"Now if the Dean did chance to do anything wrong, Mrs. Baxter simply wouldn't see that it was wrong," she meditated. "Neither would Amy Benyon, if Dick did. I see it's wrong and yet defend it. I'm the wrong sort of woman to have married Alexander."
Yes, from that point of view, undoubtedly. But there was another. What would Mrs. Baxter or Lady Richard have made of him at the times when he woke to greatness? Dick had appreciated him then; Dick's wife never had; she saw only the worst. Well, it was plain to see. May saw it so plain that night that she sat where she was till the night was old because, if she went upstairs, she might find him there. And she fell to wishing that the seat at Henstead was not shaky; so much hung on it, her hopes for him as well as his own hopes, her passionate interest in him as well as his ambition. Nay, she had a feeling or a fear that more still hung on it. Pondering there alone in the night, assessing her opinion and reviewing her knowledge of him, she told herself that there was hardly anything that he would not do sooner than lose the seat. So that she dreaded the struggle for the strain it might put on him; strains of that sort she knew now that he was not able to bear. "Lead us not into temptation," was the prayer which must be on her lips for him; if that were not answered, he was well-nigh past praying for altogether. For with temptation came his blindness, and he no longer saw the thing that tempted him for what it was. Oh, and what a fool she had been to think that she could make him see!
At last she went upstairs, slowly and reluctantly. Passing her own door, she mounted again to the baby's nursery, and entered softly. All was peace; both baby and nurse slept. May was smiling as she came down the stairs; she murmured, "Gaston!" mimicking the satisfied tones of old Aunt Maria's voice. Then she entered her own room; Quisanté's bed was empty. A sense of great relief rose in her, but she went out again and softly turned the handle of his dressing-room door. He had elected to sleep there, as he often did. The light was still high; a book lay open by him on the bed. He was in deep sleep, looking very pale, very tired, very peaceful. She stood looking at him for a moment; again she smiled as she stole forward and peeped at the book. It was a work on Bimetallism. Did he mean to win Henstead with that? Oh, no; he meant to preach the Majesty of the British Sovereign, King of coins, good tender from China to Peru. She imagined him making some fine rhetoric out of it.
He breathed gently and regularly; for once he rested, he really rested from his unresting efforts, from the cruel race he ran; he was for once free from all the thoughts of his brain, all the devices of his resourceful, unbaffled, unhesitating mind. With a sigh she turned away and lowered the light, that in darkness he might sleep more easily. In the darkness she stood a minute longer, seeing now only the dim outline of his body on the bed; again the smile came, but her lips moved to murmur softly, "Lead us not into temptation." And still murmuring the only prayer that might serve him, still smiling that it was the only prayer she could pray for her chosen husband, she left Quisanté to his rest.
PRACTICAL POLITICS.
While Alexander Quisanté increased in promise and prominence, Weston Marchmont had begun to cause some anxiety to his best friends. His passion for ultimates grew upon him; sometimes it seemed as though he would put up with nothing less. At the same time a personal fastidiousness and a social exclusiveness, always to a certain extent characteristic of the man, gathered greater dominion over him. He was not civil to the people towards whom civility would be useful, and he refused to shut his eyes to the logical defects or moral shortcomings in the measures promoted by his party. His abilities were still conceded in ample terms, his charm still handsomely and sincerely acknowledged. But a suspicion gradually got about that he was impracticable, that he had a perverse affection for unpopular causes, for reasons of approval or disapproval that did not occur to the world at large, for having a private point of view of his own, differentiated from the common view by distinctions as unyielding as to the ordinary eye they were minute. The man who begins merely by being uncompromising as to his own convictions may end in finding an actual pleasure in disagreeing with those of others. Some such development was, according to acute observers, taking place in Marchmont; if the tendency became his master, farewell to the high career to which he had appeared to be destined. Plain men would call him finicking, and practical men would think it impossible to work with him. No impression is more damning about a man engaged in public life; the Whips have to put a query to his name, and he cannot be trusted to confine his revolts to such occasions as those on which Mr. Foster of Henstead thought an exhibition of independence a venial sin, or in certain circumstances a prudent act.
"The fact is," Morewood said to Marchmont once, when they had been talking over his various positions and opinions, "if you want to lead ordinary people, you must keep on roads that ordinary people can travel, roads broad enough for the grande armée. You may take them quicker or slower, you may lead them downhill or get them to follow you uphill, but you must keep to the road. A bye-path is all right and charming for yourself, for a tête-à-tête, or a small party of friends, but you don't take an army-corps along it."
The unusual length and the oratorical character of this warning were strong evidence of the painter's feelings. Marchmont nodded a grave and troubled assent.
"Still if I see the thing one way, I can't act as if I saw it the other."