>>281278914
He's also at the mercy of time and not knowing what's going on. When he proposed to Elanor he did it with full intention of marrying her, but the circumstances and situations around him and the two women in his life constantly evolve and outright change. Emma comes back, he knows where she is now and has contact, and he just can't help but go back to her because he loves her. He's basically swept up in a flood, he has no idea what or if anything will come next and can only try to react to things as they occur. The timing of it all was tragic.
So you have to look at how he reacts:
These are spoiliers if you haven't read ahead/read the whole mango before, btw.
- He would have been a decent, non abusive husband to Elanor. He probably would have never loved loved her and this would be a tragic marriage for both of them but probably not a lot worse than many other marriages of the time for people of their standing.
- His 'revenge plan' may or may not be something he constantly has in mind to act on, in the story it does not feel like he is USING Elanor for revenge it actually feels like he is just finally bowing to the pressure to conform but is bitter about it. What did it really consist of? It wasn't actually revenge, he resolved to conform and marry and live as an upper class/aristocratic man but be secretly contemptuous of it all and then at the end of his life inform people of that contempt by way of some as yet undefined, conceptualised, act of 'throwing it away'. This, if it had been done, may have been cruel to Elanor at the time it happened but it's all hypothetical. That whole speech to Hakim was more like him being angry, sad and feeling sorry for himself rather than forming a sole life mission, evil, mustache twirling plan.
