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- Author: Henry James
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“You try my patience,” her father went on, “and you ought to know what I am, I am not a very good man. Though I am very smooth externally, at bottom I am very passionate; and I assure you I can be very hard.”
She could not think why he told her these things. Had he brought her there on purpose, and was it part of a plan? What was the plan? Catherine asked herself. Was it to startle her suddenly into a retractation—to take an advantage of her by dread? Dread of what? The place was ugly and lonely, but the place could do her no harm. There was a kind of still intensity about her father, which made him dangerous, but Catherine hardly went so far as to say to herself that it might be part of his plan to fasten his hand—the neat, fine, supple hand of a distinguished physician—in her throat. Nevertheless, she receded a step. “I am sure you can be anything you please,” she said. And it was her simple belief.
“I am very angry,” he replied, more sharply.
“Why has it taken you so suddenly?”
“It has not taken me suddenly. I have been raging inwardly for the last six months. But just now this seemed a good place to flare out. It’s so quiet, and we are alone.”
“Yes, it’s very quiet,” said Catherine vaguely, looking about her. “Won’t you come back to the carriage?”
“In a moment. Do you mean that in all this time you have not yielded an inch?”
“I would if I could, father; but I can’t.”
The Doctor looked round him too. “Should you like to be left in such a place as this, to starve?”
“What do you mean?” cried the girl.
“That will be your fate—that’s how he will leave you.”
He would not touch her, but he had touched Morris. The warmth came back to her heart. “That is not true, father,” she broke out, “and you ought not to say it! It is not right, and it’s not true!”
He shook his head slowly. “No, it’s not right, because you won’t believe it. But it IS true. Come back to the carriage.”
He turned away, and she followed him; he went faster, and was presently much in advance. But from time to time he stopped, without turning round, to let her keep up with him, and she made her way forward with difficulty, her heart beating with the excitement of having for the first time spoken to him in violence. By this time it had grown almost dark, and she ended by losing sight of him. But she kept her course, and after a little, the valley making a sudden turn, she gained the road, where the carriage stood waiting. In it sat her father, rigid and silent; in silence, too, she took her place beside him.
It seemed to her, later, in looking back upon all this, that for days afterwards not a word had been exchanged between them. The scene had been a strange one, but it had not permanently affected her feeling towards her father, for it was natural, after all, that he should occasionally make a scene of some kind, and he had let her alone for six months. The strangest part of it was that he had said he was not a good man; Catherine wondered a great deal what he had meant by that. The statement failed to appeal to her credence, and it was not grateful to any resentment that she entertained. Even in the utmost bitterness that she might feel, it would give her no satisfaction to think him less complete. Such a saying as that was a part of his great subtlety—men so clever as he might say anything and mean anything. And as to his being hard, that surely, in a man, was a virtue.
He let her alone for six months more—six months during which she accommodated herself without a protest to the extension of their tour. But he spoke again at the end of this time; it was at the very last, the night before they embarked for New York, in the hotel at Liverpool. They had been dining together in a great dim, musty sitting-room; and then the cloth had been removed, and the Doctor walked slowly up and down. Catherine at last took her candle to go to bed, but her father motioned her to stay.
“What do you mean to do when you get home?” he asked, while she stood there with her candle in her hand.
“Do you mean about Mr. Townsend?”
“About Mr. Townsend.”
“We shall probably marry.”
The Doctor took several turns again while she waited. “Do you hear from him as much as ever?”
“Yes; twice a month,” said Catherine promptly.
“And does he always talk about marriage?”
“Oh yes! That is, he talks about other things too, but he always says something about that.”
“I am glad to hear he varies his subjects; his letters might otherwise be monotonous.”
“He writes beautifully,” said Catherine, who was very glad of a chance to say it.
“They always write beautifully. However, in a given case that doesn’t diminish the merit. So, as soon as you arrive, you are going off with him?”
This seemed a rather gross way of putting it, and something that there was of dignity in Catherine resented it. “I cannot tell you till we arrive,” she said.
“That’s reasonable enough,” her father answered. “That’s all I ask of you—that you DO tell me, that you give me definite notice. When a poor man is to lose his only child, he likes to have an inkling of it beforehand.”
“Oh, father, you will not lose me!” Catherine said, spilling her candle-wax.
