, and when you're safely
married, be as much interested in Sandro as you like."
May was not quite sure of the morality of this counsel; it seemed
possible that Aunt Maria shared the vagueness about right and wrong which
she quarrelled with in her nephew. She laughed as she said,
"But then Mr. Quisanté would marry some other woman, and she mightn't
like it. And my nice husband mightn't like it."
It was possible to discuss the matter far more frankly with Miss Quisanté
than with anybody else, yet the talk with her was only the first of
several in which May tried to glean what would be thought of such a step
as marrying Alexander Quisanté. Almost everywhere she found, not only the
lack of encouragement which Aunt Maria had shown, but an amazement hardly
distinguishable from horror and an utter failure to understand her point
of view; her care to conceal any personal interest in the discussions she
found means to bring about gained her very candid expressions of opinion
about Quisanté, and she became aware that her world would regard her as
something like a lunatic if it awoke one morning to read of her
engagement to the man.
Yet side by side with this feeling there was a great and a growing
expectancy with regard to him in his public aspect. He began to be a
figure, somebody of whom account would have to be taken; Dick Benyon's
infatuation was less often mentioned, his sagacity more often praised.
May was struck again with the sharp line drawn between the man himself,
and what he was to do, with the way in which everybody proposed to invite
him to his house, but nobody contemplated admitting him to his heart. The
inhumanity made her angry again, but she was alone in perceiving it; and
she was half-aware that her perception of it would be far keener than
Quisanté's own. In fact it was very doubtful if he asked any more of the
world than what the world was prepared to give him. But that, said May,
was not because he lacked the power and the desire of love, but because
his affections were withered by neglect or rusty from disuse. She knew
well that they were there and would expand under the influence of
sympathy. If people grew human towards him, he would respond in kind; in
hitting on this idea she commended herself for a sagacity in questions of
emotion not less than that which Dick Benyon had shown in matters of the
intellect. Dick had discovered Quisanté, as he thought; May told herself
that he had discovered only half of Quisanté, and that the other half had
been left for her to explore, and to reveal to the world. The effect of
her various conversations was rather to confirm her in her inclination
towards Quisanté than to frighten her out of it.
There was one talk which she could not escape and had to face with what
resolution she might. Weston Marchmont was not content with the brief
dismissal which had reached him from Ashwood, and he was amazed beyond
understanding at the hint of its cause which Dick Benyon had given him.
He had no doubt some reason to think himself ill-used, but he was not
inclined to press that side of the case. It was not his own failure so
much as the threatened success of such a rival that staggered and
horrified him. Few are wide-minded enough to feel a friendship quite
untouched and unimpaired when their friend takes into equal intimacy a
third person for whom they themselves entertain aversion or contempt; at
the best they see in such conduct an unexpected failure of discernment;
very often they detect in it evidence of a startling coarseness of
feeling, an insensibility, and a grossness of taste difficult to tolerate
in one to whom they have given their affection. Marchmont felt that, if
May Gaston wronged him, she was wronging far more herself, and most of
all his ideal of her. He could not believe such a thing of her without
her own plain assurance, and would not suffer it until every effort to
redeem and rescue her was exhausted.
"You don't mean," he said at last openly and bluntly to Dick Benyon,
"that you think it's possible she'll marry him?"
"I do, quite," groaned poor Dick. "You can imagine how I feel about it;
and if I didn't see it myself, Amy would soon let me know it."
Marchmont said no more, feeling that discussion was difficult for one in
his position, but Dick did not spare him a description of what had
happened at Ashwood, from which he realised the gravity of the danger.
"After all, he's a very remarkable man," Dick pleaded, in a forlorn
effort at defending himself no less than the lady.
Marchmont found May in a mood most favourable to the cause he had at
heart, if he had known how to use his opportunity to the best advantage.
From day to day now she wavered between the fear and the fascination, and
on this day the fear was stronger and, working together with her
affection for Marchmont, might well have gained him the victory.
Ill-usage of Quisanté would perhaps have been involved here, but May
would not have stood at that, had it been made plain to her heart that in
the end the man could not be accepted or endured. To win, Marchmont
should have made love to her in his own way, refused to accept his
dismissal, and pressed his own suit on his own merits, leaving his rival
to stand the contrast as he best might, but not dragging him explicitly
into the issue between himself and May. He did not take this course; to
his pride it was difficult to plead passionately again when his former
pleading had been rebuffed; and the intensity of his desire to show her
the truth about Quisanté, and at all costs to rescue her from Quisanté,
made him devote more energy to denouncing his rival than to recommending
himself. Thus he set May to defend the absent friend rather than to pity
and be drawn towards the suitor who was before her. Yet in spite of his
mistaken tactics, he shook her sorely; all that was in his favour came
home to her with renewed force; she looked on him with pleasure and heard
his voice again with delight; it was very pleasant to her to be with him;
she admitted to herself that very, very easily she might be in love with
him. Old Miss Quisanté's advice recurred to her mind; was this the nice
husband who would give her a safety not incompatible with a continued
interest in Alexander Quisanté? She smiled regretfully; Marchmont did not
fit at all into Aunt Maria's scheme.
"I don't want to question you," he said, "but if you will speak plainly
to me I shall be glad. The change came at Ashwood?"
"There's been no change; there's been a failure to change. When I saw you
last, I thought I might change so as to be able to do what you wanted.
Now I know I can't."
"And why?" She was silent; he went on, speaking lower. "Is there any
truth at all in what Dick Benyon thinks? It seemed to me incredible. Will
you tell me that I may utterly disbelieve that at all events?"
