CHAPTER XXXII
Our story has hitherto moved with very short steps, but as it
approaches its termination it must take a long stride. As time went
on, it might have appeared to the Doctor that his daughter's account
of her rupture with Morris Townsend, mere bravado as he had deemed
it, was in some degree justified by the sequel. Morris remained as
rigidly and unremittingly absent as if he had died of a broken heart,
and Catherine had apparently buried the memory of this fruitless
episode as deep as if it had terminated by her own choice. We know
that she had been deeply and incurably wounded, but the Doctor had no
means of knowing it. He was certainly curious about it, and would
have given a good deal to discover the exact truth; but it was his
punishment that he never knew--his punishment, I mean, for the abuse
of sarcasm in his relations with his daughter. There was a good deal
of effective sarcasm in her keeping him in the dark, and the rest of
the world conspired with her, in this sense, to be sarcastic. Mrs.
Penniman told him nothing, partly because he never questioned her--he
made too light of Mrs. Penniman for that--and partly because she
flattered herself that a tormenting reserve, and a serene profession
of ignorance, would avenge her for his theory that she had meddled in
the matter. He went two or three times to see Mrs. Montgomery, but
Mrs. Montgomery had nothing to impart. She simply knew that her
brother's engagement was broken off, and now that Miss Sloper was out
of danger she preferred not to bear witness in any way against
Morris. She had done so before--however unwillingly--because she was
sorry for Miss Sloper; but she was not sorry for Miss Sloper now--not
at all sorry. Morris had told her nothing about his relations with
Miss Sloper at the time, and he had told her nothing since. He was
always away, and he very seldom wrote to her; she believed he had
gone to California. Mrs. Almond had, in her sister's phrase, "taken
up" Catherine violently since the recent catastrophe; but though the
girl was very grateful to her for her kindness, she revealed no
secrets, and the good lady could give the Doctor no satisfaction.
Even, however, had she been able to narrate to him the private
history of his daughter's unhappy love affair, it would have given
her a certain comfort to leave him in ignorance; for Mrs. Almond was
at this time not altogether in sympathy with her brother. She had
guessed for herself that Catherine had been cruelly jilted--she knew
nothing from Mrs. Penniman, for Mrs. Penniman had not ventured to lay
the famous explanation of Morris's motives before Mrs. Almond, though
she had thought it good enough for Catherine--and she pronounced her
brother too consistently indifferent to what the poor creature must
have suffered and must still be suffering. Dr. Sloper had his
theory, and he rarely altered his theories. The marriage would have
been an abominable one, and the girl had had a blessed escape. She
was not to be pitied for that, and to pretend to condole with her
would have been to make concessions to the idea that she had ever had
a right to think of Morris.
"I put my foot on this idea from the first, and I keep it there now,"
said the Doctor. "I don't see anything cruel in that; one can't keep
it there too long." To this Mrs. Almond more than once replied that
if Catherine had got rid of her incongruous lover, she deserved the
credit of it, and that to bring herself to her father's enlightened
view of the matter must have cost her an effort that he was bound to
appreciate.
"I am by no means sure she has got rid of him," the Doctor said.
"There is not the smallest probability that, after having been as
obstinate as a mule for two years, she suddenly became amenable to
reason. It is infinitely more probable that he got rid of her."
"All the more reason you should be gentle with her."
"I AM gentle with her. But I can't do the pathetic; I can't pump up
tears, to look graceful, over the most fortunate thing that ever
happened to her."
"You have no sympathy," said Mrs. Almond; "that was never your strong
point. You have only to look at her to see that, right or wrong, and
whether the rupture came from herself or from him, her poor little
heart is grievously bruised."
"Handling bruises--and even dropping tears on them--doesn't make them
any better! My business is to see she gets no more knocks, and that
I shall carefully attend to. But I don't at all recognise your
description of Catherine. She doesn't strike me in the least as a
young woman going about in search of a moral poultice. In fact, she
seems to me much better than while the fellow was hanging about. She
is perfectly comfortable and blooming; she eats and sleeps, takes her
usual exercise, and overloads herself, as usual, with finery. She is
always knitting some purse or embroidering some handkerchief, and it
seems to me she turns these articles out about as fast as ever. She
hasn't much to say; but when had she anything to say? She had her
little dance, and now she is sitting down to rest. I suspect that,
on the whole, she enjoys it."
"She enjoys it as people enjoy getting rid of a leg that has been
crushed. The state of mind after amputation is doubtless one of
comparative repose."
"If your leg is a metaphor for young Townsend, I can assure you he
has never been crushed. Crushed? Not he! He is alive and perfectly
intact, and that's why I am not satisfied."
"Should you have liked to kill him?" asked Mrs. Almond.
"Yes, very much. I think it is quite possible that it is all a
blind."
"A blind?"
"An arrangement between them. Il fait le mort, as they say in
France; but he is looking out of the corner of his eye. You can
depend upon it he has not burned his ships; he has kept one to come
back in. When I am dead, he will set sail again, and then she will
marry him."
"It is interesting to know that you accuse your only daughter of
being the vilest of hypocrites," said Mrs. Almond.