“Three days before will do,” he went on, “if you are in a position to be positive then. He ought to be very thankful to me, do you know. I have done a mighty good thing for him in taking you abroad; your value is twice as great, with all the knowledge and taste that you have acquired. A year ago, you were perhaps a little limited—a little rustic; but now you have seen everything, and appreciated everything, and you will be a most entertaining companion. We have fattened the sheep for him before he kills it!” Catherine turned away, and stood staring at the blank door. “Go to bed,” said her father; “and, as we don’t go aboard till noon, you may sleep late. We shall probably have a most uncomfortable voyage.”
The voyage was indeed uncomfortable, and Catherine, on arriving in New York, had not the compensation of “going off,” in her father’s phrase, with Morris Townsend. She saw him, however, the day after she landed; and, in the meantime, he formed a natural subject of conversation between our heroine and her Aunt Lavinia, with whom, the night she disembarked, the girl was closeted for a long time before either lady retired to rest.
“I have seen a great deal of him,” said Mrs. Penniman. “He is not very easy to know. I suppose you think you know him; but you don’t, my dear. You will some day; but it will only be after you have lived with him. I may almost say I have lived with him,” Mrs. Penniman proceeded, while Catherine stared. “I think I know him now; I have had such remarkable opportunities. You will have the same—or rather, you will have better!” and Aunt Lavinia smiled. “Then you will see what I mean. It’s a wonderful character, full of passion and energy, and just as true!”
Catherine listened with a mixture of interest and apprehension. Aunt Lavinia was intensely sympathetic, and Catherine, for the past year, while she wandered through foreign galleries and churches, and rolled over the smoothness of posting roads, nursing the thoughts that never passed her lips, had often longed for the company of some intelligent person of her own sex. To tell her story to some kind woman—at moments it seemed to her that this would give her comfort, and she had more than once been on the point of taking the landlady, or the nice young person from the dressmaker’s, into her confidence. If a woman had been near her she would on certain occasions have treated such a companion to a fit of weeping; and she had an apprehension that, on her return, this would form her response to Aunt Lavinia’s first embrace. In fact, however, the two ladies had met, in Washington Square, without tears, and when they found themselves alone together a certain dryness fell upon the girl’s emotion. It came over her with a greater force that Mrs. Penniman had enjoyed a whole year of her lover’s society, and it was not a pleasure to her to hear her aunt explain and interpret the young man, speaking of him as if her own knowledge of him were supreme. It was not that Catherine was jealous; but her sense of Mrs. Penniman’s innocent falsity, which had lain dormant, began to haunt her again, and she was glad that she was safely at home. With this, however, it was a blessing to be able to talk of Morris, to sound his name, to be with a person who was not unjust to him.
“You have been very kind to him,” said Catherine. “He has written me that, often. I shall never forget that, Aunt Lavinia.”
“I have done what I could; it has been very little. To let him come and talk to me, and give him his cup of tea—that was all. Your Aunt Almond thought it was too much, and used to scold me terribly; but she promised me, at least, not to betray me.”
“To betray you?”
“Not to tell your father. He used to sit in your father’s study!” said Mrs. Penniman, with a little laugh.
Catherine was silent a moment. This idea was disagreeable to her, and she was reminded again, with pain, of her aunt’s secretive habits. Morris, the reader may be informed, had had the tact not to tell her that he sat in her father’s study. He had known her but for a few months, and her aunt had known her for fifteen years; and yet he would not have made the mistake of thinking that Catherine would see the joke of the thing. “I am sorry you made him go into father’s room,” she said, after a while.
“I didn’t make him go; he went himself. He liked to look at the books, and all those things in the glass cases. He knows all about them; he knows all about everything.”
Catherine was silent again; then, “I wish he had found some employment,” she said.
“He has found some employment! It’s beautiful news, and he told me to tell you as soon as you arrived. He has gone into partnership with a commission merchant. It was all settled, quite suddenly, a week ago.”
This seemed to Catherine indeed beautiful news; it had a fine prosperous air. “Oh, I’m so glad!” she said; and now, for a moment, she was disposed to throw herself on Aunt Lavinia’s neck.
“It’s much better than being under some one; and he has never been used to that,” Mrs. Penniman went on. “He is just as good as his partner—they are perfectly equal! You see how right he was to wait. I should like to know what your father can say now! They have got an office in Duane Street, and little printed cards; he brought me one to show me. I have got
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