FOR LACK OF LOVE?
Weston Marchmont, punctilious to the verge of fastidiousness, or even
over it, in his conduct towards the world and his friends, allowed
himself easily enough a liberty of speculative opinion which the Dean of
St. Neot's would have hesitated about and the Dean's wife decidedly
veiled by a reference to Providence. To him the blow that had fallen on
Quisanté seemed no public evil. Allowing the man's talents, he distrusted
both his aims and his methods; they would not have come to good; the
removal of his personality meant relief from an influence which was not
healthy and an example which taught nothing beyond the satisfaction of
ambition and the pursuit of power. It was well then if Quisanté were
indeed, as he himself said, "done with," so far as public activity went.
Marchmont, not concealing his particular interest but rather facing it
and declaring it just, went on to say that, since Quisanté was done with
publicly, it was well that he should be done with privately also, and
that as speedily as might be. Love for May Quisanté might be the moving
spring of this conclusion, but he insisted that it was not necessary
thereto. Any reasonable person her friend, nay, anybody whose attention
was fairly directed to the case, must hold the same view. There was a
hideous mistake to be undone, and only one way of undoing it. Permanent
unions in marriage, immense and indispensable engines of civilisation,
yet exacted their price. One instance of the compensating payment was
that deaths sometimes became desirable; you had to wish a death sooner
than life-long misery for a friend; to wish it was not wrong, though to
have to wish it might be distasteful. In this self-justification he
contrived to subordinate, while he admitted, his own strong interest in
the death and his violent dislike of the sufferer which robbed the death
of its pain so far as he was concerned. People's infatuation with
Quisanté, above all May's infatuation, had so irritated him that he did
not scruple to accept the only means of ending them; that they would be
thus ended it never came into his mind to doubt. His regret was only for
the stretch of delay, for the time of waiting, for the respite promised
to the doomed man if he would be docile and obedient; for all of them
life was passing, and too much had already in tragic mistake been spent
on Alexander Quisanté.
"I think you're damnably inhuman," said Dick Benyon, expressing, as he
often did, an unsophisticated but not perhaps an altogether unsound
popular judgment. "He's a remarkable man. And after all she married him.
She needn't have. As for the party--well, I don't know how we shall
replace him."
"I don't want him replaced," said Marchmont. "Everything that he was
doing had better be left undone; and everything that he is had better not
be. You call me inhuman. Well, people who repress their pity for
individuals in the interests of the general welfare are always called
that."
"Yes, but you don't pity him," retorted Dick.
Marchmont thought for a moment. "No, I don't," he admitted. "I see why
one might; but I can't do it myself." He paused and added, smiling, "I
suppose that's the weak point in my attitude."
"One of them," said Dick, but he said no more. There are limits to candid
discussion even among the closest friends; he could not tell Marchmont in
so many words that he wanted Quisanté dead so as to be able to marry
Quisanté's wife, however well aware of the fact he might be and Marchmont
might suspect him to be. Or, if he had said this, he could have said it
only in vigorous reproof, perhaps even in horror; and to this he was not
equal. For Dick was sorely torn. On the one hand he had never ceased to
hang on Quisanté's words and to count on Quisanté's deeds; on the other,
he had never acquitted himself of responsibility for a marriage which he
believed to have been most disastrous. Worst of all then for him was what
threatened now, an end of the illuminating words and the stirring deeds,
but no end to the marriage yet in sight. To him too death seemed the best
thing, unless that wonderful unlikely resurrection of activity and power
could come. And even then--Dick remembered the face of Quisanté's wife as
she lied for him to her friends at Ashwood. The resurrection must be not
only with a renewed but with a transformed mind, if it were to bring
happiness, and to bring no more of things like that.
