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- Title: Washington Square
- Author: Henry James
- Release Date: January 13, 2015 [eBook #2870]
- [This file was first posted on September 5, 2000]
- Language: English
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- ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WASHINGTON SQUARE***
- Transcribed from the 1921 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
- ccx074@pglaf.org. Proofed by Dimitri Papadopoulos, Lynn A. Weinberg,
- Stuart Bennett and Mary Willard.
- [Picture: Book cover]
- WASHINGTON
- SQUARE
- * * * * *
- BY
- HENRY JAMES
- * * * * *
- MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
- ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
- 1921
- * * * * *
- COPYRIGHT
- _First published in_ 1881
- * * * * *
- I
- DURING a portion of the first half of the present century, and more
- particularly during the latter part of it, there flourished and practised
- in the city of New York a physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional
- share of the consideration which, in the United States, has always been
- bestowed upon distinguished members of the medical profession. This
- profession in America has constantly been held in honour, and more
- successfully than elsewhere has put forward a claim to the epithet of
- “liberal.” In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either
- earn your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has
- appeared in a high degree to combine two recognised sources of credit.
- It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a
- great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of science—a merit
- appreciated in a community in which the love of knowledge has not always
- been accompanied by leisure and opportunity. It was an element in Dr.
- Sloper’s reputation that his learning and his skill were very evenly
- balanced; he was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there
- was nothing abstract in his remedies—he always ordered you to take
- something. Though he was felt to be extremely thorough, he was not
- uncomfortably theoretic, and if he sometimes explained matters rather
- more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far
- (like some practitioners one has heard of) as to trust to the explanation
- alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable prescription. There
- were some doctors that left the prescription without offering any
- explanation at all; and he did not belong to that class either, which
- was, after all, the most vulgar. It will be seen that I am describing a
- clever man; and this is really the reason why Dr. Sloper had become a
- local celebrity. At the time at which we are chiefly concerned with him,
- he was some fifty years of age, and his popularity was at its height. He
- was very witty, and he passed in the best society of New York for a man
- of the world—which, indeed, he was, in a very sufficient degree. I
- hasten to add, to anticipate possible misconception, that he was not the
- least of a charlatan. He was a thoroughly honest man—honest in a degree
- of which he had perhaps lacked the opportunity to give the complete
- measure; and, putting aside the great good-nature of the circle in which
- he practised, which was rather fond of boasting that it possessed the
- “brightest” doctor in the country, he daily justified his claim to the
- talents attributed to him by the popular voice. He was an observer, even
- a philosopher, and to be bright was so natural to him, and (as the
- popular voice said) came so easily, that he never aimed at mere effect,
- and had none of the little tricks and pretensions of second-rate
- reputations. It must be confessed that fortune had favoured him, and
- that he had found the path to prosperity very soft to his tread. He had
- married at the age of twenty-seven, for love, a very charming girl, Miss
- Catherine Harrington, of New York, who, in addition to her charms, had
- brought him a solid dowry. Mrs. Sloper was amiable, graceful,
- accomplished, elegant, and in 1820 she had been one of the pretty girls
- of the small but promising capital which clustered about the Battery and
- overlooked the Bay, and of which the uppermost boundary was indicated by
- the grassy waysides of Canal Street. Even at the age of twenty-seven
- Austin Sloper had made his mark sufficiently to mitigate the anomaly of
- his having been chosen among a dozen suitors by a young woman of high
- fashion, who had ten thousand dollars of income and the most charming
- eyes in the island of Manhattan. These eyes, and some of their
- accompaniments, were for about five years a source of extreme
- satisfaction to the young physician, who was both a devoted and a very
- happy husband. The fact of his having married a rich woman made no
- difference in the line he had traced for himself, and he cultivated his
- profession with as definite a purpose as if he still had no other
- resources than his fraction of the modest patrimony which on his father’s
- death he had shared with his brothers and sisters. This purpose had not
- been preponderantly to make money—it had been rather to learn something
- and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something
- useful—this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of
- which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no
- degree to modify the validity. He was fond of his practice, and of
- exercising a skill of which he was agreeably conscious, and it was so
- patent a truth that if he were not a doctor there was nothing else he
- could be, that a doctor he persisted in being, in the best possible
- conditions. Of course his easy domestic situation saved him a good deal
- of drudgery, and his wife’s affiliation to the “best people” brought him
- a good many of those patients whose symptoms are, if not more interesting
- in themselves than those of the lower orders, at least more consistently
- displayed. He desired experience, and in the course of twenty years he
- got a great deal. It must be added that it came to him in some forms
- which, whatever might have been their intrinsic value, made it the
- reverse of welcome. His first child, a little boy of extraordinary
- promise, as the Doctor, who was not addicted to easy enthusiasms, firmly
- believed, died at three years of age, in spite of everything that the
- mother’s tenderness and the father’s science could invent to save him.
- Two years later Mrs. Sloper gave birth to a second infant—an infant of a
- sex which rendered the poor child, to the Doctor’s sense, an inadequate
- substitute for his lamented first-born, of whom he had promised himself
- to make an admirable man. The little girl was a disappointment; but this
- was not the worst. A week after her birth the young mother, who, as the
- phrase is, had been doing well, suddenly betrayed alarming symptoms, and
- before another week had elapsed Austin Sloper was a widower.
- For a man whose trade was to keep people alive, he had certainly done
- poorly in his own family; and a bright doctor who within three years
- loses his wife and his little boy should perhaps be prepared to see
- either his skill or his affection impugned. Our friend, however, escaped
- criticism: that is, he escaped all criticism but his own, which was much
- the most competent and most formidable. He walked under the weight of
- this very private censure for the rest of his days, and bore for ever the
- scars of a castigation to which the strongest hand he knew had treated
- him on the night that followed his wife’s death. The world, which, as I
- have said, appreciated him, pitied him too much to be ironical; his
- misfortune made him more interesting, and even helped him to be the
- fashion. It was observed that even medical families cannot escape the
- more insidious forms of disease, and that, after all, Dr. Sloper had lost
- other patients beside the two I have mentioned; which constituted an
- honourable precedent. His little girl remained to him, and though she
- was not what he had desired, he proposed to himself to make the best of
- her. He had on hand a stock of unexpended authority, by which the child,
- in its early years, profited largely. She had been named, as a matter of
- course, after her poor mother, and even in her most diminutive babyhood
- the Doctor never called her anything but Catherine. She grew up a very
- robust and healthy child, and her father, as he looked at her, often said
- to himself that, such as she was, he at least need have no fear of losing
- her. I say “such as she was,” because, to tell the truth—But this is a
- truth of which I will defer the telling.
- II
- WHEN the child was about ten years old, he invited his sister, Mrs.
- Penniman, to come and stay with him. The Miss Slopers had been but two
- in number, and both of them had married early in life. The younger, Mrs.
- Almond by name, was the wife of a prosperous merchant, and the mother of
- a blooming family. She bloomed herself, indeed, and was a comely,
- comfortable, reasonable woman, and a favourite with her clever brother,
- who, in the matter of women, even when they were nearly related to him,
- was a man of distinct preferences. He preferred Mrs. Almond to his
- sister Lavinia, who had married a poor clergyman, of a sickly
- constitution and a flowery style of eloquence, and then, at the age of
- thirty-three, had been left a widow, without children, without
- fortune—with nothing but the memory of Mr. Penniman’s flowers of speech,
- a certain vague aroma of which hovered about her own conversation.
- Nevertheless he had offered her a home under his own roof, which Lavinia
- accepted with the alacrity of a woman who had spent the ten years of her
- married life in the town of Poughkeepsie. The Doctor had not proposed to
- Mrs. Penniman to come and live with him indefinitely; he had suggested
- that she should make an asylum of his house while she looked about for
- unfurnished lodgings. It is uncertain whether Mrs. Penniman ever
- instituted a search for unfurnished lodgings, but it is beyond dispute
- that she never found them. She settled herself with her brother and
- never went away, and when Catherine was twenty years old her Aunt Lavinia
- was still one of the most striking features of her immediate _entourage_.
- Mrs. Penniman’s own account of the matter was that she had remained to
- take charge of her niece’s education. She had given this account, at
- least, to every one but the Doctor, who never asked for explanations
- which he could entertain himself any day with inventing. Mrs. Penniman,
- moreover, though she had a good deal of a certain sort of artificial
- assurance, shrank, for indefinable reasons, from presenting herself to
- her brother as a fountain of instruction. She had not a high sense of
- humour, but she had enough to prevent her from making this mistake; and
- her brother, on his side, had enough to excuse her, in her situation, for
- laying him under contribution during a considerable part of a lifetime.
- He therefore assented tacitly to the proposition which Mrs. Penniman had
- tacitly laid down, that it was of importance that the poor motherless
- girl should have a brilliant woman near her. His assent could only be
- tacit, for he had never been dazzled by his sister’s intellectual lustre.
- Save when he fell in love with Catherine Harrington, he had never been
- dazzled, indeed, by any feminine characteristics whatever; and though he
- was to a certain extent what is called a ladies’ doctor, his private
- opinion of the more complicated sex was not exalted. He regarded its
- complications as more curious than edifying, and he had an idea of the
- beauty of _reason_, which was, on the whole, meagrely gratified by what
- he observed in his female patients. His wife had been a reasonable
- woman, but she was a bright exception; among several things that he was
- sure of, this was perhaps the principal. Such a conviction, of course,
- did little either to mitigate or to abbreviate his widowhood; and it set
- a limit to his recognition, at the best, of Catherine’s possibilities and
- of Mrs. Penniman’s ministrations. He, nevertheless, at the end of six
- months, accepted his sister’s permanent presence as an accomplished fact,
- and as Catherine grew older perceived that there were in effect good
- reasons why she should have a companion of her own imperfect sex. He was
- extremely polite to Lavinia, scrupulously, formally polite; and she had
- never seen him in anger but once in her life, when he lost his temper in
- a theological discussion with her late husband. With her he never
- discussed theology, nor, indeed, discussed anything; he contented himself
- with making known, very distinctly, in the form of a lucid ultimatum, his
- wishes with regard to Catherine.
- Once, when the girl was about twelve years old, he had said to her:
- “Try and make a clever woman of her, Lavinia; I should like her to be a
- clever woman.”
- Mrs. Penniman, at this, looked thoughtful a moment. “My dear Austin,”
- she then inquired, “do you think it is better to be clever than to be
- good?”
- “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you
- are clever.”
- From this assertion Mrs. Penniman saw no reason to dissent; she possibly
- reflected that her own great use in the world was owing to her aptitude
- for many things.
- “Of course I wish Catherine to be good,” the Doctor said next day; “but
- she won’t be any the less virtuous for not being a fool. I am not afraid
- of her being wicked; she will never have the salt of malice in her
- character. She is as good as good bread, as the French say; but six
- years hence I don’t want to have to compare her to good bread and
- butter.”
- “Are you afraid she will turn insipid? My dear brother, it is I who
- supply the butter; so you needn’t fear!” said Mrs. Penniman, who had
- taken in hand the child’s accomplishments, overlooking her at the piano,
- where Catherine displayed a certain talent, and going with her to the
- dancing-class, where it must be confessed that she made but a modest
- figure.
- Mrs. Penniman was a tall, thin, fair, rather faded woman, with a
- perfectly amiable disposition, a high standard of gentility, a taste for
- light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and obliquity of
- character. She was romantic, she was sentimental, she had a passion for
- little secrets and mysteries—a very innocent passion, for her secrets had
- hitherto always been as unpractical as addled eggs. She was not
- absolutely veracious; but this defect was of no great consequence, for
- she had never had anything to conceal. She would have liked to have a
- lover, and to correspond with him under an assumed name in letters left
- at a shop; I am bound to say that her imagination never carried the
- intimacy farther than this. Mrs. Penniman had never had a lover, but her
- brother, who was very shrewd, understood her turn of mind. “When
- Catherine is about seventeen,” he said to himself, “Lavinia will try and
- persuade her that some young man with a moustache is in love with her.
- It will be quite untrue; no young man, with a moustache or without, will
- ever be in love with Catherine. But Lavinia will take it up, and talk to
- her about it; perhaps, even, if her taste for clandestine operations
- doesn’t prevail with her, she will talk to me about it. Catherine won’t
- see it, and won’t believe it, fortunately for her peace of mind; poor
- Catherine isn’t romantic.”
- She was a healthy well-grown child, without a trace of her mother’s
- beauty. She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle
- countenance. The most that had ever been said for her was that she had a
- “nice” face, and, though she was an heiress, no one had ever thought of
- regarding her as a belle. Her father’s opinion of her moral purity was
- abundantly justified; she was excellently, imperturbably good;
- affectionate, docile, obedient, and much addicted to speaking the truth.
- In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an
- awkward confession to make about one’s heroine, I must add that she was
- something of a glutton. She never, that I know of, stole raisins out of
- the pantry; but she devoted her pocket-money to the purchase of
- cream-cakes. As regards this, however, a critical attitude would be
- inconsistent with a candid reference to the early annals of any
- biographer. Catherine was decidedly not clever; she was not quick with
- her book, nor, indeed, with anything else. She was not abnormally
- deficient, and she mustered learning enough to acquit herself respectably
- in conversation with her contemporaries, among whom it must be avowed,
- however, that she occupied a secondary place. It is well known that in
- New York it is possible for a young girl to occupy a primary one.
- Catherine, who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on most
- social occasions, as they are called, you would have found her lurking in
- the background. She was extremely fond of her father, and very much
- afraid of him; she thought him the cleverest and handsomest and most
- celebrated of men. The poor girl found her account so completely in the
- exercise of her affections that the little tremor of fear that mixed
- itself with her filial passion gave the thing an extra relish rather than
- blunted its edge. Her deepest desire was to please him, and her
- conception of happiness was to know that she had succeeded in pleasing
- him. She had never succeeded beyond a certain point. Though, on the
- whole, he was very kind to her, she was perfectly aware of this, and to
- go beyond the point in question seemed to her really something to live
- for. What she could not know, of course, was that she disappointed him,
- though on three or four occasions the Doctor had been almost frank about
- it. She grew up peacefully and prosperously, but at the age of eighteen
- Mrs. Penniman had not made a clever woman of her. Dr. Sloper would have
- liked to be proud of his daughter; but there was nothing to be proud of
- in poor Catherine. There was nothing, of course, to be ashamed of; but
- this was not enough for the Doctor, who was a proud man and would have
- enjoyed being able to think of his daughter as an unusual girl. There
- would have been a fitness in her being pretty and graceful, intelligent
- and distinguished; for her mother had been the most charming woman of her
- little day, and as regards her father, of course he knew his own value.
- He had moments of irritation at having produced a commonplace child, and
- he even went so far at times as to take a certain satisfaction in the
- thought that his wife had not lived to find her out. He was naturally
- slow in making this discovery himself, and it was not till Catherine had
- become a young lady grown that he regarded the matter as settled. He
- gave her the benefit of a great many doubts; he was in no haste to
- conclude. Mrs. Penniman frequently assured him that his daughter had a
- delightful nature; but he knew how to interpret this assurance. It
- meant, to his sense, that Catherine was not wise enough to discover that
- her aunt was a goose—a limitation of mind that could not fail to be
- agreeable to Mrs. Penniman. Both she and her brother, however,
- exaggerated the young girl’s limitations; for Catherine, though she was
- very fond of her aunt, and conscious of the gratitude she owed her,
- regarded her without a particle of that gentle dread which gave its stamp
- to her admiration of her father. To her mind there was nothing of the
- infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were,
- and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father’s great
- faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of
- luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that
- Catherine’s own mind ceased to follow them.
- It must not be supposed that Dr. Sloper visited his disappointment upon
- the poor girl, or ever let her suspect that she had played him a trick.
- On the contrary, for fear of being unjust to her, he did his duty with
- exemplary zeal, and recognised that she was a faithful and affectionate
- child. Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over
- his disappointment, and in the fulness of time he got used to it. He
- satisfied himself that he had expected nothing, though, indeed, with a
- certain oddity of reasoning. “I expect nothing,” he said to himself, “so
- that if she gives me a surprise, it will be all clear again. If she
- doesn’t, it will be no loss.” This was about the time Catherine had
- reached her eighteenth year, so that it will be seen her father had not
- been precipitate. At this time she seemed not only incapable of giving
- surprises; it was almost a question whether she could have received
- one—she was so quiet and irresponsive. People who expressed themselves
- roughly called her stolid. But she was irresponsive because she was shy,
- uncomfortably, painfully shy. This was not always understood, and she
- sometimes produced an impression of insensibility. In reality she was
- the softest creature in the world.
- III
- AS a child she had promised to be tall, but when she was sixteen she
- ceased to grow, and her stature, like most other points in her
- composition, was not unusual. She was strong, however, and properly
- made, and, fortunately, her health was excellent. It has been noted that
- the Doctor was a philosopher, but I would not have answered for his
- philosophy if the poor girl had proved a sickly and suffering person.
- Her appearance of health constituted her principal claim to beauty, and
- her clear, fresh complexion, in which white and red were very equally
- distributed, was, indeed, an excellent thing to see. Her eye was small
- and quiet, her features were rather thick, her tresses brown and smooth.
- A dull, plain girl she was called by rigorous critics—a quiet, ladylike
- girl by those of the more imaginative sort; but by neither class was she
- very elaborately discussed. When it had been duly impressed upon her
- that she was a young lady—it was a good while before she could believe
- it—she suddenly developed a lively taste for dress: a lively taste is
- quite the expression to use. I feel as if I ought to write it very
- small, her judgement in this matter was by no means infallible; it was
- liable to confusions and embarrassments. Her great indulgence of it was
- really the desire of a rather inarticulate nature to manifest itself; she
- sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for her diffidence
- of speech by a fine frankness of costume. But if she expressed herself
- in her clothes it is certain that people were not to blame for not
- thinking her a witty person. It must be added that though she had the
- expectation of a fortune—Dr. Sloper for a long time had been making
- twenty thousand dollars a year by his profession, and laying aside the
- half of it—the amount of money at her disposal was not greater than the
- allowance made to many poorer girls. In those days in New York there
- were still a few altar-fires flickering in the temple of Republican
- simplicity, and Dr. Sloper would have been glad to see his daughter
- present herself, with a classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith.
- It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his
- should be both ugly and overdressed. For himself, he was fond of the
- good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a
- dread of vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the
- society that surrounded him. Moreover, the standard of luxury in the
- United States thirty years ago was carried by no means so high as at
- present, and Catherine’s clever father took the old-fashioned view of the
- education of young persons. He had no particular theory on the subject;
- it had scarcely as yet become a necessity of self-defence to have a
- collection of theories. It simply appeared to him proper and reasonable
- that a well-bred young woman should not carry half her fortune on her
- back. Catherine’s back was a broad one, and would have carried a good
- deal; but to the weight of the paternal displeasure she never ventured to
- expose it, and our heroine was twenty years old before she treated
- herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe;
- though this was an article which, for many years, she had coveted in
- secret. It made her look, when she sported it, like a woman of thirty;
- but oddly enough, in spite of her taste for fine clothes, she had not a
- grain of coquetry, and her anxiety when she put them on was as to whether
- they, and not she, would look well. It is a point on which history has
- not been explicit, but the assumption is warrantable; it was in the royal
- raiment just mentioned that she presented herself at a little
- entertainment given by her aunt, Mrs. Almond. The girl was at this time
- in her twenty-first year, and Mrs. Almond’s party was the beginning of
- something very important.
- Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household
- gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his
- marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous
- fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes’ walk of
- the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view)
- about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily
- northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which
- it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled
- farther to the right and left of Broadway. By the time the Doctor
- changed his residence the murmur of trade had become a mighty uproar,
- which was music in the ears of all good citizens interested in the
- commercial development, as they delighted to call it, of their fortunate
- isle. Dr. Sloper’s interest in this phenomenon was only indirect—though,
- seeing that, as the years went on, half his patients came to be
- overworked men of business, it might have been more immediate—and when
- most of his neighbours’ dwellings (also ornamented with granite copings
- and large fanlights) had been converted into offices, warehouses, and
- shipping agencies, and otherwise applied to the base uses of commerce, he
- determined to look out for a quieter home. The ideal of quiet and of
- genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the
- Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big
- balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps
- ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This
- structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were
- supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural
- science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings.
- In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of
- inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its
- rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august
- precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a
- spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I
- know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but
- this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It
- has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in
- other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more
- honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great
- longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social
- history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority,
- that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of
- sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in
- venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself
- alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that
- you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal
- step and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailantus-trees which at
- that time formed the principal umbrage of the Square, and diffused an
- aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it
- was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed,
- broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue
- cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your
- observations and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my
- heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this
- topographical parenthesis.
- Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a
- high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a
- theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was
- one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch
- houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter.
- These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New
- York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of
- middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of
- them. Catherine had a great many cousins, and with her Aunt Almond’s
- children, who ended by being nine in number, she lived on terms of
- considerable intimacy. When she was younger they had been rather afraid
- of her; she was believed, as the phrase is, to be highly educated, and a
- person who lived in the intimacy of their Aunt Penniman had something of
- reflected grandeur. Mrs. Penniman, among the little Almonds, was an
- object of more admiration than sympathy. Her manners were strange and
- formidable, and her mourning robes—she dressed in black for twenty years
- after her husband’s death, and then suddenly appeared one morning with
- pink roses in her cap—were complicated in odd, unexpected places with
- buckles, bugles, and pins, which discouraged familiarity. She took
- children too hard, both for good and for evil, and had an oppressive air
- of expecting subtle things of them, so that going to see her was a good
- deal like being taken to church and made to sit in a front pew. It was
- discovered after a while, however, that Aunt Penniman was but an accident
- in Catherine’s existence, and not a part of its essence, and that when
- the girl came to spend a Saturday with her cousins, she was available for
- “follow-my-master,” and even for leapfrog. On this basis an
- understanding was easily arrived at, and for several years Catherine
- fraternised with her young kinsmen. I say young kinsmen, because seven
- of the little Almonds were boys, and Catherine had a preference for those
- games which are most conveniently played in trousers. By degrees,
- however, the little Almonds’ trousers began to lengthen, and the wearers
- to disperse and settle themselves in life. The elder children were older
- than Catherine, and the boys were sent to college or placed in
- counting-rooms. Of the girls, one married very punctually, and the other
- as punctually became engaged. It was to celebrate this latter event that
- Mrs. Almond gave the little party I have mentioned. Her daughter was to
- marry a stout young stockbroker, a boy of twenty; it was thought a very
- good thing.
- IV
- MRS. PENNIMAN, with more buckles and bangles than ever, came, of course,
- to the entertainment, accompanied by her niece; the Doctor, too, had
- promised to look in later in the evening. There was to be a good deal of
- dancing, and before it had gone very far, Marian Almond came up to
- Catherine, in company with a tall young man. She introduced the young
- man as a person who had a great desire to make our heroine’s
- acquaintance, and as a cousin of Arthur Townsend, her own intended.
- Marian Almond was a pretty little person of seventeen, with a very small
- figure and a very big sash, to the elegance of whose manners matrimony
- had nothing to add. She already had all the airs of a hostess, receiving
- the company, shaking her fan, saying that with so many people to attend
- to she should have no time to dance. She made a long speech about Mr.
- Townsend’s cousin, to whom she administered a tap with her fan before
- turning away to other cares. Catherine had not understood all that she
- said; her attention was given to enjoying Marian’s ease of manner and
- flow of ideas, and to looking at the young man, who was remarkably
- handsome. She had succeeded, however, as she often failed to do when
- people were presented to her, in catching his name, which appeared to be
- the same as that of Marian’s little stockbroker. Catherine was always
- agitated by an introduction; it seemed a difficult moment, and she
- wondered that some people—her new acquaintance at this moment, for
- instance—should mind it so little. She wondered what she ought to say,
- and what would be the consequences of her saying nothing. The
- consequences at present were very agreeable. Mr. Townsend, leaving her
- no time for embarrassment, began to talk with an easy smile, as if he had
- known her for a year.
- “What a delightful party! What a charming house! What an interesting
- family! What a pretty girl your cousin is!”
- These observations, in themselves of no great profundity, Mr. Townsend
- seemed to offer for what they were worth, and as a contribution to an
- acquaintance. He looked straight into Catherine’s eyes. She answered
- nothing; she only listened, and looked at him; and he, as if he expected
- no particular reply, went on to say many other things in the same
- comfortable and natural manner. Catherine, though she felt tongue-tied,
- was conscious of no embarrassment; it seemed proper that he should talk,
- and that she should simply look at him. What made it natural was that he
- was so handsome, or rather, as she phrased it to herself, so beautiful.
- The music had been silent for a while, but it suddenly began again; and
- then he asked her, with a deeper, intenser smile, if she would do him the
- honour of dancing with him. Even to this inquiry she gave no audible
- assent; she simply let him put his arm round her waist—as she did so it
- occurred to her more vividly than it had ever done before, that this was
- a singular place for a gentleman’s arm to be—and in a moment he was
- guiding her round the room in the harmonious rotation of the polka. When
- they paused she felt that she was red; and then, for some moments, she
- stopped looking at him. She fanned herself, and looked at the flowers
- that were painted on her fan. He asked her if she would begin again, and
- she hesitated to answer, still looking at the flowers.
- “Does it make you dizzy?” he asked, in a tone of great kindness.
- Then Catherine looked up at him; he was certainly beautiful, and not at
- all red. “Yes,” she said; she hardly knew why, for dancing had never
- made her dizzy.
- “Ah, well, in that case,” said Mr. Townsend, “we will sit still and talk.
- I will find a good place to sit.”
- He found a good place—a charming place; a little sofa that seemed meant
- only for two persons. The rooms by this time were very full; the dancers
- increased in number, and people stood close in front of them, turning
- their backs, so that Catherine and her companion seemed secluded and
- unobserved. “_We_ will talk,” the young man had said; but he still did
- all the talking. Catherine leaned back in her place, with her eyes fixed
- upon him, smiling and thinking him very clever. He had features like
- young men in pictures; Catherine had never seen such features—so
- delicate, so chiselled and finished—among the young New Yorkers whom she
- passed in the streets and met at parties. He was tall and slim, but he
- looked extremely strong. Catherine thought he looked like a statue. But
- a statue would not talk like that, and, above all, would not have eyes of
- so rare a colour. He had never been at Mrs. Almond’s before; he felt
- very much like a stranger; and it was very kind of Catherine to take pity
- on him. He was Arthur Townsend’s cousin—not very near; several times
- removed—and Arthur had brought him to present him to the family. In
- fact, he was a great stranger in New York. It was his native place; but
- he had not been there for many years. He had been knocking about the
- world, and living in far-away lands; he had only come back a month or two
- before. New York was very pleasant, only he felt lonely.
- “You see, people forget you,” he said, smiling at Catherine with his
- delightful gaze, while he leaned forward obliquely, turning towards her,
- with his elbows on his knees.
- It seemed to Catherine that no one who had once seen him would ever
- forget him; but though she made this reflexion she kept it to herself,
- almost as you would keep something precious.
- They sat there for some time. He was very amusing. He asked her about
- the people that were near them; he tried to guess who some of them were,
- and he made the most laughable mistakes. He criticised them very freely,
- in a positive, off-hand way. Catherine had never heard any
- one—especially any young man—talk just like that. It was the way a young
- man might talk in a novel; or better still, in a play, on the stage,
- close before the footlights, looking at the audience, and with every one
- looking at him, so that you wondered at his presence of mind. And yet
- Mr. Townsend was not like an actor; he seemed so sincere, so natural.
- This was very interesting; but in the midst of it Marian Almond came
- pushing through the crowd, with a little ironical cry, when she found
- these young people still together, which made every one turn round, and
- cost Catherine a conscious blush. Marian broke up their talk, and told
- Mr. Townsend—whom she treated as if she were already married, and he had
- become her cousin—to run away to her mother, who had been wishing for the
- last half-hour to introduce him to Mr. Almond.
- “We shall meet again!” he said to Catherine as he left her, and Catherine
- thought it a very original speech.
- Her cousin took her by the arm, and made her walk about. “I needn’t ask
- you what you think of Morris!” the young girl exclaimed.
- “Is that his name?”
- “I don’t ask you what you think of his name, but what you think of
- himself,” said Marian.
- “Oh, nothing particular!” Catherine answered, dissembling for the first
- time in her life.
- “I have half a mind to tell him that!” cried Marian. “It will do him
- good. He’s so terribly conceited.”
- “Conceited?” said Catherine, staring.
- “So Arthur says, and Arthur knows about him.”
- “Oh, don’t tell him!” Catherine murmured imploringly.
- “Don’t tell him he’s conceited? I have told him so a dozen times.”
- At this profession of audacity Catherine looked down at her little
- companion in amazement. She supposed it was because Marian was going to
- be married that she took so much on herself; but she wondered too,
- whether, when she herself should become engaged, such exploits would be
- expected of her.
- Half an hour later she saw her Aunt Penniman sitting in the embrasure of
- a window, with her head a little on one side, and her gold eye-glass
- raised to her eyes, which were wandering about the room. In front of her
- was a gentleman, bending forward a little, with his back turned to
- Catherine. She knew his back immediately, though she had never seen it;
- for when he had left her, at Marian’s instigation, he had retreated in
- the best order, without turning round. Morris Townsend—the name had
- already become very familiar to her, as if some one had been repeating it
- in her ear for the last half-hour—Morris Townsend was giving his
- impressions of the company to her aunt, as he had done to herself; he was
- saying clever things, and Mrs. Penniman was smiling, as if she approved
- of them. As soon as Catherine had perceived this she moved away; she
- would not have liked him to turn round and see her. But it gave her
- pleasure—the whole thing. That he should talk with Mrs. Penniman, with
- whom she lived and whom she saw and talked with every day—that seemed to
- keep him near her, and to make him even easier to contemplate than if she
- herself had been the object of his civilities; and that Aunt Lavinia
- should like him, should not be shocked or startled by what he said, this
- also appeared to the girl a personal gain; for Aunt Lavinia’s standard
- was extremely high, planted as it was over the grave of her late husband,
- in which, as she had convinced every one, the very genius of conversation
- was buried. One of the Almond boys, as Catherine called him, invited our
- heroine to dance a quadrille, and for a quarter of an hour her feet at
- least were occupied. This time she was not dizzy; her head was very
- clear. Just when the dance was over, she found herself in the crowd face
- to face with her father. Dr. Sloper had usually a little smile, never a
- very big one, and with his little smile playing in his clear eyes and on
- his neatly-shaved lips, he looked at his daughter’s crimson gown.
- “Is it possible that this magnificent person is my child?” he said.
- You would have surprised him if you had told him so; but it is a literal
- fact that he almost never addressed his daughter save in the ironical
- form. Whenever he addressed her he gave her pleasure; but she had to cut
- her pleasure out of the piece, as it were. There were portions left
- over, light remnants and snippets of irony, which she never knew what to
- do with, which seemed too delicate for her own use; and yet Catherine,
- lamenting the limitations of her understanding, felt that they were too
- valuable to waste and had a belief that if they passed over her head they
- yet contributed to the general sum of human wisdom.
- “I am not magnificent,” she said mildly, wishing that she had put on
- another dress.
- “You are sumptuous, opulent, expensive,” her father rejoined. “You look
- as if you had eighty thousand a year.”
- “Well, so long as I haven’t—” said Catherine illogically. Her conception
- of her prospective wealth was as yet very indefinite.
- “So long as you haven’t you shouldn’t look as if you had. Have you
- enjoyed your party?”
- Catherine hesitated a moment; and then, looking away, “I am rather
- tired,” she murmured. I have said that this entertainment was the
- beginning of something important for Catherine. For the second time in
- her life she made an indirect answer; and the beginning of a period of
- dissimulation is certainly a significant date. Catherine was not so
- easily tired as that.
- Nevertheless, in the carriage, as they drove home, she was as quiet as if
- fatigue had been her portion. Dr. Sloper’s manner of addressing his
- sister Lavinia had a good deal of resemblance to the tone he had adopted
- towards Catherine.
- “Who was the young man that was making love to you?” he presently asked.
- “Oh, my good brother!” murmured Mrs. Penniman, in deprecation.
- “He seemed uncommonly tender. Whenever I looked at you, for half an
- hour, he had the most devoted air.”
- “The devotion was not to me,” said Mrs. Penniman. “It was to Catherine;
- he talked to me of her.”
- Catherine had been listening with all her ears. “Oh, Aunt Penniman!” she
- exclaimed faintly.
- “He is very handsome; he is very clever; he expressed himself with a
- great deal—a great deal of felicity,” her aunt went on.
- “He is in love with this regal creature, then?” the Doctor inquired
- humorously.
- “Oh, father,” cried the girl, still more faintly, devoutly thankful the
- carriage was dark.
- “I don’t know that; but he admired her dress.”
- Catherine did not say to herself in the dark, “My dress only?” Mrs.
- Penniman’s announcement struck her by its richness, not by its
- meagreness.
- “You see,” said her father, “he thinks you have eighty thousand a year.”
- “I don’t believe he thinks of that,” said Mrs. Penniman; “he is too
- refined.”
- “He must be tremendously refined not to think of that!”
- “Well, he is!” Catherine exclaimed, before she knew it.
- “I thought you had gone to sleep,” her father answered. “The hour has
- come!” he added to himself. “Lavinia is going to get up a romance for
- Catherine. It’s a shame to play such tricks on the girl. What is the
- gentleman’s name?” he went on, aloud.
- “I didn’t catch it, and I didn’t like to ask him. He asked to be
- introduced to me,” said Mrs. Penniman, with a certain grandeur; “but you
- know how indistinctly Jefferson speaks.” Jefferson was Mr. Almond.
- “Catherine, dear, what was the gentleman’s name?”
- For a minute, if it had not been for the rumbling of the carriage, you
- might have heard a pin drop.
- “I don’t know, Aunt Lavinia,” said Catherine, very softly. And, with all
- his irony, her father believed her.
- V
- HE learned what he had asked some three or four days later, after Morris
- Townsend, with his cousin, had called in Washington Square. Mrs.
- Penniman did not tell her brother, on the drive home, that she had
- intimated to this agreeable young man, whose name she did not know, that,
- with her niece, she should be very glad to see him; but she was greatly
- pleased, and even a little flattered, when, late on a Sunday afternoon,
- the two gentlemen made their appearance. His coming with Arthur Townsend
- made it more natural and easy; the latter young man was on the point of
- becoming connected with the family, and Mrs. Penniman had remarked to
- Catherine that, as he was going to marry Marian, it would be polite in
- him to call. These events came to pass late in the autumn, and Catherine
- and her aunt had been sitting together in the closing dusk, by the
- firelight, in the high back parlour.
- Arthur Townsend fell to Catherine’s portion, while his companion placed
- himself on the sofa, beside Mrs. Penniman. Catherine had hitherto not
- been a harsh critic; she was easy to please—she liked to talk with young
- men. But Marian’s betrothed, this evening, made her feel vaguely
- fastidious; he sat looking at the fire and rubbing his knees with his
- hands. As for Catherine, she scarcely even pretended to keep up the
- conversation; her attention had fixed itself on the other side of the
- room; she was listening to what went on between the other Mr. Townsend
- and her aunt. Every now and then he looked over at Catherine herself and
- smiled, as if to show that what he said was for her benefit too.
- Catherine would have liked to change her place, to go and sit near them,
- where she might see and hear him better. But she was afraid of seeming
- bold—of looking eager; and, besides, it would not have been polite to
- Marian’s little suitor. She wondered why the other gentleman had picked
- out her aunt—how he came to have so much to say to Mrs. Penniman, to
- whom, usually, young men were not especially devoted. She was not at all
- jealous of Aunt Lavinia, but she was a little envious, and above all she
- wondered; for Morris Townsend was an object on which she found that her
- imagination could exercise itself indefinitely. His cousin had been
- describing a house that he had taken in view of his union with Marian,
- and the domestic conveniences he meant to introduce into it; how Marian
- wanted a larger one, and Mrs. Almond recommended a smaller one, and how
- he himself was convinced that he had got the neatest house in New York.
- “It doesn’t matter,” he said; “it’s only for three or four years. At the
- end of three or four years we’ll move. That’s the way to live in New
- York—to move every three or four years. Then you always get the last
- thing. It’s because the city’s growing so quick—you’ve got to keep up
- with it. It’s going straight up town—that’s where New York’s going. If
- I wasn’t afraid Marian would be lonely, I’d go up there—right up to the
- top—and wait for it. Only have to wait ten years—they’d all come up
- after you. But Marian says she wants some neighbours—she doesn’t want to
- be a pioneer. She says that if she’s got to be the first settler she had
- better go out to Minnesota. I guess we’ll move up little by little; when
- we get tired of one street we’ll go higher. So you see we’ll always have
- a new house; it’s a great advantage to have a new house; you get all the
- latest improvements. They invent everything all over again about every
- five years, and it’s a great thing to keep up with the new things. I
- always try and keep up with the new things of every kind. Don’t you
- think that’s a good motto for a young couple—to keep ‘going higher’?
- That’s the name of that piece of poetry—what do they call
- it?—_Excelsior_!”
- Catherine bestowed on her junior visitor only just enough attention to
- feel that this was not the way Mr. Morris Townsend had talked the other
- night, or that he was talking now to her fortunate aunt. But suddenly
- his aspiring kinsman became more interesting. He seemed to have become
- conscious that she was affected by his companion’s presence, and he
- thought it proper to explain it.
- “My cousin asked me to bring him, or I shouldn’t have taken the liberty.
- He seemed to want very much to come; you know he’s awfully sociable. I
- told him I wanted to ask you first, but he said Mrs. Penniman had invited
- him. He isn’t particular what he says when he wants to come somewhere!
- But Mrs. Penniman seems to think it’s all right.”
- “We are very glad to see him,” said Catherine. And she wished to talk
- more about him; but she hardly knew what to say. “I never saw him
- before,” she went on presently.
- Arthur Townsend stared.
- “Why, he told me he talked with you for over half an hour the other
- night.”
- “I mean before the other night. That was the first time.”
- “Oh, he has been away from New York—he has been all round the world. He
- doesn’t know many people here, but he’s very sociable, and he wants to
- know every one.”
- “Every one?” said Catherine.
- “Well, I mean all the good ones. All the pretty young ladies—like Mrs.
