Chapter 17. Done For?

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_ CHAPTER XVII. DONE FOR?

A knotty point of casuistry was engaging the thoughts of the Dean of St. Neot's. Morewood had been to see him, had told without disguise the whole story of his blunder at the dinner-table at Ashwood, had referred to Alexander Quisante's serious illness, and had finally, without apology and without periphrasis, expressed the hope that Alexander Quisante would die. The Dean's rebuke had produced a strenuous effort at justification. Quisante was, the painter pointed out, no doubt a force, but a force essentially immoral (Morewood took up morality when it suited his purpose); he did work, but he made unhappiness; he affected people's lives, but not so as to promote their well-being. Or if the Dean chose to champion the man, Morewood was ready for him again. If Quisante were good, were moral, were deserving of defence, then the merely natural process lugubriously described as death, and fantastically treated with black plumes and crape, would, so far as he himself was concerned, be no more than a transition to a better state of existence, while certain solid and indisputable benefits would accrue to those who were condemned to wait a little longer for their summons. Whether the Dean elected to be for Quisante or against him, Morewood claimed a verdict.

This challenging of a man's general notions by the putting of a thorny special case was rather resented by the Dean; it reminded him of the voluble atheist in Hyde Park, who bases his attack on the supernatural on the obsolete enactments of the Book of Leviticus. None the less he was rather puzzled as to what he had a right to wish about Alexander Quisante, and so he had recourse to his usual remedy--a consultation with his wife. He had the greatest faith in Mrs. Baxter's eye for morality; perhaps generations of clerical ancestry had bred in her such an instinct as we see in sporting-dogs; she could not go wrong. On this question she was immediately satisfactory.

"We are forbidden," she said, removing a piece of tape from her mouth, "to wish anybody's death; you know that as well as I do, Dan." She made a stitch or two. "We must leave it to Providence," she ended serenely.

At first sight there was nothing much in this dictum; it appeared even commonplace. But Mrs. Baxter had been lunching with the Mildmays, had heard a full account of what the doctors said about Quisante, and had expressed her conviction that he could not possibly last long. So far as could be judged then, the confidence which she proposed to show ran no appreciable risk of being misplaced, while at the same time she avoided committing herself by any expression of a personal opinion.

"Doubtless, my dear," said the Dean with a little cough.

"If he had thought less about himself and more about other people----" she resumed.

"That can't have anything to do with an apoplectic seizure," the Dean pleaded.

Mrs. Baxter looked up with a patient smile.

"If you weren't in such a hurry, Dan, to show what you call your enlightenment (though heaven knows you may be wrong all the time, and a judgment is a perfectly possible thing) you'd have found out that I was only going to say that, if he'd thought more of other people, he'd find other people thinking more about him now."

"There I quite agree with you, my dear."

Mrs. Baxter looked less grateful than she might have for this endorsement of her views; self-confidence is apt to hold external support in cheap esteem.

"When the first Mrs. Greening died," she remarked, "they gave the maids very nice black frocks, with a narrow edging of good crape. The very first Sunday-out that Elizabeth had--the butcher's daughter near the Red Cow--you remember?--she stuck a red ribbon round the neck."

The Dean looked puzzled.

"Mrs. Greening was the most selfish woman I've ever known," explained Mrs. Baxter; and she added with a pensive smile, "And I've lived in a Cathedral town for thirty years."

The red-ribbon became intelligible; it fell into line with Morewood's ill-disciplined wish. Both signified an absence of love, such a departing without being desired as serves for the epitaph of a Jewish king. The Dean cast round for somebody who would prove such an inscription false on Alexander Quisante's tomb.

"Anyhow it would break the old aunt's heart," he said.

"It'd save her money," observed Mrs. Baxter.

"And his wife!" mused the Dean. It was impossible to say whether there were a question in his words or not. But his first instance had not been Quisante's wife; the old aunt offered a surer case.

