38 N.J. Eq. 163 | New York Court of Chancery | 1884
The petitioner seeks a divorce from his wife on the ground of adultery. Adultery with three different men is charged, but no attempt has been made to prove the fact except with two of them. The evidence is both direct and circumstantial, and, if believed, fully establishes both charges. But the most material and decisive part of that which support one of the charges proceeds
If the defendant’s story is true, her married life has been one of wretchedness. She represents her husband as jealous, passionate, unjust and brutal, and describes her married life as a prolonged misery in consequence of his revolting accusations and the scorn and neglect with which he generally treated her. If her story is true, it is quite certain if she ever loved him, he had, by his harsh and contumelious treatment, completely alienated her affections, and deprived the purity of his bed of the safeguard of her love. She had nothing to restrain her from crime but her love of purity and self-respect. Her story, in the main, making such allowance for exaggeration as a person testifying under a deep sense of wrong would be likely to make, must be accepted as true, for the petitioner has neither denied nor explained by his own oath a single one of the violations of conjugal duty she charges against him. The petitioner must, therefore, be considered as standing before the court very much in the condition described by Chancellor Zabriskie, in Derby v. Derby, 6 C. E. Gr. 36. His hands are not so un.clean that he should not be allowed to touch the horns of the altar of justice, but they are so weakened, blanched and attenuated that they take but a feeble hold of them.
The charge which I think is proved is the one which accuses the defendant with criminal intimacy with a person by the name of Worthington. In support of this charge, the testimony of an
During the period it is said criminal relations existed between the defendant and Worthington, the petitioner kept a country inn in the county of Middlesex, and also cultivated a farm lying near his inn. The defendant waited on customers at the bar in the absence of her husband. Worthington was a frequent visitor at the inn. A brother of the defendant, who lived in the petitioner’s family, says he came there two or three times a week, generally in the afternoon. He was there frequently in the petitioner’s absence. The frequency of his visits and the character of bis attentions to the “defendant attracted attention as early as
The parties separated on the 3d of July, 1877. Worthington had spent the afternoon of the previous day with the defendant while her husband was absent in the harvest-field. During the night of that day the petitioner accused the defendant, with great violence of language, with having committed adultery with Worthington. She says- he told her if he gave her her deserts he would shoot her on the spot. Worthington says, three or four days after the separation, he heard that the petitioner had turned his wife out of his house in consequence of her relations with him; that he was very sorry she should suffer distress on his account, and he made up his mind he would see the petitioner at once. He went to see him that day. He says the petitioner treated him with perfect good nature, but he does not pretend that he asked the petitioner whether he had sent his wife away because he suspected that she had been criminally intimate with him, or that he uttered a single word in exculpation of the defendant, or of remonstrance against the injustice of the petitioner’s conduct. He says the occurrences that day were so perfectly ephemeral that they did not make enough impression upon his memory to enable him to remember the date. The defendant, soon afier leaving her husband, went to her father’s house. Worthington visited her there. His visits were frequent, and generally at night. A person living just across the street from her residence, and who seems to be neither an eager nor a partial witness, swears that he has seen Worthington go to her residence a great many times at night, from nine to ten o’clock and half-past ten, and that he has seen him leave there as late as eleven o’clock on several occasions; and that the defendant generally received him at the door when he entered and accompanied him to the door when he left. This witness further says that on one
The effect of these circumstances, when combined with the direct proof, is to convince me that the defendant is guilty. Neither class of proofs, standing alone, would perhaps be sufficient to produce that result, but when considered together my conviction of the defendant’s guilt is so strong that, although I fear the petitioner has shamefully disregarded many of his conjugal duties, I cannot, without disregarding his legal rights and endangering the sanctity of the marriage bed, refuse a divorce. A decree of divorce will be advised.