The world at large, conceiving that the last word had been said and the
last scene in which it was interested played, had soon turned its curious
eyes away from Quisanté's sick bed, leaving only the gaze of the smaller
circle personally concerned in the dull and long-drawn-out ending of a
piece once so full of dramatic incident. But the world found itself
wrong, and all the eyes spun round in amazed staring when the sick man
leapt from his bed and declared that he was himself again. The news came
in paragraphs, to the effect that after another week's rest Mr. Quisanté,
whose health had made a rapid and great improvement, hoped to return to
his Parliamentary duties and to fulfil the more urgent of his public
engagements. Here was matter enough for surprise, but it was needful to
add the fast-following well-authenticated stories of how the doctors had
protested, how Sir Rufus Beaming had washed his hands of the case, and
how Dr. Claud Manton had addressed an energetic warning to Lady May
Quisanté. This last item came home most closely to the general feeling,
and the general voice asked what Lady May was thinking of. There was
warrant for the question in the wondering despair of Lady Mildmay and the
sad embarrassment of debonair Sir Winterton. The Mildmays knew all about
it, the whole thing had happened in their house; but Sir Winterton,
challenged with the story about Sir Rufus, could only hum and ha, and
Lady Mildmay had not denied the interview between Quisanté's wife and the
energetic Dr. Manton. What was the meaning of it? And, once again, what
was Lady May Quisanté thinking of? Was she blind, was she careless? Or
were the doctors idiots? The world, conscious of its own physical
frailty, shrank from the last question and confined its serious attention
to the two preceding ones. "Does she want to kill him?" asked the honest
graspers of the obvious. "Does she think him above all laws?" was the
question of those who wished to be more subtle. At least she was a
puzzle. All agreed on that.
Lady Richard discountenanced all speculation and all questionings. For
her part she did her duty, mentioning to Mrs. Baxter that this was what
she meant to do and that, whatever happened, she intended to be able,
_salvâ conscientiâ_, to tell herself that she had done it; Mrs. Baxter
approved, saying that this was what the second Mrs. Greening had done
when her husband's sister's daughter, a very emancipated young woman as
it seemed, had incomprehensibly flirted with the auctioneer's apprentice
and had scouted Mrs. Greening's control; Mrs. Greening had told the
girl's mother and sent the girl home, second class, under the care of the
guard. Similarly then Lady Richard, without embarking on any consideration
of ultimate problems, wrote to May, suggesting that Mr. Quisanté wanted
rest and putting Ashwood at her disposal for so long as she and her
husband might be pleased to occupy it. "If they don't choose to go, it's
not my fault," said Lady Richard with the sigh which declares that every
reasonable requirement of conscience has been fulfilled. Happy lady, to
be able to repose in this conviction by the simple expedient of lending a
house not otherwise required at the moment! So kind are we to our own
actions that Lady Richard felt meritorious.
They chose to go, and went unaccompanied save by their baby girl and Aunt
Maria--this last a strange addition made at Quisanté's own request. He
had not been wont to show such a desire for the old lady's society when
there was nothing to be gained by seeking it; nor had it seemed to May
altogether certain that Miss Quisanté would come. Yet she came with
ardent eagerness and her nephew was plainly glad to have her. It took May
a little while to understand why, but soon she saw the reason. Aunt Maria
was deep in the conspiracy, or the infatuation, or whatever it was to be
called; she flattered Quisanté's hope of life, she applauded his defiance
of the inevitable; she hung on him more and more, herself forgetting and
making him forget the peril of the way he trod. He wanted to be told that
he was right, and he wanted an applauding audience. In both ways Aunt
Maria satisfied him. She would talk of the present as though it were no
more than a passing interruption of a long career, of the future as
though it stretched in assured leisure through years of great
achievement, of his life and his life's work as though both were in his
own hand and subject to nothing save his own will and power. She was to
him the readiest echo of the world's wonder and applause, the readiest
assurance that his great effort was not going unrecognised. Hence he
would have her with him, though there seemed no more love and no more
tenderness between them than when in old days they had quarrelled and he
had grumbled and she had flung him her money with a bitter jeer. But she
lived in him and could think of him only as living, and through her he
could cheat himself into an assurance that indeed he could live and work.
Then Aunt Maria was very bad for him. That could not be denied, but
something more nearly touching herself pressed on May Quisanté. She had
seen the Mildmays' painful puzzle; she had listened to Dr. Claud Manton's
energetic warning; it was before her, no less than before the patient,
that Sir Rufus had washed his hands. She was not ignorant of the
questions the world asked. She was not careless, nor was she any longer
the dupe of her old delusion that such a man as Quisanté could not die.
Her eye for truth had conquered; now she believed that, if he persisted
in his rebellion, he must surely die; unless all medical knowledge went
for nothing, he would surely die, and die not after long years of
lingering, but soon, perhaps very soon. A moment of excitement, say one
of the moments that she had loved so much, might kill him; so Claud
Manton said. A life of excitement would surely and early do the work. And
why was he rebellious? She accused himself, she accused Aunt Maria, she
accused the foolishly wondering, foolishly chattering world; and in every
accusation there was some justice. Was there enough to acquit the other
defendant who stood arraigned? To that she dared not answer "Yes,"
because of the fear which was in her that the strongest amongst all the
various impulses driving him to his defiance was in the end to be found
in his relations to her, in the attitude of his own wife towards him.
