Washington Square by Henry James (superbooks4u txt) 📖

the word, but because you would feel sorry for her. She is so soft, so simple-minded, she would be such an easy victim! A bad husband would have remarkable facilities for making her miserable; for she would have neither the intelligence nor the resolution to get the better of him, and yet she would have an exaggerated power of suffering. I see,” added the Doctor, with his most insinuating, his most professional laugh, “you are already interested!”

“I have been interested from the moment he told me he was engaged,” said Mrs. Montgomery.

“Ah! he says that—he calls it an engagement?”

“Oh, he has told me you didn’t like it.”

“Did he tell you that I don’t like HIM?”

“Yes, he told me that too. I said I couldn’t help it!” added Mrs. Montgomery.

“Of course you can’t. But what you can do is to tell me I am right— to give me an attestation, as it were.” And the Doctor accompanied this remark with another professional smile.

Mrs. Montgomery, however, smiled not at all; it was obvious that she could not take the humorous view of his appeal. “That is a good deal to ask,” she said at last.

“There can be no doubt of that; and I must, in conscience, remind you of the advantages a young man marrying my daughter would enjoy. She has an income of ten thousand dollars in her own right, left her by her mother; if she marries a husband I approve, she will come into almost twice as much more at my death.”

Mrs. Montgomery listened in great earnestness to this splendid financial statement; she had never heard thousands of dollars so familiarly talked about. She flushed a little with excitement. “Your daughter will be immensely rich,” she said softly.

“Precisely—that’s the bother of it.”

“And if Morris should marry her, he—he—” And she hesitated timidly.

“He would be master of all that money? By no means. He would be master of the ten thousand a year that she has from her mother; but I should leave every penny of my own fortune, earned in the laborious exercise of my profession, to public institutions.”

Mrs. Montgomery dropped her eyes at this, and sat for some time gazing at the straw matting which covered her floor.

“I suppose it seems to you,” said the Doctor, laughing, “that in so doing I should play your brother a very shabby trick.”

“Not at all. That is too much money to get possession of so easily, by marrying. I don’t think it would be right.”

“It’s right to get all one can. But in this case your brother wouldn’t be able. If Catherine marries without my consent, she doesn’t get a penny from my own pocket.”

“Is that certain?” asked Mrs. Montgomery, looking up.

“As certain as that I sit here!”

“Even if she should pine away?”

“Even if she should pine to a shadow, which isn’t probable.”

“Does Morris know this?”

“I shall be most happy to inform him!” the Doctor exclaimed.

Mrs. Montgomery resumed her meditations, and her visitor, who was prepared to give time to the affair, asked himself whether, in spite of her little conscientious air, she was not playing into her brother’s hands. At the same time he was half ashamed of the ordeal to which he had subjected her, and was touched by the gentleness with which she bore it. “If she were a humbug,” he said, “she would get angry; unless she be very deep indeed. It is not probable that she is as deep as that.”

“What makes you dislike Morris so much?” she presently asked, emerging from her reflexions.

“I don’t dislike him in the least as a friend, as a companion. He seems to me a charming fellow, and I should think he would be excellent company. I dislike him, exclusively, as a son-in-law. If the only office of a son-in-law were to dine at the paternal table, I should set a high value upon your brother. He dines capitally. But that is a small part of his function, which, in general, is to be a protector and caretaker of my child, who is singularly ill-adapted to take care of herself. It is there that he doesn’t satisfy me. I confess I have nothing but my impression to go by; but I am in the habit of trusting my impression. Of course you are at liberty to contradict it flat. He strikes me as selfish and shallow.”

Mrs. Montgomery’s eyes expanded a little, and the Doctor fancied he saw the light of admiration in them. “I wonder you have discovered he is selfish!” she exclaimed.

“Do you think he hides it so well?”

“Very well indeed,” said Mrs. Montgomery. “And I think we are all rather selfish,” she added quickly.

“I think so too; but I have seen people hide it better than he. You see I am helped by a habit I have of dividing people into classes, into types. I may easily be mistaken about your brother as an individual, but his type is written on his whole person.”

“He is very good-looking,” said Mrs. Montgomery.

The Doctor eyed her a moment. “You women are all the same! But the type to which your brother belongs was made to be the ruin of you, and you were made to be its handmaids and victims. The sign of the type in question is the determination—sometimes terrible in its quiet intensity—to accept nothing of life but its pleasures, and to secure these pleasures chiefly by the aid of your complaisant sex. Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women. What our young friends chiefly insist upon is that some one else shall suffer for them; and women do that sort of thing, as you must know, wonderfully well.” The Doctor paused a moment, and then he added abruptly, “You have suffered immensely for your brother!”

