_ CHAPTER II. MOMENTS
At the little dinner which Lady Richard's absence rendered more easy there were only the Benyon brothers (a wag had recently suggested that they should convert themselves into Quisante Limited), Mrs. Gellatly, Morewood the painter, and the honoured guest. Morewood was there because he was painting a kit-cat of Quisante for the host (Heaven knew in what corner Lady Richard would suffer it to hang), and Mrs. Gellatly because she had expressed a desire to meet Lady May Gaston. Quisante greeted May with an elaborate air of remembrance; his handshake was so ornate as to persuade her that she must always hate him, and that Dick Benyon was as foolish as his wife thought him. This mood lasted half through dinner; the worst of Quisante was uppermost, and the exhibition depressed the others. The brothers were apologetic, Mrs. Gellatly gallantly suave; her much-lined, still pretty face worked in laborious smiles at every loudness and every awkwardness. Morewood was so savage that an abrupt conclusion of the entertainment threatened to be necessary. May, who had previously decided that Mr. Quisante would be much better in company, was travelling to the conclusion that he was not nearly so trying when alone; to be weaselly is not so bad as to be inconsiderate and ostentatious.
Just then came the change which transformed the party. Somebody mentioned Mahomet; Morewood, with his love of a paradox, launched on an indiscriminate championship of the Prophet. Next to believing in nobody, it was best, he said, to believe in Mahomet; there, he maintained, you got most out of your religion and gave least to it; and he defended the criterion with his usual uncompromising aggressiveness. Then Quisante put his arms on the table, interrupted Morewood without apology, and began to talk. May thought that she would not have known how good the talk was--for it came so easily--had she not seen how soon Morewood became a listener, or even a foil, ready and content to put his questions not as puzzles but as provocatives. Yet Morewood was proverbially conceited, and he was fully a dozen years Quisante's senior. She stole a look round; the brothers were open-mouthed, Mrs. Gellatly looked almost frightened. Next her eyes scanned Quisante's face; he was not weaselly now, nor ostentatious. His subject filled him and lit him up; she did not know that he looked as he had when he spoke to old Maria of his Empress among women, but she knew that he looked as if nothing mentally small, nothing morally mean, nothing that was not in some way or other, for good or evil, big and spacious could ever come near him from without or proceed out from him.
She was immensely startled when, in a pause, her host whispered in her ear, "One of his moments!" The phrase was to become very familiar to her on the lips of others, even more in her own thoughts. "His moments!" It implied a sort of intermittent inspiration, as though he were some ancient prophet or mediaeval fanatic through whose mouth Heaven spoke sometimes, leaving him for the rest to his own low and carnal nature. The phrase meant at once a plenitude of inspiration and a rarity of it. Not days, nor hours, but moments were seemingly what his friends valued him for, what his believers attached their faith to, what must (if anything could) outweigh all that piled the scales so full against him. An intense curiosity then and there assailed her; she must know more of the man; she must launch a boat on this unexplored ocean--for the Benyons had not navigated it, they only stood gaping on the beach. Here was scope for that unruly spirit of hers which Marchmont's culture and Marchmont's fascination could neither minister to nor assuage.
She was gazing intently at Quisante when she became conscious of Mrs. Gellatly's eyes on her. Mrs. Gellatly looked frightened still; accustomed tactfully to screen awkwardness, she was rather at a loss in the face of naked energy. She sought to share her alarm with May Gaston, but May was like a climber fronted by a mountain range.
"You may be right and you may be wrong," said Morewood. "At least I don't know anybody who can settle the quarrel between facts and dreams."
"There isn't any quarrel."
"There's a little stiffness anyhow," urged Morewood, still unwontedly docile.
"They'd get on better if they saw more of one another," suggested May timidly. It was her first intervention. She felt its insignificance. She would not have complained if Quisante had followed Morewood's example and taken no notice of it. He stopped, turned to her with exaggerated deference, and greeted her obvious little carrying out of the metaphor as though it were a heaven-sent light. Somehow in doing this he seemed to fall all in an instant from lofty heights to depths almost beyond eyesight. While he complimented her elaborately, Morewood turned away in open impatience. Another topic was started, the conversation was killed; or, to put it as she put it to herself, that moment of Quisante's was ended. Did his moments always end like that? Did they fade before a breath, like the frailest flower? Did the contemptible always follow in a flash on the entrancing?