Ashwood was full of associations; there was Duty Hill, where he had risen
to his greatest and thereby won her; there was the tree beneath which she
had sat with Marchmont on the evening when the knowledge of her husband's
worst side had been driven like a sharp knife into her very heart. But
more vivid than these memories now was the recollection of that first
evening when she had seen him sitting alone, nobody's friend, and had
determined to be human towards him and to treat him in a human way. There
had been the true beginning of her great experiment. Now she told herself
that she had failed in it, had never been human to him, and had never
treated him in a human way, had not been what a man's wife should be, had
stood always outside, a follower, an admirer, a critic, an accuser, never
simply the woman who was his wife. His fault or hers, or that of both--it
seemed to matter little. The experiment had been hers; and because she
had made it and failed, it seemed to her that he was braving death. Had
she been different, perhaps he would not have rebelled and could have
lived the quiet life with her. It needed little more to make her tell
herself that she drove him to his death, that she was with the enemy,
with the chattering world and with poor deluded old Aunt Maria; she was
of the conspirators; she egged him on to brave his doom.
In darker vein still ran her musings sometimes, when there came over her
that haunting self-distrust; the fear that she was juggling with herself,
shutting her eyes to the sin of her own heart, and, in spite of all her
protestations, was really inspired by a secret hope too black and
treacherous to put in words. However passionately she repudiated it, it
still cried mockingly, "I am here!" It asked if her prayers for her
husband's life were sincere, if her care for him were more than a due
paid to decency, if the doom were in truth a thing she dreaded, and not a
deliverance which convention alone forbade her openly to desire. Plainly,
plainly--did she wish the doom to fall, did she wish him dead, was the
rebellion that threatened death the course which the secret craving of
her heart urged him to take? To do everything for him was not enough, if
the doubt still lurked that her heart was not in the doing. For now she
could no more ask coolly what she wished; the thing had come too near; it
was odious to have a thought except of saving him by all means and at
every cost; it was intolerable not to know at least that no part of the
impulse which drove him to his rebellion lay at her door, not to feel at
least that she had nothing but dread and horror for the threatened doom.
She had no love for him; it came home to her now with a strange new sense
of self-condemnation; she had married him for her own pleasure, because
he interested her and made life seem dull without him. She pleaded no
more that he had killed her love; it had never been there to kill. Had
she left him to find a woman who loved him in and for himself, not for
his doings, not for the interest of him, that woman might now be winning
him by love from the open jaws of death.
Yet again laughter, obstinate and irrepressible, shot often in a jarring
streak of inharmonious colour across the sombre fabric of her thoughts.
He was not only mad, not only splendid--he seemed both to her--he was
absurd too at moments, often when he was with Aunt Maria. Letters came in
great numbers, from political followers, from women prominent in society,
from constituents, from old Foster and Japhet Williams at Henstead, even
from puissant Lady Castlefort; they wondered, applauded, implored,
flattered, in every key of that sweet instrument called praise. Quisanté
read them out, pluming and preening his feathers, strutting about,
crowing. He would repeat the passages he liked, asking his wife's
approbation; that he must have, it seemed. She gave it with what
heartiness she could, and laughed only in her sleeve. Surely a man facing
death could have forgotten all this? Not Alexander Quisanté. He could
die, and die bravely; but the world must stand by his bedside. So till
the end, whenever that most uncertainly dated end might come, the old
mixture promised to go on, the great and small, the mean and grand, the
call for tears and throbs of the heart alternating with the obstinate
curling or curving of lips swift to respond to the vision of the
contemptible or the ludicrous.
But she had her appeal to make, the one thing, it seemed, she could do to
put herself at all in the right, the offer she must make, and try to make
with a sincerity which should rise unimpaired from the conflicts of her
heart. She had caught at coming to Ashwood because she thought she could
make it best there, not indeed in the room where she had lied for him,
nor by the tree where she had turned to Marchmont in a pang of wild
regret, but there, on Duty Hill, where he had won her, had touched his
highest, and had seemed a conqueror. She took him there, climbing with
him very slowly, very gently; there she made him sit and sat by him.
Again it was a quiet evening, and still the valley stretched below;
nothing changed here made all the changes of her life seem half unreal.
Here she told him he must live, he must be docile and must live.
"You may get strong again, but for the time you must do as the doctors
say. You ought to; for the little girl's sake, if for nothing else, you
ought to. You know you're risking another seizure now, and you know what
that might mean."
