Part 15

In this way the girl delivered herself, and from hour to hour kept her aunt at bay. From hour to hour Mrs. Penniman’s curiosity grew. She would have given her little finger to know what Morris had said and done, what tone he had taken, what pretext he had found. She wrote to him, naturally, to request an interview; but she received, as naturally, no answer to her petition. Morris was not in a writing mood; for Catherine had addressed him two short notes which met with no acknowledgment. These notes were so brief that I may give them entire. “Won’t you give me some sign that you didn’t mean to be so cruel as you seemed on Tuesday?”—that was the first; the other was a little longer. “If I was unreasonable or suspicious on Tuesday—if I annoyed you or troubled you in any way—I beg your forgiveness, and I promise never again to be so foolish. I am punished enough, and I don’t understand. Dear Morris, you are killing me!” These notes were despatched on the Friday and Saturday; but Saturday and Sunday passed without bringing the poor girl the satisfaction she desired. Her punishment accumulated; she continued to bear it, however, with a good deal of superficial fortitude. On Saturday morning the Doctor, who had been watching in silence, spoke to his sister Lavinia.

“The thing has happened—the scoundrel has backed out!”

“Never!” cried Mrs. Penniman, who had bethought herself what she should say to Catherine, but was not provided with a line of defence against her brother, so that indignant negation was the only weapon in her hands.

“He has begged for a reprieve, then, if you like that better!”

“It seems to make you very happy that your daughter’s affections have been trifled with.”

“It does,” said the Doctor; ‘“for I had foretold it! It’s a great pleasure to be in the right.”

“Your pleasures make one shudder!” his sister exclaimed.

Catherine went rigidly through her usual occupations; that is, up to the point of going with her aunt to church on Sunday morning. She generally went to afternoon service as well; but on this occasion her courage faltered, and she begged of Mrs. Penniman to go without her.

“I am sure you have a secret,” said Mrs. Penniman, with great significance, looking at her rather grimly.

“If I have, I shall keep it!” Catherine answered, turning away.

Mrs. Penniman started for church; but before she had arrived, she stopped and turned back, and before twenty minutes had elapsed she re-entered the house, looked into the empty parlours, and then went upstairs and knocked at Catherine’s door. She got no answer; Catherine was not in her room, and Mrs. Penniman presently ascertained that she was not in the house. “She has gone to him, she has fled!” Lavinia cried, clasping her hands with admiration and envy. But she soon perceived that Catherine had taken nothing with her—all her personal property in her room was intact—and then she jumped at the hypothesis that the girl had gone forth, not in tenderness, but in resentment. “She has followed him to his own door—she has burst upon him in his own apartment!” It was in these terms that Mrs. Penniman depicted to herself her niece’s errand, which, viewed in this light, gratified her sense of the picturesque only a shade less strongly than the idea of a clandestine marriage. To visit one’s lover, with tears and reproaches, at his own residence, was an image so agreeable to Mrs. Penniman’s mind that she felt a sort of æsthetic disappointment at its lacking, in this case, the harmonious accompaniments of darkness and storm. A quiet Sunday afternoon appeared an inadequate setting for it; and, indeed, Mrs. Penniman was quite out of humour with the conditions of the time, which passed very slowly as she sat in the front parlour in her bonnet and her cashmere shawl, awaiting Catherine’s return.

This event at last took place. She saw her—at the window—mount the steps, and she went to await her in the hall, where she pounced upon her as soon as she had entered the house, and drew her into the parlour, closing the door with solemnity. Catherine was flushed, and her eye was bright. Mrs. Penniman hardly knew what to think.

“May I venture to ask where you have been?” she demanded.

“I have been to take a walk,” said Catherine. “I thought you had gone to church.”

“I did go to church; but the service was shorter than usual. And pray, where did you walk?”

“I don’t know!” said Catherine.

“Your ignorance is most extraordinary! Dear Catherine, you can trust me.”

“What am I to trust you with?”

“With your secret—your sorrow.”

“I have no sorrow!” said Catherine fiercely.

“My poor child,” Mrs. Penniman insisted, “you can’t deceive me. I know everything. I have been requested to—a—to converse with you.”

“I don’t want to converse!”

