Chapter 14. Open Eyes

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_ CHAPTER XIV. OPEN EYES

It is a matter of common observation that the local influences and peculiarities which loom so large before the eyes of both parties during such a struggle as that at Henstead seem to be entirely forgotten after the declaration of the poll, at least by the victorious faction and their friends in the Press and the country. Out of a congeries of conflicting views, fancies, fads, interests, quarrels, and misunderstandings a reasoned and single political verdict is considered to emerge, and great is the credit of the advocate who extracts it from the multitudinous jury. When Quisante had won Henstead, little more was heard of the gentleman with a deceased wife's sister, of the butcher in trouble about slaughter-houses, of Japhet Williams' conscience or Tom Sinnett's affair. The result was taken as an augury of triumph for the party all over the country, where these things had never been heard of and the voices of Henstead did not reach. Unhappily however, as events proved, the victory of Henstead had in the end to be regarded not as the inauguration of a triumphant campaign but as a brilliant exploit performed in face of an overwhelming enemy. To be brief, the Government was beaten, somewhat badly beaten, the great cry was a failure, and there were many casualties in the ranks. Marchmont kept his seat by virtue of personal and hereditary popularity; but Dick Benyon, who had been considered quite safe, lost his, a fate shared by many who had deemed themselves no less secure.

"I suppose you preached your miserable Crusade, as you call it?" said Constantine Blair. They were at dinner at Marchmont's, Morewood and the Dean also being of the company.

"I did, and without it I should have got a worse thrashing," said Dick stoutly; it would be unkind to scrutinise too closely the sincerity of this statement.

"Quisante had the sense to throw it over," growled Constantine; his equanimity was not up to its usual standard.

"It's wisdom to lighten the ship in a storm," smiled Marchmont.

"Yes, and to jettison other people's heavy luggage first," said Morewood.

"The duty of a captain, I suppose," murmured the Dean with a smile.

"You needn't begin with your best guns," argued Dick, a little hotly.

"We can't let Dick appropriate our metaphor to his own purposes," said Marchmont. "As a matter of fact now, had the Crusade much to do with it?"

Morewood interposed before Dick could answer.

"Oh, only as a Crusade. 'Causes' of any kind are properly suspected," said he. "For my part I should imitate the noble simplicity of municipal election bills. 'Down with the rates!' Quite enough, you know. The end is indisputably attractive, and you aren't such an ass as to try to indicate the means. So you get in."

"And don't do it?" The question was Marchmont's.

"Of course not--or what would you have to say next time?"

"The other side has always prevented your doing it?" the Dean suggested.

"Mostly, yes--by factious opposition."

"You fellows don't seem to care," observed Constantine Blair moodily, "but I tell you we're out for four or five years at least."

There was a pause; the accused persons looked at one another; then Marchmont had the courage to observe that the country would perhaps live through the period of calamity before it.

"The country, yes, but how about some of the party?" asked Morewood. "How about that, Blair? You're supposed to be the man who feeds the ravens and providently caters for the sparrows, you know. You'll have your hands full, I should think."

Blair's look expressed the opinion that they trenched on mysteries; he had these little traits of self-importance, sitting funnily on a round and merry face. Marchmont laughed as he turned to Dick and enquired after Jimmy.

"He was helping you, I suppose?"

"Yes, after Quisante was in. He's all right." Dick's tone was slightly reserved.

"Did Quisante help you? He seems to have helped everybody; the man ran about like an electric current."

"I didn't ask him to come to me. I felt, you know----"

"Yes, I see. But Jimmy didn't?"

Dick looked rather puzzled. "I don't quite make Jimmy out about Quisante," he remarked. "He worked for him like a horse all the time, and wrote me letters praising him to the skies. Then when he was in and everybody was cracking him up Jimmy wouldn't open his mouth about him--seemed not to like the subject, you know."

Nobody spoke; they had heard rumours of an event which would bring Jimmy into new relations with Quisante, and they waited for possible information. But Dick did not go on, so it was left to Morewood to make the necessary intrusion into private affairs; he did it willingly, with a malicious grin.

"Thinking him over in the light of a relation, perhaps?" he suggested.