- Penniman!” and Arthur Townsend gave a private laugh.
- “My aunt likes him very much,” said Catherine.
- “Most people like him—he’s so brilliant.”
- “He’s more like a foreigner,” Catherine suggested.
- “Well, I never knew a foreigner!” said young Townsend, in a tone which
- seemed to indicate that his ignorance had been optional.
- “Neither have I,” Catherine confessed, with more humility. “They say
- they are generally brilliant,” she added vaguely.
- “Well, the people of this city are clever enough for me. I know some of
- them that think they are too clever for me; but they ain’t!”
- “I suppose you can’t be too clever,” said Catherine, still with humility.
- “I don’t know. I know some people that call my cousin too clever.”
- Catherine listened to this statement with extreme interest, and a feeling
- that if Morris Townsend had a fault it would naturally be that one. But
- she did not commit herself, and in a moment she asked: “Now that he has
- come back, will he stay here always?”
- “Ah,” said Arthur, “if he can get something to do.”
- “Something to do?”
- “Some place or other; some business.”
- “Hasn’t he got any?” said Catherine, who had never heard of a young
- man—of the upper class—in this situation.
- “No; he’s looking round. But he can’t find anything.”
- “I am very sorry,” Catherine permitted herself to observe.
- “Oh, he doesn’t mind,” said young Townsend. “He takes it easy—he isn’t
- in a hurry. He is very particular.”
- Catherine thought he naturally would be, and gave herself up for some
- moments to the contemplation of this idea, in several of its bearings.
- “Won’t his father take him into his business—his office?” she at last
- inquired.
- “He hasn’t got any father—he has only got a sister. Your sister can’t
- help you much.”
- It seemed to Catherine that if she were his sister she would disprove
- this axiom. “Is she—is she pleasant?” she asked in a moment.
- “I don’t know—I believe she’s very respectable,” said young Townsend.
- And then he looked across to his cousin and began to laugh. “Look here,
- we are talking about you,” he added.
- Morris Townsend paused in his conversation with Mrs. Penniman, and
- stared, with a little smile. Then he got up, as if he were going.
- “As far as you are concerned, I can’t return the compliment,” he said to
- Catherine’s companion. “But as regards Miss Sloper, it’s another
- affair.”
- Catherine thought this little speech wonderfully well turned; but she was
- embarrassed by it, and she also got up. Morris Townsend stood looking at
- her and smiling; he put out his hand for farewell. He was going, without
- having said anything to her; but even on these terms she was glad to have
- seen him.
- “I will tell her what you have said—when you go!” said Mrs. Penniman,
- with an insinuating laugh.
- Catherine blushed, for she felt almost as if they were making sport of
- her. What in the world could this beautiful young man have said? He
- looked at her still, in spite of her blush; but very kindly and
- respectfully.
- “I have had no talk with you,” he said, “and that was what I came for.
- But it will be a good reason for coming another time; a little pretext—if
- I am obliged to give one. I am not afraid of what your aunt will say
- when I go.”
- With this the two young men took their departure; after which Catherine,
- with her blush still lingering, directed a serious and interrogative eye
- to Mrs. Penniman. She was incapable of elaborate artifice, and she
- resorted to no jocular device—to no affectation of the belief that she
- had been maligned—to learn what she desired.
- “What did you say you would tell me?” she asked.
- Mrs. Penniman came up to her, smiling and nodding a little, looked at her
- all over, and gave a twist to the knot of ribbon in her neck. “It’s a
- great secret, my dear child; but he is coming a-courting!”
- Catherine was serious still. “Is that what he told you!”
- “He didn’t say so exactly. But he left me to guess it. I’m a good
- guesser.”
- “Do you mean a-courting me?”
- “Not me, certainly, miss; though I must say he is a hundred times more
- polite to a person who has no longer extreme youth to recommend her than
- most of the young men. He is thinking of some one else.” And Mrs.
- Penniman gave her niece a delicate little kiss. “You must be very
- gracious to him.”
- Catherine stared—she was bewildered. “I don’t understand you,” she said;
- “he doesn’t know me.”
- “Oh yes, he does; more than you think. I have told him all about you.”
- “Oh, Aunt Penniman!” murmured Catherine, as if this had been a breach of
- trust. “He is a perfect stranger—we don’t know him.” There was
- infinite, modesty in the poor girl’s “we.”
- Aunt Penniman, however, took no account of it; she spoke even with a
- touch of acrimony. “My dear Catherine, you know very well that you
- admire him!”
- “Oh, Aunt Penniman!” Catherine could only murmur again. It might very
- well be that she admired him—though this did not seem to her a thing to
- talk about. But that this brilliant stranger—this sudden apparition, who
- had barely heard the sound of her voice—took that sort of interest in her
- that was expressed by the romantic phrase of which Mrs. Penniman had just
- made use: this could only be a figment of the restless brain of Aunt
- Lavinia, whom every one knew to be a woman of powerful imagination.
- VI
- MRS. PENNIMAN even took for granted at times that other people had as
- much imagination as herself; so that when, half an hour later, her
- brother came in, she addressed him quite on this principle.
- “He has just been here, Austin; it’s such a pity you missed him.”
- “Whom in the world have I missed?” asked the Doctor.
- “Mr. Morris Townsend; he has made us such a delightful visit.”
- “And who in the world is Mr. Morris Townsend?”
- “Aunt Penniman means the gentleman—the gentleman whose name I couldn’t
- remember,” said Catherine.
- “The gentleman at Elizabeth’s party who was so struck with Catherine,”
- Mrs. Penniman added.
- “Oh, his name is Morris Townsend, is it? And did he come here to propose
- to you?”
- “Oh, father,” murmured the girl for all answer, turning away to the
- window, where the dusk had deepened to darkness.
- “I hope he won’t do that without your permission,” said Mrs. Penniman,
- very graciously.
- “After all, my dear, he seems to have yours,” her brother answered.
- Lavinia simpered, as if this might not be quite enough, and Catherine,
- with her forehead touching the window-panes, listened to this exchange of
- epigrams as reservedly as if they had not each been a pin-prick in her
- own destiny.
- “The next time he comes,” the Doctor added, “you had better call me. He
- might like to see me.”
- Morris Townsend came again, some five days afterwards; but Dr. Sloper was
- not called, as he was absent from home at the time. Catherine was with
- her aunt when the young man’s name was brought in, and Mrs. Penniman,
- effacing herself and protesting, made a great point of her niece’s going
- into the drawing-room alone.
- “This time it’s for you—for you only,” she said. “Before, when he talked
- to me, it was only preliminary—it was to gain my confidence. Literally,
- my dear, I should not have the _courage_ to show myself to-day.”
- And this was perfectly true. Mrs. Penniman was not a brave woman, and
- Morris Townsend had struck her as a young man of great force of
- character, and of remarkable powers of satire; a keen, resolute,
- brilliant nature, with which one must exercise a great deal of tact. She
- said to herself that he was “imperious,” and she liked the word and the
- idea. She was not the least jealous of her niece, and she had been
- perfectly happy with Mr. Penniman, but in the bottom of her heart she
- permitted herself the observation: “That’s the sort of husband I should
- have had!” He was certainly much more imperious—she ended by calling it
- imperial—than Mr. Penniman.
- So Catherine saw Mr. Townsend alone, and her aunt did not come in even at
- the end of the visit. The visit was a long one; he sat there—in the
- front parlour, in the biggest armchair—for more than an hour. He seemed
- more at home this time—more familiar; lounging a little in the chair,
- slapping a cushion that was near him with his stick, and looking round
- the room a good deal, and at the objects it contained, as well as at
- Catherine; whom, however, he also contemplated freely. There was a smile
- of respectful devotion in his handsome eyes which seemed to Catherine
- almost solemnly beautiful; it made her think of a young knight in a poem.
- His talk, however, was not particularly knightly; it was light and easy
- and friendly; it took a practical turn, and he asked a number of
- questions about herself—what were her tastes—if she liked this and
- that—what were her habits. He said to her, with his charming smile,
- “Tell me about yourself; give me a little sketch.” Catherine had very
- little to tell, and she had no talent for sketching; but before he went
- she had confided to him that she had a secret passion for the theatre,
- which had been but scantily gratified, and a taste for operatic
- music—that of Bellini and Donizetti, in especial (it must be remembered
- in extenuation of this primitive young woman that she held these opinions
- in an age of general darkness)—which she rarely had an occasion to hear,
- except on the hand-organ. She confessed that she was not particularly
- fond of literature. Morris Townsend agreed with her that books were
- tiresome things; only, as he said, you had to read a good many before you
- found it out. He had been to places that people had written books about,
- and they were not a bit like the descriptions. To see for yourself—that
- was the great thing; he always tried to see for himself. He had seen all
- the principal actors—he had been to all the best theatres in London and
- Paris. But the actors were always like the authors—they always
- exaggerated. He liked everything to be natural. Suddenly he stopped,
- looking at Catherine with his smile.
- “That’s what I like you for; you are so natural! Excuse me,” he added;
- “you see I am natural myself!”
- And before she had time to think whether she excused him or not—which
- afterwards, at leisure, she became conscious that she did—he began to
- talk about music, and to say that it was his greatest pleasure in life.
- He had heard all the great singers in Paris and London—Pasta and Rubini
- and Lablache—and when you had done that, you could say that you knew what
- singing was.
- “I sing a little myself,” he said; “some day I will show you. Not
- to-day, but some other time.”
- And then he got up to go; he had omitted, by accident, to say that he
- would sing to her if she would play to him. He thought of this after he
- got into the street; but he might have spared his compunction, for
- Catherine had not noticed the lapse. She was thinking only that “some
- other time” had a delightful sound; it seemed to spread itself over the
- future.
- This was all the more reason, however, though she was ashamed and
- uncomfortable, why she should tell her father that Mr. Morris Townsend
- had called again. She announced the fact abruptly, almost violently, as
- soon as the Doctor came into the house; and having done so—it was her
- duty—she took measures to leave the room. But she could not leave it
- fast enough; her father stopped her just as she reached the door.
- “Well, my dear, did he propose to you to-day?” the Doctor asked.
- This was just what she had been afraid he would say; and yet she had no
- answer ready. Of course she would have liked to take it as a joke—as her
- father must have meant it; and yet she would have liked, also, in denying
- it, to be a little positive, a little sharp; so that he would perhaps not
- ask the question again. She didn’t like it—it made her unhappy. But
- Catherine could never be sharp; and for a moment she only stood, with her
- hand on the door-knob, looking at her satiric parent, and giving a little
- laugh.
- “Decidedly,” said the Doctor to himself, “my daughter is not brilliant.”
- But he had no sooner made this reflexion than Catherine found something;
- she had decided, on the whole, to take the thing as a joke.
- “Perhaps he will do it the next time!” she exclaimed, with a repetition
- of her laugh. And she quickly got out of the room.
- The Doctor stood staring; he wondered whether his daughter were serious.
- Catherine went straight to her own room, and by the time she reached it
- she bethought herself that there was something else—something better—she
- might have said. She almost wished, now, that her father would ask his
- question again, so that she might reply: “Oh yes, Mr. Morris Townsend
- proposed to me, and I refused him!”
- The Doctor, however, began to put his questions elsewhere; it naturally
- having occurred to him that he ought to inform himself properly about
- this handsome young man who had formed the habit of running in and out of
- his house. He addressed himself to the younger of his sisters, Mrs.
- Almond—not going to her for the purpose; there was no such hurry as
- that—but having made a note of the matter for the first opportunity. The
- Doctor was never eager, never impatient nor nervous; but he made notes of
- everything, and he regularly consulted his notes. Among them the
- information he obtained from Mrs. Almond about Morris Townsend took its
- place.
- “Lavinia has already been to ask me,” she said. “Lavinia is most
- excited; I don’t understand it. It’s not, after all, Lavinia that the
- young man is supposed to have designs upon. She is very peculiar.”
- “Ah, my dear,” the Doctor replied, “she has not lived with me these
- twelve years without my finding it out!”
- “She has got such an artificial mind,” said Mrs. Almond, who always
- enjoyed an opportunity to discuss Lavinia’s peculiarities with her
- brother. “She didn’t want me to tell you that she had asked me about Mr.
- Townsend; but I told her I would. She always wants to conceal
- everything.”
- “And yet at moments no one blurts things out with such crudity. She is
- like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling
- brilliancy! But what did you tell her?” the Doctor asked.
- “What I tell you; that I know very little of him.”
- “Lavinia must have been disappointed at that,” said the Doctor; “she
- would prefer him to have been guilty of some romantic crime. However, we
- must make the best of people. They tell me our gentleman is the cousin
- of the little boy to whom you are about to entrust the future of your
- little girl.”
- “Arthur is not a little boy; he is a very old man; you and I will never
- be so old. He is a distant relation of Lavinia’s _protégé_. The name is
- the same, but I am given to understand that there are Townsends and
- Townsends. So Arthur’s mother tells me; she talked about
- ‘branches’—younger branches, elder branches, inferior branches—as if it
- were a royal house. Arthur, it appears, is of the reigning line, but
- poor Lavinia’s young man is not. Beyond this, Arthur’s mother knows very
- little about him; she has only a vague story that he has been ‘wild.’
- But I know his sister a little, and she is a very nice woman. Her name
- is Mrs. Montgomery; she is a widow, with a little property and five
- children. She lives in the Second Avenue.”
- “What does Mrs. Montgomery say about him?”
- “That he has talents by which he might distinguish himself.”
- “Only he is lazy, eh?”
- “She doesn’t say so.”
- “That’s family pride,” said the Doctor. “What is his profession?”
- “He hasn’t got any; he is looking for something. I believe he was once
- in the Navy.”
- “Once? What is his age?”
- “I suppose he is upwards of thirty. He must have gone into the Navy very
- young. I think Arthur told me that he inherited a small property—which
- was perhaps the cause of his leaving the Navy—and that he spent it all in
- a few years. He travelled all over the world, lived abroad, amused
- himself. I believe it was a kind of system, a theory he had. He has
- lately come back to America, with the intention, as he tells Arthur, of
- beginning life in earnest.”
- “Is he in earnest about Catherine, then?”
- “I don’t see why you should be incredulous,” said Mrs. Almond. “It seems
- to me that you have never done Catherine justice. You must remember that
- she has the prospect of thirty thousand a year.”
- The Doctor looked at his sister a moment, and then, with the slightest
- touch of bitterness: “You at least appreciate her,” he said.
- Mrs. Almond blushed.
- “I don’t mean that is her only merit; I simply mean that it is a great
- one. A great many young men think so; and you appear to me never to have
- been properly aware of that. You have always had a little way of
- alluding to her as an unmarriageable girl.”
- “My allusions are as kind as yours, Elizabeth,” said the Doctor frankly.
- “How many suitors has Catherine had, with all her expectations—how much
- attention has she ever received? Catherine is not unmarriageable, but
- she is absolutely unattractive. What other reason is there for Lavinia
- being so charmed with the idea that there is a lover in the house? There
- has never been one before, and Lavinia, with her sensitive, sympathetic
- nature, is not used to the idea. It affects her imagination. I must do
- the young men of New York the justice to say that they strike me as very
- disinterested. They prefer pretty girls—lively girls—girls like your
- own. Catherine is neither pretty nor lively.”
- “Catherine does very well; she has a style of her own—which is more than
- my poor Marian has, who has no style at all,” said Mrs. Almond. “The
- reason Catherine has received so little attention is that she seems to
- all the young men to be older than themselves. She is so large, and she
- dresses—so richly. They are rather afraid of her, I think; she looks as
- if she had been married already, and you know they don’t like married
- women. And if our young men appear disinterested,” the Doctor’s wiser
- sister went on, “it is because they marry, as a general thing, so young;
- before twenty-five, at the age of innocence and sincerity, before the age
- of calculation. If they only waited a little, Catherine would fare
- better.”
- “As a calculation? Thank you very much,” said the Doctor.
- “Wait till some intelligent man of forty comes along, and he will be
- delighted with Catherine,” Mrs. Almond continued.
- “Mr. Townsend is not old enough, then; his motives may be pure.”
- “It is very possible that his motives are pure; I should be very sorry to
- take the contrary for granted. Lavinia is sure of it, and, as he is a
- very prepossessing youth, you might give him the benefit of the doubt.”
- Dr. Sloper reflected a moment.
- “What are his present means of subsistence?”
- “I have no idea. He lives, as I say, with his sister.”
- “A widow, with five children? Do you mean he lives _upon_ her?”
- Mrs. Almond got up, and with a certain impatience: “Had you not better
- ask Mrs. Montgomery herself?” she inquired.
- “Perhaps I may come to that,” said the Doctor. “Did you say the Second
- Avenue?” He made a note of the Second Avenue.
- VII
- HE was, however, by no means so much in earnest as this might seem to
- indicate; and, indeed, he was more than anything else amused with the
- whole situation. He was not in the least in a state of tension or of
- vigilance with regard to Catherine’s prospects; he was even on his guard
- against the ridicule that might attach itself to the spectacle of a house
- thrown into agitation by its daughter and heiress receiving attentions
- unprecedented in its annals. More than this, he went so far as to
- promise himself some entertainment from the little drama—if drama it
- was—of which Mrs. Penniman desired to represent the ingenious Mr.
- Townsend as the hero. He had no intention, as yet, of regulating the
- _dénouement_. He was perfectly willing, as Elizabeth had suggested, to
- give the young man the benefit of every doubt. There was no great danger
- in it; for Catherine, at the age of twenty-two, was, after all, a rather
- mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a vigorous
- jerk. The fact that Morris Townsend was poor—was not of necessity
- against him; the Doctor had never made up his mind that his daughter
- should marry a rich man. The fortune she would inherit struck him as a
- very sufficient provision for two reasonable persons, and if a penniless
- swain who could give a good account of himself should enter the lists, he
- should be judged quite upon his personal merits. There were other things
- besides. The Doctor thought it very vulgar to be precipitate in accusing
- people of mercenary motives, inasmuch as his door had as yet not been in
- the least besieged by fortune-hunters; and, lastly, he was very curious
- to see whether Catherine might really be loved for her moral worth. He
- smiled as he reflected that poor Mr. Townsend had been only twice to the
- house, and he said to Mrs. Penniman that the next time he should come she
- must ask him to dinner.
- He came very soon again, and Mrs. Penniman had of course great pleasure
- in executing this mission. Morris Townsend accepted her invitation with
- equal good grace, and the dinner took place a few days later. The Doctor
- had said to himself, justly enough, that they must not have the young man
- alone; this would partake too much of the nature of encouragement. So
- two or three other persons were invited; but Morris Townsend, though he
- was by no means the ostensible, was the real, occasion of the feast.
- There is every reason to suppose that he desired to make a good
- impression; and if he fell short of this result, it was not for want of a
- good deal of intelligent effort. The Doctor talked to him very little
- during dinner; but he observed him attentively, and after the ladies had
- gone out he pushed him the wine and asked him several questions. Morris
- was not a young man who needed to be pressed, and he found quite enough
- encouragement in the superior quality of the claret. The Doctor’s wine
- was admirable, and it may be communicated to the reader that while he
- sipped it Morris reflected that a cellar-full of good liquor—there was
- evidently a cellar-full here—would be a most attractive idiosyncrasy in a
- father-in-law. The Doctor was struck with his appreciative guest; he saw
- that he was not a commonplace young man. “He has ability,” said
- Catherine’s father, “decided ability; he has a very good head if he
- chooses to use it. And he is uncommonly well turned out; quite the sort
- of figure that pleases the ladies. But I don’t think I like him.” The
- Doctor, however, kept his reflexions to himself, and talked to his
- visitors about foreign lands, concerning which Morris offered him more
- information than he was ready, as he mentally phrased it, to swallow.
- Dr. Sloper had travelled but little, and he took the liberty of not
- believing everything this anecdotical idler narrated. He prided himself
- on being something of a physiognomist, and while the young man, chatting
- with easy assurance, puffed his cigar and filled his glass again, the
- Doctor sat with his eyes quietly fixed on his bright, expressive face.
- “He has the assurance of the devil himself,” said Morris’s host; “I don’t
- think I ever saw such assurance. And his powers of invention are most
- remarkable. He is very knowing; they were not so knowing as that in my
- time. And a good head, did I say? I should think so—after a bottle of
- Madeira and a bottle and a half of claret!”
- After dinner Morris Townsend went and stood before Catherine, who was
- standing before the fire in her red satin gown.
- “He doesn’t like me—he doesn’t like me at all!” said the young man.
- “Who doesn’t like you?” asked Catherine.
- “Your father; extraordinary man!”
- “I don’t see how you know,” said Catherine, blushing.
- “I feel; I am very quick to feel.”
- “Perhaps you are mistaken.”
- “Ah, well; you ask him and you will see.”
- “I would rather not ask him, if there is any danger of his saying what
- you think.”
- Morris looked at her with an air of mock melancholy.
- “It wouldn’t give you any pleasure to contradict him?”
- “I never contradict him,” said Catherine.
- “Will you hear me abused without opening your lips in my defence?”
- “My father won’t abuse you. He doesn’t know you enough.”
- Morris Townsend gave a loud laugh, and Catherine began to blush again.
- “I shall never mention you,” she said, to take refuge from her confusion.
- “That is very well; but it is not quite what I should have liked you to
- say. I should have liked you to say: ‘If my father doesn’t think well of
- you, what does it matter?’”
- “Ah, but it would matter; I couldn’t say that!” the girl exclaimed.
- He looked at her for a moment, smiling a little; and the Doctor, if he
- had been watching him just then, would have seen a gleam of fine
- impatience in the sociable softness of his eye. But there was no
- impatience in his rejoinder—none, at least, save what was expressed in a
- little appealing sigh. “Ah, well, then, I must not give up the hope of
- bringing him round!”
- He expressed it more frankly to Mrs. Penniman later in the evening. But
- before that he sang two or three songs at Catherine’s timid request; not
- that he flattered himself that this would help to bring her father round.
- He had a sweet, light tenor voice, and when he had finished every one
- made some exclamation—every one, that is, save Catherine, who remained
- intensely silent. Mrs. Penniman declared that his manner of singing was
- “most artistic,” and Dr. Sloper said it was “very taking—very taking
- indeed”; speaking loudly and distinctly, but with a certain dryness.
- “He doesn’t like me—he doesn’t like me at all,” said Morris Townsend,
- addressing the aunt in the same manner as he had done the niece. “He
- thinks I’m all wrong.”
- Unlike her niece, Mrs. Penniman asked for no explanation. She only
- smiled very sweetly, as if she understood everything; and, unlike
- Catherine too, she made no attempt to contradict him. “Pray, what does
- it matter?” she murmured softly.
- “Ah, you say the right thing!” said Morris, greatly to the gratification
- of Mrs. Penniman, who prided herself on always saying the right thing.
- The Doctor, the next time he saw his sister Elizabeth, let her know that
- he had made the acquaintance of Lavinia’s _protégé_.
- “Physically,” he said, “he’s uncommonly well set up. As an anatomist, it
- is really a pleasure to me to see such a beautiful structure; although,
- if people were all like him, I suppose there would be very little need
- for doctors.”
- “Don’t you see anything in people but their bones?” Mrs. Almond rejoined.
- “What do you think of him as a father?”
- “As a father? Thank Heaven I am not his father!”
- “No; but you are Catherine’s. Lavinia tells me she is in love.”
- “She must get over it. He is not a gentleman.”
- “Ah, take care! Remember that he is a branch of the Townsends.”
- “He is not what I call a gentleman. He has not the soul of one. He is
- extremely insinuating; but it’s a vulgar nature. I saw through it in a
- minute. He is altogether too familiar—I hate familiarity. He is a
- plausible coxcomb.”
- “Ah, well,” said Mrs. Almond; “if you make up your mind so easily, it’s a
- great advantage.”
- “I don’t make up my mind easily. What I tell you is the result of thirty
- years of observation; and in order to be able to form that judgement in a
- single evening, I have had to spend a lifetime in study.”
- “Very possibly you are right. But the thing is for Catherine to see it.”
- “I will present her with a pair of spectacles!” said the Doctor.
- VIII
- IF it were true that she was in love, she was certainly very quiet about
- it; but the Doctor was of course prepared to admit that her quietness
- might mean volumes. She had told Morris Townsend that she would not
- mention him to her father, and she saw no reason to retract this vow of
- discretion. It was no more than decently civil, of course, that after
- having dined in Washington Square, Morris should call there again; and it
- was no more than natural that, having been kindly received on this
- occasion, he should continue to present himself. He had had plenty of
- leisure on his hands; and thirty years ago, in New York, a young man of
- leisure had reason to be thankful for aids to self-oblivion. Catherine
- said nothing to her father about these visits, though they had rapidly
- become the most important, the most absorbing thing in her life. The
- girl was very happy. She knew not as yet what would come of it; but the
- present had suddenly grown rich and solemn. If she had been told she was
- in love, she would have been a good deal surprised; for she had an idea
- that love was an eager and exacting passion, and her own heart was filled
- in these days with the impulse of self-effacement and sacrifice.
- Whenever Morris Townsend had left the house, her imagination projected
- itself, with all its strength, into the idea of his soon coming back; but
- if she had been told at such a moment that he would not return for a
- year, or even that he would never return, she would not have complained
- nor rebelled, but would have humbly accepted the decree, and sought for
- consolation in thinking over the times she had already seen him, the
- words he had spoken, the sound of his voice, of his tread, the expression
- of his face. Love demands certain things as a right; but Catherine had
- no sense of her rights; she had only a consciousness of immense and
- unexpected favours. Her very gratitude for these things had hushed
- itself; for it seemed to her that there would be something of impudence
- in making a festival of her secret. Her father suspected Morris
- Townsend’s visits, and noted her reserve. She seemed to beg pardon for
- it; she looked at him constantly in silence, as if she meant to say that
- she said nothing because she was afraid of irritating him. But the poor
- girl’s dumb eloquence irritated him more than anything else would have
- done, and he caught himself murmuring more than once that it was a
- grievous pity his only child was a simpleton. His murmurs, however, were
- inaudible; and for a while he said nothing to any one. He would have
- liked to know exactly how often young Townsend came; but he had
- determined to ask no questions of the girl herself—to say nothing more to
- her that would show that he watched her. The Doctor had a great idea of
- being largely just: he wished to leave his daughter her liberty, and
- interfere only when the danger should be proved. It was not in his
- manner to obtain information by indirect methods, and it never even
- occurred to him to question the servants. As for Lavinia, he hated to
- talk to her about the matter; she annoyed him with her mock romanticism.
- But he had to come to this. Mrs. Penniman’s convictions as regards the
- relations of her niece and the clever young visitor who saved appearances
- by coming ostensibly for both the ladies—Mrs. Penniman’s convictions had
- passed into a riper and richer phase. There was to be no crudity in Mrs.
- Penniman’s treatment of the situation; she had become as uncommunicative
- as Catherine herself. She was tasting of the sweets of concealment; she
- had taken up the line of mystery. “She would be enchanted to be able to
- prove to herself that she is persecuted,” said the Doctor; and when at
- last he questioned her, he was sure she would contrive to extract from
- his words a pretext for this belief.
- “Be so good as to let me know what is going on in the house,” he said to
- her, in a tone which, under the circumstances, he himself deemed genial.
- “Going on, Austin?” Mrs. Penniman exclaimed. “Why, I am sure I don’t
- know! I believe that last night the old grey cat had kittens!”
- “At her age?” said the Doctor. “The idea is startling—almost shocking.
- Be so good as to see that they are all drowned. But what else has
- happened?”
- “Ah, the dear little kittens!” cried Mrs. Penniman. “I wouldn’t have
- them drowned for the world!”
- Her brother puffed his cigar a few moments in silence. “Your sympathy
- with kittens, Lavinia,” he presently resumed, “arises from a feline
- element in your own character.”
- “Cats are very graceful, and very clean,” said Mrs. Penniman, smiling.
- “And very stealthy. You are the embodiment both of grace and of
- neatness; but you are wanting in frankness.”
- “You certainly are not, dear brother.”
- “I don’t pretend to be graceful, though I try to be neat. Why haven’t
- you let me know that Mr. Morris Townsend is coming to the house four
- times a week?”
- Mrs. Penniman lifted her eyebrows. “Four times a week?”
- “Five times, if you prefer it. I am away all day, and I see nothing.
- But when such things happen, you should let me know.”
- Mrs. Penniman, with her eyebrows still raised, reflected intently. “Dear
- Austin,” she said at last, “I am incapable of betraying a confidence. I
- would rather suffer anything.”
- “Never fear; you shall not suffer. To whose confidence is it you allude?
- Has Catherine made you take a vow of eternal secrecy?”
- “By no means. Catherine has not told me as much as she might. She has
- not been very trustful.”
- “It is the young man, then, who has made you his confidante? Allow me to
- say that it is extremely indiscreet of you to form secret alliances with
- young men. You don’t know where they may lead you.”
- “I don’t know what you mean by an alliance,” said Mrs. Penniman. “I take
- a great interest in Mr. Townsend; I won’t conceal that. But that’s all.”
- “Under the circumstances, that is quite enough. What is the source of
- your interest in Mr. Townsend?”
- “Why,” said Mrs. Penniman, musing, and then breaking into her smile,
- “that he is so interesting!”
- The Doctor felt that he had need of his patience. “And what makes him
- interesting?—his good looks?”
- “His misfortunes, Austin.”
- “Ah, he has had misfortunes? That, of course, is always interesting.
- Are you at liberty to mention a few of Mr. Townsend’s?”
- “I don’t know that he would like it,” said Mrs. Penniman. “He has told
- me a great deal about himself—he has told me, in fact, his whole history.
- But I don’t think I ought to repeat those things. He would tell them to
- you, I am sure, if he thought you would listen to him kindly. With
- kindness you may do anything with him.”
- The Doctor gave a laugh. “I shall request him very kindly, then, to
- leave Catherine alone.”
- “Ah!” said Mrs. Penniman, shaking her forefinger at her brother, with her
- little finger turned out, “Catherine had probably said something to him
- kinder than that.”
- “Said that she loved him? Do you mean that?”
- Mrs. Penniman fixed her eyes on the floor. “As I tell you, Austin, she
- doesn’t confide in me.”
- “You have an opinion, I suppose, all the same. It is that I ask you for;
- though I don’t conceal from you that I shall not regard it as
- conclusive.”
- Mrs. Penniman’s gaze continued to rest on the carpet; but at last she
- lifted it, and then her brother thought it very expressive. “I think
- Catherine is very happy; that is all I can say.”
- “Townsend is trying to marry her—is that what you mean?”
- “He is greatly interested in her.”
- “He finds her such an attractive girl?”
- “Catherine has a lovely nature, Austin,” said Mrs. Penniman, “and Mr.
- Townsend has had the intelligence to discover that.”
- “With a little help from you, I suppose. My dear Lavinia,” cried the
- Doctor, “you are an admirable aunt!”
- “So Mr. Townsend says,” observed Lavinia, smiling.
- “Do you think he is sincere?” asked her brother.
- “In saying that?”
- “No; that’s of course. But in his admiration for Catherine?”
- “Deeply sincere. He has said to me the most appreciative, the most
- charming things about her. He would say them to you, if he were sure you
- would listen to him—gently.”
- “I doubt whether I can undertake it. He appears to require a great deal
- of gentleness.”
- “He is a sympathetic, sensitive nature,” said Mrs. Penniman.
- Her brother puffed his cigar again in silence. “These delicate qualities
- have survived his vicissitudes, eh? All this while you haven’t told me
- about his misfortunes.”
- “It is a long story,” said Mrs. Penniman, “and I regard it as a sacred
- trust. But I suppose there is no objection to my saying that he has been
- wild—he frankly confesses that. But he has paid for it.”
- “That’s what has impoverished him, eh?”
- “I don’t mean simply in money. He is very much alone in the world.”
- “Do you mean that he has behaved so badly that his friends have given him
- up?”
- “He has had false friends, who have deceived and betrayed him.”
- “He seems to have some good ones too. He has a devoted sister, and
- half-a-dozen nephews and nieces.”
- Mrs. Penniman was silent a minute. “The nephews and nieces are children,
- and the sister is not a very attractive person.”
- “I hope he doesn’t abuse her to you,” said the Doctor; “for I am told he
- lives upon her.”
- “Lives upon her?”
- “Lives with her, and does nothing for himself; it is about the same
- thing.”
- “He is looking for a position—most earnestly,” said Mrs. Penniman. “He
- hopes every day to find one.”
- “Precisely. He is looking for it here—over there in the front parlour.
- The position of husband of a weak-minded woman with a large fortune would
- suit him to perfection!”
- Mrs. Penniman was truly amiable, but she now gave signs of temper. She
- rose with much animation, and stood for a moment looking at her brother.
- “My dear Austin,” she remarked, “if you regard Catherine as a weak-minded
- woman, you are particularly mistaken!” And with this she moved
- majestically away.
- IX
- IT was a regular custom with the family in Washington Square to go and
- spend Sunday evening at Mrs. Almond’s. On the Sunday after the
- conversation I have just narrated, this custom was not intermitted and on
- this occasion, towards the middle of the evening, Dr. Sloper found reason
- to withdraw to the library, with his brother-in-law, to talk over a
- matter of business. He was absent some twenty minutes, and when he came
- back into the circle, which was enlivened by the presence of several
- friends of the family, he saw that Morris Townsend had come in and had
- lost as little time as possible in seating himself on a small sofa,
- beside Catherine. In the large room, where several different groups had
- been formed, and the hum of voices and of laughter was loud, these two
- young persons might confabulate, as the Doctor phrased it to himself,
- without attracting attention. He saw in a moment, however, that his
- daughter was painfully conscious of his own observation. She sat
- motionless, with her eyes bent down, staring at her open fan, deeply
- flushed, shrinking together as if to minimise the indiscretion of which
- she confessed herself guilty.
- The Doctor almost pitied her. Poor Catherine was not defiant; she had no
- genius for bravado; and as she felt that her father viewed her
- companion’s attentions with an unsympathising eye, there was nothing but
- discomfort for her in the accident of seeming to challenge him. The
- Doctor felt, indeed, so sorry for her that he turned away, to spare her
- the sense of being watched; and he was so intelligent a man that, in his
- thoughts, he rendered a sort of poetic justice to her situation.
- “It must be deucedly pleasant for a plain inanimate girl like that to
- have a beautiful young fellow come and sit down beside her and whisper to
- her that he is her slave—if that is what this one whispers. No wonder
- she likes it, and that she thinks me a cruel tyrant; which of course she
- does, though she is afraid—she hasn’t the animation necessary—to admit it
- to herself. Poor old Catherine!” mused the Doctor; “I verily believe she
- is capable of defending me when Townsend abuses me!”
- And the force of this reflexion, for the moment, was such in making him
- feel the natural opposition between his point of view and that of an
- infatuated child, that he said to himself that he was perhaps, after all,
- taking things too hard and crying out before he was hurt. He must not
- condemn Morris Townsend unheard. He had a great aversion to taking
- things too hard; he thought that half the discomfort and many of the
- disappointments of life come from it; and for an instant he asked himself
- whether, possibly, he did not appear ridiculous to this intelligent young
- man, whose private perception of incongruities he suspected of being
- keen. At the end of a quarter of an hour Catherine had got rid of him,
- and Townsend was now standing before the fireplace in conversation with
- Mrs. Almond.
- “We will try him again,” said the Doctor. And he crossed the room and
- joined his sister and her companion, making her a sign that she should
- leave the young man to him. She presently did so, while Morris looked at
- him, smiling, without a sign of evasiveness in his affable eye.
- “He’s amazingly conceited!” thought the Doctor; and then he said aloud:
- “I am told you are looking out for a position.”
- “Oh, a position is more than I should presume to call it,” Morris
- Townsend answered. “That sounds so fine. I should like some quiet
- work—something to turn an honest penny.”
- “What sort of thing should you prefer?”
- “Do you mean what am I fit for? Very little, I am afraid. I have
- nothing but my good right arm, as they say in the melodramas.”
- “You are too modest,” said the Doctor. “In addition to your good right
- arm, you have your subtle brain. I know nothing of you but what I see;
- but I see by your physiognomy that you are extremely intelligent.”
- “Ah,” Townsend murmured, “I don’t know what to answer when you say that!
- You advise me, then, not to despair?”
- And he looked at his interlocutor as if the question might have a double
- meaning. The Doctor caught the look and weighed it a moment before he
- replied. “I should be very sorry to admit that a robust and
- well-disposed young man need ever despair. If he doesn’t succeed in one
- thing, he can try another. Only, I should add, he should choose his line
- with discretion.”
- “Ah, yes, with discretion,” Morris Townsend repeated sympathetically.
- “Well, I have been indiscreet, formerly; but I think I have got over it.
- I am very steady now.” And he stood a moment, looking down at his
- remarkably neat shoes. Then at last, “Were you kindly intending to
- propose something for my advantage?” he inquired, looking up and smiling.
- “Damn his impudence!” the Doctor exclaimed privately. But in a moment he
- reflected that he himself had, after all, touched first upon this
- delicate point, and that his words might have been construed as an offer
- of assistance. “I have no particular proposal to make,” he presently
- said; “but it occurred to me to let you know that I have you in my mind.
- Sometimes one hears of opportunities. For instance—should you object to
- leaving New York—to going to a distance?”
- “I am afraid I shouldn’t be able to manage that. I must seek my fortune
- here or nowhere. You see,” added Morris Townsend, “I have ties—I have
- responsibilities here. I have a sister, a widow, from whom I have been
- separated for a long time, and to whom I am almost everything. I
- shouldn’t like to say to her that I must leave her. She rather depends
- upon me, you see.”
- “Ah, that’s very proper; family feeling is very proper,” said Dr. Sloper.
- “I often think there is not enough of it in our city. I think I have
- heard of your sister.”
- “It is possible, but I rather doubt it; she lives so very quietly.”
- “As quietly, you mean,” the Doctor went on, with a short laugh, “as a
- lady may do who has several young children.”
- “Ah, my little nephews and nieces—that’s the very point! I am helping to
- bring them up,” said Morris Townsend. “I am a kind of amateur tutor; I
- give them lessons.”
- “That’s very proper, as I say; but it is hardly a career.”
- “It won’t make my fortune!” the young man confessed.
