Family Pride; Or, Purified by SufferingHolmes, Mary Jane
General
Family Pride; Or, Purified by Suffering
Holmes, Mary Jane
American fiction; Dime novels
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."
"Granted that she is not," Morris answered, "the divorce remains the
same."
"I do not believe in divorces. 'Whom God hath joined together let no man
put asunder,'" Katy said with an air which implied that from this
argument there could be no appeal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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