"No, I can't tell you to disbelieve it utterly."
The love for her which was his strongest appeal left his face; he looked
aghast, at a loss, almost disgusted. His hands moved in a gesture of
protest.
"I don't tell you to believe it. I can tell you nothing about it just
now. I admit you had a right to ask me, but I can say nothing more now."
Again the chance offered for him to make her forget Quisanté or remember
him only by a disadvantageous comparison. His honest desire to save her
combined again with bitter prejudice to lead him wrong.
"I can't believe it of you," he declared. "I can't have been so wrong
about you as that."
"I see nothing to prevent you from having been absolutely wrong about
me," she said coldly, "as wrong about me as you are about--other people."
"If you mean----"
"Oh, yes, let's be open with one another," she cried. "I mean Mr.
Quisanté; you're utterly wrong and prejudiced about him."
"He's not even a gentleman."
"I suppose he goes to the wrong tailor!" said May scornfully.
He came a step nearer to her. "You know I don't mean that sort of thing,
nor even other things that aren't vital to life though they're desirable
in society. He hasn't the mind of a gentleman."
Now she wavered; she sat looking at him with troubled eyes, feeling he
was right, desiring to be persuaded, struggling against the opposing
force. But Marchmont went on fretfully, almost peevishly,
"The astonishing thing is that you're blind to that, that you don't see
him as he really and truly is."
"That's just what I do," she cried eagerly and almost angrily.
Marchmont's words had brought back what Quisanté could be; surely a man's
best must be what he really and truly is? Then his true self shows itself
untrammelled; the measure of it is rather the heights to which it can
rise than the level on which it moves at ordinary times. She remembered
Quisanté on Duty Hill. "That's what I do, and you--you and all of
them--don't. You fix on his small faults, faults of manner--oh, yes, and
of breeding too, I daresay, perhaps of feeling too. But to see a man's
faults is not to see the man." She rose to her feet and faced him. "I see
him more truly than you do," she said proudly and defiantly. Then her
face grew suddenly soft, and she caught his hand. "My dear friend, my
dear, dear friend," she murmured, "don't be unkind to me. I'm not happy
about it; how can I be happy about it? Don't make it worse for me; I'm
trying to see the truth, and you might help me; but you only tell me what
leaves out more than half the truth."
He would not or could not respond to her gentleness; his evil spirit
possessed him; he gave expression to his anger with her and his scorn of
his rival, not to his own love and his own tenderness.
"It turns me almost sick," he declared, "to think of you with him."
She let go his hand, moved away, and sat down. "If you're like that, I
can say no more," she said. Her eyes were full of tears as she looked at
him, but his heart was hard to her; to him she seemed to be humiliating
both him and herself; the victory of Quisanté at once insulted him and
degraded her. Here was a case where Alexander Quisanté, with all his
defects, would have gone right, while Marchmont went wrong. It was a
crisis, and Quisanté's insight would have taught him how to handle it, to
assure her that whatever she did he would be the same to her, that though
he might not understand he would be loyal, that his love only grew
greater with his pain, that in everything that awaited her he would be
ready with eager service and friendship unimpaired. None of this came
from Marchmont's lips; he made no effort to amend or palliate his last
bitter speech. He could not conquer his resentment, and it bred an
answering resentment in her. "You must think what you like of me," she
said, her voice growing cold again.
With the end of this interview, with the departure of Marchmont, still
sore, angry, and blind to her point of view, May felt that the matter had
settled itself. She knew in her heart that she would not have turned
Marchmont away unless she had meant to bid Quisanté come. For a little
while she struggled against finality, telling herself that the question
was still an open one, and that to refuse one man was not of necessity to
marry another. Other friends came and talked to her, but none of them got
within her guard or induced her to speak freely to them. In the end she
had to settle this thing for herself; and now it was settled.
Even when undertaken in the conviction of a full harmony of feeling, a
community of mind, and an identity of tastes, marriage may startle by the
extent of its demands. She was to marry a man--she faced the matter and
told herself this--a man from whom she was divided by the training of a
lifetime, by antagonisms of feeling so acute as to bite deep into their
every-day intercourse, by a jarring of tastes which made him sometimes
odious to her. In spite of the resentment to which Marchmont's scorn had
stung her, she understood very well how it was that her friends failed to
appreciate the motives of her action. To herself she could not justify
it; it was taken on impulse, not calculation, and had to rest in the end
on the vague effects of what she had seen in Quisanté, not continually,
not in his normal state, but by fits and snatches, in scraps of time
which, all added together, would scarcely fill the hours between luncheon
and dinner. She took him on the strength of his moments; that was the
case in plain English, reduced to its lowest terms and its baldest
statement. Of confidence, of security, of trust she had none; their place
was filled by a vague expectancy, an insistent curiosity, and a puzzled
fearful fascination. Not promising materials these, out of which to make
happiness. She surprised herself by finding how little happiness in its
ordinary sense entered into her reckoning. Or if anything that we happen
to want is to be called our happiness, then her happiness consisted in,
and refused to be analysed into anything more definite than, a sort of
necessity which she felt of being near to Alexander Quisanté, of sharing
his mind and partaking of his life. But if this were happiness, then
happiness was not what she had been accustomed to think it; where were
the rest, the contentment, the placidity and satisfaction which the word
was usually considered to imply?