"It would only be a connection anyhow," Dick corrected rather sharply.

"Oh, if that comforts you!" said Morewood, laughing.

"She's a charming girl and I'm awfully glad it's come off."

"Oh, it has?" asked Marchmont.

"Yes, the other day."

"And you're glad in spite of----?"

"Yes, I am. Besides I don't mean anything of that sort. I suppose I know as well as anybody what Quisante is."

"As far as I'm concerned I'll admit you do, and still feel you don't know much," remarked the Dean.

"Well, I wish there were more men like him," said Blair, nodding vigorously.

"Some men would sacrifice anything for their party," remarked Morewood.

Marchmont took no part in the talk about Quisante; he could not praise; for reasons very plain to himself he would not say a word in blame or depreciation. Not only had he been Quisante's rival, but ever since his talk with May he had felt himself the repository of special information, imperfect indeed and shadowy, yet beyond that which the outside world possessed. Besides he had received two letters from her, one written in the course of the fight, gay in tone, expressing an eager interest in her husband's fortunes, keenly appreciative of her husband's brilliancy and bravery. The second, in reply to his telegram of congratulation, had run in another key; an utter weariness and an almost disgusted satiety seemed to have superseded her former interest. Side by side with these he had discovered in the repressed but eloquent words of her greeting to him an intense desire to see him. "I want a change so badly," she wrote. "I want somebody unpractical, unpushing. You must come directly we're back in town." They had been back in town ten days, he knew, but he had not yet obeyed her summons. The thought crossed his mind that the contrast between her two letters was an odd parallel to Dick's description of the puzzling demeanour of his brother Jimmy. Was it a characteristic of the man's to produce these sudden and startling changes of mood towards himself? Marchmont was puzzled at the notion; he was too little able to sympathise with the attraction to find himself capable of understanding the force and extent of the revulsion. "At all events she must be pretty well prepared for what he is by now," he said to himself with the mixture of pity and resentment which his love for her and her rejection of him in Quisante's favour had bred in his mind. For her he was very sorry; it was harder to be quite simply and sincerely sorry that her blindness to what had been so obvious was working out its inevitable result; he would like to console her in any way short of refraining from pointing out how wrong she had been proved.

When, in obedience to another note, he went, he did not at first find May alone. Although he knew Sir Winterton Mildmay, he was not acquainted with his wife, and was surprised when the kind-looking woman who sat with May was introduced to him as Lady Mildmay. This was a quick and thorough burying of the hatchet indeed. "Would you see this in any country except England?" he asked jokingly. Lady Mildmay declared not, adding that there was no bitterness in England because there was only upstanding fighting which left no rancour and indeed bred personal liking. Marchmont thought to himself that Quisante must have been very clever--or that this dear woman (he gave her the epithet at once as everybody did) was not very clever, no cleverer than he had long known handsome Sir Winterton to be. Glancing across at May, he seemed to see an expression of absolute pain on her face, as Lady Mildmay developed these amiable theories.

"I don't believe my husband will ever stand against yours again," she said.

May looked at Marchmont. "They really have taken quite a fancy to one another," she said with a laugh that sounded rather forced. "Funny, isn't it?"

"The speech you invite me to would be a very unfortunate one to address to the wives of the two gentlemen," he answered, smiling. "Funny indeed! I prefer to call it inevitable, don't you, Lady Mildmay?"

May made the slightest gesture of impatience, but a moment later smiled again at Lady Mildmay, saying, "Yes, I suppose that's what I ought to have said."

The visitor rose to go; approaching May, she first shook hands and then stood for a moment with a half-expectant half-imploring air. It was plain that she suggested a kiss. Marchmont looked on rather amused; he knew that May Quisante was not given to effusiveness. It would, however, have been cruel not to kiss Lady Mildmay, and May kissed her with an excellent grace.

"Well," said Marchmont when the door was shut, "she takes defeat prettily. Evidently you've made a conquest, as well as your husband."

"I wish she wouldn't come here," said May, wandering to the window and speaking in a disconsolate voice.

"You don't like her?"

"Like her? Oh, of course I like the dear creature! Who wouldn't? And I like him too." She turned round, smiling a little. "He's so nice, and large, and clean, and direct, and obvious, and simple, you know. I like him just as I like a great rosy apple."