This exclamation was abrupt, as I say, but it was also perfectly calculated. The Doctor had been rather disappointed at not finding his compact and comfortable little hostess surrounded in a more visible degree by the ravages of Morris Townsend’s immorality; but he had said to himself that this was not because the young man had spared her, but because she had contrived to plaster up her wounds. They were aching there, behind the varnished stove, the festooned engravings, beneath her own neat little poplin bosom; and if he could only touch the tender spot, she would make a movement that would betray her. The words I have just quoted were an attempt to put his finger suddenly upon the place; and they had some of the success that he looked for. The tears sprang for a moment to Mrs. Montgomery’s eyes, and she indulged in a proud little jerk of the head.

“I don’t know how you have found that out!” she exclaimed.

“By a philosophic trick—by what they call induction. You know you have always your option of contradicting me. But kindly answer me a question. Don’t you give your brother money? I think you ought to answer that.”

“Yes, I have given him money,” said Mrs. Montgomery.

“And you have not had much to give him?”

She was silent a moment. “If you ask me for a confession of poverty, that is easily made. I am very poor.”

“One would never suppose it from your—your charming house,” said the Doctor. “I learned from my sister that your income was moderate, and your family numerous.”

“I have five children,” Mrs. Montgomery observed; “but I am happy to say I can bring them up decently.”

“Of course you can—accomplished and devoted as you are! But your brother has counted them over, I suppose?”

“Counted them over?”

“He knows there are five, I mean. He tells me it is he that brings them up.”

Mrs. Montgomery stared a moment, and then quickly—“Oh yes; he teaches them Spanish.”

The Doctor laughed out. “That must take a great deal off your hands! Your brother also knows, of course, that you have very little money.”

“I have often told him so!” Mrs. Montgomery exclaimed, more unreservedly than she had yet spoken. She was apparently taking some comfort in the Doctor’s clairvoyancy.

“Which means that you have often occasion to, and that he often sponges on you. Excuse the crudity of my language; I simply express a fact. I don’t ask you how much of your money he has had, it is none of my business. I have ascertained what I suspected—what I wished.” And the Doctor got up, gently smoothing his hat. “Your brother lives on you,” he said as he stood there.

Mrs. Montgomery quickly rose from her chair, following her visitor’s movements with a look of fascination. But then, with a certain inconsequence—“I have never complained of him!” she said.

“You needn’t protest—you have not betrayed him. But I advise you not to give him any more money.”

“Don’t you see it is in my interest that he should marry a rich person?” she asked. “If, as you say, he lives on me, I can only wish to get rid of him, and to put obstacles in the way of his marrying is to increase my own difficulties.”

“I wish very much you would come to me with your difficulties,” said the Doctor. “Certainly, if I throw him back on your hands, the least I can do is to help you to bear the burden. If you will allow me to say so, then, I shall take the liberty of placing in your hands, for the present, a certain fund for your brother’s support.”

Mrs. Montgomery stared; she evidently thought he was jesting; but she presently saw that he was not, and the complication of her feelings became painful. “It seems to me that I ought to be very much offended with you,” she murmured.

“Because I have offered you money? That’s a superstition,” said the Doctor. “You must let me come and see you again, and we will talk about these things. I suppose that some of your children are girls.”

“I have two little girls,” said Mrs. Montgomery.

“Well, when they grow up, and begin to think of taking husbands, you will see how anxious you will be about the moral character of these gentlemen. Then you will understand this visit of mine!”

“Ah, you are not to believe that Morris’s moral character is bad!”

The Doctor looked at her a little, with folded arms. “There is something I should greatly like—as a moral satisfaction. I should like to hear you say—‘He is abominably selfish!’”

The words came out with the grave distinctness of his voice, and they seemed for an instant to create, to poor Mrs. Montgomery’s troubled vision, a material image. She gazed at it an instant, and then she turned away. “You distress me, sir!” she exclaimed. “He is, after all, my brother, and his talents, his talents—” On these last words her voice quavered, and before he knew it she had burst into tears.

“His talents are first-rate!” said the Doctor. “We must find a proper field for them!” And he assured her most respectfully of his regret at having so greatly discomposed her. “It’s all for my poor Catherine,” he went on. “You must know her, and you will see.”

Mrs. Montgomery brushed away her tears, and blushed at having shed them. “I should like to know your daughter,” she answered; and then, in an instant—“Don’t let her marry him!”

Dr. Sloper went away with the words gently humming in his ears— “Don’t let her marry him!” They gave him the moral satisfaction of which he had just spoken, and their value was the greater that they