ADVICE FROM AUNT MARIA.
The two Cabinet Ministers brought back from Manchester different accounts of Quisanté's speech and its effects. One said it was frothy rhetoric heard in puzzled lethargy, the other that it was genuine eloquence received with the hush of profound attention, but hailed at the end with rapturous enthusiasm. This was a typical case of the division of opinion which began to prevail about Quisanté, and was not disposed of by observing that the unfavourable Minister belonged to that "old gang" which it was Quisanté's mission to shake up or shake out. Rich in merits, his speeches were nevertheless faulty to a critical ear; the ornate was apt to turn to the gaudy, the dignified to the pompous. To the critical, defects outweigh merits; but the mass of people, not being critical, fix on the fine things, contentedly and perhaps not unwisely ignoring the blemishes. So the speech was a great popular success, and Alexander Quisanté conceived that he had more than justified his reputation and had ornamented his Lady's colours with the laurel of victory. He wrote to her to say that he was staying a few days in Lancashire and had arranged to speak at one or two other places. "If I do at all well," he wrote, "it is because I forget my audience and think that I speak only to you and to earn the praise of your eyes."
"Oh, dear, why does he talk like that?" said May Gaston with a sigh and a smile. "Forget his audience! The praise of my eyes!" She read the compliment over again almost despairingly. "Yet he doesn't really think me an idiot," she ended. She had made up her mind to forgive him his habit of playing to the gallery, but he need not treat her as though she sat there. She felt able to understand the dumb and bewildered reproach which fronted her in her sister Fanny's face, but found spoken expression only in the news that Fanny had had a letter from Lady Richard.
The next day she went to see Miss Quisanté; the paying of this visit had been in her mind from the first moment she left Ashwood. In the little flat's narrow passage she had to squeeze by a short, stout, dark man, dressed with much elaboration; Miss Quisanté explained afterwards that he was a sort of cousin of her own and Sandro's.
"His name is Mandeville," she said. "His father's was Isaacs. You knew we had Jewish relations?"
"I thought it not improbable."
"I suppose we've got some of the blood, and some of it's a very good thing," pursued Aunt Maria. "This man's a stock-jobber; he came to talk to me about my money, but he let out a thing or two about Sandro."
"About Mr. Quisanté?"
"Yes. Well, I'm not surprised; I never am surprised at Sandro. Only if he speculates with my money I shan't give it him."
May listened and heard how Quisanté had embarked the five hundred pounds given him to support his new position in a hazardous, although not unpromising, speculation. Whether he would win or lose was still uncertain; Mandeville had hopes.