"Hum! I don't eat many of those, do you?"

She laughed, but rather reluctantly. "Perhaps that's more your fault than the apple's. Still I agree. A bite now and then. But they're mostly only to dress the table."

"Why don't you want her to come?"

May sat down and fidgeted with a nick-nack on the table.

"Don't you think being forgiven's rather tiresome work?" she asked. "They don't mean that, I know, but I can't help feeling as if they did."

"I don't see why you should."

She looked full at him for a moment. "No, I didn't suppose you would see it," she said. "Don't stand there, come and sit here,--near me. I've written you three letters, but you don't seem to understand yet that I want to see you." He took the chair near her to which she had pointed; she looked at him, evidently with both pleasure and amusement. "You don't look the least as if you'd been electioneering," she told him in an admiring congratulatory tone.

"I've had the egg-marks brushed off," he explained with the insincere gravity that he knew she liked.

"Will they brush off? Will they always brush off?" she asked, her voice low, her hands nursing her knee, her eyes on his.

"Parables, my lady?"

"Yes. Do you know that we won the election because rosy Sir Winterton was supposed to have flirted with his keeper's daughter, and wouldn't say he hadn't, and wouldn't bring that dear soul where anybody was likely to say he had?"

"No, I hadn't heard that. I thought your husband's----"

"Oh, yes, all that helped. He was splendid. But we shouldn't have done it without the keeper's daughter."

"_Vox populi, vox Dei_; they're both so hard to understand."

"I've been longing for you," she said, seeming to awake suddenly from her half-dreamy half-playful account of the life she had been living. The speech, with its cruel frankness and its more cruel affection, embittered him.

"When you're tired of a rosy apple, you like a bite at a bitter cherry? One bite; the rest of me, I suppose, is only to dress the table."

She understood him.

"Well, then, you shouldn't come," she protested. "I've been fair about it."

"No, not always; what you write and say now and then isn't fair unless it means something more."

"Oh, I don't know what it means."

Her misery drove away his resentment, and pity filled its place.

"You seem more than usually down on your luck," he said with a smile.

"Yes, a little," she confessed. "It's the Mildmays and--and--the general sham of it, you know." She glanced across at him, smiling. "That's why I longed for you," she said.

It seemed to him that never had fate and never had woman been so cruel. The one so nearly had given what he wanted, the other tantalised with the exhibition of a feeling only just short of what he hoped for, but the more merciless because it seemed not to understand by how narrow an inch it failed of his desires. He spoke to her hardly and coldly.

"You seem to me to choose to try a bit of everything and a bit of everybody," he said. "That's your affair. But I'm not surprised that you don't find it satisfactory."

"I have to try more than I like of some things and some people," she replied. She went on quickly, "I know, oh, I know! Now you're calling me disloyal!"

A curious vexation laid hold of him. Once he had liked her to speak of him in this strain, even as once he had loved to see in her the type of the pure, calm, gracious maiden. Now he knew better both her and himself. The impulse was on him to say that he cared nothing for her disloyalty so that he himself was the cause of it and he himself to reap the benefit. He was quick to read her, and he read in her restless misery some sore discontent with the lot that she had chosen. But he refrained from the words, not in his turn from any loyalty, but rather still from bitterness, from a perverse desire to give her nothing of what she had refused, to leave her in the solitude of spirit which came of her own action. Besides his fastidiousness revolted from plunging him into a position which was so common, and which he, with his dislike of things common, had always counted vulgar. Thus he was silent, and she also sat silent, looking straight before her. At last, however, she spoke.

"Alexander's gone to the city," she said, "to see his stockbroker. The stockbroker's a cousin of--ours." She smiled for a moment. "His name's Mandeville. Since the party's out, we've got to see if we can make some money."

His pity revived; whatever she deserved, it was not this horrible common-place lot of wanting money; that sat so ill on his still stately, no longer faultless, image of her.

"To make some money?" he repeated, half-scornful, half-puzzled.