* * *
Quisanté came to her, wreathed in triumph. It was a mood she liked him
in; he offended her not when he celebrated success, but when he intrigued
for it. His new-born confidence seemed to make any drawing-back on her
part impossible; she had sent him, she was bound to reward the happy
issue of her mission. Another thing touched her very deeply; while
protesting his unworthiness of her, he based his humility on the special
and wonderful knowledge of her that he possessed and referred it entirely
to this inner secret excellence of hers and not in the least to her
position or to any difference between his and hers. He did not suppose
that society would be aghast or that the world at large would see cause
for dismay in the marriage. He expected hearty congratulations for
himself, but it was evident that he thought she would have her full share
of them too; he had, in fact, no idea that May Gaston would not be
thought to be doing very well for herself. This mixture of simplicity and
self-appreciation, of ignorance of the mind of others combined with a
knowledge of the claims of his own, took May's fancy; she laughed a
little as she determined that the general opinion of the matter must be
kept from his ears, and his robust confidence in the world's admiration
of him preserved.
"You say you know me so well," she said. "I know very, very little of
you; and of what I know there's a lot that's bad."
He was not in the temper that had inspired his confession of bad manners
and bad morals on Duty Hill. He was inclined, as at such a moment he
might be pardonably, to make light of his faults. He was not alarmed when
she declared that if she found out anything very bad she would not after
all become his wife.
"At any moment that you repent, you're free," he said gaily. But she
answered gravely,
"There'll be a great many moments when I shall repent. You see I don't
think I really love you." He looked puzzled. "You know what I mean? Real
love is so beautifully undiscriminating, isn't it? I'm not a bit
undiscriminating about you; and that'll make me miserable often; it'll
make you angry too. You'll forget that I said all this, that I told you
and warned you. I shall be (she smiled again for a moment) a critic on
the hearth. And nobody hardly understands criticism as badly as you do."
"What a lot of reasons for refusing me!" he said, still gay, though with
a hint of disturbance in his manner. "And yet you don't refuse."
The old answer which was all she could give to herself was all that she
found herself able to give him.
"Somehow I can't do without you, you see," she said. Then she suddenly
leant forward and went on in a low imploring voice, "Don't be worse than
I've ever thought. There are some things I couldn't stand. Please don't."
Her eyes, fixed on to his, prayed a reassurance against a horde of vague
dangers.
He laughed off the question, not understanding how or why she came to put
it, and their talk passed to a lighter vein. But presently he said, with
a half-embarrassed, half-vexed laugh, "Need we sit so far from one
another?"
May had suffered from a dread of the beginning of sentiment. But she was
laughing as she rose and, crossing the room, sat down by him on the sofa.
"Here I am then," she said, "and you may kiss me. And if you will ask me
I'll kiss you; only I don't particularly want to, you know. I don't think
of you in the very least as a man to be kissed. I've thought of other men
much more in that way--oh, only thought of them, Mr. Quisanté!"
The playful, yet not meaningless, defiance of a softer mood, and of his
power to induce it in her, acted as a spark to Quisanté's ardour. It was
just the opposition that he had wanted to rescue him from awkwardness. He
recovered the splendid intensity which had marked his declaration on Duty
Hill. If he did not succeed in changing her feelings, at least he set her
wondering why they did not change and wrung from her the smiling
admission, "You're very picturesque anyhow." She did not deny vehemently
when he told her that he would make her love him as he loved her. "Well,
I never use the word impossible about you," she said. "Only--it hasn't
happened yet, you know." She paused and added, with a touch of reviving
apprehension, "And I mayn't always like you to behave as if it
had--though I don't mind much to-night."
His manner was good, almost defying criticism, as he reassured her on
this point; and when he left her, her predominant impression was that, so
far as their personal relations went, she had exaggerated the dangers and
under-rated the attractions.
"I think he'll always be rather nice to me and not do anything very
dreadful. But then, what will he do to other people?"
This was the fear which still possessed her and which no fine moment of
his drove out. She seemed to have power to bring him to his best, to give
him the cue for his fine scenes, to create in him the inspiration to
great moments. But when he dealt with other people, her power would be
useless. She would have to stand by and see him at his worst, looking on
no longer as an irresponsible, as well as a helpless, spectator, but as
one who had undertaken responsibility for him, who must feel for him what
he did not for himself, who must be sensitive while he was callous,
wounded while his skin went unpierced. She felt that she had taken up a
very solitary position, between him and the world, not truly at home with
either; a sense of loneliness came upon her.
"I shall have to fight the whole world," she said. "I wonder if my cause
is a good one?"
CHAPTER VIII.
CONTRA MUNDUM.
It was impossible not to admire the wealth of experience which Mrs.
Baxter had gathered from a singularly quiet life; many men have gone half
a dozen times round the world for less. Whatever the situation, whatever
the action, she could supply a parallel and thereby forecast an issue.
Superficial differences did not hinder her; she pierced to the underlying
likeness. When all the world was piteously crying out that never in its
life had it heard of such an affair as this of May Gaston's, Mrs. Baxter
dived into her treasure-chest and serenely produced the case of the
Nonconformist Minister's daughter and the Circus Proprietor. Set this
affair side by side with the Quisanté business, and a complete sum in
double proportion at once made its appearance. The audacity of the man,
the headlong folly of the girl, the hopeless mixing of incompatibles were
common to the two cases; the issue of the earlier clearly indicated the
fate that must attend the later. Lady Richard could do nothing but gasp
out, "And what happened, Mrs. Baxter?"
Mrs. Baxter told her, punctuating the story with stitches on a June
petticoat.
"She ran away from him twice; but he brought her back, and, they said,
beat her well. At any rate she ended by settling down to her new life.