"If you always knew what a man's wife thought about him, you'd know a great deal," said Mrs. Baxter. She possessed in the fullest degree her sex's sense of an ultimate superiority in perception; men knew neither what their wives did nor what they were; wives might not know what their husbands did, but they always knew what they were. It would be rash to differ from a person of her observation and experience; half a dozen examples would at once have confounded the objector.

Mrs. Baxter took perhaps a too private and domestic view of the man whose fate she was discussing; she judged the husband and friend, she had nothing to say to the public character. The voices of his political associates and acquaintances, of his fellow-workers in business, of his followers and enthusiastic adherents in his constituency, did not reach her ears, and perhaps, if they had, would not have won much attention. The consternation of Constantine Blair, Lady Castlefort's dismay, the sad gossiping and head-shaking that went on in the streets of Henstead and round old Mr. Foster's comfortable board, witnessed to a side of Quisante in which Mrs. Baxter did not take much interest. She did not understand the sort of stupor with which they who had lived with him and worked with him saw the force he wielded and the anticipations he filled them with both struck down by a sudden blow; she did not share the feeling that all at once a gap had been made in life.

But something of this sort was the effect in all the circles which Quisante had invaded and in which he had moved. The philosophical might already be saying that there was no necessary man; to the generality that reflection would come only later, when they had found a new leader, a fresh inspiration, and another personality in which to see the embodiment of their hopes. Now the loss was too fresh and too complete; for although it might be doubtful how long Quisante's life would last, there seemed no chance of his ever filling the place to which he had appeared to be destined. Only a miracle could give that back to one who must cling to life, if he could keep his hold on it at all, at the cost of abandoning all the efforts and all the activities which had made it what it was alike for himself and for others. He was rallying slowly and painfully from his blow; a repetition of it would be the certain penalty of any strenuous mental exertion or any sustained strain of labour. In inactivity, in retirement, in the placid existence of a recognised invalid he might live years, indeed probably would; but otherwise the authorities declined to promise him any life at all. His body had played him false in the end. Constantine Blair began to look out for a candidate for Henstead and to wonder whether Sir Winterton would again expose himself to the unpleasantness of a contested election; Lady Castlefort must find another Prime Minister, the fighting men another champion, even the Alethea Printing Press Limited a new chairman. The places he had filled or made himself heir to were open to other occupants and fresh pretenders. That the change seemed so considerable proved how great a figure he had become in men's eyes no less than how utterly his career was overthrown. The comments on his public life were very flattering, but already they praised in the tone of an obituary notice, and the hopes they expressed of his being able some day to return to the arena were well understood to be no more than a kind or polite refusal to display naked truth in the merciless clearness of print.

Here was the state of things which extorted from Morewood the blunt wish that Quisante might die. Such a desire was hardly cruel to the man himself, since he must now lose all that he had loved best in the market of the world; but it was not the man himself who had been most in Morewood's thoughts. With a penetration sharpened by the memory of his blunder he had appreciated the perverse calamity which had fallen on the man's wife, and had passed swiftly to the conclusion that for her an end by death was the only chance, the only turn of events which could give back to her the chance of a real life to be lived. He knew by what Quisante had attracted and held her; all that, it seemed, was gone now. He divined also in what Quisante repelled and almost terrified her; that would remain so long as breath was in the man and might grow even more intense. A sense of fairness somehow impelled him to his wish; her bargain had turned out so badly; the underlying basis of her marriage was broken; she was left to pay the price to the last penny, but was to get nothing of what she had looked to purchase. Was it not then the part of a courageous man to face his instinctive wish, and to accept it boldly? Cant and tradition apart, it must be the wish of every sensible person. For she knew, she had realised most completely on the very evening when Quisante was struck down, what manner of man he was. She might have endured if she had still been able to tell herself of the wonderful things that he would do. No such comfort was open now. The man was still what he was; but he would do nothing. There came the change.