"Oh, you're rich--you don't know. We spent a lot at Henstead. We must have money: I spend a lot, so does Alexander." She glanced at him, and he saw that something had nearly escaped her lips of which she repented. "Do you ever feel," she went on, apparently by way of amendment, "as if you might be dishonest--under stress of circumstances, you know?"

"I suppose I might. I've never thought about it."

"So dishonest as--as to get into trouble and be sent to prison and so on?"

"Oh, I should hope to be skilful enough to avoid that," he laughed. "Fools ought never to be dishonest; so they invented the 'best policy' proverb to keep themselves straight."

May nodded. "That's it, I think," she said, and fell into silence again. This time he spoke.

"I don't like your wanting money," he said in a low voice.

"No, I know," she smiled. "It's not like what you've always chosen to think I'm like. I ought to live in gilded halls and scatter largesse, oughtn't I?" She laughed a little bitterly. "Perhaps I will, if cousin Mandeville does his duty."

"Meanwhile you feel the temptation to dishonesty?" He paused, but then went on deliberately, "Or, to follow your rule of complete identification, shall I say 'we feel a temptation to dishonesty, do we?'"

"Oh, but we should be clever enough not to be found out, shouldn't we?"

"I think you would."

"You've not half such good reason to think it as I have." She rose, walked to the hearth-rug, and stood facing the grate, her back turned to him. She seemed to him to be looking at a photograph which he noticed now for the first time on the mantelpiece, the picture of a stout elderly man with large clean-shaven face and an expression of tolerant shrewdness. Marchmont moved close to her shoulder and looked also. Perceiving him, she half turned her head towards him. "That's my husband's right-hand man at Henstead," she said. "They understand each other perfectly."

"He looks a sharp fellow."

"So he may be able to understand Alexander? Thank you. I like to have his picture here." Suddenly she turned round full on him, stretching out her hand. "I wish you'd go now," she said. "Have you turned stupid, or don't you see that you must leave me alone, or--or I shall say all sorts of things I mustn't? That man on the mantelpiece there typifies it all. Bless his dear old fat face! I like him so much--and he's such a humbug, and I don't think he knows that he's in the least a humbug. Is sincerity just stupidity?" Her mirth broke out. "Alexander hates my having him there," she whispered; then she drew away, crying, "Go, go."

"I'm off," said he. "But why doesn't Quisante like the old gentleman's picture, and why do you keep it there if he doesn't?"

"And why are none of us perfect--except perhaps the Mildmays? Good-bye." She gave him her hand. "Oh, by the way," she went on, calling him back after he had turned, "have you ever had anything to do with promoting companies or anything of that kind?"

"Well, no, I can't say I have."

"Is it necessarily disreputable?"

"Oh, no," he smiled. "Not necessarily. In fact it's an essential feature in the life of a commercial nation." He was mockingly grave again.

"Thank you very much, Mr. Marchmont. An essential feature of the life in a commercial nation! That's very good." She broke into a laugh. "Now I've got something agreeable to say," she said. He did not move till she shook her head violently at him and pointed to the door. As he went out, she turned back to Mr. Foster's picture, murmuring, "It's no use my setting up for a martyr. Martyrs don't giggle half the time." Had Marchmont heard her, the word "giggle" would have stirred him to real indignation; it was so inappropriate to that low reluctant mirth-laden laugh of hers, which seemed to reveal the feeling that it mocked and extorted the pity that it could not but deride. It sounded again as she stood looking at old Foster the maltster's picture there on the mantelpiece where Quisante did not like to see it.

For what was the meaning of it to her, declared by her perverse determination to keep it there and plain enough to her husband's quick wit? It was the outward sign that her malicious fancy chose of the new state of feeling and the new relation between them which had emerged from the tempest of emotion that Foster's congratulatory note had thrown her into. The tempest had raged in solitude and silence; she had not spoken a word to her sister, or to Jimmy Benyon, hardly a word to Quisante himself. He had his case of course, and she was obliged to hear it, to hear also Foster's own account of how he came to express himself so awkwardly and to write as though Mr. Quisante had originally set the story afloat, whereas he meant only to applaud the tact with which his leader had regulated their conduct towards it after it was started. May said she was quite sure he had meant only this, thanked him for all his services, and begged the photograph. Quisante approved this bearing towards the third party but was not deceived by it himself. When the picture was set on the mantelpiece, he understood that his case was not convincing, that the episode would not fall into the oblivion which he had suggested for it; it would not be forgotten and could not be forgiven. Deeply resentful of this treatment--for he saw nothing very bad in his manoeuvre--he had been moved to protest passionately, to explain volubly, and to offer pledge on pledge. Protests, plaints, and promises broke uselessly against the cool, composed, indulgent friendliness of her bearing. She gave him to understand that no pretences were longer possible between them, but that they would get along without them. She allowed him to see that the one fear left to her on his account was the apprehension that some day he would be found out by other people. Here her terror was as great as it had ever been, for her pride was unbroken; but she did not show him the full extent of her anxiety.

