“Mr. Morris Townsend.”
This was what she heard, vaguely but recognizably, articulated by the domestic, while she hesitated. She had her back turned to the door of the parlor, 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 presence, and a fair and lustrous beard, spreading itself upon a well-presented chest, contributed to its effect. After a moment Catherine recognized 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 asked.
“We’re 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 these 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 learned the contents of Doctor 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 calmness. 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?”
&nb
sp; “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 parlor, picking up her morsel of fancywork, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
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Daniel J. Boorstin
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A. S. Byatt
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Christopher Cerf
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Shelby Foote
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Vartan Gregorian
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Larry McMurtry
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Edmund Morris
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John Richardson
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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
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William Styron
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Gore Vidal
THE MODERN LIBRARY - A LIST OF CURRENT TITLES
The Education of Henry Adams
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Modern Magic·
DANTE ALIGHIERI
Inferno
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ERWOOD ANDERSON
Winesburg, Ohio
RICHARD BURTON
The Arabian Nights
ARISTOTLE
Introduction to Aristotle
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
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The Fire Next Time
Go Tell It on the Mountain
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The Selected Stories·
MONROE C. BEARDSLEY, EDITOR
The European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche·
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The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader·
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
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Wuthering Heights
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Bulfinch’s Mythology
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The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill·
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In Cold Blood
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
My Ántonia
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The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely·
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The Canterbury Tales
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Longer Stories from the Last Decade·
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The Awakening and Selected Stories
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The Count of Monte Cristo
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Invisible Man
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Tom Jones
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This Side of Paradise
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Madame Bovary
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The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign·
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E. M. FORSTER
A Room with a View & Howards End
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The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud·
The Interpretation of Dreams
EDWARD GIBBON
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I, Volume II, Volume III
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella
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Dead Souls
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The Quiet American
LORRAINE HANSBERRY
A Raisin in the Sun
THOMAS HARDY
The Collected Novels Vol. I: Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Vol. II: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure
The Return of the Native
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Complete Novels and Selected Tales Vol. I: Fanshawe, Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, The Scarlet Letter
O. HENRY
The Best Short Stories
VICTOR HUGO
Les Misérables
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
JANE JACOBS
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
HENRY JAMES
The Wings of the Dove
WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious Experience
THOMAS JEFFERSON
The Life and Selected Writings
SARAH ORNE JEWETT
The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
JAMES JOYCE
Dubliners
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Ulysses
C. G. JUNG
The Basic Writings
FRANZ KAFKA
Selected Short Stories
IMMANUEL KANT
The Philosophy of Kant
JOHN KEATS
Complete Poems
TRACY KIDDER
The Soul of a New Machine
LAO-TZU
Te-Tao Ching
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Sons and Lovers
A. J. LIEBLING
Between Meals·
The Road Back to Paris
NORMAN MAILER
The Executioner’s Song
SIR THOMAS MALORY
Le Morte d’Arthur
THOMAS MANN
Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories
Doctor Faustus
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sp; CARSON MCCULLERS
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
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The Bottom of the Harbor
Joe Gould’s Secret
NANCY MITFORD
The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate
LADY MURASAKI
The Tale of Genji
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South to a Very Old Place
V. S. NAIPAUL
A Bend in the River
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
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Thus Spoke Zarathustra
FRANK NORRIS
McTeague
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Nine Plays
DOROTHY PARKER
The Poetry and Short Stories
PLATO
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PLUTARCH
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Volume I, Volume II
EDGAR ALLAN POE
The Collected Tales and Poems
V. S. PRITCHETT
A Cab at the Door & Midnight Oil·
MARCEL PROUST
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
Vol. I: Swann’s Way
Vol. II: Within a Budding Grove
Vol. III: The Guermantes Way
Vol. IV: Sodom and Gomorrah
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RAINER MARIA RILKE
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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
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LILLIAN ROSS
Picture
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Goodbye, Columbus
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A Sport and a Pastime
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ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
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The Red and the Black
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Tristram Shandy & A Sentimental Journey
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
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