Presently she found a chance for a whisper to Morewood.
"How are you painting him?" she asked.
"You must come and see," he replied, with a rather sour grin.
"So I will, but tell me now. You know the difference, I mean?"
"Oh, and do you already? Well, I shall do him making himself agreeable to a lady."
"For heaven's sake don't!" she whispered, half-laughing yet not without seriousness. The man was a malicious creature and might well caricature what he was bound to idealise to the extreme limit of nature's sufferance. Such a trick would be hardly honest to Dick Benyon, but Morewood would plead his art with unashamed effrontery, and, if more were needed, tell Dick to take his cheque to the deuce and go with it himself.
The rest of the party was, to put it bluntly, a pleasant little gathering in no way remarkable and rather spoilt by the presence of one person who was not quite a gentleman. May struggled hard against the mercilessness of the judgment contained in the last words; for it ought to have proved quite final as regarded Alexander Quisante. As a fact it would not leave her mind, it established an absolutely sure footing in her convictions; and yet it did not seem quite final in regard to Quisante. Perhaps Dick Benyon would maintain the proud level of his remark about the genealogy, and remind her that somebody settled Napoleon's claims by the same verdict. But one did not meet Napoleon at little dinners, nor think of him with no countervailing achievements to his name.
Her mind was so full of the man that when she joined her mother at a party later in the evening, she had an absurd anticipation that everybody would talk to her about him. Nobody did; that evening an Arctic explorer and a new fortune-teller divided the attention of the polite; men came and discussed one or other of these subjects with her until she was weary. For once then, on Marchmont making an appearance near her, her legs did not carry her in the opposite direction; she awaited and even invited his approach; at least he would spare her the fashionable gossip, and she thought he might tell her something about Quisante. In two words he told her, if not anything about Quisante, still everything that he himself thought of Quisante.
"I met Mr. Quisante at dinner," she said.
"That fellow!" exclaimed Marchmont.
The tone was full of weariness and contempt; it qualified the man as unspeakable and dismissed him as intolerable. Was Marchmont infallible, as Fanny had said? At least he represented, in its finest and most authoritative form, the opinion of her own circle, the unhesitating judgment against which she must set herself if she became Quisante's champion. It would be much easier, and probably much more sensible, to fall into line and acquiesce in the condemnation; then it would matter nothing whether the vulgar did or did not elect to admire Dick Benyon's peculiar friend. Yet a protest stirred within her; only her sense of the ludicrous prevented her from adopting Dick's word and asking Marchmont if he had ever seen the fellow in one of his "moments." But it would be absurd to catch up the phrase like that, and it was by no means certain that even the moments would appeal to Marchmont.
Looking round, she perceived that a little space in the crowded room had been left vacant about them; nobody came up to her, no woman, in passing by, signalled to Marchmont; the constant give-and-take of companions was suspended in their favour. In fine, people supposed that they wanted to talk to one another; it would not be guessed that one of the pair wished Quisante to be the topic.
"He's got some brains," Marchmont went on, "though of rather a flashy sort, I think. Dick Benyon's been caught by them. But a more impossible person I never met. You don't like him?"
"Yes, I do," she answered defiantly. "At least I do every now and then."
"Pray make the occasions as rare as possible," he urged in his low lazy voice, with his pleasant smile and a confidential look in his handsome eyes. "And don't let them coincide with my presence."
"Really he won't hurt you; you're too particular."
"No, he won't hurt me, but I should feel rather as though he were hurting you."
"What do you mean?"
"By being near you, certainly by being anything in the least like a friend of yours."
"He'd defile me?" she asked, laughing.
"Yes," said he seriously; the next moment he smiled and shrugged his shoulders; he did not withdraw his seriousness but he apologised for it.
"Oh, I'd better get under a glass-case at once," she exclaimed, laughing again impatiently.
"Yes, and lock it, and----"
"Give you the key?"
He laughed as he said, "The most artistic emotions have some selfishness in them, I admit it."
"It would make a little variety if I sent a duplicate to Mr. Quisante!"