"You ought to be particularly careful, so many people would like to see you come to grief." This, or something like it, was what she had said, by way of dismissing the subject for ever from their conversation with one another. It expressed very well her new position, how she had abandoned those mad hopes of changing him and fallen back on the resolve to see the truth of him herself and make the best of him to others. But the very calmness and friendliness of the warning told him how resolutely she had chosen her path, while they concealed the shame and the fear with which she set herself to tread it. One thing only Quisante understood quite clearly; it was no use acting to her any more; what she wished was that he should cease to act to her. Yet, knowing this, he could not cease, it was not in his nature to cease, and he went on playing his part before eyes that he knew were not imposed on but saw through all his disguises. His old furtiveness of manner came back now when he talked over himself and his affairs with his wife.

But even here he had his triumph, he was not at her mercy, he wielded a power of his own; she recognised it with a smile. Like Aunt Maria, whatever she might think of him she was bound to think constantly of him, to be occupied with his doings and his success, to want to know what was in his mind, yes, although it might be what she hated to find there. For a while he had withdrawn himself from her, ceasing to tell of his life, aims, and doings. If he sought thus to bring her to terms, she proved an easy conquest; she surrendered at once, laughing at herself and at him. "We're partners," she said, "and I must hear all about what you're doing. I can't live without that, you know." And as the price of what she must have she gave him friendship, sympathy, and comradeship, crossing his wishes in nothing and never allowing herself to upbraid except in that small tacit jeer of Mr. Foster's picture on the mantelpiece. For now she believed herself to know the worst, and yet to be able to endure.

What sort of life promised to form itself out of this state of affairs? For after all she was at the beginning of life, and he hardly well into the middle of his. Neither of the two obvious things seemed possible; devotion was out of the question, alienation was forbidden by her unconquerable interest in him and his irrepressible instinct to hold her mind, even if he could not chain her affections. Perhaps a third thing was more usual still, tolerance. But for her at least neither was tolerance the mood, for that is ill to build out of a mixture of intense admiration and scornful contempt. These seemed likely to be the predominant features of her life with her husband, sharing it so equally that the one could never drive out the other nor yet come to fair terms and, dividing the territory, live at peace.

"Perhaps they will some day," she thought, "when I get old and quiet." She was neither old nor quiet now, and her youth cried out against so poor a consolation. Then she told herself that she had the child, only to reproach herself, a moment later, with the insincere repetition of a commonplace. The child was not enough; had her nature been such as to find the child enough, she would certainly never have become Alexander Quisante's wife. Always when she was most strongly repelled by him, there was in the back of her mind the feeling that it was something to be his wife. Only--he mustn't be found out. The worst terror of all, at which her half-jesting words to Marchmont had hinted, came back as she murmured, "I wish we had more money." For money was necessary, as votes had been, and--her eyes strayed to old Foster's portrait on the mantelpiece. The election had cost a lot; no salary was to be looked for now; both by policy and by instinct Quisante was lavish; she herself had no aptitude for small economies. Money was wanted very much indeed in Grosvenor Road.

