Materfamilias

Оглавление

Ada Cambridge. Materfamilias

CHAPTER I. THE BEGINNING OF IT ALL

CHAPTER II. IN THE EARLY DAYS

CHAPTER III. A PAGE OF LIFE

CHAPTER IV. THE BROKEN CIRCLE

CHAPTER V. A LITTLE MISUNDERSTANDING

CHAPTER VI. DEPOSED

CHAPTER VII. A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT

CHAPTER VIII. THE SILVER WEDDING

CHAPTER IX. GRANDMAMMA

CHAPTER X. VINDICATED

Отрывок из книги

I was not a girl, but a woman, when I married Tom. He, a man incapable of grossness in any shape or form, was still a man, healthily natural, of ripe experience in the ways of men. Whatever our faults in the past – if they were faults – the result was to teach us what we could never otherwise have learned, the meaning of wedlock in its last perfection. Don't let any one run down second marriages to me! The way to them must necessarily be painful and troubled, and one always desires passionately to keep one's children out of it; but the end of the journey, bringing together, open-eyed to all the conditions, educated to discriminate and understand, two born mates like Tom and me – ah, well! One mustn't say all one thinks about these matters – except, of course, to him.

Talking of being open-eyed, I was so blind at one time as actually to fancy that he was in no hurry to have me. When I gave him to understand – hardly knowing what I did – that I should die or something without him to take care of me, he said he asked nothing better than to take care of me, God knew, but that how to do it for the best was what bothered him. It did not bother me in the slightest degree. I depended on him – only on him of all the world – and I told him so; and yet he wanted, after that, to send me back to my father with some old woman whom I had never seen, in another ship, while he took the Racer home – which never would have got home, nor he either. And I a married woman, independent in my own right, and over twenty-one! However, I flatly refused to go, except with him, as I had come. He said he would not trust my life to that rotten tub again, and I said – I forget what I said; but I hurt his feelings by it; and then I cried bitterly, and said I would go out and be a housemaid.

.....

At any rate, his back was hardly turned – he could scarcely have cleared the Heads, we reckoned – when the catastrophe befell. I have often tried to imagine what his feelings were when, at his first port of call, the intelligence was conveyed to him that he had a son, and that mother and child were doing well. He attempted to express them by letter, but he is not literary. And he can't gush. All the same, I know – I know!

Did I say that the happiest moment of my life was when he called me a brave girl? I was wrong. The happiest moment of my life – even though Tom was away from me – was the moment when I heard the first cry of my own child. Words cannot describe the effect on me of that little voice so suddenly audible, as great an astonishment as if one had never expected it; but every mother in the world will understand.

.....