by Henry James
“Do you mean that for an impertinence?” he inquired; an inquiry of which, as he made it, he quite perceived the grossness.
“An impertinence? Oh, father, what terrible things you say!”
“If you don’t wait for my death, you might as well marry immediately; there is nothing else to wait for.”
For some time Catherine made no answer; but finally she said—
“I think Morris—little by little—might persuade you.”
“I shall never let him speak to me again. I dislike him too much.”
Catherine gave a long, low sigh; she tried to stifle it, for she had made up her mind that it was wrong to make a parade of her trouble, and to endeavour to act upon her father by the meretricious aid of emotion. Indeed, she even thought it wrong—in the sense of being inconsiderate—to attempt to act upon his feelings at all; her part was to effect some gentle, gradual change in his intellectual perception of poor Morris’s character. But the means of effecting such a change were at present shrouded in mystery, and she felt miserably helpless and hopeless. She had exhausted all arguments, all replies. Her father might have pitied her, and in fact he did so; but he was sure he was right.
“There is one thing you can tell Mr. Townsend, when you see him again,” he said: “that if you marry without my consent, I don’t leave you a farthing of money. That will interest him more than anything else you can tell him.”
“That would be very right,” Catherine answered. “I ought not in that case to have a farthing of your money.”
“My dear child,” the Doctor observed, laughing, “your simplicity is touching. Make that remark, in that tone, and with that expression of countenance, to Mr. Townsend, and take a note of his answer. It won’t be polite—it will express irritation; and I shall be glad of that, as it will put me in the right; unless, indeed—which is perfectly possible—you should like him the better for being rude to you.”
“He will never be rude to me,” said Catherine, gently.
“Tell him what I say, all the same.”
She looked at her father, and her quiet eyes filled with tears.
“I think I will see him, then,” she murmured, in her timid voice.
“Exactly as you choose!” And he went to the door and opened it for her to go out. The movement gave her a terrible sense of his turning her off.
“It will be only once, for the present,” she added, lingering a moment.
“Exactly as you choose,” he repeated, standing there with his hand on the door. “I have told you what I think. If you see him, you will be an ungrateful, cruel child; you will have given your old father the greatest pain of his life.”
This was more than the poor girl could bear; her tears overflowed, and she moved towards her grimly consistent parent with a pitiful cry. Her hands were raised in supplication, but he sternly evaded this appeal. Instead of letting her sob out her misery on his shoulder, he simply took her by the arm and directed her course across the threshold, closing the door gently but firmly behind her. After he had done so, he remained listening. For a long time there was no sound; he knew that she was standing outside. He was sorry for her, as I have said; but he was so sure he was right. At last he heard her move away, and then her footstep creaked faintly upon the stairs.
The Doctor took several turns round his study, with his hands in his pockets, and a thin sparkle, possibly of irritation, but partly also of something like humour, in his eye. “By Jove,” he said to himself, “I believe she will stick—I believe she will stick!” And this idea of Catherine “sticking” appeared to have a comical side, and to offer a prospect of entertainment. He determined, as he said to himself, to see it out.
XIX
IT WAS for reasons connected with this determination that on the morrow he sought a few words of private conversation with Mrs. Penniman. He sent for her to the library, and he there informed her that he hoped very much that, as regarded this affair of Catherine’s, she would mind her p’s and q’s.
“I don’t know what you mean by such an expression,” said his sister. “You speak as if I were learning the alphabet.”
“The alphabet of common sense is something you will never learn,” the Doctor permitted himself to respond.
“Have you called me here to insult me?” Mrs. Penniman inquired.
“Not at all. Simply to advise you. You have taken up young Townsend; that’s your own affair. I have nothing to do with your sentiments, your fancies, your affections, your delusions; but what I request of you is that you will keep these things to yourself. I have explained my views to Catherine; she understands them perfectly, and anything that she does further in the way of encouraging Mr. Townsend’s attentions will be in deliberate opposition to my wishes. Anything that you should do in the way of giving her aid and comfort will be—permit me the expression—distinctly treasonable. You know high treason is a capital offense; take care how you incur the penalty.”
Mrs. Penniman threw back her head, with a certain expansion of the eye which she occasionally practised. “It seems to me that you talk like a great autocrat.”
“I talk like my daughter’s father.”
“Not like your sister’s brother!” cried Lavinia.
“My dear Lavinia,” said the Doctor, “I sometimes wonder whether I am your brother. We are so extremely different. In spite of differences, however, we can, at a pinch, understand each other; and that is the essential thing just now. Walk straight with regard to Mr. Townsend; that’s all I ask. It is highly probable you have been corresponding with him for the last three weeks—perhaps even seeing him. I don’t ask you—you needn’t tell me.” He had a moral conviction that she would contrive to tell a fib about the matter, which it would disgust him to listen to. “Whatever you have done, stop doing it. That’s all I wish.”
“Don’t you wish also by chance to murder your child?” Mrs. Penniman inquired.