His eyes were fixed keenly on her, though he lay back motionless in
weariness.
"You ought to live for your daughter." She paused a minute and added,
"And some day we might have a son, and you'd live again in him; we both
should; we should feel that we were doing--that you were doing--everything
he did. I think your son would be a great man, and I should be proud to
be his mother. Isn't the hope of that worth something?"
He was silent, watching her closely still.
"I know what you think of me," she continued. "You think an active life
essential to me, that I can't do without it. God knows I loved all you
did, I loved your triumphs, I loved to hear you speak and see them
listen. You know I loved all that, loved it too much perhaps. But I'll do
without it. I'm your wife, your fate's mine. It'll be the braver thing
for you to face it, really; I'm ready to face it with you."
Still he would only look at her.
"We know what we both are," she went on with a little smile. "We're not
Mildmays, you and I. But let's try. I must tell you. I can't bear to
think that it's partly at least because of me that you won't try, that if
I were a different sort of woman it might be much easier for you to try.
If it's that at all, imagine what I should feel if--if anything happened
such as the doctors are afraid of."
"I've chosen my course. I believe the doctors are all wrong."
"Do you really believe that?" she asked quickly.
He shrugged his shoulders, seeming to say that he would not discuss it.
"A great many considerations influence me," he said with a touch of
pompousness.
"Am I one of them?" she persisted. "Because I don't want to be. I'm ready
to share your life, whatever it is."
"Are you?" he asked, with something of the same malicious smile that he
was wont to bestow on Aunt Maria. "Do you think you could share my life?
Do you think you have?"
"I know what you mean," she said, flushing a little. "I daresay I've been
hard and--and didn't take the pains to understand, and was uncharitable
perhaps. Anyhow there'll be no opportunity for any more--any more
misunderstandings of that sort."
"No; the understanding's clear enough now," said he.
She looked at him almost despairingly; he seemed so strangely hostile, so
bitterly sensitive to her judgment of him.
"You think me," he went on, with his persistent eyes unwaveringly set on
her, "a not over-honest mountebank; that's what you and your friends
think me."
"Oh, I wish I'd never tried to talk to you about it!" she cried. "You
take hold of some hasty mood or look of mine and treat it as if it were
everything. You know it isn't."
"It's there, though."
"It never need be, never, never."
"You'll forget it all when we're settled down at--where was it?--Torquay
or somewhere--in our villa, like two old tabby-cats sitting in the sun?
No time to think it all over then? No, only all the hours of every day!"
He paused and then added in a low hard voice, "I'm damned if I'll do it.
I may have to die, but I'll die standing." His eyes gleamed now, and for
the first time they turned from her and roamed over the prospect that lay
below Duty Hill. But they were back on her face soon.
"No, no," she implored. "Not because of me, for heaven's sake, not
because of me!"
"Because of it all. Yes, and because of you too. You don't love me, you
never have." He leant towards her. "But I love you," he said, "yes, as I
loved you when I asked you to be my wife on this hill where we are. Then
don't you understand? I won't go and live that old cat's life with you."
He laid his hand on hers. "Your eyes shall still sparkle for me, your
breath shall still come quick for me, your heart beat for me; or I'll
have no more of it at all."
The touch of rhetoric, so characteristic of him, so unlike anything that
Marchmont or Dick Benyon would have used in such a case, did not
displease her then. And it hit the truth as his penetration was wont to
hit it. That was what he wanted, that was what she could and should and
must give, or he would have nothing from her. Here was the truth; but the
truth was what she had struggled so hard to deny and feared so terribly
to find true. He was not indeed led by a sense of obligation towards her;
the need was for himself. It was not that he felt in her a right to call
on him for exertions or for a performance of his side of the bargain; it
was that he could not bear to lose his tribute from her. But still she
stood self-condemned. Again the thought came--with a woman who loved him
there might have been another tribute that she could have paid and he
been content to levy. He would have believed such a woman if she told him
that he would be as much to her, and she as much absorbed in him, in the
villa at Torquay as ever in the great world; and perhaps--oh, only
perhaps, it is true--he would have made shift with that and fed his
appetite on the homage of one, since his wretched body denied him the
rows on rows of applauding spectators that he loved. But from his wife's
lips he would not accept any such assurance, and from her no such homage
could be hoped for to solace him.
Then the strange creature began to talk to her, not of what he had done,
nor even of what he had hoped to do, but of what he meant and was going
to do; how he would grow greater and richer, of schemes in politics and
in business, of the fervour and devotion of the fighting men behind him
and how they were sick of the old gang and would have no leader but
Alexander Quisanté; of the prosperity of the Alethea, how the shares
rose, how big orders came in, how utterly poor old Maturin had blundered.
