“The woman said you were.”
He did not answer for a minute, the truth being that he did not know what it was best to say, and wanted to wait and let her make statements that he could either contradict or seek to justify.
“What made you think I wanted to marry Dominick Ryan?” she said slowly, her eyes on the fire.
This was a question that went to the core of the subject. He knew now that he could not put her off, or slip from the responsibilities of the occasion. Drawing himself to the edge of his chair, he leaned forward and spoke with a sincerity and feeling that made his words very impressive.
“One evening when I was at Antelope, I came into the sitting-room and saw my daughter in the arms of Dominick Ryan. I knew that my girl wasn’t the woman to let a man do that unless she loved him. That was how I came to know.”
“Oh,” said Rose in a faint tone.
“Afterward I heard from Dominick of what his marriage was. I heard from his mother, too. Then I saw his wife and I got a better idea from her what it was than I did from either of the others. That fellow, the man my daughter cared for, was tied up in a marriage that was hell. He was bound to a woman who could only be managed with a club, and Dominick was not the kind that uses a club to a woman. What liking he’d had for her was gone. She stuck to him like a barnacle because she wanted to get money, was ready to hang on, feet and hands, till Delia Ryan was dead and then put up a claim for a share of the estate. Do you think a man’s doing such a horrible thing to break up a marriage like that?”
“Yes,” said Rose, “I do. It was a marriage. They’d taken each other for better or for worse. They’d made the most solemn promises to each other. Neither you nor any one else had a right to interfere.”
She spoke with a hard determination, with something of an inflexible, unrelenting positiveness, that was very unusual in her, which surprised and, for the moment, silenced her father. It rose from a source of conviction deeper than the surface emotions of likes and dislikes, of loves and hates, of personal satisfactions and disappointments. At the core of her being, with roots extending through all the ramifications of her mental and moral nature, was a belief in the inviolability of the marriage tie. It was a conviction founded on neither tradition, nor reason, nor expediency, a thing of impulse, of sex, an hereditary instinct inherited from generations of virtuous women, who, in the days of their defenselessness, as in the days of their supremacy, knew that the most sacred possessions of their lives—their husbands, their children, their homes—rested on its stability. All the small, individual preoccupations of her love for Dominick, her pity for his sufferings, were swept aside by this greater feeling that she did not understand or reason about. She obeyed an instinct, elemental as the instinct of motherhood, when she refused to admit his right to break the bond he had contracted.
Her father stared at her for the moment, chilled by a sense of unfamiliarity in her sudden assumption of an attitude of challenge and authority. He had often heard her inveigh against the divorces so lightly obtained in the world about them. He had thought it one of those pretty ornamental prejudices of hers, that so gracefully adorned her youth and that he liked her to have when they did not interfere with anything of importance. Now, set up like a barrier in the path, he stopped before this one particular prejudice, perplexed at its sudden intrusion, unwilling to believe that it was not a frail, temporary obstruction to be put gently aside.