They had seven children, all brought up to the circus; only the other day
one was sent to prison for ill-treating the dancing bear. He's dead, but
she still keeps the circus under his name. Of course all her old friends
have dropped her; indeed I hear she drinks. Her father still preaches
once on Sundays."
It was easy to disentangle the relevant from the merely reminiscent; the
running away, the beating, the settling down, the complete absorption in
the new life (vividly indicated by the seven children and their habits),
stood out saliently. Add the attitude of old friends, and Lady Richard
could not deny the value of the parallel. She acknowledged it with a
long-drawn sigh.
"May Gaston must be mad," she observed. "You can imagine how Dick feels
about it!"
"And all the while her cousin in the Bank was quite ready to marry her
and give her a nice little home. He was Church and sang in the choir at
St. Dunstan's."
Without consciously appreciating the nicety of the parallel here, Lady
Richard began to think of Weston Marchmont.
"I suppose Mr. Marchmont'll take Fanny now," she said. "I don't know,
though; he won't like any sort of connection with Alexander Quisanté. How
selfish people are! They never think of what their marriages mean to
their relations."
This observation expressed a large part of what was felt by society; add
friends to relations, and it summed up one side of the indictment against
May Gaston. Lady Attlebridge's helpless and bewildered woe was one
instance of its truth, Fanny's rage another; to look farther afield,
May's friends and acquaintances discovered great cause for vexation in
that they saw themselves somehow "let in for" Quisanté. At least the
alternative was to drop May Gaston as entirely as the unfortunate circus
proprietor's wife had been dropped; and this alternative was a difficult
one. Had Quisanté's raid resulted in the seizure of some insignificant
colourless girl who had been merely tolerated for the sake of who she was
without possessing any claims in respect of what she was, the dropping
would have been easy; but May was not of that kind. She was not only one
of them, but very conspicuous among them, one of their ornaments, one in
whom they took pride; they would have acknowledged in her a natural
leader so soon as a suitable marriage gave her the necessary status and
experience. Her treachery was the more flagrant, Quisanté's presumption
the more enormous, their own course of action the more puzzling to
decide.
Yet in their hearts they knew that they must swallow the man; events were
too strong for them. Dick Benyon had forced him on them in one side of
life, May Gaston now did the like in another; henceforward he must be and
would be among them. This consciousness mingled an ingredient of asperity
with their genuine pity for May. She would not merely have herself to
thank for the troubles which would certainly come upon her; her
misfortunes must be regarded as in part a proper punishment for the
annoyance she was inflicting on her friends. As for Dick Benyon, it was
impossible to speak to him without perceiving that if remorse be in truth
the sharpest penalty of sin, he was already punished enough.
The poor man's state was indeed such as to move compassion. Besides his
old friend Lady Attlebridge's dumbly accusing eyes, besides Fanny's and
Lady Richard's by no means dumb reproaches, a very heavy blow had fallen
on him. In the words of his own complaint, his brother Jimmy had gone
back on him--and back on his allegiance to Alexander Quisanté. The
engagement was too much for Jimmy, and in the revulsion of feeling he
became downright hostile to Quisanté's claims and pretensions. How could
he not when Fanny Gaston imperiously and almost tearfully commanded him
to attach himself to her banner, and to behold with her eyes the
indignity suffered by the noble family of Gaston? Logic was not Jimmy's
strong point, and he confounded poor Dick by the twofold assertion that
the thing was utterly incredible, and that Dick and he had been most
inconceivably idiotic not to have foreseen it from the first hour that
they took up Quisanté. In this stress of feeling the brothers spoke to
one another with candour.
"You know how I feel about Fanny," said Jimmy, "so you can imagine how
much I like it."
"Oh, yes, I know; and I quite understand that you wanted Marchmont to
marry May," Dick retorted in an alien savageness born of his wounded
spirit.
Jimmy was taken aback by this direct onslaught, but his native honesty
forbade him to deny the charge point-blank.
"Supposing she came to like me," he grumbled, "it wouldn't be over and
above pleasant to have Quisanté for a brother-in-law."
Dick was roused; he summoned up his old faith and his old admiration.
"I tell you what," he said, "the only chance you have of your name being
known to posterity is if you succeed in becoming his brother-in-law."
"Damn posterity," said Jimmy, tugging at his moustache. He had never
entertained the absurd idea of interesting future ages. He began to
perceive more and more clearly how ridiculous his brother had made
himself over the fellow; he had shared in the folly, but now at least he
could repent and dissociate himself from it.
"What does the Dean say?" he asked maliciously.
"I dare say you won't understand," Dick answered in measured tones, "but
the Dean's got sense enough to say nothing. Talking's no use, is it?"
Few indeed shared the Dean's wisdom, or the somewhat limited view that
talking is only to be practised when it chances to be useful. Are we
never to discuss the obvious or to deplore the inevitable? From so stern
a code human nature revolts, and the storm of volubility went on in spite
of the silence of the Dean of St. Neot's. Even this silence was imperfect
in so far as the Dean said a word or two in private to Morewood when he
visited him in his studio, and the pair were looking at Quisanté's
picture. Dick Benyon was less anxious now to have it finished and sent
home in the shortest possible time.
"You've seen some good in him," said the Dean, pointing to the picture.
"Well--something anyhow," said Morewood.
"I think, you know," the Dean pursued meditatively, "that a great woman
might succeed in what she's undertaken (Morewood did not need the mention
of May Gaston's name), at the cost of sacrificing all her other interests
and most of her feelings."