“It will relieve you. Don’t you know Shakespeare’s lines?—‘the grief that does not speak!’ My dear girl, it is better as it is.”

“What is better?” Catherine asked.

She was really too perverse. A certain amount of perversity was to be allowed for in a young lady whose lover had thrown her over; but not such an amount as would prove inconvenient to his apologists. “That you should be reasonable,” said Mrs. Penniman, with some sternness. “That you should take counsel of worldly prudence, and submit to practical considerations. That you should agree to—a—separate.”

Catherine had been ice up to this moment, but at this word she flamed up. “Separate? What do you know about our separating?”

Mrs. Penniman shook her head with a sadness in which there was almost a sense of injury. “Your pride is my pride, and your susceptibilities are mine. I see your side perfectly, but I also”—and she smiled with melancholy suggestiveness—“I also see the situation as a whole!”

This suggestiveness was lost upon Catherine, who repeated her violent inquiry. “Why do you talk about separation; what do you know about it?”

“We must study resignation,” said Mrs. Penniman, hesitating, but sententious at a venture.

“Resignation to what?”

“To a change of—of our plans.”

“My plans have not changed!” said Catherine, with a little laugh.

“Ah, but Mr. Townsend’s have,” her aunt answered very gently.

“What do you mean?”

There was an imperious brevity in the tone of this inquiry, against which Mrs. Penniman felt bound to protest; the information with which she had undertaken to supply her niece was, after all, a favour. She had tried sharpness, and she had tried sternness: but neither would do; she was shocked at the girl’s obstinacy. “Ah, well,” she said, “if he hasn’t told you! . . . ” and she turned away.

Catherine watched her a moment in silence; then she hurried after her, stopping her before she reached the door. “Told me what? What do you mean? What are you hinting at and threatening me with?”

“Isn’t it broken off?” asked Mrs. Penniman.

“My engagement? Not in the least!”

“I beg your pardon in that case. I have spoken too soon!”

“Too soon! Soon or late,” Catherine broke out, “you speak foolishly and cruelly!”

“What has happened between you, then?” asked her aunt, struck by the sincerity of this cry. “For something certainly has happened.”

“Nothing has happened but that I love him more and more!”

Mrs. Penniman was silent an instant. “I suppose that’s the reason you went to see him this afternoon.”

Catherine flushed as if she had been struck. “Yes, I did go to see him! But that’s my own business.”

“Very well, then; we won’t talk about it.” And Mrs. Penniman moved towards the door again. But she was stopped by a sudden imploring cry from the girl.

“Aunt Lavinia, _where_ has he gone?”

“Ah, you admit, then, that he has gone away? Didn’t they know at his house?”

“They said he had left town. I asked no more questions; I was ashamed,” said Catherine, simply enough.

“You needn’t have taken so compromising a step if you had had a little more confidence in me,” Mrs. Penniman observed, with a good deal of grandeur.

“Is it to New Orleans?” Catherine went on irrelevantly.

It was the first time Mrs. Penniman had heard of New Orleans in this connexion; but she was averse to letting Catherine know that she was in the dark. She attempted to strike an illumination from the instructions she had received from Morris. “My dear Catherine,” she said, “when a separation has been agreed upon, the farther he goes away the better.”

“Agreed upon? Has he agreed upon it with you?” A consummate sense of her aunt’s meddlesome folly had come over her during the last five minutes, and she was sickened at the thought that Mrs. Penniman had been let loose, as it were, upon her happiness.

“He certainly has sometimes advised with me,” said Mrs. Penniman.

“Is it you, then, that have changed him and made him so unnatural?” Catherine cried. “Is it you that have worked on him and taken him from me? He doesn’t belong to you, and I don’t see how you have anything to do with what is between us! Is it you that have made this plot and told him to leave me? How could you be so wicked, so cruel? What have I ever done to you; why can’t you leave me alone? I was afraid you would spoil everything; for you _do_ spoil everything you touch; I was afraid of you all the time we were abroad; I had no rest when I thought that you were always talking to him.” Catherine went on with growing vehemence, pouring out in her bitterness and in the clairvoyance of her passion (which suddenly, jumping all processes, made her judge her aunt finally and without appeal) the uneasiness which had lain for so many months upon her heart.

