“I should think I might. I disappoint everyone—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 forever—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 childlike 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.
CHAPTER 21
Doctor 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’m 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 favor 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 until 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-humor, 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 center 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 claim it is 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 an orthodox 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.
CHAPTER 22
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 reflections gave him plenty of occupation, and made it necessary that he should trim his sail. Doctor 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 shortcuts, 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 skillfully 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 honor, 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 connection 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 toward a vague horror from which s
he recoiled. “I think we shall marry pretty soon,” she repeated, at last.
Her father gave her his dreadful look again, as if she were someone 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 fly 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.”