Part 31 (1/2)

”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 pa.s.sion (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 a.s.sertion 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 apt.i.tude 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?”

”I haven't the least idea; I am not in secret correspondence with him!” And Mrs. Penniman wished indeed that she were, so that she might let him know how Catherine abused her, after all she had done.

”Was it a plan of his, then, to break off--?” By this time Catherine had become completely quiet.

Mrs. Penniman began again to have a glimpse of her chance for explaining. ”He shrank--he shrank,” she said. ”He lacked courage, but it was the courage to injure you! He couldn't bear to bring down on you your father's curse.”

Catherine listened to this with her eyes fixed upon her aunt, and continued to gaze at her for some time afterwards. ”Did he tell you to say that?”

”He told me to say many things--all so delicate, so discriminating.