Washington Square

E 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.