Quisante by Antonio Hope

Weston Marchmont, punctilious to the verge of fastidiousness, or even over it, in his conduct towards the world and his friends, allowed himself easily enough a liberty of speculative opinion which the Dean of St. Neot's would have hesitated about and the Dean's wife decidedly veiled by a reference to Providence. To him the blow that had fallen on Quisante seemed no public evil. Allowing the man's talents, he distrusted both his aims and his methods; they would not have come to good; the removal of his personality meant relief from an influence which was not healthy and an example which taught nothing beyond the satisfaction of ambition and the pursuit of power. It was well then if Quisante were indeed, as he himself said, "done with," so far as public activity went. Marchmont, not concealing his particular interest but rather facing it and declaring it just, went on to say that, since Quisante was done with publicly, it was well that he should be done with privately also, and that as speedily as might be. Love for May Quisante might be the moving spring of this conclusion, but he insisted that it was not necessary thereto. Any reasonable person her friend, nay, anybody whose attention was fairly directed to the case, must hold the same view. There was a hideous mistake to be undone, and only one way of undoing it. Permanent unions in marriage, immense and indispensable engines of civilisation, yet exacted their price. One instance of the compensating payment was that deaths sometimes became desirable; you had to wish a death sooner than life-long misery for a friend; to wish it was not wrong, though to have to wish it might be distasteful. In this self-justification he contrived to subordinate, while he admitted, his own strong interest in the death and his violent dislike of the sufferer which robbed the death of its pain so far as he was concerned. People's infatuation with Quisante, above all May's infatuation, had so irritated him that he did not scruple to accept the only means of ending them; that they would be thus ended it never came into his mind to doubt. His regret was only for the stretch of delay, for the time of waiting, for the respite promised to the doomed man if he would be docile and obedient; for all of them life was passing, and too much had already in tragic mistake been spent on Alexander Quisante.

"I think you're damnably inhuman," said Dick Benyon, expressing, as he often did, an unsophisticated but not perhaps an altogether unsound popular judgment. "He's a remarkable man. And after all she married him. She needn't have. As for the party -- well, I don't know how we shall replace him."