Washington Square

She turned away, feeling sick and faint; and the Doctor went on.  “And if you wait for it with impatience, judge, if you please, what his eagerness will be!”

Catherine turned it over—her father’s words had such an authority for her that her very thoughts were capable of obeying him.  There was a dreadful ugliness in it, which seemed to glare at her through the interposing medium of her own feebler reason.  Suddenly, however, she had an inspiration—she almost knew it to be an inspiration.

“If I don’t marry before your death, I will not after,” she said.

To her father, it must be admitted, this seemed only another epigram; and as obstinacy, in unaccomplished minds, does not usually select such a mode of expression, he was the more surprised at this wanton play of a fixed idea.

“Do you mean that for an impertinence?” he inquired; an inquiry of which, as he made it, he quite perceived the grossness.

“An impertinence?  Oh, father, what terrible things you say!”

“If you don’t wait for my death, you might as well marry immediately; there is nothing else to wait for.”

For some time Catherine made no answer; but finally she said:

“I think Morris—little by little—might persuade you.”

“I shall never let him speak to me again.  I dislike him too much.”

Catherine gave a long, low sigh; she tried to stifle it, for she had made up her mind that it was wrong to make a parade of her trouble, and to endeavour to act upon her father by the meretricious aid of emotion.  Indeed, she even thought it wrong—in the sense of being inconsiderate—to attempt to act upon his feelings at all; her part was to effect some gentle, gradual change in his intellectual perception of poor Morris’s character.  But the means of effecting such a change were at present shrouded in mystery, and she felt miserably helpless and hopeless.  She had exhausted all arguments, all replies.  Her father might have pitied her, and in fact he did so; but he was sure he was right.

“There is one thing you can tell Mr. Townsend when you see him again,” he said: “that if you marry without my consent, I don’t leave you a farthing of money.  That will interest him more than anything else you can tell him.”

“That would be very right,” Catherine answered.  “I ought not in that case to have a farthing of your money.”

“My dear child,” the Doctor observed, laughing, “your simplicity is touching.  Make that remark, in that tone, and with that expression of countenance, to Mr. Townsend, and take a note of his answer.  It won’t be polite—it will, express irritation; and I shall be glad of that, as it will put me in the right; unless, indeed—which is perfectly possible—you should like him the better for being rude to you.”

“He will never be rude to me,” said Catherine gently.

“Tell him what I say, all the same.”

She looked at her father, and her quiet eyes filled with tears.

“I think I will see him, then,” she murmured, in her timid voice.

“Exactly as you choose!”  And he went to the door and opened it for her to go out.  The movement gave her a terrible sense of his turning her off.

“It will be only once, for the present,” she added, lingering a moment.

“Exactly as you choose,” he repeated, standing there with his hand on the door.  “I have told you what I think.  If you see him, you will be an ungrateful, cruel child; you will have given your old father the greatest pain of his life.”

This was more than the poor girl could bear; her tears overflowed, and she moved towards her grimly consistent parent with a pitiful cry.  Her hands were raised in supplication, but he sternly evaded this appeal.  Instead of letting her sob out her misery on his shoulder, he simply took her by the arm and directed her course across the threshold, closing the door gently but firmly behind her.  After he had done so, he remained listening.  For a long time there was no sound; he knew that she was standing outside.  He was sorry for her, as I have said; but he was so sure he was right.  At last he heard her move away, and then her footstep creaked faintly upon the stairs.

The Doctor took several turns round his study, with his hands in his pockets, and a thin sparkle, possibly of irritation, but partly also of something like humour, in his eye.  “By Jove,” he said to himself, “I believe she will stick—I believe she will stick!”  And this idea of Catherine “sticking” appeared to have a comical side, and to offer a prospect of entertainment.  He determined, as he said to himself, to see it out.

XIX

It was for reasons connected with this determination that on the morrow he sought a few words of private conversation with Mrs. Penniman.  He sent for her to the library, and he there informed her that he hoped very much that, as regarded this affair of Catherine’s, she would mind her p’s and q’s.

“I don’t know what you mean by such an expression,” said his sister.  “You speak as if I were learning the alphabet.”

“The alphabet of common sense is something you will never learn,” the Doctor permitted himself to respond.