- “You must not be too much bent on a fortune,” said the Doctor. “But I
- assure you I will keep you in mind; I won’t lose sight of you!”
- “If my situation becomes desperate I shall perhaps take the liberty of
- reminding you!” Morris rejoined, raising his voice a little, with a
- brighter smile, as his interlocutor turned away.
- Before he left the house the Doctor had a few words with Mrs. Almond.
- “I should like to see his sister,” he said. “What do you call her? Mrs.
- Montgomery. I should like to have a little talk with her.”
- “I will try and manage it,” Mrs. Almond responded. “I will take the
- first opportunity of inviting her, and you shall come and meet her.
- Unless, indeed,” Mrs. Almond added, “she first takes it into her head to
- be sick and to send for you.”
- “Ah no, not that; she must have trouble enough without that. But it
- would have its advantages, for then I should see the children. I should
- like very much to see the children.”
- “You are very thorough. Do you want to catechise them about their
- uncle!”
- “Precisely. Their uncle tells me he has charge of their education, that
- he saves their mother the expense of school-bills. I should like to ask
- them a few questions in the commoner branches.”
- “He certainly has not the cut of a schoolmaster!” Mrs. Almond said to
- herself a short time afterwards, as she saw Morris Townsend in a corner
- bending over her niece, who was seated.
- And there was, indeed, nothing in the young man’s discourse at this
- moment that savoured of the pedagogue.
- “Will you meet me somewhere to-morrow or next day?” he said, in a low
- tone, to Catherine.
- “Meet you?” she asked, lifting her frightened eyes.
- “I have something particular to say to you—very particular.”
- “Can’t you come to the house? Can’t you say it there?”
- Townsend shook his head gloomily. “I can’t enter your doors again!”
- “Oh, Mr. Townsend!” murmured Catherine. She trembled as she wondered
- what had happened, whether her father had forbidden it.
- “I can’t in self-respect,” said the young man. “Your father has insulted
- me.”
- “Insulted you!”
- “He has taunted me with my poverty.”
- “Oh, you are mistaken—you misunderstood him!” Catherine spoke with
- energy, getting up from her chair.
- “Perhaps I am too proud—too sensitive. But would you have me otherwise?”
- he asked tenderly.
- “Where my father is concerned, you must not be sure. He is full of
- goodness,” said Catherine.
- “He laughed at me for having no position! I took it quietly; but only
- because he belongs to you.”
- “I don’t know,” said Catherine; “I don’t know what he thinks. I am sure
- he means to be kind. You must not be too proud.”
- “I will be proud only of you,” Morris answered. “Will you meet me in the
- Square in the afternoon?”
- A great blush on Catherine’s part had been the answer to the declaration
- I have just quoted. She turned away, heedless of his question.
- “Will you meet me?” he repeated. “It is very quiet there; no one need
- see us—toward dusk?”
- “It is you who are unkind, it is you who laugh, when you say such things
- as that.”
- “My dear girl!” the young man murmured.
- “You know how little there is in me to be proud of. I am ugly and
- stupid.”
- Morris greeted this remark with an ardent murmur, in which she recognised
- nothing articulate but an assurance that she was his own dearest.
- But she went on. “I am not even—I am not even—” And she paused a
- moment.
- “You are not what?”
- “I am not even brave.”
- “Ah, then, if you are afraid, what shall we do?”
- She hesitated a while; then at last—“You must come to the house,” she
- said; “I am not afraid of that.”
- “I would rather it were in the Square,” the young man urged. “You know
- how empty it is, often. No one will see us.”
- “I don’t care who sees us! But leave me now.”
- He left her resignedly; he had got what he wanted. Fortunately he was
- ignorant that half an hour later, going home with her father and feeling
- him near, the poor girl, in spite of her sudden declaration of courage,
- began to tremble again. Her father said nothing; but she had an idea his
- eyes were fixed upon her in the darkness. Mrs. Penniman also was silent;
- Morris Townsend had told her that her niece preferred, unromantically, an
- interview in a chintz-covered parlour to a sentimental tryst beside a
- fountain sheeted with dead leaves, and she was lost in wonderment at the
- oddity—almost the perversity—of the choice.
- X
- CATHERINE received the young man the next day on the ground she had
- chosen—amid the chaste upholstery of a New York drawing-room furnished in
- the fashion of fifty years ago. Morris had swallowed his pride and made
- the effort necessary to cross the threshold of her too derisive parent—an
- act of magnanimity which could not fail to render him doubly interesting.
- “We must settle something—we must take a line,” he declared, passing his
- hand through his hair and giving a glance at the long narrow mirror which
- adorned the space between the two windows, and which had at its base a
- little gilded bracket covered by a thin slab of white marble, supporting
- in its turn a backgammon board folded together in the shape of two
- volumes, two shining folios inscribed in letters of greenish gilt,
- _History of England_. If Morris had been pleased to describe the master
- of the house as a heartless scoffer, it is because he thought him too
- much on his guard, and this was the easiest way to express his own
- dissatisfaction—a dissatisfaction which he had made a point of concealing
- from the Doctor. It will probably seem to the reader, however, that the
- Doctor’s vigilance was by no means excessive, and that these two young
- people had an open field. Their intimacy was now considerable, and it
- may appear that for a shrinking and retiring person our heroine had been
- liberal of her favours. The young man, within a few days, had made her
- listen to things for which she had not supposed that she was prepared;
- having a lively foreboding of difficulties, he proceeded to gain as much
- ground as possible in the present. He remembered that fortune favours
- the brave, and even if he had forgotten it, Mrs. Penniman would have
- remembered it for him. Mrs. Penniman delighted of all things in a drama,
- and she flattered herself that a drama would now be enacted. Combining
- as she did the zeal of the prompter with the impatience of the spectator,
- she had long since done her utmost to pull up the curtain. She too
- expected to figure in the performance—to be the confidante, the Chorus,
- to speak the epilogue. It may even be said that there were times when
- she lost sight altogether of the modest heroine of the play, in the
- contemplation of certain great passages which would naturally occur
- between the hero and herself.
- What Morris had told Catherine at last was simply that he loved her, or
- rather adored her. Virtually, he had made known as much already—his
- visits had been a series of eloquent intimations of it. But now he had
- affirmed it in lover’s vows, and, as a memorable sign of it, he had
- passed his arm round the girl’s waist and taken a kiss. This happy
- certitude had come sooner than Catherine expected, and she had regarded
- it, very naturally, as a priceless treasure. It may even be doubted
- whether she had ever definitely expected to possess it; she had not been
- waiting for it, and she had never said to herself that at a given moment
- it must come. As I have tried to explain, she was not eager and
- exacting; she took what was given her from day to day; and if the
- delightful custom of her lover’s visits, which yielded her a happiness in
- which confidence and timidity were strangely blended, had suddenly come
- to an end, she would not only not have spoken of herself as one of the
- forsaken, but she would not have thought of herself as one of the
- disappointed. After Morris had kissed her, the last time he was with
- her, as a ripe assurance of his devotion, she begged him to go away, to
- leave her alone, to let her think. Morris went away, taking another kiss
- first. But Catherine’s meditations had lacked a certain coherence. She
- felt his kisses on her lips and on her cheeks for a long time afterwards;
- the sensation was rather an obstacle than an aid to reflexion. She would
- have liked to see her situation all clearly before her, to make up her
- mind what she should do if, as she feared, her father should tell her
- that he disapproved of Morris Townsend. But all that she could see with
- any vividness was that it was terribly strange that anyone should
- disapprove of him; that there must in that case be some mistake, some
- mystery, which in a little while would be set at rest. She put off
- deciding and choosing; before the vision of a conflict with her father
- she dropped her eyes and sat motionless, holding her breath and waiting.
- It made her heart beat, it was intensely painful. When Morris kissed her
- and said these things—that also made her heart beat; but this was worse,
- and it frightened her. Nevertheless, to-day, when the young man spoke of
- settling something, taking a line, she felt that it was the truth, and
- she answered very simply and without hesitating.
- “We must do our duty,” she said; “we must speak to my father. I will do
- it to-night; you must do it to-morrow.”
- “It is very good of you to do it first,” Morris answered. “The young
- man—the happy lover—generally does that. But just as you please!”
- It pleased Catherine to think that she should be brave for his sake, and
- in her satisfaction she even gave a little smile. “Women have more
- tact,” she said “they ought to do it first. They are more conciliating;
- they can persuade better.”
- “You will need all your powers of persuasion. But, after all,” Morris
- added, “you are irresistible.”
- “Please don’t speak that way—and promise me this. To-morrow, when you
- talk with father, you will be very gentle and respectful.”
- “As much so as possible,” Morris promised. “It won’t be much use, but I
- shall try. I certainly would rather have you easily than have to fight
- for you.”
- “Don’t talk about fighting; we shall not fight.”
- “Ah, we must be prepared,” Morris rejoined; “you especially, because for
- you it must come hardest. Do you know the first thing your father will
- say to you?”
- “No, Morris; please tell me.”
- “He will tell you I am mercenary.”
- “Mercenary?”
- “It’s a big word; but it means a low thing. It means that I am after
- your money.”
- “Oh!” murmured Catherine softly.
- The exclamation was so deprecating and touching that Morris indulged in
- another little demonstration of affection. “But he will be sure to say
- it,” he added.
- “It will be easy to be prepared for that,” Catherine said. “I shall
- simply say that he is mistaken—that other men may be that way, but that
- you are not.”
- “You must make a great point of that, for it will be his own great
- point.”
- Catherine looked at her lover a minute, and then she said, “I shall
- persuade him. But I am glad we shall be rich,” she added.
- Morris turned away, looking into the crown of his hat. “No, it’s a
- misfortune,” he said at last. “It is from that our difficulty will
- come.”
- “Well, if it is the worst misfortune, we are not so unhappy. Many people
- would not think it so bad. I will persuade him, and after that we shall
- be very glad we have money.”
- Morris Townsend listened to this robust logic in silence. “I will leave
- my defence to you; it’s a charge that a man has to stoop to defend
- himself from.”
- Catherine on her side was silent for a while; she was looking at him
- while he looked, with a good deal of fixedness, out of the window.
- “Morris,” she said abruptly, “are you very sure you love me?”
- He turned round, and in a moment he was bending over her. “My own
- dearest, can you doubt it?”
- “I have only known it five days,” she said; “but now it seems to me as if
- I could never do without it.”
- “You will never be called upon to try!” And he gave a little tender,
- reassuring laugh. Then, in a moment, he added, “There is something you
- must tell me, too.” She had closed her eyes after the last word she
- uttered, and kept them closed; and at this she nodded her head, without
- opening them. “You must tell me,” he went on, “that if your father is
- dead against me, if he absolutely forbids our marriage, you will still be
- faithful.”
- Catherine opened her eyes, gazing at him, and she could give no better
- promise than what he read there.
- “You will cleave to me?” said Morris. “You know you are your own
- mistress—you are of age.”
- “Ah, Morris!” she murmured, for all answer. Or rather not for all; for
- she put her hand into his own. He kept it a while, and presently he
- kissed her again. This is all that need be recorded of their
- conversation; but Mrs. Penniman, if she had been present, would probably
- have admitted that it was as well it had not taken place beside the
- fountain in Washington Square.
- XI
- CATHERINE listened for her father when he came in that evening, and she
- heard him go to his study. She sat quiet, though her heart was beating
- fast, for nearly half an hour; then she went and knocked at his door—a
- ceremony without which she never crossed the threshold of this apartment.
- On entering it now she found him in his chair beside the fire,
- entertaining himself with a cigar and the evening paper.
- “I have something to say to you,” she began very gently; and she sat down
- in the first place that offered.
- “I shall be very happy to hear it, my dear,” said her father. He
- waited—waited, looking at her, while she stared, in a long silence, at
- the fire. He was curious and impatient, for he was sure she was going to
- speak of Morris Townsend; but he let her take her own time, for he was
- determined to be very mild.
- “I am engaged to be married!” Catherine announced at last, still staring
- at the fire.
- The Doctor was startled; the accomplished fact was more than he had
- expected. But he betrayed no surprise. “You do right to tell me,” he
- simply said. “And who is the happy mortal whom you have honoured with
- your choice?”
- “Mr. Morris Townsend.” And as she pronounced her lover’s name, Catherine
- looked at him. What she saw was her father’s still grey eye and his
- clear-cut, definite smile. She contemplated these objects for a moment,
- and then she looked back at the fire; it was much warmer.
- “When was this arrangement made?” the Doctor asked.
- “This afternoon—two hours ago.”
- “Was Mr. Townsend here?”
- “Yes, father; in the front parlour.” She was very glad that she was not
- obliged to tell him that the ceremony of their betrothal had taken place
- out there under the bare ailantus-trees.
- “Is it serious?” said the Doctor.
- “Very serious, father.”
- Her father was silent a moment. “Mr. Townsend ought to have told me.”
- “He means to tell you to-morrow.”
- “After I know all about it from you? He ought to have told me before.
- Does he think I didn’t care—because I left you so much liberty?”
- “Oh no,” said Catherine; “he knew you would care. And we have been so
- much obliged to you for—for the liberty.”
- The Doctor gave a short laugh. “You might have made a better use of it,
- Catherine.”
- “Please don’t say that, father,” the girl urged softly, fixing her dull
- and gentle eyes upon him.
- He puffed his cigar awhile, meditatively. “You have gone very fast,” he
- said at last.
- “Yes,” Catherine answered simply; “I think we have.”
- Her father glanced at her an instant, removing his eyes from the fire.
- “I don’t wonder Mr. Townsend likes you. You are so simple and so good.”
- “I don’t know why it is—but he _does_ like me. I am sure of that.”
- “And are you very fond of Mr. Townsend?”
- “I like him very much, of course—or I shouldn’t consent to marry him.”
- “But you have known him a very short time, my dear.”
- “Oh,” said Catherine, with some eagerness, “it doesn’t take long to like
- a person—when once you begin.”
- “You must have begun very quickly. Was it the first time you saw
- him—that night at your aunt’s party?”
- “I don’t know, father,” the girl answered. “I can’t tell you about
- that.”
- “Of course; that’s your own affair. You will have observed that I have
- acted on that principle. I have not interfered, I have left you your
- liberty, I have remembered that you are no longer a little girl—that you
- have arrived at years of discretion.”
- “I feel very old—and very wise,” said Catherine, smiling faintly.
- “I am afraid that before long you will feel older and wiser yet. I don’t
- like your engagement.”
- “Ah!” Catherine exclaimed softly, getting up from her chair.
- “No, my dear. I am sorry to give you pain; but I don’t like it. You
- should have consulted me before you settled it. I have been too easy
- with you, and I feel as if you had taken advantage of my indulgence.
- Most decidedly, you should have spoken to me first.”
- Catherine hesitated a moment, and then—“It was because I was afraid you
- wouldn’t like it!” she confessed.
- “Ah, there it is! You had a bad conscience.”
- “No, I have not a bad conscience, father!” the girl cried out, with
- considerable energy. “Please don’t accuse me of anything so dreadful.”
- These words, in fact, represented to her imagination something very
- terrible indeed, something base and cruel, which she associated with
- malefactors and prisoners. “It was because I was afraid—afraid—” she
- went on.
- “If you were afraid, it was because you had been foolish!”
- “I was afraid you didn’t like Mr. Townsend.”
- “You were quite right. I don’t like him.”
- “Dear father, you don’t know him,” said Catherine, in a voice so timidly
- argumentative that it might have touched him.
- “Very true; I don’t know him intimately. But I know him enough. I have
- my impression of him. You don’t know him either.”
- She stood before the fire, with her hands lightly clasped in front of
- her; and her father, leaning back in his chair and looking up at her,
- made this remark with a placidity that might have been irritating.
- I doubt, however, whether Catherine was irritated, though she broke into
- a vehement protest. “I don’t know him?” she cried. “Why, I know
- him—better than I have ever known any one!”
- “You know a part of him—what he has chosen to show you. But you don’t
- know the rest.”
- “The rest? What is the rest?”
- “Whatever it may be. There is sure to be plenty of it.”
- “I know what you mean,” said Catherine, remembering how Morris had
- forewarned her. “You mean that he is mercenary.”
- Her father looked up at her still, with his cold, quiet reasonable eye.
- “If I meant it, my dear, I should say it! But there is an error I wish
- particularly to avoid—that of rendering Mr. Townsend more interesting to
- you by saying hard things about him.”
- “I won’t think them hard if they are true,” said Catherine.
- “If you don’t, you will be a remarkably sensible young woman!”
- “They will be your reasons, at any rate, and you will want me to hear
- your reasons.”
- The Doctor smiled a little. “Very true. You have a perfect right to ask
- for them.” And he puffed his cigar a few moments. “Very well, then,
- without accusing Mr. Townsend of being in love only with your fortune—and
- with the fortune that you justly expect—I will say that there is every
- reason to suppose that these good things have entered into his
- calculation more largely than a tender solicitude for your happiness
- strictly requires. There is, of course, nothing impossible in an
- intelligent young man entertaining a disinterested affection for you.
- You are an honest, amiable girl, and an intelligent young man might
- easily find it out. But the principal thing that we know about this
- young man—who is, indeed, very intelligent—leads us to suppose that,
- however much he may value your personal merits, he values your money
- more. The principal thing we know about him is that he has led a life of
- dissipation, and has spent a fortune of his own in doing so. That is
- enough for me, my dear. I wish you to marry a young man with other
- antecedents—a young man who could give positive guarantees. If Morris
- Townsend has spent his own fortune in amusing himself, there is every
- reason to believe that he would spend yours.”
- The Doctor delivered himself of these remarks slowly, deliberately, with
- occasional pauses and prolongations of accent, which made no great
- allowance for poor Catherine’s suspense as to his conclusion. She sat
- down at last, with her head bent and her eyes still fixed upon him; and
- strangely enough—I hardly know how to tell it—even while she felt that
- what he said went so terribly against her, she admired his neatness and
- nobleness of expression. There was something hopeless and oppressive in
- having to argue with her father; but she too, on her side, must try to be
- clear. He was so quiet; he was not at all angry; and she too must be
- quiet. But her very effort to be quiet made her tremble.
- “That is not the principal thing we know about him,” she said; and there
- was a touch of her tremor in her voice. “There are other things—many
- other things. He has very high abilities—he wants so much to do
- something. He is kind, and generous, and true,” said poor Catherine, who
- had not suspected hitherto the resources of her eloquence. “And his
- fortune—his fortune that he spent—was very small!”
- “All the more reason he shouldn’t have spent it,” cried the Doctor,
- getting up, with a laugh. Then as Catherine, who had also risen to her
- feet again, stood there in her rather angular earnestness, wishing so
- much and expressing so little, he drew her towards him and kissed her.
- “You won’t think me cruel?” he said, holding her a moment.
- This question was not reassuring; it seemed to Catherine, on the
- contrary, to suggest possibilities which made her feel sick. But she
- answered coherently enough—“No, dear father; because if you knew how I
- feel—and you must know, you know everything—you would be so kind, so
- gentle.”
- “Yes, I think I know how you feel,” the Doctor said. “I will be very
- kind—be sure of that. And I will see Mr. Townsend to-morrow. Meanwhile,
- and for the present, be so good as to mention to no one that you are
- engaged.”
- XII
- ON the morrow, in the afternoon, he stayed at home, awaiting Mr.
- Townsend’s call—a proceeding by which it appeared to him (justly perhaps,
- for he was a very busy man) that he paid Catherine’s suitor great honour,
- and gave both these young people so much the less to complain of. Morris
- presented himself with a countenance sufficiently serene—he appeared to
- have forgotten the “insult” for which he had solicited Catherine’s
- sympathy two evenings before, and Dr. Sloper lost no time in letting him
- know that he had been prepared for his visit.
- “Catherine told me yesterday what has been going on between you,” he
- said. “You must allow me to say that it would have been becoming of you
- to give me notice of your intentions before they had gone so far.”
- “I should have done so,” Morris answered, “if you had not had so much the
- appearance of leaving your daughter at liberty. She seems to me quite
- her own mistress.”
- “Literally, she is. But she has not emancipated herself morally quite so
- far, I trust, as to choose a husband without consulting me. I have left
- her at liberty, but I have not been in the least indifferent. The truth
- is that your little affair has come to a head with a rapidity that
- surprises me. It was only the other day that Catherine made your
- acquaintance.”
- “It was not long ago, certainly,” said Morris, with great gravity. “I
- admit that we have not been slow to—to arrive at an understanding. But
- that was very natural, from the moment we were sure of ourselves—and of
- each other. My interest in Miss Sloper began the first time I saw her.”
- “Did it not by chance precede your first meeting?” the Doctor asked.
- Morris looked at him an instant. “I certainly had already heard that she
- was a charming girl.”
- “A charming girl—that’s what you think her?”
- “Assuredly. Otherwise I should not be sitting here.”
- The Doctor meditated a moment. “My dear young man,” he said at last,
- “you must be very susceptible. As Catherine’s father, I have, I trust, a
- just and tender appreciation of her many good qualities; but I don’t mind
- telling you that I have never thought of her as a charming girl, and
- never expected any one else to do so.”
- Morris Townsend received this statement with a smile that was not wholly
- devoid of deference. “I don’t know what I might think of her if I were
- her father. I can’t put myself in that place. I speak from my own point
- of view.”
- “You speak very well,” said the Doctor; “but that is not all that is
- necessary. I told Catherine yesterday that I disapproved of her
- engagement.”
- “She let me know as much, and I was very sorry to hear it. I am greatly
- disappointed.” And Morris sat in silence awhile, looking at the floor.
- “Did you really expect I would say I was delighted, and throw my daughter
- into your arms?”
- “Oh no; I had an idea you didn’t like me.”
- “What gave you the idea?”
- “The fact that I am poor.”
- “That has a harsh sound,” said the Doctor, “but it is about the
- truth—speaking of you strictly as a son-in-law. Your absence of means,
- of a profession, of visible resources or prospects, places you in a
- category from which it would be imprudent for me to select a husband for
- my daughter, who is a weak young woman with a large fortune. In any
- other capacity I am perfectly prepared to like you. As a son-in-law, I
- abominate you!”
- Morris Townsend listened respectfully. “I don’t think Miss Sloper is a
- weak woman,” he presently said.
- “Of course you must defend her—it’s the least you can do. But I have
- known my child twenty years, and you have known her six weeks. Even if
- she were not weak, however, you would still be a penniless man.”
- “Ah, yes; that is _my_ weakness! And therefore, you mean, I am
- mercenary—I only want your daughter’s money.”
- “I don’t say that. I am not obliged to say it; and to say it, save under
- stress of compulsion, would be very bad taste. I say simply that you
- belong to the wrong category.”
- “But your daughter doesn’t marry a category,” Townsend urged, with his
- handsome smile. “She marries an individual—an individual whom she is so
- good as to say she loves.”
- “An individual who offers so little in return!”
- “Is it possible to offer more than the most tender affection and a
- lifelong devotion?” the young man demanded.
- “It depends how we take it. It is possible to offer a few other things
- besides; and not only is it possible, but it’s usual. A lifelong
- devotion is measured after the fact; and meanwhile it is customary in
- these cases to give a few material securities. What are yours? A very
- handsome face and figure, and a very good manner. They are excellent as
- far as they go, but they don’t go far enough.”
- “There is one thing you should add to them,” said Morris; “the word of a
- gentleman!”
- “The word of a gentleman that you will always love Catherine? You must
- be a very fine gentleman to be sure of that.”
- “The word of a gentleman that I am not mercenary; that my affection for
- Miss Sloper is as pure and disinterested a sentiment as was ever lodged
- in a human breast! I care no more for her fortune than for the ashes in
- that grate.”
- “I take note—I take note,” said the Doctor. “But having done so, I turn
- to our category again. Even with that solemn vow on your lips, you take
- your place in it. There is nothing against you but an accident, if you
- will; but with my thirty years’ medical practice, I have seen that
- accidents may have far-reaching consequences.”
- Morris smoothed his hat—it was already remarkably glossy—and continued to
- display a self-control which, as the Doctor was obliged to admit, was
- extremely creditable to him. But his disappointment was evidently keen.
- “Is there nothing I can do to make you believe in me?”
- “If there were I should be sorry to suggest it, for—don’t you see?—I
- don’t want to believe in you!” said the Doctor, smiling.
- “I would go and dig in the fields.”
- “That would be foolish.”
- “I will take the first work that offers, to-morrow.”
- “Do so by all means—but for your own sake, not for mine.”
- “I see; you think I am an idler!” Morris exclaimed, a little too much in
- the tone of a man who has made a discovery. But he saw his error
- immediately, and blushed.
- “It doesn’t matter what I think, when once I have told you I don’t think
- of you as a son-in-law.”
- But Morris persisted. “You think I would squander her money.”
- The Doctor smiled. “It doesn’t matter, as I say; but I plead guilty to
- that.”
- “That’s because I spent my own, I suppose,” said Morris. “I frankly
- confess that. I have been wild. I have been foolish. I will tell you
- every crazy thing I ever did, if you like. There were some great follies
- among the number—I have never concealed that. But I have sown my wild
- oats. Isn’t there some proverb about a reformed rake? I was not a rake,
- but I assure you I have reformed. It is better to have amused oneself
- for a while and have done with it. Your daughter would never care for a
- milksop; and I will take the liberty of saying that you would like one
- quite as little. Besides, between my money and hers there is a great
- difference. I spent my own; it was because it was my own that I spent
- it. And I made no debts; when it was gone I stopped. I don’t owe a
- penny in the world.”
- “Allow me to inquire what you are living on now—though I admit,” the
- Doctor added, “that the question, on my part, is inconsistent.”
- “I am living on the remnants of my property,” said Morris Townsend.
- “Thank you!” the Doctor gravely replied.
- Yes, certainly, Morris’s self-control was laudable. “Even admitting I
- attach an undue importance to Miss Sloper’s fortune,” he went on, “would
- not that be in itself an assurance that I should take much care of it?”
- “That you should take too much care would be quite as bad as that you
- should take too little. Catherine might suffer as much by your economy
- as by your extravagance.”
- “I think you are very unjust!” The young man made this declaration
- decently, civilly, without violence.
- “It is your privilege to think so, and I surrender my reputation to you!
- I certainly don’t flatter myself I gratify you.”
- “Don’t you care a little to gratify your daughter? Do you enjoy the idea
- of making her miserable?”
- “I am perfectly resigned to her thinking me a tyrant for a twelvemonth.”
- “For a twelvemonth!” exclaimed Morris, with a laugh.
- “For a lifetime, then! She may as well be miserable in that way as in
- the other.”
- Here at last Morris lost his temper. “Ah, you are not polite, sir!” he
- cried.
- “You push me to it—you argue too much.”
- “I have a great deal at stake.”
- “Well, whatever it is,” said the Doctor, “you have lost it!”
- “Are you sure of that?” asked Morris; “are you sure your daughter will
- give me up?”
- “I mean, of course, you have lost it as far as I am concerned. As for
- Catherine’s giving you up—no, I am not sure of it. But as I shall
- strongly recommend it, as I have a great fund of respect and affection in
- my daughter’s mind to draw upon, and as she has the sentiment of duty
- developed in a very high degree, I think it extremely possible.”
- Morris Townsend began to smooth his hat again. “I too have a fund of
- affection to draw upon!” he observed at last.
- The Doctor at this point showed his own first symptoms of irritation.
- “Do you mean to defy me?”
- “Call it what you please, sir! I mean not to give your daughter up.”
- The Doctor shook his head. “I haven’t the least fear of your pining away
- your life. You are made to enjoy it.”
- Morris gave a laugh. “Your opposition to my marriage is all the more
- cruel, then! Do you intend to forbid your daughter to see me again?”
- “She is past the age at which people are forbidden, and I am not a father
- in an old-fashioned novel. But I shall strongly urge her to break with
- you.”
- “I don’t think she will,” said Morris Townsend.
- “Perhaps not. But I shall have done what I could.”
- “She has gone too far,” Morris went on.
- “To retreat? Then let her stop where she is.”
- “Too far to stop, I mean.”
- The Doctor looked at him a moment; Morris had his hand on the door.
- “There is a great deal of impertinence in your saying it.”
- “I will say no more, sir!” Morris answered; and, making his bow, he left
- the room.
- XIII
- IT may be thought the Doctor was too positive, and Mrs. Almond intimated
- as much. But, as he said, he had his impression; it seemed to him
- sufficient, and he had no wish to modify it. He had passed his life in
- estimating people (it was part of the medical trade), and in nineteen
- cases out of twenty he was right.
- “Perhaps Mr. Townsend is the twentieth case,” Mrs. Almond suggested.
- “Perhaps he is, though he doesn’t look to me at all like a twentieth
- case. But I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and, to make sure, I
- will go and talk with Mrs. Montgomery. She will almost certainly tell me
- I have done right; but it is just possible that she will prove to me that
- I have made the greatest mistake of my life. If she does, I will beg Mr.
- Townsend’s pardon. You needn’t invite her to meet me, as you kindly
- proposed; I will write her a frank letter, telling her how matters stand,
- and asking leave to come and see her.”
- “I am afraid the frankness will be chiefly on your side. The poor little
- woman will stand up for her brother, whatever he may be.”
- “Whatever he may be? I doubt that. People are not always so fond of
- their brothers.”
- “Ah,” said Mrs. Almond, “when it’s a question of thirty thousand a year
- coming into a family—”
- “If she stands up for him on account of the money, she will be a humbug.
- If she is a humbug I shall see it. If I see it, I won’t waste time with
- her.”
- “She is not a humbug—she is an exemplary woman. She will not wish to
- play her brother a trick simply because he is selfish.”
- “If she is worth talking to, she will sooner play him a trick than that
- he should play Catherine one. Has she seen Catherine, by the way—does
- she know her?”
- “Not to my knowledge. Mr. Townsend can have had no particular interest
- in bringing them together.”
- “If she is an exemplary woman, no. But we shall see to what extent she
- answers your description.”
- “I shall be curious to hear her description of you!” said Mrs. Almond,
- with a laugh. “And, meanwhile, how is Catherine taking it?”
- “As she takes everything—as a matter of course.”
- “Doesn’t she make a noise? Hasn’t she made a scene?”
- “She is not scenic.”
- “I thought a love-lorn maiden was always scenic.”
- “A fantastic widow is more so. Lavinia has made me a speech; she thinks
- me very arbitrary.”
- “She has a talent for being in the wrong,” said Mrs. Almond. “But I am
- very sorry for Catherine, all the same.”
- “So am I. But she will get over it.”
- “You believe she will give him up?”
- “I count upon it. She has such an admiration for her father.”
- “Oh, we know all about that! But it only makes me pity her the more. It
- makes her dilemma the more painful, and the effort of choosing between
- you and her lover almost impossible.”
- “If she can’t choose, all the better.”
- “Yes, but he will stand there entreating her to choose, and Lavinia will
- pull on that side.”
- “I am glad she is not on my side; she is capable of ruining an excellent
- cause. The day Lavinia gets into your boat it capsizes. But she had
- better be careful,” said the Doctor. “I will have no treason in my
- house!”
- “I suspect she will be careful; for she is at bottom very much afraid of
- you.”
- “They are both afraid of me—harmless as I am!” the Doctor answered. “And
- it is on that that I build—on the salutary terror I inspire!”
- XIV
- HE wrote his frank letter to Mrs. Montgomery, who punctually answered it,
- mentioning an hour at which he might present himself in the Second
- Avenue. She lived in a neat little house of red brick, which had been
- freshly painted, with the edges of the bricks very sharply marked out in
- white. It has now disappeared, with its companions, to make room for a
- row of structures more majestic. There were green shutters upon the
- windows, without slats, but pierced with little holes, arranged in
- groups; and before the house was a diminutive yard, ornamented with a
- bush of mysterious character, and surrounded by a low wooden paling,
- painted in the same green as the shutters. The place looked like a
- magnified baby-house, and might have been taken down from a shelf in a
- toy-shop. Dr. Sloper, when he went to call, said to himself, as he
- glanced at the objects I have enumerated, that Mrs. Montgomery was
- evidently a thrifty and self-respecting little person—the modest
- proportions of her dwelling seemed to indicate that she was of small
- stature—who took a virtuous satisfaction in keeping herself tidy, and had
- resolved that, since she might not be splendid, she would at least be
- immaculate. She received him in a little parlour, which was precisely
- the parlour he had expected: a small unspeckled bower, ornamented with a
- desultory foliage of tissue-paper, and with clusters of glass drops, amid
- which—to carry out the analogy—the temperature of the leafy season was
- maintained by means of a cast-iron stove, emitting a dry blue flame, and
- smelling strongly of varnish. The walls were embellished with engravings
- swathed in pink gauze, and the tables ornamented with volumes of extracts
- from the poets, usually bound in black cloth stamped with florid designs
- in jaundiced gilt. The Doctor had time to take cognisance of these
- details, for Mrs. Montgomery, whose conduct he pronounced under the
- circumstances inexcusable, kept him waiting some ten minutes before she
- appeared. At last, however, she rustled in, smoothing down a stiff
- poplin dress, with a little frightened flush in a gracefully-rounded
- cheek.
- She was a small, plump, fair woman, with a bright, clear eye, and an
- extraordinary air of neatness and briskness. But these qualities were
- evidently combined with an unaffected humility, and the Doctor gave her
- his esteem as soon as he had looked at her. A brave little person, with
- lively perceptions, and yet a disbelief in her own talent for social, as
- distinguished from practical, affairs—this was his rapid mental _résumé_
- of Mrs. Montgomery, who, as he saw, was flattered by what she regarded as
- the honour of his visit. Mrs. Montgomery, in her little red house in the
- Second Avenue, was a person for whom Dr. Sloper was one of the great men,
- one of the fine gentlemen of New York; and while she fixed her agitated
- eyes upon him, while she clasped her mittened hands together in her
- glossy poplin lap, she had the appearance of saying to herself that he
- quite answered her idea of what a distinguished guest would naturally be.
- She apologised for being late; but he interrupted her.
- “It doesn’t matter,” he said; “for while I sat here I had time to think
- over what I wish to say to you, and to make up my mind how to begin.”
- “Oh, do begin!” murmured Mrs. Montgomery.
- “It is not so easy,” said the Doctor, smiling. “You will have gathered
- from my letter that I wish to ask you a few questions, and you may not
- find it very comfortable to answer them.”
- “Yes; I have thought what I should say. It is not very easy.”
- “But you must understand my situation—my state of mind. Your brother
- wishes to marry my daughter, and I wish to find out what sort of a young
- man he is. A good way to do so seemed to be to come and ask you; which I
- have proceeded to do.”
- Mrs. Montgomery evidently took the situation very seriously; she was in a
- state of extreme moral concentration. She kept her pretty eyes, which
- were illumined by a sort of brilliant modesty, attached to his own
- countenance, and evidently paid the most earnest attention to each of his
- words. Her expression indicated that she thought his idea of coming to
- see her a very superior conception, but that she was really afraid to
- have opinions on strange subjects.
- “I am extremely glad to see you,” she said, in a tone which seemed to
- admit, at the same time, that this had nothing to do with the question.
- The Doctor took advantage of this admission. “I didn’t come to see you
- for your pleasure; I came to make you say disagreeable things—and you
- can’t like that. What sort of a gentleman is your brother?”
- Mrs. Montgomery’s illuminated gaze grew vague, and began to wander. She
- smiled a little, and for some time made no answer, so that the Doctor at
- last became impatient. And her answer, when it came, was not
- satisfactory. “It is difficult to talk about one’s brother.”
- “Not when one is fond of him, and when one has plenty of good to say.”
- “Yes, even then, when a good deal depends on it,” said Mrs. Montgomery.
- “Nothing depends on it, for you.”
- “I mean for—for—” and she hesitated.
- “For your brother himself. I see!”
- “I mean for Miss Sloper,” said Mrs. Montgomery. The Doctor liked this;
- it had the accent of sincerity. “Exactly; that’s the point. If my poor
- girl should marry your brother, everything—as regards her happiness—would
- depend on his being a good fellow. She is the best creature in the
- world, and she could never do him a grain of injury. He, on the other
- hand, if he should not be all that we desire, might make her very
- miserable. That is why I want you to throw some light upon his
- character, you know. Of course you are not bound to do it. My daughter,
- whom you have never seen, is nothing to you; and I, possibly, am only an
- indiscreet and impertinent old man. It is perfectly open to you to tell
- me that my visit is in very bad taste and that I had better go about my
- business. But I don’t think you will do this; because I think we shall
- interest you, my poor girl and I. I am sure that if you were to see
- Catherine, she would interest you very much. I don’t mean because she is
- interesting in the usual sense of the word, but because you would feel
- sorry for her. She is so soft, so simple-minded, she would be such an
- easy victim! A bad husband would have remarkable facilities for making
- her miserable; for she would have neither the intelligence nor the
- resolution to get the better of him, and yet she would have an
- exaggerated power of suffering. I see,” added the Doctor, with his most
- insinuating, his most professional laugh, “you are already interested!”
- “I have been interested from the moment he told me he was engaged,” said
- Mrs. Montgomery.
- “Ah! he says that—he calls it an engagement?”
- “Oh, he has told me you didn’t like it.”
- “Did he tell you that I don’t like _him_?”
- “Yes, he told me that too. I said I couldn’t help it!” added Mrs.
- Montgomery.
- “Of course you can’t. But what you can do is to tell me I am right—to
- give me an attestation, as it were.” And the Doctor accompanied this
- remark with another professional smile.
- Mrs. Montgomery, however, smiled not at all; it was obvious that she
- could not take the humorous view of his appeal. “That is a good deal to
- ask,” she said at last.
- “There can be no doubt of that; and I must, in conscience, remind you of
- the advantages a young man marrying my daughter would enjoy. She has an
- income of ten thousand dollars in her own right, left her by her mother;
- if she marries a husband I approve, she will come into almost twice as
- much more at my death.”
- Mrs. Montgomery listened in great earnestness to this splendid financial
- statement; she had never heard thousands of dollars so familiarly talked
- about. She flushed a little with excitement. “Your daughter will be
- immensely rich,” she said softly.
- “Precisely—that’s the bother of it.”
- “And if Morris should marry her, he—he—” And she hesitated timidly.
- “He would be master of all that money? By no means. He would be master
- of the ten thousand a year that she has from her mother; but I should
- leave every penny of my own fortune, earned in the laborious exercise of
- my profession, to public institutions.”