"That's the weak point about marriage as compared with other contractual arrangements," said Morewood to Dick Benyon. "You can never in any bargain ensure people getting what they expect to get--because to do that you'd have to give all of them sense--but in most you can to a certain extent see that they're allowed to keep what they actually did get. In marriage you can't. Something of this sort happens and the whole understanding on which the arrangement was based breaks down."

"Do people marry on understandings?" asked Dick doubtfully.

"The only way of getting anything like justice for her is that he should die. You must see that?"

"I don't know anything about it," said Dick morosely, "but I hear there's no particular likelihood of his dying if he obeys orders and keeps quiet."

"Just so, just so," said Morewood. "That's exactly what I mean. Do you suppose she'd ever have taken him if he'd been going to keep quiet? You know why you took him up; well, she did just the same. You know what you found him; she's found him just the same. What's left now? The _role_ of a loving nurse! She's not born a nurse; and how in the devil's name is she to be expected to love him?"

Dick Benyon found no answer to questions which put with a brutal truthfulness the salient facts of the position. The one thing necessary, the one thing which would have made the calamity bearable, perhaps better than bearable, was wanting. She might love or have loved things in him, or about him, or done by him; himself she did not love; and now nothing but himself remained to her. Seeing the matter in this light, Dick was dumb before Morewood's challenge to him to say, if he dared, that he hoped a long life for Alexander Quisante. Yet neither would he wish his death; for Dick had been an enthusiast, the spell had been very strong on him, and there still hung about him something of that inability to think of Quisante as dead or dying, something of the idea that he must live and must by very strength of will find strength of body, which had prevented May herself from believing that the news which came in her telegram could mean anything really serious. While Quisante lived, there would always be to Dick a possibility that he would rise up from his sickness and get to work again. Death would end this, death with its finality and its utter incongruous stillness. Death was repose, and neither for good nor for evil had Quisante ever embraced repose. He had never been quiet; when he was not achieving, he had been grimacing. In death he could do neither.

"I can't fancy the fellow dead," said Dick to his wife and his brother. "I should be expecting him to jump up again every minute."

Lady Richard shuddered. The actual Quisante had been bad; the idea of a dead Quisante horribly galvanized into movement by a restlessness that the tomb could not stifle was hideous. Jimmy came to her aid with a rather unfeeling but apparently serious suggestion.

"We must cremate him," he said gravely.

"No, but, barring rot," Dick pursued, "I don't believe he'll die, you know."

"Poor May!" said Lady Richard. Neither of them pressed her to explain the precise point in May Quisante's position which produced this exclamation of pity. It might have been that the death was possible, or that the death was not certain, or at least not near, or it might have sprung from a purely general reflection on the unhappiness of having life coupled with the life of such a man as Quisante.

All these voices of a much interested, much pitying, much (and on the whole not unenjoyably) discussing world were heard only in dim echoes in the Mildmays' big quiet house in Carlton-House Terrace, where Quisante had been stricken by his blow. There May had found him on her hasty return from Ashwood, and here he was still, thanks to the host's and hostess's urgent entreaties. They declared that he was not fit to be moved; the doctors hardly endorsed this view heartily but went so far as to say that any disturbance was no doubt bad in its degree; Lady Mildmay seized eagerly on the grudging support. "Let him stay here till he's fit to go to the country," she urged. "I'm sure we can make him comfortable. And--" she smiled apologetically, "I'm a good nurse, if I'm nothing else, you know."

"But won't Sir Winterton----?"

"My dear, you don't know what a lot Winterton thinks of Mr. Quisante; he's proud to be of the least service to him. And you do know, I think, how it delights him to be any use at all to you."