“On the contrary, I wish to make her live and be happy.”
“You will kill her; she passed a dreadful night.”
“She won’t die of one dreadful night, nor of a dozen. Remember that I am a distinguished physician.”
Mrs. Penniman hesitated a moment. Then she risked her retort. “Your being a distinguished physician has not prevented you from already losing two members of your family!”
She had risked it, but her brother gave her such a terribly incisive look—a look so like a surgeon’s lancet—that she was frightened at her courage. And he answered her in words that corresponded to the look: “It may not prevent me, either, from losing the society of still another.”
Mrs. Penniman took herself off, with whatever air of depreciated merit was at her command, and repaired to Catherine’s room, where the poor girl was closeted. She knew all about her dreadful night, for the two had met again, the evening before, after Catherine left her father. Mrs. Penniman was on the landing of the second floor when her niece came upstairs. It was not remarkable that a person of so much subtlety should have discovered that Catherine had been shut up with the Doctor. It was still less remarkable that she should have felt an extreme curiosity to learn the result of this interview, and that this sentiment, combined with her great amiability and generosity, should have prompted her to regret the sharp words lately exchanged between her niece and herself. As the unhappy girl came into sight, in the dusky corridor, she made a lively demonstration of sympathy. Catherine’s bursting heart was equally oblivious. She only knew that her aunt was taking her into her arms. Mrs. Penniman drew her into Catherine’s own room, and the two women sat there together, far into the small hours; the younger one with her head on the other’s lap, sobbing and sobbing at first in a soundless, stifled manner, and then at last perfectly still. It gratified Mrs. Penniman to be able to feel conscientiously that this scene virtually removed the interdict which Catherine had placed upon her further communion with Morris Townsend. She was not gratified, however, when, in coming back to her niece’s room before breakfast, she found
that Catherine had risen and was preparing herself for this meal.
“You should not go to breakfast,” she said; “you are not well enough, after your fearful night.”
“Yes, I am very well, and I am only afraid of being late.”
“I can’t understand you!” Mrs. Penniman cried. “You should stay in bed for three days.”
“Oh, I could never do that!” said Catherine, to whom this idea presented no attractions.
Mrs. Penniman was in despair, and she noted, with extreme annoyance, that the trace of the night’s tears had completely vanished from Catherine’s eyes. She had a most impracticable physique. “What effect do you expect to have upon your father,” her aunt demanded, “if you come plumping down, without a vestige of any sort of feeling, as if nothing in the world had happened?”
“He would not like me to lie in bed,” said Catherine, simply.
“All the more reason for your doing it. How else do you expect to move him?”
Catherine thought a little. “I don’t know how; but not in that way. I wish to be just as usual.” And she finished dressing, and, according to her aunt’s expression, went plumping down into the paternal presence. She was really too modest for consistent pathos.
And yet it was perfectly true that she had had a dreadful night. Even after Mrs. Penniman left her she had had no sleep. She lay staring at the uncomforting gloom, with her eyes and ears filled with the movement with which her father had turned her out of his room, and of the words in which he had told her that she was a heartless daughter. Her heart was breaking. She had heart enough for that. At moments it seemed to her that she believed him, and that to do what she was doing, a girl must indeed be bad. She was bad; but she couldn’t help it. She would try to appear good, even if her heart were perverted; and from time to time she had a fancy that she might accomplish something by ingenious concessions to form, though she should persist in caring for Morris. Catherine’s ingenuities were indefinite, and we are not called upon to expose their hollowness. The best of them perhaps showed itself in that freshness of aspect which was so discouraging to Mrs. Penniman, who was amazed at the absence of haggardness in a young woman who for a whole night had lain quivering beneath a father’s curse. Poor Catherine was conscious of her freshness; it gave her a feeling about the future which rather added to the weight upon her mind. It seemed a proof that she was strong and solid and dense, and would live to a great age—longer than might be generally convenient; and this idea was depressing, for it appeared to saddle her with a pretension the more, just when the cultivation of any pretension was inconsistent with her doing right. She wrote that day to Morris Townsend, requesting him to come and see her on the morrow; using very few words, and explaining nothing. She would explain everything face to face.
XX
ON THE morrow, in the afternoon, she heard his voice at the door, and his step in the hall. She received him in the big, bright front parlour, and she instructed the servant that if any one should call she was particularly engaged. She was not afraid of her father’s coming in, for at that hour he was always driving about town. When Morris stood there before her, the first thing that she was conscious of was that he was even more beautiful to look at than fond recollection had painted him; the next was that he had pressed her in his arms. When she was free again it appeared to her that she had now indeed thrown herself into the gulf of defiance, and even, for an instant, that she had been married to him.
He told her that she had been very cruel, and had made him very unhappy; and Catherine felt acutely the difficulty of her destiny, which forced her to give pain in such opposite quarters. But she wished that, instead of reproaches, however tender, he would give her help; he was certainly wise enough, and clever enough, to invent some issue from their troubles. She expressed this belief, and Morris received the assurance as if he thought it natural; but he interrogated, at first—as was natural too—rather than committed himself to marking out a course.
