Concerning A Wife And Family
If any one fancies for a moment that this commercial move on the part
of Cowperwood was either hasty or ill-considered they but little
appreciate the incisive, apprehensive psychology of the man. His
thoughts as to life and control (tempered and hardened by thirteen
months of reflection in the Eastern District Penitentiary) had given
him a fixed policy. He could, should, and would rule alone. No man
must ever again have the least claim on him save that of a suppliant.
He wanted no more dangerous combinations such as he had had with
Stener, the man through whom he had lost so much in Philadelphia, and
others. By right of financial intellect and courage he was first, and
would so prove it. Men must swing around him as planets around the sun.
Moreover, since his fall from grace in Philadelphia he had come to
think that never again, perhaps, could he hope to become socially
acceptable in the sense in which the so-called best society of a city
interprets the phrase; and pondering over this at odd moments, he
realized that his future allies in all probability would not be among
the rich and socially important--the clannish, snobbish elements of
society--but among the beginners and financially strong men who had
come or were coming up from the bottom, and who had no social hopes
whatsoever. There were many such. If through luck and effort he
became sufficiently powerful financially he might then hope to dictate
to society. Individualistic and even anarchistic in character, and
without a shred of true democracy, yet temperamentally he was in
sympathy with the mass more than he was with the class, and he
understood the mass better. Perhaps this, in a way, will explain his
desire to connect himself with a personality so naive and strange as
Peter Laughlin. He had annexed him as a surgeon selects a special
knife or instrument for an operation, and, shrewd as old Laughlin was,
he was destined to be no more than a tool in Cowperwood's strong hands,
a mere hustling messenger, content to take orders from this swiftest of
moving brains. For the present Cowperwood was satisfied to do business
under the firm name of Peter Laughlin & Co.--as a matter of fact, he
preferred it; for he could thus keep himself sufficiently inconspicuous
to avoid undue attention, and gradually work out one or two coups by
which he hoped to firmly fix himself in the financial future of Chicago.
As the most essential preliminary to the social as well as the
financial establishment of himself and Aileen in Chicago, Harper
Steger, Cowperwood's lawyer, was doing his best all this while to
ingratiate himself in the confidence of Mrs. Cowperwood, who had no
faith in lawyers any more than she had in her recalcitrant husband.
She was now a tall, severe, and rather plain woman, but still bearing
the marks of the former passive charm that had once interested
Cowperwood. Notable crows'-feet had come about the corners of her
nose, mouth, and eyes. She had a remote, censorious, subdued,
self-righteous, and even injured air.
The cat-like Steger, who had all the graceful contemplative air of a
prowling Tom, was just the person to deal with her. A more suavely
cunning and opportunistic soul never was. His motto might well have
been, speak softly and step lightly.
"My dear Mrs. Cowperwood," he argued, seated in her modest West
Philadelphia parlor one spring afternoon, "I need not tell you what a
remarkable man your husband is, nor how useless it is to combat him.
Admitting all his faults--and we can agree, if you please, that they
are many"--Mrs. Cowperwood stirred with irritation--"still it is not
worth while to attempt to hold him to a strict account. You know"--and
Mr. Steger opened his thin, artistic hands in a deprecatory way--"what
sort of a man Mr. Cowperwood is, and whether he can be coerced or not.
He is not an ordinary man, Mrs. Cowperwood. No man could have gone
through what he has and be where he is to-day, and be an average man.
If you take my advice you will let him go his way. Grant him a
divorce. He is willing, even anxious to make a definite provision for
you and your children. He will, I am sure, look liberally after their
future. But he is becoming very irritable over your unwillingness to
give him a legal separation, and unless you do I am very much afraid
that the whole matter will be thrown into the courts. If, before it
comes to that, I could effect an arrangement agreeable to you, I would
be much pleased. As you know, I have been greatly grieved by the
whole course of your recent affairs. I am intensely sorry that things
are as they are."
Mr. Steger lifted his eyes in a very pained, deprecatory way. He
regretted deeply the shifty currents of this troubled world.
Mrs. Cowperwood for perhaps the fifteenth or twentieth time heard him
to the end in patience. Cowperwood would not return. Steger was as
much her friend as any other lawyer would be. Besides, he was socially
agreeable to her. Despite his Machiavellian profession, she half
believed him. He went over, tactfully, a score of additional points.
Finally, on the twenty-first visit, and with seemingly great distress,
he told her that her husband had decided to break with her financially,
to pay no more bills, and do nothing until his responsibility had been
fixed by the courts, and that he, Steger, was about to retire from the
case. Mrs. Cowperwood felt that she must yield; she named her
ultimatum. If he would fix two hundred thousand dollars on her and the
children (this was Cowperwood's own suggestion) and later on do
something commercially for their only son, Frank, junior, she would let
him go. She disliked to do it. She knew that it meant the triumph of
Aileen Butler, such as it was. But, after all, that wretched creature
had been properly disgraced in Philadelphia. It was not likely she
could ever raise her head socially anywhere any more. She agreed to
file a plea which Steger would draw up for her, and by that oily
gentleman's machinations it was finally wormed through the local court
in the most secret manner imaginable. The merest item in three of the
Philadelphia papers some six weeks later reported that a divorce had
been granted. When Mrs. Cowperwood read it she wondered greatly that
so little attention had been attracted by it. She had feared a much
more extended comment. She little knew the cat-like prowlings, legal
and journalistic, of her husband's interesting counsel. When
Cowperwood read it on one of his visits to Chicago he heaved a sigh of
relief. At last it was really true. Now he could make Aileen his
wife. He telegraphed her an enigmatic message of congratulation. When
Aileen read it she thrilled from head to foot. Now, shortly, she would
become the legal bride of Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the newly
enfranchised Chicago financier, and then--
"Oh," she said, in her Philadelphia home, when she read it, "isn't that
splendid! Now I'll be Mrs. Cowperwood. Oh, dear!"
Mrs. Frank Algernon Cowperwood number one, thinking over her husband's
liaison, failure, imprisonment, pyrotechnic operations at the time of
the Jay Cooke failure, and his present financial ascendancy, wondered
at the mystery of life. There must be a God. The Bible said so. Her
husband, evil though he was, could not be utterly bad, for he had made
ample provision for her, and the children liked him. Certainly, at the
time of the criminal prosecution he was no worse than some others who
had gone free. Yet he had been convicted, and she was sorry for that
and had always been. He was an able and ruthless man. She hardly knew
what to think. The one person she really did blame was the wretched,
vain, empty-headed, ungodly Aileen Butler, who had been his seductress
and was probably now to be his wife. God would punish her, no doubt.
He must. So she went to church on Sundays and tried to believe, come
what might, that all was for the best.