Chapter 7. Advice From Aunt Maria

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_ CHAPTER VII. ADVICE FROM AUNT MARIA

The two Cabinet Ministers brought back from Manchester different accounts of Quisante'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 Quisante, and was not disposed of by observing that the unfavourable Minister belonged to that "old gang" which it was Quisante'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 Quisante 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 Quisante; 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 Quisante 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. Quisante?"

"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 Quisante 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 Quisante 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 Quisante 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 Quisante." 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 Quisante 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 Quisante 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 Quisante," 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 Quisante 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 Quisante 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. Quisante 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 Quisante 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 Quisante. 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 Quisante, 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 Quisante'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 Quisante, as he thought; May told herself that he had discovered only half of Quisante, 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 Quisante 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 Quisante 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 Quisante, and at all costs to rescue her from Quisante, 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 Quisante'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 Quisante? 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 Quisante 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. Quisante; 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 Quisante 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 Quisante 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 Quisante at once insulted him and degraded her. Here was a case where Alexander Quisante, with all his defects, would have gone right, while Marchmont went wrong. It was a crisis, and Quisante'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 Quisante 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 Quisante, 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 Quisante, 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?

* * *

Quisante 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. Quisante!"

The playful, yet not meaningless, defiance of a softer mood, and of his power to induce it in her, acted as a spark to Quisante'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?" _

Read next: Chapter 8. Contra Mundum

Read previous: Chapter 6. On Duty Hill

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