- Mrs. Montgomery dropped her eyes at this, and sat for some time gazing at
- the straw matting which covered her floor.
- “I suppose it seems to you,” said the Doctor, laughing, “that in so doing
- I should play your brother a very shabby trick.”
- “Not at all. That is too much money to get possession of so easily, by
- marrying. I don’t think it would be right.”
- “It’s right to get all one can. But in this case your brother wouldn’t
- be able. If Catherine marries without my consent, she doesn’t get a
- penny from my own pocket.”
- “Is that certain?” asked Mrs. Montgomery, looking up.
- “As certain as that I sit here!”
- “Even if she should pine away?”
- “Even if she should pine to a shadow, which isn’t probable.”
- “Does Morris know this?”
- “I shall be most happy to inform him!” the Doctor exclaimed.
- Mrs. Montgomery resumed her meditations, and her visitor, who was
- prepared to give time to the affair, asked himself whether, in spite of
- her little conscientious air, she was not playing into her brother’s
- hands. At the same time he was half ashamed of the ordeal to which he
- had subjected her, and was touched by the gentleness with which she bore
- it. “If she were a humbug,” he said, “she would get angry; unless she be
- very deep indeed. It is not probable that she is as deep as that.”
- “What makes you dislike Morris so much?” she presently asked, emerging
- from her reflexions.
- “I don’t dislike him in the least as a friend, as a companion. He seems
- to me a charming fellow, and I should think he would be excellent
- company. I dislike him, exclusively, as a son-in-law. If the only
- office of a son-in-law were to dine at the paternal table, I should set a
- high value upon your brother. He dines capitally. But that is a small
- part of his function, which, in general, is to be a protector and
- caretaker of my child, who is singularly ill-adapted to take care of
- herself. It is there that he doesn’t satisfy me. I confess I have
- nothing but my impression to go by; but I am in the habit of trusting my
- impression. Of course you are at liberty to contradict it flat. He
- strikes me as selfish and shallow.”
- Mrs. Montgomery’s eyes expanded a little, and the Doctor fancied he saw
- the light of admiration in them. “I wonder you have discovered he is
- selfish!” she exclaimed.
- “Do you think he hides it so well?”
- “Very well indeed,” said Mrs. Montgomery. “And I think we are all rather
- selfish,” she added quickly.
- “I think so too; but I have seen people hide it better than he. You see
- I am helped by a habit I have of dividing people into classes, into
- types. I may easily be mistaken about your brother as an individual, but
- his type is written on his whole person.”
- “He is very good-looking,” said Mrs. Montgomery.
- The Doctor eyed her a moment. “You women are all the same! But the type
- to which your brother belongs was made to be the ruin of you, and you
- were made to be its handmaids and victims. The sign of the type in
- question is the determination—sometimes terrible in its quiet
- intensity—to accept nothing of life but its pleasures, and to secure
- these pleasures chiefly by the aid of your complaisant sex. Young men of
- this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other
- people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the
- superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in
- ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women. What our young friends
- chiefly insist upon is that some one else shall suffer for them; and
- women do that sort of thing, as you must know, wonderfully well.” The
- Doctor paused a moment, and then he added abruptly, “You have suffered
- immensely for your brother!”
- This exclamation was abrupt, as I say, but it was also perfectly
- calculated. The Doctor had been rather disappointed at not finding his
- compact and comfortable little hostess surrounded in a more visible
- degree by the ravages of Morris Townsend’s immorality; but he had said to
- himself that this was not because the young man had spared her, but
- because she had contrived to plaster up her wounds. They were aching
- there, behind the varnished stove, the festooned engravings, beneath her
- own neat little poplin bosom; and if he could only touch the tender spot,
- she would make a movement that would betray her. The words I have just
- quoted were an attempt to put his finger suddenly upon the place; and
- they had some of the success that he looked for. The tears sprang for a
- moment to Mrs. Montgomery’s eyes, and she indulged in a proud little jerk
- of the head.
- “I don’t know how you have found that out!” she exclaimed.
- “By a philosophic trick—by what they call induction. You know you have
- always your option of contradicting me. But kindly answer me a question.
- Don’t you give your brother money? I think you ought to answer that.”
- “Yes, I have given him money,” said Mrs. Montgomery.
- “And you have not had much to give him?”
- She was silent a moment. “If you ask me for a confession of poverty,
- that is easily made. I am very poor.”
- “One would never suppose it from your—your charming house,” said the
- Doctor. “I learned from my sister that your income was moderate, and
- your family numerous.”
- “I have five children,” Mrs. Montgomery observed; “but I am happy to say
- I can bring them up decently.”
- “Of course you can—accomplished and devoted as you are! But your brother
- has counted them over, I suppose?”
- “Counted them over?”
- “He knows there are five, I mean. He tells me it is he that brings them
- up.”
- Mrs. Montgomery stared a moment, and then quickly—“Oh yes; he teaches
- them Spanish.”
- The Doctor laughed out. “That must take a great deal off your hands!
- Your brother also knows, of course, that you have very little money.”
- “I have often told him so!” Mrs. Montgomery exclaimed, more unreservedly
- than she had yet spoken. She was apparently taking some comfort in the
- Doctor’s clairvoyancy.
- “Which means that you have often occasion to, and that he often sponges
- on you. Excuse the crudity of my language; I simply express a fact. I
- don’t ask you how much of your money he has had, it is none of my
- business. I have ascertained what I suspected—what I wished.” And the
- Doctor got up, gently smoothing his hat. “Your brother lives on you,” he
- said as he stood there.
- Mrs. Montgomery quickly rose from her chair, following her visitor’s
- movements with a look of fascination. But then, with a certain
- inconsequence—“I have never complained of him!” she said.
- “You needn’t protest—you have not betrayed him. But I advise you not to
- give him any more money.”
- “Don’t you see it is in my interest that he should marry a rich person?”
- she asked. “If, as you say, he lives on me, I can only wish to get rid
- of him, and to put obstacles in the way of his marrying is to increase my
- own difficulties.”
- “I wish very much you would come to me with your difficulties,” said the
- Doctor. “Certainly, if I throw him back on your hands, the least I can
- do is to help you to bear the burden. If you will allow me to say so,
- then, I shall take the liberty of placing in your hands, for the present,
- a certain fund for your brother’s support.”
- Mrs. Montgomery stared; she evidently thought he was jesting; but she
- presently saw that he was not, and the complication of her feelings
- became painful. “It seems to me that I ought to be very much offended
- with you,” she murmured.
- “Because I have offered you money? That’s a superstition,” said the
- Doctor. “You must let me come and see you again, and we will talk about
- these things. I suppose that some of your children are girls.”
- “I have two little girls,” said Mrs. Montgomery.
- “Well, when they grow up, and begin to think of taking husbands, you will
- see how anxious you will be about the moral character of these gentlemen.
- Then you will understand this visit of mine!”
- “Ah, you are not to believe that Morris’s moral character is bad!”
- The Doctor looked at her a little, with folded arms. “There is something
- I should greatly like—as a moral satisfaction. I should like to hear you
- say—‘He is abominably selfish!’”
- The words came out with the grave distinctness of his voice, and they
- seemed for an instant to create, to poor Mrs. Montgomery’s troubled
- vision, a material image. She gazed at it an instant, and then she
- turned away. “You distress me, sir!” she exclaimed. “He is, after all,
- my brother, and his talents, his talents—” On these last words her voice
- quavered, and before he knew it she had burst into tears.
- “His talents are first-rate!” said the Doctor. “We must find a proper
- field for them!” And he assured her most respectfully of his regret at
- having so greatly discomposed her. “It’s all for my poor Catherine,” he
- went on. “You must know her, and you will see.”
- Mrs. Montgomery brushed away her tears, and blushed at having shed them.
- “I should like to know your daughter,” she answered; and then, in an
- instant—“Don’t let her marry him!”
- Dr. Sloper went away with the words gently humming in his ears—“Don’t let
- her marry him!” They gave him the moral satisfaction of which he had
- just spoken, and their value was the greater that they had evidently cost
- a pang to poor little Mrs. Montgomery’s family pride.
- XV
- HE had been puzzled by the way that Catherine carried herself; her
- attitude at this sentimental crisis seemed to him unnaturally passive.
- She had not spoken to him again after that scene in the library, the day
- before his interview with Morris; and a week had elapsed without making
- any change in her manner. There was nothing in it that appealed for
- pity, and he was even a little disappointed at her not giving him an
- opportunity to make up for his harshness by some manifestation of
- liberality which should operate as a compensation. He thought a little
- of offering to take her for a tour in Europe; but he was determined to do
- this only in case she should seem mutely to reproach him. He had an idea
- that she would display a talent for mute reproaches, and he was surprised
- at not finding himself exposed to these silent batteries. She said
- nothing, either tacitly or explicitly, and as she was never very
- talkative, there was now no especial eloquence in her reserve. And poor
- Catherine was not sulky—a style of behaviour for which she had too little
- histrionic talent; she was simply very patient. Of course she was
- thinking over her situation, and she was apparently doing so in a
- deliberate and unimpassioned manner, with a view of making the best of
- it.
- “She will do as I have bidden her,” said the Doctor, and he made the
- further reflexion that his daughter was not a woman of a great spirit. I
- know not whether he had hoped for a little more resistance for the sake
- of a little more entertainment; but he said to himself, as he had said
- before, that though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity was,
- after all, not an exciting vocation.
- Catherine, meanwhile, had made a discovery of a very different sort; it
- had become vivid to her that there was a great excitement in trying to be
- a good daughter. She had an entirely new feeling, which may be described
- as a state of expectant suspense about her own actions. She watched
- herself as she would have watched another person, and wondered what she
- would do. It was as if this other person, who was both herself and not
- herself, had suddenly sprung into being, inspiring her with a natural
- curiosity as to the performance of untested functions.
- “I am glad I have such a good daughter,” said her father, kissing her,
- after the lapse of several days.
- “I am trying to be good,” she answered, turning away, with a conscience
- not altogether clear.
- “If there is anything you would like to say to me, you know you must not
- hesitate. You needn’t feel obliged to be so quiet. I shouldn’t care
- that Mr. Townsend should be a frequent topic of conversation, but
- whenever you have anything particular to say about him I shall be very
- glad to hear it.”
- “Thank you,” said Catherine; “I have nothing particular at present.”
- He never asked her whether she had seen Morris again, because he was sure
- that if this had been the case she would tell him. She had, in fact, not
- seen him, she had only written him a long letter. The letter at least
- was long for her; and, it may be added, that it was long for Morris; it
- consisted of five pages, in a remarkably neat and handsome hand.
- Catherine’s handwriting was beautiful, and she was even a little proud of
- it; she was extremely fond of copying, and possessed volumes of extracts
- which testified to this accomplishment; volumes which she had exhibited
- one day to her lover, when the bliss of feeling that she was important in
- his eyes was exceptionally keen. She told Morris in writing that her
- father had expressed the wish that she should not see him again, and that
- she begged he would not come to the house until she should have “made up
- her mind.” Morris replied with a passionate epistle, in which he asked
- to what, in Heaven’s name, she wished to make up her mind. Had not her
- mind been made up two weeks before, and could it be possible that she
- entertained the idea of throwing him off? Did she mean to break down at
- the very beginning of their ordeal, after all the promises of fidelity
- she had both given and extracted? And he gave an account of his own
- interview with her father—an account not identical at all points with
- that offered in these pages. “He was terribly violent,” Morris wrote;
- “but you know my self-control. I have need of it all when I remember
- that I have it in my power to break in upon your cruel captivity.”
- Catherine sent him, in answer to this, a note of three lines. “I am in
- great trouble; do not doubt of my affection, but let me wait a little and
- think.” The idea of a struggle with her father, of setting up her will
- against his own, was heavy on her soul, and it kept her formally
- submissive, as a great physical weight keeps us motionless. It never
- entered into her mind to throw her lover off; but from the first she
- tried to assure herself that there would be a peaceful way out of their
- difficulty. The assurance was vague, for it contained no element of
- positive conviction that her father would change his mind. She only had
- an idea that if she should be very good, the situation would in some
- mysterious manner improve. To be good, she must be patient, respectful,
- abstain from judging her father too harshly, and from committing any act
- of open defiance. He was perhaps right, after all, to think as he did;
- by which Catherine meant not in the least that his judgement of Morris’s
- motives in seeking to marry her was perhaps a just one, but that it was
- probably natural and proper that conscientious parents should be
- suspicious and even unjust. There were probably people in the world as
- bad as her father supposed Morris to be, and if there were the slightest
- chance of Morris being one of these sinister persons, the Doctor was
- right in taking it into account. Of course he could not know what she
- knew, how the purest love and truth were seated in the young man’s eyes;
- but Heaven, in its time, might appoint a way of bringing him to such
- knowledge. Catherine expected a good deal of Heaven, and referred to the
- skies the initiative, as the French say, in dealing with her dilemma.
- She could not imagine herself imparting any kind of knowledge to her
- father, there was something superior even in his injustice and absolute
- in his mistakes. But she could at least be good, and if she were only
- good enough, Heaven would invent some way of reconciling all things—the
- dignity of her father’s errors and the sweetness of her own confidence,
- the strict performance of her filial duties and the enjoyment of Morris
- Townsend’s affection. Poor Catherine would have been glad to regard Mrs.
- Penniman as an illuminating agent, a part which this lady herself indeed
- was but imperfectly prepared to play. Mrs. Penniman took too much
- satisfaction in the sentimental shadows of this little drama to have, for
- the moment, any great interest in dissipating them. She wished the plot
- to thicken, and the advice that she gave her niece tended, in her own
- imagination, to produce this result. It was rather incoherent counsel,
- and from one day to another it contradicted itself; but it was pervaded
- by an earnest desire that Catherine should do something striking. “You
- must _act_, my dear; in your situation the great thing is to act,” said
- Mrs. Penniman, who found her niece altogether beneath her opportunities.
- Mrs. Penniman’s real hope was that the girl would make a secret marriage,
- at which she should officiate as brideswoman or duenna. She had a vision
- of this ceremony being performed in some subterranean chapel—subterranean
- chapels in New York were not frequent, but Mrs. Penniman’s imagination
- was not chilled by trifles—and of the guilty couple—she liked to think of
- poor Catherine and her suitor as the guilty couple—being shuffled away in
- a fast-whirling vehicle to some obscure lodging in the suburbs, where she
- would pay them (in a thick veil) clandestine visits, where they would
- endure a period of romantic privation, and where ultimately, after she
- should have been their earthly providence, their intercessor, their
- advocate, and their medium of communication with the world, they should
- be reconciled to her brother in an artistic tableau, in which she herself
- should be somehow the central figure. She hesitated as yet to recommend
- this course to Catherine, but she attempted to draw an attractive picture
- of it to Morris Townsend. She was in daily communication with the young
- man, whom she kept informed by letters of the state of affairs in
- Washington Square. As he had been banished, as she said, from the house,
- she no longer saw him; but she ended by writing to him that she longed
- for an interview. This interview could take place only on neutral
- ground, and she bethought herself greatly before selecting a place of
- meeting. She had an inclination for Greenwood Cemetery, but she gave it
- up as too distant; she could not absent herself for so long, as she said,
- without exciting suspicion. Then she thought of the Battery, but that
- was rather cold and windy, besides one’s being exposed to intrusion from
- the Irish emigrants who at this point alight, with large appetites, in
- the New World and at last she fixed upon an oyster saloon in the Seventh
- Avenue, kept by a negro—an establishment of which she knew nothing save
- that she had noticed it in passing. She made an appointment with Morris
- Townsend to meet him there, and she went to the tryst at dusk, enveloped
- in an impenetrable veil. He kept her waiting for half an hour—he had
- almost the whole width of the city to traverse—but she liked to wait, it
- seemed to intensify the situation. She ordered a cup of tea, which
- proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering
- in a romantic cause. When Morris at last arrived, they sat together for
- half an hour in the duskiest corner of a back shop; and it is hardly too
- much to say that this was the happiest half-hour that Mrs. Penniman had
- known for years. The situation was really thrilling, and it scarcely
- seemed to her a false note when her companion asked for an oyster stew,
- and proceeded to consume it before her eyes. Morris, indeed, needed all
- the satisfaction that stewed oysters could give him, for it may be
- intimated to the reader that he regarded Mrs. Penniman in the light of a
- fifth wheel to his coach. He was in a state of irritation natural to a
- gentleman of fine parts who had been snubbed in a benevolent attempt to
- confer a distinction upon a young woman of inferior characteristics, and
- the insinuating sympathy of this somewhat desiccated matron appeared to
- offer him no practical relief. He thought her a humbug, and he judged of
- humbugs with a good deal of confidence. He had listened and made himself
- agreeable to her at first, in order to get a footing in Washington
- Square; and at present he needed all his self-command to be decently
- civil. It would have gratified him to tell her that she was a fantastic
- old woman, and that he should like to put her into an omnibus and send
- her home. We know, however, that Morris possessed the virtue of
- self-control, and he had, moreover, the constant habit of seeking to be
- agreeable; so that, although Mrs. Penniman’s demeanour only exasperated
- his already unquiet nerves, he listened to her with a sombre deference in
- which she found much to admire.
- XVI
- THEY had of course immediately spoken of Catherine. “Did she send me a
- message, or—or anything?” Morris asked. He appeared to think that she
- might have sent him a trinket or a lock of her hair.
- Mrs. Penniman was slightly embarrassed, for she had not told her niece of
- her intended expedition. “Not exactly a message,” she said; “I didn’t
- ask her for one, because I was afraid to—to excite her.”
- “I am afraid she is not very excitable!” And Morris gave a smile of some
- bitterness.
- “She is better than that. She is steadfast—she is true!”
- “Do you think she will hold fast, then?”
- “To the death!”
- “Oh, I hope it won’t come to that,” said Morris.
- “We must be prepared for the worst, and that is what I wish to speak to
- you about.”
- “What do you call the worst?”
- “Well,” said Mrs. Penniman, “my brother’s hard, intellectual nature.”
- “Oh, the devil!”
- “He is impervious to pity,” Mrs. Penniman added, by way of explanation.
- “Do you mean that he won’t come round?”
- “He will never be vanquished by argument. I have studied him. He will
- be vanquished only by the accomplished fact.”
- “The accomplished fact?”
- “He will come round afterwards,” said Mrs. Penniman, with extreme
- significance. “He cares for nothing but facts; he must be met by facts!”
- “Well,” rejoined Morris, “it is a fact that I wish to marry his daughter.
- I met him with that the other day, but he was not at all vanquished.”
- Mrs. Penniman was silent a little, and her smile beneath the shadow of
- her capacious bonnet, on the edge of which her black veil was arranged
- curtain-wise, fixed itself upon Morris’s face with a still more tender
- brilliancy. “Marry Catherine first and meet him afterwards!” she
- exclaimed.
- “Do you recommend that?” asked the young man, frowning heavily.
- She was a little frightened, but she went on with considerable boldness.
- “That is the way I see it: a private marriage—a private marriage.” She
- repeated the phrase because she liked it.
- “Do you mean that I should carry Catherine off? What do they call
- it—elope with her?”
- “It is not a crime when you are driven to it,” said Mrs. Penniman. “My
- husband, as I have told you, was a distinguished clergyman; one of the
- most eloquent men of his day. He once married a young couple that had
- fled from the house of the young lady’s father. He was so interested in
- their story. He had no hesitation, and everything came out beautifully.
- The father was afterwards reconciled, and thought everything of the young
- man. Mr. Penniman married them in the evening, about seven o’clock. The
- church was so dark, you could scarcely see; and Mr. Penniman was
- intensely agitated; he was so sympathetic. I don’t believe he could have
- done it again.”
- “Unfortunately Catherine and I have not Mr. Penniman to marry us,” said
- Morris.
- “No, but you have me!” rejoined Mrs. Penniman expressively. “I can’t
- perform the ceremony, but I can help you. I can watch.”
- “The woman’s an idiot,” thought Morris; but he was obliged to say
- something different. It was not, however, materially more civil. “Was
- it in order to tell me this that you requested I would meet you here?”
- Mrs. Penniman had been conscious of a certain vagueness in her errand,
- and of not being able to offer him any very tangible reward for his long
- walk. “I thought perhaps you would like to see one who is so near to
- Catherine,” she observed, with considerable majesty. “And also,” she
- added, “that you would value an opportunity of sending her something.”
- Morris extended his empty hands with a melancholy smile. “I am greatly
- obliged to you, but I have nothing to send.”
- “Haven’t you a _word_?” asked his companion, with her suggestive smile
- coming back.
- Morris frowned again. “Tell her to hold fast,” he said rather curtly.
- “That is a good word—a noble word. It will make her happy for many days.
- She is very touching, very brave,” Mrs. Penniman went on, arranging her
- mantle and preparing to depart. While she was so engaged she had an
- inspiration. She found the phrase that she could boldly offer as a
- vindication of the step she had taken. “If you marry Catherine at all
- risks” she said, “you will give my brother a proof of your being what he
- pretends to doubt.”
- “What he pretends to doubt?”
- “Don’t you know what that is?” Mrs. Penniman asked almost playfully.
- “It does not concern me to know,” said Morris grandly.
- “Of course it makes you angry.”
- “I despise it,” Morris declared.
- “Ah, you know what it is, then?” said Mrs. Penniman, shaking her finger
- at him. “He pretends that you like—you like the money.”
- Morris hesitated a moment; and then, as if he spoke advisedly—“I _do_
- like the money!”
- “Ah, but not—but not as he means it. You don’t like it more than
- Catherine?”
- He leaned his elbows on the table and buried his head in his hands. “You
- torture me!” he murmured. And, indeed, this was almost the effect of the
- poor lady’s too importunate interest in his situation.
- But she insisted on making her point. “If you marry her in spite of him,
- he will take for granted that you expect nothing of him, and are prepared
- to do without it. And so he will see that you are disinterested.”
- Morris raised his head a little, following this argument, “And what shall
- I gain by that?”
- “Why, that he will see that he has been wrong in thinking that you wished
- to get his money.”
- “And seeing that I wish he would go to the deuce with it, he will leave
- it to a hospital. Is that what you mean?” asked Morris.
- “No, I don’t mean that; though that would be very grand!” Mrs. Penniman
- quickly added. “I mean that having done you such an injustice, he will
- think it his duty, at the end, to make some amends.”
- Morris shook his head, though it must be confessed he was a little struck
- with this idea. “Do you think he is so sentimental?”
- “He is not sentimental,” said Mrs. Penniman; “but, to be perfectly fair
- to him, I think he has, in his own narrow way, a certain sense of duty.”
- There passed through Morris Townsend’s mind a rapid wonder as to what he
- might, even under a remote contingency, be indebted to from the action of
- this principle in Dr. Sloper’s breast, and the inquiry exhausted itself
- in his sense of the ludicrous. “Your brother has no duties to me,” he
- said presently, “and I none to him.”
- “Ah, but he has duties to Catherine.”
- “Yes, but you see that on that principle Catherine has duties to him as
- well.”
- Mrs. Penniman got up, with a melancholy sigh, as if she thought him very
- unimaginative. “She has always performed them faithfully; and now, do
- you think she has no duties to _you_?” Mrs. Penniman always, even in
- conversation, italicised her personal pronouns.
- “It would sound harsh to say so! I am so grateful for her love,” Morris
- added.
- “I will tell her you said that! And now, remember that if you need me, I
- am there.” And Mrs. Penniman, who could think of nothing more to say,
- nodded vaguely in the direction of Washington Square.
- Morris looked some moments at the sanded floor of the shop; he seemed to
- be disposed to linger a moment. At last, looking up with a certain
- abruptness, “It is your belief that if she marries me he will cut her
- off?” he asked.
- Mrs. Penniman stared a little, and smiled. “Why, I have explained to you
- what I think would happen—that in the end it would be the best thing to
- do.”
- “You mean that, whatever she does, in the long run she will get the
- money?”
- “It doesn’t depend upon her, but upon you. Venture to appear as
- disinterested as you are!” said Mrs. Penniman ingeniously. Morris
- dropped his eyes on the sanded floor again, pondering this; and she
- pursued. “Mr. Penniman and I had nothing, and we were very happy.
- Catherine, moreover, has her mother’s fortune, which, at the time my
- sister-in-law married, was considered a very handsome one.”
- “Oh, don’t speak of that!” said Morris; and, indeed, it was quite
- superfluous, for he had contemplated the fact in all its lights.
- “Austin married a wife with money—why shouldn’t you?”
- “Ah! but your brother was a doctor,” Morris objected.
- “Well, all young men can’t be doctors!”
- “I should think it an extremely loathsome profession,” said Morris, with
- an air of intellectual independence. Then in a moment, he went on rather
- inconsequently, “Do you suppose there is a will already made in
- Catherine’s favour?”
- “I suppose so—even doctors must die; and perhaps a little in mine,” Mrs.
- Penniman frankly added.
- “And you believe he would certainly change it—as regards Catherine?”
- “Yes; and then change it back again.”
- “Ah, but one can’t depend on that!” said Morris.
- “Do you want to _depend_ on it?” Mrs. Penniman asked.
- Morris blushed a little. “Well, I am certainly afraid of being the cause
- of an injury to Catherine.”
- “Ah! you must not be afraid. Be afraid of nothing, and everything will
- go well!”
- And then Mrs. Penniman paid for her cup of tea, and Morris paid for his
- oyster stew, and they went out together into the dimly-lighted wilderness
- of the Seventh Avenue. The dusk had closed in completely and the street
- lamps were separated by wide intervals of a pavement in which cavities
- and fissures played a disproportionate part. An omnibus, emblazoned with
- strange pictures, went tumbling over the dislocated cobble-stones.
- “How will you go home?” Morris asked, following this vehicle with an
- interested eye. Mrs. Penniman had taken his arm.
- She hesitated a moment. “I think this manner would be pleasant,” she
- said; and she continued to let him feel the value of his support.
- So he walked with her through the devious ways of the west side of the
- town, and through the bustle of gathering nightfall in populous streets,
- to the quiet precinct of Washington Square. They lingered a moment at
- the foot of Dr. Sloper’s white marble steps, above which a spotless white
- door, adorned with a glittering silver plate, seemed to figure, for
- Morris, the closed portal of happiness; and then Mrs. Penniman’s
- companion rested a melancholy eye upon a lighted window in the upper part
- of the house.
- “That is my room—my dear little room!” Mrs. Penniman remarked.
- Morris started. “Then I needn’t come walking round the Square to gaze at
- it.”
- “That’s as you please. But Catherine’s is behind; two noble windows on
- the second floor. I think you can see them from the other street.”
- “I don’t want to see them, ma’am!” And Morris turned his back to the
- house.
- “I will tell her you have been _here_, at any rate,” said Mrs. Penniman,
- pointing to the spot where they stood; “and I will give her your
- message—that she is to hold fast!”
- “Oh, yes! of course. You know I write her all that.”
- “It seems to say more when it is spoken! And remember, if you need me,
- that I am _there_”; and Mrs. Penniman glanced at the third floor.
- On this they separated, and Morris, left to himself, stood looking at the
- house a moment; after which he turned away, and took a gloomy walk round
- the Square, on the opposite side, close to the wooden fence. Then he
- came back, and paused for a minute in front of Dr. Sloper’s dwelling.
- His eyes travelled over it; they even rested on the ruddy windows of Mrs.
- Penniman’s apartment. He thought it a devilish comfortable house.
- XVII
- MRS. PENNIMAN told Catherine that evening—the two ladies were sitting in
- the back parlour—that she had had an interview with Morris Townsend; and
- on receiving this news the girl started with a sense of pain. She felt
- angry for the moment; it was almost the first time she had ever felt
- angry. It seemed to her that her aunt was meddlesome; and from this came
- a vague apprehension that she would spoil something.
- “I don’t see why you should have seen him. I don’t think it was right,”
- Catherine said.
- “I was so sorry for him—it seemed to me some one ought to see him.”
- “No one but I,” said Catherine, who felt as if she were making the most
- presumptuous speech of her life, and yet at the same time had an instinct
- that she was right in doing so.
- “But you wouldn’t, my dear,” Aunt Lavinia rejoined; “and I didn’t know
- what might have become of him.”
- “I have not seen him, because my father has forbidden it,” Catherine said
- very simply.
- There was a simplicity in this, indeed, which fairly vexed Mrs. Penniman.
- “If your father forbade you to go to sleep, I suppose you would keep
- awake!” she commented.
- Catherine looked at her. “I don’t understand you. You seem to be very
- strange.”
- “Well, my dear, you will understand me some day!” And Mrs. Penniman, who
- was reading the evening paper, which she perused daily from the first
- line to the last, resumed her occupation. She wrapped herself in
- silence; she was determined Catherine should ask her for an account of
- her interview with Morris. But Catherine was silent for so long, that
- she almost lost patience; and she was on the point of remarking to her
- that she was very heartless, when the girl at last spoke.
- “What did he say?” she asked.
- “He said he is ready to marry you any day, in spite of everything.”
- Catherine made no answer to this, and Mrs. Penniman almost lost patience
- again; owing to which she at last volunteered the information that Morris
- looked very handsome, but terribly haggard.
- “Did he seem sad?” asked her niece.
- “He was dark under the eyes,” said Mrs. Penniman. “So different from
- when I first saw him; though I am not sure that if I had seen him in this
- condition the first time, I should not have been even more struck with
- him. There is something brilliant in his very misery.”
- This was, to Catherine’s sense, a vivid picture, and though she
- disapproved, she felt herself gazing at it. “Where did you see him?” she
- asked presently.
- “In—in the Bowery; at a confectioner’s,” said Mrs. Penniman, who had a
- general idea that she ought to dissemble a little.
- “Whereabouts is the place?” Catherine inquired, after another pause.
- “Do you wish to go there, my dear?” said her aunt.
- “Oh no!” And Catherine got up from her seat and went to the fire, where
- she stood looking a while at the glowing coals.
- “Why are you so dry, Catherine?” Mrs. Penniman said at last.
- “So dry?”
- “So cold—so irresponsive.”
- The girl turned very quickly. “Did _he_ say that?”
- Mrs. Penniman hesitated a moment. “I will tell you what he said. He
- said he feared only one thing—that you would be afraid.”
- “Afraid of what?”
- “Afraid of your father.”
- Catherine turned back to the fire again, and then, after a pause, she
- said—“I _am_ afraid of my father.”
- Mrs. Penniman got quickly up from her chair and approached her niece.
- “Do you mean to give him up, then?”
- Catherine for some time never moved; she kept her eyes on the coals. At
- last she raised her head and looked at her aunt. “Why do you push me
- so?” she asked.
- “I don’t push you. When have I spoken to you before?”
- “It seems to me that you have spoken to me several times.”
- “I am afraid it is necessary, then, Catherine,” said Mrs. Penniman, with
- a good deal of solemnity. “I am afraid you don’t feel the importance—”
- She paused a little; Catherine was looking at her. “The importance of
- not disappointing that gallant young heart!” And Mrs. Penniman went back
- to her chair, by the lamp, and, with a little jerk, picked up the evening
- paper again.
- Catherine stood there before the fire, with her hands behind her, looking
- at her aunt, to whom it seemed that the girl had never had just this dark
- fixedness in her gaze. “I don’t think you understand—or that you know
- me,” she said.
- “If I don’t, it is not wonderful; you trust me so little.”
- Catherine made no attempt to deny this charge, and for some time more
- nothing was said. But Mrs. Penniman’s imagination was restless, and the
- evening paper failed on this occasion to enchain it.
- “If you succumb to the dread of your father’s wrath,” she said, “I don’t
- know what will become of us.”
- “Did _he_ tell you to say these things to me?”
- “He told me to use my influence.”
- “You must be mistaken,” said Catherine. “He trusts me.”
- “I hope he may never repent of it!” And Mrs. Penniman gave a little
- sharp slap to her newspaper. She knew not what to make of her niece, who
- had suddenly become stern and contradictious.
- This tendency on Catherine’s part was presently even more apparent. “You
- had much better not make any more appointments with Mr. Townsend,” she
- said. “I don’t think it is right.”
- Mrs. Penniman rose with considerable majesty. “My poor child, are you
- jealous of me?” she inquired.
- “Oh, Aunt Lavinia!” murmured Catherine, blushing.
- “I don’t think it is your place to teach me what is right.”
- On this point Catherine made no concession. “It can’t be right to
- deceive.”
- “I certainly have not deceived _you_!”
- “Yes; but I promised my father—”
- “I have no doubt you promised your father. But I have promised him
- nothing!”
- Catherine had to admit this, and she did so in silence. “I don’t believe
- Mr. Townsend himself likes it,” she said at last.
- “Doesn’t like meeting me?”
- “Not in secret.”
- “It was not in secret; the place was full of people.”
- “But it was a secret place—away off in the Bowery.”
- Mrs. Penniman flinched a little. “Gentlemen enjoy such things,” she
- remarked presently. “I know what gentlemen like.”
- “My father wouldn’t like it, if he knew.”
- “Pray, do you propose to inform him?” Mrs. Penniman inquired.
- “No, Aunt Lavinia. But please don’t do it again.”
- “If I do it again, you will inform him: is that what you mean? I do not
- share your dread of my brother; I have always known how to defend my own
- position. But I shall certainly never again take any step on your
- behalf; you are much too thankless. I knew you were not a spontaneous
- nature, but I believed you were firm, and I told your father that he
- would find you so. I am disappointed—but your father will not be!” And
- with this, Mrs. Penniman offered her niece a brief good-night, and
- withdrew to her own apartment.
- XVIII
- CATHERINE sat alone by the parlour fire—sat there for more than an hour,
- lost in her meditations. Her aunt seemed to her aggressive and foolish,
- and to see it so clearly—to judge Mrs. Penniman so positively—made her
- feel old and grave. She did not resent the imputation of weakness; it
- made no impression on her, for she had not the sense of weakness, and she
- was not hurt at not being appreciated. She had an immense respect for
- her father, and she felt that to displease him would be a misdemeanour
- analogous to an act of profanity in a great temple; but her purpose had
- slowly ripened, and she believed that her prayers had purified it of its
- violence. The evening advanced, and the lamp burned dim without her
- noticing it; her eyes were fixed upon her terrible plan. She knew her
- father was in his study—that he had been there all the evening; from time
- to time she expected to hear him move. She thought he would perhaps
- come, as he sometimes came, into the parlour. At last the clock struck
- eleven, and the house was wrapped in silence; the servants had gone to
- bed. Catherine got up and went slowly to the door of the library, where
- she waited a moment, motionless. Then she knocked, and then she waited
- again. Her father had answered her, but she had not the courage to turn
- the latch. What she had said to her aunt was true enough—she was afraid
- of him; and in saying that she had no sense of weakness she meant that
- she was not afraid of herself. She heard him move within, and he came
- and opened the door for her.
- “What is the matter?” asked the Doctor. “You are standing there like a
- ghost.”
- She went into the room, but it was some time before she contrived to say
- what she had come to say. Her father, who was in his dressing-gown and
- slippers, had been busy at his writing-table, and after looking at her
- for some moments, and waiting for her to speak, he went and seated
- himself at his papers again. His back was turned to her—she began to
- hear the scratching of his pen. She remained near the door, with her
- heart thumping beneath her bodice; and she was very glad that his back
- was turned, for it seemed to her that she could more easily address
- herself to this portion of his person than to his face. At last she
- began, watching it while she spoke.
- “You told me that if I should have anything more to say about Mr.
- Townsend you would be glad to listen to it.”
- “Exactly, my dear,” said the Doctor, not turning round, but stopping his
- pen.
- Catherine wished it would go on, but she herself continued. “I thought I
- would tell you that I have not seen him again, but that I should like to
- do so.”
- “To bid him good-bye?” asked the Doctor.
- The girl hesitated a moment. “He is not going away.”
- The Doctor wheeled slowly round in his chair, with a smile that seemed to
- accuse her of an epigram; but extremes meet, and Catherine had not
- intended one. “It is not to bid him good-bye, then?” her father said.
- “No, father, not that; at least, not for ever. I have not seen him
- again, but I should like to see him,” Catherine repeated.
- The Doctor slowly rubbed his under lip with the feather of his quill.
- “Have you written to him?”
- “Yes, four times.”
- “You have not dismissed him, then. Once would have done that.”
- “No,” said Catherine; “I have asked him—asked him to wait.”
- Her father sat looking at her, and she was afraid he was going to break
- out into wrath; his eyes were so fine and cold.
- “You are a dear, faithful child,” he said at last. “Come here to your
- father.” And he got up, holding out his hands toward her.
- The words were a surprise, and they gave her an exquisite joy. She went
- to him, and he put his arm round her tenderly, soothingly; and then he
- kissed her. After this he said:
- “Do you wish to make me very happy?”
- “I should like to—but I am afraid I can’t,” Catherine answered.
- “You can if you will. It all depends on your will.”
- “Is it to give him up?” said Catherine.
- “Yes, it is to give him up.”
- And he held her still, with the same tenderness, looking into her face
- and resting his eyes on her averted eyes. There was a long silence; she
- wished he would release her.
- “You are happier than I, father,” she said, at last.
- “I have no doubt you are unhappy just now. But it is better to be
- unhappy for three months and get over it, than for many years and never
- get over it.”
- “Yes, if that were so,” said Catherine.
- “It would be so; I am sure of that.” She answered nothing, and he went
- on. “Have you no faith in my wisdom, in my tenderness, in my solicitude
- for your future?”
- “Oh, father!” murmured the girl.
- “Don’t you suppose that I know something of men: their vices, their
- follies, their falsities?”
- She detached herself, and turned upon him. “He is not vicious—he is not
- false!”
- Her father kept looking at her with his sharp, pure eye. “You make
- nothing of my judgement, then?”
- “I can’t believe that!”
- “I don’t ask you to believe it, but to take it on trust.”
- Catherine was far from saying to herself that this was an ingenious
- sophism; but she met the appeal none the less squarely. “What has he
- done—what do you know?”
- “He has never done anything—he is a selfish idler.”
- “Oh, father, don’t abuse him!” she exclaimed pleadingly.
- “I don’t mean to abuse him; it would be a great mistake. You may do as
- you choose,” he added, turning away.
- “I may see him again?”
- “Just as you choose.”
- “Will you forgive me?”