In spite of that reason buried in her own heart which made every kindness received from these kind hands bitter to her, May let him stay. He wanted to stay, she thought, so far as his relaxed face and dimmed eyes gave evidence of any desire. And besides--yes, Lady Mildmay was a good nurse; he might find none so good if he were moved away. No sense of duty, no punctilious performance of offices, no such constancy of attendance as a wife is bound to render, could give what Lady Mildmay gave. Yet more than these May could not achieve. It was rather cruel, as it seemed to her, that the great and sudden call on her sympathy should come at the moment of all others when the spring of her sympathy was choked, when anger still burnt in her heart, when passionate resentment for a wound to her own pride and her own honour still inflamed her, when the mood in which she had broken out in her talk with Marchmont was still predominant. Such a falling-out of events sometimes made this real and heavy sickness seem like one of Quisante's tricks, of at least suggested that he might be making the most of it in his old way, as he had of his faintness at the Imperial League banquet, or of his headache when old Foster's letter followed on the declaration of the poll at Henstead. Such feelings as these, strong enough to chill her pity till Lady Mildmay wondered at a wife so cold, were not deep or sincere enough to blind May Quisante's eyes. Even without the doctor's story--which she had insisted on being told in all its plainness--she thought that she would have known the meaning of what had befallen her husband and herself, and have grasped at once its two great features, the great certainty and the great uncertainty; the certainty that his career was at an end, the uncertainty as to how near his life was to its end. Such a position chimed in too well with the bitter mood of Ashwood not to seem sent to crown it by a malicious device of fate's. At the very moment when she least could love, she was left no resource but love; at the moment when she would have turned her eyes most away from him and most towards his deeds, the deeds were taken away and he only was left; at the time when her hot anger against him drove her into a cry for release, she received no promise of release, or a promise deferred beyond an indefinitely stretching period of a worse imprisonment. For she clung to no such hope as that which made Dick Benyon dream of a resurrection of activity and of power, and had nothing to look for save years of a life both to herself and to him miserable. It might be sin to wish him dead; but was it sin to wish him either alive or dead, either in vigour or at rest? Sin or no sin, that was the desire in her heart, and it would not be stifled however much she accused its inhumanity or recognised the want of love in it. Was the fault all hers? With her lips still burning from the lie that she had told for him, she could not answer 'yes.'

Still and silent Quisante lay on his bed. His head was quite clear now and his eyes grew brighter. He watched Lady Mildmay as she ministered to him, and he watched his wife with his old quick furtive glances, so keen to mark every shade of her manner towards him. She had never really deceived him as to her thoughts of him; she did not deceive him now. He knew that her sympathies were estranged, more estranged than they had ever been before. So far as the reason lay in the incident of Ashwood, it was hidden from him; he knew nothing of the last great shame that he had put on her. But long before this he had recognised where his power over her lay, by what means he had gained and by what he kept it; he had been well aware that if she were still to be under his sway, the conquest must be held by his achievements; he himself was as nothing beside them. Now, as he lay, he was thinking what would happen. He also had heard the doctor's story or enough of it to enable him to guess the purport of their sentence on him; he was to live as an invalid, to abandon all his ambitions, to throw away all that made people admire him or made him something in the world's eyes and something great in hers. On these terms and on these only life was offered to him now; if he refused, if he defied nature, then he must go on with the sword ever hanging over him, in the knowledge that it soon must fall. He told himself that, yet was but half-convinced. Need it fall? With the first spurt of renewed strength he raised that question and argued it, till he seemed able to say 'It may fall,' rather than 'It must.'

What should be his course then? The world thought it had done with him. All seemed gone for which his wife had prized him. Should he accept that, and in its acceptance take up his life as valetudinarian, his life forgotten of the world which he had loved to conquer, barren of interest for the woman whom it had been his strongest passion to win against her instincts, to hold as it were against her will, and to fascinate in face of her distaste? Such were the terms offered; Alexander Quisante lay long hours open-eyed and thought of them. There had come into his head an idea that attracted him mightily and suited well with his nature, so oddly mixed of strength and weakness, greatness and smallness, courage and bravado, the idea of a means by which he might keep the world's applause and his wife's fascinated interest, aye, and increase them too, till they should be more intense than they had ever been. That would be a triumph, played before admiring eyes. But what would be the price of it, and was the price one that he would pay. It might be the biggest price a mortal man can pay. So for a few days more Alexander Quisante lay and thought about it.