Morewood was lighting his pipe and made no answer.
"Is our dear young friend a great woman, though?" asked the Dean.
"She aspires to be," said Morewood; he was sneering as usual, but rather
at aspirations in general than at any unusual absurdity in May Gaston's;
thus at least the Dean understood him.
"You mean that that's at the bottom of the trouble?" he inquired, smiling
a little.
"Oh, yes," answered Morewood, weary of indicating what was so apparent.
"You've dived down to something in that picture; perhaps she has."
"Yes, she has." Morewood looked straight at the Dean as he added, "But I
can leave out the other things, you see. That's the difference."
"And she can't? No. That is the difference. She'll have to live with the
other things." He looked courageously at Morewood and ended, "We must
trust in God." Either the sincerity or the unexpectedness of the remark
kept Morewood silent.
No such ambition as these two imputed to her consciously animated May
Gaston. Just now she was content if she could persuade her mother that
people after all said nothing very dreadful (for what was said was always
more to Lady Attlebridge than what was true), could keep on something
like friendly relations with her sister, and could maintain a cheerful
view of her own position and of her experiment. Inevitably the hostility
of his future mother-in-law and of Fanny brought out the worst side of
Quisanté's manners; in the effort to conciliate he almost fawned. May had
to find consolation in a growth of openness and simplicity towards
herself. And she had one notable triumph which more than anything else
brought her through the trial with her purpose unshaken and her faith
even a little strengthened. It was not a complete triumph, and in trying
to push it too far she suffered a slight rebuff; but there was hope to be
had from it, it seemed to open a prospect of successes more ample. She
made Quisanté send back Aunt Maria's five hundred pounds before Mr.
Mandeville's operations had resulted either in safety or in gain.
"You see, she never gave it you to use in speculation," she had said. "It
isn't right, you must see it isn't. Have you got the money?"
"Yes; but I meant to buy you----"
"No, no, I wouldn't have it. Now do send it back. I know you see what I
mean." Her voice grew doubtful and imploring.
"Oh, yes, in a way. But I shan't lose it, you know."
"That doesn't make the least difference."
"If it pleases you, I'll send it back."
"Well, do," she said with a little sigh. The motive was not that which
she wished to rouse, but very likely it was that with which she must
begin her work. Then she tried the further step. "And any profit you
make, if you make any, you ought to send too," she said.
Genuine surprise was exhibited on Quisanté's face. "What, after sending
back the five hundred?" he asked.
"Yes, you ought." She made a little concession by adding, "Strictly, you
know." Quisanté looked at her, kissed her hand, and laughed. Her sense of
humour, which she began to perceive would rather hamper her, made her
join in the laugh. "Do you think me very absurd? No, no, not compliments!
Truth, truth always!"
"I call the suggestion rather--well, rather fanciful," said he.
"Yes, I suppose you do," she sighed. "Do you know what I hope?" she went
on. "I hope that some day that sort of suggestion will seem a matter of
course to you."
He stopped laughing and looked put out. She saw that his vanity was hurt.
"But I hope all sorts of unusual things about you," she went on, her
conscience rebuking her for using the wile of flattery. But it served
well; the cloud passed from his face, as he begged her not to expect to
see him a saint too soon.
A few days later he came in radiant; the operation had gone splendidly,
there was a cent. per cent. profit; she was to come with him and buy the
necklace at once. May loved necklaces and liked him for being so eager to
give her one. And she did not wish to appear in the light of a prig (that
had probably been his impression of her) again so soon. But had he not
the evening before, as they talked over their prospects, told her that he
owed Dick Benyon a thousand pounds or more, and was in arrears with the
instalments by which the debt was to be liquidated? By a not unnatural
turn of her mind she found herself less able to allow him to forget his
obligation, less able to indulge him in the temporary extravagance of a
lover, than if he had been a man on whose punctilious honour in all
matters of money she relied absolutely. She was more affectionate and
more effusive to him than usual, and it was with a kiss that she
whispered,
"Give me the money, not the necklace."
"The money?" he said in surprise.
"Yes, to do what I like with. At least give me your promise to do what I
ask with it."
He was suspicious and his face showed it. She laughed. "Yes, I'm worrying
again," she said. "I can now, you see. When we're married I shan't have
the power."
"You'll always have absolute power over me."
"Oh, I wish that was true!" she said. "No, I don't," came an instant
later. "If I thought that, I'd never speak to you again." Moving away a
little, she turned her head back towards him and went on, "Use it to pay
Dick Benyon. I'd rather you did that than gave me a thousand necklaces."
"Oh, Dick's in no hurry; he's got lots of money." Quisanté was visibly
vexed this time. "Aren't you going to allow me to give you anything?" he
asked.
She had a struggle to win this time, and again had to call in the ally
she distrusted, an appeal to his vanity. She told him that it hurt her
idea, her great idea, of him, that he should be in any way under
obligations to or dependent on anybody. This way of putting the matter
caught his fancy, which had remained blind to the more prosaic aspect of
the case. "You must stand by your own strength," she said. She had to go
a step farther still. "It'll make Amy Benyon quite angry too; it'll take
away one of her grievances. Don't pay only the arrears, pay all you can."
Thus she won and was comforted, in spite of her suspicion of the weapons
that she found herself obliged to use.
Comfort she needed sadly, and it could come only from Quisanté himself.
