CHAPTER XV
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.