- “By no means.”
- “It will only be for once.”
- “I don’t know what you mean by once. You must either give him up or
- continue the acquaintance.”
- “I wish to explain—to tell him to wait.”
- “To wait for what?”
- “Till you know him better—till you consent.”
- “Don’t tell him any such nonsense as that. I know him well enough, and I
- shall never consent.”
- “But we can wait a long time,” said poor Catherine, in a tone which was
- meant to express the humblest conciliation, but which had upon her
- father’s nerves the effect of an iteration not characterised by tact.
- The Doctor answered, however, quietly enough: “Of course you can wait
- till I die, if you like.” Catherine gave a cry of natural horror.
- “Your engagement will have one delightful effect upon you; it will make
- you extremely impatient for that event.”
- Catherine stood staring, and the Doctor enjoyed the point he had made.
- It came to Catherine with the force—or rather with the vague
- impressiveness—of a logical axiom which it was not in her province to
- controvert; and yet, though it was a scientific truth, she felt wholly
- unable to accept it.
- “I would rather not marry, if that were true,” she said.
- “Give me a proof of it, then; for it is beyond a question that by
- engaging yourself to Morris Townsend you simply wait for my death.”
- She turned away, feeling sick and faint; and the Doctor went on. “And if
- you wait for it with impatience, judge, if you please, what _his_
- eagerness will be!”
- Catherine turned it over—her father’s words had such an authority for her
- that her very thoughts were capable of obeying him. There was a dreadful
- ugliness in it, which seemed to glare at her through the interposing
- medium of her own feebler reason. Suddenly, however, she had an
- inspiration—she almost knew it to be an inspiration.
- “If I don’t marry before your death, I will not after,” she said.
- To her father, it must be admitted, this seemed only another epigram; and
- as obstinacy, in unaccomplished minds, does not usually select such a
- mode of expression, he was the more surprised at this wanton play of a
- fixed idea.
- “Do you mean that for an impertinence?” he inquired; an inquiry of which,
- as he made it, he quite perceived the grossness.
- “An impertinence? Oh, father, what terrible things you say!”
- “If you don’t wait for my death, you might as well marry immediately;
- there is nothing else to wait for.”
- For some time Catherine made no answer; but finally she said:
- “I think Morris—little by little—might persuade you.”
- “I shall never let him speak to me again. I dislike him too much.”
- Catherine gave a long, low sigh; she tried to stifle it, for she had made
- up her mind that it was wrong to make a parade of her trouble, and to
- endeavour to act upon her father by the meretricious aid of emotion.
- Indeed, she even thought it wrong—in the sense of being inconsiderate—to
- attempt to act upon his feelings at all; her part was to effect some
- gentle, gradual change in his intellectual perception of poor Morris’s
- character. But the means of effecting such a change were at present
- shrouded in mystery, and she felt miserably helpless and hopeless. She
- had exhausted all arguments, all replies. Her father might have pitied
- her, and in fact he did so; but he was sure he was right.
- “There is one thing you can tell Mr. Townsend when you see him again,” he
- said: “that if you marry without my consent, I don’t leave you a farthing
- of money. That will interest him more than anything else you can tell
- him.”
- “That would be very right,” Catherine answered. “I ought not in that
- case to have a farthing of your money.”
- “My dear child,” the Doctor observed, laughing, “your simplicity is
- touching. Make that remark, in that tone, and with that expression of
- countenance, to Mr. Townsend, and take a note of his answer. It won’t be
- polite—it will, express irritation; and I shall be glad of that, as it
- will put me in the right; unless, indeed—which is perfectly possible—you
- should like him the better for being rude to you.”
- “He will never be rude to me,” said Catherine gently.
- “Tell him what I say, all the same.”
- She looked at her father, and her quiet eyes filled with tears.
- “I think I will see him, then,” she murmured, in her timid voice.
- “Exactly as you choose!” And he went to the door and opened it for her
- to go out. The movement gave her a terrible sense of his turning her
- off.
- “It will be only once, for the present,” she added, lingering a moment.
- “Exactly as you choose,” he repeated, standing there with his hand on the
- door. “I have told you what I think. If you see him, you will be an
- ungrateful, cruel child; you will have given your old father the greatest
- pain of his life.”
- This was more than the poor girl could bear; her tears overflowed, and
- she moved towards her grimly consistent parent with a pitiful cry. Her
- hands were raised in supplication, but he sternly evaded this appeal.
- Instead of letting her sob out her misery on his shoulder, he simply took
- her by the arm and directed her course across the threshold, closing the
- door gently but firmly behind her. After he had done so, he remained
- listening. For a long time there was no sound; he knew that she was
- standing outside. He was sorry for her, as I have said; but he was so
- sure he was right. At last he heard her move away, and then her footstep
- creaked faintly upon the stairs.
- The Doctor took several turns round his study, with his hands in his
- pockets, and a thin sparkle, possibly of irritation, but partly also of
- something like humour, in his eye. “By Jove,” he said to himself, “I
- believe she will stick—I believe she will stick!” And this idea of
- Catherine “sticking” appeared to have a comical side, and to offer a
- prospect of entertainment. He determined, as he said to himself, to see
- it out.
- XIX
- IT was for reasons connected with this determination that on the morrow
- he sought a few words of private conversation with Mrs. Penniman. He
- sent for her to the library, and he there informed her that he hoped very
- much that, as regarded this affair of Catherine’s, she would mind her
- _p’s_ and _q’s_.
- “I don’t know what you mean by such an expression,” said his sister.
- “You speak as if I were learning the alphabet.”
- “The alphabet of common sense is something you will never learn,” the
- Doctor permitted himself to respond.
- “Have you called me here to insult me?” Mrs. Penniman inquired.
- “Not at all. Simply to advise you. You have taken up young Townsend;
- that’s your own affair. I have nothing to do with your sentiments, your
- fancies, your affections, your delusions; but what I request of you is
- that you will keep these things to yourself. I have explained my views
- to Catherine; she understands them perfectly, and anything that she does
- further in the way of encouraging Mr. Townsend’s attentions will be in
- deliberate opposition to my wishes. Anything that you should do in the
- way of giving her aid and comfort will be—permit me the
- expression—distinctly treasonable. You know high treason is a capital
- offence; take care how you incur the penalty.”
- Mrs. Penniman threw back her head, with a certain expansion of the eye
- which she occasionally practised. “It seems to me that you talk like a
- great autocrat.”
- “I talk like my daughter’s father.”
- “Not like your sister’s brother!” cried Lavinia. “My dear Lavinia,” said
- the Doctor, “I sometimes wonder whether I am your brother. We are so
- extremely different. In spite of differences, however, we can, at a
- pinch, understand each other; and that is the essential thing just now.
- Walk straight with regard to Mr. Townsend; that’s all I ask. It is
- highly probable you have been corresponding with him for the last three
- weeks—perhaps even seeing him. I don’t ask you—you needn’t tell me.” He
- had a moral conviction that she would contrive to tell a fib about the
- matter, which it would disgust him to listen to. “Whatever you have
- done, stop doing it. That’s all I wish.”
- “Don’t you wish also by chance to murder our child?” Mrs. Penniman
- inquired.
- “On the contrary, I wish to make her live and be happy.”
- “You will kill her; she passed a dreadful night.”
- “She won’t die of one dreadful night, nor of a dozen. Remember that I am
- a distinguished physician.”
- Mrs. Penniman hesitated a moment. Then she risked her retort. “Your
- being a distinguished physician has not prevented you from already losing
- _two members_ of your family!”
- She had risked it, but her brother gave her such a terribly incisive
- look—a look so like a surgeon’s lancet—that she was frightened at her
- courage. And he answered her in words that corresponded to the look: “It
- may not prevent me, either, from losing the society of still another.”
- Mrs. Penniman took herself off, with whatever air of depreciated merit
- was at her command, and repaired to Catherine’s room, where the poor girl
- was closeted. She knew all about her dreadful night, for the two had met
- again, the evening before, after Catherine left her father. Mrs.
- Penniman was on the landing of the second floor when her niece came
- upstairs. It was not remarkable that a person of so much subtlety should
- have discovered that Catherine had been shut up with the Doctor. It was
- still less remarkable that she should have felt an extreme curiosity to
- learn the result of this interview, and that this sentiment, combined
- with her great amiability and generosity, should have prompted her to
- regret the sharp words lately exchanged between her niece and herself.
- As the unhappy girl came into sight, in the dusky corridor, she made a
- lively demonstration of sympathy. Catherine’s bursting heart was equally
- oblivious. She only knew that her aunt was taking her into her arms.
- Mrs. Penniman drew her into Catherine’s own room, and the two women sat
- there together, far into the small hours; the younger one with her head
- on the other’s lap, sobbing and sobbing at first in a soundless, stifled
- manner, and then at last perfectly still. It gratified Mrs. Penniman to
- be able to feel conscientiously that this scene virtually removed the
- interdict which Catherine had placed upon her further communion with
- Morris Townsend. She was not gratified, however, when, in coming back to
- her niece’s room before breakfast, she found that Catherine had risen and
- was preparing herself for this meal.
- “You should not go to breakfast,” she said; “you are not well enough,
- after your fearful night.”
- “Yes, I am very well, and I am only afraid of being late.”
- “I can’t understand you!” Mrs. Penniman cried. “You should stay in bed
- for three days.”
- “Oh, I could never do that!” said Catherine, to whom this idea presented
- no attractions.
- Mrs. Penniman was in despair, and she noted, with extreme annoyance, that
- the trace of the night’s tears had completely vanished from Catherine’s
- eyes. She had a most impracticable _physique_. “What effect do you
- expect to have upon your father,” her aunt demanded, “if you come
- plumping down, without a vestige of any sort of feeling, as if nothing in
- the world had happened?”
- “He would not like me to lie in bed,” said Catherine simply.
- “All the more reason for your doing it. How else do you expect to move
- him?”
- Catherine thought a little. “I don’t know how; but not in that way. I
- wish to be just as usual.” And she finished dressing, and, according to
- her aunt’s expression, went plumping down into the paternal presence.
- She was really too modest for consistent pathos.
- And yet it was perfectly true that she had had a dreadful night. Even
- after Mrs. Penniman left her she had had no sleep. She lay staring at
- the uncomforting gloom, with her eyes and ears filled with the movement
- with which her father had turned her out of his room, and of the words in
- which he had told her that she was a heartless daughter. Her heart was
- breaking. She had heart enough for that. At moments it seemed to her
- that she believed him, and that to do what she was doing, a girl must
- indeed be bad. She _was_ bad; but she couldn’t help it. She would try
- to appear good, even if her heart were perverted; and from time to time
- she had a fancy that she might accomplish something by ingenious
- concessions to form, though she should persist in caring for Morris.
- Catherine’s ingenuities were indefinite, and we are not called upon to
- expose their hollowness. The best of them perhaps showed itself in that
- freshness of aspect which was so discouraging to Mrs. Penniman, who was
- amazed at the absence of haggardness in a young woman who for a whole
- night had lain quivering beneath a father’s curse. Poor Catherine was
- conscious of her freshness; it gave her a feeling about the future which
- rather added to the weight upon her mind. It seemed a proof that she was
- strong and solid and dense, and would live to a great age—longer than
- might be generally convenient; and this idea was depressing, for it
- appeared to saddle her with a pretension the more, just when the
- cultivation of any pretension was inconsistent with her doing right. She
- wrote that day to Morris Townsend, requesting him to come and see her on
- the morrow; using very few words, and explaining nothing. She would
- explain everything face to face.
- XX
- ON the morrow, in the afternoon, she heard his voice at the door, and his
- step in the hall. She received him in the big, bright front parlour, and
- she instructed the servant that if any one should call she was
- particularly engaged. She was not afraid of her father’s coming in, for
- at that hour he was always driving about town. When Morris stood there
- before her, the first thing that she was conscious of was that he was
- even more beautiful to look at than fond recollection had painted him;
- the next was that he had pressed her in his arms. When she was free
- again it appeared to her that she had now indeed thrown herself into the
- gulf of defiance, and even, for an instant, that she had been married to
- him.
- He told her that she had been very cruel, and had made him very unhappy;
- and Catherine felt acutely the difficulty of her destiny, which forced
- her to give pain in such opposite quarters. But she wished that, instead
- of reproaches, however tender, he would give her help; he was certainly
- wise enough, and clever enough, to invent some issue from their troubles.
- She expressed this belief, and Morris received the assurance as if he
- thought it natural; but he interrogated, at first—as was natural
- too—rather than committed himself to marking out a course.
- “You should not have made me wait so long,” he said. “I don’t know how I
- have been living; every hour seemed like years. You should have decided
- sooner.”
- “Decided?” Catherine asked.
- “Decided whether you would keep me or give me up.”
- “Oh, Morris,” she cried, with a long tender murmur, “I never thought of
- giving you up!”
- “What, then, were you waiting for?” The young man was ardently logical.
- “I thought my father might—might—” and she hesitated.
- “Might see how unhappy you were?”
- “Oh no! But that he might look at it differently.”
- “And now you have sent for me to tell me that at last he does so. Is
- that it?”
- This hypothetical optimism gave the poor girl a pang. “No, Morris,” she
- said solemnly, “he looks at it still in the same way.”
- “Then why have you sent for me?”
- “Because I wanted to see you!” cried Catherine piteously.
- “That’s an excellent reason, surely. But did you want to look at me
- only? Have you nothing to tell me?”
- His beautiful persuasive eyes were fixed upon her face, and she wondered
- what answer would be noble enough to make to such a gaze as that. For a
- moment her own eyes took it in, and then—“I _did_ want to look at you!”
- she said gently. But after this speech, most inconsistently, she hid her
- face.
- Morris watched her for a moment, attentively. “Will you marry me
- to-morrow?” he asked suddenly.
- “To-morrow?”
- “Next week, then. Any time within a month.”
- “Isn’t it better to wait?” said Catherine.
- “To wait for what?”
- She hardly knew for what; but this tremendous leap alarmed her. “Till we
- have thought about it a little more.”
- He shook his head, sadly and reproachfully. “I thought you had been
- thinking about it these three weeks. Do you want to turn it over in your
- mind for five years? You have given me more than time enough. My poor
- girl,” he added in a moment, “you are not sincere!”
- Catherine coloured from brow to chin, and her eyes filled with tears.
- “Oh, how can you say that?” she murmured.
- “Why, you must take me or leave me,” said Morris, very reasonably. “You
- can’t please your father and me both; you must choose between us.”
- “I have chosen you!” she said passionately.
- “Then marry me next week.”
- She stood gazing at him. “Isn’t there any other way?”
- “None that I know of for arriving at the same result. If there is, I
- should be happy to hear of it.”
- Catherine could think of nothing of the kind, and Morris’s luminosity
- seemed almost pitiless. The only thing she could think of was that her
- father might, after all, come round, and she articulated, with an awkward
- sense of her helplessness in doing so, a wish that this miracle might
- happen.
- “Do you think it is in the least degree likely?” Morris asked.
- “It would be, if he could only know you!”
- “He can know me if he will. What is to prevent it?”
- “His ideas, his reasons,” said Catherine. “They are so—so terribly
- strong.” She trembled with the recollection of them yet.
- “Strong?” cried Morris. “I would rather you should think them weak.”
- “Oh, nothing about my father is weak!” said the girl.
- Morris turned away, walking to the window, where he stood looking out.
- “You are terribly afraid of him!” he remarked at last.
- She felt no impulse to deny it, because she had no shame in it; for if it
- was no honour to herself, at least it was an honour to him. “I suppose I
- must be,” she said simply.
- “Then you don’t love me—not as I love you. If you fear your father more
- than you love me, then your love is not what I hoped it was.”
- “Ah, my friend!” she said, going to him.
- “Do _I_ fear anything?” he demanded, turning round on her. “For your
- sake what am I not ready to face?”
- “You are noble—you are brave!” she answered, stopping short at a distance
- that was almost respectful.
- “Small good it does me, if you are so timid.”
- “I don’t think that I am—_really_,” said Catherine.
- “I don’t know what you mean by ‘really.’ It is really enough to make us
- miserable.”
- “I should be strong enough to wait—to wait a long time.”
- “And suppose after a long time your father should hate me worse than
- ever?”
- “He wouldn’t—he couldn’t!”
- “He would be touched by my fidelity? Is that what you mean? If he is so
- easily touched, then why should you be afraid of him?”
- This was much to the point, and Catherine was struck by it. “I will try
- not to be,” she said. And she stood there submissively, the image, in
- advance, of a dutiful and responsible wife. This image could not fail to
- recommend itself to Morris Townsend, and he continued to give proof of
- the high estimation in which he held her. It could only have been at the
- prompting of such a sentiment that he presently mentioned to her that the
- course recommended by Mrs. Penniman was an immediate union, regardless of
- consequences.
- “Yes, Aunt Penniman would like that,” Catherine said simply—and yet with
- a certain shrewdness. It must, however, have been in pure simplicity,
- and from motives quite untouched by sarcasm, that, a few moments after,
- she went on to say to Morris that her father had given her a message for
- him. It was quite on her conscience to deliver this message, and had the
- mission been ten times more painful she would have as scrupulously
- performed it. “He told me to tell you—to tell you very distinctly, and
- directly from himself, that if I marry without his consent, I shall not
- inherit a penny of his fortune. He made a great point of this. He
- seemed to think—he seemed to think—”
- Morris flushed, as any young man of spirit might have flushed at an
- imputation of baseness.
- “What did he seem to think?”
- “That it would make a difference.”
- “It _will_ make a difference—in many things. We shall be by many
- thousands of dollars the poorer; and that is a great difference. But it
- will make none in my affection.”
- “We shall not want the money,” said Catherine; “for you know I have a
- good deal myself.”
- “Yes, my dear girl, I know you have something. And he can’t touch that!”
- “He would never,” said Catherine. “My mother left it to me.”
- Morris was silent a while. “He was very positive about this, was he?” he
- asked at last. “He thought such a message would annoy me terribly, and
- make me throw off the mask, eh?”
- “I don’t know what he thought,” said Catherine wearily.
- “Please tell him that I care for his message as much as for that!” And
- Morris snapped his fingers sonorously.
- “I don’t think I could tell him that.”
- “Do you know you sometimes disappoint me?” said Morris.
- “I should think I might. I disappoint every one—father and Aunt
- Penniman.”
- “Well, it doesn’t matter with me, because I am fonder of you than they
- are.”
- “Yes, Morris,” said the girl, with her imagination—what there was of
- it—swimming in this happy truth, which seemed, after all, invidious to no
- one.
- “Is it your belief that he will stick to it—stick to it for ever, to this
- idea of disinheriting you?—that your goodness and patience will never
- wear out his cruelty?”
- “The trouble is that if I marry you, he will think I am not good. He
- will think that a proof.”
- “Ah, then, he will never forgive you!”
- This idea, sharply expressed by Morris’s handsome lips, renewed for a
- moment, to the poor girl’s temporarily pacified conscience, all its
- dreadful vividness. “Oh, you must love me very much!” she cried.
- “There is no doubt of that, my dear!” her lover rejoined. “You don’t
- like that word ‘disinherited,’” he added in a moment.
- “It isn’t the money; it is that he should—that he should feel so.”
- “I suppose it seems to you a kind of curse,” said Morris. “It must be
- very dismal. But don’t you think,” he went on presently, “that if you
- were to try to be very clever, and to set rightly about it, you might in
- the end conjure it away? Don’t you think,” he continued further, in a
- tone of sympathetic speculation, “that a really clever woman, in your
- place, might bring him round at last? Don’t you think?”
- Here, suddenly, Morris was interrupted; these ingenious inquiries had not
- reached Catherine’s ears. The terrible word “disinheritance,” with all
- its impressive moral reprobation, was still ringing there; seemed indeed
- to gather force as it lingered. The mortal chill of her situation struck
- more deeply into her child-like heart, and she was overwhelmed by a
- feeling of loneliness and danger. But her refuge was there, close to
- her, and she put out her hands to grasp it. “Ah, Morris,” she said, with
- a shudder, “I will marry you as soon as you please.” And she surrendered
- herself, leaning her head on his shoulder.
- “My dear good girl!” he exclaimed, looking down at his prize. And then
- he looked up again, rather vaguely, with parted lips and lifted eyebrows.
- XXI
- DR. SLOPER very soon imparted his conviction to Mrs. Almond, in the same
- terms in which he had announced it to himself. “She’s going to stick, by
- Jove! she’s going to stick.”
- “Do you mean that she is going to marry him?” Mrs. Almond inquired.
- “I don’t know that; but she is not going to break down. She is going to
- drag out the engagement, in the hope of making me relent.”
- “And shall you not relent?”
- “Shall a geometrical proposition relent? I am not so superficial.”
- “Doesn’t geometry treat of surfaces?” asked Mrs. Almond, who, as we know,
- was clever, smiling.
- “Yes; but it treats of them profoundly. Catherine and her young man are
- my surfaces; I have taken their measure.”
- “You speak as if it surprised you.”
- “It is immense; there will be a great deal to observe.”
- “You are shockingly cold-blooded!” said Mrs. Almond.
- “I need to be with all this hot blood about me. Young Townsend indeed is
- cool; I must allow him that merit.”
- “I can’t judge him,” Mrs. Almond answered; “but I am not at all surprised
- at Catherine.”
- “I confess I am a little; she must have been so deucedly divided and
- bothered.”
- “Say it amuses you outright! I don’t see why it should be such a joke
- that your daughter adores you.”
- “It is the point where the adoration stops that I find it interesting to
- fix.”
- “It stops where the other sentiment begins.”
- “Not at all—that would be simple enough. The two things are extremely
- mixed up, and the mixture is extremely odd. It will produce some third
- element, and that’s what I am waiting to see. I wait with suspense—with
- positive excitement; and that is a sort of emotion that I didn’t suppose
- Catherine would ever provide for me. I am really very much obliged to
- her.”
- “She will cling,” said Mrs. Almond; “she will certainly cling.”
- “Yes; as I say, she will stick.”
- “Cling is prettier. That’s what those very simple natures always do, and
- nothing could be simpler than Catherine. She doesn’t take many
- impressions; but when she takes one she keeps it. She is like a copper
- kettle that receives a dent; you may polish up the kettle, but you can’t
- efface the mark.”
- “We must try and polish up Catherine,” said the Doctor. “I will take her
- to Europe.”
- “She won’t forget him in Europe.”
- “He will forget her, then.”
- Mrs. Almond looked grave. “Should you really like that?”
- “Extremely!” said the Doctor.
- Mrs. Penniman, meanwhile, lost little time in putting herself again in
- communication with Morris Townsend. She requested him to favour her with
- another interview, but she did not on this occasion select an oyster
- saloon as the scene of their meeting. She proposed that he should join
- her at the door of a certain church, after service on Sunday afternoon,
- and she was careful not to appoint the place of worship which she usually
- visited, and where, as she said, the congregation would have spied upon
- her. She picked out a less elegant resort, and on issuing from its
- portal at the hour she had fixed she saw the young man standing apart.
- She offered him no recognition till she had crossed the street and he had
- followed her to some distance. Here, with a smile—“Excuse my apparent
- want of cordiality,” she said. “You know what to believe about that.
- Prudence before everything.” And on his asking her in what direction
- they should walk, “Where we shall be least observed,” she murmured.
- Morris was not in high good-humour, and his response to this speech was
- not particularly gallant. “I don’t flatter myself we shall be much
- observed anywhere.” Then he turned recklessly toward the centre of the
- town. “I hope you have come to tell me that he has knocked under,” he
- went on.
- “I am afraid I am not altogether a harbinger of good; and yet, too, I am
- to a certain extent a messenger of peace. I have been thinking a great
- deal, Mr. Townsend,” said Mrs. Penniman.
- “You think too much.”
- “I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active.
- When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my
- famous headaches—a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen
- carries her crown. Would you believe that I have one now? I wouldn’t,
- however, have missed our rendezvous for anything. I have something very
- important to tell you.”
- “Well, let’s have it,” said Morris.
- “I was perhaps a little headlong the other day in advising you to marry
- immediately. I have been thinking it over, and now I see it just a
- little differently.”
- “You seem to have a great many different ways of seeing the same object.”
- “Their number is infinite!” said Mrs. Penniman, in a tone which seemed to
- suggest that this convenient faculty was one of her brightest attributes.
- “I recommend you to take one way and stick to it,” Morris replied.
- “Ah! but it isn’t easy to choose. My imagination is never quiet, never
- satisfied. It makes me a bad adviser, perhaps; but it makes me a capital
- friend!”
- “A capital friend who gives bad advice!” said Morris.
- “Not intentionally—and who hurries off, at every risk, to make the most
- humble excuses!”
- “Well, what do you advise me now?”
- “To be very patient; to watch and wait.”
- “And is that bad advice or good?”
- “That is not for me to say,” Mrs. Penniman rejoined, with some dignity.
- “I only pretend it’s sincere.”
- “And will you come to me next week and recommend something different and
- equally sincere?”
- “I may come to you next week and tell you that I am in the streets!”
- “In the streets?”
- “I have had a terrible scene with my brother, and he threatens, if
- anything happens, to turn me out of the house. You know I am a poor
- woman.”
- Morris had a speculative idea that she had a little property; but he
- naturally did not press this.
- “I should be very sorry to see you suffer martyrdom for me,” he said.
- “But you make your brother out a regular Turk.”
- Mrs. Penniman hesitated a little.
- “I certainly do not regard Austin as a satisfactory Christian.”
- “And am I to wait till he is converted?”
- “Wait, at any rate, till he is less violent. Bide your time, Mr.
- Townsend; remember the prize is great!”
- Morris walked along some time in silence, tapping the railings and
- gateposts very sharply with his stick.
- “You certainly are devilish inconsistent!” he broke out at last. “I have
- already got Catherine to consent to a private marriage.”
- Mrs. Penniman was indeed inconsistent, for at this news she gave a little
- jump of gratification.
- “Oh! when and where?” she cried. And then she stopped short.
- Morris was a little vague about this.
- “That isn’t fixed; but she consents. It’s deuced awkward, now, to back
- out.”
- Mrs. Penniman, as I say, had stopped short; and she stood there with her
- eyes fixed brilliantly on her companion.
- “Mr. Townsend,” she proceeded, “shall I tell you something? Catherine
- loves you so much that you may do anything.”
- This declaration was slightly ambiguous, and Morris opened his eyes.
- “I am happy to hear it! But what do you mean by ‘anything’?”
- “You may postpone—you may change about; she won’t think the worse of
- you.”
- Morris stood there still, with his raised eyebrows; then he said simply
- and rather dryly—“Ah!” After this he remarked to Mrs. Penniman that if
- she walked so slowly she would attract notice, and he succeeded, after a
- fashion, in hurrying her back to the domicile of which her tenure had
- become so insecure.
- XXII
- HE had slightly misrepresented the matter in saying that Catherine had
- consented to take the great step. We left her just now declaring that
- she would burn her ships behind her; but Morris, after having elicited
- this declaration, had become conscious of good reasons for not taking it
- up. He avoided, gracefully enough, fixing a day, though he left her
- under the impression that he had his eye on one. Catherine may have had
- her difficulties; but those of her circumspect suitor are also worthy of
- consideration. The prize was certainly great; but it was only to be won
- by striking the happy mean between precipitancy and caution. It would be
- all very well to take one’s jump and trust to Providence; Providence was
- more especially on the side of clever people, and clever people were
- known by an indisposition to risk their bones. The ultimate reward of a
- union with a young woman who was both unattractive and impoverished ought
- to be connected with immediate disadvantages by some very palpable chain.
- Between the fear of losing Catherine and her possible fortune altogether,
- and the fear of taking her too soon and finding this possible fortune as
- void of actuality as a collection of emptied bottles, it was not
- comfortable for Morris Townsend to choose; a fact that should be
- remembered by readers disposed to judge harshly of a young man who may
- have struck them as making but an indifferently successful use of fine
- natural parts. He had not forgotten that in any event Catherine had her
- own ten thousand a year; he had devoted an abundance of meditation to
- this circumstance. But with his fine parts he rated himself high, and he
- had a perfectly definite appreciation of his value, which seemed to him
- inadequately represented by the sum I have mentioned. At the same time
- he reminded himself that this sum was considerable, that everything is
- relative, and that if a modest income is less desirable than a large one,
- the complete absence of revenue is nowhere accounted an advantage. These
- reflexions gave him plenty of occupation, and made it necessary that he
- should trim his sail. Dr. Sloper’s opposition was the unknown quantity
- in the problem he had to work out. The natural way to work it out was by
- marrying Catherine; but in mathematics there are many short cuts, and
- Morris was not without a hope that he should yet discover one. When
- Catherine took him at his word and consented to renounce the attempt to
- mollify her father, he drew back skilfully enough, as I have said, and
- kept the wedding-day still an open question. Her faith in his sincerity
- was so complete that she was incapable of suspecting that he was playing
- with her; her trouble just now was of another kind. The poor girl had an
- admirable sense of honour; and from the moment she had brought herself to
- the point of violating her father’s wish, it seemed to her that she had
- no right to enjoy his protection. It was on her conscience that she
- ought to live under his roof only so long as she conformed to his wisdom.
- There was a great deal of glory in such a position, but poor Catherine
- felt that she had forfeited her claim to it. She had cast her lot with a
- young man against whom he had solemnly warned her, and broken the
- contract under which he provided her with a happy home. She could not
- give up the young man, so she must leave the home; and the sooner the
- object of her preference offered her another the sooner her situation
- would lose its awkward twist. This was close reasoning; but it was
- commingled with an infinite amount of merely instinctive penitence.
- Catherine’s days at this time were dismal, and the weight of some of her
- hours was almost more than she could bear. Her father never looked at
- her, never spoke to her. He knew perfectly what he was about, and this
- was part of a plan. She looked at him as much as she dared (for she was
- afraid of seeming to offer herself to his observation), and she pitied
- him for the sorrow she had brought upon him. She held up her head and
- busied her hands, and went about her daily occupations; and when the
- state of things in Washington Square seemed intolerable, she closed her
- eyes and indulged herself with an intellectual vision of the man for
- whose sake she had broken a sacred law. Mrs. Penniman, of the three
- persons in Washington Square, had much the most of the manner that
- belongs to a great crisis. If Catherine was quiet, she was quietly
- quiet, as I may say, and her pathetic effects, which there was no one to
- notice, were entirely unstudied and unintended. If the Doctor was stiff
- and dry and absolutely indifferent to the presence of his companions, it
- was so lightly, neatly, easily done, that you would have had to know him
- well to discover that, on the whole, he rather enjoyed having to be so
- disagreeable. But Mrs. Penniman was elaborately reserved and
- significantly silent; there was a richer rustle in the very deliberate
- movements to which she confined herself, and when she occasionally spoke,
- in connexion with some very trivial event, she had the air of meaning
- something deeper than what she said. Between Catherine and her father
- nothing had passed since the evening she went to speak to him in his
- study. She had something to say to him—it seemed to her she ought to say
- it; but she kept it back, for fear of irritating him. He also had
- something to say to her; but he was determined not to speak first. He
- was interested, as we know, in seeing how, if she were left to herself,
- she would “stick.” At last she told him she had seen Morris Townsend
- again, and that their relations remained quite the same.
- “I think we shall marry—before very long. And probably, meanwhile, I
- shall see him rather often; about once a week, not more.”
- The Doctor looked at her coldly from head to foot, as if she had been a
- stranger. It was the first time his eyes had rested on her for a week,
- which was fortunate, if that was to be their expression. “Why not three
- times a day?” he asked. “What prevents your meeting as often as you
- choose?”
- She turned away a moment; there were tears in her eyes. Then she said,
- “It is better once a week.”
- “I don’t see how it is better. It is as bad as it can be. If you
- flatter yourself that I care for little modifications of that sort, you
- are very much mistaken. It is as wrong of you to see him once a week as
- it would be to see him all day long. Not that it matters to me,
- however.”
- Catherine tried to follow these words, but they seemed to lead towards a
- vague horror from which she recoiled. “I think we shall marry pretty
- soon,” she repeated at last.
- Her father gave her his dreadful look again, as if she were some one
- else. “Why do you tell me that? It’s no concern of mine.”
- “Oh, father!” she broke out, “don’t you care, even if you do feel so?”
- “Not a button. Once you marry, it’s quite the same to me when or where
- or why you do it; and if you think to compound for your folly by hoisting
- your flag in this way, you may spare yourself the trouble.”
- With this he turned away. But the next day he spoke to her of his own
- accord, and his manner was somewhat changed. “Shall you be married
- within the next four or five months?” he asked.
- “I don’t know, father,” said Catherine. “It is not very easy for us to
- make up our minds.”
- “Put it off, then, for six months, and in the meantime I will take you to
- Europe. I should like you very much to go.”
- It gave her such delight, after his words of the day before, to hear that
- he should “like” her to do something, and that he still had in his heart
- any of the tenderness of preference, that she gave a little exclamation
- of joy. But then she became conscious that Morris was not included in
- this proposal, and that—as regards really going—she would greatly prefer
- to remain at home with him. But she blushed, none the less, more
- comfortably than she had done of late. “It would be delightful to go to
- Europe,” she remarked, with a sense that the idea was not original, and
- that her tone was not all it might be.
- “Very well, then, we will go. Pack up your clothes.”
- “I had better tell Mr. Townsend,” said Catherine.
- Her father fixed his cold eyes upon her. “If you mean that you had
- better ask his leave, all that remains to me is to hope he will give it.”
- The girl was sharply touched by the pathetic ring of the words; it was
- the most calculated, the most dramatic little speech the Doctor had ever
- uttered. She felt that it was a great thing for her, under the
- circumstances, to have this fine opportunity of showing him her respect;
- and yet there was something else that she felt as well, and that she
- presently expressed. “I sometimes think that if I do what you dislike so
- much, I ought not to stay with you.”
- “To stay with me?”
- “If I live with you, I ought to obey you.”
- “If that’s your theory, it’s certainly mine,” said the Doctor, with a dry
- laugh.
- “But if I don’t obey you, I ought not to live with you—to enjoy your
- kindness and protection.”
- This striking argument gave the Doctor a sudden sense of having
- underestimated his daughter; it seemed even more than worthy of a young
- woman who had revealed the quality of unaggressive obstinacy. But it
- displeased him—displeased him deeply, and he signified as much. “That
- idea is in very bad taste,” he said. “Did you get it from Mr. Townsend?”
- “Oh no; it’s my own!” said Catherine eagerly.
- “Keep it to yourself, then,” her father answered, more than ever
- determined she should go to Europe.
- XXIII
- IF Morris Townsend was not to be included in this journey, no more was
- Mrs. Penniman, who would have been thankful for an invitation, but who
- (to do her justice) bore her disappointment in a perfectly ladylike
- manner. “I should enjoy seeing the works of Raphael and the ruins—the
- ruins of the Pantheon,” she said to Mrs. Almond; “but, on the other hand,
- I shall not be sorry to be alone and at peace for the next few months in
- Washington Square. I want rest; I have been through so much in the last
- four months.” Mrs. Almond thought it rather cruel that her brother
- should not take poor Lavinia abroad; but she easily understood that, if
- the purpose of his expedition was to make Catherine forget her lover, it
- was not in his interest to give his daughter this young man’s best friend
- as a companion. “If Lavinia had not been so foolish, she might visit the
- ruins of the Pantheon,” she said to herself; and she continued to regret
- her sister’s folly, even though the latter assured her that she had often
- heard the relics in question most satisfactorily described by Mr.
- Penniman. Mrs. Penniman was perfectly aware that her brother’s motive in
- undertaking a foreign tour was to lay a trap for Catherine’s constancy;
- and she imparted this conviction very frankly to her niece.
- “He thinks it will make you forget Morris,” she said (she always called
- the young man “Morris” now); “out of sight, out of mind, you know. He
- thinks that all the things you will see over there will drive him out of
- your thoughts.”
- Catherine looked greatly alarmed. “If he thinks that, I ought to tell
- him beforehand.”
- Mrs. Penniman shook her head. “Tell him afterwards, my dear! After he
- has had all the trouble and the expense! That’s the way to serve him.”
- And she added, in a softer key, that it must be delightful to think of
- those who love us among the ruins of the Pantheon.
- Her father’s displeasure had cost the girl, as we know, a great deal of
- deep-welling sorrow—sorrow of the purest and most generous kind, without
- a touch of resentment or rancour; but for the first time, after he had
- dismissed with such contemptuous brevity her apology for being a charge
- upon him, there was a spark of anger in her grief. She had felt his
- contempt; it had scorched her; that speech about her bad taste made her
- ears burn for three days. During this period she was less considerate;
- she had an idea—a rather vague one, but it was agreeable to her sense of
- injury—that now she was absolved from penance, and might do what she
- chose. She chose to write to Morris Townsend to meet her in the Square
- and take her to walk about the town. If she were going to Europe out of
- respect to her father, she might at least give herself this satisfaction.
- She felt in every way at present more free and more resolute; there was a
- force that urged her. Now at last, completely and unreservedly, her
- passion possessed her.
- Morris met her at last, and they took a long walk. She told him
- immediately what had happened—that her father wished to take her away.
- It would be for six months, to Europe; she would do absolutely what
- Morris should think best. She hoped inexpressibly that he would think it
- best she should stay at home. It was some time before he said what he
- thought: he asked, as they walked along, a great many questions. There
- was one that especially struck her; it seemed so incongruous.
- “Should you like to see all those celebrated things over there?”
- “Oh no, Morris!” said Catherine, quite deprecatingly.
- “Gracious Heaven, what a dull woman!” Morris exclaimed to himself.
- “He thinks I will forget you,” said Catherine: “that all these things
- will drive you out of my mind.”
- “Well, my dear, perhaps they will!”
- “Please don’t say that,” Catherine answered gently, as they walked along.
- “Poor father will be disappointed.”
- Morris gave a little laugh. “Yes, I verily believe that your poor father
- will be disappointed! But you will have seen Europe,” he added
- humorously. “What a take-in!”
- “I don’t care for seeing Europe,” Catherine said.
- “You ought to care, my dear. And it may mollify your father.”
- Catherine, conscious of her obstinacy, expected little of this, and could
- not rid herself of the idea that in going abroad and yet remaining firm,
- she should play her father a trick. “Don’t you think it would be a kind
- of deception?” she asked.