Here he would not follow her in her banter. He grew grave and even frowned, but all he said was, "Really there are limits, you know." It was her own verdict, expressed more tersely, more completely, and more finally. There were limits, and Alexander Quisante was beyond them; the barrier they raised could not be surmounted; he could not fly over it even on the wings of his moments.
"You above everybody oughtn't to know such people," Marchmont went on.
Now he was thinking of the type she was supposed to represent; that was the fashion in which it was appropriate to talk to the type.
"I'm not in the very least like that really," she assured him. "If you knew me better you'd find that out very soon."
"I'm willing to risk it."
Flirtation for flirtation--and this conversation was becoming one--there could be no comparison between Marchmont's and Quisante's; the one was delightful, the other odious; the one combined charm with dignity; the other was a mixture of cringing and presumption. May put the contrast no less strongly than this as she yielded to the impulse of the minute and gave the lie to Marchmont's ideal of her by her reckless acceptance of the immediate delights he offered. The ideal would no doubt cause him to put a great deal of meaning into her acceptance; whether such meaning were one she would be prepared to indorse her mood did not allow her to consider. She showed him very marked favour that evening, and in his company contrived to forget entirely the puzzle of Quisante and his moments, and the possible relation of those moments to the limits about which her companion was so decisive.
At last, however, they were interrupted. The interruption came from Dick Benyon, who had looked in somewhere else and arrived now at the tail of the evening. Far too eager and engrossed in his great theme to care whether his appearance were welcome, he dashed up to May, crying out even before he reached her, "Well, what do you say about him now? Wasn't he splendid?"
Clearly Dick forgot his earlier apologetic period; for him the moment was the evening. A cool question from Marchmont, the cooler perhaps for annoyance, forced Dick into explanations, and he sketched in his summary fashion the incident which had aroused his enthusiasm and made him look so confidently for a response from May. Marchmont was unreservedly and almost scornfully antagonistic.
"Oh, you're too cultivated to live," cried Dick. "Now isn't he too elegant, May?"
"I'm not the least elegant," said Marchmont, with quiet confidence. "But I'm--well, I'm what Quisante isn't. So are you, Dick."
"Suppose we are, and by Jove, isn't he what we aren't? I'm primitive, I suppose. I think hands and brains are better than manners."
"I'll agree, but I don't like his hands or his brains either."
"He'll mount high."
"As high as Haman. I shouldn't be the least surprised to see it."
"Well, I'm not going to give him up because he doesn't shake hands at the latest fashionable angle."
"All right, Dick. And I'm not going to take him up because he's a dab at rodomontade."
"And you neither of you need fight about him," May put in, laughing. They joined in her laugh, each excusing himself by good-natured abuse of the other.
There was no question of a quarrel, but the divergence was complete, striking, and even startling. To one all was black, to the other all white; to one all tin, to the other all gold. Was there no possibility of compromise? As she sat between the two, May thought that a discriminating view of Quisante ought to be attainable, not an oscillation from disgust to admiration, but a well-balanced stable judgment which should allow full value to merits and to defects, and sum up the man as a whole. Something of the sort she tried to suggest; neither disputant would hear of it, and Marchmont went off with an unyielding assertion that the man was a cad, no more and no less than a cad. Dick looked after him with a well-satisfied air; May fancied that opposition and the failure of others to understand intensified his satisfaction in his own discovery. But he grew mournful as he said to her,
"I shan't have a chance with you now. You'll go with Marchmont of course. And I did want you to like him."
"Mr. Marchmont doesn't control my opinions."
They were very old friends; Dick allowed himself a significant smile.
"I know what you mean," she said, smiling. "But it's nonsense. Besides, look at yourself and Amy! She hates him, and yet you----"
"Oh, she's only half-serious, and Marchmont's in deadly earnest under that deuced languid manner of his. I tell you what, he's a very limited fellow, after all."
May laughed; the limits were being turned to a new use now.
"Awfully clever and well-read, but shut up inside a sort of compartment of life. Don't you know what I mean? He's always ridden first-class, and he won't believe there's anybody worth knowing in the thirds."
"You think he's like that?" she asked thoughtfully.
"You can see it for yourself. There's no better fellow, no better friend, but, hang it, an oyster's got a broader mind."
"I like broad minds."