Mrs. Penniman was scared and bewildered; she saw no prospect of introducing her little account of the purity of Morris’s motives. “You are a most ungrateful girl!” she cried. “Do you scold me for talking with him? I am sure we never talked of anything but you!”

“Yes; and that was the way you worried him; you made him tired of my very name! I wish you had never spoken of me to him; I never asked your help!”

“I am sure if it hadn’t been for me he would never have come to the house, and you would never have known what he thought of you,” Mrs. Penniman rejoined, with a good deal of justice.

“I wish he never had come to the house, and that I never had known it! That’s better than this,” said poor Catherine.

“You are a very ungrateful girl,” Aunt Lavinia repeated.

Catherine’s outbreak of anger and the sense of wrong gave her, while they lasted, the satisfaction that comes from all assertion of force; they hurried her along, and there is always a sort of pleasure in cleaving the air. But at the bottom she hated to be violent, and she was conscious of no aptitude for organised resentment. She calmed herself with a great effort, but with great rapidity, and walked about the room a few moments, trying to say to herself that her aunt had meant everything for the best. She did not succeed in saying it with much conviction, but after a little she was able to speak quietly enough.

“I am not ungrateful, but I am very unhappy. It’s hard to be grateful for that,” she said. “Will you please tell me where he is?”

“I haven’t the least idea; I am not in secret correspondence with him!” And Mrs. Penniman wished indeed that she were, so that she might let him know how Catherine abused her, after all she had done.

“Was it a plan of his, then, to break off—?” By this time Catherine had become completely quiet.

Mrs. Penniman began again to have a glimpse of her chance for explaining. “He shrank—he shrank,” she said. “He lacked courage, but it was the courage to injure you! He couldn’t bear to bring down on you your father’s curse.”

Catherine listened to this with her eyes fixed upon her aunt, and continued to gaze at her for some time afterwards. “Did he tell you to say that?”

“He told me to say many things—all so delicate, so discriminating. And he told me to tell you he hoped you wouldn’t despise him.”

“I don’t,” said Catherine. And then she added: “And will he stay away for ever?”

“Oh, for ever is a long time. Your father, perhaps, won’t live for ever.”

“Perhaps not.”

“I am sure you appreciate—you understand—even though your heart bleeds,” said Mrs. Penniman. “You doubtless think him too scrupulous. So do I, but I respect his scruples. What he asks of you is that you should do the same.”

Catherine was still gazing at her aunt, but she spoke at last, as if she had not heard or not understood her. “It has been a regular plan, then. He has broken it off deliberately; he has given me up.”

“For the present, dear Catherine. He has put it off only.”

“He has left me alone,” Catherine went on.

“Haven’t you _me_?” asked Mrs. Penniman, with much expression.

Catherine shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe it!” and she left the room.

XXXI

THOUGH she had forced herself to be calm, she preferred practising this virtue in private, and she forbore to show herself at tea—a repast which, on Sundays, at six o’clock, took the place of dinner. Dr. Sloper and his sister sat face to face, but Mrs. Penniman never met her brother’s eye. Late in the evening she went with him, but without Catherine, to their sister Almond’s, where, between the two ladies, Catherine’s unhappy situation was discussed with a frankness that was conditioned by a good deal of mysterious reticence on Mrs. Penniman’s part.

“I am delighted he is not to marry her,” said Mrs. Almond, “but he ought to be horsewhipped all the same.”

Mrs. Penniman, who was shocked at her sister’s coarseness, replied that he had been actuated by the noblest of motives—the desire not to impoverish Catherine.

“I am very happy that Catherine is not to be impoverished—but I hope he may never have a penny too much! And what does the poor girl say to _you_?” Mrs. Almond asked.

“She says I have a genius for consolation,” said Mrs. Penniman.

This was the account of the matter that she gave to her sister, and it was perhaps with the consciousness of genius that, on her return that evening to Washington Square, she again presented herself for admittance at Catherine’s door. Catherine came and opened it; she was apparently very quiet.

“I only want to give you a little word of advice,” she said. “If your father asks you, say that everything is going on.”