- “Doesn’t he want to deceive you?” cried Morris. “It will serve him
- right! I really think you had better go.”
- “And not be married for so long?”
- “Be married when you come back. You can buy your wedding clothes in
- Paris.” And then Morris, with great kindness of tone, explained his view
- of the matter. It would be a good thing that she should go; it would put
- them completely in the right. It would show they were reasonable and
- willing to wait. Once they were so sure of each other, they could afford
- to wait—what had they to fear? If there was a particle of chance that
- her father would be favourably affected by her going, that ought to
- settle it; for, after all, Morris was very unwilling to be the cause of
- her being disinherited. It was not for himself, it was for her and for
- her children. He was willing to wait for her; it would be hard, but he
- could do it. And over there, among beautiful scenes and noble monuments,
- perhaps the old gentleman would be softened; such things were supposed to
- exert a humanising influence. He might be touched by her gentleness, her
- patience, her willingness to make any sacrifice but _that_ one; and if
- she should appeal to him some day, in some celebrated spot—in Italy, say,
- in the evening; in Venice, in a gondola, by moonlight—if she should be a
- little clever about it and touch the right chord, perhaps he would fold
- her in his arms and tell her that he forgave her. Catherine was
- immensely struck with this conception of the affair, which seemed
- eminently worthy of her lover’s brilliant intellect; though she viewed it
- askance in so far as it depended upon her own powers of execution. The
- idea of being “clever” in a gondola by moonlight appeared to her to
- involve elements of which her grasp was not active. But it was settled
- between them that she should tell her father that she was ready to follow
- him obediently anywhere, making the mental reservation that she loved
- Morris Townsend more than ever.
- She informed the Doctor she was ready to embark, and he made rapid
- arrangements for this event. Catherine had many farewells to make, but
- with only two of them are we actively concerned. Mrs. Penniman took a
- discriminating view of her niece’s journey; it seemed to her very proper
- that Mr. Townsend’s destined bride should wish to embellish her mind by a
- foreign tour.
- “You leave him in good hands,” she said, pressing her lips to Catherine’s
- forehead. (She was very fond of kissing people’s foreheads; it was an
- involuntary expression of sympathy with the intellectual part.) “I shall
- see him often; I shall feel like one of the vestals of old, tending the
- sacred flame.”
- “You behave beautifully about not going with us,” Catherine answered, not
- presuming to examine this analogy.
- “It is my pride that keeps me up,” said Mrs. Penniman, tapping the body
- of her dress, which always gave forth a sort of metallic ring.
- Catherine’s parting with her lover was short, and few words were
- exchanged.
- “Shall I find you just the same when I come back?” she asked; though the
- question was not the fruit of scepticism.
- “The same—only more so!” said Morris, smiling.
- It does not enter into our scheme to narrate in detail Dr. Sloper’s
- proceedings in the eastern hemisphere. He made the grand tour of Europe,
- travelled in considerable splendour, and (as was to have been expected in
- a man of his high cultivation) found so much in art and antiquity to
- interest him, that he remained abroad, not for six months, but for
- twelve. Mrs. Penniman, in Washington Square, accommodated herself to his
- absence. She enjoyed her uncontested dominion in the empty house, and
- flattered herself that she made it more attractive to their friends than
- when her brother was at home. To Morris Townsend, at least, it would
- have appeared that she made it singularly attractive. He was altogether
- her most frequent visitor, and Mrs. Penniman was very fond of asking him
- to tea. He had his chair—a very easy one at the fireside in the back
- parlour (when the great mahogany sliding-doors, with silver knobs and
- hinges, which divided this apartment from its more formal neighbour, were
- closed), and he used to smoke cigars in the Doctor’s study, where he
- often spent an hour in turning over the curious collections of its absent
- proprietor. He thought Mrs. Penniman a goose, as we know; but he was no
- goose himself, and, as a young man of luxurious tastes and scanty
- resources, he found the house a perfect castle of indolence. It became
- for him a club with a single member. Mrs. Penniman saw much less of her
- sister than while the Doctor was at home; for Mrs. Almond had felt moved
- to tell her that she disapproved of her relations with Mr. Townsend. She
- had no business to be so friendly to a young man of whom their brother
- thought so meanly, and Mrs. Almond was surprised at her levity in
- foisting a most deplorable engagement upon Catherine.
- “Deplorable?” cried Lavinia. “He will make her a lovely husband!”
- “I don’t believe in lovely husbands,” said Mrs. Almond; “I only believe
- in good ones. If he marries her, and she comes into Austin’s money, they
- may get on. He will be an idle, amiable, selfish, and doubtless
- tolerably good-natured fellow. But if she doesn’t get the money and he
- finds himself tied to her, Heaven have mercy on her! He will have none.
- He will hate her for his disappointment, and take his revenge; he will be
- pitiless and cruel. Woe betide poor Catherine! I recommend you to talk
- a little with his sister; it’s a pity Catherine can’t marry _her_!”
- Mrs. Penniman had no appetite whatever for conversation with Mrs.
- Montgomery, whose acquaintance she made no trouble to cultivate; and the
- effect of this alarming forecast of her niece’s destiny was to make her
- think it indeed a thousand pities that Mr. Townsend’s generous nature
- should be embittered. Bright enjoyment was his natural element, and how
- could he be comfortable if there should prove to be nothing to enjoy? It
- became a fixed idea with Mrs. Penniman that he should yet enjoy her
- brother’s fortune, on which she had acuteness enough to perceive that her
- own claim was small.
- “If he doesn’t leave it to Catherine, it certainly won’t be to leave it
- to me,” she said.
- XXIV
- THE Doctor, during the first six months he was abroad, never spoke to his
- daughter of their little difference; partly on system, and partly because
- he had a great many other things to think about. It was idle to attempt
- to ascertain the state of her affections without direct inquiry, because,
- if she had not had an expressive manner among the familiar influences of
- home, she failed to gather animation from the mountains of Switzerland or
- the monuments of Italy. She was always her father’s docile and
- reasonable associate—going through their sight-seeing in deferential
- silence, never complaining of fatigue, always ready to start at the hour
- he had appointed over-night, making no foolish criticisms and indulging
- in no refinements of appreciation. “She is about as intelligent as the
- bundle of shawls,” the Doctor said; her main superiority being that while
- the bundle of shawls sometimes got lost, or tumbled out of the carriage,
- Catherine was always at her post, and had a firm and ample seat. But her
- father had expected this, and he was not constrained to set down her
- intellectual limitations as a tourist to sentimental depression; she had
- completely divested herself of the characteristics of a victim, and
- during the whole time that they were abroad she never uttered an audible
- sigh. He supposed she was in correspondence with Morris Townsend; but he
- held his peace about it, for he never saw the young man’s letters, and
- Catherine’s own missives were always given to the courier to post. She
- heard from her lover with considerable regularity, but his letters came
- enclosed in Mrs. Penniman’s; so that whenever the Doctor handed her a
- packet addressed in his sister’s hand, he was an involuntary instrument
- of the passion he condemned. Catherine made this reflexion, and six
- months earlier she would have felt bound to give him warning; but now she
- deemed herself absolved. There was a sore spot in her heart that his own
- words had made when once she spoke to him as she thought honour prompted;
- she would try and please him as far as she could, but she would never
- speak that way again. She read her lover’s letters in secret.
- One day at the end of the summer, the two travellers found themselves in
- a lonely valley of the Alps. They were crossing one of the passes, and
- on the long ascent they had got out of the carriage and had wandered much
- in advance. After a while the Doctor descried a footpath which, leading
- through a transverse valley, would bring them out, as he justly supposed,
- at a much higher point of the ascent. They followed this devious way,
- and finally lost the path; the valley proved very wild and rough, and
- their walk became rather a scramble. They were good walkers, however,
- and they took their adventure easily; from time to time they stopped,
- that Catherine might rest; and then she sat upon a stone and looked about
- her at the hard-featured rocks and the glowing sky. It was late in the
- afternoon, in the last of August; night was coming on, and, as they had
- reached a great elevation, the air was cold and sharp. In the west there
- was a great suffusion of cold, red light, which made the sides of the
- little valley look only the more rugged and dusky. During one of their
- pauses, her father left her and wandered away to some high place, at a
- distance, to get a view. He was out of sight; she sat there alone, in
- the stillness, which was just touched by the vague murmur, somewhere, of
- a mountain brook. She thought of Morris Townsend, and the place was so
- desolate and lonely that he seemed very far away. Her father remained
- absent a long time; she began to wonder what had become of him. But at
- last he reappeared, coming towards her in the clear twilight, and she got
- up, to go on. He made no motion to proceed, however, but came close to
- her, as if he had something to say. He stopped in front of her and stood
- looking at her, with eyes that had kept the light of the flushing
- snow-summits on which they had just been fixed. Then, abruptly, in a low
- tone, he asked her an unexpected question:
- “Have you given him up?”
- The question was unexpected, but Catherine was only superficially
- unprepared.
- “No, father!” she answered.
- He looked at her again for some moments, without speaking.
- “Does he write to you?” he asked.
- “Yes—about twice a month.”
- The Doctor looked up and down the valley, swinging his stick; then he
- said to her, in the same low tone:
- “I am very angry.”
- She wondered what he meant—whether he wished to frighten her. If he did,
- the place was well chosen; this hard, melancholy dell, abandoned by the
- summer light, made her feel her loneliness. She looked around her, and
- her heart grew cold; for a moment her fear was great. But she could
- think of nothing to say, save to murmur gently, “I am sorry.”
- “You try my patience,” her father went on, “and you ought to know what I
- am, I am not a very good man. Though I am very smooth externally, at
- bottom I am very passionate; and I assure you I can be very hard.”
- She could not think why he told her these things. Had he brought her
- there on purpose, and was it part of a plan? What was the plan?
- Catherine asked herself. Was it to startle her suddenly into a
- retractation—to take an advantage of her by dread? Dread of what? The
- place was ugly and lonely, but the place could do her no harm. There was
- a kind of still intensity about her father, which made him dangerous, but
- Catherine hardly went so far as to say to herself that it might be part
- of his plan to fasten his hand—the neat, fine, supple hand of a
- distinguished physician—in her throat. Nevertheless, she receded a step.
- “I am sure you can be anything you please,” she said. And it was her
- simple belief.
- “I am very angry,” he replied, more sharply.
- “Why has it taken you so suddenly?”
- “It has not taken me suddenly. I have been raging inwardly for the last
- six months. But just now this seemed a good place to flare out. It’s so
- quiet, and we are alone.”
- “Yes, it’s very quiet,” said Catherine vaguely, looking about her.
- “Won’t you come back to the carriage?”
- “In a moment. Do you mean that in all this time you have not yielded an
- inch?”
- “I would if I could, father; but I can’t.”
- The Doctor looked round him too. “Should you like to be left in such a
- place as this, to starve?”
- “What do you mean?” cried the girl.
- “That will be your fate—that’s how he will leave you.”
- He would not touch her, but he had touched Morris. The warmth came back
- to her heart. “That is not true, father,” she broke out, “and you ought
- not to say it! It is not right, and it’s not true!”
- He shook his head slowly. “No, it’s not right, because you won’t believe
- it. But it _is_ true. Come back to the carriage.”
- He turned away, and she followed him; he went faster, and was presently
- much in advance. But from time to time he stopped, without turning
- round, to let her keep up with him, and she made her way forward with
- difficulty, her heart beating with the excitement of having for the first
- time spoken to him in violence. By this time it had grown almost dark,
- and she ended by losing sight of him. But she kept her course, and after
- a little, the valley making a sudden turn, she gained the road, where the
- carriage stood waiting. In it sat her father, rigid and silent; in
- silence, too, she took her place beside him.
- It seemed to her, later, in looking back upon all this, that for days
- afterwards not a word had been exchanged between them. The scene had
- been a strange one, but it had not permanently affected her feeling
- towards her father, for it was natural, after all, that he should
- occasionally make a scene of some kind, and he had let her alone for six
- months. The strangest part of it was that he had said he was not a good
- man; Catherine wondered a great deal what he had meant by that. The
- statement failed to appeal to her credence, and it was not grateful to
- any resentment that she entertained. Even in the utmost bitterness that
- she might feel, it would give her no satisfaction to think him less
- complete. Such a saying as that was a part of his great subtlety—men so
- clever as he might say anything and mean anything. And as to his being
- hard, that surely, in a man, was a virtue.
- He let her alone for six months more—six months during which she
- accommodated herself without a protest to the extension of their tour.
- But he spoke again at the end of this time; it was at the very last, the
- night before they embarked for New York, in the hotel at Liverpool. They
- had been dining together in a great dim, musty sitting-room; and then the
- cloth had been removed, and the Doctor walked slowly up and down.
- Catherine at last took her candle to go to bed, but her father motioned
- her to stay.
- “What do you mean to do when you get home?” he asked, while she stood
- there with her candle in her hand.
- “Do you mean about Mr. Townsend?”
- “About Mr. Townsend.”
- “We shall probably marry.”
- The Doctor took several turns again while she waited. “Do you hear from
- him as much as ever?”
- “Yes; twice a month,” said Catherine promptly.
- “And does he always talk about marriage?”
- “Oh yes! That is, he talks about other things too, but he always says
- something about that.”
- “I am glad to hear he varies his subjects; his letters might otherwise be
- monotonous.”
- “He writes beautifully,” said Catherine, who was very glad of a chance to
- say it.
- “They always write beautifully. However, in a given case that doesn’t
- diminish the merit. So, as soon as you arrive, you are going off with
- him?”
- This seemed a rather gross way of putting it, and something that there
- was of dignity in Catherine resented it. “I cannot tell you till we
- arrive,” she said.
- “That’s reasonable enough,” her father answered. “That’s all I ask of
- you—that you _do_ tell me, that you give me definite notice. When a poor
- man is to lose his only child, he likes to have an inkling of it
- beforehand.”
- “Oh, father, you will not lose me!” Catherine said, spilling her
- candle-wax.
- “Three days before will do,” he went on, “if you are in a position to be
- positive then. He ought to be very thankful to me, do you know. I have
- done a mighty good thing for him in taking you abroad; your value is
- twice as great, with all the knowledge and taste that you have acquired.
- A year ago, you were perhaps a little limited—a little rustic; but now
- you have seen everything, and appreciated everything, and you will be a
- most entertaining companion. We have fattened the sheep for him before
- he kills it!” Catherine turned away, and stood staring at the blank door.
- “Go to bed,” said her father; “and, as we don’t go aboard till noon, you
- may sleep late. We shall probably have a most uncomfortable voyage.”
- XXV
- THE voyage was indeed uncomfortable, and Catherine, on arriving in New
- York, had not the compensation of “going off,” in her father’s phrase,
- with Morris Townsend. She saw him, however, the day after she landed;
- and, in the meantime, he formed a natural subject of conversation between
- our heroine and her Aunt Lavinia, with whom, the night she disembarked,
- the girl was closeted for a long time before either lady retired to rest.
- “I have seen a great deal of him,” said Mrs. Penniman. “He is not very
- easy to know. I suppose you think you know him; but you don’t, my dear.
- You will some day; but it will only be after you have lived with him. I
- may almost say _I_ have lived with him,” Mrs. Penniman proceeded, while
- Catherine stared. “I think I know him now; I have had such remarkable
- opportunities. You will have the same—or rather, you will have better!”
- and Aunt Lavinia smiled. “Then you will see what I mean. It’s a
- wonderful character, full of passion and energy, and just as true!”
- Catherine listened with a mixture of interest and apprehension. Aunt
- Lavinia was intensely sympathetic, and Catherine, for the past year,
- while she wandered through foreign galleries and churches, and rolled
- over the smoothness of posting roads, nursing the thoughts that never
- passed her lips, had often longed for the company of some intelligent
- person of her own sex. To tell her story to some kind woman—at moments
- it seemed to her that this would give her comfort, and she had more than
- once been on the point of taking the landlady, or the nice young person
- from the dressmaker’s, into her confidence. If a woman had been near her
- she would on certain occasions have treated such a companion to a fit of
- weeping; and she had an apprehension that, on her return, this would form
- her response to Aunt Lavinia’s first embrace. In fact, however, the two
- ladies had met, in Washington Square, without tears, and when they found
- themselves alone together a certain dryness fell upon the girl’s emotion.
- It came over her with a greater force that Mrs. Penniman had enjoyed a
- whole year of her lover’s society, and it was not a pleasure to her to
- hear her aunt explain and interpret the young man, speaking of him as if
- her own knowledge of him were supreme. It was not that Catherine was
- jealous; but her sense of Mrs. Penniman’s innocent falsity, which had
- lain dormant, began to haunt her again, and she was glad that she was
- safely at home. With this, however, it was a blessing to be able to talk
- of Morris, to sound his name, to be with a person who was not unjust to
- him.
- “You have been very kind to him,” said Catherine. “He has written me
- that, often. I shall never forget that, Aunt Lavinia.”
- “I have done what I could; it has been very little. To let him come and
- talk to me, and give him his cup of tea—that was all. Your Aunt Almond
- thought it was too much, and used to scold me terribly; but she promised
- me, at least, not to betray me.”
- “To betray you?”
- “Not to tell your father. He used to sit in your father’s study!” said
- Mrs. Penniman, with a little laugh.
- Catherine was silent a moment. This idea was disagreeable to her, and
- she was reminded again, with pain, of her aunt’s secretive habits.
- Morris, the reader may be informed, had had the tact not to tell her that
- he sat in her father’s study. He had known her but for a few months, and
- her aunt had known her for fifteen years; and yet he would not have made
- the mistake of thinking that Catherine would see the joke of the thing.
- “I am sorry you made him go into father’s room,” she said, after a while.
- “I didn’t make him go; he went himself. He liked to look at the books,
- and all those things in the glass cases. He knows all about them; he
- knows all about everything.”
- Catherine was silent again; then, “I wish he had found some employment,”
- she said.
- “He has found some employment! It’s beautiful news, and he told me to
- tell you as soon as you arrived. He has gone into partnership with a
- commission merchant. It was all settled, quite suddenly, a week ago.”
- This seemed to Catherine indeed beautiful news; it had a fine prosperous
- air. “Oh, I’m so glad!” she said; and now, for a moment, she was
- disposed to throw herself on Aunt Lavinia’s neck.
- “It’s much better than being under some one; and he has never been used
- to that,” Mrs. Penniman went on. “He is just as good as his partner—they
- are perfectly equal! You see how right he was to wait. I should like to
- know what your father can say now! They have got an office in Duane
- Street, and little printed cards; he brought me one to show me. I have
- got it in my room, and you shall see it to-morrow. That’s what he said
- to me the last time he was here—‘You see how right I was to wait!’ He
- has got other people under him, instead of being a subordinate. He could
- never be a subordinate; I have often told him I could never think of him
- in that way.”
- Catherine assented to this proposition, and was very happy to know that
- Morris was his own master; but she was deprived of the satisfaction of
- thinking that she might communicate this news in triumph to her father.
- Her father would care equally little whether Morris were established in
- business or transported for life. Her trunks had been brought into her
- room, and further reference to her lover was for a short time suspended,
- while she opened them and displayed to her aunt some of the spoils of
- foreign travel. These were rich and abundant; and Catherine had brought
- home a present to every one—to every one save Morris, to whom she had
- brought simply her undiverted heart. To Mrs. Penniman she had been
- lavishly generous, and Aunt Lavinia spent half an hour in unfolding and
- folding again, with little ejaculations of gratitude and taste. She
- marched about for some time in a splendid cashmere shawl, which Catherine
- had begged her to accept, settling it on her shoulders, and twisting down
- her head to see how low the point descended behind.
- “I shall regard it only as a loan,” she said. “I will leave it to you
- again when I die; or rather,” she added, kissing her niece again, “I will
- leave it to your first-born little girl!” And draped in her shawl, she
- stood there smiling.
- “You had better wait till she comes,” said Catherine.
- “I don’t like the way you say that,” Mrs. Penniman rejoined, in a moment.
- “Catherine, are you changed?”
- “No; I am the same.”
- “You have not swerved a line?”
- “I am exactly the same,” Catherine repeated, wishing her aunt were a
- little less sympathetic.
- “Well, I am glad!” and Mrs. Penniman surveyed her cashmere in the glass.
- Then, “How is your father?” she asked in a moment, with her eyes on her
- niece. “Your letters were so meagre—I could never tell!”
- “Father is very well.”
- “Ah, you know what I mean,” said Mrs. Penniman, with a dignity to which
- the cashmere gave a richer effect. “Is he still implacable!”
- “Oh yes!”
- “Quite unchanged?”
- “He is, if possible, more firm.”
- Mrs. Penniman took off her great shawl, and slowly folded it up. “That
- is very bad. You had no success with your little project?”
- “What little project?”
- “Morris told me all about it. The idea of turning the tables on him, in
- Europe; of watching him, when he was agreeably impressed by some
- celebrated sight—he pretends to be so artistic, you know—and then just
- pleading with him and bringing him round.”
- “I never tried it. It was Morris’s idea; but if he had been with us, in
- Europe, he would have seen that father was never impressed in that way.
- He _is_ artistic—tremendously artistic; but the more celebrated places we
- visited, and the more he admired them, the less use it would have been to
- plead with him. They seemed only to make him more determined—more
- terrible,” said poor Catherine. “I shall never bring him round, and I
- expect nothing now.”
- “Well, I must say,” Mrs. Penniman answered, “I never supposed you were
- going to give it up.”
- “I have given it up. I don’t care now.”
- “You have grown very brave,” said Mrs. Penniman, with a short laugh. “I
- didn’t advise you to sacrifice your property.”
- “Yes, I am braver than I was. You asked me if I had changed; I have
- changed in that way. Oh,” the girl went on, “I have changed very much.
- And it isn’t my property. If _he_ doesn’t care for it, why should I?”
- Mrs. Penniman hesitated. “Perhaps he does care for it.”
- “He cares for it for my sake, because he doesn’t want to injure me. But
- he will know—he knows already—how little he need be afraid about that.
- Besides,” said Catherine, “I have got plenty of money of my own. We
- shall be very well off; and now hasn’t he got his business? I am
- delighted about that business.” She went on talking, showing a good deal
- of excitement as she proceeded. Her aunt had never seen her with just
- this manner, and Mrs. Penniman, observing her, set it down to foreign
- travel, which had made her more positive, more mature. She thought also
- that Catherine had improved in appearance; she looked rather handsome.
- Mrs. Penniman wondered whether Morris Townsend would be struck with that.
- While she was engaged in this speculation, Catherine broke out, with a
- certain sharpness, “Why are you so contradictory, Aunt Penniman? You
- seem to think one thing at one time, and another at another. A year ago,
- before I went away, you wished me not to mind about displeasing father;
- and now you seem to recommend me to take another line. You change about
- so.”
- This attack was unexpected, for Mrs. Penniman was not used, in any
- discussion, to seeing the war carried into her own country—possibly
- because the enemy generally had doubts of finding subsistence there. To
- her own consciousness, the flowery fields of her reason had rarely been
- ravaged by a hostile force. It was perhaps on this account that in
- defending them she was majestic rather than agile.
- “I don’t know what you accuse me of, save of being too deeply interested
- in your happiness. It is the first time I have been told I am
- capricious. That fault is not what I am usually reproached with.”
- “You were angry last year that I wouldn’t marry immediately, and now you
- talk about my winning my father over. You told me it would serve him
- right if he should take me to Europe for nothing. Well, he has taken me
- for nothing, and you ought to be satisfied. Nothing is changed—nothing
- but my feeling about father. I don’t mind nearly so much now. I have
- been as good as I could, but he doesn’t care. Now I don’t care either.
- I don’t know whether I have grown bad; perhaps I have. But I don’t care
- for that. I have come home to be married—that’s all I know. That ought
- to please you, unless you have taken up some new idea; you are so
- strange. You may do as you please; but you must never speak to me again
- about pleading with father. I shall never plead with him for anything;
- that is all over. He has put me off. I am come home to be married.”
- This was a more authoritative speech than she had ever heard on her
- niece’s lips, and Mrs. Penniman was proportionately startled. She was
- indeed a little awestruck, and the force of the girl’s emotion and
- resolution left her nothing to reply. She was easily frightened, and she
- always carried off her discomfiture by a concession; a concession which
- was often accompanied, as in the present case, by a little nervous laugh.
- XXVI
- IF she had disturbed her niece’s temper—she began from this moment
- forward to talk a good deal about Catherine’s temper, an article which up
- to that time had never been mentioned in connexion with our
- heroine—Catherine had opportunity, on the morrow, to recover her
- serenity. Mrs. Penniman had given her a message from Morris Townsend, to
- the effect that he would come and welcome her home on the day after her
- arrival. He came in the afternoon; but, as may be imagined, he was not
- on this occasion made free of Dr. Sloper’s study. He had been coming and
- going, for the past year, so comfortably and irresponsibly, that he had a
- certain sense of being wronged by finding himself reminded that he must
- now limit his horizon to the front parlour, which was Catherine’s
- particular province.
- “I am very glad you have come back,” he said; “it makes me very happy to
- see you again.” And he looked at her, smiling, from head to foot; though
- it did not appear, afterwards, that he agreed with Mrs. Penniman (who,
- womanlike, went more into details) in thinking her embellished.
- To Catherine he appeared resplendent; it was some time before she could
- believe again that this beautiful young man was her own exclusive
- property. They had a great deal of characteristic lovers’ talk—a soft
- exchange of inquiries and assurances. In these matters Morris had an
- excellent grace, which flung a picturesque interest even over the account
- of his début in the commission business—a subject as to which his
- companion earnestly questioned him. From time to time he got up from the
- sofa where they sat together, and walked about the room; after which he
- came back, smiling and passing his hand through his hair. He was
- unquiet, as was natural in a young man who has just been reunited to a
- long-absent mistress, and Catherine made the reflexion that she had never
- seen him so excited. It gave her pleasure, somehow, to note this fact.
- He asked her questions about her travels, to some of which she was unable
- to reply, for she had forgotten the names of places, and the order of her
- father’s journey. But for the moment she was so happy, so lifted up by
- the belief that her troubles at last were over, that she forgot to be
- ashamed of her meagre answers. It seemed to her now that she could marry
- him without the remnant of a scruple or a single tremor save those that
- belonged to joy. Without waiting for him to ask, she told him that her
- father had come back in exactly the same state of mind—that he had not
- yielded an inch.
- “We must not expect it now,” she said, “and we must do without it.”
- Morris sat looking and smiling. “My poor dear girl!” he exclaimed.
- “You mustn’t pity me,” said Catherine; “I don’t mind it now—I am used to
- it.”
- Morris continued to smile, and then he got up and walked about again.
- “You had better let me try him!”
- “Try to bring him over? You would only make him worse,” Catherine
- answered resolutely.
- “You say that because I managed it so badly before. But I should manage
- it differently now. I am much wiser; I have had a year to think of it.
- I have more tact.”
- “Is that what you have been thinking of for a year?”
- “Much of the time. You see, the idea sticks in my crop. I don’t like to
- be beaten.”
- “How are you beaten if we marry?”
- “Of course, I am not beaten on the main issue; but I am, don’t you see,
- on all the rest of it—on the question of my reputation, of my relations
- with your father, of my relations with my own children, if we should have
- any.”
- “We shall have enough for our children—we shall have enough for
- everything. Don’t you expect to succeed in business?”
- “Brilliantly, and we shall certainly be very comfortable. But it isn’t
- of the mere material comfort I speak; it is of the moral comfort,” said
- Morris—“of the intellectual satisfaction!”
- “I have great moral comfort now,” Catherine declared, very simply.
- “Of course you have. But with me it is different. I have staked my
- pride on proving to your father that he is wrong; and now that I am at
- the head of a flourishing business, I can deal with him as an equal. I
- have a capital plan—do let me go at him!”
- He stood before her with his bright face, his jaunty air, his hands in
- his pockets; and she got up, with her eyes resting on his own. “Please
- don’t, Morris; please don’t,” she said; and there was a certain mild, sad
- firmness in her tone which he heard for the first time. “We must ask no
- favours of him—we must ask nothing more. He won’t relent, and nothing
- good will come of it. I know it now—I have a very good reason.”
- “And pray; what is your reason?”
- She hesitated to bring it out, but at last it came. “He is not very fond
- of me!”
- “Oh, bother!” cried Morris angrily.
- “I wouldn’t say such a thing without being sure. I saw it, I felt it, in
- England, just before he came away. He talked to me one night—the last
- night; and then it came over me. You can tell when a person feels that
- way. I wouldn’t accuse him if he hadn’t made me feel that way. I don’t
- accuse him; I just tell you that that’s how it is. He can’t help it; we
- can’t govern our affections. Do I govern mine? mightn’t he say that to
- me? It’s because he is so fond of my mother, whom we lost so long ago.
- She was beautiful, and very, very brilliant; he is always thinking of
- her. I am not at all like her; Aunt Penniman has told me that. Of
- course, it isn’t my fault; but neither is it his fault. All I mean is,
- it’s true; and it’s a stronger reason for his never being reconciled than
- simply his dislike for you.”
- “‘Simply?’” cried Morris, with a laugh, “I am much obliged for that!”
- “I don’t mind about his disliking you now; I mind everything less. I
- feel differently; I feel separated from my father.”
- “Upon my word,” said Morris, “you are a queer family!”
- “Don’t say that—don’t say anything unkind,” the girl entreated. “You
- must be very kind to me now, because, Morris—because,” and she hesitated
- a moment—“because I have done a great deal for you.”
- “Oh, I know that, my dear!”
- She had spoken up to this moment without vehemence or outward sign of
- emotion, gently, reasoningly, only trying to explain. But her emotion
- had been ineffectually smothered, and it betrayed itself at last in the
- trembling of her voice. “It is a great thing to be separated like that
- from your father, when you have worshipped him before. It has made me
- very unhappy; or it would have made me so if I didn’t love you. You can
- tell when a person speaks to you as if—as if—”
- “As if what?”
- “As if they despised you!” said Catherine passionately. “He spoke that
- way the night before we sailed. It wasn’t much, but it was enough, and I
- thought of it on the voyage, all the time. Then I made up my mind. I
- will never ask him for anything again, or expect anything from him. It
- would not be natural now. We must be very happy together, and we must
- not seem to depend upon his forgiveness. And Morris, Morris, you must
- never despise me!”
- This was an easy promise to make, and Morris made it with fine effect.
- But for the moment he undertook nothing more onerous.
- XXVII
- THE Doctor, of course, on his return, had a good deal of talk with his
- sisters. He was at no great pains to narrate his travels or to
- communicate his impressions of distant lands to Mrs. Penniman, upon whom
- he contented himself with bestowing a memento of his enviable experience,
- in the shape of a velvet gown. But he conversed with her at some length
- about matters nearer home, and lost no time in assuring her that he was
- still an inflexible father.
- “I have no doubt you have seen a great deal of Mr. Townsend, and done
- your best to console him for Catherine’s absence,” he said. “I don’t ask
- you, and you needn’t deny it. I wouldn’t put the question to you for the
- world, and expose you to the inconvenience of having to—a—excogitate an
- answer. No one has betrayed you, and there has been no spy upon your
- proceedings. Elizabeth has told no tales, and has never mentioned you
- except to praise your good looks and good spirits. The thing is simply
- an inference of my own—an induction, as the philosophers say. It seems
- to me likely that you would have offered an asylum to an interesting
- sufferer. Mr. Townsend has been a good deal in the house; there is
- something in the house that tells me so. We doctors, you know, end by
- acquiring fine perceptions, and it is impressed upon my sensorium that he
- has sat in these chairs, in a very easy attitude, and warmed himself at
- that fire. I don’t grudge him the comfort of it; it is the only one he
- will ever enjoy at my expense. It seems likely, indeed, that I shall be
- able to economise at his own. I don’t know what you may have said to
- him, or what you may say hereafter; but I should like you to know that if
- you have encouraged him to believe that he will gain anything by hanging
- on, or that I have budged a hair’s-breadth from the position I took up a
- year ago, you have played him a trick for which he may exact reparation.
- I’m not sure that he may not bring a suit against you. Of course you
- have done it conscientiously; you have made yourself believe that I can
- be tired out. This is the most baseless hallucination that ever visited
- the brain of a genial optimist. I am not in the least tired; I am as
- fresh as when I started; I am good for fifty years yet. Catherine
- appears not to have budged an inch either; she is equally fresh; so we
- are about where we were before. This, however, you know as well as I.
- What I wish is simply to give you notice of my own state of mind! Take
- it to heart, dear Lavinia. Beware of the just resentment of a deluded
- fortune-hunter!”
- “I can’t say I expected it,” said Mrs. Penniman. “And I had a sort of
- foolish hope that you would come home without that odious ironical tone
- with which you treat the most sacred subjects.”
- “Don’t undervalue irony, it is often of great use. It is not, however,
- always necessary, and I will show you how gracefully I can lay it aside.
- I should like to know whether you think Morris Townsend will hang on.”
- “I will answer you with your own weapons,” said Mrs. Penniman. “You had
- better wait and see!”
- “Do you call such a speech as that one of my own weapons? I never said
- anything so rough.”
- “He will hang on long enough to make you very uncomfortable, then.”
- “My dear Lavinia,” exclaimed the Doctor, “do you call that irony? I call
- it pugilism.”
- Mrs. Penniman, however, in spite of her pugilism, was a good deal
- frightened, and she took counsel of her fears. Her brother meanwhile
- took counsel, with many reservations, of Mrs. Almond, to whom he was no
- less generous than to Lavinia, and a good deal more communicative.
- “I suppose she has had him there all the while,” he said. “I must look
- into the state of my wine! You needn’t mind telling me now; I have
- already said all I mean to say to her on the subject.”
- “I believe he was in the house a good deal,” Mrs. Almond answered. “But
- you must admit that your leaving Lavinia quite alone was a great change
- for her, and that it was natural she should want some society.”
- “I do admit that, and that is why I shall make no row about the wine; I
- shall set it down as compensation to Lavinia. She is capable of telling
- me that she drank it all herself. Think of the inconceivable bad taste,
- in the circumstances, of that fellow making free with the house—or coming
- there at all! If that doesn’t describe him, he is indescribable.”
- “His plan is to get what he can. Lavinia will have supported him for a
- year,” said Mrs. Almond. “It’s so much gained.”
- “She will have to support him for the rest of his life, then!” cried the
- Doctor. “But without wine, as they say at the _tables d’hôte_.”
- “Catherine tells me he has set up a business, and is making a great deal
- of money.”
- The Doctor stared. “She has not told me that—and Lavinia didn’t deign.
- Ah!” he cried, “Catherine has given me up. Not that it matters, for all
- that the business amounts to.”
- “She has not given up Mr. Townsend,” said Mrs. Almond. “I saw that in
- the first half minute. She has come home exactly the same.”
- “Exactly the same; not a grain more intelligent. She didn’t notice a
- stick or a stone all the while we were away—not a picture nor a view, not
- a statue nor a cathedral.”
- “How could she notice? She had other things to think of; they are never
- for an instant out of her mind. She touches me very much.”
- “She would touch me if she didn’t irritate me. That’s the effect she has
- upon me now. I have tried everything upon her; I really have been quite
- merciless. But it is of no use whatever; she is absolutely _glued_. I
- have passed, in consequence, into the exasperated stage. At first I had
- a good deal of a certain genial curiosity about it; I wanted to see if
- she really would stick. But, good Lord, one’s curiosity is satisfied! I
- see she is capable of it, and now she can let go.”
- “She will never let go,” said Mrs. Almond.
- “Take care, or you will exasperate me too. If she doesn’t let go, she
- will be shaken off—sent tumbling into the dust! That’s a nice position
- for my daughter. She can’t see that if you are going to be pushed you
- had better jump. And then she will complain of her bruises.”
- “She will never complain,” said Mrs. Almond.
- “That I shall object to even more. But the deuce will be that I can’t
- prevent anything.”
- “If she is to have a fall,” said Mrs. Almond, with a gentle laugh, “we
- must spread as many carpets as we can.” And she carried out this idea by
- showing a great deal of motherly kindness to the girl.
- Mrs. Penniman immediately wrote to Morris Townsend. The intimacy between
- these two was by this time consummate, but I must content myself with
- noting but a few of its features. Mrs. Penniman’s own share in it was a
- singular sentiment, which might have been misinterpreted, but which in
- itself was not discreditable to the poor lady. It was a romantic
- interest in this attractive and unfortunate young man, and yet it was not
- such an interest as Catherine might have been jealous of. Mrs. Penniman
- had not a particle of jealousy of her niece. For herself, she felt as if
- she were Morris’s mother or sister—a mother or sister of an emotional
- temperament—and she had an absorbing desire to make him comfortable and
- happy. She had striven to do so during the year that her brother left
- her an open field, and her efforts had been attended with the success
- that has been pointed out. She had never had a child of her own, and
- Catherine, whom she had done her best to invest with the importance that
- would naturally belong to a youthful Penniman, had only partly rewarded
- her zeal. Catherine, as an object of affection and solicitude, had never
- had that picturesque charm which (as it seemed to her) would have been a
- natural attribute of her own progeny. Even the maternal passion in Mrs.
- Penniman would have been romantic and factitious, and Catherine was not
- constituted to inspire a romantic passion. Mrs. Penniman was as fond of
- her as ever, but she had grown to feel that with Catherine she lacked
- opportunity. Sentimentally speaking, therefore, she had (though she had
- not disinherited her niece) adopted Morris Townsend, who gave her
- opportunity in abundance. She would have been very happy to have a
- handsome and tyrannical son, and would have taken an extreme interest in
- his love affairs. This was the light in which she had come to regard
- Morris, who had conciliated her at first, and made his impression by his
- delicate and calculated deference—a sort of exhibition to which Mrs.
- Penniman was particularly sensitive. He had largely abated his deference
- afterwards, for he economised his resources, but the impression was made,
- and the young man’s very brutality came to have a sort of filial value.
- If Mrs. Penniman had had a son, she would probably have been afraid of
- him, and at this stage of our narrative she was certainly afraid of
- Morris Townsend. This was one of the results of his domestication in
- Washington Square. He took his ease with her—as, for that matter, he
- would certainly have done with his own mother.
