“All right, then, I won’t take your money,” said he.
“Well, leave it; or you can put it into the sinking fund for the enterprise of this family,” she said. “No one is overinfluenced here.”
And he did it that day.
And then the divorce was amicably enough accomplished, but the other marriage did not occur.
He said to Ethel afterwards, with wide eyes full of childlike wonder: “How queer! Do you know she refused me? I’m—I’m afraid, you know, she’s somehow gone wrong, in spite of all your good opinions.”
And Alitza, speaking of this remark, said, irate, to Daniel: “After all, it does seem as if it took a burial six feet under ground to get that stuff out of him and his like. Why can’t they take to decency as naturally as women do?”
“Oh, all he needs is some real misery,” said Daniel. “Leave him to get it in his own way. He has dreamed of heaven and languished sentimentally in paradise, but his business is now to pull himself up out of sluggish uselessness to others. Turning away that money of yours into the public good, is a hint at something courageous.”
“Anyway,” said Alitza, “Regie’s as truthful as a dumb brute, even when he is tossed about by his instincts. He told me, today that he had never had any feeling toward me but a brother’s anxiety and sense of responsibility, and that he knew all about the property matter from the nurse; and that he did hate his ‘old dad,’ and had a sort of hankering after revenge; and besides, felt it was too mean for the old man to be cheating me out of my money. And when the nurse said ‘there was enough for both, and for him to ask me to marry him,’ he thought it would be about the only way to fix things up easy all round. Yet that when it was done, and we quarreled all the way home from the minister’s, he felt sick of it. For he had no love for me like that. And the sight of his ‘old dad’s’ fury threw him into confusion and terror, and a sort of dumb sickness, just as he had seen in his mother many a time. So he said today, in his simple way, he was as glad as anything that I had pulled through life so splendidly; and was glad, in a way, that we didn’t in the least care for each other, and could be divorced all comfortably.”
“It’s a queer case, and, in a way, uncommonly sweet, take it altogether, as these sorts of confusing marital troubles go in these days. For I was privately planning to marry him, so that he could have the house and money that he thought were his own, without creating any fuss with old Grove over the affair. And he was chivalrously going to marry me (in fact did in a way) so as to deliver me and my money out of old Grove’s clutches without disgracing his father. Of course it was all quite as if the question of managing the money were the one question on earth to be considered. Isn’t it disgraceful? Think of the confusion that comes of unintelligent conduct, in regard to what real love and real marriage is. In a way, Reg is a lovable fellow, and has some common sense in him. He is my own cousin, anyway, and I would do anything to save him except to marry him, and luckily he don’t want me to do that; so I can mother him still, as I have always done. I promised his mother I would do my best for him; and I find he had promised to do the same by me. And I think we have both blunderingly tried.”
“Oh, he’ll be well mothered among them all,” said Robert, when Daniel one day told him all this. “And the queer part is, it is my opinion that Mrs. Mancredo loves him with the soundest kind of a real wife love, whether she knows it or not. But as for him, he says he has never had a permanent attraction toward any woman except the mother of his child. And now she dreads him with a furious fear, lest he should somehow set up a claim, and get power over her boy. I’ve seen women like that before. I wonder where these transitional states will land us all.”