It was on the way, though. This was the news that Quisante, in the interval between his return from electioneering and the meeting of Parliament, brought back day by day from his excursions to the City and his conversations with Mandeville. He was careful to explain to his wife that he was no "guinea-pig," that he did not approve of the animal, and would never use his position to pick up gain in that way. But he had leisure--at least he could make time--and some of it he proposed to devote to starting a really legitimate and highly lucrative undertaking. The Alethea Printing Press was to revolutionise a great many things besides the condition of Quisante's finances; it was not an ordinary speculative company. Marchmont's phrase came in here, and May used it neatly and graciously. Quisante, much encouraged, plunged into an account of the great invention; if only it worked as it was certain to work, there was not one fortune but many fortunes in it. "And it will work?" she asked. "If we can get the capital," he answered with a confident air. "I shall try to interest all my friends in it," he went on. "You can help me there." May looked doubtful, and Quisante grew more eloquent. At last he held up a sheaf of papers, saying triumphantly,

"Here are favourable reports from all the leading experts. We shall have an array of them in the prospectus. Of course they're absolutely impartial, and they really leave no room for doubt." He held them out to her, but she leant back with her hands in her lap.

"I shouldn't understand them," she protested. "But they all agree, do they?"

"Yes, all," he said emphatically. "Well, all except one." His brow wrinkled a little. "Mandeville insisted on having an opinion from Professor Maturin. I was against it. Maturin's absurdly pessimistic."

"He's a great man, isn't he?"

"Oh, yes, I suppose so,--he's got a great reputation anyhow."

"And he's against you?"

"The fact is that his is only--only a draft report. So far as it goes, it's not encouraging, but he's never had the facts really laid before him."

"You'd better go and lay them before him," she said very gravely.

Quisante caught eagerly at the suggestion.

"Exactly what I proposed to Mandeville!" he cried. "The prospectus won't be out for nearly a month yet, and I shall go and see Maturin. I know----" He rose and began to walk about. "I know Maturin is wrong, and I know that I can show him he's wrong. I only want an hour with him to bring him round to my view, to the true view."

"Well, why haven't you been to see him?"

"I tried to go, but he's ill and not equal to business. As soon as he gets better I shall go. To put his report in as it stands would not only do us infinite harm--in fact we couldn't think of it--but it wouldn't be just to him."

"But if he won't change his opinion?"

"Oh, he must, he will. I tell you it's as plain as a pikestaff, when once it's properly explained."

"I'm sure you'll be able to convert him, if anyone can," said May soothingly.

"I must," said Quisante briefly, and sat down to his papers again.

For an hour or two he worked steadily, without a pause, without an apparent hesitation. That fine machine of his was ploughing its straight unfaltering way through details previously unfamiliar and through problems which he had never studied. From five to seven she sat with a book in her hands, feigning to read, really watching her husband. He could not fail, she said to herself; he would make the Alethea Printing Press a success, irrespective of the actual merits of it. Was that possible? It seemed almost possible as she looked at him.

"It's bound to go," he said at last, pushing away the papers. "I'm primed now, and I can convince old Maturin in half an hour." He held up the Professor's report. "He must withdraw this and give us another."

Alas, there are things before which even will and energy and brains must bow. As he spoke the servant came in, bringing the _Evening Standard_. May took it, glanced at the middle page, and then, with a little start, looked across at her husband. He saw her glance. "Any news?" he asked.

"The Professor can't be convinced," she said. "His illness took a sudden turn for the worse last night and he died this afternoon at three o'clock."

Quisante sat quite still for a few minutes, the dead Professor's report on the Alethea Printing Press still in his fingers.

"What'll you do now?" she asked, with the smile of curiosity which she always had ready for his plans. Would he pursue the Professor beyond Charon's stream?

He hesitated a little, glancing at her rather uneasily. At last he spoke.

"One thing at all events is clear to me," he said. "This thing doesn't represent a reasoned and well-informed opinion." He folded it up carefully and placed it by itself in a long envelope. "We must consider our course," he ended.

In a flash, by an instinct, May knew what their course would be and at whose dictation it would be followed.

"Of course," said Quisante, "all this is strictly between ourselves."

Her cheek flushed a little. "You mustn't tell me any more business secrets. I don't like them," said she, and she turned away to escape the quick, would-be covert glance that she knew he would direct at her.

Money was necessary; votes had been necessary; old Foster smiled in fat shrewdness from the mantelpiece. May Quisante was less sure that she knew the worst. _

Read next: Chapter 15. A Strange Idea

Read previous: Chapter 13. Not Superhuman

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