- XXVIII
- THE letter was a word of warning; it informed him that the Doctor had
- come home more impracticable than ever. She might have reflected that
- Catherine would supply him with all the information he needed on this
- point; but we know that Mrs. Penniman’s reflexions were rarely just; and,
- moreover, she felt that it was not for her to depend on what Catherine
- might do. She was to do her duty, quite irrespective of Catherine. I
- have said that her young friend took his ease with her, and it is an
- illustration of the fact that he made no answer to her letter. He took
- note of it, amply; but he lighted his cigar with it, and he waited, in
- tranquil confidence that he should receive another. “His state of mind
- really freezes my blood,” Mrs. Penniman had written, alluding to her
- brother; and it would have seemed that upon this statement she could
- hardly improve. Nevertheless, she wrote again, expressing herself with
- the aid of a different figure. “His hatred of you burns with a lurid
- flame—the flame that never dies,” she wrote. “But it doesn’t light up
- the darkness of your future. If my affection could do so, all the years
- of your life would be an eternal sunshine. I can extract nothing from
- C.; she is so terribly secretive, like her father. She seems to expect
- to be married very soon, and has evidently made preparations in
- Europe—quantities of clothing, ten pairs of shoes, etc. My dear friend,
- you cannot set up in married life simply with a few pairs of shoes, can
- you? Tell me what you think of this. I am intensely anxious to see you;
- I have so much to say. I miss you dreadfully; the house seems so empty
- without you. What is the news down town? Is the business extending?
- That dear little business—I think it’s so brave of you! Couldn’t I come
- to your office?—just for three minutes? I might pass for a customer—is
- that what you call them? I might come in to buy something—some shares or
- some railroad things. _Tell me what you think of this plan_. I would
- carry a little reticule, like a woman of the people.”
- In spite of the suggestion about the reticule, Morris appeared to think
- poorly of the plan, for he gave Mrs. Penniman no encouragement whatever
- to visit his office, which he had already represented to her as a place
- peculiarly and unnaturally difficult to find. But as she persisted in
- desiring an interview—up to the last, after months of intimate colloquy,
- she called these meetings “interviews”—he agreed that they should take a
- walk together, and was even kind enough to leave his office for this
- purpose, during the hours at which business might have been supposed to
- be liveliest. It was no surprise to him, when they met at a street
- corner, in a region of empty lots and undeveloped pavements (Mrs.
- Penniman being attired as much as possible like a “woman of the people”),
- to find that, in spite of her urgency, what she chiefly had to convey to
- him was the assurance of her sympathy. Of such assurances, however, he
- had already a voluminous collection, and it would not have been worth his
- while to forsake a fruitful avocation merely to hear Mrs. Penniman say,
- for the thousandth time, that she had made his cause her own. Morris had
- something of his own to say. It was not an easy thing to bring out, and
- while he turned it over the difficulty made him acrimonious.
- “Oh yes, I know perfectly that he combines the properties of a lump of
- ice and a red-hot coal,” he observed. “Catherine has made it thoroughly
- clear, and you have told me so till I am sick of it. You needn’t tell me
- again; I am perfectly satisfied. He will never give us a penny; I regard
- that as mathematically proved.”
- Mrs. Penniman at this point had an inspiration.
- “Couldn’t you bring a lawsuit against him?” She wondered that this
- simple expedient had never occurred to her before.
- “I will bring a lawsuit against _you_,” said Morris, “if you ask me any
- more such aggravating questions. A man should know when he is beaten,”
- he added, in a moment. “I must give her up!”
- Mrs. Penniman received this declaration in silence, though it made her
- heart beat a little. It found her by no means unprepared, for she had
- accustomed herself to the thought that, if Morris should decidedly not be
- able to get her brother’s money, it would not do for him to marry
- Catherine without it. “It would not do” was a vague way of putting the
- thing; but Mrs. Penniman’s natural affection completed the idea, which,
- though it had not as yet been so crudely expressed between them as in the
- form that Morris had just given it, had nevertheless been implied so
- often, in certain easy intervals of talk, as he sat stretching his legs
- in the Doctor’s well-stuffed armchairs, that she had grown first to
- regard it with an emotion which she flattered herself was philosophic,
- and then to have a secret tenderness for it. The fact that she kept her
- tenderness secret proves, of course, that she was ashamed of it; but she
- managed to blink her shame by reminding herself that she was, after all,
- the official protector of her niece’s marriage. Her logic would scarcely
- have passed muster with the Doctor. In the first place, Morris _must_
- get the money, and she would help him to it. In the second, it was plain
- it would never come to him, and it would be a grievous pity he should
- marry without it—a young man who might so easily find something better.
- After her brother had delivered himself, on his return from Europe, of
- that incisive little address that has been quoted, Morris’s cause seemed
- so hopeless that Mrs. Penniman fixed her attention exclusively upon the
- latter branch of her argument. If Morris had been her son, she would
- certainly have sacrificed Catherine to a superior conception of his
- future; and to be ready to do so as the case stood was therefore even a
- finer degree of devotion. Nevertheless, it checked her breath a little
- to have the sacrificial knife, as it were, suddenly thrust into her hand.
- Morris walked along a moment, and then he repeated harshly: “I must give
- her up!”
- “I think I understand you,” said Mrs. Penniman gently.
- “I certainly say it distinctly enough—brutally and vulgarly enough.”
- He was ashamed of himself, and his shame was uncomfortable; and as he was
- extremely intolerant of discomfort, he felt vicious and cruel. He wanted
- to abuse somebody, and he began, cautiously—for he was always
- cautious—with himself.
- “Couldn’t you take her down a little?” he asked.
- “Take her down?”
- “Prepare her—try and ease me off.”
- Mrs. Penniman stopped, looking at him very solemnly.
- “My poor Morris, do you know how much she loves you?”
- “No, I don’t. I don’t want to know. I have always tried to keep from
- knowing. It would be too painful.”
- “She will suffer much,” said Mrs. Penniman.
- “You must console her. If you are as good a friend to me as you pretend
- to be, you will manage it.”
- Mrs. Penniman shook her head sadly.
- “You talk of my ‘pretending’ to like you; but I can’t pretend to hate
- you. I can only tell her I think very highly of you; and how will that
- console her for losing you?”
- “The Doctor will help you. He will be delighted at the thing being
- broken off, and, as he is a knowing fellow, he will invent something to
- comfort her.”
- “He will invent a new torture!” cried Mrs. Penniman. “Heaven deliver her
- from her father’s comfort. It will consist of his crowing over her and
- saying, ‘I always told you so!’”
- Morris coloured a most uncomfortable red.
- “If you don’t console her any better than you console me, you certainly
- won’t be of much use! It’s a damned disagreeable necessity; I feel it
- extremely, and you ought to make it easy for me.”
- “I will be your friend for life!” Mrs. Penniman declared.
- “Be my friend _now_!” And Morris walked on.
- She went with him; she was almost trembling.
- “Should you like me to tell her?” she asked. “You mustn’t tell her, but
- you can—you can—” And he hesitated, trying to think what Mrs. Penniman
- could do. “You can explain to her why it is. It’s because I can’t bring
- myself to step in between her and her father—to give him the pretext he
- grasps at—so eagerly (it’s a hideous sight) for depriving her of her
- rights.”
- Mrs. Penniman felt with remarkable promptitude the charm of this formula.
- “That’s so like you,” she said; “it’s so finely felt.”
- Morris gave his stick an angry swing.
- “Oh, botheration!” he exclaimed perversely.
- Mrs. Penniman, however, was not discouraged.
- “It may turn out better than you think. Catherine is, after all, so very
- peculiar.” And she thought she might take it upon herself to assure him
- that, whatever happened, the girl would be very quiet—she wouldn’t make a
- noise. They extended their walk, and, while they proceeded, Mrs.
- Penniman took upon herself other things besides, and ended by having
- assumed a considerable burden; Morris being ready enough, as may be
- imagined, to put everything off upon her. But he was not for a single
- instant the dupe of her blundering alacrity; he knew that of what she
- promised she was competent to perform but an insignificant fraction, and
- the more she professed her willingness to serve him, the greater fool he
- thought her.
- “What will you do if you don’t marry her?” she ventured to inquire in the
- course of this conversation.
- “Something brilliant,” said Morris. “Shouldn’t you like me to do
- something brilliant?”
- The idea gave Mrs. Penniman exceeding pleasure.
- “I shall feel sadly taken in if you don’t.”
- “I shall have to, to make up for this. This isn’t at all brilliant, you
- know.”
- Mrs. Penniman mused a little, as if there might be some way of making out
- that it was; but she had to give up the attempt, and, to carry off the
- awkwardness of failure, she risked a new inquiry.
- “Do you mean—do you mean another marriage?”
- Morris greeted this question with a reflexion which was hardly the less
- impudent from being inaudible. “Surely, women are more crude than men!”
- And then he answered audibly:
- “Never in the world!”
- Mrs. Penniman felt disappointed and snubbed, and she relieved herself in
- a little vaguely-sarcastic cry. He was certainly perverse.
- “I give her up, not for another woman, but for a wider career!” Morris
- announced.
- This was very grand; but still Mrs. Penniman, who felt that she had
- exposed herself, was faintly rancorous.
- “Do you mean never to come to see her again?” she asked, with some
- sharpness.
- “Oh no, I shall come again; but what is the use of dragging it out? I
- have been four times since she came back, and it’s terribly awkward work.
- I can’t keep it up indefinitely; she oughtn’t to expect that, you know.
- A woman should never keep a man dangling!” he added finely.
- “Ah, but you must have your last parting!” urged his companion, in whose
- imagination the idea of last partings occupied a place inferior in
- dignity only to that of first meetings.
- XXIX
- HE came again, without managing the last parting; and again and again,
- without finding that Mrs. Penniman had as yet done much to pave the path
- of retreat with flowers. It was devilish awkward, as he said, and he
- felt a lively animosity for Catherine’s aunt, who, as he had now quite
- formed the habit of saying to himself, had dragged him into the mess and
- was bound in common charity to get him out of it. Mrs. Penniman, to tell
- the truth, had, in the seclusion of her own apartment—and, I may add,
- amid the suggestiveness of Catherine’s, which wore in those days the
- appearance of that of a young lady laying out her _trousseau_—Mrs.
- Penniman had measured her responsibilities, and taken fright at their
- magnitude. The task of preparing Catherine and easing off Morris
- presented difficulties which increased in the execution, and even led the
- impulsive Lavinia to ask herself whether the modification of the young
- man’s original project had been conceived in a happy spirit. A brilliant
- future, a wider career, a conscience exempt from the reproach of
- interference between a young lady and her natural rights—these excellent
- things might be too troublesomely purchased. From Catherine herself Mrs.
- Penniman received no assistance whatever; the poor girl was apparently
- without suspicion of her danger. She looked at her lover with eyes of
- undiminished trust, and though she had less confidence in her aunt than
- in a young man with whom she had exchanged so many tender vows, she gave
- her no handle for explaining or confessing. Mrs. Penniman, faltering and
- wavering, declared Catherine was very stupid, put off the great scene, as
- she would have called it, from day to day, and wandered about very
- uncomfortably, primed, to repletion, with her apology, but unable to
- bring it to the light. Morris’s own scenes were very small ones just
- now; but even these were beyond his strength. He made his visits as
- brief as possible, and while he sat with his mistress, found terribly
- little to talk about. She was waiting for him, in vulgar parlance, to
- name the day; and so long as he was unprepared to be explicit on this
- point it seemed a mockery to pretend to talk about matters more abstract.
- She had no airs and no arts; she never attempted to disguise her
- expectancy. She was waiting on his good pleasure, and would wait
- modestly and patiently; his hanging back at this supreme time might
- appear strange, but of course he must have a good reason for it.
- Catherine would have made a wife of the gentle old-fashioned
- pattern—regarding reasons as favours and windfalls, but no more expecting
- one every day than she would have expected a bouquet of camellias.
- During the period of her engagement, however, a young lady even of the
- most slender pretensions counts upon more bouquets than at other times;
- and there was a want of perfume in the air at this moment which at last
- excited the girl’s alarm.
- “Are you sick?” she asked of Morris. “You seem so restless, and you look
- pale.”
- “I am not at all well,” said Morris; and it occurred to him that, if he
- could only make her pity him enough, he might get off.
- “I am afraid you are overworked; you oughtn’t to work so much.”
- “I must do that.” And then he added, with a sort of calculated
- brutality, “I don’t want to owe you everything!”
- “Ah, how can you say that?”
- “I am too proud,” said Morris.
- “Yes—you are too proud!”
- “Well, you must take me as I am,” he went on, “you can never change me.”
- “I don’t want to change you,” she said gently. “I will take you as you
- are!” And she stood looking at him.
- “You know people talk tremendously about a man’s marrying a rich girl,”
- Morris remarked. “It’s excessively disagreeable.”
- “But I am not rich?” said Catherine.
- “You are rich enough to make me talked about!”
- “Of course you are talked about. It’s an honour!”
- “It’s an honour I could easily dispense with.”
- She was on the point of asking him whether it were not a compensation for
- this annoyance that the poor girl who had the misfortune to bring it upon
- him, loved him so dearly and believed in him so truly; but she hesitated,
- thinking that this would perhaps seem an exacting speech, and while she
- hesitated, he suddenly left her.
- The next time he came, however, she brought it out, and she told him
- again that he was too proud. He repeated that he couldn’t change, and
- this time she felt the impulse to say that with a little effort he might
- change.
- Sometimes he thought that if he could only make a quarrel with her it
- might help him; but the question was how to quarrel with a young woman
- who had such treasures of concession. “I suppose you think the effort is
- all on your side!” he was reduced to exclaiming. “Don’t you believe that
- I have my own effort to make?”
- “It’s all yours now,” she said. “My effort is finished and done with!”
- “Well, mine is not.”
- “We must bear things together,” said Catherine. “That’s what we ought to
- do.”
- Morris attempted a natural smile. “There are some things which we can’t
- very well bear together—for instance, separation.”
- “Why do you speak of separation?”
- “Ah! you don’t like it; I knew you wouldn’t!”
- “Where are you going, Morris?” she suddenly asked.
- He fixed his eye on her for a moment, and for a part of that moment she
- was afraid of it. “Will you promise not to make a scene?”
- “A scene!—do I make scenes?”
- “All women do!” said Morris, with the tone of large experience.
- “I don’t. Where are you going?”
- “If I should say I was going away on business, should you think it very
- strange?”
- She wondered a moment, gazing at him. “Yes—no. Not if you will take me
- with you.”
- “Take you with me—on business?”
- “What is your business? Your business is to be with me.”
- “I don’t earn my living with you,” said Morris. “Or rather,” he cried
- with a sudden inspiration, “that’s just what I do—or what the world says
- I do!”
- This ought perhaps to have been a great stroke, but it miscarried.
- “Where are you going?” Catherine simply repeated.
- “To New Orleans. About buying some cotton.”
- “I am perfectly willing to go to New Orleans.” Catherine said.
- “Do you suppose I would take you to a nest of yellow fever?” cried
- Morris. “Do you suppose I would expose you at such a time as this?”
- “If there is yellow fever, why should you go? Morris, you must not go!”
- “It is to make six thousand dollars,” said Morris. “Do you grudge me
- that satisfaction?”
- “We have no need of six thousand dollars. You think too much about
- money!”
- “You can afford to say that? This is a great chance; we heard of it last
- night.” And he explained to her in what the chance consisted; and told
- her a long story, going over more than once several of the details, about
- the remarkable stroke of business which he and his partner had planned
- between them.
- But Catherine’s imagination, for reasons best known to herself,
- absolutely refused to be fired. “If you can go to New Orleans, I can
- go,” she said. “Why shouldn’t you catch yellow fever quite as easily as
- I? I am every bit as strong as you, and not in the least afraid of any
- fever. When we were in Europe, we were in very unhealthy places; my
- father used to make me take some pills. I never caught anything, and I
- never was nervous. What will be the use of six thousand dollars if you
- die of a fever? When persons are going to be married they oughtn’t to
- think so much about business. You shouldn’t think about cotton, you
- should think about me. You can go to New Orleans some other time—there
- will always be plenty of cotton. It isn’t the moment to choose—we have
- waited too long already.” She spoke more forcibly and volubly than he
- had ever heard her, and she held his arm in her two hands.
- “You said you wouldn’t make a scene!” cried Morris. “I call this a
- scene.”
- “It’s you that are making it! I have never asked you anything before.
- We have waited too long already.” And it was a comfort to her to think
- that she had hitherto asked so little; it seemed to make her right to
- insist the greater now.
- Morris bethought himself a little. “Very well, then; we won’t talk about
- it any more. I will transact my business by letter.” And he began to
- smooth his hat, as if to take leave.
- “You won’t go?” And she stood looking up at him.
- He could not give up his idea of provoking a quarrel; it was so much the
- simplest way! He bent his eyes on her upturned face, with the darkest
- frown he could achieve. “You are not discreet. You mustn’t bully me!”
- But, as usual, she conceded everything. “No, I am not discreet; I know I
- am too pressing. But isn’t it natural? It is only for a moment.”
- “In a moment you may do a great deal of harm. Try and be calmer the next
- time I come.”
- “When will you come?”
- “Do you want to make conditions?” Morris asked. “I will come next
- Saturday.”
- “Come to-morrow,” Catherine begged; “I want you to come to-morrow. I
- will be very quiet,” she added; and her agitation had by this time become
- so great that the assurance was not becoming. A sudden fear had come
- over her; it was like the solid conjunction of a dozen disembodied
- doubts, and her imagination, at a single bound, had traversed an enormous
- distance. All her being, for the moment, centred in the wish to keep him
- in the room.
- Morris bent his head and kissed her forehead. “When you are quiet, you
- are perfection,” he said; “but when you are violent, you are not in
- character.”
- It was Catherine’s wish that there should be no violence about her save
- the beating of her heart, which she could not help; and she went on, as
- gently as possible, “Will you promise to come to-morrow?”
- “I said Saturday!” Morris answered, smiling. He tried a frown at one
- moment, a smile at another; he was at his wit’s end.
- “Yes, Saturday too,” she answered, trying to smile. “But to-morrow
- first.” He was going to the door, and she went with him quickly. She
- leaned her shoulder against it; it seemed to her that she would do
- anything to keep him.
- “If I am prevented from coming to-morrow, you will say I have deceived
- you!” he said.
- “How can you be prevented? You can come if you will.”
- “I am a busy man—I am not a dangler!” cried Morris sternly.
- His voice was so hard and unnatural that, with a helpless look at him,
- she turned away; and then he quickly laid his hand on the door-knob. He
- felt as if he were absolutely running away from her. But in an instant
- she was close to him again, and murmuring in a tone none the less
- penetrating for being low, “Morris, you are going to leave me.”
- “Yes, for a little while.”
- “For how long?”
- “Till you are reasonable again.”
- “I shall never be reasonable in that way!” And she tried to keep him
- longer; it was almost a struggle. “Think of what I have done!” she broke
- out. “Morris, I have given up everything!”
- “You shall have everything back!”
- “You wouldn’t say that if you didn’t mean something. What is it?—what
- has happened?—what have I done?—what has changed you?”
- “I will write to you—that is better,” Morris stammered.
- “Ah, you won’t come back!” she cried, bursting into tears.
- “Dear Catherine,” he said, “don’t believe that I promise you that you
- shall see me again!” And he managed to get away and to close the door
- behind him.
- XXX
- IT was almost her last outbreak of passive grief; at least, she never
- indulged in another that the world knew anything about. But this one was
- long and terrible; she flung herself on the sofa and gave herself up to
- her misery. She hardly knew what had happened; ostensibly she had only
- had a difference with her lover, as other girls had had before, and the
- thing was not only not a rupture, but she was under no obligation to
- regard it even as a menace. Nevertheless, she felt a wound, even if he
- had not dealt it; it seemed to her that a mask had suddenly fallen from
- his face. He had wished to get away from her; he had been angry and
- cruel, and said strange things, with strange looks. She was smothered
- and stunned; she buried her head in the cushions, sobbing and talking to
- herself. But at last she raised herself, with the fear that either her
- father or Mrs. Penniman would come in; and then she sat there, staring
- before her, while the room grew darker. She said to herself that perhaps
- he would come back to tell her he had not meant what he said; and she
- listened for his ring at the door, trying to believe that this was
- probable. A long time passed, but Morris remained absent; the shadows
- gathered; the evening settled down on the meagre elegance of the light,
- clear-coloured room; the fire went out. When it had grown dark,
- Catherine went to the window and looked out; she stood there for half an
- hour, on the mere chance that he would come up the steps. At last she
- turned away, for she saw her father come in. He had seen her at the
- window looking out, and he stopped a moment at the bottom of the white
- steps, and gravely, with an air of exaggerated courtesy, lifted his hat
- to her. The gesture was so incongruous to the condition she was in, this
- stately tribute of respect to a poor girl despised and forsaken was so
- out of place, that the thing gave her a kind of horror, and she hurried
- away to her room. It seemed to her that she had given Morris up.
- She had to show herself half an hour later, and she was sustained at
- table by the immensity of her desire that her father should not perceive
- that anything had happened. This was a great help to her afterwards, and
- it served her (though never as much as she supposed) from the first. On
- this occasion Dr. Sloper was rather talkative. He told a great many
- stories about a wonderful poodle that he had seen at the house of an old
- lady whom he visited professionally. Catherine not only tried to appear
- to listen to the anecdotes of the poodle, but she endeavoured to interest
- herself in them, so as not to think of her scene with Morris. That
- perhaps was an hallucination; he was mistaken, she was jealous; people
- didn’t change like that from one day to another. Then she knew that she
- had had doubts before—strange suspicions, that were at once vague and
- acute—and that he had been different ever since her return from Europe:
- whereupon she tried again to listen to her father, who told a story so
- remarkably well. Afterwards she went straight to her own room; it was
- beyond her strength to undertake to spend the evening with her aunt. All
- the evening, alone, she questioned herself. Her trouble was terrible;
- but was it a thing of her imagination, engendered by an extravagant
- sensibility, or did it represent a clear-cut reality, and had the worst
- that was possible actually come to pass? Mrs. Penniman, with a degree of
- tact that was as unusual as it was commendable, took the line of leaving
- her alone. The truth is, that her suspicions having been aroused, she
- indulged a desire, natural to a timid person, that the explosion should
- be localised. So long as the air still vibrated she kept out of the way.
- She passed and repassed Catherine’s door several times in the course of
- the evening, as if she expected to hear a plaintive moan behind it. But
- the room remained perfectly still; and accordingly, the last thing before
- retiring to her own couch, she applied for admittance. Catherine was
- sitting up, and had a book that she pretended to be reading. She had no
- wish to go to bed, for she had no expectation of sleeping. After Mrs.
- Penniman had left her she sat up half the night, and she offered her
- visitor no inducement to remain. Her aunt came stealing in very gently,
- and approached her with great solemnity.
- “I am afraid you are in trouble, my dear. Can I do anything to help
- you?”
- “I am not in any trouble whatever, and do not need any help,” said
- Catherine, fibbing roundly, and proving thereby that not only our faults,
- but our most involuntary misfortunes, tend to corrupt our morals.
- “Has nothing happened to you?”
- “Nothing whatever.”
- “Are you very sure, dear?”
- “Perfectly sure.”
- “And can I really do nothing for you?”
- “Nothing, aunt, but kindly leave me alone,” said Catherine.
- Mrs. Penniman, though she had been afraid of too warm a welcome before,
- was now disappointed at so cold a one; and in relating afterwards, as she
- did to many persons, and with considerable variations of detail, the
- history of the termination of her niece’s engagement, she was usually
- careful to mention that the young lady, on a certain occasion, had
- “hustled” her out of the room. It was characteristic of Mrs. Penniman
- that she related this fact, not in the least out of malignity to
- Catherine, whom she very sufficiently pitied, but simply from a natural
- disposition to embellish any subject that she touched.
- Catherine, as I have said, sat up half the night, as if she still
- expected to hear Morris Townsend ring at the door. On the morrow this
- expectation was less unreasonable; but it was not gratified by the
- reappearance of the young man. Neither had he written; there was not a
- word of explanation or reassurance. Fortunately for Catherine she could
- take refuge from her excitement, which had now become intense, in her
- determination that her father should see nothing of it. How well she
- deceived her father we shall have occasion to learn; but her innocent
- arts were of little avail before a person of the rare perspicacity of
- Mrs. Penniman. This lady easily saw that she was agitated, and if there
- was any agitation going forward, Mrs. Penniman was not a person to
- forfeit her natural share in it. She returned to the charge the next
- evening, and requested her niece to lean upon her—to unburden her heart.
- Perhaps she should be able to explain certain things that now seemed
- dark, and that she knew more about than Catherine supposed. If Catherine
- had been frigid the night before, to-day she was haughty.
- “You are completely mistaken, and I have not the least idea what you
- mean. I don’t know what you are trying to fasten on me, and I have never
- had less need of any one’s explanations in my life.”
- In this way the girl delivered herself, and from hour to hour kept her
- aunt at bay. From hour to hour Mrs. Penniman’s curiosity grew. She
- would have given her little finger to know what Morris had said and done,
- what tone he had taken, what pretext he had found. She wrote to him,
- naturally, to request an interview; but she received, as naturally, no
- answer to her petition. Morris was not in a writing mood; for Catherine
- had addressed him two short notes which met with no acknowledgment.
- These notes were so brief that I may give them entire. “Won’t you give
- me some sign that you didn’t mean to be so cruel as you seemed on
- Tuesday?”—that was the first; the other was a little longer. “If I was
- unreasonable or suspicious on Tuesday—if I annoyed you or troubled you in
- any way—I beg your forgiveness, and I promise never again to be so
- foolish. I am punished enough, and I don’t understand. Dear Morris, you
- are killing me!” These notes were despatched on the Friday and Saturday;
- but Saturday and Sunday passed without bringing the poor girl the
- satisfaction she desired. Her punishment accumulated; she continued to
- bear it, however, with a good deal of superficial fortitude. On Saturday
- morning the Doctor, who had been watching in silence, spoke to his sister
- Lavinia.
- “The thing has happened—the scoundrel has backed out!”
- “Never!” cried Mrs. Penniman, who had bethought herself what she should
- say to Catherine, but was not provided with a line of defence against her
- brother, so that indignant negation was the only weapon in her hands.
- “He has begged for a reprieve, then, if you like that better!”
- “It seems to make you very happy that your daughter’s affections have
- been trifled with.”
- “It does,” said the Doctor; ‘“for I had foretold it! It’s a great
- pleasure to be in the right.”
- “Your pleasures make one shudder!” his sister exclaimed.
- Catherine went rigidly through her usual occupations; that is, up to the
- point of going with her aunt to church on Sunday morning. She generally
- went to afternoon service as well; but on this occasion her courage
- faltered, and she begged of Mrs. Penniman to go without her.
- “I am sure you have a secret,” said Mrs. Penniman, with great
- significance, looking at her rather grimly.
- “If I have, I shall keep it!” Catherine answered, turning away.
- Mrs. Penniman started for church; but before she had arrived, she stopped
- and turned back, and before twenty minutes had elapsed she re-entered the
- house, looked into the empty parlours, and then went upstairs and knocked
- at Catherine’s door. She got no answer; Catherine was not in her room,
- and Mrs. Penniman presently ascertained that she was not in the house.
- “She has gone to him, she has fled!” Lavinia cried, clasping her hands
- with admiration and envy. But she soon perceived that Catherine had
- taken nothing with her—all her personal property in her room was
- intact—and then she jumped at the hypothesis that the girl had gone
- forth, not in tenderness, but in resentment. “She has followed him to
- his own door—she has burst upon him in his own apartment!” It was in
- these terms that Mrs. Penniman depicted to herself her niece’s errand,
- which, viewed in this light, gratified her sense of the picturesque only
- a shade less strongly than the idea of a clandestine marriage. To visit
- one’s lover, with tears and reproaches, at his own residence, was an
- image so agreeable to Mrs. Penniman’s mind that she felt a sort of
- æsthetic disappointment at its lacking, in this case, the harmonious
- accompaniments of darkness and storm. A quiet Sunday afternoon appeared
- an inadequate setting for it; and, indeed, Mrs. Penniman was quite out of
- humour with the conditions of the time, which passed very slowly as she
- sat in the front parlour in her bonnet and her cashmere shawl, awaiting
- Catherine’s return.
- This event at last took place. She saw her—at the window—mount the
- steps, and she went to await her in the hall, where she pounced upon her
- as soon as she had entered the house, and drew her into the parlour,
- closing the door with solemnity. Catherine was flushed, and her eye was
- bright. Mrs. Penniman hardly knew what to think.
- “May I venture to ask where you have been?” she demanded.
- “I have been to take a walk,” said Catherine. “I thought you had gone to
- church.”
- “I did go to church; but the service was shorter than usual. And pray,
- where did you walk?”
- “I don’t know!” said Catherine.
- “Your ignorance is most extraordinary! Dear Catherine, you can trust
- me.”
- “What am I to trust you with?”
- “With your secret—your sorrow.”
- “I have no sorrow!” said Catherine fiercely.
- “My poor child,” Mrs. Penniman insisted, “you can’t deceive me. I know
- everything. I have been requested to—a—to converse with you.”
- “I don’t want to converse!”
- “It will relieve you. Don’t you know Shakespeare’s lines?—‘the grief
- that does not speak!’ My dear girl, it is better as it is.”
- “What is better?” Catherine asked.
- She was really too perverse. A certain amount of perversity was to be
- allowed for in a young lady whose lover had thrown her over; but not such
- an amount as would prove inconvenient to his apologists. “That you
- should be reasonable,” said Mrs. Penniman, with some sternness. “That
- you should take counsel of worldly prudence, and submit to practical
- considerations. That you should agree to—a—separate.”
- Catherine had been ice up to this moment, but at this word she flamed up.
- “Separate? What do you know about our separating?”
- Mrs. Penniman shook her head with a sadness in which there was almost a
- sense of injury. “Your pride is my pride, and your susceptibilities are
- mine. I see your side perfectly, but I also”—and she smiled with
- melancholy suggestiveness—“I also see the situation as a whole!”
- This suggestiveness was lost upon Catherine, who repeated her violent
- inquiry. “Why do you talk about separation; what do you know about it?”
- “We must study resignation,” said Mrs. Penniman, hesitating, but
- sententious at a venture.
- “Resignation to what?”
- “To a change of—of our plans.”
- “My plans have not changed!” said Catherine, with a little laugh.
- “Ah, but Mr. Townsend’s have,” her aunt answered very gently.
- “What do you mean?”
- There was an imperious brevity in the tone of this inquiry, against which
- Mrs. Penniman felt bound to protest; the information with which she had
- undertaken to supply her niece was, after all, a favour. She had tried
- sharpness, and she had tried sternness: but neither would do; she was
- shocked at the girl’s obstinacy. “Ah, well,” she said, “if he hasn’t
- told you! . . . ” and she turned away.
- Catherine watched her a moment in silence; then she hurried after her,
- stopping her before she reached the door. “Told me what? What do you
- mean? What are you hinting at and threatening me with?”
- “Isn’t it broken off?” asked Mrs. Penniman.
- “My engagement? Not in the least!”
- “I beg your pardon in that case. I have spoken too soon!”
- “Too soon! Soon or late,” Catherine broke out, “you speak foolishly and
- cruelly!”
- “What has happened between you, then?” asked her aunt, struck by the
- sincerity of this cry. “For something certainly has happened.”
- “Nothing has happened but that I love him more and more!”
- Mrs. Penniman was silent an instant. “I suppose that’s the reason you
- went to see him this afternoon.”
- Catherine flushed as if she had been struck. “Yes, I did go to see him!
- But that’s my own business.”
- “Very well, then; we won’t talk about it.” And Mrs. Penniman moved
- towards the door again. But she was stopped by a sudden imploring cry
- from the girl.
- “Aunt Lavinia, _where_ has he gone?”
- “Ah, you admit, then, that he has gone away? Didn’t they know at his
- house?”
- “They said he had left town. I asked no more questions; I was ashamed,”
- said Catherine, simply enough.
- “You needn’t have taken so compromising a step if you had had a little
- more confidence in me,” Mrs. Penniman observed, with a good deal of
- grandeur.
- “Is it to New Orleans?” Catherine went on irrelevantly.
- It was the first time Mrs. Penniman had heard of New Orleans in this
- connexion; but she was averse to letting Catherine know that she was in
- the dark. She attempted to strike an illumination from the instructions
- she had received from Morris. “My dear Catherine,” she said, “when a
- separation has been agreed upon, the farther he goes away the better.”
- “Agreed upon? Has he agreed upon it with you?” A consummate sense of
- her aunt’s meddlesome folly had come over her during the last five
- minutes, and she was sickened at the thought that Mrs. Penniman had been
- let loose, as it were, upon her happiness.
- “He certainly has sometimes advised with me,” said Mrs. Penniman.
- “Is it you, then, that have changed him and made him so unnatural?”
- Catherine cried. “Is it you that have worked on him and taken him from
- me? He doesn’t belong to you, and I don’t see how you have anything to
- do with what is between us! Is it you that have made this plot and told
- him to leave me? How could you be so wicked, so cruel? What have I ever
- done to you; why can’t you leave me alone? I was afraid you would spoil
- everything; for you _do_ spoil everything you touch; I was afraid of you
- all the time we were abroad; I had no rest when I thought that you were
- always talking to him.” Catherine went on with growing vehemence,
- pouring out in her bitterness and in the clairvoyance of her passion
- (which suddenly, jumping all processes, made her judge her aunt finally
- and without appeal) the uneasiness which had lain for so many months upon
- her heart.
- Mrs. Penniman was scared and bewildered; she saw no prospect of
- introducing her little account of the purity of Morris’s motives. “You
- are a most ungrateful girl!” she cried. “Do you scold me for talking
- with him? I am sure we never talked of anything but you!”
- “Yes; and that was the way you worried him; you made him tired of my very
- name! I wish you had never spoken of me to him; I never asked your
- help!”
- “I am sure if it hadn’t been for me he would never have come to the
- house, and you would never have known what he thought of you,” Mrs.
- Penniman rejoined, with a good deal of justice.
- “I wish he never had come to the house, and that I never had known it!
- That’s better than this,” said poor Catherine.
- “You are a very ungrateful girl,” Aunt Lavinia repeated.
- Catherine’s outbreak of anger and the sense of wrong gave her, while they
- lasted, the satisfaction that comes from all assertion of force; they
- hurried her along, and there is always a sort of pleasure in cleaving the
- air. But at the bottom she hated to be violent, and she was conscious of
- no aptitude for organised resentment. She calmed herself with a great
- effort, but with great rapidity, and walked about the room a few moments,
- trying to say to herself that her aunt had meant everything for the best.
- She did not succeed in saying it with much conviction, but after a little
- she was able to speak quietly enough.
- “I am not ungrateful, but I am very unhappy. It’s hard to be grateful
- for that,” she said. “Will you please tell me where he is?”
- “I haven’t the least idea; I am not in secret correspondence with him!”
- And Mrs. Penniman wished indeed that she were, so that she might let him
- know how Catherine abused her, after all she had done.
- “Was it a plan of his, then, to break off—?” By this time Catherine had
- become completely quiet.
- Mrs. Penniman began again to have a glimpse of her chance for explaining.
- “He shrank—he shrank,” she said. “He lacked courage, but it was the
- courage to injure you! He couldn’t bear to bring down on you your
- father’s curse.”
- Catherine listened to this with her eyes fixed upon her aunt, and
- continued to gaze at her for some time afterwards. “Did he tell you to
- say that?”
- “He told me to say many things—all so delicate, so discriminating. And
- he told me to tell you he hoped you wouldn’t despise him.”
- “I don’t,” said Catherine. And then she added: “And will he stay away
- for ever?”
- “Oh, for ever is a long time. Your father, perhaps, won’t live for
- ever.”
- “Perhaps not.”
- “I am sure you appreciate—you understand—even though your heart bleeds,”
- said Mrs. Penniman. “You doubtless think him too scrupulous. So do I,
- but I respect his scruples. What he asks of you is that you should do
- the same.”
- Catherine was still gazing at her aunt, but she spoke at last, as if she
- had not heard or not understood her. “It has been a regular plan, then.
- He has broken it off deliberately; he has given me up.”
- “For the present, dear Catherine. He has put it off only.”
- “He has left me alone,” Catherine went on.
- “Haven’t you _me_?” asked Mrs. Penniman, with much expression.
- Catherine shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe it!” and she left the
- room.
- XXXI
- THOUGH she had forced herself to be calm, she preferred practising this
- virtue in private, and she forbore to show herself at tea—a repast which,
- on Sundays, at six o’clock, took the place of dinner. Dr. Sloper and his
- sister sat face to face, but Mrs. Penniman never met her brother’s eye.
- Late in the evening she went with him, but without Catherine, to their
- sister Almond’s, where, between the two ladies, Catherine’s unhappy
- situation was discussed with a frankness that was conditioned by a good
- deal of mysterious reticence on Mrs. Penniman’s part.
- “I am delighted he is not to marry her,” said Mrs. Almond, “but he ought
- to be horsewhipped all the same.”
- Mrs. Penniman, who was shocked at her sister’s coarseness, replied that
- he had been actuated by the noblest of motives—the desire not to
- impoverish Catherine.
- “I am very happy that Catherine is not to be impoverished—but I hope he
- may never have a penny too much! And what does the poor girl say to
- _you_?” Mrs. Almond asked.
- “She says I have a genius for consolation,” said Mrs. Penniman.
- This was the account of the matter that she gave to her sister, and it
- was perhaps with the consciousness of genius that, on her return that
- evening to Washington Square, she again presented herself for admittance
- at Catherine’s door. Catherine came and opened it; she was apparently
- very quiet.
- “I only want to give you a little word of advice,” she said. “If your
- father asks you, say that everything is going on.”
- Catherine stood there, with her hand on the knob looking at her aunt, but
- not asking her to come in. “Do you think he will ask me?”
- “I am sure he will. He asked me just now, on our way home from your Aunt
- Elizabeth’s. I explained the whole thing to your Aunt Elizabeth. I said
- to your father I know nothing about it.”
- “Do you think he will ask me when he sees—when he sees—?” But here
- Catherine stopped.
- “The more he sees the more disagreeable he will be,” said her aunt.
- “He shall see as little as possible!” Catherine declared.
- “Tell him you are to be married.”