Once old Miss Quisante came to see him, at his summons, not of her own volunteering. Since the blow fell she had neither come nor written, and May, with a sense of relief, had caught at the excuse for doing no more than sending now and again a sick-room report. Aunt Maria looked old, frail, and very yellow, as she made her way to a chair by her nephew's bed. He turned to her with the smile of mockery so familiar to her eyes.

"You haven't been in any hurry to see me, Aunt Maria," said he.

"You've always sent for me when you wanted me before, Sandro, and I supposed you would this time."

"May's kept you posted up? You know what those fools of doctors say?" The old woman nodded. Quisante was smiling still. "I'm done then, eh?" he asked.

Her hands were trembling, but her voice was hard and unsympathetic. "It sounds like it," she said.

Quisante raised himself on his elbow.

"You'll see me out after all," said he, "if I'm not careful. That's what it comes to." He gave a low laugh as Aunt Maria's lips moved but no words came. He leant over a little nearer to her and asked, "Have you had any talk with my wife about it?"

"No," said Aunt Maria. "Not a word, Sandro."

"Nothing to be said, eh? What does she think, though? Oh, you know! You've got your wits about you. Don't take to considering my feelings at this time of day."

Now the old woman smiled too.

"I'm sorry you're done for, Sandro," she said. "So's your wife, I'll be bound."

"You both love me so much?" he sneered.

"We've always understood one another," said Aunt Maria.

"I tell you, I love my wife." Aunt Maria made no remark. "And you both think I'm done for? Well, we'll see!"

Aunt Maria looked up with a gleam of new interest in her sharp eyes, so like the eyes of the man on the bed. Quisante met her glance and understood it; it appealed at once to his malice and to his vanity; it was a foretaste of the wonder he would raise and the applause he would win, if he determined to face the price that might have to be paid for them. He had listened with exasperated impatience to kind Lady Mildmay's pleadings with him, to her motherly insisting on perfect rest for his mind, and to her pathetically hopeful picture of the new interests and the new pleasure he would find in days of rest and peace, with his wife tenderly looking after him. To such charming as that his ears were deaf; they pricked at the faintest sound of distant cheering. It would be something to show even Aunt Maria that he was not done with; what would it not be to show it to the world--and to that wife of his whom he loved and could hold only by his deeds?

"I only know what the doctors say," remarked Miss Quisante. "They say you must throw up everything."

"You wouldn't have me risk another of those damned strokes, would you?" he asked, the mockery most evident now in his voice and look. "Lady Mildmay implores me to be careful, almost with tears. I suppose my own aunt'll be still more anxious, and my own wife too?"

"Doctors aren't infallible. And they don't know you, Sandro. You're not like other men." Hard as the tone was, his ears drank in the words eagerly. "They don't know how much there is in you."

Again he leant forward and said almost in a whisper,

"May thinks I'm done for?" Aunt Maria nodded. "And she'll nurse me? Take me to some infernal invalids' place, full of bath-chairs, and walk beside mine, eh?" Aunt Maria smiled grimly. "She'll like that, won't she?" he asked.

"You won't die," she said suddenly and abruptly, her eyes fixed on his.

"What?" he asked sharply. "Well, who said I was going to die?"

"The doctors--unless you go to the invalids' place."

"Oh, and my dear aunt doesn't agree with them?" Eagerness now broke through the mockery in his tones. He had longed so for a word of hope, for someone to persuade him that he might still live and could still work. "But suppose they proved right? Well, that's no worse than the other anyhow."

