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, lifting her gently up and pillowing her hot head upon his arm, while she moaned like a weary child.
“It rests me so just to see you, Morris. May I go back with you, 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 farm-house, 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?”
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; 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 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 mad-house, 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, but she went on with the story, which made Morris clench 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.”
“Granted that she is not,” Morris answered, “the divorce remains the same.”
“I do not believe in divorces. Whom God hath joined together let not man put asunder,” Katy said with an air which implied that from this argument there could be no appeal.
“That is the Scripture, I know,” Morris replied, “but you must know that for one sin our Saviour permitted a man to put away his wife, thus making it perfectly right.”
“But in Genevra’s case the sin did not exist. She was as innocent as I am, and that must make a difference.”