“Whom do I mean? His folks, of course! They have been the instigators of every sorrow I have known since I left Silverton. Oh, Helen! never, never marry anybody who has folks, if you wish to be happy.”
Helen could not repress a smile, though she pitied her sister, who continued,
“I don’t mean father Cameron, nor Bell, for I believe they love me. Father does, I know, and Bell has helped me so often; but Mrs. Cameron and Juno, oh, Helen, you will never know what they have been to me.”
Since Helen came to New York there had been so much else to talk about that Katy had said comparatively little of the Camerons. Now, however there was no holding back on Katy’s part, and beginning with the first night of her arrival in New York, she told what is already known to the reader, exonerating Wilford in word, but dealing out full justice to his mother and Juno, the former of whom controlled him so completely.
“I tried so hard to love her,” Katy said, “and if she had given me ever so little in return I would have been satisfied; but she never did—that is, when I hungered for it most, missing you at home, and the loving care which sheltered me in childhood. After the world took me into favor she began to caress me, but I was wicked enough to think it all came of selfishness. I know I am hard and bad, for when I was sick, Mrs. Cameron was really very kind, and I began to like her; but if she takes baby away I shall surely die.”
“Where is baby to be sent?” Helen asked, and Katy answered,
“Up the river, to a house which Father Cameron owns, and which is kept by a farmer’s family. I can’t trust Kirby. I do not like her. She keeps baby asleep too long, and acts so cross if I try to wake her, or hint that she looks unnatural. I cannot give baby to her care, with no one to look after her, though Wilford says I must.”
Katy had never offered so violent opposition to any plan as she did now to that of sending her child away.
“I can’t, I can’t,” she repeated constantly, and Mrs. Cameron’s call, made that afternoon, with a view to reconcile the matter, only made it worse, so that Wilford, on his return at night, felt a pang of self-reproach as he saw the drooping figure holding his child upon its lap and singing its lullaby in a plaintive voice, which told how sore was its heart.
Wilford did not mean to be either a savage or a brute. On the contrary, he had made himself believe that he was acting only for the good of both mother and child; but the sight of Katy touched him, and he might have given up the contest had not Helen, unfortunately, taken up the cudgels in Katy’s defence, neglecting to conceal the weapons, and so defeating her purpose. It was at the dinner, from which Katy was absent, that she ventured to speak, not asking that the plan be given up, but speaking of it as an unnatural one, which seemed to her not only useless, but cruel.