Washington Square

UR 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.