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_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.