“We shall not want the money,” said Catherine; “for you know I have a good deal myself.”
“Yes, my dear girl, I know you have something. And he can’t touch that!”
“He would never,” said Catherine. “My mother left it to me.”
Morris was silent a while. “He was very positive about this, was he?” he asked at last. “He thought such a message would annoy me terribly, and make me throw off the mask, eh?”
“I don’t know what he thought,” said Catherine wearily.
“Please tell him that I care for his message as much as for that!” And Morris snapped his fingers sonorously.
“I don’t think I could tell him that.”
“Do you know you sometimes disappoint me?” said Morris.
“I should think I might. I disappoint everyone—father and Aunt Penniman.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter with me, because I am fonder of you than they are.”
“Yes, Morris,” said the girl, with her imagination—what there was of it—swimming in this happy truth, which seemed, after all, invidious to no one.
“Is it your belief that he will stick to it—stick to it forever, to this idea of disinheriting you?—that your goodness and patience will never wear out his cruelty?”
“The trouble is that if I marry you, he will think I am not good. He will think that a proof.”
“Ah, then, he will never forgive you!”
This idea, sharply expressed by Morris’s handsome lips, renewed for a moment, to the poor girl’s temporarily pacified conscience, all its dreadful vividness. “Oh, you must love me very much!” she cried.
“There is no doubt of that, my dear!” her lover rejoined. “You don’t like that word ‘disinherited,’ ” he added in a moment.
“It isn’t the money; it is that he should—that he should feel so.”
“I suppose it seems to you a kind of curse,” said Morris. “It must be very dismal. But don’t you think,” he went on presently, “that if you were to try to be very clever, and to set rightly about it, you might in the end conjure it away? Don’t you think,” he continued further, in a tone of sympathetic speculation, “that a really clever woman, in your place, might bring him round at last? Don’t you think?”
Here, suddenly, Morris was interrupted; these ingenious inquiries had not reached Catherine’s ears. The terrible word “disinheritance,” with all its impressive moral reprobation, was still ringing there; seemed indeed to gather force as it lingered. The mortal chill of her situation struck more deeply into her childlike heart, and she was overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness and danger. But her refuge was there, close to her, and she put out her hands to grasp it. “Ah, Morris,” she said, with a shudder, “I will marry you as soon as you please.” And she surrendered herself, leaning her head on his shoulder.
“My dear good girl!” he exclaimed, looking down at his prize. And then he looked up again, rather vaguely, with parted lips and lifted eyebrows.
XXI
Dr. Sloper very soon imparted his conviction to Mrs. Almond, in the same terms in which he had announced it to himself. “She’s going to stick, by Jove! she’s going to stick.”
“Do you mean that she is going to marry him?” Mrs. Almond inquired.
“I don’t know that; but she is not going to break down. She is going to drag out the engagement, in the hope of making me relent.”
“And shall you not relent?”
“Shall a geometrical proposition relent? I am not so superficial.”
“Doesn’t geometry treat of surfaces?” asked Mrs. Almond, who, as we know, was clever, smiling.
“Yes; but it treats of them profoundly. Catherine and her young man are my surfaces; I have taken their measure.”
“You speak as if it surprised you.”
“It is immense; there will be a great deal to observe.”
“You are shockingly cold-blooded!” said Mrs. Almond.
“I need to be with all this hot blood about me. Young Townsend indeed is cool; I must allow him that merit.”
“I can’t judge him,” Mrs. Almond answered; “but I am not at all surprised at Catherine.”
“I confess I am a little; she must have been so deucedly divided and bothered.”
“Say it amuses you outright! I don’t see why it should be such a joke that your daughter adores you.”
“It is the point where the adoration stops that I find it interesting to fix.”
“It stops where the other sentiment begins.”
“Not at all—that would be simple enough. The two things are extremely mixed up, and the mixture is extremely odd. It will produce some third element, and that’s what I am waiting to see. I wait with suspense—with positive excitement; and that is a sort of emotion that I didn’t suppose Catherine would ever provide for me. I am really very much obliged to her.”
“She will cling,” said Mrs. Almond; “she will certainly cling.”
“Yes; as I say, she will stick.”
“Cling is prettier. That’s what those very simple natures always do, and nothing could be simpler than Catherine. She doesn’t take many impressions; but when she takes one she keeps it. She is like a copper kettle that receives a dent; you may polish up the kettle, but you can’t efface the mark.”
“We must try and polish up Catherine,” said the Doctor. “I will take her to Europe.”
“She won’t forget him in Europe.”
“He will forget her, then.”
Mrs. Almond looked grave. “Should you really like that?”
“Extremely!” said the Doctor.
Mrs. Penniman, meanwhile, lost little time in putting herself again in communication with Morris Townsend. She requested him to favour her with another interview, but she did not on this occasion select an oyster saloon as the scene of their meeting. She proposed that he should join her at the door of a certain church, after service on Sunday afternoon, and she was careful not to appoint the place of worship which she usually visited, and where, as she said, the congregation would have spied upon her. She picked out a less elegant resort, and on issuing from its portal at the hour she had fixed she saw the young man standing apart.