“You should not have made me wait so long,” he said. “I don’t know how I have been living; every hour seemed like years. You should have decided sooner.”
“Decided?” Catherine asked.
“Decided whether you would keep me or give me up.”
“Oh, Morris,” she cried, with a long tender murmur, “I never thought of giving you up!”
“What, then, were you waiting for?” The young man was ardently logical.
“I thought my father might—might——” and she hesitated.
“Might see how unhappy you were?”
“Oh, no! But that he might look at it differently.”
“And now you have sent for me to tell me that at last he does so. Is that it?”
This hypothetical optimism gave the poor girl a pang. “No, Morris,” she said solemnly, “he looks at it still in the same way.”
“Then why have you sent for me?”
“Because I wanted to see you!” cried Catherine, piteously.
“That’s an excellent reason, surely. But did you want to look at me only? Have you nothing to tell me?”
His beautiful persuasive eyes were fixed upon her face, and she wondered what answer would be noble enough to make to such a gaze as that. For a moment her own eyes took it in, and then—“I did want to look at you!” she said, gently. But after this speech, most inconsistently, she hid her face.
Morris watched her for a moment, attentively. “Will you marry me to-morrow?” he asked suddenly.
“To-morrow?”
“Next week, then. Any time within a month.”
“Isn’t it better to wait?” said Catherine.
“To wait for what?”
She hardly knew for what; but this tremendous leap alarmed her. “Till we have thought about it a little more.”
He shook his head, sadly and reproachfully. “I thought you had been thinking about it these three weeks. Do you want to turn it over in your mind for five years? You have given me more than time enough. My poor girl,” he added in a moment, “you are not sincere!”
Catherine coloured from brow to chin, and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, how can you say that?” she murmured.
“Why, you must take me or leave me,” said Morris, very reasonably. “You can’t please your father and me both; you must choose between us.”
“I have chosen you!” she said, passionately.
“Then marry me next week.”
She stood gazing at him. “Isn’t there any other way?”
“None that I know of for arriving at the same result. If there is, I should be happy to hear of it.”
Catherine could think of nothing of the kind, and Morris’s luminosity seemed almost pitiless. The only thing she could think of was that her father might, after all, come round, and she articulated, with an awkward sense of her helplessness in doing so, a wish that this miracle might happen.
“Do you think it is in the least degree likely?” Morris asked.
“It would be, if he could only know you!”
“He can know me if he will. What is to prevent it?”
“His ideas, his reasons,” said Catherine. “They are so—so terribly strong.” She trembled with the recollection of them yet.
“Strong?” cried Morris. “I would rather you should think them weak.”
“Oh, nothing about my father is weak!” said the girl.
Morris turned away, walking to the window, where he stood looking out. “You are terribly afraid of him!” he remarked at last.
She felt no impulse to deny it, because she had no shame in it; for if it was no honour to herself, at least it was an honour to him. “I suppose I must be,” she said, simply.
“Then you don’t love me—not as I love you. If you fear your father more than you love me, then your love is not what I hoped it was.”
“Ah, my friend!” she said, going to him.
“Do I fear anything?” he demanded, turning round on her. “For your sake what am I not ready to face?”
> “You are noble—you are brave!” she answered, stopping short at a distance that was almost respectful.
“Small good it does me, if you are so timid.”
“I don’t think that I am—really,” said Catherine.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘really.’ It is really enough to make us miserable.”
“I should be strong enough to wait—to wait a long time.”
“And suppose after a long time your father should hate me worse than ever?”
“He wouldn’t—he couldn’t!”
“He would be touched by my fidelity? Is that what you mean? If he is so easily touched, then why should you be afraid of him?”
This was much to the point, and Catherine was struck by it. “I will try not to be,” she said. And she stood there, submissively, the image, in advance, of a dutiful and responsible wife. This image could not fail to recommend itself to Morris Townsend, and he continued to give proof of the high estimation in which he held her. It could only have been at the prompting of such a sentiment that he presently mentioned to her that the course recommended by Mrs. Penniman was an immediate union, regardless of consequences.
“Yes, Aunt Penniman would like that,” Catherine said, simply—and yet with a certain shrewdness. It must, however, have been in pure simplicity, and from motives quite untouched by sarcasm, that, a few moments after, she went on to say to Morris that her father had given her a message for him. It was quite on her conscience to deliver this message, and had the mission been ten times more painful she would have as scrupulously performed it. “He told me to tell you—to tell you very distinctly, and directly from himself, that if I marry without his consent, I shall not inherit a penny of his fortune. He made a great point of this. He seemed to think—he seemed to think——”
Morris flushed, as any young man of spirit might have flushed at an imputation of baseness.
“What did he seem to think?”
“That it would make a difference.”