Washington Square

This event at last took place.  She saw her—at the window—mount the steps, and she went to await her in the hall, where she pounced upon her as soon as she had entered the house, and drew her into the parlour, closing the door with solemnity.  Catherine was flushed, and her eye was bright.  Mrs. Penniman hardly knew what to think.

“May I venture to ask where you have been?” she demanded.

“I have been to take a walk,” said Catherine.  “I thought you had gone to church.”

“I did go to church; but the service was shorter than usual.  And pray, where did you walk?”

“I don’t know!” said Catherine.

“Your ignorance is most extraordinary!  Dear Catherine, you can trust me.”

“What am I to trust you with?”

“With your secret—your sorrow.”

“I have no sorrow!” said Catherine fiercely.

“My poor child,” Mrs. Penniman insisted, “you can’t deceive me.  I know everything.  I have been requested to—a—to converse with you.”

“I don’t want to converse!”

“It will relieve you.  Don’t you know Shakespeare’s lines?—‘the grief that does not speak!’  My dear girl, it is better as it is.”

“What is better?” Catherine asked.

She was really too perverse.  A certain amount of perversity was to be allowed for in a young lady whose lover had thrown her over; but not such an amount as would prove inconvenient to his apologists.  “That you should be reasonable,” said Mrs. Penniman, with some sternness.  “That you should take counsel of worldly prudence, and submit to practical considerations.  That you should agree to—a—separate.”

Catherine had been ice up to this moment, but at this word she flamed up.  “Separate?  What do you know about our separating?”

Mrs. Penniman shook her head with a sadness in which there was almost a sense of injury.  “Your pride is my pride, and your susceptibilities are mine.  I see your side perfectly, but I also”—and she smiled with melancholy suggestiveness—“I also see the situation as a whole!”

This suggestiveness was lost upon Catherine, who repeated her violent inquiry.  “Why do you talk about separation; what do you know about it?”

“We must study resignation,” said Mrs. Penniman, hesitating, but sententious at a venture.

“Resignation to what?”

“To a change of—of our plans.”

“My plans have not changed!” said Catherine, with a little laugh.

“Ah, but Mr. Townsend’s have,” her aunt answered very gently.

“What do you mean?”

There was an imperious brevity in the tone of this inquiry, against which Mrs. Penniman felt bound to protest; the information with which she had undertaken to supply her niece was, after all, a favour.  She had tried sharpness, and she had tried sternness: but neither would do; she was shocked at the girl’s obstinacy.  “Ah, well,” she said, “if he hasn’t told you! . . . ” and she turned away.

Catherine watched her a moment in silence; then she hurried after her, stopping her before she reached the door.  “Told me what?  What do you mean?  What are you hinting at and threatening me with?”

“Isn’t it broken off?” asked Mrs. Penniman.

“My engagement?  Not in the least!”

“I beg your pardon in that case.  I have spoken too soon!”

“Too soon!  Soon or late,” Catherine broke out, “you speak foolishly and cruelly!”

“What has happened between you, then?” asked her aunt, struck by the sincerity of this cry.  “For something certainly has happened.”

“Nothing has happened but that I love him more and more!”

Mrs. Penniman was silent an instant.  “I suppose that’s the reason you went to see him this afternoon.”

Catherine flushed as if she had been struck.  “Yes, I did go to see him!  But that’s my own business.”

“Very well, then; we won’t talk about it.”  And Mrs. Penniman moved towards the door again.  But she was stopped by a sudden imploring cry from the girl.

“Aunt Lavinia, where has he gone?”

“Ah, you admit, then, that he has gone away?  Didn’t they know at his house?”

“They said he had left town.  I asked no more questions; I was ashamed,” said Catherine, simply enough.

“You needn’t have taken so compromising a step if you had had a little more confidence in me,” Mrs. Penniman observed, with a good deal of grandeur.

“Is it to New Orleans?” Catherine went on irrelevantly.

It was the first time Mrs. Penniman had heard of New Orleans in this connexion; but she was averse to letting Catherine know that she was in the dark.  She attempted to strike an illumination from the instructions she had received from Morris.  “My dear Catherine,” she said, “when a separation has been agreed upon, the farther he goes away the better.”

“Agreed upon?  Has he agreed upon it with you?”  A consummate sense of her aunt’s meddlesome folly had come over her during the last five minutes, and she was sickened at the thought that Mrs. Penniman had been let loose, as it were, upon her happiness.

“He certainly has sometimes advised with me,” said Mrs. Penniman.

“Is it you, then, that have changed him and made him so unnatural?” Catherine cried.  “Is it you that have worked on him and taken him from me?  He doesn’t belong to you, and I don’t see how you have anything to do with what is between us!  Is it you that have made this plot and told him to leave me?  How could you be so wicked, so cruel?  What have I ever done to you; why can’t you leave me alone?  I was afraid you would spoil everything; for you do spoil everything you touch; I was afraid of you all the time we were abroad; I had no rest when I thought that you were always talking to him.”  Catherine went on with growing vehemence, pouring out in her bitterness and in the clairvoyance of her passion (which suddenly, jumping all processes, made her judge her aunt finally and without appeal) the uneasiness which had lain for so many months upon her heart.

Mrs. Penniman was scared and bewildered; she saw no prospect of introducing her little account of the purity of Morris’s motives.  “You are a most ungrateful girl!” she cried.  “Do you scold me for talking with him?  I am sure we never talked of anything but you!”

“Yes; and that was the way you worried him; you made him tired of my very name!  I wish you had never spoken of me to him; I never asked your help!”

“I am sure if it hadn’t been for me he would never have come to the house, and you would never have known what he thought of you,” Mrs. Penniman rejoined, with a good deal of justice.

“I wish he never had come to the house, and that I never had known it!  That’s better than this,” said poor Catherine.

“You are a very ungrateful girl,” Aunt Lavinia repeated.

Catherine’s outbreak of anger and the sense of wrong gave her, while they lasted, the satisfaction that comes from all assertion of force; they hurried her along, and there is always a sort of pleasure in cleaving the air.  But at the bottom she hated to be violent, and she was conscious of no aptitude for organised resentment.  She calmed herself with a great effort, but with great rapidity, and walked about the room a few moments, trying to say to herself that her aunt had meant everything for the best.  She did not succeed in saying it with much conviction, but after a little she was able to speak quietly enough.

“I am not ungrateful, but I am very unhappy.  It’s hard to be grateful for that,” she said.  “Will you please tell me where he is?”