- “So I am,” said Catherine softly; and she closed the door upon her aunt.
- She could not have said this two days later—for instance, on Tuesday,
- when she at last received a letter from Morris Townsend. It was an
- epistle of considerable length, measuring five large square pages, and
- written at Philadelphia. It was an explanatory document, and it
- explained a great many things, chief among which were the considerations
- that had led the writer to take advantage of an urgent “professional”
- absence to try and banish from his mind the image of one whose path he
- had crossed only to scatter it with ruins. He ventured to expect but
- partial success in this attempt, but he could promise her that, whatever
- his failure, he would never again interpose between her generous heart
- and her brilliant prospects and filial duties. He closed with an
- intimation that his professional pursuits might compel him to travel for
- some months, and with the hope that when they should each have
- accommodated themselves to what was sternly involved in their respective
- positions—even should this result not be reached for years—they should
- meet as friends, as fellow-sufferers, as innocent but philosophic victims
- of a great social law. That her life should be peaceful and happy was
- the dearest wish of him who ventured still to subscribe himself her most
- obedient servant. The letter was beautifully written, and Catherine, who
- kept it for many years after this, was able, when her sense of the
- bitterness of its meaning and the hollowness of its tone had grown less
- acute, to admire its grace of expression. At present, for a long time
- after she received it, all she had to help her was the determination,
- daily more rigid, to make no appeal to the compassion of her father.
- He suffered a week to elapse, and then one day, in the morning, at an
- hour at which she rarely saw him, he strolled into the back parlour. He
- had watched his time, and he found her alone. She was sitting with some
- work, and he came and stood in front of her. He was going out, he had on
- his hat and was drawing on his gloves.
- “It doesn’t seem to me that you are treating me just now with all the
- consideration I deserve,” he said in a moment.
- “I don’t know what I have done,” Catherine answered, with her eyes on her
- work.
- “You have apparently quite banished from your mind the request I made you
- at Liverpool, before we sailed; the request that you would notify me in
- advance before leaving my house.”
- “I have not left your house!” said Catherine.
- “But you intend to leave it, and by what you gave me to understand, your
- departure must be impending. In fact, though you are still here in body,
- you are already absent in spirit. Your mind has taken up its residence
- with your prospective husband, and you might quite as well be lodged
- under the conjugal roof, for all the benefit we get from your society.”
- “I will try and be more cheerful!” said Catherine.
- “You certainly ought to be cheerful, you ask a great deal if you are not.
- To the pleasure of marrying a brilliant young man, you add that of having
- your own way; you strike me as a very lucky young lady!”
- Catherine got up; she was suffocating. But she folded her work,
- deliberately and correctly, bending her burning face upon it. Her father
- stood where he had planted himself; she hoped he would go, but he
- smoothed and buttoned his gloves, and then he rested his hands upon his
- hips.
- “It would be a convenience to me to know when I may expect to have an
- empty house,” he went on. “When you go, your aunt marches.”
- She looked at him at last, with a long silent gaze, which, in spite of
- her pride and her resolution, uttered part of the appeal she had tried
- not to make. Her father’s cold grey eye sounded her own, and he insisted
- on his point.
- “Is it to-morrow? Is it next week, or the week after?”
- “I shall not go away!” said Catherine.
- The Doctor raised his eyebrows. “Has he backed out?”
- “I have broken off my engagement.”
- “Broken it off?”
- “I have asked him to leave New York, and he has gone away for a long
- time.”
- The Doctor was both puzzled and disappointed, but he solved his
- perplexity by saying to himself that his daughter simply
- misrepresented—justifiably, if one would? but nevertheless
- misrepresented—the facts; and he eased off his disappointment, which was
- that of a man losing a chance for a little triumph that he had rather
- counted on, by a few words that he uttered aloud.
- “How does he take his dismissal?”
- “I don’t know!” said Catherine, less ingeniously than she had hitherto
- spoken.
- “You mean you don’t care? You are rather cruel, after encouraging him
- and playing with him for so long!”
- The Doctor had his revenge, after all.
- XXXII
- OUR story has hitherto moved with very short steps, but as it approaches
- its termination it must take a long stride. As time went on, it might
- have appeared to the Doctor that his daughter’s account of her rupture
- with Morris Townsend, mere bravado as he had deemed it, was in some
- degree justified by the sequel. Morris remained as rigidly and
- unremittingly absent as if he had died of a broken heart, and Catherine
- had apparently buried the memory of this fruitless episode as deep as if
- it had terminated by her own choice. We know that she had been deeply
- and incurably wounded, but the Doctor had no means of knowing it. He was
- certainly curious about it, and would have given a good deal to discover
- the exact truth; but it was his punishment that he never knew—his
- punishment, I mean, for the abuse of sarcasm in his relations with his
- daughter. There was a good deal of effective sarcasm in her keeping him
- in the dark, and the rest of the world conspired with her, in this sense,
- to be sarcastic. Mrs. Penniman told him nothing, partly because he never
- questioned her—he made too light of Mrs. Penniman for that—and partly
- because she flattered herself that a tormenting reserve, and a serene
- profession of ignorance, would avenge her for his theory that she had
- meddled in the matter. He went two or three times to see Mrs.
- Montgomery, but Mrs. Montgomery had nothing to impart. She simply knew
- that her brother’s engagement was broken off, and now that Miss Sloper
- was out of danger she preferred not to bear witness in any way against
- Morris. She had done so before—however unwillingly—because she was sorry
- for Miss Sloper; but she was not sorry for Miss Sloper now—not at all
- sorry. Morris had told her nothing about his relations with Miss Sloper
- at the time, and he had told her nothing since. He was always away, and
- he very seldom wrote to her; she believed he had gone to California.
- Mrs. Almond had, in her sister’s phrase, “taken up” Catherine violently
- since the recent catastrophe; but though the girl was very grateful to
- her for her kindness, she revealed no secrets, and the good lady could
- give the Doctor no satisfaction. Even, however, had she been able to
- narrate to him the private history of his daughter’s unhappy love affair,
- it would have given her a certain comfort to leave him in ignorance; for
- Mrs. Almond was at this time not altogether in sympathy with her brother.
- She had guessed for herself that Catherine had been cruelly jilted—she
- knew nothing from Mrs. Penniman, for Mrs. Penniman had not ventured to
- lay the famous explanation of Morris’s motives before Mrs. Almond, though
- she had thought it good enough for Catherine—and she pronounced her
- brother too consistently indifferent to what the poor creature must have
- suffered and must still be suffering. Dr. Sloper had his theory, and he
- rarely altered his theories. The marriage would have been an abominable
- one, and the girl had had a blessed escape. She was not to be pitied for
- that, and to pretend to condole with her would have been to make
- concessions to the idea that she had ever had a right to think of Morris.
- “I put my foot on this idea from the first, and I keep it there now,”
- said the Doctor. “I don’t see anything cruel in that; one can’t keep it
- there too long.” To this Mrs. Almond more than once replied that if
- Catherine had got rid of her incongruous lover, she deserved the credit
- of it, and that to bring herself to her father’s enlightened view of the
- matter must have cost her an effort that he was bound to appreciate.
- “I am by no means sure she has got rid of him,” the Doctor said. “There
- is not the smallest probability that, after having been as obstinate as a
- mule for two years, she suddenly became amenable to reason. It is
- infinitely more probable that he got rid of her.”
- “All the more reason you should be gentle with her.”
- “I _am_ gentle with her. But I can’t do the pathetic; I can’t pump up
- tears, to look graceful, over the most fortunate thing that ever happened
- to her.”
- “You have no sympathy,” said Mrs. Almond; “that was never your strong
- point. You have only to look at her to see that, right or wrong, and
- whether the rupture came from herself or from him, her poor little heart
- is grievously bruised.”
- “Handling bruises—and even dropping tears on them—doesn’t make them any
- better! My business is to see she gets no more knocks, and that I shall
- carefully attend to. But I don’t at all recognise your description of
- Catherine. She doesn’t strike me in the least as a young woman going
- about in search of a moral poultice. In fact, she seems to me much
- better than while the fellow was hanging about. She is perfectly
- comfortable and blooming; she eats and sleeps, takes her usual exercise,
- and overloads herself, as usual, with finery. She is always knitting
- some purse or embroidering some handkerchief, and it seems to me she
- turns these articles out about as fast as ever. She hasn’t much to say;
- but when had she anything to say? She had her little dance, and now she
- is sitting down to rest. I suspect that, on the whole, she enjoys it.”
- “She enjoys it as people enjoy getting rid of a leg that has been
- crushed. The state of mind after amputation is doubtless one of
- comparative repose.”
- “If your leg is a metaphor for young Townsend, I can assure you he has
- never been crushed. Crushed? Not he! He is alive and perfectly intact,
- and that’s why I am not satisfied.”
- “Should you have liked to kill him?” asked Mrs. Almond.
- “Yes, very much. I think it is quite possible that it is all a blind.”
- “A blind?”
- “An arrangement between them. _Il fait le mort_, as they say in France;
- but he is looking out of the corner of his eye. You can depend upon it
- he has not burned his ships; he has kept one to come back in. When I am
- dead, he will set sail again, and then she will marry him.”
- “It is interesting to know that you accuse your only daughter of being
- the vilest of hypocrites,” said Mrs. Almond.
- “I don’t see what difference her being my only daughter makes. It is
- better to accuse one than a dozen. But I don’t accuse any one. There is
- not the smallest hypocrisy about Catherine, and I deny that she even
- pretends to be miserable.”
- The Doctor’s idea that the thing was a “blind” had its intermissions and
- revivals; but it may be said on the whole to have increased as he grew
- older; together with his impression of Catherine’s blooming and
- comfortable condition. Naturally, if he had not found grounds for
- viewing her as a lovelorn maiden during the year or two that followed her
- great trouble, he found none at a time when she had completely recovered
- her self-possession. He was obliged to recognise the fact that if the
- two young people were waiting for him to get out of the way, they were at
- least waiting very patiently. He had heard from time to time that Morris
- was in New York; but he never remained there long, and, to the best of
- the Doctor’s belief, had no communication with Catherine. He was sure
- they never met, and he had reason to suspect that Morris never wrote to
- her. After the letter that has been mentioned, she heard from him twice
- again, at considerable intervals; but on none of these occasions did she
- write herself. On the other hand, as the Doctor observed, she averted
- herself rigidly from the idea of marrying other people. Her
- opportunities for doing so were not numerous, but they occurred often
- enough to test her disposition. She refused a widower, a man with a
- genial temperament, a handsome fortune, and three little girls (he had
- heard that she was very fond of children, and he pointed to his own with
- some confidence); and she turned a deaf ear to the solicitations of a
- clever young lawyer, who, with the prospect of a great practice, and the
- reputation of a most agreeable man, had had the shrewdness, when he came
- to look about him for a wife, to believe that she would suit him better
- than several younger and prettier girls. Mr. Macalister, the widower,
- had desired to make a marriage of reason, and had chosen Catherine for
- what he supposed to be her latent matronly qualities; but John Ludlow,
- who was a year the girl’s junior, and spoken of always as a young man who
- might have his “pick,” was seriously in love with her. Catherine,
- however, would never look at him; she made it plain to him that she
- thought he came to see her too often. He afterwards consoled himself,
- and married a very different person, little Miss Sturtevant, whose
- attractions were obvious to the dullest comprehension. Catherine, at the
- time of these events, had left her thirtieth year well behind her, and
- had quite taken her place as an old maid. Her father would have
- preferred she should marry, and he once told her that he hoped she would
- not be too fastidious. “I should like to see you an honest man’s wife
- before I die,” he said. This was after John Ludlow had been compelled to
- give it up, though the Doctor had advised him to persevere. The Doctor
- exercised no further pressure, and had the credit of not “worrying” at
- all over his daughter’s singleness. In fact he worried rather more than
- appeared, and there were considerable periods during which he felt sure
- that Morris Townsend was hidden behind some door. “If he is not, why
- doesn’t she marry?” he asked himself. “Limited as her intelligence may
- be, she must understand perfectly well that she is made to do the usual
- thing.” Catherine, however, became an admirable old maid. She formed
- habits, regulated her days upon a system of her own, interested herself
- in charitable institutions, asylums, hospitals, and aid societies; and
- went generally, with an even and noiseless step, about the rigid business
- of her life. This life had, however, a secret history as well as a
- public one—if I may talk of the public history of a mature and diffident
- spinster for whom publicity had always a combination of terrors. From
- her own point of view the great facts of her career were that Morris
- Townsend had trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken
- its spring. Nothing could ever alter these facts; they were always
- there, like her name, her age, her plain face. Nothing could ever undo
- the wrong or cure the pain that Morris had inflicted on her, and nothing
- could ever make her feel towards her father as she felt in her younger
- years. There was something dead in her life, and her duty was to try and
- fill the void. Catherine recognised this duty to the utmost; she had a
- great disapproval of brooding and moping. She had, of course, no faculty
- for quenching memory in dissipation; but she mingled freely in the usual
- gaieties of the town, and she became at last an inevitable figure at all
- respectable entertainments. She was greatly liked, and as time went on
- she grew to be a sort of kindly maiden aunt to the younger portion of
- society. Young girls were apt to confide to her their love affairs
- (which they never did to Mrs. Penniman), and young men to be fond of her
- without knowing why. She developed a few harmless eccentricities; her
- habits, once formed, were rather stiffly maintained; her opinions, on all
- moral and social matters, were extremely conservative; and before she was
- forty she was regarded as an old-fashioned person, and an authority on
- customs that had passed away. Mrs. Penniman, in comparison, was quite a
- girlish figure; she grew younger as she advanced in life. She lost none
- of her relish for beauty and mystery, but she had little opportunity to
- exercise it. With Catherine’s later wooers she failed to establish
- relations as intimate as those which had given her so many interesting
- hours in the society of Morris Townsend. These gentlemen had an
- indefinable mistrust of her good offices, and they never talked to her
- about Catherine’s charms. Her ringlets, her buckles and bangles,
- glistened more brightly with each succeeding year, and she remained quite
- the same officious and imaginative Mrs. Penniman, and the odd mixture of
- impetuosity and circumspection, that we have hitherto known. As regards
- one point, however, her circumspection prevailed, and she must be given
- due credit for it. For upwards of seventeen years she never mentioned
- Morris Townsend’s name to her niece. Catherine was grateful to her, but
- this consistent silence, so little in accord with her aunt’s character,
- gave her a certain alarm, and she could never wholly rid herself of a
- suspicion that Mrs. Penniman sometimes had news of him.
- XXXIII
- LITTLE by little Dr. Sloper had retired from his profession; he visited
- only those patients in whose symptoms he recognised a certain
- originality. He went again to Europe, and remained two years; Catherine
- went with him, and on this occasion Mrs. Penniman was of the party.
- Europe apparently had few surprises for Mrs. Penniman, who frequently
- remarked, in the most romantic sites—“You know I am very familiar with
- all this.” It should be added that such remarks were usually not
- addressed to her brother, or yet to her niece, but to fellow-tourists who
- happened to be at hand, or even to the cicerone or the goat-herd in the
- foreground.
- One day, after his return from Europe, the Doctor said something to his
- daughter that made her start—it seemed to come from so far out of the
- past.
- “I should like you to promise me something before I die.”
- “Why do you talk about your dying?” she asked.
- “Because I am sixty-eight years old.”
- “I hope you will live a long time,” said Catherine.
- “I hope I shall! But some day I shall take a bad cold, and then it will
- not matter much what any one hopes. That will be the manner of my exit,
- and when it takes place, remember I told you so. Promise me not to marry
- Morris Townsend after I am gone.”
- This was what made Catherine start, as I have said; but her start was a
- silent one, and for some moments she said nothing. “Why do you speak of
- him?” she asked at last.
- “You challenge everything I say. I speak of him because he’s a topic,
- like any other. He’s to be seen, like any one else, and he is still
- looking for a wife—having had one and got rid of her, I don’t know by
- what means. He has lately been in New York, and at your cousin Marian’s
- house; your Aunt Elizabeth saw him there.”
- “They neither of them told me,” said Catherine.
- “That’s their merit; it’s not yours. He has grown fat and bald, and he
- has not made his fortune. But I can’t trust those facts alone to steel
- your heart against him, and that’s why I ask you to promise.”
- “Fat and bald”: these words presented a strange image to Catherine’s
- mind, out of which the memory of the most beautiful young man in the
- world had never faded. “I don’t think you understand,” she said. “I
- very seldom think of Mr. Townsend.”
- “It will be very easy for you to go on, then. Promise me, after my
- death, to do the same.”
- Again, for some moments, Catherine was silent; her father’s request
- deeply amazed her; it opened an old wound and made it ache afresh. “I
- don’t think I can promise that,” she answered.
- “It would be a great satisfaction,” said her father.
- “You don’t understand. I can’t promise that.”
- The Doctor was silent a minute. “I ask you for a particular reason. I
- am altering my will.”
- This reason failed to strike Catherine; and indeed she scarcely
- understood it. All her feelings were merged in the sense that he was
- trying to treat her as he had treated her years before. She had suffered
- from it then; and now all her experience, all her acquired tranquillity
- and rigidity, protested. She had been so humble in her youth that she
- could now afford to have a little pride, and there was something in this
- request, and in her father’s thinking himself so free to make it, that
- seemed an injury to her dignity. Poor Catherine’s dignity was not
- aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could
- find it. Her father had pushed very far.
- “I can’t promise,” she simply repeated.
- “You are very obstinate,” said the Doctor.
- “I don’t think you understand.”
- “Please explain, then.”
- “I can’t explain,” said Catherine. “And I can’t promise.”
- “Upon my word,” her father explained, “I had no idea how obstinate you
- are!”
- She knew herself that she was obstinate, and it gave her a certain joy.
- She was now a middle-aged woman.
- About a year after this, the accident that the Doctor had spoken of
- occurred; he took a violent cold. Driving out to Bloomingdale one April
- day to see a patient of unsound mind, who was confined in a private
- asylum for the insane, and whose family greatly desired a medical opinion
- from an eminent source, he was caught in a spring shower, and being in a
- buggy, without a hood, he found himself soaked to the skin. He came home
- with an ominous chill, and on the morrow he was seriously ill. “It is
- congestion of the lungs,” he said to Catherine; “I shall need very good
- nursing. It will make no difference, for I shall not recover; but I wish
- everything to be done, to the smallest detail, as if I should. I hate an
- ill-conducted sick-room; and you will be so good as to nurse me on the
- hypothesis that I shall get well.” He told her which of his
- fellow-physicians to send for, and gave her a multitude of minute
- directions; it was quite on the optimistic hypothesis that she nursed
- him. But he had never been wrong in his life, and he was not wrong now.
- He was touching his seventieth year, and though he had a very
- well-tempered constitution, his hold upon life had lost its firmness. He
- died after three weeks’ illness, during which Mrs. Penniman, as well as
- his daughter, had been assiduous at his bedside.
- On his will being opened after a decent interval, it was found to consist
- of two portions. The first of these dated from ten years back, and
- consisted of a series of dispositions by which he left the great mass of
- property to his daughter, with becoming legacies to his two sisters. The
- second was a codicil, of recent origin, maintaining the annuities to Mrs.
- Penniman and Mrs. Almond, but reducing Catherine’s share to a fifth of
- what he had first bequeathed her. “She is amply provided for from her
- mother’s side,” the document ran, “never having spent more than a
- fraction of her income from this source; so that her fortune is already
- more than sufficient to attract those unscrupulous adventurers whom she
- has given me reason to believe that she persists in regarding as an
- interesting class.” The large remainder of his property, therefore, Dr.
- Sloper had divided into seven unequal parts, which he left, as
- endowments, to as many different hospitals and schools of medicine, in
- various cities of the Union.
- To Mrs. Penniman it seemed monstrous that a man should play such tricks
- with other people’s money; for after his death, of course, as she said,
- it was other people’s. “Of course, you will dispute the will,” she
- remarked, fatuously, to Catherine.
- “Oh no,” Catherine answered, “I like it very much. Only I wish it had
- been expressed a little differently!”
- XXXIV
- IT was her habit to remain in town very late in the summer; she preferred
- the house in Washington Square to any other habitation whatever, and it
- was under protest that she used to go to the seaside for the month of
- August. At the sea she spent her month at an hotel. The year that her
- father died she intermitted this custom altogether, not thinking it
- consistent with deep mourning; and the year after that she put off her
- departure till so late that the middle of August found her still in the
- heated solitude of Washington Square. Mrs. Penniman, who was fond of a
- change, was usually eager for a visit to the country; but this year she
- appeared quite content with such rural impressions as she could gather,
- at the parlour window, from the ailantus-trees behind the wooden paling.
- The peculiar fragrance of this vegetation used to diffuse itself in the
- evening air, and Mrs. Penniman, on the warm nights of July, often sat at
- the open window and inhaled it. This was a happy moment for Mrs.
- Penniman; after the death of her brother she felt more free to obey her
- impulses. A vague oppression had disappeared from her life, and she
- enjoyed a sense of freedom of which she had not been conscious since the
- memorable time, so long ago, when the Doctor went abroad with Catherine
- and left her at home to entertain Morris Townsend. The year that had
- elapsed since her brother’s death reminded her—of that happy time,
- because, although Catherine, in growing older, had become a person to be
- reckoned with, yet her society was a very different thing, as Mrs.
- Penniman said, from that of a tank of cold water. The elder lady hardly
- knew what use to make of this larger margin of her life; she sat and
- looked at it very much as she had often sat, with her poised needle in
- her hand, before her tapestry frame. She had a confident hope, however,
- that her rich impulses, her talent for embroidery, would still find their
- application, and this confidence was justified before many months had
- elapsed.
- Catherine continued to live in her father’s house in spite of its being
- represented to her that a maiden lady of quiet habits might find a more
- convenient abode in one of the smaller dwellings, with brown stone
- fronts, which had at this time begun to adorn the transverse
- thoroughfares in the upper part of the town. She liked the earlier
- structure—it had begun by this time to be called an “old” house—and
- proposed to herself to end her days in it. If it was too large for a
- pair of unpretending gentlewomen, this was better than the opposite
- fault; for Catherine had no desire to find herself in closer quarters
- with her aunt. She expected to spend the rest of her life in Washington
- Square, and to enjoy Mrs. Penniman’s society for the whole of this
- period; as she had a conviction that, long as she might live, her aunt
- would live at least as long, and always retain her brilliancy and
- activity. Mrs. Penniman suggested to her the idea of a rich vitality.
- On one of those warm evenings in July of which mention has been made, the
- two ladies sat together at an open window, looking out on the quiet
- Square. It was too hot for lighted lamps, for reading, or for work; it
- might have appeared too hot even for conversation, Mrs. Penniman having
- long been speechless. She sat forward in the window, half on the
- balcony, humming a little song. Catherine was within the room, in a low
- rocking-chair, dressed in white, and slowly using a large palmetto fan.
- It was in this way, at this season, that the aunt and niece, after they
- had had tea, habitually spent their evenings.
- “Catherine,” said Mrs. Penniman at last, “I am going to say something
- that will surprise you.”
- “Pray do,” Catherine answered; “I like surprises. And it is so quiet
- now.”
- “Well, then, I have seen Morris Townsend.”
- If Catherine was surprised, she checked the expression of it; she gave
- neither a start nor an exclamation. She remained, indeed, for some
- moments intensely still, and this may very well have been a symptom of
- emotion. “I hope he was well,” she said at last.
- “I don’t know; he is a great deal changed. He would like very much to
- see you.”
- “I would rather not see him,” said Catherine quickly.
- “I was afraid you would say that. But you don’t seem surprised!”
- “I am—very much.”
- “I met him at Marian’s,” said Mrs. Penniman. “He goes to Marian’s, and
- they are so afraid you will meet him there. It’s my belief that that’s
- why he goes. He wants so much to see you.” Catherine made no response
- to this, and Mrs. Penniman went on. “I didn’t know him at first; he is
- so remarkably changed. But he knew me in a minute. He says I am not in
- the least changed. You know how polite he always was. He was coming
- away when I came, and we walked a little distance together. He is still
- very handsome, only, of course, he looks older, and he is not so—so
- animated as he used to be. There was a touch of sadness about him; but
- there was a touch of sadness about him before—especially when he went
- away. I am afraid he has not been very successful—that he has never got
- thoroughly established. I don’t suppose he is sufficiently plodding, and
- that, after all, is what succeeds in this world.” Mrs. Penniman had not
- mentioned Morris Townsend’s name to her niece for upwards of the fifth of
- a century; but now that she had broken the spell, she seemed to wish to
- make up for lost time, as if there had been a sort of exhilaration in
- hearing herself talk of him. She proceeded, however, with considerable
- caution, pausing occasionally to let Catherine give some sign. Catherine
- gave no other sign than to stop the rocking of her chair and the swaying
- of her fan; she sat motionless and silent. “It was on Tuesday last,”
- said Mrs. Penniman, “and I have been hesitating ever since about telling
- you. I didn’t know how you might like it. At last I thought that it was
- so long ago that you would probably not have any particular feeling. I
- saw him again, after meeting him at Marian’s. I met him in the street,
- and he went a few steps with me. The first thing he said was about you;
- he asked ever so many questions. Marian didn’t want me to speak to you;
- she didn’t want you to know that they receive him. I told him I was sure
- that after all these years you couldn’t have any feeling about that; you
- couldn’t grudge him the hospitality of his own cousin’s house. I said
- you would be bitter indeed if you did that. Marian has the most
- extraordinary ideas about what happened between you; she seems to think
- he behaved in some very unusual manner. I took the liberty of reminding
- her of the real facts, and placing the story in its true light. _He_ has
- no bitterness, Catherine, I can assure you; and he might be excused for
- it, for things have not gone well with him. He has been all over the
- world, and tried to establish himself everywhere; but his evil star was
- against him. It is most interesting to hear him talk of his evil star.
- Everything failed; everything but his—you know, you remember—his proud,
- high spirit. I believe he married some lady somewhere in Europe. You
- know they marry in such a peculiar matter-of-course way in Europe; a
- marriage of reason they call it. She died soon afterwards; as he said to
- me, she only flitted across his life. He has not been in New York for
- ten years; he came back a few days ago. The first thing he did was to
- ask me about you. He had heard you had never married; he seemed very
- much interested about that. He said you had been the real romance of his
- life.”
- Catherine had suffered her companion to proceed from point to point, and
- pause to pause, without interrupting her; she fixed her eyes on the
- ground and listened. But the last phrase I have quoted was followed by a
- pause of peculiar significance, and then, at last, Catherine spoke. It
- will be observed that before doing so she had received a good deal of
- information about Morris Townsend. “Please say no more; please don’t
- follow up that subject.”
- “Doesn’t it interest you?” asked Mrs. Penniman, with a certain timorous
- archness.
- “It pains me,” said Catherine.
- “I was afraid you would say that. But don’t you think you could get used
- to it? He wants so much to see you.”
- “Please don’t, Aunt Lavinia,” said Catherine, getting up from her seat.
- She moved quickly away, and went to the other window, which stood open to
- the balcony; and here, in the embrasure, concealed from her aunt by the
- white curtains, she remained a long time, looking out into the warm
- darkness. She had had a great shock; it was as if the gulf of the past
- had suddenly opened, and a spectral figure had risen out of it. There
- were some things she believed she had got over, some feelings that she
- had thought of as dead; but apparently there was a certain vitality in
- them still. Mrs. Penniman had made them stir themselves. It was but a
- momentary agitation, Catherine said to herself; it would presently pass
- away. She was trembling, and her heart was beating so that she could
- feel it; but this also would subside. Then, suddenly, while she waited
- for a return of her calmness, she burst into tears. But her tears flowed
- very silently, so that Mrs. Penniman had no observation of them. It was
- perhaps, however, because Mrs. Penniman suspected them that she said no
- more that evening about Morris Townsend.
- XXXV
- HER refreshed attention to this gentleman had not those limits of which
- Catherine desired, for herself, to be conscious; it lasted long enough to
- enable her to wait another week before speaking of him again. It was
- under the same circumstances that she once more attacked the subject.
- She had been sitting with her niece in the evening; only on this
- occasion, as the night was not so warm, the lamp had been lighted, and
- Catherine had placed herself near it with a morsel of fancy-work. Mrs.
- Penniman went and sat alone for half an hour on the balcony; then she
- came in, moving vaguely about the room. At last she sank into a seat
- near Catherine, with clasped hands, and a little look of excitement.
- “Shall you be angry if I speak to you again about _him_?” she asked.
- Catherine looked up at her quietly. “Who is _he_?”
- “He whom you once loved.”
- “I shall not be angry, but I shall not like it.”
- “He sent you a message,” said Mrs. Penniman. “I promised him to deliver
- it, and I must keep my promise.”
- In all these years Catherine had had time to forget how little she had to
- thank her aunt for in the season of her misery; she had long ago forgiven
- Mrs. Penniman for taking too much upon herself. But for a moment this
- attitude of interposition and disinterestedness, this carrying of
- messages and redeeming of promises, brought back the sense that her
- companion was a dangerous woman. She had said she would not be angry;
- but for an instant she felt sore. “I don’t care what you do with your
- promise!” she answered.
- Mrs. Penniman, however, with her high conception of the sanctity of
- pledges, carried her point. “I have gone too far to retreat,” she said,
- though precisely what this meant she was not at pains to explain. “Mr.
- Townsend wishes most particularly to see you, Catherine; he believes that
- if you knew how much, and why, he wishes it, you would consent to do so.”
- “There can be no reason,” said Catherine; “no good reason.”
- “His happiness depends upon it. Is not that a good reason?” asked Mrs.
- Penniman impressively.
- “Not for me. My happiness does not.”
- “I think you will be happier after you have seen him. He is going away
- again—going to resume his wanderings. It is a very lonely, restless,
- joyless life. Before he goes he wishes to speak to you; it is a fixed
- idea with him—he is always thinking of it. He has something very
- important to say to you. He believes that you never understood him—that
- you never judged him rightly, and the belief has always weighed upon him
- terribly. He wishes to justify himself; he believes that in a very few
- words he could do so. He wishes to meet you as a friend.”
- Catherine listened to this wonderful speech without pausing in her work;
- she had now had several days to accustom herself to think of Morris
- Townsend again as an actuality. When it was over she said simply,
- “Please say to Mr. Townsend that I wish he would leave me alone.”
- She had hardly spoken when a sharp, firm ring at the door vibrated
- through the summer night. Catherine looked up at the clock; it marked a
- quarter-past nine—a very late hour for visitors, especially in the empty
- condition of the town. Mrs. Penniman at the same moment gave a little
- start, and then Catherine’s eyes turned quickly to her aunt. They met
- Mrs. Penniman’s and sounded them for a moment, sharply. Mrs. Penniman
- was blushing; her look was a conscious one; it seemed to confess
- something. Catherine guessed its meaning, and rose quickly from her
- chair.
- “Aunt Penniman,” she said, in a tone that scared her companion, “have you
- taken the _liberty_ . . . ?”
- “My dearest Catherine,” stammered Mrs. Penniman, “just wait till you see
- him!”
- Catherine had frightened her aunt, but she was also frightened herself;
- she was on the point of rushing to give orders to the servant, who was
- passing to the door, to admit no one; but the fear of meeting her visitor
- checked her.
- “Mr. Morris Townsend.”
- This was what she heard, vaguely but recognisably articulated by the
- domestic, while she hesitated. She had her back turned to the door of
- the parlour, and for some moments she kept it turned, feeling that he had
- come in. He had not spoken, however, and at last she faced about. Then
- she saw a gentleman standing in the middle of the room, from which her
- aunt had discreetly retired.
- She would never have known him. He was forty-five years old, and his
- figure was not that of the straight, slim young man she remembered. But
- it was a very fine person, and a fair and lustrous beard, spreading
- itself upon a well-presented chest, contributed to its effect. After a
- moment Catherine recognised the upper half of the face, which, though her
- visitor’s clustering locks had grown thin, was still remarkably handsome.
- He stood in a deeply deferential attitude, with his eyes on her face. “I
- have ventured—I have ventured,” he said; and then he paused, looking
- about him, as if he expected her to ask him to sit down. It was the old
- voice, but it had not the old charm. Catherine, for a minute, was
- conscious of a distinct determination not to invite him to take a seat.
- Why had he come? It was wrong for him to come. Morris was embarrassed,
- but Catherine gave him no help. It was not that she was glad of his
- embarrassment; on the contrary, it excited all her own liabilities of
- this kind, and gave her great pain. But how could she welcome him when
- she felt so vividly that he ought not to have come? “I wanted so much—I
- was determined,” Morris went on. But he stopped again; it was not easy.
- Catherine still said nothing, and he may well have recalled with
- apprehension her ancient faculty of silence. She continued to look at
- him, however, and as she did so she made the strangest observation. It
- seemed to be he, and yet not he; it was the man who had been everything,
- and yet this person was nothing. How long ago it was—how old she had
- grown—how much she had lived! She had lived on something that was
- connected with _him_, and she had consumed it in doing so. This person
- did not look unhappy. He was fair and well-preserved, perfectly dressed,
- mature and complete. As Catherine looked at him, the story of his life
- defined itself in his eyes; he had made himself comfortable, and he had
- never been caught. But even while her perception opened itself to this,
- she had no desire to catch him; his presence was painful to her, and she
- only wished he would go.
- “Will you not sit down?” he asked.
- “I think we had better not,” said Catherine.
- “I offend you by coming?” He was very grave; he spoke in a tone of the
- richest respect.
- “I don’t think you ought to have come.”
- “Did not Mrs. Penniman tell you—did she not give you my message?”
- “She told me something, but I did not understand.”
- “I wish you would let _me_ tell you—let me speak for myself.”
- “I don’t think it is necessary,” said Catherine.
- “Not for you, perhaps, but for me. It would be a great satisfaction—and
- I have not many.” He seemed to be coming nearer; Catherine turned away.
- “Can we not be friends again?” he said.
- “We are not enemies,” said Catherine. “I have none but friendly feelings
- to you.”
- “Ah, I wonder whether you know the happiness it gives me to hear you say
- that!” Catherine uttered no intimation that she measured the influence
- of her words; and he presently went on, “You have not changed—the years
- have passed happily for you.”
- “They have passed very quietly,” said Catherine.
- “They have left no marks; you are admirably young.” This time he
- succeeded in coming nearer—he was close to her; she saw his glossy
- perfumed beard, and his eyes above it looking strange and hard. It was
- very different from his old—from his young—face. If she had first seen
- him this way she would not have liked him. It seemed to her that he was
- smiling, or trying to smile. “Catherine,” he said, lowering his voice,
- “I have never ceased to think of you.”
- “Please don’t say those things,” she answered.
- “Do you hate me?”
- “Oh no,” said Catherine.
- Something in her tone discouraged him, but in a moment he recovered
- himself. “Have you still some kindness for me, then?”
- “I don’t know why you have come here to ask me such things!” Catherine
- exclaimed.
- “Because for many years it has been the desire of my life that we should
- be friends again.”
- “That is impossible.”
- “Why so? Not if you will allow it.”
- “I will not allow it!” said Catherine.
- He looked at her again in silence. “I see; my presence troubles you and
- pains you. I will go away; but you must give me leave to come again.”
- “Please don’t come again,” she said.
- “Never?—never?”
- She made a great effort; she wished to say something that would make it
- impossible he should ever again cross her threshold. “It is wrong of
- you. There is no propriety in it—no reason for it.”
- “Ah, dearest lady, you do me injustice!” cried Morris Townsend. “We have
- only waited, and now we are free.”
- “You treated me badly,” said Catherine.
- “Not if you think of it rightly. You had your quiet life with your
- father—which was just what I could not make up my mind to rob you of.”
- “Yes; I had that.”
- Morris felt it to be a considerable damage to his cause that he could not
- add that she had had something more besides; for it is needless to say
- that he had learnt the contents of Dr. Sloper’s will. He was
- nevertheless not at a loss. “There are worse fates than that!” he
- exclaimed, with expression; and he might have been supposed to refer to
- his own unprotected situation. Then he added, with a deeper tenderness,
- “Catherine, have you never forgiven me?”
- “I forgave you years ago, but it is useless for us to attempt to be
- friends.”
- “Not if we forget the past. We have still a future, thank God!”
- “I can’t forget—I don’t forget,” said Catherine. “You treated me too
- badly. I felt it very much; I felt it for years.” And then she went on,
- with her wish to show him that he must not come to her this way, “I can’t
- begin again—I can’t take it up. Everything is dead and buried. It was
- too serious; it made a great change in my life. I never expected to see
- you here.”
- “Ah, you are angry!” cried Morris, who wished immensely that he could
- extort some flash of passion from her mildness. In that case he might
- hope.
- “No, I am not angry. Anger does not last, that way, for years. But
- there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong.
- But I can’t talk.”
- Morris stood stroking his beard, with a clouded eye. “Why have you never
- married?” he asked abruptly. “You have had opportunities.”
- “I didn’t wish to marry.”
- “Yes, you are rich, you are free; you had nothing to gain.”
- “I had nothing to gain,” said Catherine.
- Morris looked vaguely round him, and gave a deep sigh. “Well, I was in
- hopes that we might still have been friends.”
- “I meant to tell you, by my aunt, in answer to your message—if you had
- waited for an answer—that it was unnecessary for you to come in that
- hope.”
- “Good-bye, then,” said Morris. “Excuse my indiscretion.”
- He bowed, and she turned away—standing there, averted, with her eyes on
- the ground, for some moments after she had heard him close the door of
- the room.
- In the hall he found Mrs. Penniman, fluttered and eager; she appeared to
- have been hovering there under the irreconcilable promptings of her
- curiosity and her dignity.
- “That was a precious plan of yours!” said Morris, clapping on his hat.
- “Is she so hard?” asked Mrs. Penniman.
- “She doesn’t care a button for me—with her confounded little dry manner.”
- “Was it very dry?” pursued Mrs. Penniman, with solicitude.
- Morris took no notice of her question; he stood musing an instant, with
- his hat on. “But why the deuce, then, would she never marry?”
- “Yes—why indeed?” sighed Mrs. Penniman. And then, as if from a sense of
- the inadequacy of this explanation, “But you will not despair—you will
- come back?”
- “Come back? Damnation!” And Morris Townsend strode out of the house,
- leaving Mrs. Penniman staring.
- Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy
- work, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were.
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