“That’s what she is,—smart and long-headed. She’s more far-sighted than women of her kind usually are and she’s got her eye on the future. She’s not going to give us a chance for divorce. She’s not going to make any breaks or mistakes. There’s not a more respectable woman in San Francisco. She doesn’t go with any one but her husband and her own sisters, two decent women that you can’t believe have the same blood in them. She’s the quietest, most domestic kind of a wife. It don’t matter, and nobody knows, that she’s making her husband the most miserable man in the country. That doesn’t cut any ice. What does is that there’s no ground for divorce against her. If she had the kind of husband that wouldn’t put up with anything from a woman, all he could do would be to leave her and she’d go round then getting everybody’s sympathies as a virtuous, deserted wife.”
The old man gave his head an appreciative jerk, and murmured,
“A pretty smart woman, all right.”
“She’s all that—that and more. It’s the future that she’s banking on. I’m nearly seventy years of age, Bill Cannon, and this has broken me up more than anything that’s gone before. I’m not the woman I was before my boy married. And what’s going to happen when I die? I’ve only got two living children. Outside them there’s nobody but some distant relations that Con made settlements on before he died. If I left all I’ve got to Cornelia, or divided it up between Cornelia and charity, cutting off my son because he’d made a marriage I didn’t like, would such a will as that stand? Why had I left nothing to my only son? Because he’d married a woman I didn’t think good enough? And what was there against her? She’d been a typewriter and her husband’s mistress for six months before he married her. The mistress part of it had been condoned by marriage and good conduct—and after all, how many families in San Francisco and other places were founded on just those beginnings? As for her being a typewriter, Delia Ryan herself had been a washerwoman, washed for the miners with these hands;”—she held out her blunt, beringed hands with one of those dramatic gestures natural to the Irish—“when Con was working underground with his pick I was at the wash-tub, and I made money that way for him to run the mine. Where’s the California jury that would hesitate to award Dominick, and through him, his wife her part of the fortune that Con and I made?”
“Well, that’s all possible,” Cannon said slowly, “but it’s so far off. It’s all surmise. You may live twenty years yet. I fancy she’d find a twenty-years’ wait under the present conditions rather wearying.”
The old woman shook her head, looking very sad.
“I’m not the woman I was,” she repeated, “this last thing’s broken me more than anything that went before. I lost three children by death, and it wasn’t as hard as losing my youngest boy the way I have.”
“Have you any idea whether Dominick has ever thought of divorce?” he asked.
“I’ve the clearest kind of an idea that he hasn’t. You don’t know Dominick. He’s the best boy in the world. He’ll blame himself for everything that’s gone wrong, not that woman. She’s smart enough to let him, too. And suppose he was a different kind and did think of it? That’s all the good it would do him. Men don’t sue women for divorce except under the greatest provocation, and Dominick’s got no provocation at all. My hopes were that the woman herself would sue—that we’d freeze her out with small means and cold shoulders—and you see that’s just what she’s determined not to do!”
Cannon dropped his supporting hand on the chair-arm and began to caress gently a large tassel that hung there.