He spoke like a strong man with a wealth of years and store-houses of
force, who sees life stretched long before him, material to be shaped by
his hand and forced into what he will make it. He talked low and fast,
his eyes again roaming over the prospect; the evening fell while he still
talked. Almost it seemed then that the doctors were wrong, that his
courage was no folly, that indeed he would not die. O for the faith to
believe that! For his spell was on her again now, and now she would not
have him die. Once again he had his desire; once more her heart beat and
her eyes gleamed for him. But then it came on her, with a sudden fierce
light of conviction, that all this was hollow, useless, vain, that the
sentence was written and the doom pronounced. No pleading however
eloquent could alter it. Quisanté was stopped in mid-career by a short
sharp sob that escaped from his wife's lips. He turned and looked at her,
breaking off the sentence that he had begun. She met his glance with a
frightened look in her eyes.
"What's the matter?" he asked slowly, rather resentfully.
"Nothing, nothing," she stammered. "I--I was excited by what you were
saying." She tried to laugh. "I'm emotional, you know, and you can always
rouse my emotions."
"Was it that?" For a moment longer he sat upright, looking hard at her;
then his body relaxed, and he lay back, his lower lip dropping and his
eyes half closed. An expression of great weariness and despair came over
him. He had read the meaning of her sob; and now he hid his face in his
hands. His pretences failed him, and he was assailed by the bitterness of
truth and of death.
She rose, saying, "It's late, we must go in; you'll be over-tired."
After an instant Quisanté rose slowly and falteringly; he laid his arm in
hers, and they stood side by side, gazing down into the valley. This hill
had come to mean much in their lives, and somehow now they seemed to be
saying good-bye to it.
"I could never forget this hill," she said, "any more than I could forget
you. You told me just now that I didn't love you. Well, as you mean it,
perhaps not. But you've been almost everything in the world to me.
Everything in the world isn't all good, but it's--everything." She turned
to him suddenly and kissed him on the cheek. "Lean on me as we go down
the hill," she said. There was pity and tenderness in the words and the
tone. But Quisanté drew his arm sharply away and braced his body to
uprightness.
"I'm not tired. I can go quite well by myself. You look more tired than I
do," he said. "Come, we shall be late," and he set off down the hill at a
brisk pace.
Her appeal then had failed; this last little incident told her that with
unpitying plainness. If he had yielded for a moment before the face of
reality, he soon recovered himself, turned away from the sight, and went
back to his masquerading. She lacked the power to lead him from it, and
again she feared that she lacked the power because her will was not
sincere and single. Now they must go on to that uncertain end, he playing
his part before the world, before her and Aunt Maria, she looking on,
sometimes in admiration, sometimes in contempt, always in fear of the
moment when the actor's speeches would be suddenly cut short and the
curtain, falling on the interrupted scene, hide him for ever from the
audience whom he had made wondering applauding partners in his
counterfeit. The last of his life was to be like the rest of it, with the
same elements of tragedy and of farce, of what attracted and of what
revolted, of the great and the little. It was to be like in another way
too; it was to be lived alone, without any true companion for his soul,
without the love that he had not asked except of one, and, asking of that
one, had not obtained. As the days went on, the fascination of the
spectacle she watched grew on her; it was more poignant now than in the
former time, and it filled all her life. Thus in some sort Alexander
Quisanté had his way; his hold on her was not relaxed, his dominion over
her not abrogated, to the end of his life he would be what she told him
he had been--almost everything. When the end came, what would he be? The
question crossed her thoughts, but found no answer; some day it would
fall to be answered. Now she could only watch and wait, half persuaded
that the pretence was no pretence, yet always dreading the summons of
reality to end the play. So the world asked in vain what May Quisanté was
thinking of, whether she wanted to kill him, or whether she thought him
above all laws. A puzzle to the world and a puzzle to her friends, she
waited for the falling of the blow which Quisanté daily challenged.
Sir Rufus Beaming met Dr. Claud Manton at the Athenaeum and showed him a
newspaper paragraph.
"To address a great meeting at Henstead!" said Manton, raising his brows
and shaping his lips for a whistle. "'From his own and neighbouring
constituencies.'"
"He might just as well take chloroform comfortably by his fireside," said
Sir Rufus. "It would be a little quicker, perhaps, but not a bit more
sure."
And again they washed their hands of the whole affair very solemnly.