Then Aunt Maria was very bad for him. That could not be denied, but something more nearly touching herself pressed on May Quisanté. She had seen the Mildmays' painful puzzle; she had listened to Dr. Claud Manton's energetic warning; it was before her, no less than before the patient, that Sir Rufus had washed his hands. She was not ignorant of the questions the world asked. She was not careless, nor was she any longer the dupe of her old delusion that such a man as Quisanté could not die. Her eye for truth had conquered; now she believed that, if he persisted in his rebellion, he must surely die; unless all medical knowledge went for nothing, he would surely die, and die not after long years of lingering, but soon, perhaps very soon. A moment of excitement, say one of the moments that she had loved so much, might kill him; so Claud Manton said. A life of excitement would surely and early do the work. And why was he rebellious? She accused himself, she accused Aunt Maria, she accused the foolishly wondering, foolishly chattering world; and in every accusation there was some justice. Was there enough to acquit the other defendant who stood arraigned? To that she dared not answer "Yes," because of the fear which was in her that the strongest amongst all the various impulses driving him to his defiance was in the end to be found in his relations to her, in the attitude of his own wife towards him. Ashwood was full of associations; there was Duty Hill, where he had risen to his greatest and thereby won her; there was the tree beneath which she had sat with Marchmont on the evening when the knowledge of her husband's worst side had been driven like a sharp knife into her very heart. But more vivid than these memories now was the recollection of that first evening when she had seen him sitting alone, nobody's friend, and had determined to be human towards him and to treat him in a human way. There had been the true beginning of her great experiment. Now she told herself that she had failed in it, had never been human to him, and had never treated him in a human way, had not been what a man's wife should be, had stood always outside, a follower, an admirer, a critic, an accuser, never simply the woman who was his wife. His fault or hers, or that of both—it seemed to matter little. The experiment had been hers; and because she had made it and failed, it seemed to her that he was braving death. Had she been different, perhaps he would not have rebelled and could have lived the quiet life with her. It needed little more to make her tell herself that she drove him to his death, that she was with the enemy, with the chattering world and with poor deluded old Aunt Maria; she was of the conspirators; she egged him on to brave his doom.
In darker vein still ran her musings sometimes, when there came over her that haunting self-distrust; the fear that she was juggling with herself, shutting her eyes to the sin of her own heart, and, in spite of all her protestations, was really inspired by a secret hope too black and treacherous to put in words. However passionately she repudiated it, it still cried mockingly, "I am here!" It asked if her prayers for her husband's life were sincere, if her care for him were more than a due paid to decency, if the doom were in truth a thing she dreaded, and not a deliverance which convention alone forbade her openly to desire. Plainly, plainly—did she wish the doom to fall, did she wish him dead, was the rebellion that threatened death the course which the secret craving of her heart urged him to take? To do everything for him was not enough, if the doubt still lurked that her heart was not in the doing. For now she could no more ask coolly what she wished; the thing had come too near; it was odious to have a thought except of saving him by all means and at every cost; it was intolerable not to know at least that no part of the impulse which drove him to his rebellion lay at her door, not to feel at least that she had nothing but dread and horror for the threatened doom. She had no love for him; it came home to her now with a strange new sense of self-condemnation; she had married him for her own pleasure, because he interested her and made life seem dull without him. She pleaded no more that he had killed her love; it had never been there to kill. Had she left him to find a woman who loved him in and for himself, not for his doings, not for the interest of him, that woman might now be winning him by love from the open jaws of death.
Yet again laughter, obstinate and irrepressible, shot often in a jarring streak of inharmonious colour across the sombre fabric of her thoughts. He was not only mad, not only splendid—he seemed both to her—he was absurd too at moments, often when he was with Aunt Maria. Letters came in great numbers, from political followers, from women prominent in society, from constituents, from old Foster and Japhet Williams at Henstead, even from puissant Lady Castlefort; they wondered, applauded, implored, flattered, in every key of that sweet instrument called praise. Quisanté read them out, pluming and preening his feathers, strutting about, crowing. He would repeat the passages he liked, asking his wife's approbation; that he must have, it seemed. She gave it with what heartiness she could, and laughed only in her sleeve. Surely a man facing death could have forgotten all this? Not Alexander Quisanté. He could die, and die bravely; but the world must stand by his bedside. So till the end, whenever that most uncertainly dated end might come, the old mixture promised to go on, the great and small, the mean and grand, the call for tears and throbs of the heart alternating with the obstinate curling or curving of lips swift to respond to the vision of the contemptible or the ludicrous.
But she had her appeal to make, the one thing, it seemed, she could do to put herself at all in the right, the offer she must make, and try to make with a sincerity which should rise unimpaired from the conflicts of her heart. She had caught at coming to Ashwood because she thought she could make it best there, not indeed in the room where she had lied for him, nor by the tree where she had turned to Marchmont in a pang of wild regret, but there, on Duty Hill, where he had won her, had touched his highest, and had seemed a conqueror. She took him there, climbing with him very slowly, very gently; there she made him sit and sat by him. Again it was a quiet evening, and still the valley stretched below; nothing changed here made all the changes of her life seem half unreal. Here she told him he must live, he must be docile and must live.
"You may get strong again, but for the time you must do as the doctors say. You ought to; for the little girl's sake, if for nothing else, you ought to. You know you're risking another seizure now, and you know what that might mean."
His eyes were fixed keenly on her, though he lay back motionless in weariness.
"You ought to live for your daughter." She paused a minute and added, "And some day we might have a son, and you'd live again in him; we both should; we should feel that we were doing—that you were doing—everything he did. I think your son would be a great man, and I should be proud to be his mother. Isn't the hope of that worth something?"
He was silent, watching her closely still.
"I know what you think of me," she continued. "You think an active life essential to me, that I can't do without it. God knows I loved all you did, I loved your triumphs, I loved to hear you speak and see them listen. You know I loved all that, loved it too much perhaps. But I'll do without it. I'm your wife, your fate's mine. It'll be the braver thing for you to face it, really; I'm ready to face it with you."
Still he would only look at her.