Catherine stood there, with her hand on the knob looking at her aunt, but not asking her to come in. “Do you think he will ask me?”

“I am sure he will. He asked me just now, on our way home from your Aunt Elizabeth’s. I explained the whole thing to your Aunt Elizabeth. I said to your father I know nothing about it.”

“Do you think he will ask me when he sees—when he sees—?” But here Catherine stopped.

“The more he sees the more disagreeable he will be,” said her aunt.

“He shall see as little as possible!” Catherine declared.

“Tell him you are to be married.”

“So I am,” said Catherine softly; and she closed the door upon her aunt.

She could not have said this two days later—for instance, on Tuesday, when she at last received a letter from Morris Townsend. It was an epistle of considerable length, measuring five large square pages, and written at Philadelphia. It was an explanatory document, and it explained a great many things, chief among which were the considerations that had led the writer to take advantage of an urgent “professional” absence to try and banish from his mind the image of one whose path he had crossed only to scatter it with ruins. He ventured to expect but partial success in this attempt, but he could promise her that, whatever his failure, he would never again interpose between her generous heart and her brilliant prospects and filial duties. He closed with an intimation that his professional pursuits might compel him to travel for some months, and with the hope that when they should each have accommodated themselves to what was sternly involved in their respective positions—even should this result not be reached for years—they should meet as friends, as fellow-sufferers, as innocent but philosophic victims of a great social law. That her life should be peaceful and happy was the dearest wish of him who ventured still to subscribe himself her most obedient servant. The letter was beautifully written, and Catherine, who kept it for many years after this, was able, when her sense of the bitterness of its meaning and the hollowness of its tone had grown less acute, to admire its grace of expression. At present, for a long time after she received it, all she had to help her was the determination, daily more rigid, to make no appeal to the compassion of her father.

He suffered a week to elapse, and then one day, in the morning, at an hour at which she rarely saw him, he strolled into the back parlour. He had watched his time, and he found her alone. She was sitting with some work, and he came and stood in front of her. He was going out, he had on his hat and was drawing on his gloves.

“It doesn’t seem to me that you are treating me just now with all the consideration I deserve,” he said in a moment.

“I don’t know what I have done,” Catherine answered, with her eyes on her work.

“You have apparently quite banished from your mind the request I made you at Liverpool, before we sailed; the request that you would notify me in advance before leaving my house.”

“I have not left your house!” said Catherine.

“But you intend to leave it, and by what you gave me to understand, your departure must be impending. In fact, though you are still here in body, you are already absent in spirit. Your mind has taken up its residence with your prospective husband, and you might quite as well be lodged under the conjugal roof, for all the benefit we get from your society.”

“I will try and be more cheerful!” said Catherine.

“You certainly ought to be cheerful, you ask a great deal if you are not. To the pleasure of marrying a brilliant young man, you add that of having your own way; you strike me as a very lucky young lady!”

Catherine got up; she was suffocating. But she folded her work, deliberately and correctly, bending her burning face upon it. Her father stood where he had planted himself; she hoped he would go, but he smoothed and buttoned his gloves, and then he rested his hands upon his hips.

“It would be a convenience to me to know when I may expect to have an empty house,” he went on. “When you go, your aunt marches.”

She looked at him at last, with a long silent gaze, which, in spite of her pride and her resolution, uttered part of the appeal she had tried not to make. Her father’s cold grey eye sounded her own, and he insisted on his point.

“Is it to-morrow? Is it next week, or the week after?”

“I shall not go away!” said Catherine.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. “Has he backed out?”

“I have broken off my engagement.”

“Broken it off?”

“I have asked him to leave New York, and he has gone away for a long time.”

The Doctor was both puzzled and disappointed, but he solved his perplexity by saying to himself that his daughter simply misrepresented—justifiably, if one would? but nevertheless misrepresented—the facts; and he eased off his disappointment, which was that of a man losing a chance for a little triumph that he had rather counted on, by a few words that he uttered aloud.

“How does he take his dismissal?”

“I don’t know!” said Catherine, less ingeniously than she had hitherto spoken.

“You mean you don’t care? You are rather cruel, after encouraging him and playing with him for so long!”

The Doctor had his revenge, after all.

XXXII