Chương Chương 22 · 第22章

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.