FullReads

“Ma’am,” he said, “if I can draw my check for twenty-five thousand dollars it’s because I was born believing that blood will tell. It’s because I’ve acted on it all my life. And it’s the truth, and I’ve made a fortune out of it…. Cattle,” he added in explanation.

“I don’t know what you think of women,” she said, “who talk of their affairs to strangers. But my heart is so full of mine. I did so hope to reach Carcasonne early this evening. It don’t seem to me as if I could stand hours and hours behind that horse without talking to some one. Do you mind if I talk to you?” she appealed. “Somehow you’re so big and steady-minded–you don’t seem like a stranger.”

“Ma’am,” said Saterlee, the most chivalrous courtesy in his voice, for hers had sounded truly distressed, “fire away!”

“It’s about my daughter,” she said. “She has made up her mind to marry a young man whom I scarcely know. But about him and his antecedents I know this: that his father has buried three wives.”

The blood rushed into Saterlee’s face and nearly strangled him. But the lady, who was leaning forward, elbows on knees and face between hands, did not perceive this convulsion of nature.

“If blood counts for anything,” said she, “the son has perhaps the same brutish instincts. A nice prospect for my girl–to suffer–to die–and to be superseded. The man’s second wife was in her grave but three weeks when he had taken a third. I am told he is a great, rough, bullying man. No wonder the poor souls died. The son is a tremendous great fellow, too. Oh! blood will tell every time,” she exclaimed. “M. A. Saterlee, the cattle man–do you know him?”

“Yep!” Saterlee managed, with an effort that would have moved a ton.

“I am going to appeal to her,” said the lady. “I have been a good mother to her. I have suffered for her. And she must–she shall–listen to me.”

“If I can help in any way,” said Saterlee, somewhat grimly, “you can count on me…. Not,” he said a little later, “that I’m in entire sympathy with your views, Ma’am…. Now, if you’d said this man Saterlee had divorced three wives….”

The lady started. And in her turn suffered from a torrential rush of blood to the face. Saterlee perceived it through her spread fingers, and was pleased.

“If you had said that this man,” he went on, “had tired of his first wife and had divorced her, or been divorced by her, because his desire was to another woman, then I would go your antipathy for him, Ma’am. But I understand he buried a wife, and took another, and so on. There is a difference. Because God Almighty Himself says in one of His books that man was not meant to live alone. Mebbe, Ma’am, the agony of losing a faithful and tender companion is what sets a man–some men–to looking for a successor. Mebbe the more a man loved his dead wife the quicker is he driven to find a living woman that he can love. But for people who can’t cling together until death–and death alone part ’em–for such people, Ma’am, I don’t give a ding.”

“And you are wrong,” said the lady, who, although nettled by the applicability of his remarks to her own case, had recovered her composure. “Let us say that a good woman marries a man, and that he dies–not the death–but dies to her. Tires of her, carries his love to another, and all that. Isn’t he as dead, even if she loved him, as if he had really died? He is dead to her–buried–men don’t come back. Well, maybe the more she loved that man the quicker she is to get the service read over him–that’s divorce–and find another whom she can trust and love. Suppose that happens to her twice. The cases would seem identical, sir, I think. Except that I could understand divorcing a man who had become intolerable to me; but I could never, never fancy myself marrying again–if my husband, in the course of nature, had died still loving me, still faithful to me. So you see the cases are not identical. And that only remarriage after divorce is defensible.”