Kabanata Kabanata 2 · 第2章

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.