Friendship is more composite than love, and becomes more and more so with advancing years, as the whole of life, which made such a hugely noble impression upon our young sight, is dissected, bit by bit, before the weary eyes that have seen it too long, and before the tribunal of a heart that has known bitterness. Friendship, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. The rending of it shows them as they are, and they are not beautiful.
Katharine had of late gone through events which had tended to destroy the whole-heartedness of her view of the world and its people. Within the past six months her character had developed, if it had not changed, and if she was more in earnest about her realities, she was harder in judging her imaginings and in testing anything in the nature of an ideal which presented itself to her moral vision. She would have made a firmer friend now, than formerly, but her friendship was also much harder to obtain.
She was, doubtless, quite truthful to herself in what she thought of her own mother, for instance. They were altogether reconciled for the present, and outwardly their intercourse was what it had been before Mrs. Lauderdale’s unreasoning envy had almost brought about a permanent estrangement. But the fact remained that the estrangement had come, though it had also gone again, and Katharine felt that it might possibly some day return. The childlike faith, the belief that her mother could do nothing wrong, which is one of childhood’s happiest tenets, was destroyed forever. Her mother, henceforth, was as other women were in her eyes, nearer to her, by the natural bonds that bound the two together and by the necessary intercourse of daily life, but not in heart nor in real sympathy. Katharine asked herself coldly what an affection could be worth which could hate its object out of pure vanity; and the answer was that it could not be worth much. But she never underrated its true value in the newly discovered proof of its fallibility.
Evidently, she was going far—too far, perhaps, for justice and certainly too far for happiness. And she applied her conclusion not only to her own mother, but to all handsome mothers who had pretty daughters. The first breath of envy would poison any mother’s love she thought, and the memories of her own childhood were poisoned retrospectively by the bitterness of the present. She was at that stage of growth when generalities have a force which they have never acquired before and which they soon lose, as life’s hailstorm of exceptions batters them out of shape. Out of isolated facts she made them, and made of them rules, and of rules, laws.
As for her father’s conduct, it had been less unexpected, though it had hurt her even more, because it had crossed her own path so much more rudely and directly. But it had helped to destroy other illusions, and in a way to undermine something which was not an illusion at all. She had always believed in his courage and manliness, and both had, in her opinion, broken down. No man could be brave, she felt, who treated any woman as her father had treated her, and the mere thought of the past scenes of violence sent a thrill of pain to her injured arm. No man could be manly who could wish to sacrifice his daughter as she considered that he had wished to sacrifice her—to sell her, as she said in her anger.
There was injustice in this. Archibald Wingfield was one of the most desirable and desired young men in New York. Having made up his mind that Katharine should not marry Ralston, Alexander Junior could hardly have done better for her than he did in trying to bring about a match with Wingfield. But there Katharine was influenced by her love for John, which made her look upon the mere suggestion of a rival as an insult hardly to be forgiven.
The deeper and less apparent wound in her belief was the more dangerous, though she did not know it. Alexander Junior had always professed to act upon the most rigid religious principles, and though Katharine did not sympathize with the form of worship in which she had been brought up, and had at one time been strongly inclined to become a Roman Catholic, as her mother was, she had, nevertheless, accorded a certain degree of admiration to her father’s unbending and uncompromising consistency. There was no gentleness and no consolation in such religion, she thought, but she could not help admiring its strength and directness. She had said, too, that her father was faithful in his love for her mother, a fact which seemed suddenly to have lost its weight in her eyes at present. But of late he had done many things which Katharine was sure could not be justified by any religion whatsoever, and had shown tendencies which, if his religion had ever been real, should, in her view, have been stamped out or wholly destroyed long ago. His avarice was one of them, his cruelty to herself another, his attempt to injure John Ralston in Mr. Beman’s opinion was a third. And all these tendencies were as strong as himself and could not be easily hidden nor charitably overlooked. Not knowing the real strength of any great passion, she could not realize that there might have been a conflict in her father’s heart. To children, real sin seems as monstrous as real virtue seems to those who have sinned often, and in respect of real sin, Katharine was yet but a child. She saw a man doing wrong, who said that he acted in accordance with the principles of his religion. She overlooked his temptations, she ignored his struggles, she said that he was bad and called his religion a fiction.
The direct consequence was that such convictions as she had herself were undermined and shaken and almost ruined, and the moral disturbance affected her in all the relations of life, except, perhaps, in her love for John Ralston, which grew stronger as other things failed.
With regard to her friendship for Hester, however, it had not, as yet, suffered any rude shock.