第 十五 章 · 第15章

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.