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?"