FOR LACK OF LOVE?
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 Quisanté 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 Quisanté 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 Quisanté 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 Quisanté 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 Quisanté, 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 Quisanté.
"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."
"I don't want him replaced," said Marchmont. "Everything that he was doing had better be left undone; and everything that he is had better not be. You call me inhuman. Well, people who repress their pity for individuals in the interests of the general welfare are always called that."
"Yes, but you don't pity him," retorted Dick.
Marchmont thought for a moment. "No, I don't," he admitted. "I see why one might; but I can't do it myself." He paused and added, smiling, "I suppose that's the weak point in my attitude."
"One of them," said Dick, but he said no more. There are limits to candid discussion even among the closest friends; he could not tell Marchmont in so many words that he wanted Quisanté dead so as to be able to marry Quisanté's wife, however well aware of the fact he might be and Marchmont might suspect him to be. Or, if he had said this, he could have said it only in vigorous reproof, perhaps even in horror; and to this he was not equal. For Dick was sorely torn. On the one hand he had never ceased to hang on Quisanté's words and to count on Quisanté's deeds; on the other, he had never acquitted himself of responsibility for a marriage which he believed to have been most disastrous. Worst of all then for him was what threatened now, an end of the illuminating words and the stirring deeds, but no end to the marriage yet in sight. To him too death seemed the best thing, unless that wonderful unlikely resurrection of activity and power could come. And even then—Dick remembered the face of Quisanté's wife as she lied for him to her friends at Ashwood. The resurrection must be not only with a renewed but with a transformed mind, if it were to bring happiness, and to bring no more of things like that.
The world at large, conceiving that the last word had been said and the last scene in which it was interested played, had soon turned its curious eyes away from Quisanté's sick bed, leaving only the gaze of the smaller circle personally concerned in the dull and long-drawn-out ending of a piece once so full of dramatic incident. But the world found itself wrong, and all the eyes spun round in amazed staring when the sick man leapt from his bed and declared that he was himself again. The news came in paragraphs, to the effect that after another week's rest Mr. Quisanté, whose health had made a rapid and great improvement, hoped to return to his Parliamentary duties and to fulfil the more urgent of his public engagements. Here was matter enough for surprise, but it was needful to add the fast-following well-authenticated stories of how the doctors had protested, how Sir Rufus Beaming had washed his hands of the case, and how Dr. Claud Manton had addressed an energetic warning to Lady May Quisanté. This last item came home most closely to the general feeling, and the general voice asked what Lady May was thinking of. There was warrant for the question in the wondering despair of Lady Mildmay and the sad embarrassment of debonair Sir Winterton. The Mildmays knew all about it, the whole thing had happened in their house; but Sir Winterton, challenged with the story about Sir Rufus, could only hum and ha, and Lady Mildmay had not denied the interview between Quisanté's wife and the energetic Dr. Manton. What was the meaning of it? And, once again, what was Lady May Quisanté thinking of? Was she blind, was she careless? Or were the doctors idiots? The world, conscious of its own physical frailty, shrank from the last question and confined its serious attention to the two preceding ones. "Does she want to kill him?" asked the honest graspers of the obvious. "Does she think him above all laws?" was the question of those who wished to be more subtle. At least she was a puzzle. All agreed on that.
Lady Richard discountenanced all speculation and all questionings. For her part she did her duty, mentioning to Mrs. Baxter that this was what she meant to do and that, whatever happened, she intended to be able, salvâ conscientiâ, to tell herself that she had done it; Mrs. Baxter approved, saying that this was what the second Mrs. Greening had done when her husband's sister's daughter, a very emancipated young woman as it seemed, had incomprehensibly flirted with the auctioneer's apprentice and had scouted Mrs. Greening's control; Mrs. Greening had told the girl's mother and sent the girl home, second class, under the care of the guard. Similarly then Lady Richard, without embarking on any consideration of ultimate problems, wrote to May, suggesting that Mr. Quisanté wanted rest and putting Ashwood at her disposal for so long as she and her husband might be pleased to occupy it. "If they don't choose to go, it's not my fault," said Lady Richard with the sigh which declares that every reasonable requirement of conscience has been fulfilled. Happy lady, to be able to repose in this conviction by the simple expedient of lending a house not otherwise required at the moment! So kind are we to our own actions that Lady Richard felt meritorious.
They chose to go, and went unaccompanied save by their baby girl and Aunt Maria—this last a strange addition made at Quisanté's own request. He had not been wont to show such a desire for the old lady's society when there was nothing to be gained by seeking it; nor had it seemed to May altogether certain that Miss Quisanté would come. Yet she came with ardent eagerness and her nephew was plainly glad to have her. It took May a little while to understand why, but soon she saw the reason. Aunt Maria was deep in the conspiracy, or the infatuation, or whatever it was to be called; she flattered Quisanté's hope of life, she applauded his defiance of the inevitable; she hung on him more and more, herself forgetting and making him forget the peril of the way he trod. He wanted to be told that he was right, and he wanted an applauding audience. In both ways Aunt Maria satisfied him. She would talk of the present as though it were no more than a passing interruption of a long career, of the future as though it stretched in assured leisure through years of great achievement, of his life and his life's work as though both were in his own hand and subject to nothing save his own will and power. She was to him the readiest echo of the world's wonder and applause, the readiest assurance that his great effort was not going unrecognised. Hence he would have her with him, though there seemed no more love and no more tenderness between them than when in old days they had quarrelled and he had grumbled and she had flung him her money with a bitter jeer. But she lived in him and could think of him only as living, and through her he could cheat himself into an assurance that indeed he could live and work.