Quisanté | Page 6

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 Quisanté's senior. She stole a look round; the
brothers were open-mouthed, Mrs. Gellatly looked almost frightened.
Next her eyes scanned Quisanté'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 mediæval 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 Quisanté 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 Quisanté 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 Quisanté'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 Quisanté. 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