"I don't see what difference her being my only daughter makes. It is
better to accuse one than a dozen. But I don't accuse any one.
There is not the smallest hypocrisy about Catherine, and I deny that
she even pretends to be miserable."
The Doctor's idea that the thing was a "blind" had its intermissions
and revivals; but it may be said on the whole to have increased as he
grew older; together with his impression of Catherine's blooming and
comfortable condition. Naturally, if he had not found grounds for
viewing her as a lovelorn maiden during the year or two that followed
her great trouble, he found none at a time when she had completely
recovered her self-possession. He was obliged to recognise the fact
that if the two young people were waiting for him to get out of the
way, they were at least waiting very patiently. He had heard from
time to time that Morris was in New York; but he never remained there
long, and, to the best of the Doctor's belief, had no communication
with Catherine. He was sure they never met, and he had reason to
suspect that Morris never wrote to her. After the letter that has
been mentioned, she heard from him twice again, at considerable
intervals; but on none of these occasions did she write herself. On
the other hand, as the Doctor observed, she averted herself rigidly
from the idea of marrying other people. Her opportunities for doing
so were not numerous, but they occurred often enough to test her
disposition. She refused a widower, a man with a genial temperament,
a handsome fortune, and three little girls (he had heard that she was
very fond of children, and he pointed to his own with some
confidence); and she turned a deaf ear to the solicitations of a
clever young lawyer, who, with the prospect of a great practice, and
the reputation of a most agreeable man, had had the shrewdness, when
he came to look about him for a wife, to believe that she would suit
him better than several younger and prettier girls. Mr. Macalister,
the widower, had desired to make a marriage of reason, and had chosen
Catherine for what he supposed to be her latent matronly qualities;
but John Ludlow, who was a year the girl's junior, and spoken of
always as a young man who might have his "pick," was seriously in
love with her. Catherine, however, would never look at him; she made
it plain to him that she thought he came to see her too often. He
afterwards consoled himself, and married a very different person,
little Miss Sturtevant, whose attractions were obvious to the dullest
comprehension. Catherine, at the time of these events, had left her
thirtieth year well behind her, and had quite taken her place as an
old maid. Her father would have preferred she should marry, and he
once told her that he hoped she would not be too fastidious. "I
should like to see you an honest man's wife before I die," he said.
This was after John Ludlow had been compelled to give it up, though
the Doctor had advised him to persevere. The Doctor exercised no
further pressure, and had the credit of not "worrying" at all over
his daughter's singleness. In fact he worried rather more than
appeared, and there were considerable periods during which he felt
sure that Morris Townsend was hidden behind some door. "If he is
not, why doesn't she marry?" he asked himself. "Limited as her
intelligence may be, she must understand perfectly well that she is
made to do the usual thing." Catherine, however, became an admirable
old maid. She formed habits, regulated her days upon a system of her
own, interested herself in charitable institutions, asylums,
hospitals, and aid societies; and went generally, with an even and
noiseless step, about the rigid business of her life. This life had,
however, a secret history as well as a public one--if I may talk of
the public history of a mature and diffident spinster for whom
publicity had always a combination of terrors. From her own point of
view the great facts of her career were that Morris Townsend had
trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its
spring. Nothing could ever alter these facts; they were always
there, like her name, her age, her plain face. Nothing could ever
undo the wrong or cure the pain that Morris had inflicted on her, and
nothing could ever make her feel towards her father as she felt in
her younger years. There was something dead in her life, and her
duty was to try and fill the void. Catherine recognised this duty to
the utmost; she had a great disapproval of brooding and moping. She
had, of course, no faculty for quenching memory in dissipation; but
she mingled freely in the usual gaieties of the town, and she became
at last an inevitable figure at all respectable entertainments. She
was greatly liked, and as time went on she grew to be a sort of
kindly maiden aunt to the younger portion of society. Young girls
were apt to confide to her their love affairs (which they never did
to Mrs. Penniman), and young men to be fond of her without knowing
why. She developed a few harmless eccentricities; her habits, once
formed, were rather stiffly maintained; her opinions, on all moral
and social matters, were extremely conservative; and before she was
forty she was regarded as an old-fashioned person, and an authority
on customs that had passed away. Mrs. Penniman, in comparison, was
quite a girlish figure; she grew younger as she advanced in life.
She lost none of her relish for beauty and mystery, but she had
little opportunity to exercise it. With Catherine's later wooers she
failed to establish relations as intimate as those which had given
her so many interesting hours in the society of Morris Townsend.
These gentlemen had an indefinable mistrust of her good offices, and
they never talked to her about Catherine's charms. Her ringlets, her
buckles and bangles, glistened more brightly with each succeeding
year, and she remained quite the same officious and imaginative Mrs.
Penniman, and the odd mixture of impetuosity and circumspection, that
we have hitherto known. As regards one point, however, her
circumspection prevailed, and she must be given due credit for it.
For upwards of seventeen years she never mentioned Morris Townsend's
name to her niece. Catherine was grateful to her, but this
consistent silence, so little in accord with her aunt's character,
gave her a certain alarm, and she could never wholly rid herself of a
suspicion that Mrs. Penniman sometimes had news of him.
