Family Pride; Or, Purified by Suffering

by Mary Jane Holmes

Dr. Morris was thoroughly a man, and though much of his sinful nature had been subdued, there was enough left to make his heart rise and fall with great throbs of joy as he thought of Katy free, even though that freedom were bought at the expense of dire disgrace to others and of misery to her. But only for a moment did he feel thus, only till the bonnet was removed and the gaslight fell upon the pallid face with the dark rings beneath the eyes, and the faint, quivering motion around the lips, which told that she was not wholly unconscious.

"My poor little wounded bird," he said, as pityingly as if he had been her father, while, much as a father might kiss his suffering child, he kissed the forehead and the eyelids where the tears began to gather.

Katy was not insensible, and the name by which he called her, with the kisses that he gave, thawed the ice around her heart and brought a flood of tears which Morris wiped away, removing her heavy fur and lifting her gently up, while he took away the cloak and left her unencumbered. With a sigh she sank back into the chair, and, leaning her head upon its cushioned arm, moaned like a weary child.

"It is so pleasant to be here, and it rests me so. I wish I might never go away. May I stay here, Morris, as your housekeeper, instead of Mrs. Hull?—that is, if I am not his wife. The world might despise me, but you would know I was not to blame. I should go nowhere but to the farmhouse, to church, and baby's grave. Poor baby! I am glad God gave her to me, even if I am not Wilford's wife; and I am glad now that she died."

She was talking to herself rather than to Morris, who, smoothing back her hair and chafing her cold hands, said:

"My poor child, you have passed through some agitating scene. Are you able now to tell me all about it, and what you mean by another wife?"

He saw she was greatly exhausted, and he brought her a glass of wine, hoping she would rally. She had no supper, she said, except a cracker bought in Springfield, but the moment he turned to the bellrope she begged him not to ring. She was not hungry—she could not eat. She should never eat again.

Wishing himself to know something definite ere going to Mrs. Hull, Morris yielded to her entreaties, and sitting down in front of her, said again: "Now tell me what brought you here without your husband's knowledge."

There was a shiver, and the white lips grew still whiter as Katy began her story, going back to St. Mary's churchyard, and then coming to her first night in New York, when Juno had told her of a picture and asked her whose it was. Then she told of Wilford's admission of an earlier love, who, he said, was dead; of the trouble about the baby's name, and his aversion to Genevra; of his frequent abstracted moods, which she remembered now, never suspecting at the time their cause, and not knowing now for certain that Genevra was the subject of his thoughts. But it was safe to believe almost anything of one who had deceived her so cruelly, and Katy's blue eyes flashed resentfully as she uttered the first bitter words she had ever breathed against her husband. But when she approached the dinner at the elder Cameron's, her lip quivered in a grieved kind of way as she remembered what Wilford had said of her to his mother, but she would not tell this to Morris, it was not necessary to her story, and so she said: "They were talking of what I ought never to have heard, and it seemed as if the walls were closing me in so that I could not move to let them know I was there. I said to myself, 'I shall go mad after this,' and I thought of you all coming to see me in the madhouse, your kind face, Morris, coming up distinctly before me, just as it would look at me if I were really crazed. But all this was swept away like a hurricane when I heard the rest, the part about Genevra, Wilford's other wife."

Katy was panting for breath and Morris brought the wine again, after which she went on with the story, which made Morris clinch his hands as he comprehended the deceit which had been practiced so long. Of course he did not look at it as Katy did, for he knew that according to all civil law she was as really Wilford's wife as if no other had existed, and he told her so, but Katy shook her head: "He can't have two wives living, and I tell you I knew the picture—Genevra is not dead. I have seen her; I have talked with her—Genevra is not dead."