Quisanté | Page 2

face; now there was even the indignation which a reference to non-payment of debts had failed to elicit.
"I shall do something with it, you might know that," he said resentfully.
"Something honest, I mean."
"What?"
"Well, something not criminal," she amended, chuckling again. "I'm sorry to seem to know you so well," she added.
"Oh, we know one another pretty well," said he with a nod. "Never the jam without the powder from you."
"But always the jam," said old Maria. "And you'll find the world a good deal like your aunt, Sandro."
An odd half-cunning half-eager gleam shot across his eyes.
"A man finds the world what he makes it," he said. He rose, came and stood over her, and went on, laughing. "But the devil makes an aunt once and for all, and won't let one touch his handiwork."
"You can touch her savings, though!"
He blazed out into a sudden defiance. "Oh, refuse if you like. I can manage without you. You're not essential to me."
She smiled, her thin lips setting in a wry curve. Now and then it seemed hard that there could be no affection between her and the one being whom the course of events plainly suggested for her love. But, as Sandro said, they knew one another very well. In the result she felt entitled to assume no airs of superiority; he had not been a dutiful or a grateful nephew, she had not been a devoted or a patient aunt; as she looked back, she was obliged to remember one or two occasions when he had driven or betrayed her into a severity of which she did not willingly think. This reflection dictated the words with which she met his outburst.
"You can tell your story on Judgment Day and I'll tell mine," she said. "Oh, neither of 'em will lose in the telling, I'll be bound. Meanwhile let's be----"
"Friends?" he suggested with an obvious but not ill-natured sneer.
"Lord, no! Whatever you like! Banker and client, debtor and creditor, actor and audience? Take your choice--and send me your bank's address."
He nodded slightly, as though he concluded a bargain, not at all as though he acknowledged a favour. Yet he remarked in a ruminative tone, "I shall be very glad of the money."
A moment's pause followed. Then Miss Quisanté observed reluctantly,
"The only thing I ever care to know about you is what you're planning, Sandro. Don't I earn that by my thousand a year?"
"Well, here you are. I'm started, thanks to Dick Benyon and myself. I've got my seat, I can go on now. But I'm an outsider still." He paused a moment. "I feel that; Benyon feels it too. I want to obviate it a bit. I mean to marry."
"An insider?" asked the old lady. She looked at him steadily. "Your taste's too bad," she said; he was certainly dressed in a rather bizarre way. "And your manners," she added. "She won't have you," she ended. Quisanté took no notice and seemed not to hear; he stood quite still by the window, staring over the park. "Besides she'll know what you want her for."
He wheeled round suddenly and looked down at his aunt. His face was softer, the cunningness had gone from his smile, his eyes seemed larger, clearer, even (by a queer delusion of sight) better set and wider apart.
"Yes, I'll show her that," he said in a low voice, with a new richness of tone.
Old Maria looked up at him with an air of surprise.
"You do want her for that? As a help, I mean?" she asked.
His lips just moved to answer "Yes." Aunt Maria's eyes did not leave his face. She remembered that when he had come before to talk about contesting the seat in Parliament he had now won, there had been a moment (poised between long periods of calculation and elaborate forecasts of personal advantage) in which his face had taken on the same soft light, the same inspiration.
"You odd creature!" she murmured gently. "She's handsome, I suppose?"
"Superb--better than that."
"A swell?" asked old Maria scornfully.
"Yes," he nodded.
His aunt laughed. "A Queen among women?" was the form her last question took.
"An Empress," said Alexander Quisanté, the more ornate title bursting gorgeously from his lips.
"Just the woman for you then!" remarked Aunt Maria. A stranger would have heard nothing in her tone save mockery. Quisanté heard more, or did not hear that at all. He nodded again quite gravely, and turned back to the window. There were two reasonable views of the matter; either the lady was not what Quisanté declared her, or if she were she would have nothing to do with Quisanté. But Aunt Maria reserved her opinion; she was prepared to find neither of these alternatives correct.
For there was something remarkable about Sandro; the knowledge that had been hers so long promised fair to become the