For the rest the sense of loneliness was strong upon her, and with it a
bitterness that this time in her life should be so different from what it
was in the lives of most girls. The superficials were there; friends sent
presents and Lady Attlebridge was as particular about the gowns and so
forth as though the match had been absolutely to her liking. But there
was no sincere congratulation, no sympathy, no envy. Her engagement was a
mistake, her marriage a tragedy; that was the verdict; she saw it in
every glance and discerned it under every civil speech. The common
judgment, the opinion of the group we have lived with, has a force
irrespective of its merit; there were times when May sank under the
burden of it and almost retreated. Then she was outwardly most contented,
took Quisanté everywhere with her, tried (as people said) to thrust him
down everybody's throat, even pretended a love which she had expressly
denied to the man himself. All this done, she would fly to solitude and
there be a victim to her fears, shudder at the risk she had elected to
run, and pray for any strange convulsion of events to rescue her.
None came; time went on, people settled down to the notion; only to a
small circle the matter retained a predominant interest. The rest of the
world could not go on talking about it for ever; they had a number of
other people's affairs to attend to, and the vagaries of one fanciful
young woman could not occupy their important minds for ever. None the
less, they turned away with a pleasant sense that they might find good
reason for turning back presently; let a year or two of the marriage run,
and there might be something to look at again.
But to one man the thing never became less strange, less engrossing, or
less horrible. Weston Marchmont abandoned as pure folly the attempt to
accustom his mind to it or to acquiesce in it; he had not the power to
cease to think of it. It was unnatural; to that he returned always; and
it ousted what surely was natural, what his whole being cried out was
meant, if there were such a thing as a purpose in human lives at all.
Disguised by his habit of self-repression before others, his passion was
as strong as Quisanté's own; it was backed by a harmony of tastes and a
similarity of training which gave it increased intensity; it had been
encouraged by an apparent promise of success, now turned to utter
failure. Amy Benyon might think that he would now marry Fanny, if only he
could endure such an indirect connection with Quisanté. To himself it
seemed so impossible to think of anyone but May that in face of facts he
could not believe that he was not foremost in her heart. The facts meant
marriage, it seemed; he denied that they meant love. He discerned what
May had said to Quisanté--although not of course that she had said
it--and it filled him with a more unendurable revolt. He might have
tolerated a defeat in love; not to be defeated and yet to suffer all the
pains of the vanquished was not to be borne. But he was helpless, and
when he had tried to plead his cause he had done himself no good. He had
rather so conducted himself as to give May Gaston the right to shut the
door on any further friendship with him; towards her future husband he
had never varied from an attitude of cool disdain. It was more than a
month since he had seen her, it was longer since he had done more than
nod carelessly to Quisanté as they passed one another in the lobby or the
smoking-room.
Then one day, a fortnight before the marriage, he met Quisanté as they
were both leaving the House about four o'clock. On a sudden impulse he
joined his rival. He knew his man; Quisanté received him with
friendliness and even effusion, and invited him to join him in a call at
Lady Attlebridge's. They went on together, Quisanté elated at this new
evidence of his power to reconcile opposition and conciliate support,
Marchmont filled with a vague painful curiosity and a desire to see the
two together at the cost of any suffering the sight might bring him.
The drawing-room at Lady Attlebridge's was a double room; in one half May
sat reading, in the other her mother dozed. May rose with a start as the
men entered together; her face flushed as she greeted Marchmont and bade
Quisanté go and pay his respects to her mother.
"I hardly expected ever to see you again," she said. "And I didn't expect
Mr. Quisanté to bring you." Her tone was oddly expressive at once of
pleasure and regret, of anticipation and fear. "Have you made friends?"
she asked.
He answered under the impulse of his mood.
"We must make friends," he said, "or I shall never see any more of you."
"I thought you didn't want to." She liked him too well not to show a
little coquetry, a little challenge.
"I thought so too, or tried to think so."
"I was sure you had deserted me. You said such--well, such severe
things."
"I say them all still."
"But here you are!" she cried, laughing.
"Yes, here I am," said he, but he was grave and looked intently at her.
She grew red again as she met his gaze, and frowned a little.
"I'm not sure I'm glad you've come after all," she said after a pause.
"Why have you come? I don't quite understand."
"I've come to see you, to look on at your happiness," he answered.
"You've no right to talk like that."
They became silent. From the inner room they heard Lady Attlebridge's
nervous efforts at conversation and Quisanté's fluent, too fluent,
responses. He was telling the good lady about her great social influence,
and, little as she liked him, she seemed to listen eagerly. Marchmont
looked at May and smiled. He was disappointed when she returned his
smile.
"He's a little too much of a politician, isn't he?" she asked.
Her refusal to perceive the insinuation of his smile made him ashamed of
it.
"We all are, when we've something to get, I suppose," he said with a
shrug.
"Oh, I don't think you need reproach yourself," she exclaimed, laughing.
There was a short pause. Then he said suddenly,
"You're the one person in the world to talk to."
Now she neither laughed nor yet rebuked him, and, as his eyes met hers,
he seemed to have no fear that she would do either the one or the other.
Yet he could not quite understand her look; did she pity him or did she
entreat for herself? For his life he could not answer. The only thing he
knew was that she would follow her path and take for husband the man who
flattered Lady Attlebridge in the inner room. Then she spoke in a low
voice.
"Yes, do come, come and see us afterwards, come as often as you like." He
raised his eyes to hers again. "Because the oftener you come, the more
you'll understand him, and the better you understand him, the better
you'll know why I'm doing what I am."
The soft look of pity or of entreaty vanished from her eyes now. She
seemed to speak in a strong and even defiant confidence. But he met her
with a resolute dissent.
