The Democratic Press

A Woman's Devotion.
The Story of One Woman's Devotion to a Brutal Husband.
Murders and suicides and drunkenness go along with the stories of woman's infidelity or devotion. The story I tell you is of a woman's devotion, an old, old story, and pitiful and foolish. Thinking on such stories and such women I always want to kill the latter for being fools and send them to heaven for being angels.
A man and his wife moved to Birmingham some years ago. They were plain people and the man was a low-bred brute. He drank and gambled and treated his wife as such men usually do. He speculated and made a load of money and then became ambitious. He wanted to shine in society. He was a rather good-looking animal, and had a good deal of dash and go about him. The woman was plain and couldn't shine, and he hated and maltreated her more than ever. She clung to him bravely until he gave her a blow on the head which prostrated her with brain fever for some months. While she was ill he kept her in one of the basement rooms of the handsome house he had built. There she would have died but for the humanity of a negro servant. When she recovered she sued for a divorce, and as soon as it was granted she set up a dressmaking establishment, while the former loved husband went to a distant town and married a pretty young girl.
The man showered every luxury upon his second wife. She lived in clover, had an elegant carriage, and ordered many of her costumes from the north. When she had a gown made in Birmingham her husband's first wife was her dressmaker.
One evening the poor woman had to bring a party gown of 'my lady's' to the mansion herself. The rich woman was to give a reception, and kneeling down upon the floor the toilworn woman looped the filmy gown about the fair young creature. Her face was radiant and rosy as a child's on Christmas morning. Jewels sparkled upon her round white neck and arms. She smiled down on the sewing woman and asked:
'Do you think I look pretty to-night?'
Dear reader, if you are a woman don't you think you would have sprung up and strangled that white neck by its rope of gems?
But the kneeling woman was a fool angel, and she went on draping the gown that was, in all its cloudlike beauty, her own shroud.
When she arose there were some liquid diamonds in the draperies that would shine in the pages of pain for all eternity.
She passed out of the halls of light and laughter, out into the cold frosty air with the glad music crying like a dirge in her ears. The stars looked down and seemed to wink and laugh at her in mockery. When she opened her door her little child sprang up from his bed and rushed to its mother's arms.
'Didn't you bring me something from the party?' he cried.
And the woman answered not, but when the child lay asleep on her breast, his golden hair was wet and shining with the treasures brought from the revel.
Several years the man and his new wife passed in luxury, then misfortune came. The man speculated and lost. He again became a brute and a gambler. His pretty wife deserted him. He was a waif, an outcast.
Again one cold night the tired woman passed through the streets to her cottage door. Beside her gate she stepped on something human. It was the hand of a man who lay besotted on the pavement.
She kneeled down and sought his face, and finding it, she found the history of her whole sad life. What memory was uppermost at that moment?
The day when he, in his unstained manhood, took her in his arms and asked her to be his wife.
The man's face was wet with tear-drops, and God, seeing how they shone, took them up to heaven and made them new stars in his firmament.
The woman dragged this wreck into her bright little room. Had he not been beyond movement he might have struck her. She put him on her clean bed, and he died unconscious of her presence in a week's time.—Atlanta Constitution.