"Then you'll like Quis----"
"Absolutely you shan't mention that name again. Find mother for me and tell her to tell me that it's time to go home."
Going home brought with it a discovery. May was considered to have invited the world to take notice of her preference for Marchmont. This fact was first conveyed to her by Lady Attlebridge's gently affectionate and congratulatory air; at this May was little more than amused. Evidence of greater significance lay in Fanny's demeanour; she came into her sister's room and talked for a while; before leaving, but after the ordinary kiss of goodnight, she came back suddenly and kissed her again; she said nothing, but the embrace was emphatic and eloquent. It seemed to the recipient to be forgiving also; it meant "I want you to be happy, don't imagine I think of anything else." If Fanny kissed her like that, it was because Fanny supposed that she had made up her mind to marry Weston Marchmont. She was fully conscious that the inference was not a strange one to draw from her conduct that evening. But now the mood of impulse was entirely gone; she considered the matter in a cool spirit, and her talk with Dick Benyon assumed unlooked-for importance in her deliberations. To marry Marchmont was a step entirely in harmony with the ideal which her family and the world had of her, which Marchmont himself most thoroughly and undoubtingly believed in. If she were really what she was supposed to be, the match would satisfy her as well as it would everybody else. But if she were quite different in her heart? In that case it might indeed be urged that no marriage would or could permanently satisfy her or the whole of her nature. This was likely enough; to see how often something of that kind happened it was, unfortunately, only necessary to run over ten or a dozen names which offered themselves promptly enough from the list of her acquaintance. Still to marry knowing you would not be satisfied was to drop below the common fate of marrying knowing that you might not be; it gave up the golden chance; it abandoned illusion just where illusion seemed most necessary.
Oh for life, for the movement of life! It is perhaps hard to realise how often that cry breaks from the hearts of women. No doubt the aspiration it expresses is rather apt to end in antics, not edifying to the onlooker, hardly (it may be supposed) comforting to the performer. But the antics are one thing, the aspiration another, and they have the aspiration strongest who condemn and shun the antics. The matter may be stated very simply, at least if the form in which it presented itself to May Gaston in her twenty-third year be allowed to suffice. Most girls are bred in a cage, most girls expect to escape therefrom by marriage, most girls find that they have only walked into another cage. She had nothing to say, so far as her own case went, against the comfort either of the old or of the new cage; they were both indeed luxurious. But cages they were and such she knew them to be. Doubtless there must be limits, not only to the tolerance of Weston Marchmont and of society, but to everything else except infinity. But there are great expanses, wide spaces, short of infinity. When she walked out of her first cage, the one which her mother's careful fingers had kept locked on her, she would like not to walk into another, but to escape into some park or forest, not boundless, yet so large as to leave room for exploring, for the finding of new things, for speculation, for doubt, excitement, uncertainty, even for the presence of apprehension and the possibility of danger. As she surveyed the manner in which she was expected to pass her life, the manner in which she was supposed (she faced now the common interpretation of her conduct this evening) already to have elected to pass it, she felt as a speculator feels towards Consols, as a gambler towards threepenny whist. It seemed as though nothing could be good which did not also hold within it the potency of being very bad, as though certainty damned and chance alone had lures to offer. She would have liked to take life in her hand--however precious a thing, what use is it if you hoard it?--and see what she could make of it, what usury its free loan to fate and fortune would earn. She might lose it; youth made light of the risk. She might crawl back in sad plight; the Prodigal Son did not think of that when he set out. She found herself wishing she had nothing, that she might be free to start on the search for anything.
Like Quisante? Why, yes, just like Quisante. Like that strange, intolerable, vulgar, attractive, intermittently inspired creature, who presented himself at life's roulette-table, not less various in his own person than were the varying turns he courted, unaccountable as chance, baffling as fate, changeable as luck. Indeed he was like life itself, a thing you loved and hated, grew weary of and embraced, shrank from and pursued. To see him then was in a way to look on at life, to be in contact with him was to feel the throb of its movement. In her midnight musings the man seemed somehow to cease to be odious because he ceased to be individual, to be no longer incomprehensible because he was no longer apart, because he became to her less himself and more the expression and impersonation of an instinct that in her own blood ran riot and held festivity.
"I'm having moments, like Mr. Quisante himself!" she said with a sudden laugh. _