"If you want me, I'll come. But I shan't understand why you did what
you're doing and I shall never see in him what you want me to see." He
looked round and saw Quisanté preparing to join them. "Am I to come,
then?" he asked.
Quisanté was walking towards them; she answered with a nervous laugh, "I
think you must come sometimes anyhow." Then she raised her voice and said
to Quisanté, "I'm telling Mr. Marchmont that I shall expect to see him
often at our house."
Quisanté seconded her invitation with more than adequate enthusiasm; if
Marchmont were converted to him, who could still be obstinate? The two
men began to talk, May falling more and more into silence. She did not
accuse Marchmont of deliberate malice, but by chance or the freak of some
mischievous demon everything he said led Quisanté on to display his
weaknesses. She knew that Marchmont marked them every one; he was too
well bred to show his consciousness by so much as the most fleeting
glance at her; yet she could have met such a glance with understanding,
yes, with sympathy, and would have had to summon up by artificial effort
the resentment that convention demanded of her. The sight of the two men
brought home to her with a new and an almost terrible sharpness the
divorce between her emotional liking and her intellectual interest. And
in a matter which all experience declared to concern the emotions
primarily, she had elected to give foremost place to the intellect, to
suffer under an ever recurring jar of the feelings for the sake of an
occasional treat to the brain. That was her prospect unless she could
transform the nature of Alexander Quisanté. "Marry a nice man of your own
sort, and then be as much interested as you like in Sandro." Aunt Maria's
advice echoed in her ears as she watched the two men round whom the
struggle of her soul centred, the struggle that she had thought was
finished on the day when she promised to become Alexander Quisanté's
wife.
"I shall keep you both to your word," said Marchmont when he left them.
May nodded, smiling slightly. Quisanté said all and more than all the
proper things.
CHAPTER IX.
LEAD US NOT.
After a long sojourn in kindlier climates, Miss Quisanté returned to
England some eighteen months after May Gaston's marriage. From various
hotels and boarding-houses she had watched with an interested eye the
progress of public affairs so far as they concerned her nephew. She had
seen how his name became more prominent and was more frequently mentioned,
how the hopes and fears about him grew, how he had gained glory by dashing
sorties in defence of the severely-pressed Government garrison; if the
garrison decided (as rumour said they would) to sally out and try fortune
in the open field of a General Election, and proved victorious, it could
not be doubted that they would bestow a handsome reward on their gallant
defender. Quisanté bid fair to eclipse his rivals and to justify to the
uttermost Dick Benyon's sagacity and enthusiasm. The bitterness of the
foe told the same story; unless a man is feared, he is not caricatured
in a comic paper in the guise of a juggler keeping three balls in the
air at once, the said balls being each of them legibly inscribed with
one of the three words, "Gas--Gabble--Grab." Such a straining of the
usual amenity of controversy witnesses to grave apprehension. Miss
Quisanté in her _pension_ at Florence smiled contentedly.
Of his private life her information had not been very ample. She had heard
several times from May, but May occupied her pen chiefly with her husband's
political aims. She had heard once from Sandro himself, when he informed
her that his wife had borne him a daughter and that all had gone very
well indeed. Again Miss Quisanté smiled approvingly. She sent her love to
May and expressed to Sandro the hope that the baby would resemble its
mother in appearance, constitution, and disposition; the passage was a
good example of that _expressio unius_ which is a most emphatic and
unmistakable _exclusio alterius_. In the letter she enclosed a cheque
for three hundred pounds; the _pensions_ were cheaper than the flat, and
thus this service had become possible.
The Quisantés had taken a house in Grosvenor Road, near Westminster for
Quisanté's convenience, by the river, in obedience to his wife's choice.
Here Miss Quisanté was welcomed by her nephew's wife and shown her
nephew's daughter. May watched the old lady's face as she perfunctorily
kissed and critically inspected the infant.
"Gaston!" said Aunt Maria at last; relief was clamorous in her tone.
"Yes, Miss Quisanté, Gaston, I think," said May, laughing.
The nurse admitted the predominance of Gaston, but with a professional
keenness of eye began to point out minor points in which the baby
"favoured" her father.
"Nonsense, my good woman," snapped Aunt Maria. "The child's got two legs
and two arms, I suppose, as its father has, but that's all the likeness."
Somewhat ruffled (her observations had been well meant) the nurse carried
off her charge.
"You look very well," Aunt Maria went on, "but older, my dear."
"I am both well and older," said May cheerfully. "Think of my
responsibilities! There's the baby! And then Alexander's been seedy. And
we aren't as rich as we should like to be; you of all people must know
that. And there's going to be an election and our seat's very shaky. So
the cares of the world are on me."
"Sandro's been doing well."
"Splendidly, simply splendidly. It's impossible to doubt that he'll do
great things if--if all goes well, and he doesn't make mistakes."
"Seems like making mistakes, does he?"
"Oh, no. I only said 'if.'"
"And you're as happy as you expected to be?"
"Quite, thanks."
"I see. Just about," was Miss Quisanté's next observation; since it was a
little hard to answer, May smiled and rang the bell for tea.
"You're very gay, I suppose?" asked the old lady.
"Just as many parties as I can find gowns for," May declared.
"Seen anything of the Benyons lately?"
A little shadow came on May's face. "I hardly ever see Jimmy except at
mother's," she answered. "Dick comes sometimes." She paused a moment, and
then added, "I expect him this afternoon."
"Is he still as devoted to Sandro?"