"Not much," said Aunt Maria. "But I don't believe 'em." Her faith in him came back at his first summons of it. He had but to tell her that he would live and need not die, and she would believe him. Sandro's ways were not as other men's; she could not believe that for Sandro as for other men there were necessities not to be avoided, and a fate not to be mastered by any defiant human will. So there she sat, persuading him that he was not mortal; and he lay listening, mocking, embittered, yet still lending an ear to the story, eager to believe her fable, rejoicing in the power that he had over her mind. If he felt all this for Aunt Maria, what would he not feel for the world, and for that wife of his? If old Aunt Maria could so wake in him the love of life and the hatred of that living death to which he had been condemned, what passionate will to live would rise in answer to the world's wonder and his wife's?

"I wish you'd give me that little book on the table there," he said. Aunt Maria obeyed. "My engagement-book," he explained. "Look. I had things booked for five months ahead. See--speeches, meetings, committees, the Alethea--so on--so on. They're all what they call cancelled now." He turned the leaves and Aunt Maria stood by him, watching.

"They won't get anybody to do 'em like you, Sandro," she said.

He flung the book down on the floor in sudden peevishness, with an oath of anger and exasperation.

"By God, why haven't I a fair chance?" he asked, and fell back on his pillows.

Lady Mildmay would have come and whispered softly to him, patted his hand, given him lemonade, and bade him try to sleep while she read softly to him. His old Aunt Maria Quisante stood motionless, saying not a word, looking away from him. Yet she was nearer to his mood and suited him better than kind Lady Mildmay.

"You've done a good bit already, Sandro," she said. "And you're only thirty-nine."

"And I'm to die at thirty-nine, or else live like an idiot, bored to death, and boring to death everybody about me!"

"I shall go now," said Aunt Maria. "Good-bye, Sandro. Send for me again when you want me."

"Aunt Maria!" She stopped at his call. "Go and see May. Go and talk to her."

"Yes, Sandro."

"Tell her what you think. You know: I mean, tell her that perhaps it's not as bad as the doctors say; that I may get about a bit soon and--and so on--You know."

"I'm to tell her that?" asked Aunt Maria.

"She's not to conclude it's all over with me yet." Miss Quisante nodded and moved towards the door.

"Oh, and before you go, just pick up that book and give it me again, will you?"

She returned, picked up the engagement-book and gave it him; then she stood for a moment by the bed, beginning to smile a little.

"You've got a lot to fret about," she said. "Don't you fret about money, Sandro. I can manage a thousand in a month or so. No use hoarding it; it looks as if we should neither of us want it long."

"You've got a thousand? What, now? Available?"

"In a week or so it could be."

"Then in God's name put it in the Alethea. What are you thinking about? It's the biggest thing out."

"In the Alethea? I meant to give it to you."

"All right. I shall put it in, if you do. I tell you that in three years' time you'll be rich out of it, and I shall draw an income of a couple of thousand a year at least as long as the patent lasts, if not longer."

"How long does it last?"

"Fourteen years; then we'll try for an extension, for another seven, you know, and we ought to get it. First and last I expect to get fifty thousand out of the Alethea alone, besides another thing that I've talked over with Mandeville. I'll tell you about it some day, I can't to-day. I--I'm a little tired. But anyhow the Alethea's sure. I'll put the thousand into it for you, and I'll hand you back double the money this time next year."

He was leaning on his left elbow, talking volubly; his eyes were bright, his right hand moved in rapid apt gestures; his voice was sanguine as he spoke of the seven years' extension of the Alethea patent; he had forgotten his stroke and the verdict of his doctors. Aunt Maria nodded her head to him, saying, "I'll send it you as soon as I can," and made for the door. She was smiling now; Sandro seemed more himself again. He, left alone, lay back on his pillow, breathing fast, rather exhausted; but after awhile he opened the engagement-book again and ran his eyes up and down its columns. Lady Mildmay found him thus occupied when she came to give him a cup of milk. _

Read next: Chapter 18. For Lack Of Love?

Read previous: Chapter 16. The Irrevocable

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