Washington Square

ITTLE by little Dr. Sloper had retired from his profession; he visited
only those patients in whose symptoms he recognised a certain
originality. He went again to Europe, and remained two years; Catherine
went with him, and on this occasion Mrs. Penniman was of the party.
Europe apparently had few surprises for Mrs. Penniman, who frequently
remarked, in the most romantic sites—“You know I am very familiar with
all this.” It should be added that such remarks were usually not
addressed to her brother, or yet to her niece, but to fellow-tourists who
happened to be at hand, or even to the cicerone or the goat-herd in the
foreground.

One day, after his return from Europe, the Doctor said something to his
daughter that made her start—it seemed to come from so far out of the
past.

“I should like you to promise me something before I die.”

“Why do you talk about your dying?” she asked.

“Because I am sixty-eight years old.”

“I hope you will live a long time,” said Catherine.

“I hope I shall! But some day I shall take a bad cold, and then it will
not matter much what any one hopes. That will be the manner of my exit,
and when it takes place, remember I told you so. Promise me not to marry
Morris Townsend after I am gone.”

This was what made Catherine start, as I have said; but her start was a
silent one, and for some moments she said nothing. “Why do you speak of
him?” she asked at last.

“You challenge everything I say. I speak of him because he’s a topic,
like any other. He’s to be seen, like any one else, and he is still
looking for a wife—having had one and got rid of her, I don’t know by
what means. He has lately been in New York, and at your cousin Marian’s
house; your Aunt Elizabeth saw him there.”

“They neither of them told me,” said Catherine.

“That’s their merit; it’s not yours. He has grown fat and bald, and he
has not made his fortune. But I can’t trust those facts alone to steel
your heart against him, and that’s why I ask you to promise.”

“Fat and bald”: these words presented a strange image to Catherine’s
mind, out of which the memory of the most beautiful young man in the
world had never faded. “I don’t think you understand,” she said. “I
very seldom think of Mr. Townsend.”

“It will be very easy for you to go on, then. Promise me, after my
death, to do the same.”

Again, for some moments, Catherine was silent; her father’s request
deeply amazed her; it opened an old wound and made it ache afresh. “I
don’t think I can promise that,” she answered.

“It would be a great satisfaction,” said her father.

“You don’t understand. I can’t promise that.”

The Doctor was silent a minute. “I ask you for a particular reason. I
am altering my will.”

This reason failed to strike Catherine; and indeed she scarcely
understood it. All her feelings were merged in the sense that he was
trying to treat her as he had treated her years before. She had suffered
from it then; and now all her experience, all her acquired tranquillity
and rigidity, protested. She had been so humble in her youth that she
could now afford to have a little pride, and there was something in this
request, and in her father’s thinking himself so free to make it, that
seemed an injury to her dignity. Poor Catherine’s dignity was not
aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could
find it. Her father had pushed very far.

“I can’t promise,” she simply repeated.

“You are very obstinate,” said the Doctor.

“I don’t think you understand.”

“Please explain, then.”

“I can’t explain,” said Catherine. “And I can’t promise.”

“Upon my word,” her father explained, “I had no idea how obstinate you
are!”

She knew herself that she was obstinate, and it gave her a certain joy.
She was now a middle-aged woman.

About a year after this, the accident that the Doctor had spoken of
occurred; he took a violent cold. Driving out to Bloomingdale one April
day to see a patient of unsound mind, who was confined in a private
asylum for the insane, and whose family greatly desired a medical opinion
from an eminent source, he was caught in a spring shower, and being in a
buggy, without a hood, he found himself soaked to the skin. He came home
with an ominous chill, and on the morrow he was seriously ill. “It is
congestion of the lungs,” he said to Catherine; “I shall need very good
nursing. It will make no difference, for I shall not recover; but I wish
everything to be done, to the smallest detail, as if I should. I hate an
ill-conducted sick-room; and you will be so good as to nurse me on the
hypothesis that I shall get well.” He told her which of his
fellow-physicians to send for, and gave her a multitude of minute
directions; it was quite on the optimistic hypothesis that she nursed
him. But he had never been wrong in his life, and he was not wrong now.
He was touching his seventieth year, and though he had a very
well-tempered constitution, his hold upon life had lost its firmness. He
died after three weeks’ illness, during which Mrs. Penniman, as well as
his daughter, had been assiduous at his bedside.

On his will being opened after a decent interval, it was found to consist
of two portions. The first of these dated from ten years back, and
consisted of a series of dispositions by which he left the great mass of
property to his daughter, with becoming legacies to his two sisters. The
second was a codicil, of recent origin, maintaining the annuities to Mrs.
Penniman and Mrs. Almond, but reducing Catherine’s share to a fifth of
what he had first bequeathed her. “She is amply provided for from her
mother’s side,” the document ran, “never having spent more than a
fraction of her income from this source; so that her fortune is already
more than sufficient to attract those unscrupulous adventurers whom she
has given me reason to believe that she persists in regarding as an
interesting class.” The large remainder of his property, therefore, Dr.
Sloper had divided into seven unequal parts, which he left, as
endowments, to as many different hospitals and schools of medicine, in
various cities of the Union.

To Mrs. Penniman it seemed monstrous that a man should play such tricks
with other people’s money; for after his death, of course, as she said,
it was other people’s. “Of course, you will dispute the will,” she
remarked, fatuously, to Catherine.

“Oh no,” Catherine answered, “I like it very much. Only I wish it had
been expressed a little differently!”