"He believes in his abilities as enthusiastically as ever." The dry laugh
which Miss Quisanté gave was as significant as her "Just about," a few
minutes before. This time May did not laugh, but looked gravely at Aunt
Maria. "They've had a little difference on a political matter. Did you
ever hear of what Dick calls the Crusade? His great Church movement, you
know."
"Lord, yes, my dear. Sandro once speechified to me about it for an hour."
"Well, he doesn't speechify so much now; he doesn't believe in it so
much, and Dick's annoyed. That's natural, I think, though perhaps it's a
little silly of him. However, if you wait, he'll tell you about it
himself."
"Why doesn't Sandro believe in it so much?"
"Perhaps I ought to have said that he doesn't think the present time a
suitable one for pressing it."
"I see," said Miss Quisanté sipping her tea. May looked at her again and
seemed about to speak, but in the end she only smiled. She was amused at
the old lady's questions, impelled to speak plainly to her, and
restrained only by the sense that any admission she might seem to make
would be used to the full against her husband by his faithful and liberal
aunt.
"He says he has good reasons, and Dick Benyon says they're bad ones," she
ended by explaining, though it was not much of an explanation after all.
Miss Quisanté had the curiosity to await Dick Benyon's coming, and, in
spite of his evident expectation of a _tête-à-tête_, not to go
immediately on his arrival. She was struck with the air of mingled
affection and compassion with which he greeted his healthy, handsome,
smiling young hostess. Moreover he was himself apologetic, as though
suffering from a touch of remorse. He began to talk trifles, but May
brought him to the point.
"I read the speech after I got your letter," she said. "I'm sorry you
don't like it, but Alexander must consider the practical aspect of the
matter. You won't do your cause any good by urging it out of season."
"In season and out of season; that's the only way."
"You might be an Irish member," said May, smiling.
Dick was too much in earnest to be diverted to mirth. The presence of
Miss Quisanté still seemed to make him a little uncomfortable, but the
old lady did not move. May gave her no hint, and he was too full of his
subject to hold his tongue.
"I want you to speak to him about it," he went on.
"To urge him to do what he thinks a mistake?"
Dick grew a little hot. "To urge him not to go back on the cause and
on--on his friends, and almost to laugh at them for----" He paused and
looked at May; she was smiling steadily. He did not end quite as bluntly
as he had meant. "I think that he has, unconsciously no doubt, allowed
personal considerations to influence him."
A short sudden chuckle came from Aunt Maria; she rose to her feet and
crossed the room to May.
"If he's going to abuse Sandro, I mustn't stay," she said. "I couldn't
bear to lose any of my illusions, my dear." She kissed May and added,
"You might tell him to come and see me, though. I should like to hear
what he's got in his head now. Good-bye, Lord Richard. Don't you fret
about your Crusade. Sandro'll take it up again when it's convenient." She
chuckled again at the puzzled stare which accompanied Dick's shake of the
hand.
"A very kind old woman, but with a rather malicious tongue," said May.
She walked to the hearth and stood there, facing her visitor. "Now, Dick,
what is it?" she asked.
"The Dean's tremendously hurt about it; he doesn't say much, but he feels
it deeply."
"I'm very sorry. What are the personal considerations?"
"You know Henstead?" It was the borough for which Quisanté sat. "There's
an old Wesleyan colony there; several of them are very rich and employ a
lot of labour and so on. They've always voted for us. And they've found a
lot of the money. They found a lot when Quisanté got in before."
"Yes?" Her voice displayed interest but nothing more. Dick grew rather
red and hurried on with his story.
"Well, one of them, old Foster the maltster, came to your husband
and--and told him they didn't like the Crusade and that it wouldn't do."
He paused, glanced at May for an instant, and ended, "The seat's not
safe, you know, and--and it wants money to fight it."
A silence of some few minutes followed. Dick fidgeted with his hat, while
May looked out of the window on to the river.
"Why do you come and tell this to me?" she asked presently. "Supposing it
was all true, what could I do?"
Dick's resentment got the better of him; he answered hotly, "Well, you
might tell him that it was playing it pretty low down on us."
"Have you told him that?"
"Yes, I have, or I shouldn't have come to you. I don't mean I used just
those words, but I made my meaning clear enough."
"And what did he say?"
"He said he didn't see it in the light I did."
A faint smile came on the face of Mr. Quisanté's wife.
"But you could make him see it," urged Dick. May smiled at him for a
brief moment and then looked out to the river again.
"It'll be deuced awkward for him if they get hold of his back speeches,"
said Dick with gloomy satisfaction.
"Oh, everybody's back speeches are what you call deuced awkward." A
moment later she went on, "What does it all come to, after all? We must
take things as they are; we mustn't be quixotic, we mustn't quarrel with
our bread-and-butter."
Dick looked at her with evident surprise, even with dismay.
"You think it all right?" he asked.
"It's not for me to say. Am I to sit in judgment on my husband? Anyhow
people do just the same thing every day. You know that as well as I do,
Dick." Just on the last words her voice grew softer; he might have caught
a hint of entreaty, had not his mind been fixed on his own wrongs and the
betrayal of his favourite cause. "I'm assuming that what you say is
true," she added, more coldly again.
When Dick left her, it was to go home to his wife and tell her, and Mrs.
Gellatly whom he found with her, that he did not understand what had come
over May Gaston--May Quisanté, he corrected himself. Not understanding,
he proved naturally quite unable to explain. Lady Richard was more equal
to the occasion.
"That man's simply got hold of her," she said. "She'll think black's
white if he says it is. Still she must see that he's treating you
shamefully."
"She didn't seem to see it." m
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