Under the circumstances, however you may feel, you can have no real objection to my doing that, I am sure; yet you go on fighting me—making it hard for me to do what you really know ought to be done."
"Ye're a scoundrel," said Butler, seeing through his motives quite clearly.
"Ye're a sharper, to my way of thinkin', and it's no child of mine I want connected with ye.
I'm not sayin', seein' that things are as they are, that if ye were a free man it wouldn't be better that she should marry ye.
It's the one dacent thing ye could do—if ye would, which I doubt.
But that's nayther here nor there now.
What can ye want with her hid away somewhere?
Ye can't marry her.
Ye can't get a divorce.
Ye've got your hands full fightin' your lawsuits and kapin' yourself out of jail.
She'll only be an added expense to ye, and ye'll be wantin' all the money ye have for other things, I'm thinkin'.
Why should ye want to be takin' her away from a dacent home and makin' something out of her that ye'd be ashamed to marry if you could?
The laist ye could do, if ye were any kind of a man at all, and had any of that thing that ye're plased to call love, would be to lave her at home and keep her as respectable as possible.
Mind ye, I'm not thinkin' she isn't ten thousand times too good for ye, whatever ye've made of her.
But if ye had any sinse of dacency left, ye wouldn't let her shame her family and break her old mother's heart, and that for no purpose except to make her worse than she is already.
What good can ye get out of it, now?
What good can ye expect to come of it?
Be hivins, if ye had any sinse at all I should think ye could see that for yerself.
Ye're only addin' to your troubles, not takin' away from them—and she'll not thank ye for that later on."
He stopped, rather astonished that he should have been drawn into an argument.
His contempt for this man was so great that he could scarcely look at him, but his duty and his need was to get Aileen back.
Cowperwood looked at him as one who gives serious attention to another. He seemed to be thinking deeply over what Butler had said.
"To tell you the truth, Mr. Butler," he said, "I did not want Aileen to leave your home at all; and she will tell you so, if you ever talk to her about it.
I did my best to persuade her not to, and when she insisted on going the only thing I could do was to be sure she would be comfortable wherever she went.
She was greatly outraged to think you should have put detectives on her trail.
That, and the fact that you wanted to send her away somewhere against her will, was the principal reasons for her leaving.
I assure you I did not want her to go.
I think you forget sometimes, Mr. Butler, that Aileen is a grown woman, and that she has a will of her own.
You think I control her to her great disadvantage.
As a matter of fact, I am very much in love with her, and have been for three or four years; and if you know anything about love you know that it doesn't always mean control.
I'm not doing Aileen any injustice when I say that she has had as much influence on me as I have had on her.
I love her, and that's the cause of all the trouble.
You come and insist that I shall return your daughter to you.
As a matter of fact, I don't know whether I can or not.
I don't know that she would go if I wanted her to.
She might turn on me and say that I didn't care for her any more.
That is not true, and I would not want her to feel that way.
She is greatly hurt, as I told you, by what you did to her, and the fact that you want her to leave Philadelphia.
You can do as much to remedy that as I can.
I could tell you where she is, but I do not know that I want to.
Certainly not until I know what your attitude toward her and this whole proposition is to be."
He paused and looked calmly at the old contractor, who eyed him grimly in return.
"What proposition are ye talkin' about?" asked Butler, interested by the peculiar developments of this argument.
In spite of himself he was getting a slightly different angle on the whole situation.
The scene was shifting to a certain extent.
Cowperwood appeared to be reasonably sincere in the matter.
His promises might all be wrong, but perhaps he did love Aileen; and it was possible that he did intend to get a divorce from his wife some time and marry her.
Divorce, as Butler knew, was against the rules of the Catholic Church, which he so much revered.
The laws of God and any sense of decency commanded that Cowperwood should not desert his wife and children and take up with another woman—not even Aileen, in order to save her.
It was a criminal thing to plan, sociologically speaking, and showed what a villain Cowperwood inherently was; but, nevertheless, Cowperwood was not a Catholic, his views of life were not the same as his own, Butler's, and besides and worst of all (no doubt due in part to Aileen's own temperament), he had compromised her situation very materially.